All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [50]
He reached for the bottle and did it again.
“Are you?” she demanded, not coaxing now.
“I was,” he said, looking up to her, the blood up in his face now, the tousle of hair hanging, his breath coming heavy. “I was,” he said, “before, but I’m not now.”
“Not what?” she said.
“Not used to it.”
“You better get used to it,” she said, and laughed, and shoved the bottle in his direction.
He took it, poured, drank, set the glass down deliberately, and said: “I better not. I better not get used to it.”
She laughed again, that wild artificial laugh, chopped off the laugh, and echoed, “He says he better not get used to it. Oh, my God!” Then she laughed again.
He sat there heavy in his chair, but not leaning back, the sweat beginning to pop out of his face and run down slow and shining over the flesh. He sat there, not noticing the sweat, not wiping it away, watching her laugh.
All at once he heaved up out of the chair. I thought he was going to jump at her. And she must have thought so too, for her laugh stopped. Right in the middle of the aria. But he didn’t jump her. He wasn’t even looking at her. He flung his glance wide around the room, and lifted his hands up in front of him, as though he were ready to grab something. “I’ll kill ’em!” he said, “I’ll kill ’em!”
“Sit down,” she said, and leaned quickly toward him to give him a shove on the chest.
His pegs weren’t too steady, and he went down. Right in the chair.
“I’ll kill ’em,” he said, sitting there, sweating.
“You won’t do a God-damned thing,” she announced. “You won’t be Governor and you won’t get paid for not being and you won’t kill them or anybody else, and you know why?”
“I kill ’em,” he said.
“I’ll tell you why,” she said, leaning. “It’s because you’re a sap. A triple-plated, spoon-fed, one-gallus sap, and you–”
I got up. “I don’t care what kind of games you play,” I said, “but I don’t have to stay here and watch you.”
She didn’t even turn her head. I went to the door, and out, and the last I heard she was defining what kind of a sap he was. I figured that that might take anybody some time.
I took in a good deal of Upton that night. I saw the folks coming out of the last show at the Picture Palace, and I admired the cemetery gates and the schoolhouse by moonlight, and I leaned over the railing of the bridge over the creek and spit in the water. It took about two hours. Then I went back to the hotel.
When I opened the door of the room, Sadie was sitting in a chair by the writing table, smoking a cigarette. The air was thick enough to cut with a knife, and in the light of the lamp on the table the blue smoke drifted and swayed and curdled around her so that I got the impression I might have been looking at her sitting submerged in a tank full of soapy dishwater at the aquarium. The bottle on the table was empty.
For a second or two I thought that Willie had left. Then I saw the finished product.
It was lying on my bed.
I came in, and shut the door.
“Things seem to have quieted down,” I remarked.
“Yeah.”
I walked over to the bed and inspected the item. It was lying on his back’ The coat was pushed up under the armpits, the hands were crossed piously on the bosom like the hands of a gisant on a tomb in a cathedral, the shirt had pulled up some from its moorings under the belt and the two lowest buttons had come unbuttoned so that a triangular patch of slightly distended stomach was visible–white, with a few coarse dark hairs. The mouth was parted a little, and the lower lip vibrated with a delicate flabbiness at each measured expulsion of breath. All very pretty.
“He rared around some,” Sadie said. “Telling me what he was going to do. Oh, he’s gonna do big things. He’s gonna be President. He’s gonna kill people with his bare hands. Oh, my God!” She took a drag on her cigarette and spewed the smoke out and then fanned the backwash away from her face with a savage, slapping motion of her right hand. “But I quieted him down,” she added, with an air of grim, suddenly spinsterish, satisfaction, the kind your great-aunt used to wear.
“Is he going to the barbecue?