I have not seen the town. I had never even set foot inside the State of Arkansas. But I have seen the town in my head. And standing on the steps of the commissary is a girl with yellow hair hanging in two heavy braids and with large blue eyes and with the hint of a delicate, famished hollow in each cheek. Let us say that she is wearing a lettuce-green gingham dress, for lettuce-green is nice, fresh color for a blond girl to be wearing as she stands in the morning sunlight on the commissary steps and listens to the saws scream and watches a stocky man in a dark suit come picking his way soberly through the red mud left by the last big spring rain.
The girl is standing on the commissary steps because her father clerks in the commissary for the company. That is what I know about her father.
The man in the dark suit stays in the town for two months transacting his legal business. In the evening, toward sunset, he and the girl walk down the street of the town, now dusty, and move out beyond the houses, where the stumps are. I can see them standing in the middle of the ruined land, against the background of the brass-and-blood-colored summer sunset of Arkansas. I cannot make out what they say to each other.
When the man has finished his business and leaves the town, he takes the girl with him. He is a kind, innocent, shy man, and as he sits beside the girl on the red plush of the train seat, he holds her hand in his, stiffly and carefully as though he might drop and break something valuable.
He puts her in a big white house, which his grandfather had built. In front of it is the sea. That is new to her. Everyday she spends a great deal of time looking at it. Sometimes she goes down to the beach and stands there, alone, looking out at the lift of the horizon.
I know that that is true, the business of looking at the sea, for my mother once, years later when I was a big boy, said to me, "When I first came here I used to stand down at the gate and just look out over the water. I spent hours doing it, and didn't know why. But it wore off. It wore off a long time before you were born, Son."
The Scholarly Attorney went to Arkansas and the girl was on the steps of the commissary, and that is why I was in the car, in the rain, at night.
I entered the lobby of my hotel just about midnight. The clerk saw me enter, beckoned to me, and gave me a number to call. "They been giving the operator prostration," he said. I didn't recognize the number. "Said ask for a party named Miss Burke," the clerk added.
So I didn't bother to go upstairs before calling, but stepped into one of the lobby booths. "Markheim Hotel," the crisp voice answered, and I asked for Miss Burke, and there was Sadie's voice saying, "Well, by God, it's time you got here. I called Burden's Landing God knows when and they said you'd left. What did you do, walk?"
"I'm not Sugar-Boy," I said.
"Well, get on over here. Suite 905. Hell has popped."
I hung the receiver up very deliberately, walked over to the desk and asked the clerk to give my bag to a bellhop, got a drink out of the lobby cooler, bought a couple of packs of cigarettes from the sleepy sister at the lobby stand, opened a package and lighted myself one, and stood there to take a long drag and look at the blank lobby, as though there weren't any place in the world where I had to go.
But there was such a place. And I went there. Quick, once I started.
Sadie was sitting in the outside room of Suite 905, over by the telephone stand, with a tray full of cigarette butts in front of her and a coronal of smoke revolving slowly about hr head of hacked-off black hair.
"Well," she said in the tone of the matron of a home for wayward girls from inside the smoke screen, but I didn't answer. I walked straight over to her, past the form of Sugar-Boy, who snored in a chair, and grabbed a handful of that wild black Irish hair to steady her and kissed her smack on the forehead before she could God-damn me.
Which she did.
"You have no idea why I did that," I said.
"I don't care, just so it isn't a habit."
"It was nothing personal," I said. "It was just because your name is not Dumonde."
"Your name is going to be mud if you don't get on in here," she said, and twitched her head in the direction of a door.
"Maybe I'll resign," I said in my whimsey, then for a split second, with a surprising flash in my head like the flash of a photographer's bulb, I thought maybe I would.
Sadie was just about to say something, when the telephone rang and she sprang at it as though she'd strangle it with her bare hands and snatched up the receiver. As I walked toward the inner door, I heard her saying, "So you got him. All right, get him to town here…. To hell with his wife. Tell him he'll be sicker'n she is if he don't come…. Yeah, tell him–"
Then I knocked on the inner door, heard a voice, and went in.
I saw the Boss in shirt sleeves, cocked back in an easy chair with his sock-feet propped on a straight chair in front of him, and his tie askew, and his eyes bugging out and a forefinger out in the air in front of him as tough it were the stock of a bull whip. Then I saw what the snapper of the bull whip would have been flicking the flies off of if that forefinger of the Boss had been the stock of a bull whip: it was Mr. Byram B. White, State Auditor, and his long bony paraffin-colored face was oozing a few painful drops of moisture and his eyes reached out and grabbed me like the last hope.
I took in the fact that I was intruding.
"Excuse me," I said, and started to back out of the door.
"Shut the door and sit down," the Boss said, and his voice moved right on without any punctuation to something it had been saying before my entrance, and the forefinger snapped, "–and you can just damned well remember you aren't supposed to get rich. A fellow like you, fifty years old and gut-shot and teeth gone and never had a dime, if God-Almighty had never intended you to be rich he'd done it long back. Look at yourself, damn it! You to figure you're supposed to be rich, it is plain blasphemy. Look at yourself. Ain't it a fact?" And the forefinger leveled at Mr. Byram B. White.
But Mr. White didn't answer. He just stood there in his unhappiness and looked at the finger.
"God damn it, has the cat got your tongue?" the Boss demanded. "Can't you answer a civil question?"
"Yes," Mr. White managed with gray lips that scarcely moved.
"Speak up, don't mumble, say, 'It's a fact, it's blasphemous fact,' " the Boss insisted, still pointing the finger.
Mr. White's lips went grayer, and the voice was less than loud and clear, but he said it. Every word.
"All right, that's better," the Boss said. "Now you know what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to stay pore and take orders. I don't care about your chastity, which from the looks of you you don't have any trouble keeping plenty of, but I mean it's poverty and obedience and don't you forget it. Especially the last. There'll be a little something coming to you now and then in the way of sweetening, but Duffy'll tend to that. Don't you go setting up on your own any more. There just aren't going to be any one-man bonanzas. You got that? Speak up!"
"Yes," Mr. White said.
"Louder" And say, 'I got that.' "
He said it. Louder.
"All right," the Boss said, "I'm going to stop this impeachment business for you. But don't go and get the notion it's because I love you. It's just because those fellows can't get the idea they can just up and knock off somebody. Are my motives clear?"
"Yes," Mr. White said.
"All right, then sit down over there at the desk." And the Boss pointed at the little desk with the pen tray and telephone. "Get a sheet of plain paper out of the drawer and take your pen in hand." He waited until Mr. White had glided spectrally across the room and settled himself at the desk, making himself remarkably small, like the genie getting ready to go back into the bottle, drawing himself into hunch as though he wanted to assume the prenatal position and be little and warm and safe in the dark. But the Boss was saying, "Now write what I say." Then he began to dictate: "Dear Governor Stark,–because of ill health–which renders it difficult for me to attend consciously–" The Boss interrupted himself, saying, "Be sure you put that _consciously__ in now, you wouldn't want to leave that out," and then continued in the business voice–"to the duties of my position as Auditor–I wish to offer my resignation–to take effect as soon after the above date–as you can relieve me." He eyed the hunched figure, and added, "Respectfully yours."