All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [234]
“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