The Boss laid his hand on the doorknob, opened the door, and then, with his hand still on the knob, he looked back. "Well, Judge," he said, "more in pain than wrath I go. And if your conscience decides it could gag at Callahan, just let me know. In, of course–" and he grinned–"a reasonable time."
Then he looked over to me and said, "Let's haul ass, Jack," and started down toward the front door, out of sight.
Before I could get into lower gear, the Judge swung his face in my direction, and focused his eyes on me, and his upper lip lifted under that nose to form a smile of somewhat massive irony, and he said, "Your employer is calling you, Mr. Burden."
"I don't use any ear trumpet yet." I said, and pulled off toward the door, and thought to myself: _Christ, Jack, you talk like a snot, Christ, you are a smart guy__.
I had just about made the door, when he said, "I'm dining with your mother this week. Shall I tell her you still like your work?"
_Why won't he lay off?__ I thought, but he wouldn't, and that lip lifted up again.
So I said, "Suit yourself, Judge. But if I were you I wouldn't go around advertising this visit to anybody. In case you changed your mind, somebody might figure you had stooped to a low political deal with the Boss. In the dark of night."
And I went out the door and down the hall and out the hall door and left it open but let the screen door slam.
_God damn him, why hadn't he laid off me?__
But he hadn't scared.
We left the bay, and lost the salt, sad, sweet, fishy smell of the tidelands out of our nostrils. We headed north again. It was darker now. The ground mist lay heavier on the fields, and in the dips of the road the mist frayed out over the slab and blunted the headlights. Now and then a pair of eyes would burn at us out of the dark ahead. I knew that they were the eyes of a cow–a poor dear stoic old cow with a cud, standing on the highway shoulder, for there wasn't any stock law–but her eyes burned at us out of the dark as though her skull were full of blazing molten metal like blood and we could see inside the skull into that bloody hot brightness in that moment when the reflection was right before we picked up her shape, which is so perfectly formed to be pelted with clods, and knew what she was and knew that inside that unlovely knotty head there wasn't anything but a handful of coldly coagulated gray mess in which something slow happened as we went by. We were something slow happening inside the cold brain of a cow. That's what the cow would say if she were a brass-bound Idealist like little Jackie Burden.
The Boss said, "Well, Jackie, it looks like you got a job cut out for you."
And I said, "Callahan?"
And he said, "Nope, Irwin."
And I said, "I don't reckon you will find anything on Irwin."
And he said, "You find it."
We bored into the dark for another twenty miles and eighteen minutes. The ectoplasmic fingers of the mist reached out of the swamp, threading out from the blackness of the cypresses, to snag us, but didn't have any luck. A possum came out of the swamp and started across the road and might have made it, too, if Sugar-Boy hadn't been too quick for him. Sugar-Boy just shaded the steering wheel delicately to the left, just a fraction. There wasn't even a jounce or twitch, but something thumped against the underside of the left front fender, and Sugar-Boy said, "The b-b-b-b-bas-tud." Sugar-Boy could thread a needle with that Cadillac.
At about the end of that eighteen minutes and twenty miles, I said: "But suppose I don't find anything before election day?"
The Boss said, "To hell with election day. I can deliver Masters prepaid, special handling. But if it takes ten years, you find it."
We clocked off five miles more, and I said, "But suppose there isn't anything to find?"
And the Boss said, "There is always something."
And I said, "Maybe not on the Judge."
And he said, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something."
Two miles more, and he said, "And make it stick."
And that was all a good while ago. And masters is dead now, as dead as mackerel, but the Boss was right and he went to the Senate. And Callahan is not dead but he has wished he were, no doubt, for he used up his luck a long time back and being dead was not part of it. And Adam Stanton is dead now, too, who used to go fishing with me and who lay on the sand in the hot sunshine with me and with Anne Stanton. And Judge Irwin is dead, who leaned toward me among the stems of the tall gray marsh grass, in the gray damp wintry dawn, and said, "You ought to have led that duck more, Jack. You got to lead a duck, son." And the Boss is dead, who said to me. "And make it stick."
Little Jackie made it stick, all right
Chapter Two
The last time I saw Mason City I went up there in that big black Cadillac with the Boss and the gang, and we burned up that new concrete slab, and it was a long time ago–nearly three years, for it is now into 1939, but it seems like forever. But the first time I went up there it was a lot longer time ago, back in 1922, and I went there in my Model-T, hanging on to the steering post to stay in the saddle when I sideslipped in the gray dust, which plumed out behind for a mile and settled on the cotton leaves to make them gray too, or when I hit a section of gravel, holding my jaws clamped tight to keep the vibration from the washboard from chipping the enamel off my teeth. You'll have to say this for the Boss: when he got through you could drive out for a breath of air and still keep your bridgework in place. But you couldn't that first time I went to Mason City.
The managing editor of the _Chronicle__ called me in and said, "Jack, get in your car and go up to Mason City and see who the hell that fellow Stark is who thinks he is Jesus Christ scourging the money-changers out of that shinplaster courthouse up there."
"He married a school-teacher," I said.
"Well, it must have gone to his head," Jim Madison, who was managing editor of the _Chronicle__, said. "Does he think he is the first one ever popped a school-teacher?"
"The bond issue was for building a schoolhouse," I said, "and it looks like Lucy figures they might keep some of it for that purpose."
"Who the hell is Lucy?"
"Lucy is the school-teacher," I said.
"She won't be a school-teacher long," he said. "Not on the Mason County payroll if she keeps that up. Not if I know Mason County."
"Lucy don't favor drinking either," I said.
"Was it you or the other guy popped Lucy?" he demanded. "You know so much about Lucy."
"I just know what Willie told me."
"Who the hell is Willie?"
"Willie is the fellow with the Christmas tie," I said. "He is Cousin Willie from the country. He is Willie Stark, the teacher's pet, and I met him in the back room of Slade's place a couple of months ago and he told me Lucy didn't favor drinking. I'm just guessing about her not favoring stealing."
"She don't favor Willie being County Treasurer either," Jim Madison allowed, "if she is the one putting him up to what he is doing. Doesn't she know they run things up in Mason County?"
"They run 'em up there just like they run 'em down here," I said.
"Yeah," Jim Madison said, and took the foul, chewed, and spit-bright butt of what had been a two-bit cigar out of the corner of his mouth and inspected it and reached out at arm's length and let it fall into the big brass spittoon which stood on the clover-deep, Kelly-green carpet which bloomed like an oasis of elegance in the four floors of squalor of the Chronicle Building. He watched it fall, and said again, "Yeah, but you leave down here and go on up there."
So I went up to Mason City in the Model-T, and kept my jaws clamped tight when I went over the washboard and hung to the steering post when I went over the sideslipping dust, and that was a very long time ago.