All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [86]
“You set a high valuation on something,” I said.
“I’ll ruin him, I’ll drive him out of this state, I swear to God. The son-of-a-bitch to two-time me after all I’ve done for him. Listen–” she said, and grabbed a handful of my lapels in each of her strong hands and shook me (He hands were squarish and strong and hard like a man’s.) “Listen–” she repeated.
“You needn’t choke me,” I protested peevishly, “and I don’t want to listen. O know too God-damned much now.” And I wasn’t joking. I didn’t want to listen. The world was full of things I didn’t want to know.
“Listen–” and she shook me–“who made that son-of-a-bitch what he is today? Who made him Governor? Who took him when he was the Sap of the Year and put him in big time? Who gave it to him, play by play so he couldn’t lose?”
“I reckon you mean for me to say you did.”
“And it’s the truth,” she said, “and he goes and two-times me, the–”
“No,” I said, trying to get loose from the grip on my lapels, “he was two-timing Lucy, so you need some other kind of arithmetic for what he was doing to you. But I don’t know whether to multiply or divide in a case like this.”
“Lucy!” she burst out from lips that coiled and contorted. “Lucy–she’s a fool. She had her way and he’d be in Mason City slopping the hogs right now, and he knows it. He knows what she’d do for him. If he listened to her. She had her chance, she–” She simply stopped for breath, but you could see the words still blazing on in her head while she gasped for air.
“I see you seem to think Lucy is on the way out,” I said.
“Lucy–” she said, and stopped, but the tone said everything there was to say about Lucy, who was a country girl, and had gone to a hick Baptist college where they believe in God, and had taught the little towheaded snots in the Mason Country school, and had married Willie Stark and given him a kid, and had missed her chance. Then she added, suddenly quiet, in a grim matter-of-factness, “Give him time–he’ll ditch her, the son-of-a-bitch.”
“You ought to know,” I said, simply because I couldn’t resist the logic of the proposition, but I hadn’t got it out before she slapped me. Which is what you ask for when you start mixing into affairs, public or private.
“It’s the wrong guy,” I said, fingering my cheek and backing off a step from the heat, for she was about to blaze, “I’m not the hero of the piece.”
Then she wasn’t about to blaze, at all. She stood there in a kind of heavy numbness inside the sagging clothes. I saw a tear gather at the inner corner of each eye, gather very slowly and swollenly and then run down with the precision of a tiny mechanical toy, one on each side of the slightly pitted nose, until they simultaneously arrived at the smear of dark lipstick, and spread. I saw the tongue come out and fastidiously touch the upper lip as though to sample the salt.
She was looking straight to me all the time as though if she looked hard enough she might see the answer to something.
Then she went past me to the wall, where a mirror hung, and stared into the mirror, putting her face up close to the mirror and turning it a little from side to side, slowly. I couldn’t see what was in the mirror, just the back of her head.
“What was she like?” she asked, distantly and dispassionately
“Who?” I asked, and it was an honest question.
“In Chicago,” she said.
“She was just a little tart,” I said, “with fake Swedish hair on her head and skates on her feet and practically nothing on in between.”
“Was she pretty?” the distant and dispassionate voice asked.
“Hell,” I said, “if I met her on the street tomorrow I wouldn’t recognize her.”
“Was she pretty?” the voice said.
“How do I know?” I demanded, peevish again. “The condition she earned her living in you didn’t get around to noticing her face.”
“Was she pretty?”
“For Christ’s sake, forget it,” I said.
She turned around, and came toward me, holding her hands up at about the level of the chin, one on each side, the fingers together and slightly bent, not touching her face. She came up close to me and stopped. “Forget it?” she repeated, as though she had just heard my words.