All the King's Men (14 page)

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 inspected me critically out of her inky-velvety-black, deep-set eyes, which glittered in the marred face, and shook her head. “No thanks,” she said, “I like mine with vitamins.”

“You mean you don’t think I’m handsome?” I demanded.

“I don’t care about anybody being handsome,” she said, “but I never did go for anybody that reminded me of a box of spilled spaghetti. All elbows and dry rattle.”

“All right,” I said. “I withdraw my proposal. With dignity. But tell me something, now that you mention vitamins. You figure your candidate Willie has any vitamins? For the constituency?”

“Oh, God,” she whispered, and rolled her eyes to heaven.

“All right,” I said. “When are you going to tell the boys back home it’s no go?”

“What do you mean, no go? They’re planning on a big barbecue and rally at Upton. Duffy told me so.”

“Sadie,” I said, “you know damned well they’d have to barbecue the great wooly mastodon and use ten-dollar bills instead of lettuce on the buns. Why don’t you tell the big boys it’s no go?”

“What put that in your head?”

“Listen, Sadie,” I said, “we’ve been pals for a long time and you needn’t lie to uncle. I don’t put everything I know in the papers, but I know that Willie isn’t in this race because you admire his oratory.”

“Ain’t it awful?” she demanded.

“I know it’s a frame-up,” I said. “Everybody knows but Willie.”

“All right,” she admitted.

“When are you going to tell the boys back home it’s no go, that they are wasting dough? That Willie couldn’t steal a vote from Abe Lincoln in the Cradle of the Confederacy?”

“I ought to done it long ago,” she said.

“When are you going to?” I asked.

“Listen,” she said, “I told them before this thing ever started it was no go. But they wouldn’t listen to Sadie. Those fat-heads–” and she suddenly spewed out a mouthful of cigarette smoke over the rounded, too red, suddenly outcurling and gleaming underlip.

“Why don’t you tell them it’s no go and get the poor bastard out of his agony?”

“Let them spend their God-damned money,” she said fretfully, twitching her head as though to get the cigarette smoke out of her eyes. “I wish they were spending a lot more, the fat-heads. I wish the poor bastard had had enough sense to make them grease him good to take the beating he’s in for. Now all he’ll get will be the ride. Might as well let him have that. Ignorance is bliss.”

The waitress brought a cup of coffee, which Sadie must have ordered when she came in before she spotted me. She took a drag of the coffee, and then a deep drag of the cigarette.

“You know,” she said, jabbing out the butt savagely in the cup and looking at it and not at me, “you know, even if somebody told him. Even if he found out he was a sucker, I believe he might keep right on.”

“Yeah,” I said, “making those speeches.”

“God,” she said, “aren’t they awful?”

“Yeah.”

“The sap,” she said.

We walked back to the hotel, and I didn’t see Sadie again, except once or twice to say howdy-do to, until Upton. Thinks hadn’t improved any before Upton. I went back to town and left the candidate to his own devices for a week or so in between, but I heard the news. Then I got the train over to Upton the day before the barbecue.

Upton is way over in the western part of the state, the capital of the cocklebur vote which was suppose to come pelting out of the brush to the barbecue. And just a little way north of Upton there was the coal pocket, where a lot of folks lived in company shacks and prayed for a full week’s work. It was a good location to get a sellout house for the barbecue. Thos folks in the shacks were in such a shape they’d be ready to walk fifteen miles for a bait of fresh. If they still had the strength, and it was free.

The local I rode puffed and yanked and stalled and yawed across the cotton country. We’d stop on a siding for half an hour, waiting for something, and I watched the cotton rows converging into the simmering horizon, and a black stub of a burnt tree in the middle distance up out of the cotton rows. Then, late in the afternoon, the train headed into the cut-over pine and sagebrush. We would stop beside some yellow, boxlike station, with the unpainted houses dropped down beyond, and I could see up the alley behind the down-town and then, as the train pulled out again, across the back yards of houses surrounded by board or wire fences as though to keep out the openness of the humped and sage-furred country which seemed ready to slide in and eat up the houses. The houses didn’t look as though they belonged there, improvised, flung down, ready to be abandoned. Some washing would be hanging on a line, but the people would go off and leave that too. They wouldn’t have time to snatch it off the line. It would be getting dark soon, and they’d better hurry.

But as the train pulls away, a woman comes to the back door of one of the houses–just the figure of a woman, for you cannot make out the face–and she has a pan in her hands and she flings the water out of the pan to make a sudden tattered flash of silver in the light. She goes back into the house. To what is in the house. The floor of the house is thin against the bare ground and the walls and the roof are thin against all of everything which is outside, but you cannot see through the walls to the secret to which the woman has gone in.

The train pulls away, faster now, and the woman is back there in the house, where she is going to say. She’ll stat there. And all at once, you think that you are the one who is running away, and who had better run fast to whatever you are going because it will be dark soon. The train is going pretty fast now, but its effort seems to the through a stubborn cloying density of air as though an eel tried to swim in syrup, or the effort seems to be against an increasing and implacable magnetism of earth. You think that if the earth should twitch once, as the hide of a sleeping dog twitches, the train would be jerked over and piled up and the engine would spew and gasp while somewhere a canted-up wheel would revolve once with a massive and dreamlike deliberation.

But nothing happens, and you remember that the woman had not even looked up at the train. You forget her, and the train goes fast and is going fast when it crosses a little trestle. You catch the sober, metallic, pure, late-light, unriffled glint of the water between the little banks, under the sky, and see the cow standing in the water upstream near the single leaning willow. And all at once you feel like crying. But the train is going fast, and almost immediately whatever you feel is taken away from you, too.

You bloody fool, do you think that you want to mild a cow?

You do not want to milk a cow.

Then you are at Upton.

In Upton I went to the hotel, totting my little bag and my typewriter through the gangs of people on the street, people who looked at me with the countryman’s slow, full, curious lack of shame, and didn’t make room for me to pass until I was charging them down, the way a cow won’t get out of the way of your car in a lane until your radiator damned near bats her in the underslung slats. At the hotel I ate a sandwich and went up to my room, and got the fan turned on and a pitcher of ice water sent up and took off my shoes and shirt and propped myself in a chair with a book.

At ten-thirty there was a knock on the door. I yelled, and in came Willie.

“Where you been?” I asked him.

“Been here all afternoon,” he said.

“Duffy been dragging you round to shake hands with all the leading citizens?”

“Yeah,” he said, glumly.

The glumness in his voice made me look sharply at him. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Don’t the boys around here talk nice to you?”

“Sure, they talk all right,” he said. He came over and took a chair by the writing table. He poured some water into one of the glasses on the tray beside my bottle of red-eye, drank it, repeated, “Yeah, they talk all right.”

I looked at him again. The face was thinner and the skin was pulled back tighter so that it looked almost transparent under the cluster of freckles. He sat there heavily, not paying any attention to me as though he were mumbling something over and over in his mind.

“What’s eating you?” I asked.

For a moment he didn’t act as if he had heard me, and when he did turn his head to me there seemed to be connection between the act and what I had said. The act seemed to come from what was going on inside his head and not because I had spoken.

“A man don’t have to be Governor,” he said.

“Huh?” I responded in my surprise, for that was the last thing I ever expected out of Willie by that time. The showing in the last town (where I hadn’t been) must have been a real frost to wake him up.

“A man don’t have to be Governor,” he repeated, and as I looked at his face now I didn’t see the thin-skinned, boyish face, but another face under it, as though the first face were a mask of glass and now I could through it to the other one. I looked at the second face and saw, all of a sudden, the heavyish lips laid together to remain you of masonry and the knot of muscle on each cheek back where the jawbone hinges on.

“Well,” I replied belatedly, “the votes haven’t been counted yet.”

He mumbled over in his mind what he had been working on. Then he said, “I’m not denying I wanted it. I won’t lie to you,” he said, and leaned forward a little and looked at me as though he were trying to convince me of the thing which I was already surer of than I was of hands and feet. “I wanted it. I lay awake at night, just wanting it.” He worked his big hands on his knees, making the knuckles crack. “Hell, a man can lie there and want something so bad and be so full of wanting it he just plain forgets what it is he wants. Just like when you are a boy and the sap first rises and you think you will go crazy some night wanting something and you want it so bad and get so near sick wanting it you near forget what it is. It’s something inside you–” he leaned at me, with his eyes on my face, and grabbed the front of his sweat-streaked blue shirt to make me think he was going to snatch the buttons loose to show me something.

But he subsided back in the chair, letting his eyes leave me to look across the wall as though the wall weren’t there, and said, “But wanting don’t make a thing true. You don’t have to live forever to figure that out.”

That was so true I didn’t reckon it was worthwhile even to agree with him.

He didn’t seem to notice my silence, he was so wrapped up in his own. But after a minute he pulled out of it, stared at me, and said, “I could have made a good Governor. By God–” And he struck his knee with his fist–”by God, a lot better than those fellows. Look here–” and he leaned at me–”what this state needs is a new tax program. And the rate ought to be raised on the coal lands the state’s got leased out. And there’s not a decent road in the state once you get in the country. And I could save this state some money by merging some departments. And schools–look at me, I never had a decent day’s schooling in my life, what I got I dug out, and there’s no reason why this state–”

I had heard it all before. On the platform when he stood up there high and pure in the face and nobody gave a damn.

He must have noticed that I wasn’t giving a damn. He shut up all of a sudden. He got up and walked across the floor, and back, his head thrust forward and the forelock falling over his brow. He stopped in front of me. “Those things need doing, don’t they?” he demanded.

“Sure,” I said, and it was no lie.

“But they won’t listen to it,” he said. “God damn those bastard,” he said, “they come out to hear a speaking and then they won’t listen to you. Not a word. They don’t care. God damn ‘em! They deserve to grabble in the dirt and get nothing for it but a dry gut-ruble. They won’t listen.”

“No,” I agreed, “they won’t.”

“And I won’t be Governor,” he said, shortly. “And they’ll deserve what they get.” And added, “The bastards.”

“Well, you want me to hold you hand about it? Suddenly, I was sore at him. Why did he come to me? What did he expect me to do? What made him think I wanted to hear about wt the state needed? Hell, I knew. Everybody knew. It wasn’t any secret. What it needed was some decent government. But who the hell was going to give it? And who cared if nobody did or ever did? What did he come whining to me for about that? Or about how bleeding much he wanted to be Governor because he lay and thought about it in the night? All that was in me as I suddenly felt sore at him and asked him snottily if he expected me to hold his hand.

He was looking at me slowly, giving me the once-over, reading my face. But he didn’t look sore. Which surprised me, for I had wanted to make him sore, sore enough to get out. But there wasn’t even surprise in his look. “No, Jack,” he finally said, shaking his head, “I wasn’t asking for sympathy. Whatever happens I’m not asking you or anybody else for sympathy.” He shook himself heavily, like a big dog coming out of the wet, or waking up. “No, by God,” he said, and he wasn’t really talking to me now, “I’m not asking anybody in the world for it, not now or ever.”

That seemed to settle something. So he sat down again.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I got to think,” he replied. “I don’t know and I got to think. The bastards,” he said, “if I could just make ‘em listen.”