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By Root 14672 0

I was out of a job and doing the sleeping. I had hunted up Adam and heard him play the piano. And I had sat across the spaghetti and the Dado red and looked at Anne Stanton. And as a result of what Anne said to me, I had gone down to the slums and seen the old man, not the very tall man who had once been stocky but whose face now dropped in puffy gray folds beneath the gray hair, with the steel-rimmed spectacles hanging on the end of the nose, and whose shoulders, thin now and snowed with dandruff, sagged down as with the pull of the apparently disjunctive, careful belly which made the vest of his black suit pop up above the belt and the slack-hanging pants. And in every case I had found what I had known I was going to find, because they had happened and nothing was going to change what had happened. I had been sinking down in the sleep like a drowning man in water, and they had flashed across my eyes again the way people say the past flashes across the eyes of the drowning man.

Well, I could go back to sleep now. Till my cash ran out, anyway. I could be Rip Van Winkle. Only I thought that the Rip Van Winkle story was all wrong. You went to sleep for a long time, and when you woke up nothing whatsoever had changed. No matter how long you slept, it was the same.

But I didn’t get to do much sleeping. I got a job. Or rather, the job got me. The telephone got me out of bed one morning. It was Sadie Burke, who said, “Get down here to the Capitol at ten o’clock. The Boss wants to see you.”

“The who?” I said.

“The Boss,” she said, “Willie Stark, Governor Stark, or don’t you read the papers?”

“No, but somebody told me in the barbershop.”

“It’s true,” she said, “and the Boss said for you to get down here at ten.” And she hung up the phone.

Well, I said to myself, maybe things do change while you sleep. But I didn’t believe it then, and didn’t really believe it when I went into the big room with the black oak paneling and padded across the long red carpet under the eyes of all genuine oil paintings of all the bewhiskered old men toward the man who wasn’t very old and wasn’t bewhiskered and who sat behind a desk in front of the high windows and who got up as I approached. Hell, I thought, it’s just Willie.

It was just Willie, even though he was wearing something different from the country blue serge he had had on back at Upton. But he just had the thing flung on him anyhow, with his tie loose and to one side and the collar unbuttoned. And his hair hung down over his forehead, the way it used to. I thought for a second that maybe the meaty lips were laid together firmer than they used to be, but before I could be sure, he was grinning and had come around to the front of the desk. So I thought again it was just Willie.

He put out his hand, and said, “Hello, Jack.”

“Congratulations,” I said.

“I hear they fired you.”

“You heard wrong,” I said. “I quit.”

“You were smart,” he said, “because when I get through with that outfit they wouldn’t be able to pay you. They won’t be able to pay the nigger washes the spittoons.”

“That will suit me,” I allowed.

“Want a job?” he asked.

“I’d consider a proposition.”

“Three hundred a month,” he said, “and traveling expenses. When you travel.”

“Who do I work for? The state?

“Hell, no. Me.”

“It looks like you’d be working for me,” I said. “This Governorship doesn’t pay but five thousand.”

“All right,” he said, and laughed, “I’ll be working for you then.”

Then I recollected how he’d done right well in his law practice.

“I’ll give it a try,” I said.

“Fine,” he said. Then, “Lucy’s wanting to see you. Come to dinner tomorrow night at the house.”

“You mean the Mansion?”

“What the hell you think I mean? A tourist home? A boarding house? Sure, the Mansion.”

Yes, the Mansion. He was going to treat me just like old times and take me home to dinner and introduce me to the pretty woman and the healthy kid.

“Boy,” he was saying, “we sure do rattle around in that place, Lucy and Tom and me.”

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked him.

“Eat,” he said. “Come at six-thirty and eat hearty. Call