All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [83]
Hugh Miller straightened his shoulders a little. He did not look at the Boss but at the wall beyond the Boss. “I am offering my resignation as Attorney General,” he said. “You will have it in writing, by messenger, in the morning.”
“You took a long time to do it,” the Boss said softly. “A long time, Hugh. What made you take such a long time?”
Hugh Miller didn’t answer, but he did move his gaze from the wall to the Boss’s face.
“I’ll tell you, Hugh,” the Boss said. “You sat in you law office fifteen years and watched the sons-of-bitches warm chairs in this state and not do a thing, and the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Then I came along and slipped a Louisville Slugger in your hand and whispered low, ‘You want to step in there and lay round you a little? And you did. You had a wonderful time. You made the fur fly and you put nine tin-horn grafters in the pen. But you never touched what was behind ’em. The law isn’t made for that. All you can do about that is take the damned government away from the behind guys and keep it away from ’em. Whatever way you can. You know that down in your heart. You want to keep your Harvard hands clean, but way down in your heart you know I’m telling the truth, and you’re asking the benefit of somebody getting his little patties potty-black. You know you’re welching if you pull out. That,” he said, softer than ever, and leaned toward Hugh Miller, peering up at him. “is why it took you so long to do it. To pull out.”
Hugh Miller looked down at him a half minute, down into the beefy upturned face and the steady protruding eyes. There was a shadowed, puzzled expression on Hugh Miller’s face, as though he were trying to read something in a bad light, or in a foreign language he didn’t know very well. Then he said, “My mind is made up.”
“I know your mind’s made up,” the Boss said. “I know I couldn’t change your mind, Hugh.” He stood up in front of his chair, hitched his trousers up, the way a fellow has to who is putting it on some around the middle, and sock-footed over to Hugh Miller. “Too bad,” he said. “You and me make quite a team. Your brains and my brawn.”
Hugh Miller gave something which resembled an incipient smile.
“No hard feelings?” the Boss said, and stuck out his hand.
Hugh Miller took it.
“If you don’t give up likker, you might drop in and have a drink with me some time,” the Boss said. “I won’t talk politics.”
“All right,” Hugh Miller said, and turned toward the door.
He had just about made the door, when the Boss said, “Hugh.” Hugh Miller stopped and looked back.
“You’re leaving me alone,” the Boss said, in semicomic woe, “with the sons-of-bitches. Mine and the other fellow’s.”
Hugh Miller smiled in a stiff, embarrassed way, shook his head, said, “Hell–Willie–” let his voice trail off without ever saying what he had started to say, and then Harvard Law School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands and pure heart, was with us no longer.
The Boss sank down on the foot of the bed, heaved his left ankle up over his right knee; and while he meditatively scratched the left foot, the way a farmer does when he takes off his shoes at night, he stared at the closed door.
“With the sons-of-bitches,” he said, and let the foot slip off the knee and plop to the floor, while he still stared to the door.
I stood up again. It was my third try for getting out of the place and getting back to my hotel for some sleep. The Boss could sit up all night, night after night, and never show it, and that fact was sure hell on his associates. I edged toward the door again, but the Boss swung his stare to me and I knew something was coming. So I just stopped and waited for it, while the stare worked over my face and tried to probe around in the gray stuff inside my head, like a pair of forceps.