All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [87]
Hugh Miller smiled in a stiff, embarrassed way, shook his head, said, “Hell–Willie–” let his voice trail off without ever saying what he had started to say, and then Harvard Law School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands and pure heart, was with us no longer.
The Boss sank down on the foot of the bed, heaved his left ankle up over his right knee; and while he meditatively scratched the left foot, the way a farmer does when he takes off his shoes at night, he stared at the closed door.
“With the sons-of-bitches,” he said, and let the foot slip off the knee and plop to the floor, while he still stared to the door.
I stood up again. It was my third try for getting out of the place and getting back to my hotel for some sleep. The Boss could sit up all night, night after night, and never show it, and that fact was sure hell on his associates. I edged toward the door again, but the Boss swung his stare to me and I knew something was coming. So I just stopped and waited for it, while the stare worked over my face and tried to probe around in the gray stuff inside my head, like a pair of forceps.
Then he said, “You think I ought to thrown White to the wolves?”
“It’s a hell of a time to be asking that question,” I said.
“You think I ought?”
“Ought is a funny word,” I said. “If you mean, to win, then time will tell. If you mean, to do right, then nobody will ever be able to tell you.”
“What do you think?
“Thinking is not my line,” I said, “and I’d advise you to stop thinking about it because you know damned well what you are going to do. You are going to do what you are doing.”
“Lucy is figuring on leaving,” he said calmly, as though that answered something I had said.
“Well, I’m damned,” I said, in genuine surprise, for I had Lucy figured as the long-suffering type on whose bosom repentant tears always eventually fall. Very eventually. Then my glance strayed to the closed door, beyond which Sadie Burke sat in front of the telephone with that pair of black bituminous eyes in the middle of the pocked face and cigarette smoke tangled in that wild black hacked-off Irish hair like morning mist in a pine thicket.
He caught my glance at the door. “No,” he said, “it’s not that.”
“Well, that would be enough by ordinary standards,” I said.
“She didn’t know. Not that I know of.”
“She’s a woman,” I said, “and they can smell it.”
“That wasn’t it,” he said. “She said if I took care of Byram White she would leave me.”
“Looks like everybody is trying to run your business for you.”
“God damn it!” he said, and came up off the bed, and paced savagely across the carpet for four paces, and swung, and paced again, and seeing that motion and the heavy sway of the head when he turned, I thought back to the night when I had heard the pacing in the next room in those jerkwater hotels over the state back in the days when the Boss had been Willie Stark, and Willie Stark had been the sucker with the high-school-debater speech full of facts and figures and the kick-me sign on his coattails.
Well, I was seeing it now–the lunging, taut motion that had then been on the other side of the wall, in the dry-goods-box little hotel room. Well, it was out of that room now. It was prowling the veldt.
“God damn it!” he said again, “they don’t know a thing about it, they don’t know how it is, and you can’t tell ’em.”
He paced back and forth a couple of times more, then said, “They don’t know.”
He swung again, paced, and stopped, his head thrust out toward me. “You know what I’m going to do? Soon as I bust the tar out of that gang.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t know.”
“I’m going to build me the God-damnedest, biggest, chromium-platedest, formaldehyde-stinkingest free hospital and health center the All-Father ever let live. Boy, I tell you, I’m going to have a cage of canaries in every room that can sing Italian grand opera and there ain’t going to be a nurse hasn’t won a beauty contest at Atlantic City and every bedpan will be eighteen carat gold and by Gold, every bedpan will have a Swiss music-box attachment to play ‘Turkey in