All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [85]
It took the boy from Mason City, who had never seen any ice except the skim-ice on the horse trough. “Jesus,” the boy from Mason City said, in unabashed admiration. And then, “Jesus.” And he kept swallowing hard, as though he had a sizable chunk of dry corn pone stuck in his throat.
It was over, and Josh Conklin said politely, “How did you like that, Governor?”
“They sure can skate,” the Governor said.
Then one of the Swedish-haired nymphs came out of the dressing room with her skates off and a silver cloak draped over her bare shoulders, and came over to the table. She was a friend of Josh Conklin’s and a very nice friend to have even if the hair had not come from Sweden but from the drugstore. Well, she had a friend in the act, so she got her friend, who quickly made friends with the Governor, who, for the rest of the stay in Chicago, practically dropped out of my life except for the period every night when the skating was going on. Then he’d be sitting there watching the gyrating, and swallowing on the chunk of dry corn pone stuck in his throat. Then when the last act was over he’s say, “Good night, Jack,” and he and the friend of the friend of Josh Conklin would head off into the night.
I don’t know that Lucy ever knew about the skating rink, but Sadie did. For Sadie had channels of information closed to the home-maker type. When the Boss and I got back home, and the Nordic Nymphs were but a fond memory, a soft sweet spot in the heart like the bruised place in a muskmelon, it was Sadie who raised the seven varieties of Hibernian hell. The very morning the Boss and I hit town, I heard rumbling from inside the Boss’s office as I stood in the outer room chatting with the girl who was the receptionist and catching up with the gossip. I noticed the racket inside, a noise like somebody slamming a book on a desk and then a voice, Sadie’s voice. “What’s going on?” I asked the girl.
“Yeah, you tell me what went on in Chicago,” the girl said.
“Oh,” exclaimed I in my innocence, “so that is it.”
“Oh,” she exclaimed, mimicking me, “that was it, and how!”
I retired to the door of my cubbyhole, which opened off the outside room. I was standing just inside, with my door wide open, when Sadie burst out of the Boss’s door about the way one of the big cats, no doubt, used to bounce out of the hutch at the far end of the arena and head fro the Christian martyr. Her hair was flying with distinct life and her face was chalk-white with the pock marks making it look like riddled plaster, like, say, a plaster-of-Paris mask of Medusa which some kid has been using as a target for a BB gun. But in the middle of the plaster-of-Paris mask was n event which had nothing whatsoever to do with plaster of Paris: her eyes, and they were a twin disaster, they were a black explosion, they were a conflagration. She was running a head of steam to bust the rivets, and the way she snatched across the floor you could hear the seams pop in her skirt.
Then she caught sight of me, and without change of pace swung straight into my room and slammed the door behind her.
“The son-of-a-bitch,” she said, and stood there panting and glaring at me.
“You needn’t blame me,” I said.
“The son-of-a-bitch,” she iterated, glaring, “I’ll kill him, I swear to God I