All the king's men

by Роберт Пенн Уоррен

  Hugh Miller gave something which resembled an incipient smile.

  "No hard feelings?" the Boss said, and stuck out his hand.

  Hugh Miller took it.

  "If you don't give up likker, you might drop in and have a drink with me some time," the Boss said. "I won't talk politics."

  "All right," Hugh Miller said, and turned toward the door.

  He had just about made the door, when the Boss said, "Hugh." Hugh Miller stopped and looked back.

  "You're leaving me alone," the Boss said, in semicomic woe, "with the sons-of-bitches. Mine and the other fellow's."

  Hugh Miller smiled in a stiff, embarrassed way, shook his head, said, "Hell–Willie–" let his voice trail off without ever saying what he had started to say, and then Harvard Law School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands and pure heart, was with us no longer.

  The Boss sank down on the foot of the bed, heaved his left ankle up over his right knee; and while he meditatively scratched the left foot, the way a farmer does when he takes off his shoes at night, he stared at the closed door.

  "With the sons-of-bitches," he said, and let the foot slip off the knee and plop to the floor, while he still stared to the door.

  I stood up again. It was my third try for getting out of the place and getting back to my hotel for some sleep. The Boss could sit up all night, night after night, and never show it, and that fact was sure hell on his associates. I edged toward the door again, but the Boss swung his stare to me and I knew something was coming. So I just stopped and waited for it, while the stare worked over my face and tried to probe around in the gray stuff inside my head, like a pair of forceps.

  Then he said, "You think I ought to thrown White to the wolves?"

  "It's a hell of a time to be asking that question," I said.

  "You think I ought?"

  "_Ought__ is a funny word," I said. "If you mean, to win, then time will tell. If you mean, to do right, then nobody will ever be able to tell you."

  "What do you think?

  "Thinking is not my line," I said, "and I'd advise you to stop thinking about it because you know damned well what you are going to do. You are going to do what you are doing."

  "Lucy is figuring on leaving," he said calmly, as though that answered something I had said.

  "Well, I'm damned," I said, in genuine surprise, for I had Lucy figured as the long-suffering type on whose bosom repentant tears always eventually fall. Very eventually. Then my glance strayed to the closed door, beyond which Sadie Burke sat in front of the telephone with that pair of black bituminous eyes in the middle of the pocked face and cigarette smoke tangled in that wild black hacked-off Irish hair like morning mist in a pine thicket.

  He caught my glance at the door. "No," he said, "it's not that."

  "Well, that would be enough by ordinary standards," I said.

  "She didn't know. Not that I know of."

  "She's a woman," I said, "and they can smell it."

  "That wasn't it," he said. "She said if I took care of Byram White she would leave me."

  "Looks like everybody is trying to run your business for you."

  "God damn it!" he said, and came up off the bed, and paced savagely across the carpet for four paces, and swung, and paced again, and seeing that motion and the heavy sway of the head when he turned, I thought back to the night when I had heard the pacing in the next room in those jerkwater hotels over the state back in the days when the Boss had been Willie Stark, and Willie Stark had been the sucker with the high-school-debater speech full of facts and figures and the kick-me sign on his coattails.

  Well, I was seeing it now–the lunging, taut motion that had then been on the other side of the wall, in the dry-goods-box little hotel room. Well, it was out of that room now. It was prowling the veldt.

  "God damn it!" he said again, "they don't know a thing about it, they don't know how it is, and you can't tell 'em."

  He paced back and forth a couple of times more, then said, "They don't know."

  He swung again, paced, and stopped, his head thrust out toward me. "You know what I'm going to do? Soon as I bust the tar out of that gang."

  "No," I said, "I don't know."

  "I'm going to build me the God-damnedest, biggest, chromium-platedest, formaldehyde-stinkingest free hospital and health center the All-Father ever let live. Boy, I tell you, I'm going to have a cage of canaries in every room that can sing Italian grand opera and there ain't going to be a nurse hasn't won a beauty contest at Atlantic City and every bedpan will be eighteen carat gold and by Gold, every bedpan will have a Swiss music-box attachment to play 'Turkey in the Straw' or 'The Sextet from Lucia,' take your choice."

  "That will be swell," I said.

  "I'll do it," he said. "You don't believe me, but I'm going to do it."

  "I believe every word of it," I said I was dead for sleep. I stood there, rocking on my heels, and through the haze I watched him pace and swing and lunge, and sway his big head, with the hair coming down to his eyes.

  I suppose then that it was a wonder that Lucy Stark hadn't packed her suitcase a long time before. I didn't see how she didn't know about something which could scarcely be called a secret. When it began I never knew. But it was already full blown when I found out about it. The Boss went up to Chicago on a little piece of private business, about six or eight months after he got to be Governor, and took me with him. Up there a fellow named Josh Conklin did us the town, and he was the man to do it, a big, burly fellow, with prematurely white hair and a red face and black, beetling eyebrows and a dress suit that fitted him like a corset and a trick apartment like a movie set and an address book an inch thick. He wasn't the real thing, but he sure was a good imitation of it, which is frequently better that the real thing, for the real thing can relax but the imitation can't afford to and has to spend all the time being just one cut more real than the real thing, with money no object. He took us to a night club where they rolled out a sheet of honest-to-God ice on the floor and a bevy of "Nordic Nymphs" in silver gee-strings and silver brassières came skating out on real skates to whirl and fandango and cavort and sway to the music under the housebroke aurora borealis with the skates flashing and the white knees flashing and white arms serpentining in the blue light, and the little twin, hard-soft columns of muscle and flesh up the backbones of the bare backs swaying and working in a beautiful reciprocal motion, and what was business under the silver brassières vibrating to music, and the long unbound unsnooded silver innocent Swedish hair trailing and floating and whipping in the air.

  It took the boy from Mason City, who had never seen any ice except the skim-ice on the horse trough. "Jesus," the boy from Mason City said, in unabashed admiration. And then, "Jesus." And he kept swallowing hard, as though he had a sizable chunk of dry corn pone stuck in his throat.

  It was over, and Josh Conklin said politely, "How did you like that, Governor?"

  "They sure can skate," the Governor said.

  Then one of the Swedish-haired nymphs came out of the dressing room with her skates off and a silver cloak draped over her bare shoulders, and came over to the table. She was a friend of Josh Conklin's and a very nice friend to have even if the hair had not come from Sweden but from the drugstore. Well, she had a friend in the act, so she got her friend, who quickly made friends with the Governor, who, for the rest of the stay in Chicago, practically dropped out of my life except for the period every night when the skating was going on. Then he'd be sitting there watching the gyrating, and swallowing on the chunk of dry corn pone stuck in his throat. Then when the last act was over he's say, "Good night, Jack," and he and the friend of the friend of Josh Conklin would head off into the night.

  I don't know that Lucy ever knew about the skating rink, but Sadie did. For Sadie had channels of information closed to the home-maker type. When the Boss and I got back home, and the Nordic Nymphs were but a fond memory, a soft sweet spot in the heart like the bruised place in a muskmelon, it was Sadie who
raised the seven varieties of Hibernian hell. The very morning the Boss and I hit town, I heard rumbling from inside the Boss's office as I stood in the outer room chatting with the girl who was the receptionist and catching up with the gossip. I noticed the racket inside, a noise like somebody slamming a book on a desk and then a voice, Sadie's voice. "What's going on?" I asked the girl.

  "Yeah, you tell me what went on in Chicago," the girl said.

  "Oh," exclaimed I in my innocence, "so that is it."

  "Oh," she exclaimed, mimicking me, "that was it, and how!"

  I retired to the door of my cubbyhole, which opened off the outside room. I was standing just inside, with my door wide open, when Sadie burst out of the Boss's door about the way one of the big cats, no doubt, used to bounce out of the hutch at the far end of the arena and head fro the Christian martyr. Her hair was flying with distinct life and her face was chalk-white with the pock marks making it look like riddled plaster, like, say, a plaster-of-Paris mask of Medusa which some kid has been using as a target for a BB gun. But in the middle of the plaster-of-Paris mask was n event which had nothing whatsoever to do with plaster of Paris: her eyes, and they were a twin disaster, they were a black explosion, they were a conflagration. She was running a head of steam to bust the rivets, and the way she snatched across the floor you could hear the seams pop in her skirt.

  Then she caught sight of me, and without change of pace swung straight into my room and slammed the door behind her.

  "The son-of-a-bitch," she said, and stood there panting and glaring at me.

  "You needn't blame me," I said.

  "The son-of-a-bitch," she iterated, glaring, "I'll kill him, I swear to God I'll kill him."

  "You set a high valuation on something," I said.

  "I'll ruin him, I'll drive him out of this state, I swear to God. The son-of-a-bitch to two-time me after all I've done for him. Listen–" she said, and grabbed a handful of my lapels in each of her strong hands and shook me (He hands were squarish and strong and hard like a man's.) "Listen–" she repeated.

  "You needn't choke me," I protested peevishly, "and I don't want to listen. O know too God-damned much now." And I wasn't joking. I didn't want to listen. The world was full of things I didn't want to know.

  "Listen–" and she shook me–"who made that son-of-a-bitch what he is today? Who made him Governor? Who took him when he was the Sap of the Year and put him in big time? Who gave it to him, play by play so he couldn't lose?"

  "I reckon you mean for me to say you did."

  "And it's the truth," she said, "and he goes and two-times me, the–"

  "No," I said, trying to get loose from the grip on my lapels, "he was two-timing Lucy, so you need some other kind of arithmetic for what he was doing to you. But I don't know whether to multiply or divide in a case like this."

  "Lucy!" she burst out from lips that coiled and contorted. "Lucy–she's a fool. She had her way and he'd be in Mason City slopping the hogs right now, and he knows it. He knows what she'd do for him. If he listened to her. She had her chance, she–" She simply stopped for breath, but you could see the words still blazing on in her head while she gasped for air.

  "I see you seem to think Lucy is on the way out," I said.

  "Lucy–" she said, and stopped, but the tone said everything there was to say about Lucy, who was a country girl, and had gone to a hick Baptist college where they believe in God, and had taught the little towheaded snots in the Mason Country school, and had married Willie Stark and given him a kid, and had missed her chance. Then she added, suddenly quiet, in a grim matter-of-factness, "Give him time–he'll ditch her, the son-of-a-bitch."

  "You ought to know," I said, simply because I couldn't resist the logic of the proposition, but I hadn't got it out before she slapped me. Which is what you ask for when you start mixing into affairs, public or private.

  "It's the wrong guy," I said, fingering my cheek and backing off a step from the heat, for she was about to blaze, "I'm not the hero of the piece."

  Then she wasn't about to blaze, at all. She stood there in a kind of heavy numbness inside the sagging clothes. I saw a tear gather at the inner corner of each eye, gather very slowly and swollenly and then run down with the precision of a tiny mechanical toy, one on each side of the slightly pitted nose, until they simultaneously arrived at the smear of dark lipstick, and spread. I saw the tongue come out and fastidiously touch the upper lip as though to sample the salt.

  She was looking straight to me all the time as though if she looked hard enough she might see the answer to something.

  Then she went past me to the wall, where a mirror hung, and stared into the mirror, putting her face up close to the mirror and turning it a little from side to side, slowly. I couldn't see what was in the mirror, just the back of her head.

  "What was she like?" she asked, distantly and dispassionately "Who?" I asked, and it was an honest question.

  "In Chicago," she said.

  "She was just a little tart," I said, "with fake Swedish hair on her head and skates on her feet and practically nothing on in between."

  "Was she pretty?" the distant and dispassionate voice asked.

  "Hell," I said, "if I met her on the street tomorrow I wouldn't recognize her."

  "Was she pretty?" the voice said.

  "How do I know?" I demanded, peevish again. "The condition she earned her living in you didn't get around to noticing her face."

  "Was she pretty?"

  "For Christ's sake, forget it," I said.

  She turned around, and came toward me, holding her hands up at about the level of the chin, one on each side, the fingers together and slightly bent, not touching her face. She came up close to me and stopped. "Forget it?" she repeated, as though she had just heard my words.

  Then she lifted her hands a little, and touched the white riddled plaster-of-Paris mask, touching t on each side, just barely prodding the surface as though it were swollen and painful. "Look," she commanded.

  She held it here for me to look at. "Look!" she commanded vindictively, and jabbed her fingers into the flesh, hard. For it was flesh, it wasn't plaster of Paris at all.

  "Yes, look," she said, "and we lay up there in that God-forsaken shack–both of us, my brother and me–we were kids–and it was the smallpox–and my father was a drunk no-good–he was off drunk, crying and drinking in a saloon if he could beg a dime–crying and telling how the kiddies, the sweet little angel kiddies, was sick–oh, he was a drunk lousy warm-hearted kid-beating crying Irishman–and my brother died–and he ought to have lived–it wouldn't have mattered to him–not to a man–but me, I didn't die–I didn't die, and I got well–and my father, he would look at me and grab me and start kissing me all over the face, all over the holes, slobbering, and crying and stinking of whisky–or he'd look at me and say, 'Jeez,' and slap me in the face–and it was all the same–it was all the same, for I wasn't the one that died–I didn't die–I–"

  It was all a breathless monotony, suddenly cut off. She had groped out for me and had seized the cloth of my coat in her hands and had stuck her bowed head up against my chest. So I stood there with my right arm around her shoulder, patting her, patting and making a kind of smoothing-out motion with my hand on her back that shook soundlessly with what I took to be sobs.

  Then, not lifting her head, she was saying, "It's going to be like that–it's always been that way, and it'll keep on–being like that–"

  _It__, I thought, and thought she was talking about the face.

  But she wasn't, for she was saying, "–it'll keep on–they'll kiss it and slobber–then they'll slap you in the face–no matter what you do, do anything for them, make them what they are–take them out of the gutter and make something out of them–and they'll slap you in the face–the first chance–because you had smallpox–they'll some naked slut on skates and they'll slap you in the face–they'll kick up dirt in your face–"

  I kept on patting and making the smoothing-out motion, for there w
asn't anything else to do.

  "–that's the way it'll be–always some slut on skates–some–"

  "Look here," I said, still patting, "you make out. What do you care what he does?"

  She jerked her head up. "What do you know, what the hell do you know?" she demanded, and dug her fingers in my coat and shook me.

  "If it's all this grief," I said, "let him go."

  "Let him go! Let him go! I'll kill him first, I swear it," she said, glaring at me out of the now red eyes. "Let him go? Listen here–" and she shook me again–"if he does run after some slut, he'll come back. He's got to come back, do you hear? He's got to. Because he can't do without me. And he knows it. He can do without any of those sluts, but he can't do without me. Not without Sadie Burke, and he knows it."

  And she lifted her face up, high, almost thrusting it at me, as though she were showing me something I ought damned well to be proud to look at.

  "He'll always come back," she asserted grimly.

  And she was right. He always came back. The world was full of sluts on skates, even if some of them weren't on skates. Some of them wore grass skirts and some of them pounded typewriters and some of them checked hats and some of them were married to legislators, but he always came back. Not necessarily to be greeted with open arms and a tender smile, however. Sometimes it was a cold silence like the artic night. Sometimes it was delirium for every seismograph on the continent. Sometimes it was a single well-chosen epithet. For instance, the time the Boss and I had to do a little trip up to the north of the state. The afternoon we got back we walked into the Capitol and there, in the stately lobby, under the great bronze dome, was Sadie. We approached her. She waited until we had arrived, then said, without preliminary, quite simply, "You bastard."

  "Gee, Sadie," the Boss said, and grinned his grin of the wayward attractive boy, "you don't even wait to find out anything."

  "You just can't keep buttoned up, you bastard," she said, still simply, and walked away.

  "Gee," the Boss said ruefully to me, "I didn't do a thing this trip, and look what happens."