All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [242]
Dr. Simmons, a dry, thin, grayish man, was at his desk, writing something on a big card. I told him to finish what he was doing. He said he was about through, the secretary picked up the card and put it into a filing cabinet, and he turned to me. I asked him how the Governor was doing. The operation had been a success, he said.
“You mean you got the bullets out?” I asked.
He smiled in a sort of chilly way, and said he meant a little more than that. “He’s got a chance,” he said. “He’s a strong man.”
“He’s that,” I agreed.
Dr. Simmons picked up a little envelope from his desk, and emptied the contents into his hand. “No matter how strong they are they can take much of this diet,” he said, and held out his hand, open, to show me the two little pellets resting there. A .25-caliber slug is small, all right, but these looked even smaller and more trivial than I had remembered.
I picked one of them out of his hand and examined it. It was a little misshapen slug of lead. Fingering it, I thought of how a long time back, when we were kids at the Landing, Adam and I used to shoot at a pine board, and how sometimes we had dug the lugs out of the soft wood with a pocketknife. Sometimes the slug dug out of the wood hadn’t been a bit more misshapen than this one, the wood was so soft.
“The son-of-a-bitch,” Dr. Simmons said irrelevantly.
I gave the slug back to him and went down to the lobby. It was pretty well cleared out down there now. The politicos had gone. Two or three newspapermen still hung around, waiting for developments.
There weren’t ant developments that day. Or the next day either. The Boss seemed to be getting on all right. But the third day he turn a turn for the worse. An infection had started up. It moved pretty fast. I knew for the way Dr. Simmons looked, even if he wouldn’t say much, that he was a gone gosling.
That evening, shortly after I had arrived at the hospital and had gone up to the waiting room to see how Lucy was making out, I got the message that the Boss wanted to see me. He had rallied, they said.
He was a sick-looking customer when I saw him. The flesh had fallen away on his face till the skin sacked off the bone the way it does on an old man’s face. He looked like Old Man Stark, up at Mason City. He was white as chalk.
When I first saw the eyes in the white face, they seemed to be filmed and unrecognizing. Then, as I moved toward the bed, they fixed on me and a thin light flickered up in them. His mouth twisted a little in a way which I took to be the feeble shorthand for a grin.
I came over close to the bed. “Hello, Boss,” I said, and hung something on my features which I meant to be taken for a grin.
He lifted the forefinger and the next finger of his right hand, which lay prone on the sheet, in an incipient salute, then left them drop. The strength of the muscles which held his mouth twisted gave out, too, and the grin slid off his face and the weight of flesh sagged back.
I stood up close to the bed and looked down at him, and tried to think of something to say. But my brain felt as juiceless as an old sponge left out in the sun a long time.
Then he said, in something a little better than a whisper, “I wanted to see you, Jack.”
“I wanted to see you, too, Boss.”
For a minute he didn’t speak, but his eyes looked up at me, with the light still flickering in them. Then he spoke: “Why did he do it to me?”
“Oh, God damn it,” I burst out, very loud, “I don’t know.”
The nurse looked warningly at me.
“I never did anything to him,” he said.
“No, you never did.”
He was silent again, and the flicker went down in his eyes. Then, “He was all right. The Doc.”
I nodded
I waited, but it began to seem that he wasn’t going to say any more. His eyes were on the ceiling and I could scarcely tell that he was breathing. Finally, the eyes turned toward me again, very slowly, and I almost thought that I could hear the tiny painful creak of the balls in their sockets. But the light flickered up again. He said,