All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [254]
The head rolled slightly and tiredly on the neck, and he repeated, “I-I-I shot him.”
But suppose you don’t know,” I said, leaning, “suppose there was somebody behind Stanton, somebody who framed him to do it.”
I let that sink in, and watched his face twitch while no sound came.
“Suppose,” I continued, “suppose I could tell you who–suppose I could prove it–what would you do?”
Suddenly his face wasn’t twitching. It was smooth as a baby’s and peaceful, but peaceful in the way that intensity can sometimes momentarily make a face look peaceful and pure.
“What would you do?” I demanded
“I’d kill the son-of-a-bitch,” he said. And he had not stuttered at all.
“They’d hang you,” I said.
“I’d k-k-k-kill him. They couldn’t h-h-h-hang me before I killed him.”
“Remember,” I whispered, leaning closer, “they’d hang you.”
He stared up at me, prying into my face. “Who-who-who is it?”
“They’d hang you. Are you sure you’d kill him?”
“Who-who-who–” he began. Then he clutched my coat. “Y-y-you know–” he said, “y-y-you know something you ain’t t-t-t-telling me.”
I could tell him. I could say to him, meet me here at three o’clock, I want to show you something. I could bring the stuff from Sadie, the stuff that lay up in my room in a desk, and he would take one look. One look. It would be like touching a trigger.
His hands were clutching and clawing at my coat. “T-t-tell me,” he was saying.
One look. It was perfect. I could meet him here in the afternoon. We could step into the latrine and he could take one look, and I would go home and burn the stuff. Hell, why burn it? What had I done? I even warned the little burger they’d hang him. They had nothing on me.
He was clawing at me, importunately and feebly, saying, “T-t-tell me, you better t-t-tell me now.”
It would be too easy. It was perfect. And the perfect mathematical irony of it–the perfect duplication of what Duffy had done–struck me, and I felt like laughing out loud. “Listen here,” I said to Sugar-Boy. “Stop clawing on me and listen here and I’ll–”
He stopped clawing and stood meekly before me.
He would do it, I knew he would do it. And it was such a joke on Duffy I almost laughed out loud. And as the name of Duffy flashed across my mind I saw Duffy’s face, large and lunar and sebaceous, nodding at me as at the covert and brotherly appreciation of a joke, and even s I opened my lips to speak the syllables of his name, he winked. He winked right at me like a brother.
I stood there stock-still.
Sugar-Boy’ face began to twitch again. He was going to ask again. I stared down at him. “I was kidding,” I said.
There was absolute blankness on his face, and then an absolute murderousness. There wasn’t any flare of fury. It was a cold and innocent and murderous certainty. It was as though his face had suddenly frozen in a split second in that certainty, and it looked like the face of a man who had been trapped and had died in the snow long ago, centuries ago–back in the ice age, perhaps–and the glacier brings it down all those centuries, inch by inch, and suddenly, with its primitive purity and lethal innocent, it stares at you through the last preserving glaze of ice.
I stood there for what seemed forever. I couldn’t move. I was sure I was a goner.
Then the ice face wasn’t there. It was just Sugar-Boy’s face on a head to big for the neck, and it was saying, “I-I-I durn near d-d-done it.”
I ran my tongue over my dry lips. “I know it,” I said.
“Y-y-you oughtn’t d-d-d-done me that way,” he said in humble complaint.
“I’m sorry.”
“Y-y-you know h-h-how I feel, and y-y-you oughtn’t d-d-done me like that.”
“I know how you feel,” I said. “And I’m sorry. I really am.”
“F-f-ferget it,” he said. He stood there, seeming smaller than before, slumped and forlorn as though he were a doll that had lost some of his sawdust.
I studied him. Then I said, as much to myself as him, I suppose, “You really would have done it.