All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [46]
I fell back exhausted, and Willie pondered that for a while. He just sat there, not moving and with his face quiet and pure, but you had the feeling that you listened close enough you would hear the feet tramping inside his head, that something was locked up in there and going back and forth. Then he said, soberly, “Yeah, I know that’s what some folks say.”
“You weren’t born yesterday,” I said, and was suddenly angry with him. “You weren’t deaf and dumb all the time you had the job in the courthouse in Mason City. Even if you did get in because Pillsbury put you there.”
He nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “I heard that kind of talk.”
“It gets around,” I said. “It’s not any secret.”
Then he demanded, “Do you think it’s true?”
“True?” I echoed, and almost asked myself the question before I said, “Hell, I don’t know. But there’s sure a lot of evidence.”
He sat there one minute longer, then got up and said good night and went to his room. It wasn’t long before I heard the pacing start. I got undressed and lay down. But the pacing kept on. Old Master Mind lay there and listened to the pacing in the next room and said, “The bastard is trying to think up a joke he can tell ’em at Skidmore tomorrow night and make ’em laugh.”
Old Master Mind was right. The candidate did tell a joke at Skidmore. But it didn’t make them laugh.
But it was at Skidmore that I was sitting in a booth in a Greek café after the speaking, having a cup of coffee to steady my nerves and hiding out from people and the cackle of voices and the smell of bodies and the way eyes look at you in a crowd, when in came Sadie Burke and gave the joint the once-over and caught sight of me and came back and sat down across from me in the booth.
Sadie was one of Willie’s new friends, but I had known her from way back. She was an even better friend, rumor had it, of a certain Sen-Sen Puckett, who chew Sen-Sen to keep his breath sweet and was a fat boy, both physically and politically speaking, and had been (and probably still was) a friend of Joe Harrison. Sen-Sen, according to some guesses, was the fellow who originally had had the bright idea of using Willie as the dummy. Sadie was a lot too good for Sen-Sen, who wasn’t, however, a bad looking fellow. Sadie herself wouldn’t have been called good looking, certainly not by the juries who pick out girls to be Miss Oregon and Miss New Jersey. She was built very satisfactorily but you tended to forget that, because of the awful clothes she wore and the awkward, violent, snatching gestures she made. She had absolutely black hair, which she cut off at a crazy length and which went out in all directions in a wild, electric way. Her features were good, if you noticed them, which you were inclined not to do, because her face was pocked. But she did have wonderful eyes, deep-set and inky-velvety-black.
Sadie wasn’t, however, too good for Sen-Sen because of her looks. She was too good for him because he was a heel. She had probably taken him up because he was good looking and then, again according to rumor, she had put him into political pay dirt. For Sadie was a very smart cooky. She had been around and she had learned a lot the very hard way.
She was in Skidmore with the Stark party that time because she was attached to the Stark headquarters troop (probably as a kind of spy for Sen-Sen) in some such ambiguous role as secretary. As a matter of fact, she was around a lot, and made a good many of the arrangements and tipped off Willie about local celebrities.
Well, now she came up to my booth in the Greek restaurant with that violent stride which was characteristic of her, and looked down at me, and demanded, “Can I sit with you?”
She sat down before I could reply.
“Or anything else,” I replied gallantly, “stand, sit, or lie.”
She