All the King's Men (15 page)

It was just at that time Sadie came in. Or rather, she knocked at the door, and I yelled, and she came in.

“Hello,” she said, gave a quick look at the scene, and started toward us. Her eye was on the bottle of red-eye on my table. “How about some refreshment?” she asked.

“All right,” I replied, but apparently I didn’t get the right amount of joviality into my tone. Or maybe she could tell something had been going on from the way the air smelled, and if anybody could do that it would be Sadie.

Anyway, she stopped in the middle of the floor and said, “What’s up?”

I didn’t answer right away, and she came across the writing table, moving quick and nervous, the way she always did, inside of a shapeless shoddy-blue summer suit that she must have got by walking into a secondhand store and shutting her eyes and pointing and saying, “I’ll take that.”

She reached down and took a cigarette out of my pack lying there and tapped it on the back of her knuckles and turned her hot lamps on me.

“Nothing,” I said, “except Willie here is saying how he’s not going to be Governor.”

She had the match lighted by the time I got the words out, but it never got to the cigarette. It stopped in mid-air.

“So you told him,” she said, looking at me.

“The hell I did,” I said. “I never tell anybody anything. I just listen.”

She snapped the match out with a nasty snatch of her wrist and turned on Willie. “Who told you?” she demanded.

“Told me what?” Willie asked, looking up at her steady.

She saw that she had made her mistake. And it was not the kind of mistake for Sadie Burke to make. She had made her way in the world up from the shack in the mud flat by always finding out what you knew and never letting you know what she knew. Her style was not to lead with the chin but with a neat length of lead pipe after you had stepped off balance. But she had led with the chin this time. Somewhere way back inside of Sadie Burke there had been the idea that I was going to tell Willie. Or that somebody was going to tell Willie. Not that she, Sadie Burke, would tell Willie, but that Willie would be told and Sadie Burke wouldn’t have to. Or nothing as specific as that. Just floating around in the deep dark the idea of Willie and the idea of the thing Willie didn’t know, like two bits of drift sucked down in an eddy to the bottom of the river to revolve slowly and blindly there in the dark. But there, all the time.

So, out of an assumption she had made, without knowing it, or a wish or a fear she didn’t know she had, she led with her chin. And standing there, rolling that unlighted cigarette in her strong fingers, she knew it. The nickel was in the slot, and looking at Willie you could see the wheels and the cogs and the cherries and the lemons begin to spin inside the machine.

“Told me what?” Willie said. Again.

“That you’re not going to be Governor,” she said, with a dash of easy levity, but she flashed me a look, the only S O S, I suppose, Sadie Burke ever sent out to anybody.

But it was her fudge and I let her cook it.

Willie kept on looking on her, waiting while she turned to one side and uncorked my bottle and poured herself out a steady-er. She took it, and without any ladylike cough.

“Told me what?” Willie said.

She didn’t answer. She just looked at him.

And looking right back at her, he said, in a voice like death and taxes, “Told me what?”

“God damn you!” she blazed at him then, and the glass rattled on the tray as she set it down without looking. “You God-damned sap!”

“All right,” Willie said in the same voice, boring in like a boxer when the other fellow begins to swing wild. “What was it?”

“All right,” she said, “all right, you sap, you’ve been framed!”

He looked at her steady for thirty seconds, and there wasn’t a sound but the sound of his breathing. I was listening to it.

Then he said, “Framed?”

“And how!” Sadie said, and leaned toward him with what seemed to be a vindictive and triumphant intensity glittering in her eyes and ringing in her voice. “Oh, you decoy, you wooden-headed decoy, you let ‘em! Oh, yeah, you let ‘em, because you thought you were the little white lamb of God–” and she paused to give him a couple of pitiful derisive
baa’s
_, twisting her mouth–”yeah, you thought you were the lamb of God, all right, but you know what you are?”

She waited as though for an answer, but he kept staring at her without a word.

“Well, you’re the goat,” she said. “You are the sacrificial goat. You are the ram in the bushes. You are a sap. For you let ‘em. You didn’t even get anything out of it. They’d have paid you to take the rap, but they didn’t have to pay a sap like you. Oh, no, you were so full of yourself and hot air and how you are Jesus Christ, that all you wanted was a chance to stand on your hind legs and make a speech. My friends–” she twisted her mouth in a nasty, simpering mimicry–”my friends, what this state needs is a good five-cent cigar. Oh, my God!” And she laughed with a kind of wild, artificial laugh, suddenly cut short.

“Why?” he demanded, still staring steadily at her, breathing hard but not showing anything. “Why did they do it? To me?”

“Oh, my God!” she exclaimed and turned to me. “Listen to the sap. He wants to know why.” Then she swung to him again, leaning closer, saying. “Listen, if you can get this through your thick head. They wanted you to split the MacMurfee vote. In the sticks. Do you get that or do you want a picture? Can you get that straight, you wooden-head?”

He looked at me, slow, wet his lips, then said, “Is it true?”

“He wants to know if it’s true,” Sadie announced prayerfully to the ceiling. “Oh, my God!”

“Is it true?” he asked me.

“That’s what they tell me,” I said.

Well, it hit him. There was no denying it. His face worked as though he might try to say something or might bust out crying. But he didn’t do either one. He reached over to the table and picked up the bottle and poured out enough into a glass to floor the Irish and drank it off neat.

“Hey,” I said, “take it easy, you aren’t used to that stuff.”

“He ain’t used to a lot of things,” Sadie said, shoving the bottle toward him on the tray. “He ain’t used to the idea he’s not going to be Governor. Are you, Willie?”

“Why can’t you lay off?” I said to her.

But she didn’t even notice me. She leaned toward Willie, and repeated, coaxingly this time, “Are you, Willie?

He reached for the bottle and did it again.

“Are you?” she demanded, not coaxing now.

“I was,” he said, looking up to her, the blood up in his face now, the tousle of hair hanging, his breath coming heavy. “I was,” he said, “before, but I’m not now.”

“Not what?” she said.

“Not used to it.”

“You better get used to it,” she said, and laughed, and shoved the bottle in his direction.

He took it, poured, drank, set the glass down deliberately, and said: “I better not. I better not get used to it.”

She laughed again, that wild artificial laugh, chopped off the laugh, and echoed, “He says he better not get used to it. Oh, my God!” Then she laughed again.

He sat there heavy in his chair, but not leaning back, the sweat beginning to pop out of his face and run down slow and shining over the flesh. He sat there, not noticing the sweat, not wiping it away, watching her laugh.

All at once he heaved up out of the chair. I thought he was going to jump at her. And she must have thought so too, for her laugh stopped. Right in the middle of the aria. But he didn’t jump her. He wasn’t even looking at her. He flung his glance wide around the room, and lifted his hands up in front of him, as though he were ready to grab something. “I’ll kill ‘em!” he said, “I’ll kill ‘em!”

“Sit down,” she said, and leaned quickly toward him to give him a shove on the chest.

His pegs weren’t too steady, and he went down. Right in the chair.

“I’ll kill ‘em,” he said, sitting there, sweating.

“You won’t do a God-damned thing,” she announced. “You won’t be Governor and you won’t get paid for not being and you won’t kill them or anybody else, and you know why?”

“I kill ‘em,” he said.

“I’ll tell you why,” she said, leaning. “It’s because you’re a sap. A triple-plated, spoonfed, one-gallus sap, and you–”

I got up. “I don’t care what kind of games you play,” I said, “but I don’t have to stay here and watch you.”

She didn’t even turn her head. I went to the door, and out, and the last I heard she was defining what kind of a sap he was. I figured that that might take anybody some time.

I took in a good deal of Upton that night. I saw the folks coming out of the last show at the Picture Palace, and I admired the cemetery gates and the schoolhouse by moonlight, and I leaned over the railing of the bridge over the creek and spit in the water. It took about two hours. Then I went back to the hotel.

When I opened the door of the room, Sadie was sitting in a chair by the writing table, smoking a cigarette. The air was thick enough to cut with a knife, and in the light of the lamp on the table the blue smoke drifted and swayed and curdled around her so that I got the impression I might have been looking at her sitting submerged in a tank full of soapy dishwater at the aquarium. The bottle on the table was empty.

For a second or two I thought that Willie had left. Then I saw the finished product.

It was lying on my bed.

I came in, and shut the door.

“Things seem to have quieted down,” I remarked.

“Yeah.”

I walked over to the bed and inspected the item. It was lying on his back’ The coat was pushed up under the armpits, the hands were crossed piously on the bosom like the hands of a
gisant
_ on a tomb in a cathedral, the shirt had pulled up some from its moorings under the belt and the two lowest buttons had come unbuttoned so that a triangular patch of slightly distended stomach was visible–white, with a few coarse dark hairs. The mouth was parted a little, and the lower lip vibrated with a delicate flabbiness at each measured expulsion of breath. All very pretty.

“He rared around some,” Sadie said. “Telling me what he was going to do. Oh, he’s gonna do big things. He’s gonna be President. He’s gonna kill people with his bare hands. Oh, my God!” She took a drag on her cigarette and spewed the smoke out and then fanned the backwash away from her face with a savage, slapping motion of her right hand. “But I quieted him down,” she added, with an air of grim, suddenly spinsterish, satisfaction, the kind your great-aunt used to wear.

“Is he going to the barbecue?” I asked.

“How the hell do I know?” she snapped. “He wasn’t screaming about any little detail like a barbecue. Oh, he’s a big operator. But–” She paused, and did the drag and spew and fanning routine–”I quieted him.”

“It looks like you slugged him,” I observed.

“I didn’t slug him,” she said. “But I hit him where he lives. I finally got across to him the kind of sap he is. And that quieted him.”

“He’s quiet now, all right,” I said, and walked over toward the table.

“He didn’t get that quiet all of a sudden. But he got quiet enough to sit in a chair and hang on to the bottle for support and talk about how he’d have to break the news to some God-damned Lucy.”

“That’s his wife,” I said.

“He talked like it was his mammy and would blow his nose for him. Then he said he was going right to his room and write her a letter. But,” she said, and looked over at the bed, “he never made it. He made the middle of the floor, and then heaved for the bed.”

She rose from the chair and went over to the bed and looked down at him.

“Does Duffy know?” I asked.

“I don’t give a damn what Duffy knows,” she said.

I went over to the bed, too. “I guess we’ll have to leave him here,” I said. “I’ll go over to his room and sleep.” I leaned over and hunted for his room key in the pockets. I found it. Then I took a toothbrush and some pajamas out of my bag.

She was still standing by the bed. She turned to me. “It looks like you might at least take the bastard’s shoes off,” she said.

I laid down my truck on the side of the bed, and did it. I picked up the pajamas and toothbrush and went over to the table to switch off the lamp. Sadie was still by the bed. “You better write that letter to that Mamma Lucy,” she said, “and ask where to ship the remains.”

As I laid my hand on the switch, I looked back at Sadie standing there looking down at the remains, with the left arm, the arm toward me, hanging straight down and a cigarette hanging out of the tip of two fingers and unreeling its spinner of smoke slowly upward, and with her head leaning forward a little while she expelled smoke meditatively over her again outthrust and gleaming lower lip.

There was Sadie, who had come a long way from the shanty in the mud flats. She had come a long way because she played to win and she didn’t mean to win matches and she knew to win you have to lay your money on the right number and that if your number doesn’t show there’s a fellow standing right there with a little rake in your money and then it isn’t yours anymore. She had been around a long time, talking to men and looking them straight in the eye like a man. Some of them liked her, and those that didn’t like her listened when she talked, which wasn’t too often, because there was reason to believe that when those big black eyes, which were black in a way which made it impossible for you to tell whether it was blackness of surface or blackness of depth, looked at the wheel before it began to move they could see the way the wheel would be after it had ceased to move and saw the little ball on the number. Some of them liked her a lot, like Sen-Sen. That had at one time been hard for me to get. I saw a package done up in the baggy tweed or droopy seersucker suit according to the solstice, and the pocked face with the heavy smear of lipstick and the black lamps in it and above it the mob of black hair which looked as though it had been hacked off at ear length with a meat cleaver.

Then one time, suddenly, I saw something else. You see a woman around for a long time and thing that she is ugly. You think she is nothing. Then, all of a sudden, you think how she is under that baggy tweed or droopy seersucker. All of a sudden, you see the face which is there under the pock-marked mask and is humble, pure, and trusting and is asking you to lift the mask. It must be like an old man looking at his wife and just for a second seeing the face he had seen thirty years before. Only in the case I am talking about it is not remembering a face which you have seen a long time back but discovering a face which you have never seen. It is future, not past. It is very unsettling. It was very unsettling, temporarily. I made my pass, and it didn’t come to a thing.