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By Root 14608 0

their kind so long, I just figures I’d take me a little trip and see what human folks looked like in the face before I clean forgot. Well, you all look human. More or less. And sensible. In spite of what they are saying in that Legislature and getting paid five dollars a day of your tax money for saying it. They’re saying you didn’t have bat sense or goose gumption when you cast your sacred ballot to elect me Governor of this state. Maybe you didn’t have bat sense. Don’t ask me, I’m prejudiced. But–” and now he wouldn’t be lounging with his head cocked a little on one side in that easy sizing-up way, looking out from under the eyelids that drooped a little, for now he’d thrust, all at one, the heavy head forward, and the eyes, red from sleepless ness, would bulge–“I’ll ask you a question. And I want an answer. I want an answer before God and under the awful hand of the Most High. Answer me: Have I disappointed you? Have I? Then, leaning sharply, he would lift his right hand while the question still ringing in the air, and say, “Stop! Don’t answer until you look into the depth of your heart to see the truth. For there is where truth is. Not in a book. Not in a lawyer’s book. Not on any scrap of paper. In your heart.” Then, in a long pause, he would swing his gaze slowly over the crowd of faces. The, “Answer me!”

I would wait for a roar. You can’t help it. I knew it would come, but I would wait for it, and every time it would seem intolerably long before it came. It was like a deep dive. You start up toward the light but you know you can’t breathe yet, not yet, and all you are aware of is the blood beating in your own head in the intolerable timelessness. Then the roar would come and I would feel the way you do when you pop out of the water from a deep dive and the air bursts out of your lungs and everything reels in the light. There is nothing like the roar of as crowd when it swells up, all of a sudden at the same time, out of the thing is in every an in the crowd but is not himself. The roar would swell and rise and fall and swell again, with the Boss standing with his right arm raised straight to Heaven and his red eyes bulging.

And when the roar fell away, he said, with his arm up, “I have looked in your faces!”

And they would yell.

And he said, “O Lord, and I have seen a sign!”

And they would yell again.

And he said, “I have seen dew on the fleece and the ground dry!”

Then the yell.

Then, “I have seen blood on the moon!” Then, “Buckets of blood, and boy! I know whose blood it will be.” Then, leaning forward, grabbing out with his right hand as tough to seize something in the air before him, “Gimme that meat ax!”

It was always that way, or like that. And charging across the state with the horns screaming and blatting, and Sugar-Boy shaving the gasoline truck on the highway and the spit flaying from his mouth while the lips worked soundlessly and words piled up inside him before he could get them out, “The b-b-b-bas-tud!” And the Boss standing up on something with his arm against the sky (it might be raining, it might be bright sun, it might be night and the red light from sizzling gasoline flares set on the porch of a country store), and the crowd yelling. And me so light-headed from no sleep that my head felt big as the sky and when I walked I seemed to be tiptoeing on clouds of cotton batting.

All of that.

But this too: the Boss sitting in the Cadillac, all lights off, in the side street by a house, the time long past midnight. Or in the country, by a gate. The Boss leaning to a man, Sugar-Boy or one of Sugar-Boy’s pals, Heavy Harris or Al Perkins, saying low and fast, “Tell him to come out. I know he’s there. Tell him better come out and talk to me. If he won’t come, just say you’re a friend of Ella Lou. That’ll bring him.” Or, “Ask him if he ever heard of Slick Wilson.” Or something of the kind. And then there would be a man standing there with pajama tops stuck in pants, shivering, with face white in the darkness.

And this: the Boss sitting in a room full of smoke, a pot of coffee on the floor, or a bottle,