All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [79]
“I’m not Sugar-Boy,” I said.
“Well, get on over here. Suite 905. Hell has popped.”
I hung the receiver up very deliberately, walked over to the desk and asked the clerk to give my bag to a bellhop, got a drink out of the lobby cooler, bought a couple of packs of cigarettes from the sleepy sister at the lobby stand, opened a package and lighted myself one, and stood there to take a long drag and look at the blank lobby, as though there weren’t any place in the world where I had to go.
But there was such a place. And I went there. Quick, once I started.
Sadie was sitting in the outside room of Suite 905, over by the telephone stand, with a tray full of cigarette butts in front of her and a coronal of smoke revolving slowly about hr head of hacked-off black hair.
“Well,” she said in the tone of the matron of a home for wayward girls from inside the smoke screen, but I didn’t answer. I walked straight over to her, past the form of Sugar-Boy, who snored in a chair, and grabbed a handful of that wild black Irish hair to steady her and kissed her smack on the forehead before she could God-damn me.
Which she did.
“You have no idea why I did that,” I said.
“I don’t care, just so it isn’t a habit.”
“It was nothing personal,” I said. “It was just because your name is not Dumonde.”
“Your name is going to be mud if you don’t get on in here,” she said, and twitched her head in the direction of a door.
“Maybe I’ll resign,” I said in my whimsey, then for a split second, with a surprising flash in my head like the flash of a photographer’s bulb, I thought maybe I would.
Sadie was just about to say something, when the telephone rang and she sprang at it as though she’d strangle it with her bare hands and snatched up the receiver. As I walked toward the inner door, I heard her saying, “So you got him. All right, get him to town here…. To hell with his wife. Tell him he’ll be sicker’n she is if he don’t come…. Yeah, tell him–”
Then I knocked on the inner door, heard a voice, and went in.
I saw the Boss in shirt sleeves, cocked back in an easy chair with his sock-feet propped on a straight chair in front of him, and his tie askew, and his eyes bugging out and a forefinger out in the air in front of him as tough it were the stock of a bull whip. Then I saw what the snapper of the bull whip would have been flicking the flies off of if that forefinger of the Boss had been the stock of a bull whip: it was Mr. Byram B. White, State Auditor, and his long bony paraffin-colored face was oozing a few painful drops of moisture and his eyes reached out and grabbed me like the last hope.
I took in the fact that I was intruding.
“Excuse me,” I said, and started to back out of the door.
“Shut the door and sit down,” the Boss said, and his voice moved right on without any punctuation to something it had been saying before my entrance, and the forefinger snapped, “–and you can just damned well remember you aren’t supposed to get rich. A fellow like you, fifty years old and gut-shot and teeth gone and never had a dime, if God-Almighty had never intended you to be rich he’d done it long back. Look at yourself, damn it! You to figure you’re supposed to be rich, it is plain blasphemy. Look at yourself. Ain’t it a fact?” And the forefinger leveled at Mr. Byram B. White.
But Mr. White didn’t answer. He just stood there in his unhappiness and looked at the finger.
“God damn it, has the cat got your tongue?” the Boss demanded. “Can’t you answer a civil question?”
“Yes,” Mr. White managed with gray lips that scarcely moved.
“Speak up, don’t mumble, say, ‘It’s a fact, it’s blasphemous fact,’ ” the Boss insisted, still pointing the finger.
Mr. White’s lips went grayer, and the voice was less than loud and clear, but he said it. Every word.
“All right, that’s better,” the Boss said. “Now you know what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to stay pore and take orders. I don’t care about your chastity, which from the looks of you you don