All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [51]
“How the hell do I know?” she snapped. “He wasn’t screaming about any little detail like a barbecue. Oh, he’s a big operator. But–” She paused, and did the drag and spew and fanning routine–“I quieted him.”
“It looks like you slugged him,” I observed.
“I didn’t slug him,” she said. “But I hit him where he lives. I finally got across to him the kind of sap he is. And that quieted him.”
“He’s quiet now, all right,” I said, and walked over toward the table.
“He didn’t get that quiet all of a sudden. But he got quiet enough to sit in a chair and hang on to the bottle for support and talk about how he’d have to break the news to some God-damned Lucy.”
“That’s his wife,” I said.
“He talked like it was his mammy and would blow his nose for him. Then he said he was going right to his room and write her a letter. But,” she said, and looked over at the bed, “he never made it. He made the middle of the floor, and then heaved for the bed.”
She rose from the chair and went over to the bed and looked down at him.
“Does Duffy know?” I asked.
“I don’t give a damn what Duffy knows,” she said.
I went over to the bed, too. “I guess we’ll have to leave him here,” I said. “I’ll go over to his room and sleep.” I leaned over and hunted for his room key in the pockets. I found it. Then I took a toothbrush and some pajamas out of my bag.
She was still standing by the bed. She turned to me. “It looks like you might at least take the bastard’s shoes off,” she said.
I laid down my truck on the side of the bed, and did it. I picked up the pajamas and toothbrush and went over to the table to switch off the lamp. Sadie was still by the bed. “You better write that letter to that Mamma Lucy,” she said, “and ask where to ship the remains.”
As I laid my hand on the switch, I looked back at Sadie standing there looking down at the remains, with the left arm, the arm toward me, hanging straight down and a cigarette hanging out of the tip of two fingers and unreeling its spinner of smoke slowly upward, and with her head leaning forward a little while she expelled smoke meditatively over her again outthrust and gleaming lower lip.
There was Sadie, who had come a long way from the shanty in the mud flats. She had come a long way because she played to win and she didn’t mean to win matches and she knew to win you have to lay your money on the right number and that if your number doesn’t show there’s a fellow standing right there with a little rake in your money and then it isn’t yours anymore. She had been around a long time, talking to men and looking them straight in the eye like a man. Some of them liked her, and those that didn’t like her listened when she talked, which wasn’t too often, because there was reason to believe that when those big black eyes, which were black in a way which made it impossible for you to tell whether it was blackness of surface or blackness of depth, looked at the wheel before it began to move they could see the way the wheel would be after it had ceased to move and saw the little ball on the number. Some of them liked her a lot, like Sen-Sen. That had at one time been hard for me to get. I saw a package done up in the baggy tweed or droopy seersucker suit according to the solstice, and the pocked face with the heavy smear of lipstick and the black lamps in it and above it the mob of black hair which looked as though it had been hacked off at ear length with a meat cleaver.
Then one time, suddenly, I saw something else. You see a woman around for a long time and thing that she is ugly. You think she is nothing. Then, all of a sudden, you think how she is under that baggy tweed or droopy seersucker. All of a sudden, you see the face which is there under the pock-marked mask and is humble, pure, and trusting and is asking you to lift the mask. It must be like an old man looking at his wife and just for a second seeing the face he had seen thirty years before. Only in the case I am talking about it is not remembering a face which you have seen a long time back but discovering a face which you have never seen. It is future, not past. It is very unsettling. It was very unsettling, temporarily. I made my pass, and it didn