All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [221]
“I told him,” he said, glaring up at me, “I told him, I said, if you leave off a window latch, I said if you leave one iron out of the concrete, I said if you–”
“Yeah,” I said, “I heard you.”
“–if you put one extra teaspoon of sand, you do a thing, a single thing, and I’ll rip you wide open, I’ll rip you!” He got up and came toward me. He stood very close to me. “I’ll rip him,” he said, and breathed heavily.
“So you said,” I agreed.
“I told him I would, and I will. Let him do one thing wrong.”
“All right.”
“I’ll rip him anyway. By God–” he flung his arms out wide–“I’ll rip him anyway. I’ll rip all of ’em who put their dirty hands on it. They do the job and when it’s over I’ll rip ’em. Every one. I’ll rip ’em and ruin ’em. By God, I will! Putting their dirty hands on it. For they made me, they made me do it.”
“Tom Stark had something to do with it,” I said.
That stopped him, as far gone as he was. He stared at me with a look that made me think he was about to lay hands on me. Then he turned from me, and moved back toward the couch. But he didn’t sit down. He leaned over for the bottle, did it some direct damage, stared at me again, and said, indistinctly, “He’s just a boy.”
I didn’t say anything to that. He took another try at the bottle.
“He’s just a boy,” he repeated, dully.
“All right,” I said.
“But the others,” he burst out, swinging his arms wide again, “the others–they made me do it–I’ll rip ’em–I’ll ruin ’em!”
He had quite a lot to say along that line before he took his dive into the sofa. After he got there he made a few more muffled remarks along the same line and about how Tom Stark was just a boy. Then the one-side conversation died away, and there wasn’t anything but the heavy draw and puff of his breathing. I stood there and looked down at him and thought about the first time, God knows how many years before, when he got drunk in my hotel room at Upton and passed out. He had come a long way. And it wasn’t the chubby boy face of Cousin Willie I looked down into now. Everything was changed now. It sure-God was.
Sugar-Boy, who had sat quiet all that time over in the shadow with his short legs barely reaching the floor, got off his chair and came over to the couch. He looked down at the Boss.
“He is out deader than a mackerel,” I said.
He nodded, still looking down at the burly form. The Boss was lying on his back. One leg was off the couch, dragging on the floor. Sugar-Boy leaned to pick it up and adjust it on the couch. Then he saw the discarded coat on the floor. He picked that up and spread it over the Boss’s sock-feet. He looked at me, and explained, almost apologetically, “He mi-mi-mi-might catch c-c-c-cold.”
I gathered up my brief case and topcoat, and moved toward the door. I looked back at the scene of carnage. Sugar-Boy had gone back to his chair in the shadow. I must have had some trace of question in my look, for he said, “I’ll s-s-s-s-set up and s-s-s-see no-no-no-body bothers him.”
So I left them together.
As I drove down the night street on my way home, I wondered what Adam Stanton would have to say if he ever learned about how the hospital was going to be built. I knew what the Boss would say, however, if the question about Adam were put up to him. He would say, “Hell, I said I would build it, and I’m building it. That’s the main thing, I’m building it. Let him stay in it and keep his own little patties sterile as hell.” Which was exactly what he did say when I asked him the question.
As I drove down the night street, I wondered what Anne Stanton would have to say if she had been there in that room and had seen the Boss piled up there, out blind on the couch. I took some sardonic pleasure in that speculation. If she had taken up with him because he was so big and tough and knew his own mind and was willing to pay the price for anything, well, she ought to see him piled up there like a bull that’s got tangled up in the lead rope and is down on its knees and can’t budge and can’t even lift its head any more on account of the ring in the nose. She ought to see that.
Then I thought that maybe that was what she was waiting for. There is nothing women love so much as the drunkard, the hellion, the roarer, the reprobate. They love him because they