All the King's Men (66 page)

“Axton for Stark,” the loud-speaker up above the stands bellowed, and the cheerleader called for the stuff for Stark. They gave Tom his cheer, and the leader and the assistant leaders cart-wheeled and cavorted and flung up their megaphones.

The ball went back into play. It was a pass, just as the Boss had predicted. Nine yards, and first down. “First Down on Tech’s twenty-four-yard line,” the loud-speaker announced. Then added, “Tom Stark, who was stunned on the previous play, shows signs of regaining consciousness.”

“Stunned, huh?” Tiny Duffy echoed. Then he slapped the Boss on the shoulder (he loved to slap the Boss on the shoulder in public to show what buddies they were), and said, “They can’t stun our old Tom, huh?”

The Boss’s face darkened for a moment, but he said nothing.

“Not for long,” Tiny asseverated. “That boy, he is too tough for ‘em.”

“He’s tough,” the Boss agreed. Then he gave his attention with the greatest devotion to the game.

The game was dull, but the duller it got, the more devoutly the Boss followed every play, and the more anxious he was to cheer. State ground out the touchdowns like a butcher’s machine making hamburger. There was about as much sporting chance in the process as in betting n whether or not water runs downhill. But the Boss cheered every time we made three yards. He had just cheered a pas which had put State on the six-yard line, when a fellow appeared in front of out box and took of his hat, and said, “Governor Stark–Governor Stark.”

“Yeah? the Boss asked.

“The doc–over at the field house–he says can you come over a minute?” the man said.

“Thanks,” the Boss said, “you tell him I’ll be over in a minute. Soon as I see the boys run this one over.” And he put his attention on the game.

“Hell,” Tiny began, “I know it ain’t nothing. Not old Tom, he–”

“Shut up,” the Boss commanded, “can’t you see I’m watching the game!”

And when the touchdown had been driven over and the point had been kicked, the Boss turned and said to me, “It’s getting on to quitting time here. You let Sugar-Boy drive you to the office and wait for me there. I want to see you and Swinton, if you can get him. I’ll take a cab down. Probably beat you there.” And he vaulted over the railing to the green, and went toward the field house. But he stopped by the bench for a moment to kid the boys. Then with his hat jammed down over the heavy, outthrust head, he went on toward the field house.

The rest of us in the box didn’t wait for the last whistle. We worked out before the rush started, and headed for town. Duffy got off at the Athletic Club, where he kept his wind condition by blowing the froth off beer and bending over pool tables, and I went on to the Capitol.

I could tell even before I put my key to the lock that there wasn’t any light in the big reception room. The girls had shut up shop and gone home for Saturday afternoon, off to their movies and bridge games and dates and steaks on sizzling platters at Ye Olde Wagon Wheel roadhouse or dancing at the Dream of Paris where the lights were blue and the saxophone made a sound like the slow, sweet regurgitation of sorghum molasses, off to all the chatter and jabber and giggles and whispers and gasps, off to all the things called having a good time.

For a moment, as I stood there in the big darkened room in the unaccustomed stillness of the place, a kind of sneer flickered along the edge of my mind as I though of all the particular good times they would be having in (Ye Olde Wagon Wheel, Dream of Paris, Capitol City Movie Palace, parked cars, darkened vestibules), the people the would be having the good time with (the college boys with his cocksureness and scarcely concealed air of being on a slumming expedition, the drug clerk with nine hundred dollars saved up in the bank and his hope of buying into the business next year and his notion of getting him a little woman and settling down, the middle-aged sport with hair plastered thinly over the big skull veined like agate and big, damp, brutally manicured hands the color of uncooked pork fat and an odor of bay rum and peppermint chewing gum).

Then as I stood there, the thought changed. But the sneer remained flickering along the edge of the mind, like a little flame nibbling at the edge of a piece of damp paper. Only now it was for myself. What right had I to sneer at them, I demanded. I had had all those good times too. If I wasn’t having one tonight it wasn’t because I had passed beyond it into a stage of beatitude. Perhaps it was something had passed out of me. Virtue by defect. Abstinence by nausea. When they give you the cure, they put something in your likker to make you puke, and after they have puked you enough you begin to take a distaste to your likker. You are like Pavlov’s dog whose saliva starts every time he hears the bell. Only with you the reflex works so that every time you catch a whiff of likker or even think of it, you stomach turns upside down. Somebody must have slipped the stuff into my good times, for now I just didn’t want any more good time. Not now, anyway. But I could pinch out the sneer that flickered along the edge of my mind. I didn’t have to be proud because a good time wouldn’t stay on my stomach.

So I would go into my office and, after sitting there a couple of minutes in the dusk, would flick on the light and get out the tax figures and work on them. I though of the figures with a sense of cleansing and relief.

But as I thought of the figures and resumed my passage across the big room to the door of my office, I heard, or thought I heard, a noise from one of the offices on the other side. I looked over there. There wasn’t any light showing under either of the doors. Then I heard the noise again. It was a perfectly real noise. Nobody–certainly nobody without a light–was supposed to be in there. So I went across the room, my feet noiseless on the thick carpet, and pushed open the door.

It was Sadie Burke. She sat in the chair before her desk (it must have been t creaknof t chair I had heard), her arms were laid on the desk, the forearms bent together, and I knew that she had, just that instant, raised her head from them. Not that Sadie had been crying. But she had been sitting in the dusk, in the abandoned office, on Saturday evening when everybody else was out having a hell of a good time, with her head laid on her arms on the desk.

“Hello, Sadie,” I said.

She eyed me for a moment. Her back was toward what little light seeped in from the window, on which the Venetian blind was closed, and so I could not make out the expression of her face, just the gleam of the eyes. Then she demanded, “What do you want?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Well, you needn’t wait.”

I went across to a chair and sat down and looked at her.

“You heard what I said,” she commented.

“I heard it.”

“Well, you’ll hear it again: you needn’t wait.”

“I find it quite restful here,” I replied, making no motion to rise. “Because, Sadie, we’ve got so much in common. You and me.”

“I hope you don’t mean that as a compliment,” she said.

“No, just a scientific observation.”

“Well, it don’t make you any Einstein.”

“You mean because it is not true that we have a lot in common or because it is so obviously true that doesn’t take Einstein’s brain to figure it out?”

“I mean I don’t give a damn,” she said sourly. And added, “And I don’t give a damn about having you in here either.”

I stayed in the chair and studied her. “It’s Saturday night,” I said. “Why aren’t you out painting the town?”

“To hell with this town.” She fished a cigarette out of the desk and lighted it. The flare of the match jerked the face out of the shadow. She whipped the match flame out with a snapping motion of her arm, then spewed the first gulp of smoke out over the full, curled-down lower lip. That done, she looked at me, and said, “And to hell with you.” She swept her damning gaze around the office as though it were full of forms and faces, and spewed the gray smoke out of her lungs and said, “And to hell with all of them. To hell with this place.”

Her eyes came back to rest on me, and she said, “I’m going to get out of here.”

“Here?” I questioned “This whole place,” she affirmed, and swung her arm wide with the cigarette tip glowing with the swiftness of the motion, “this place, this town.”

“Stick around and you’ll get rich,” I said.

“I could have been rich a long time back,” she said, “paddling in this muck. If I had wanted to.”

She could have, all right. But she hadn’t. At least as far as I knew.

“Yeah–” she jabbed out the cigarette in the tray on the desk–”I’m getting out of here.” She lifted her eyes to mine, as though daring me to say something.

I didn’t say anything, but I shook my head.

“You think I won’t?” she demanded.

“I think you won’t.”

“I’ll show you, damn you.”

“No,” I said, and shook my head again, “you won’t. You’ve got a talent for this, just like a fish for swimming. And you can’t expect a fish not to swim.”

She started to say something, but didn’t. We sat there in the dimness for a couple of minutes. “Stop staring at me,” he ordered. Then, “Didn’t I tell you to get out of here? Why don’t you get out and go home?”

“I’m waiting for the Boss,” I said matter-of-factly, “he’s–” Then I remembered. “Didn’t you hear what happened?”

“What?”

“Tom Stark.”

“Somebody ought to kick his teeth down his throat.”

“Somebody did,” I said.

“They ought to done it long back.”

“Well, they did a pretty good job this afternoon. The last I heard he was unconscious. They called the Boss to the field house.”

“How bad was it?” she asked. “Was it bad?” She leaned forward at me.

“He was unconscious. That’s all I know. I reckon they took him to the hospital.”

“Didn’t they say how bad? Didn’t they tell the Boss?” she demanded, leaning forward.

“What the hell’s it to you? You said somebody ought to kick his teeth down his throat, and now they did it you act like you loved him.”

“Hah,” she said, “that’s a laugh.”

I looked at my watch. “The Boss is late. I reckon he must be at the hospital with the triple threat.”

She was silent for a moment, looking down at the desk top again and gnawing the lip. Then, all at once, she got up, went across to the rack, put her coat on and jerked on her hat, and went out to the door. I swung my head around to watch her. At the door she hesitated, throwing the latch, and said, “I’m leaving, and I want to lock up. I don’t see why you can’t sit in your own office, anyway.”

I got up and went out into the reception room. She slammed her door, and without a word to me moved, pretty fast, across the place and out into the corridor. I stood there and listened to the rapid, diminishing staccato of her heels on the marble of the corridor..

When it had died away, I went into my own office and sat down by the window and looked down at the river mist which was fingering in over the roofs.

I wasn’t, however, looking out over the mist-veiled, romantic, crepuscular city, but was bent over my nice, tidy, comforting tax figures, under a green-shaded light, when the telephone rang. It was Sadie. She said that she was at the University hospital, and that Tom Stark was still unconscious. The Boss was there but she hadn’t seen him. But she understood he had asked for me.

So Sadie had gone over there. To lurk in the antiseptic shadows.

I left the tidy, comforting tax figures and went out. I had a sandwich at a hamburger stand and a cup of coffee and drove to the hospital. I found the Boss alone in a waiting room. He was looking a little grim. I asked how tom was, and learned that he was then in the X-ray room and that they didn’t know much. Dr. Stanton was on the case, and some other specialist was flying in by special plane from Baltimore for a consultation.

Then he said, “I want you to go out and get Lucy. She ought to be here. Out there in the country I guess she hasn’t seen the paper yet.”

I said I would go, and started out the door.

“Jack,” he called, and I turned. “Sort of break it to her easy,” he said. “you know–sort of build her up for it.”

I said I would, and left. It sounded pretty bad if Lucy had to have all that build-up. And as I drove along the highway, against the lights of the Saturday-night incoming traffic, I thought how much fun it was going to be to build Lucy up for the news. And I thought the same thing as I walked up the anachronistic patch of concrete walk toward the dimly lighted white house. Then as I stood in the parlor surrounded by the walnut and red plush and the cards for the stereoscope and the malarial crayon portrait on the easel, and built Lucy up for the news, it was definitely not fun.

But she took it. It hit her where she lived, but she took it. “Oh, God,” she said, not loud, “oh, God,” but the remark was not addressed to me. I presumed that she was praying, for she had gone to the little Baptist college way back in the red clay where they had been long on praying, and maybe the habit had stuck.

And it wasn’t fun, either, when I led her into the waiting room where the Boss was. He turned his face heavily to her from the midst of the floral design on the chintz-covered, overstuffed, high-backed chair in which he sat, and looked at her as a stranger. She stood in the middle of the floor, not going toward him, and asked, “How is he?”

At her question the light flared up in the Boss’s eyes, and he rose violently from the chair. “Look here,” he said, “he’s all right–he’s going to be all right. You understand that!”

“How is he? She repeated.

“I told you–I told you he’s going to be all right,” he said with a grating voice.

“You say it,” she said, “but what do the doctors say?”

The blood apoplectically flushed his face and I heard the snatch of his breathing before he said, “You wanted it this way. You said you did. You said you had rather see him dead at your feet. You wanted it this way. But–” and he stepped toward her–”he’ll fool you. He’s all right. Do you hear? He will be all right.”

“God grant it,” she said quietly.

“Grant it, grant it!” he burst out. “He’s all right, right now. That boy is tough, he can take it.”

She made no answer to that, but stood and looked at him while the blood subsided in his face and his frame seemed to sag with the weight of the flesh on it. The she asked, “Can I see him?”