All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [216]
The Boss looked across the desk at me as I walked in, and said, “God damn it, so the bastard crawled out on me.”
I didn’t say anything
“I didn’t tell you to scare him to death, I just told you to scare him.”
“He wasn’t scared,” I said
“What the hell did he do it for then?”
“I told you a long time back when the mess started he wouldn’t scare.”
“Well, why did he do it?”
“I don’t want to discuss it.”
“Well, why did he do it?”
“God damn it,” I said, “didn’t I tell you I didn’t want to discuss it?”
He looked at me with some surprise, got up from his chair and came around the desk. “I’m sorry,” he said, and put his heavy hand on my shoulder.
I moved out under the hand.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “He had been quite a pal of yours at one time, hadn’t he?”
“Yeah,” I said
He sat back on the desk and raised one big knee to clasp his hands around it.
“There is still MacMurfee,” he said reflectively.
“Yes, there is MacMurfee, but if you want any blackmailing done, get somebody else to do it.”
“Even on MacMurfee?” he asked, with a hint of jocularity, to which I didn’t respond.
“Even on MacMurfee.” I said.
“Hey,” he demanded, “you aren’t quitting me?”
“No, I’m just quitting certain things.”
“Well, it was true, wasn’t it?”
“What?”
“What the Judge did, whatever the hell it was.”
I couldn’t deny that. I had to say yes. So I nodded and said, “Yes, he did it.”
“Well? he demanded.
“I aid what I said.”
He was studying me drowsily from under the shagged-down forelock. “Boy,” he said then, soberly, “we been together a long time. I hope we’ll be in it together all the way. We been in it up to the ears, both of us, you and me, boy.”
I didn’t answer.
He continued to study me. Then he said, “Don’t you worry. It’ll all come out all right.”
“Yeah,” I said sourly, “you’ll be Senator.”
“I didn’t mean that. I could be Senator right now if that was all.”
“What did you mean?”
He didn’t answer for a moment, not even looking at me but down at the hands clasped around the crooked knee. “Hell,” he said suddenly, “forget it.” Suddenly, he released the knee, the leg dropped, the foot struck the floor heavily, and he lunged off the desk. “But nobody had better forget–MacMurfee and nobody else–that I’ll do what I’ve got to do. By God, I’ll do it if I’ve got to break their bones with my bare hands.” And he held the hands before him with spread fingers, crooked and tense as though to seize.
He sank back against the support of the desk then, and said, half as though to himself, “That Frey, now. That Frey.”
Then he fell into a brooding silence, which, had Frey been able to see it, would have made him very happy to be way off there on the Arkansas farm with no forwarding address left behind.
So the story of the Boss and MacMurfee, of which the story of Judge Irwin had been a part, went on, but I had no hand in it. I went back to my own innocent little chores and sat in my office as the fall drew imperceptibly on and the earth leaned on its axis and shouldered the spot I occupied a little out of the direct, billowing, crystalline, consuming blaze of the enormous sun. The leaves rattled dryly on the live oaks when a breeze sprang up in the evenings, the matted jungles of sugar cane in the country beyond the concrete walks and trolley lines were felled now by the heavy knife and in the evenings the great high-wheeled carts groaned along the rutted tracks, piled high with the fetid-sweet burden, and far off across the flat black fields laid bare by the knife, under the saffron sky, some nigger sang sadly about the transaction between him and Jesus. Out at the University, on the practice field, the toe of some long-legged, slug-footed, box-shouldered lad kept smacking the leather, over and over, and farther away the scrimmage surged and heaved to the sound of shouts and peremptory whistles. On Saturday nights under the glare of the battery of lights, the stadium echoed to the roar of “Tom!–Tom!–Tom!–yea, Tom!” For Tom Stark carried the ball, Tom Stark wheeled the end, Tom Stark knifed the line, and it was Tom, Tom, Tom.
The sport writers said he was better than ever. Meanwhile he was making his old man sweat. The Boss was dour as a teetotaling Scot, and the office force walked on tiptoe and girls suddenly burst out crying over their typewriters after they had been in to take dictation and state officials coming out of the inner room laid a handkerchief to the pallid brow with one hand and with the other groped across the long room under the painted eyes of all the other groped across the long room under the painted eyes of all the gilt-framed dead governors. Only Sadie suffered no change. She bit her syllables off the way a seamstress snaps off the thread, and looked at the Boss with her dark, unquenched glance, like the spirit of the future meditating on your hopeful plans. The only times the Boss got the black dog off his shoulder those days were at the games. I went with him a couple of times, and when Tom uncorked his stuff the Boss was a changed man. His eyes would bug and gleam, and he would slap me on the back and grab me like a bear. There might be a flicker of that left the next morning when he opened the Sunday sporting page, but it certainly didn