All the King's Men Read Online Free PDF

fourth chair over a few inches with his foot and said, “Git off yore dogs, Willie.”
    Willie sat down and laid his gray felt hat on the marble top in front of him. The edges of the brim crinkled and waved up all around off the marble like a piecrust before grandma trims it. Willie just sat there behind his hat and his blue-striped Christmas tie and waited, with his hands laid in his lap.
    Slade came in from the front, and said, “Beer?”
    “All round,” Mr. Duffy ordered.
    “Not for me, thank you kindly,” Willie said.
    M Duffy, with some surprise and no trace of pleasure, turned his gaze upon Willie, who seemed unaware of the significance of the event, sitting upright in his little chair behind the hat and the tie. Then Mr. Duffy looked up at Slade, and jerking his head toward Willie, said, “Aw, give him some beer.”
    “No, thanks,” Willie said, with no more emotion that you would put into the multiplication table.
    “Too strong for you?” Mr. Duffy demanded.
    “No,” Willie replied, “but no thank you.”
    “Maybe the school-teacher don’t let him drink nuthen,” Alex offered.
    “Lucy don’t favor drinking,” Willie said quietly. “For a fact.”
    “What she don’t know don’t hurt her,” Mr. Duffy said.
    “Git him some beer,” Alex said to Slade.
    “All round,” Mr. Duffy repeated, with the air of closing an issue.
    Slade looked at Alex and he looked at Mr. Duffy and he looked at Willie. He flicked his towel halfheartedly in the direction of a cruising fly, and said: “I sells beer to them as wants it. I ain’t making nobody drink it.”
    Perhaps that was the moment when Slade made his fortune. How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meanings of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.
    Well, anyway, when Repeal came and mailmen had to use Mack trucks to haul the application for licenses over to the City Hall, Slade got a license. He got a license immediately, and he got a swell location, and he got the jack to put in leather chairs kind to the femurs, and a circular bar; and Slade, who never had a dime in his life after he paid rent and protection, now stands in the shadows under the murals of undressed dames in the midst of the glitter of chromium and tinted mirrors, wearing a double-breasted blue suit, with what’s left of his hair plastered over his skull, and keeps one eye on the black boys in white jackets who tote the poison and the other on the blonde at the cash register who knows that her duties are not concluded when the lights are turned off at 2:00 A.M., and the strains of a three-piece string ensemble soothe the nerves of the customers.
    How did Slade get the license so quickly? How did he get the lease when half the big boys in the business were after that corner? How did he get the jack for the leather chairs and the string ensemble? Slade never confided in me, but I figure Slade got his reward for being an honest man.
    Anyway, Slade’s statement of principle about the beer question closed the subject that morning. Tiny Duffy lifted a face to Slade with the expression worn by the steer when you give it the hammer; then, as sensation returned, he took refuge in his dignity. Alex permitted himself the last luxury of irony. Says Alex: “Well, maybe you got some orange pop for him.” And when the whicker of his mirth had died away, Slade said: “I reckin I have. If he wants it”
    “Yes,” Willie said, “I think I’ll take some orange pop.”
    The beer came, and the bottle of pop. The bottle of pop had two straws in it. Willie lifted his two hands out of his lap where they had decorously lain during the previous conversation, and took the bottle between them, and affixed his lips to the straws. His lips were a little bit meaty, but they weren’t loose. Not exactly. Maybe at first glance you might think so. You might think he