Chapter Eight 5 страница

"God damn it," I said, "didn't I tell you I didn't want to discuss it?"

He looked at me with some surprise, got up from his chair and came around the desk. "I'm sorry," he said, and put his heavy hand on my shoulder.

I moved out under the hand.

"I'm sorry," he repeated. "He had been quite a pal of yours at one time, hadn't he?"

"Yeah," I said He sat back on the desk and raised one big knee to clasp his hands around it.

"There is still MacMurfee," he said reflectively.

"Yes, there is MacMurfee, but if you want any blackmailing done, get somebody else to do it."

"Even on MacMurfee?" he asked, with a hint of jocularity, to which I didn't respond.

"Even on MacMurfee." I said.

"Hey," he demanded, "you aren't quitting me?"

"No, I'm just quitting certain things."

"Well, it was true, wasn't it?"

"What?"

"What the Judge did, whatever the hell it was."

I couldn't deny that. I had to say yes. So I nodded and said, "Yes, he did it."

"Well? he demanded.

"I aid what I said."

He was studying me drowsily from under the shagged‑down forelock. "Boy," he said then, soberly, "we been together a long time. I hope we'll be in it together all the way. We been in it up to the ears, both of us, you and me, boy."

I didn't answer.

He continued to study me. Then he said, "Don't you worry. It'll all come out all right."

"Yeah," I said sourly, "you'll be Senator."

"I didn't mean that. I could be Senator right now if that was all."

"What did you mean?"

He didn't answer for a moment, not even looking at me but down at the hands clasped around the crooked knee. "Hell," he said suddenly, "forget it." Suddenly, he released the knee, the leg dropped, the foot struck the floor heavily, and he lunged off the desk. "But nobody had better forget–MacMurfee and nobody else–that I'll do what I've got to do. By God, I'll do it if I've got to break their bones with my bare hands." And he held the hands before him with spread fingers, crooked and tense as though to seize.

He sank back against the support of the desk then, and said, half as though to himself, "That Frey, now. That Frey."

Then he fell into a brooding silence, which, had Frey been able to see it, would have made him very happy to be way off there on the Arkansas farm with no forwarding address left behind.

So the story of the Boss and MacMurfee, of which the story of Judge Irwin had been a part, went on, but I had no hand in it. I went back to my own innocent little chores and sat in my office as the fall drew imperceptibly on and the earth leaned on its axis and shouldered the spot I occupied a little out of the direct, billowing, crystalline, consuming blaze of the enormous sun. The leaves rattled dryly on the live oaks when a breeze sprang up in the evenings, the matted jungles of sugar cane in the country beyond the concrete walks and trolley lines were felled now by the heavy knife and in the evenings the great high‑wheeled carts groaned along the rutted tracks, piled high with the fetid‑sweet burden, and far off across the flat black fields laid bare by the knife, under the saffron sky, some nigger sang sadly about the transaction between him and Jesus. Out at the University, on the practice field, the toe of some long‑legged, slug‑footed, box‑shouldered lad kept smacking the leather, over and over, and farther away the scrimmage surged and heaved to the sound of shouts and peremptory whistles. On Saturday nights under the glare of the battery of lights, the stadium echoed to the roar of "Tom!–Tom!–Tom!–yea, Tom!" For Tom Stark carried the ball, Tom Stark wheeled the end, Tom Stark knifed the line, and it was Tom, Tom, Tom.

The sport writers said he was better than ever. Meanwhile he was making his old man sweat. The Boss was dour as a teetotaling Scot, and the office force walked on tiptoe and girls suddenly burst out crying over their typewriters after they had been in to take dictation and state officials coming out of the inner room laid a handkerchief to the pallid brow with one hand and with the other groped across the long room under the painted eyes of all the other groped across the long room under the painted eyes of all the gilt‑framed dead governors. Only Sadie suffered no change. She bit her syllables off the way a seamstress snaps off the thread, and looked at the Boss with her dark, unquenched glance, like the spirit of the future meditating on your hopeful plans. The only times the Boss got the black dog off his shoulder those days were at the games. I went with him a couple of times, and when Tom uncorked his stuff the Boss was a changed man. His eyes would bug and gleam, and he would slap me on the back and grab me like a bear. There might be a flicker of that left the next morning when he opened the Sunday sporting page, but it certainly didn't last out the week. And Tom was not doing a thing to make up to the old man for the trouble he had caused. They had high words once or twice because Tom would slack off on his training and had had a row with Billie Martin, the coach. "What the hell's it to you?" Tom demanded, standing there in the middle of the hotel room, his feet apart as though he were on a swaying deck and his head wreathed in the cigar smoke of the place. "What the hell's it to you, or Martin either, so long as I can put 'em across, and what the hell else do you want? I can put 'em across and you can big‑shot around about it. That's what you want, isn't it?"

And with those remarks, Ton Stark went out and slammed the door, probably leaving the Boss paralyzed with the rush of blood to his head.

"That's what he said to me," the Boss told me, "by God, that's what he said, and I ought to slapped him down." But he was shaken. You could see that, all right.

Meanwhile the Boss had handled the Sibyl Frey business. I had, as I said, no part in it. What happened was, however, simple and predictable. There had been two ways to get at MacMurfee: Judge Irwin and Gummy Larson. The Boss had tried to scare the Judge, and that have failed. So now he had to buy Gummy. He could buy Gummy because Gummy was a businessman. Strictly business. He would sell anything for the proper figure, immortal soul or mother's sainted bones, and his old friend MacMurfee was neither. If Gummy told MacMurfee to lay off, that he wasn't going to be Senator, MacMurfee would lay off, because without Gummy, MacMurfee was nothing.

The Boss had no choice. He had to buy. He might have dealt directly with MacMurfee, and have let MacMurfee to go the Senate, with the intention of following up himself when the next senatorial election rolled around. But there two arguments against that. First, the timing would have been bad. Now was the time for the Boss to step out. Later on he would be just another senator getting on toward fifty. Now he would be a boy wonder breathing brimstone. He would have a future. Second, if he let MacMurfee climb back on the gravy train, a lot of people on whose brows the cold sweat would break now if even in the privacy of the boudoir the mere thought of crossing the Boss should dawn on them would figure that you could buck the Boss and get away with it. They would begin to make friends and swap cigars with friends of MacMurfee. They would even begin to get ideas of their own. But there was a third argument, too, against doing business with MacMurfee. It was, rather, not an argument; it was simply a fact. The fact was that the Boss was the way he was. If MacMurfee had forced him into a compromise, at least MacMurfee shouldn't be the one to profit by it. So he did business with Gummy Larson.

The figure was not cheap. It was not peanuts. It was the medical‑center contract, the general contract. It would be arranged that Larson would get the contract.

But I had nothing to do with the arranging. Duffy did that, for he had been pulling all along for such an arrangement, and I suppose that he must have got some sort of private kickback or sweetening from Larson. Well, I don't begrudge him that. He had worked for it. He had cringed and sweated and felt the baleful speculative stare of the Boss on him in the long silence after he had tried to sell the idea of Gummy Larson. It wasn't his fault that an accident now made the deal possible and not his own conscientious efforts. So I don't begrudge him his sweetening.

All of this went on behind my back, or perhaps even under my eyes, for in those days as fall came on I felt as though I were gradually withdrawing from the world around me. It could go its way and I would go mine. Or I would have gone my way if I had known what it was. I toyed with the thought of going away, of saying to the Boss, "Boss, I'm getting the hell away from here and never coming back." I could afford to do it, I thought. I didn't have to lift a finger for my morning sinker and Java. Maybe I wouldn't be rich‑rich, but I figured I was going to be rich in a nice, genteel, Southern way. Nobody down here ever wants to be rich‑rich, for that, of course, would be crass and vulgar. So I was going to be just genteel rich. As soon as they wound up the Judge's estate. (If they ever did, for his affairs were complicated and it was going to take some time.)

I was going to be genteel rich, for I had inherited the fruits of the Judge's crime, just as some day I would inherit from my mother the fruit of the Scholarly Attorney's weakness, the money he had left with her when he learned the truth and just walked away. On the proceeds of the Judge's old crime I would be able to go away and lead a nice, clean, blameless life in some place where you sit under a striped awning beside a marble‑topped table and drink vermouth, cassis and soda and look out over the wimpling, dimpling, famous sunlit blue of the sea. But I didn't go. True, since I had lost my fathers, I felt as though I could float effortless away like a balloon when the last cord is cut. But I would have to go on the money from Judge Irwin. And that particular money, which would have made the trip possible, was at the same time, paradoxically enough a bond that held me there. To change the image, it was a long cable to an anchor, and the anchor flukes clung and bit way down there in the seaweed and ooze of a long time past. Perhaps I was a fool to feel that way about my little inheritance. Perhaps it was no different from any other inheritance anybody had. Perhaps the Emperor Vespasian was right when, jingling in his jeans the money which had been derived from a tax on urinals, he wittily remarked: _"Pecunia non olet."__

I didn't go away, but I was out of the swim of things, and sat in my office or out at the University library and read books and monographs on taxation, for I now had a nice clean assignment to work on: a tax bill. I knew so little of what was going on that it wasn't until the arrangement was an accomplished fact that I knew anything about it.

I went up to the Mansion one night with my brief case full of notes and charts to have a session with the Boss. The Boss was not alone. Back there in the library with him were Tiny Duffy, Sugar‑Boy, and, to my surprise, Gummy Larson. Sugar‑Boy sat over in a corner, hunched in a chair and holding a glass between both hands, the way a child holds a glass. Out of the glass he would take little finicking sips, after each sip lifting his head up the way a chicken does when it drinks. Sugar‑Boy wasn't a drinker. He was afraid, he said, it might make him "n‑n‑n‑n‑ner‑ner‑vous." It would have been awful if Sugar‑Boy got so nervous he couldn't bust jelly glasses every shot when you threw them up in the air for him or couldn't wipe a mule's nose with the rear fender of the black Cadillac. Duffy, of course, was a drinker, but he wasn't drinking that night. He obviously was not in any mood for drinking, even if in fleeting glimpses one caught a glimmer of triumph mixed with the acute discomfort he was experiencing as he stood in the open space in front of the big leather couch. The discomfort was due, in part at least, to the fact that the Boss was, very definitely, drinking. For when the Boss really drank, what tender inhibitions ordinarily shackled up his tongue were absolutely removed. And now he was drinking all right. It looked like the first fine flush of a three‑day blow and the barometer falling. He was cocked back on the leather couch with a pitcher of water, a bottle, and a bowl of ice on the floor beside his crumpled coat and empty shoes. When the Boss really got the works, he usually took off his shoes. He was sock‑feet drunk now. The bottle was a long way down.

Mr. Larson stood back from the foot of the couch, a middle‑sized, middle‑aged, compact, gray‑faced, gray‑suited, unimaginative‑looking man. He did not drink. He had once been a gambling‑house operator and had found that it did not pay to drink. Gummy was strictly business and he didn't do anything unless it paid.

As I entered and took in the layout, the Boss put his already red‑rimmed gaze on me, but didn't say a word until I approached the open space in front of the couch. Then he flung out an arm to indicate Tiny, who stood in the middle of that unprotected open space, with a wan smile on his tallow. "Look!" the Boss said to me, pointing. "He was the one going to fix it up with Larson, and what did I tell him? I told him, hell, no. Hell, no, I told him, I'd be damned first. And what happened?"

I took that as rhetorical question and said nothing. I could see that the tax bill was out for the evening, and started sidling back the way I had come.

"And what happened?" the Boss bellowed at me.

"How do I know?" I asked, but with that cast present I had begun to have a fair notion of the nature of the drama.

The Boss swung his head toward Tiny. "Tell him," he commanded, "tell him, and tell him how puking smart you feel!"

Tiny didn't manage it. All he managed was the wan smile like a winter dawn above the expanse of expensive black tailoring and the white‑pipe waistcoat and diamond pin.

"Tell him!"

Tiny licked his lips and glanced shyly as a bride at the impassive, gray‑faced Gummy, but he didn't manage it.

"Well, I'll tell you," the Boss said, "Gummy Larson is going to build my hospital and Tiny fixed it up like he has been trying to do and everything is happy."

"That's fine," I said.

"Yeah, everybody is happy," the Boss said. "Except me. Except me," he repeated, and struck himself heavily on the chest. "For I'm the one said to Tiny, Hell, no, I won't deal with Larson. For I'm the one wouldn't let Larson come in this room when Tiny got him here. For I'm the one ought to driven him out of this state long ago. And where is he now? Where is he now?"

I looked over at Gummy Larson, whose gray face didn't show a thing. Way back in the old days, when I had first known Gummy and he had been a gambling‑house operator, the police had beat him up one time. Probably because he got behind in his protection money. They had worked over his face until it looked like uncooked hamburger. But that had healed up now. He had known it would heal up and had taken the beating without opening his trap because it always paid to keep your trap shut. It had paid him in the end. Eventually he was a rich contractor and not a gambling‑house operator. He was a rich contractor because he had finally made the right connections in the City Hall and because he knew how to keep his mouth shut. Now he stood there on the floor and took everything the Boss was throwing at him. Because it paid. Gummy had the instincts of a businessman, all right.

"I'll tell you where he is," the Boss said. "Look, there he is. Right in this room. Standing right there, and look at him. He is a beauty, ain't he? Know what he has just done? He has just sold out his best pal. He has just sold out MacMurfee."

Larson might have been standing in church, waiting for the benediction, for all his face showed.

"Oh, but that isn't anything. Not a thing. Not for Gummy."

Who didn't twitch a muscle.

"Oh, not for Gummy. The only difference between him and Judas Iscariot is that Gummy would have got some boot with that thirty pieces of silver. Oh, Gummy would sell out anything. He sold out his best pal, and I–and I–" he struck himself savagely on the chest with a hollow sound like a thump on a barrel–"and I–I had to buy, the sons‑of‑bitches made me buy!"

He relapsed into silence, glowered across at Gummy, then reached down for the bottle. He poured a lot into the glass, and sloshed in some water. He wasn't bothering with ice now. He was nearly down to essentials. Before long the water would go.

Gummy, from the vast distance of sobriety and victory and the moral certainty which comes from an accurate knowledge of exactly to the penny what everything in the whole world is worth, surveyed the figure on the couch, and when the pitcher had been set back down, said, "If we've got our business arranged, Governor, I think I'll be on my way."

"Yeah," the Boss said, "yeah," and swung his sock‑feet to the floor, "yeah, it's arranged, by God. But–" he stood up, clutching the glass in one hand, and shook himself like a big dog, so that some of the liquor sloshed from the glass–"listen here!" He started across to Larson, sock‑feet heavy on the rug, head trust out.

Tiny Duffy wasn't exactly in the way, but he didn't give back fully enough or perhaps with enough alacrity. Anyway, the Boss nearly brushed him in passing, or perhaps did brush him. At that instant, without even looking at his target, the Boss flung the liquid in his glass full into Duffy's face. And in one motion simply let the glass fall to the floor. It bounced on the rug, not breaking.

I could see Duffy's face at the moment of contact, the big pie face of surprise which reminded me of the time years before when the Boss had scared Duffy off the platform at Upton at the barbecue, and Duffy had fallen over the edge. Now, after the surprise, there was the flash of fury, then the merely humble and aggrieved expression and the placating whine, "What made you go and do that now, Boss, what made you go and do that?"

And the Boss, who had passed him, turned at that, looked at Duffy, and said, "I ought to done it long ago. I ought to done it long ago."

Then he moved to Larson, who, unperturbed by the goings‑on, had picked up his coat and hat and stood waiting for the dust to settle. The Boss stood directly in front of him, the bodies almost touching. Then he seized Larson by the lapels and thrust his own flushed face down to the gray one. "Arranged," he said, "yeah, it's arranged, but you–you leave one window latch off, you leave one piece of iron out of the concrete, you put in one extra teaspoon of sand, you chip one piece of marble, and by God–by God–I'll rip you open, I'll–" And still clutching the lapels, he jerked his hands apart sideways. A button from Larson's coat, which had been buttoned up, spun across the room and bounced on the hearth with a little click.

"For it's mine," the Boss said, "you hear–that's my hospital–it's mine!"

Then there wasn't any other sound, but the Boss breathing.

Duffy, the damp handkerchief with which he had sponged himself still clutched in his hand, regarded the scene, with awe and horror on his face. Sugar‑Boy wasn't paying the slightest attention Meanwhile, Larson stood there, the Boss's hands still gripping the lapels, and didn't blink an eye. I had to hand it to Gummy. He didn't quiver. He had ice water in his veins. Nothing fazed him, not insult or anger or violence or getting his face beat into a hamburger. He was a true businessman. He knew the value of everything.

He stood there under the heavy, flushed face, no doubt feeling the hot, alcoholic breath rasp on his own face, and waited. Then the Boss released his hold. He simply opened his hands in mid‑air, fingers spread, and stepped back. He turned his back and walked away from the spot as though it were vacant. His sock‑feet made no sound, and his head swayed ever so little as he moved.

He sat on the couch and leaned forward with his elbows on his spread knees, the forearms hanging forward, and stared into the embers on the hearth as though he were absolutely alone.

Larson, without a word, walked to the door, opened it, and went out, leaving it ajar. Tiny Duffy, with the peculiar impression of lightness, the lightness of a drowned bloated body swaying slowly upward on the ninth day, which a fat man can give when he tiptoes, moved toward the door, too. Once there, with his hand on the knob, he looked back. As his eyes rested on the unregarding Boss, the fury flashed again into the face, and just for that instant I thought, _By God, he's human__. Then he caught my gaze on him, and looked back at me with a kind of suffering, mute appeal which asked to be forgiven for everything, asked for my understanding and sympathy, asked for everybody to think well of poor old Tiny Duffy, who had done what he could according to his lights and then they threw stuff in his face. Didn't he have his rights? Didn't poor old Tiny have his feelings?

The he followed Larson off into the night. He managed to close the door without a sound.

I looked at the Boss, who hadn't stirred. "Glad I got here for the last act," I said, "but I got to toddle now." There certainly wouldn't be any talk about the tax bill.

"Wait," he said.

He reached down for the bottle and took a drag out of it. He was down to essentials now.

"I told him," he said, glaring up at me, "I told him, I said, if you leave off a window latch, I said if you leave one iron out of the concrete, I said if you–"

"Yeah," I said, "I heard you."

"–if you put one extra teaspoon of sand, you do a thing, a single thing, and I'll rip you wide open, I'll rip you!" He got up and came toward me. He stood very close to me. "I'll rip him," he said, and breathed heavily.

"So you said," I agreed.

"I told him I would, and I will. Let him do one thing wrong."

"All right."

"I'll rip him anyway. By God–" he flung his arms out wide–"I'll rip him anyway. I'll rip all of 'em who put their dirty hands on it. They do the job and when it's over I'll rip 'em. Every one. I'll rip 'em and ruin 'em. By God, I will! Putting their dirty hands on it. For they made me, they made me do it."

"Tom Stark had something to do with it," I said.

That stopped him, as far gone as he was. He stared at me with a look that made me think he was about to lay hands on me. Then he turned from me, and moved back toward the couch. But he didn't sit down. He leaned over for the bottle, did it some direct damage, stared at me again, and said, indistinctly, "He's just a boy."

I didn't say anything to that. He took another try at the bottle.

"He's just a boy," he repeated, dully.

"All right," I said.

"But the others," he burst out, swinging his arms wide again, "the others–they made me do it–I'll rip 'em–I'll ruin 'em!"

He had quite a lot to say along that line before he took his dive into the sofa. After he got there he made a few more muffled remarks along the same line and about how Tom Stark was just a boy. Then the one‑side conversation died away, and there wasn't anything but the heavy draw and puff of his breathing. I stood there and looked down at him and thought about the first time, God knows how many years before, when he got drunk in my hotel room at Upton and passed out. He had come a long way. And it wasn't the chubby boy face of Cousin Willie I looked down into now. Everything was changed now. It sure‑God was.

Sugar‑Boy, who had sat quiet all that time over in the shadow with his short legs barely reaching the floor, got off his chair and came over to the couch. He looked down at the Boss.

"He is out deader than a mackerel," I said.

He nodded, still looking down at the burly form. The Boss was lying on his back. One leg was off the couch, dragging on the floor. Sugar‑Boy leaned to pick it up and adjust it on the couch. Then he saw the discarded coat on the floor. He picked that up and spread it over the Boss's sock‑feet. He looked at me, and explained, almost apologetically, "He mi‑mi‑mi‑might catch c‑c‑c‑cold."

I gathered up my brief case and topcoat, and moved toward the door. I looked back at the scene of carnage. Sugar‑Boy had gone back to his chair in the shadow. I must have had some trace of question in my look, for he said, "I'll s‑s‑s‑s‑set up and s‑s‑s‑see no‑no‑no‑body bothers him."

So I left them together.

As I drove down the night street on my way home, I wondered what Adam Stanton would have to say if he ever learned about how the hospital was going to be built. I knew what the Boss would say, however, if the question about Adam were put up to him. He would say, "Hell, I said I would build it, and I'm building it. That's the main thing, I'm building it. Let him stay in it and keep his own little patties sterile as hell." Which was exactly what he did say when I asked him the question.

As I drove down the night street, I wondered what Anne Stanton would have to say if she had been there in that room and had seen the Boss piled up there, out blind on the couch. I took some sardonic pleasure in that speculation. If she had taken up with him because he was so big and tough and knew his own mind and was willing to pay the price for anything, well, she ought to see him piled up there like a bull that's got tangled up in the lead rope and is down on its knees and can't budge and can't even lift its head any more on account of the ring in the nose. She ought to see that.

Then I thought that maybe that was what she was waiting for. There is nothing women love so much as the drunkard, the hellion, the roarer, the reprobate. They love him because they–women, I mean–are like the bees in Samson's parable in the Bible: they like to build their honeycomb in the carcass of a dead lion.

Out of the strong shall come forth sweetness.

Tom Stark may have been just a boy, as the Boss said, but he had had a good deal to do with the ways things were going. But, then, the Boss had had a good deal to do, I suppose, with making Tom what Tom was. So there was a circle in the proof, and the son was merely an extension of the father, and when they glared at each other it was like a mirror looking into a mirror. As a matter of fact they did look alike, the same cock to the head on the shoulders, the same forward thrusts of the head, the same sudden gestures. Tom was a trained‑down, slick‑faced, confident, barbered version of what the Boss had been a long time back when I first knew him. The big difference was this: Back in those days the Boss had been blundering and groping his unwitting way toward the discovery of himself, of his great gift, wearing his overalls that bagged down about the seat, or the blue serge suit with the tight, shiny pants, nursing some blind and undefined compulsion within him like fate or a disease. Now Tom wasn't blundering and groping toward anything, and certainly not toward discovery of himself. For he knew that he was the damnedest, hottest thing there was. Tom Stark, All American, and there were no flies on him. And no overalls bagged down about his snake hips and pile‑driver knees. No, he would stand in his rubber‑soled saddle shoes in the middle of the floor with a boxer stance, the gray‑stripped sport coat draped over his shoulders, the top button of his heavy‑weave white shirt unbuttoned, the red wool tie tied in a loose hanging knot as big as your fist under his bronze‑looking throat, jerked over to one side though, and his confident eyes would rove slowly over the joint and his slick, strong, brown jaw would move idly over the athlete's chewing gum. You know how athletes chew gum. Oh, he was the hero, all right, and he wasn't blundering or groping. He knew what he was.

He knew he was good. So he didn't have to bother to keep all the rules. Not even the training rules. He could deliver anyway, he told his father, so what the hell? But he did it once too often. He and Thad Mellon, who was a substitute tackle, and Gup Lawson, who was a regular guard, did themselves proud one Saturday night after the game out at a roadhouse. They might have managed very well, if they hadn't got into a fight with some yokels who didn't know or care much about football and who resented having their girls fooled with. Gup Lawson took quite a beating from the yokels and went to the hospital and was out of football for several weeks. Tom and Thad didn't get more than a few punches before the crowd broke up the fight. But the breach of rules was dumped rather dramatically into the lap of Coach Billie Martin. It got into one of the papers. He suspended Tom Stark and Thad Mellon. That definitely changed the betting odds for the Georgia game for the following Saturday, for Georgia was good that year, and Tom Stark was the local edge.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-28