All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [59]
During all that time I didn’t see Willie. I didn’t see him again until he announced in the Democratic primary in 1930. But it wasn’t a primary. It was hell among the yearlings and the Charge of the Light Brigade and Saturday night in the back room of Casey’s saloon rolled into one, and when the smoke cleared away not a picture still hung on the walls. And there wasn’t any Democratic party. There was just Willie, with his hair in his eyes and his shirt sticking to his stomach with sweat. And he had a meat ax in his hand and was screaming for blood. In the background of the picture, under a purplish tumbled sky flecked with sinister white like driven foam, flanking Willie, one on each side, were two figures, Sadie Burke and a tallish, stooped, slow-spoken man with a sad, tanned face and what they call the eyes of a dreamer. The man was Hugh Miller, Harvard Law School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands, pure heart, and no political past. He was a fellow who had sat still for years, and then somebody (Willie Stark) handed him a baseball bat and he felt his fingers close on the tape. He was a man and was Attorney General. And Sadie Burke was just Sadie Burke.
Over the brow of the hill, there were, of course, some other people. There were, for instance, certain gentlemen who had once been devoted to Joe Harrison, but who, when they discovered that there wasn’t going to be any more Joe Harrison politically speaking, had had to hunt up a new friend. The new friend happened to be Willie. He was the only place for them to go. They figured they would sign on with Willie and grow up with the country. Willie signed them on, all right, and as a result got quiet a few votes not of the wool-hat and cocklebur variety. After a while, Willie even signed on Tiny Duffy, who became Highway Commissioner and, later Lieutenant Governor in Willie’s last term. I used to wonder why Willie kept him around. Sometimes I used to ask the Boss, “What do you keep that lunk-head for?” Sometimes he would just laugh and say nothing. Sometimes he would say, “Hell, somebody’s got to be Lieutenant Governor, and they all look alike.” But once he said: “I keep him because he reminds me of something.”
“What?”
“Something I don’t ever want to forget,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“That when they come to you sweet talking you better not listen to anything they say. I don’t aim to forget that.”
So that was it. Tiny was the fellow who had come in a big automobile and had talked sweet to Willie back when Willie was a little country lawyer.
But was that it? Or rather, was that all of it? I figured there was another reason. The Boss must have taken a kind pride in the fact that he could make Tiny Duffy a success, He had busted Tiny Duffy and then he had picked up the pieces and put him back together again as his own creation. He must have taken a lot of pleasure in looking at Tiny’s glittering rig and diamond ring, and thinking that it was all hollow, that it was a sham, that if he should crook his little finger Tiny Duffy would disappear like a whiff of smoke. In a way, the very success which the Boss laid on Tiny was his revenge on Tiny, for every time the Boss put his meditative, sleepy, distant gaze on Tiny, Tiny would know, with a cold clutch at his fat heart, that if the Boss should crook a finger there wouldn’t be anything but the whiff of smoke. In a way, Tiny’s success was a final index of the Boss’s own success.
But was that it? In the end, I decided that there was one more reason behind the other reasons. This: Tiny Duffy became, in a crazy kind of way, the other self of Willie Stark, and all the contempt and insult which Willie Stark was to heap on Tiny Duffy was nothing but what one self of Willie Stark did to the other self because of a blind, in ward necessity. But I came to that conclusion only at the very end, a long time afterwards.
But now Willie had just become Governor and nobody knew what would come afterwards.
And meanwhile–while the campaign was on