All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [91]
And she lifted her face up, high, almost thrusting it at me, as though she were showing me something I ought damned well to be proud to look at.
“He’ll always come back,” she asserted grimly.
And she was right. He always came back. The world was full of sluts on skates, even if some of them weren’t on skates. Some of them wore grass skirts and some of them pounded typewriters and some of them checked hats and some of them were married to legislators, but he always came back. Not necessarily to be greeted with open arms and a tender smile, however. Sometimes it was a cold silence like the artic night. Sometimes it was delirium for every seismograph on the continent. Sometimes it was a single well-chosen epithet. For instance, the time the Boss and I had to do a little trip up to the north of the state. The afternoon we got back we walked into the Capitol and there, in the stately lobby, under the great bronze dome, was Sadie. We approached her. She waited until we had arrived, then said, without preliminary, quite simply, “You bastard.”
“Gee, Sadie,” the Boss said, and grinned his grin of the wayward attractive boy, “you don’t even wait to find out anything.”
“You just can’t keep buttoned up, you bastard,” she said, still simply, and walked away.
“Gee,” the Boss said ruefully to me, “I didn’t do a thing this trip, and look what happens.”
What did Lucy Stark know? I don’t know. As far as you could tell, she didn’t know anything. Even when she told the Boss she was going to pack her bag, it was, so he said, because he hadn’t thrown Byram B. White to the wolves.
But she didn’t pack the bag, even then.
She didn’t pack it because she was too honorable, or too generous, or too something, to hit when she thought he was down. Or about to go down. She wasn’t going to add the weight of her thumb to what closely resembled a tidy package of disaster lying on the scales with the blood seeping through the brown paper. For the impeachment of Byram B. White had become a minor issue. They had uncorked the real stuff: the impeachment of Willie Stark.
I don’t know whether or not they had planned it that way. Or whether they were forced into it before they planned when they figured the Boss was turning on too much heat and it was their only chance to get back on the offensive. Or whether they figured that the Lord had delivered the enemy into their hands, that they could get him dead to rights on the business of attempting to corrupt, coerce, and blackmail the Legislature, in addition to the other little charges of malfeasance and nonfeasance. Maybe they had some heroes lined up from among the ranks to testify that they had had the heat put on them. It would have taken a hero, too (or sound inducements), for nobody but a half-wit would have believed, in the light of the record, that the Boss was bluffing. But apparently they figured they had found, or bought, some heroes.
Anyway, they tried it, and for a brief interval life was a blur for speed. I gravely doubt that the Boss did any sleeping for two weeks. That is, bed sleeping. No doubt, he snatched something in the back of automobiles roaring down highways at night, or in a chair between the time one fellow went out of the door and the next came in. He roared across the state at eighty miles an hour, the horn screaming, from town to town, crossroads to crossroads, five, or six, or seven, or eight speaking in a day. He would come out on the platform, almost slouching out, lounging out, as though all the time in the world were before him and all the time were his. He would begin, easy, “Folks, there’s going to be a leetle mite of trouble back in town. Between me and that Legislature-ful of hyena-headed, feist-faced, belly-dragging sons of slack-gutted she-wolves. If you know what I mean. Well, I been looking at them and