"Are you a Commissioner?" I asked the fellow just indicated. He was just another fellow, made in God's image and wearing a white shirt with a ready-tied black bow tie and jean pants held up with web galluses. Town from the waist up, country from the waist down. Get both votes.
"Yeah," he said.
"He's the head man," another fellow said, reverently, a little old squirt of a fellow with a bald knotty old head and a face he himself couldn't recollect from one time he looked in the mirror to the next, the sort of a fellow who hangs around and sits in a chair when the big boys leave one vacant and tries to buy his way into the game with a remark like the one he had just made.
"You the Chairman?" I asked the other fellow.
"Yeah," he said.
"You mind telling me your name?"
It ain't no secret," he said. "It is Dolph Pillsbury."
"Glad to know you, Mr. Pillsbury," I said and held out my hand. Not getting up, he took it as though I had offered him the business end of a cottonmouth moccasin in shedding time.
"Mr. Pillsbury," I said, "you are in a position to know the situation in regard to the schoolhouse contract. No doubt you are interested in having the truth of that situation made public."
"There ain't any situation," Mr. Pillsbury said.
"Maybe there isn't any situation," I said, "but there's been a right smart racket."
"Ain't any situation. Board meets and takes a bid what's been offered. J. H. Moore's bid, the fellow's name."
"Was that fellow Moore's bid low?"
"Not egg-zackly."
"You mean it wasn't low?"
"Well–" Mr. Pillsbury said, and his face was shadowed by an expression which might have been caused by a gas pain, "well, if'n you want to put it that a-way."
"All right," I said, "let's put it that way."
"Now look a-here–" and the shadow passed from Mr. Pillsbury's face and he sat up in his chair as suddenly as though he had been stuck by a pin–"you talk like that, and ain't nuthen done but legal. Ain't nobody can tell the Board what bid to take. Anybody can come along and put in a little piss-ant bid, but the Board doan have to take it. Naw-sir-ee. The Board takes somebody kin do the work right."
"Who was it put the little piss-ant bid in?"
"Name of Jeffers," Mr. Pillsbury said peevishly, as at an unpleasant recollection.
"Jeffers Construction?" I asked.
"Yeah."
"What's wrong with Jeffers Construction?"
"The Board picks the fellow kin do the work right, and it ain't nobody's bizness."
I took out my pencil and a pad of paper, and wrote on it. Then I said to Mr. Pillsbury, "How's this?" And I began to read to him: "Mr. Dolph Pillsbury, Chairman of the Board of County Commissioners of Mason County, stated that the bid of J. H. Moore for the construction of the Mason County School was accepted, even though it was not the low bid, because the Board wanted somebody 'who could do the work right.' The low bid, which was submitted by the Jeffers Construction Company, was rejected, Mr. Pillsbury stated. Mr. Pillsbury started further–"
"Now look a-here–" Mr. Pillsbury was sitting very straight up as though it were not a pin this time but a hot tenpenny and in the brown–"now look a-here, I didn't state nuthen. You write it down and claim I stated it. Now you look a-here–"
The Sheriff heaved massively in the chair and fixed his gaze upon Mr. Pillsbury. "Dolph," he said, "tell the bugger to git out of here."
"I didn't state nuthen," Dolph said, "and you git out!"
"Sure," I said, and put the pad in my pocket, "but maybe you can kindly tell me where Mr. Stark is?"
"I knowed it," the Sheriff exploded and dropped his feet off the desk with a noise like a brick chimney, and heaved up in the chair and glared apoplectically at me. "That Stark, I knowed it was that Stark!"
"What's wrong with Stark?" I asked.
"Jesus Gawd!" roared the Sheriff, and his face went purple with congestion of language which couldn't get out.
"He's biggety, that's what he is," Mr. Dolph Pillsbury offered. "Gits in the courthouse and gits biggety, he–"
"He's a nigger-lover," the little old bald, knotty-headed fellow submitted.
"And him, him–" Mr. Pillsbury pointed at me with an air of revelation–"I bet he's a nigger-lover, comen up here and sahayen round, I bet he–"
"No sale," I said. "I like mine vanilla. But now you've raised the subject, what's nigger-loving got to do with it?"
"That's it!" Mr. Pillsbury exclaimed, like the man overboard seizing the plank. "That Jeffers Construction now, they–"
"You, Dolph," the Sheriff bellowed at him, "why don't you shut up and tell him to git out!"
"Git out," Mr. Pillsbury said to me, obediently but without great vigor.
"Sure," I replied and went out and walked down the hall.
_They ain't real__, I thought as I walked down the hall, _nary one__. But I knew they were. You come into a strange place, into a town like Mason City, and they don't seem real, but you know they are. You know the went wading in the creek when they were kids, and when they were bigger they used to go out about sunset and lean on the back fence and look across the country at the sky and not know what was happening inside them or whether they were happy or sad, and when they got grown they slept with their wives and tickled their babies to make them laugh and went to work in the morning and didn't know what they wanted but had their reasons for doing the things they did, and then when they got old they lost their reasons for doing anything and sat on the bench in front of the harness shop and had words for the reasons other people had but had forgotten what the reasons were. And then they will lie in bed some morning just before day and look up at the ceiling they can scarcely see because the lamp is shaded with a pinned-on newspaper and they don't recognize the faces around the bed any more because the room is full of smoke, or fog, and it makes their eyes burn and gests in the throat. Oh, they are real, all right, and it may be the reason they don't seem real to you is that you aren't very real yourself.
But by the time I was standing in front of a door at one end of the cross hall and was looking up at another tin sign, and knew from it that I had arrived at the one-man leper colony of Mason City.
The leper was sitting in the room, not doing anything, all by himself. There wasn't anybody to sit and spit and jaw with him under his electric fan.
"Hello," I said, and he looked up at me as though I were a spook and the word I had used were in a foreign language. He didn't answer me right off, and I figured he was like one of those fellows who gets marooned on a desert island for twenty years and when the longboat is beached and the jolly tars leap out on the sand and ask him who the hell he is, he can't say a word because his tongue is so rusty.
Well, Willie wasn't that bad off, for he finally managed to say hello, and that he remembered me from our meeting in Slade's place a few months back, and to ask me what I wanted. I told him, and he grinned a grin more wistful than happy and asked me why I wanted to know.
"The editor told me to find out," I said, "and why he wants me to find out only God knows. Maybe it is because it is news."
That seemed to be enough to satisfy him. So I didn't tell him that beyond my boss the managing editor there was a great high world of reasons but to a fellow like me down in the ditch it was a world of flickering diaphanous spirit wings and faint angel voices I didn't always savvy and stellar influences.
"I reckon it is news," Willie allowed.
"What's been going on around here?"
"I don't mind telling you," he said. He began telling me and he finished telling me about eleven o'clock that night that Lucy Stark, after she had put the kid to bed, and me sitting with him in the parlor out at his pappy's place, where he had asked me to spend the night, and where he and Lucy ordinarily lived in the summer and where they were going to live that winter too instead of in a room in town because Lucy had just been fired from her teaching job for the coming year and there wasn't any reason to be in town and be spending good money for rent. And there was very likely to be another reason for there not being any reason to stay in town, for Willie was coming up for re-election and his chances looked about as good as the chances of a flea making a living of a carved marble lion on a monument. He had only got the job in the first place, he told me, because Dolph Pillsbury, the Chairman of the Board of County Commissioners, was a sort of secondhand relative of old Mr. Stark, by marriage or something, and Pillsbury had had a falling-out with the other fellow who wanted to be Treasurer. Pillsbury about ran the county, he and the Sheriff, and he was sick of Willie. So Willie was on his way out, and Lucy was already out.