All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [48]
“Sure,” I said, and it was no lie.
“But they won’t listen to it,” he said. “God damn those bastard,” he said, “they come out to hear a speaking and then they won’t listen to you. Not a word. They don’t care. God damn ’em! They deserve to grabble in the dirt and get nothing for it but a dry gut-ruble. They won’t listen.”
“No,” I agreed, “they won’t.”
“And I won’t be Governor,” he said, shortly. “And they’ll deserve what they get.” And added, “The bastards.”
“Well, you want me to hold you hand about it? Suddenly, I was sore at him. Why did he come to me? What did he expect me to do? What made him think I wanted to hear about wt the state needed? Hell, I knew. Everybody knew. It wasn’t any secret. What it needed was some decent government. But who the hell was going to give it? And who cared if nobody did or ever did? What did he come whining to me for about that? Or about how bleeding much he wanted to be Governor because he lay and thought about it in the night? All that was in me as I suddenly felt sore at him and asked him snottily if he expected me to hold his hand.
He was looking at me slowly, giving me the once-over, reading my face. But he didn’t look sore. Which surprised me, for I had wanted to make him sore, sore enough to get out. But there wasn’t even surprise in his look. “No, Jack,” he finally said, shaking his head, “I wasn’t asking for sympathy. Whatever happens I’m not asking you or anybody else for sympathy.” He shook himself heavily, like a big dog coming out of the wet, or waking up. “No, by God,” he said, and he wasn’t really talking to me now, “I’m not asking anybody in the world for it, not now or ever.”
That seemed to settle something. So he sat down again.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I got to think,” he replied. “I don’t know and I got to think. The bastards,” he said, “if I could just make ’em listen.”
It was just at that time Sadie came in. Or rather, she knocked at the door, and I yelled, and she came in.
“Hello,” she said, gave a quick look at the scene, and started toward us. Her eye was on the bottle of red-eye on my table. “How about some refreshment?” she asked.
“All right,” I replied, but apparently I didn’t get the right amount of joviality into my tone. Or maybe she could tell something had been going on from the way the air smelled, and if anybody could do that it would be Sadie.
Anyway, she stopped in the middle of the floor and said, “What’s up?”
I didn’t answer right away, and she came across the writing table, moving quick and nervous, the way she always did, inside of a shapeless shoddy-blue summer suit that she must have got by walking into a secondhand store and shutting her eyes and pointing and saying, “I’ll take that.”
She reached down and took a cigarette out of my pack lying there and tapped it on the back of her knuckles and turned her hot lamps on me.
“Nothing,” I said, “except Willie here is saying how he’s not going to be Governor.”
She had the match lighted by the time I got the words out, but it never got to the cigarette. It stopped in mid-air.
“So you told him,” she said, looking at me.
“The hell I did,” I said. “I never tell anybody anything. I just listen.”
She snapped the match out with a nasty snatch of her wrist and turned on Willie. “Who told you?” she demanded.
“Told me what?” Willie asked, looking up at her steady.
She saw that she had made her mistake. And it was not the kind of mistake for Sadie Burke to make. She had made her way in the world up from the shack in the mud flat by always finding out what you knew and never letting you know what she knew. Her style was not to lead with the chin but with a neat length of lead pipe after you had stepped off balance. But she had led with the chin this time. Somewhere way back inside of Sadie Burke there had been the idea that I was going to tell Willie. Or that somebody was going to tell Willie. Not that she, Sadie Burke, would tell Willie, but that Willie would be told and Sadie Burke wouldn’t have to. Or nothing as specific as that. Just floating around in the deep dark the idea of Willie and the idea of the thing Willie didn