All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [252]
Remember I am not welching. I am just giving you my advice.
Keep your tail over the dashboard.
Sincerely yours,
SADIE BURKE
I read through Sadie’s statement. It said everything there was to say, and each page was signed and witnessed. Then I folded up. It was no good to me. Not because of the advice which Sadie had given me. Her letter made sense, all right. That is, the part about Duffy and the gang. But something had happened. To hell with them all, I thought. I was sick of it all.
I looked down at the letter again. So Sadie had called me an Eagle Scout. But that wasn’t news, either. I had called myself worse names than that the night after I had seen Duffy and was walking down the street under the stars. But it touched the sore place and made it throb. It throbbed the worse because I knew that it wasn’t a secret sore place. Sadie had known about it. She had seen through me. She had read me like a book.
There was only one wry piece of consolation in the thought. At least, I had not had to wait for her to read me. I had read myself to myself that night walking down the street, full of beans and being an Eagle Scout, when the yellow, acid taste had all at once crawled up to the back of my mouth.
What had I read? I had read this: When I found out about Duffy’s killing the Boss and Adam I had felt clean and pure, and when I kicked Duffy around I felt like a million because I thought it let me out. Duffy was the villain and I was the avenging hero. I had kicked Duffy around and my head was big as a balloon with grandeur. Then all at once something happened and the yellow taste was in the back of my mouth.
This happened: I suddenly asked myself why Duffy had been so sure I would work for him. And suddenly I saw the eyes of the little squirt-face newspaperman at the cemetery gate on me, and all the eyes that had looked at me that way, and suddenly I knew that I had tried to make Duffy into a scapegoat for me and to set myself off from Duffy, and my million-dollar meal of heroism backfired that yellow taste into my gullet and I felt caught and tangled and mired and stuck like an ox in a bog and a cat in flypaper. It wasn’t simply that I again saw myself as party to that conspiracy with Anne Stanton which had committed Willie Stark and Adam Stanton to each other and to their death. It was more than that. It was as though I were caught in a more monstrous conspiracy whose meaning I could not fathom. It was as though the scene through which I had just lived had been a monstrous and comic miming for ends I could not conceive and for an audience I could not see but which I knew was leering from the shadow. It was as though in the midst of the scene Tiny Duffy had slowly and like a brother winked at me with his oyster eye and I had known he knew the nightmare truth, which was that we were twins bound together more intimately and disastrously than the poor freaks of the midway who are bound by the common stitch of flesh and gristle and the seepage of blood. We were bound together forever and I could never hate him without hating myself or love myself without loving him. We were bound together under the unwinking eye of Eternity and by the Holy Grace of the Great Twitch whom we must all adore.
And I heaved and writhed like the ox or the cat, and the acid burned my gullet and that was all there was to it and I had everything and everybody and myself and tiny Duffy and Willie Stark and Adam Stanton. To hell with them all, I said impartially under the stars. They all looked alike to me then. And I looked like them.
That was the way it was for quite a while.
I did not go back to the Landing. I did not want to see Anne Stanton. I did not even open a letter she wrote me. It lay on my bureau where I saw it every morning. I did not want to see anybody I knew. I hung around town and sat in my room or sat in bars which I had never frequented and sat in movies in the front row, where I could admire the enormous and distorted shadows which gesticulated and struck or clutched or clung and uttered asseverations which reminded you of everything which you had ever remembered. And I sat for hours in the newspaper room of the public library, the place like railway stations and missions and public latrines is where the catarrhal old men and bums go and where they sit to thumb the papers which tell about the world in which they live for a certain number of years or to sit and wheeze and stare while the gray rain slides down the big windowpanes above them.