All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [49]
So, out of an assumption she had made, without knowing it, or a wish or a fear she didn’t know she had, she led with her chin. And standing there, rolling that unlighted cigarette in her strong fingers, she knew it. The nickel was in the slot, and looking at Willie you could see the wheels and the cogs and the cherries and the lemons begin to spin inside the machine.
“Told me what?” Willie said. Again.
“That you’re not going to be Governor,” she said, with a dash of easy levity, but she flashed me a look, the only S O S, I suppose, Sadie Burke ever sent out to anybody.
But it was her fudge and I let her cook it.
Willie kept on looking on her, waiting while she turned to one side and uncorked my bottle and poured herself out a steady-er. She took it, and without any ladylike cough.
“Told me what?” Willie said.
She didn’t answer. She just looked at him.
And looking right back at her, he said, in a voice like death and taxes, “Told me what?”
“God damn you!” she blazed at him then, and the glass rattled on the tray as she set it down without looking. “You God-damned sap!”
“All right,” Willie said in the same voice, boring in like a boxer when the other fellow begins to swing wild. “What was it?”
“All right,” she said, “all right, you sap, you’ve been framed!”
He looked at her steady for thirty seconds, and there wasn’t a sound but the sound of his breathing. I was listening to it.
Then he said, “Framed?”
“And how!” Sadie said, and leaned toward him with what seemed to be a vindictive and triumphant intensity glittering in her eyes and ringing in her voice. “Oh, you decoy, you wooden-headed decoy, you let ’em! Oh, yeah, you let ’em, because you thought you were the little white lamb of God–” and she paused to give him a couple of pitiful derisive baa’s, twisting her mouth–“yeah, you thought you were the lamb of God, all right, but you know what you are?”
She waited as though for an answer, but he kept staring at her without a word.
“Well, you’re the goat,” she said. “You are the sacrificial goat. You are the ram in the bushes. You are a sap. For you let ’em. You didn’t even get anything out of it. They’d have paid you to take the rap, but they didn’t have to pay a sap like you. Oh, no, you were so full of yourself and hot air and how you are Jesus Christ, that all you wanted was a chance to stand on your hind legs and make a speech. My friends–” she twisted her mouth in a nasty, simpering mimicry–“my friends, what this state needs is a good five-cent cigar. Oh, my God!” And she laughed with a kind of wild, artificial laugh, suddenly cut short.
“Why?” he demanded, still staring steadily at her, breathing hard but not showing anything. “Why did they do it? To me?”
“Oh, my God!” she exclaimed and turned to me. “Listen to the sap. He wants to know why.” Then she swung to him again, leaning closer, saying. “Listen, if you can get this through your thick head. They wanted you to split the MacMurfee vote. In the sticks. Do you get that or do you want a picture? Can you get that straight, you wooden-head?”
He looked at me, slow, wet his lips, then said, “Is it true?”
“He wants to know if it’s true,” Sadie announced prayerfully to the ceiling. “Oh, my God!”
“Is it true?” he asked me.
“That’s what they tell me,” I said.
Well, it hit him. There was no denying it. His face worked as though he might try to say something or might bust out crying. But he didn’t do either one. He reached over to the table and picked up the bottle and poured out enough into a glass to floor the Irish and drank it off neat.
“Hey,” I said, “take it easy, you aren’t used to that stuff.”
“He ain’t used to a lot of things,” Sadie said, shoving the bottle toward him on the tray. “He ain’t used to the idea he’s not going to be Governor. Are you, Willie?”
“Why can’t you lay off?” I said to her.
But she didn’t even notice me. She leaned toward Willie, and repeated, coaxingly this time, “Are you, Willie?