All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [52]
She laughed in my face and said, “I’ve got my arrangements, and I stick to my arrangements as long as I’ve got my arrangements.”
I didn’t know what the arrangements were. That was before the day of Mr. Sen-Sen Puckett. That was before the day when she gave him the benefit of her gift for lying it on the right number.
Nothing of this passed through my mind as I put my hand on the switch of the lamp and looked back at Sadie Burke. But I tell it in order that it may be known who the Sadie Burke was who stood by the bed meditating on the carcass as I laid my hand on the switch and who had come the way she had come by not leading with her chin but who had led with her chin that night
At least, that was the way I figured it.
I turned the switch, and she and I went out of the door, and said good night in the hall.
It must have been near nine the next morning when Sadie beat on my door and I came swimming and swaying up from the bottom of a muddy sleep, like a piece of sogged driftwood stirred up from the bottom of a pond. I made the door and stuck my head out.
“Listen,” she said without ant build-up of civilities, “Duffy’s going out to the fair grounds, and I’ll ride with him. He’s got a lot of big-shotting to do out there. He wanted to get the sap out pretty early, too, to mingle with the common herd, but I told him he wasn’t feeling too good. That he’d be out a little later.”
“O.K.,” I said, “I’m not paid for it, but I’ll try to deliver him.”
“I don’t care whether he ever gets there,” she said. “It won’t be skin off my nose.”
“I’ll try to get him there anyway.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, and walked off down the hall, twitching the seersucker.
I looked out the window and saw that it was going to be another day, and shaved, and dressed, and went down to get a cup of coffee. Then I went to my room, and knocked. There was some kind of a sound inside, like an oboe blatting once deep inside a barrel of feathers. So I went in. I had left the door unlocked the night before.
It was after ten by that time.
Willie was on the bed. In the same place, the coat still wadded up under his armpits, his hands still crossed on his chest, his face pale and pure. I went over to the bed. His head didn’t turn, but his eyed swung toward me with a motion that made you think you could hear them creak in the sockets.
“Good morning,” I said.
He opened his mouth a little way and his tongue crept out and explored the lips carefully, wetting them. Then he grinned weakly, as though he were experimenting to see if anything would crack. Nothing happened, so he whispered, “I reckon I was drunk last night?”
“That’s the name it goes by,” I said.
“It’s the first time,” he said. “I never got drunk before. I never even tasted it but once before.”
“I know. Lucy doesn’t favor drinking.”
“I reckon she’ll understand though when I tell her,” he said. “She’ll see how it was I came to do it.” Then he sank into meditation.
“How do you feel?”
“I feel all right,” he said, and pried himself up to a sitting position, swinging his feet to the floor. He sat there with his sock-feet on the floor, taking stock of the internal stresses and strains. “Yeah,” he concluded, “I feel all right.”
“Are you to the barbecue?”
He looked up at me with a laborious motion of the head and an expression of question on his face as tough I were the fellow who was supposed to answer. “What made you ask that?” he demanded.
“Well, a lot’s been happening.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m going.”
“Duffy and Sadie have already gone. Duffy wants you to come on out and mingle with the common herd.”
“All right,” he said. Then, with his eyed fixed on an imaginary spot on the floor about ten feet from his toes, he stuck his tongue out again and began to caress his lips. “I’m thirsty,” he said.
“You are dehydrated,” I said. “The result of alcohol taken in excess. But that is the only way to take it. It is the only way to do a man any good.”
But he wasn’t listening. He had pulled himself up and padded off into the bathroom.
I could hear the slosh of water and the gulping and inhaling. He must have been drinking out of the faucet. After about a minute that sound stopped. There wasn