All the King's Men (65 page)

Larson, without a word, walked to the door, opened it, and went out, leaving it ajar. Tiny Duffy, with the peculiar impression of lightness, the lightness of a drowned bloated body swaying slowly upward on the ninth day, which a fat man can give when he tiptoes, moved toward the door, too. Once there, with his hand on the knob, he looked back. As his eyes rested on the unregarding Boss, the fury flashed again into the face, and just for that instant I thought,
By God, he’s human
_. Then he caught my gaze on him, and looked back at me with a kind of suffering, mute appeal which asked to be forgiven for everything, asked for my understanding and sympathy, asked for everybody to think well of poor old Tiny Duffy, who had done what he could according to his lights and then they threw stuff in his face. Didn’t he have his rights? Didn’t poor old Tiny have his feelings?

The he followed Larson off into the night. He managed to close the door without a sound.

I looked at the Boss, who hadn’t stirred. “Glad I got here for the last act,” I said, “but I got to toddle now.” There certainly wouldn’t be any talk about the tax bill.

“Wait,” he said.

He reached down for the bottle and took a drag out of it. He was down to essentials now.

“I told him,” he said, glaring up at me, “I told him, I said, if you leave off a window latch, I said if you leave one iron out of the concrete, I said if you–”

“Yeah,” I said, “I heard you.”

“–if you put one extra teaspoon of sand, you do a thing, a single thing, and I’ll rip you wide open, I’ll rip you!” He got up and came toward me. He stood very close to me. “I’ll rip him,” he said, and breathed heavily.

“So you said,” I agreed.

“I told him I would, and I will. Let him do one thing wrong.”

“All right.”

“I’ll rip him anyway. By God–” he flung his arms out wide–”I’ll rip him anyway. I’ll rip all of ‘em who put their dirty hands on it. They do the job and when it’s over I’ll rip ‘em. Every one. I’ll rip ‘em and ruin ‘em. By God, I will! Putting their dirty hands on it. For they made me, they made me do it.”

“Tom Stark had something to do with it,” I said.

That stopped him, as far gone as he was. He stared at me with a look that made me think he was about to lay hands on me. Then he turned from me, and moved back toward the couch. But he didn’t sit down. He leaned over for the bottle, did it some direct damage, stared at me again, and said, indistinctly, “He’s just a boy.”

I didn’t say anything to that. He took another try at the bottle.

“He’s just a boy,” he repeated, dully.

“All right,” I said.

“But the others,” he burst out, swinging his arms wide again, “the others–they made me do it–I’ll rip ‘em–I’ll ruin ‘em!”

He had quite a lot to say along that line before he took his dive into the sofa. After he got there he made a few more muffled remarks along the same line and about how Tom Stark was just a boy. Then the one-side conversation died away, and there wasn’t anything but the heavy draw and puff of his breathing. I stood there and looked down at him and thought about the first time, God knows how many years before, when he got drunk in my hotel room at Upton and passed out. He had come a long way. And it wasn’t the chubby boy face of Cousin Willie I looked down into now. Everything was changed now. It sure-God was.

Sugar-Boy, who had sat quiet all that time over in the shadow with his short legs barely reaching the floor, got off his chair and came over to the couch. He looked down at the Boss.

“He is out deader than a mackerel,” I said.

He nodded, still looking down at the burly form. The Boss was lying on his back. One leg was off the couch, dragging on the floor. Sugar-Boy leaned to pick it up and adjust it on the couch. Then he saw the discarded coat on the floor. He picked that up and spread it over the Boss’s sock-feet. He looked at me, and explained, almost apologetically, “He mi-mi-mi-might catch c-c-c-cold.”

I gathered up my brief case and topcoat, and moved toward the door. I looked back at the scene of carnage. Sugar-Boy had gone back to his chair in the shadow. I must have had some trace of question in my look, for he said, “I’ll s-s-s-s-set up and s-s-s-see no-no-no-body bothers him.”

So I left them together.

As I drove down the night street on my way home, I wondered what Adam Stanton would have to say if he ever learned about how the hospital was going to be built. I knew what the Boss would say, however, if the question about Adam were put up to him. He would say, “Hell, I said I would build it, and I’m building it. That’s the main thing, I’m building it. Let him stay in it and keep his own little patties sterile as hell.” Which was exactly what he did say when I asked him the question.

As I drove down the night street, I wondered what Anne Stanton would have to say if she had been there in that room and had seen the Boss piled up there, out blind on the couch. I took some sardonic pleasure in that speculation. If she had taken up with him because he was so big and tough and knew his own mind and was willing to pay the price for anything, well, she ought to see him piled up there like a bull that’s got tangled up in the lead rope and is down on its knees and can’t budge and can’t even lift its head any more on account of the ring in the nose. She ought to see that.

Then I thought that maybe that was what she was waiting for. There is nothing women love so much as the drunkard, the hellion, the roarer, the reprobate. They love him because they–women, I mean–are like the bees in Samson’s parable in the Bible: they like to build their honeycomb in the carcass of a dead lion.

Out of the strong shall come forth sweetness.

Tom Stark may have been just a boy, as the Boss said, but he had had a good deal to do with the ways things were going. But, then, the Boss had had a good deal to do, I suppose, with making Tom what Tom was. So there was a circle in the proof, and the son was merely an extension of the father, and when they glared at each other it was like a mirror looking into a mirror. As a matter of fact they did look alike, the same cock to the head on the shoulders, the same forward thrusts of the head, the same sudden gestures. Tom was a trained-down, slick-faced, confident, barbered version of what the Boss had been a long time back when I first knew him. The big difference was this: Back in those days the Boss had been blundering and groping his unwitting way toward the discovery of himself, of his great gift, wearing his overalls that bagged down about the seat, or the blue serge suit with the tight, shiny pants, nursing some blind and undefined compulsion within him like fate or a disease. Now Tom wasn’t blundering and groping toward anything, and certainly not toward discovery of himself. For he knew that he was the damnedest, hottest thing there was. Tom Stark, All American, and there were no flies on him. And no overalls bagged down about his snake hips and pile-driver knees. No, he would stand in his rubber-soled saddle shoes in the middle of the floor with a boxer stance, the gray-stripped sport coat draped over his shoulders, the top button of his heavy-weave white shirt unbuttoned, the red wool tie tied in a loose hanging knot as big as your fist under his bronze-looking throat, jerked over to one side though, and his confident eyes would rove slowly over the joint and his slick, strong, brown jaw would move idly over the athlete’s chewing gum. You know how athletes chew gum. Oh, he was the hero, all right, and he wasn’t blundering or groping. He knew what he was.

He knew he was good. So he didn’t have to bother to keep all the rules. Not even the training rules. He could deliver anyway, he told his father, so what the hell? But he did it once too often. He and Thad Mellon, who was a substitute tackle, and Gup Lawson, who was a regular guard, did themselves proud one Saturday night after the game out at a roadhouse. They might have managed very well, if they hadn’t got into a fight with some yokels who didn’t know or care much about football and who resented having their girls fooled with. Gup Lawson took quite a beating from the yokels and went to the hospital and was out of football for several weeks. Tom and Thad didn’t get more than a few punches before the crowd broke up the fight. But the breach of rules was dumped rather dramatically into the lap of Coach Billie Martin. It got into one of the papers. He suspended Tom Stark and Thad Mellon. That definitely changed the betting odds for the Georgia game for the following Saturday, for Georgia was good that year, and Tom Stark was the local edge.

The Boss took it like a man. No kicking and screaming even when Georgia wound up the half with the score seven to nothing. As soon as the whistle blew he was on his feet. “Come on,” he said to me, and I knew he was on his way to the field house. I trailed him down there, and leaned against the doorjamb and watched it. Back off on the field there was the band music now. The band would be parading around with the sunshine (for this was the first of the afternoon games, now that the season was cooling off) glittering on the brass and on the whirling gold baton of the leader. Then the band, way off there, began to tell Dear Old State how we lover her, how we’d fight, fight, fight for her, how we’d die for her, how she was the mother of heroes. Meanwhile the heroes, pretty grimy and winded, lay around and got worked over.

The Boss didn’t say a word at first. He just walked into the place, and looked slowly around the relaxed forms. The atmosphere would have reminded you of a morgue. You could have heard a pin drop. There wasn’t a sound except once the scrape of a cleat on the concrete when somebody surreptitiously moved his foot, once or twice the creak of harness when somebody shifted his position . Coach Billie Martin, standing over across the room with his hat jammed down to his eyes, looked glum and chewed an unlit cigar. The Boss worked his eyes over them all, one by one, while the band made its promises and the old grads in the stands stood up in the beautiful autumn light with their hats over their hearts and felt high and pure.

The Boss’s eyes came to rest on Jimmy Hardwich, who was sitting on a bench. Jimmy was a second-string end. He had been put in at the second quarter because the regular at left end had been performing like a constipated dowager. It was going to be Jimmy’s big chance. The chance came. It was a pass. And he dropped it. So now when the Boss’s eyes fixed on Jimmy, Jimmy stared sullenly back. Then, when the Boss’s eyes lingered a moment, Jimmy burst our, “God damn it–God damn it–go on and say it!”

But the Boss didn’t say it. He didn’t say anything. He just moved slowly over to stand in front of Jimmy. Then, very deliberately, he reached out and laid his right hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. He didn’t pat the shoulder. He jus laid it there, the way some men can do to gentle a nervous horse.

He wasn’t looking at Jimmy now, but swept his glance around over all the others. “Boys,” he said, “I just came down to tell you I know you did your best.”

He stood there, with his hand still lying on Jimmy’s shoulder, and let that sink in. Jimmy began to cry.

Then he said, “And I know you will do your best. For I know the stuff you got in you.”

He waited again. Then he took his hand off Jimmy’s shoulder, and turned slowly and moved toward the door. There he paused, and again swept his glance over the room. “I want to tell you I won’t forget you,” he said, and walked out of the door.

Jimmy was really crying now.

I followed the Boss back outside, where the band was now playing some brassy march.

When the second half opened up, the boys came out for blood. They made a touchdown early in the third quarter, and kick the point. The Boss felt pretty good, in a grim way, about that. In the fourth quarter Georgia drove down to the danger zone, was held, then kicked a field goal. That was the way it ended, ten to seven.

But we still had a shot at the Conference. If we took everything else in the season. The next Saturday Tom Stark was back out. He was out because the Boss had put the heat on Billie Martin. That was why, all right, for the Boss told me so himself.

“How did Martin take it?” I asked.

“He didn’t, the Boss said. “I crammed it down his throat.”

I didn’t say anything to that, and didn’t even know I was looking anything. But the Boss thrust his head at me and said, “Now look here, I wasn’t going to let him throw it away. We got a chance for the Conference, and the bastard would throw it away.”

I still didn’t say anything.

“It’s not Tom, it’s the championship, by God,” he said. “It’s not Tom. If it weren’t anything but Tom, I wouldn’t say a word. And if he breaks training again, I’ll pound his head on the floor. I’ll beat him with my own hands. I swear it.”

“He’s a pretty good-sized boy,” I remarked.

He swore again he would do it.

So the next Saturday Tom Stark was back out, and he carried the ball, and he was a cross between a ballerina and a locomotive, and the stands cheered, Yea, Tom, Tom, Tom, for he was their darling, and the score was twenty to nothing, and State had the sights back on the championship. There were two more games. There was an easy one with Tech, and then the Thanksgiving pay-off.

Tech was easy. In the third quarter, when State already had a lead, the coach sent Tom in just to give him a canter. Tom put on a little show for the stands. It was casual and beautiful and insolent. There was nothing to it, the way he did his stuff, it looked so easy. But once after he had knifed through for seven yards and had been nailed by the secondary, he didn’t get up right away.

“Just got the breath knocked out,” the Boss said.

And Tiny Duffy, who was with us in the Governor’s box, said, “Sure, but it won’t faze Tom.”

“Hell, no,” the Boss agreed.

But Tom didn’t get up at all. They picked him up and carried him to the field house.

“They sure knocked it out of him,” the Boss said, as though he were commenting on the weather. Then, “Look, they’re putting in Axton. Axton’s pretty good. Give him another season.”

“He’s good, but he ain’t Tom Stark. That Tom Stark is my boy,” Duffy proclaimed.

“They’ll pass now, I bet,” the Boss said judicially, but all the time he was sneaking a look at the procession making for the field house.