Chapter Eight 9 страница

I gave the slug back to him and went down to the lobby. It was pretty well cleared out down there now. The politicos had gone. Two or three newspapermen still hung around, waiting for developments.

There weren't ant developments that day. Or the next day either. The Boss seemed to be getting on all right. But the third day he turn a turn for the worse. An infection had started up. It moved pretty fast. I knew for the way Dr. Simmons looked, even if he wouldn't say much, that he was a gone gosling.

That evening, shortly after I had arrived at the hospital and had gone up to the waiting room to see how Lucy was making out, I got the message that the Boss wanted to see me. He had rallied, they said.

He was a sick‑looking customer when I saw him. The flesh had fallen away on his face till the skin sacked off the bone the way it does on an old man's face. He looked like Old Man Stark, up at Mason City. He was white as chalk.

When I first saw the eyes in the white face, they seemed to be filmed and unrecognizing. Then, as I moved toward the bed, they fixed on me and a thin light flickered up in them. His mouth twisted a little in a way which I took to be the feeble shorthand for a grin.

I came over close to the bed. "Hello, Boss," I said, and hung something on my features which I meant to be taken for a grin.

He lifted the forefinger and the next finger of his right hand, which lay prone on the sheet, in an incipient salute, then left them drop. The strength of the muscles which held his mouth twisted gave out, too, and the grin slid off his face and the weight of flesh sagged back.

I stood up close to the bed and looked down at him, and tried to think of something to say. But my brain felt as juiceless as an old sponge left out in the sun a long time.

Then he said, in something a little better than a whisper, "I wanted to see you, Jack."

"I wanted to see you, too, Boss."

For a minute he didn't speak, but his eyes looked up at me, with the light still flickering in them. Then he spoke: "Why did he do it to me?"

"Oh, God damn it," I burst out, very loud, "I don't know."

The nurse looked warningly at me.

"I never did anything to him," he said.

"No, you never did."

He was silent again, and the flicker went down in his eyes. Then, "He was all right. The Doc."

I nodded

I waited, but it began to seem that he wasn't going to say any more. His eyes were on the ceiling and I could scarcely tell that he was breathing. Finally, the eyes turned toward me again, very slowly, and I almost thought that I could hear the tiny painful creak of the balls in their sockets. But the light flickered up again. He said, "It might have been all different, Jack."

I nodded again

He roused himself more. He even seemed to be straining to lift his head from the pillow. "You got to believe that," he said hoarsely.

The nurse stepped forward and looked significantly at me.

"Yes," I said to the man on the bed.

"You got to," he said again. "You got to believe that."

"All right."

He looked at me, and for a moment it was the old strong, probing, demanding glance. But when the words this time, they were very weak. "And it might even been different yet he whispered. "If it hadn't happened, it might–have been different–even yet."

He barely got the last words out, he was so weak.

The nurse was making signals to me.

I reached down and took the hand on the sheet. It felt like a piece of jelly.

"So long, Boss," I said. "I'll be seeing you."

He didn't answer, and I wasn't even sure that there was recognition in the eyes now. I turned away and went out.

He died the next morning, just about day. There was a hell of a big funeral. The city was jam‑packed with people, all kinds of people, county‑courthouse slickers and red‑necks and wool‑hat boys and people who had never been on pavement before. And they had their women with them. They filled all the space around the Capitol and spilled and eddied back into the streets beyond, while the drizzle came down and the loud‑speakers placed on the trees and poles blared out the words which made you want to puke.

Then after the coffin had been brought down the great steps of the Capitol and loaded into the hearse and after the state patrolmen and the mounted cops had fought out a passage, the procession rolled slowly away to the cemetery. The crowd seethed after it. At the cemetery they surged and swayed over the grass, trampling the graves, breaking down shrubbery. A couple of gravestones were overturned and broken. It was two hours after the burial before the police managed to clear the place.

That was my second funeral within a week. The first one had been very different. It had been the funeral of Adam Stanton, down at Burden's Landing.

Chapter Ten

After the Boss was safe underground, and the pussel‑gutted city cops sweating in their blue and the lean, natty boys of the State Patrol and the mounted police on glossy, dancing horses whose hoofs sank fetlock deep in the flower beds had driven the crowd sullenly out of the cemetery–but long before the tramped grass began to lift itself or the caretakers came to repair the knocked‑over tombstones–I left town and took out for the Landing. There were two reasons. First, I couldn't stand to stay in town. Second, Anne Stanton was at the Landing.

She had been there since Adam's funeral. She had gone down with the body, trailing the sun‑glittering, expensive hearse in an undertaker's limousine with a nurse, who proved to be superfluous, and Katy Maynard, an old friend who proved, no doubt to be superfluous, too. I didn't see her as she sat in the rented limousine which moved at its decorous torturer's pace the near‑hundred miles, lifting the miles slowly off the concrete slab, slowly and fastidiously as though you were peeling and endless strip of skin off the live flesh. I didn't see her, but I know how she had been: erect, white in the face, the beautiful bones of her face showing under the taut flesh, her hands clenched in her lap. For that was the way she was when I saw her standing under the moss‑garlanded oaks, looking absolutely alone despite the nurse and Katy Maynard and all the people–friend of the family, curiosity‑seekers come to gloat and nudge, newspapermen, big‑shot doctors from town and from Baltimore and Philadelphia–who stood there while the shovels did their work.

And she was that way when she walked out of the place, not leaning on anybody, with the nurse and Katy Maynard trailing along with that look of embarrassed and false piety which people get on their faces when they are caught in the open with the principal mourner at a funeral.

Even when–just as she was coming out the gate of the cemetery–a newspaperman jammed a camera at her and took her picture, she didn't change the expression on her face.

He was still there when I came up, a squirt with his hat over one eye and the camera hung round his neck and a grin on his squirt face. I thought maybe I had seen him around town, but maybe not, the squirts look so much alike when they grind them out of journalism school. "Hello," I said.

He said hello.

"I saw you get that picture," I said.

He said yeah.

"Well, son," I said, "if you live long enough, you'll find out there are son kinds of a son‑of‑a‑bitch you don't have to be even to be a newspaperman."

He said yeah, out of his squirt face, and looked at am. Then he asked. "You're Burden?"

I nodded

"Jesus Christ," he exclaimed, "you work for Stark and you call somebody a son‑of‑a‑bitch."

I just looked at him. I'd been over all that ground before. I had been over it a thousand times with a thousand people. Hotel lobbies and dinner tables and club cars and street corners and bedrooms and filling stations. Sometimes they didn't say it just exactly that way and sometimes they didn't say it at all, but it was there. Oh, I'd fixed them, all right. I knew how to roll with that punch and give it right back in the gut. I ought to have known, I'd had plenty of practice.

But you get tired. In a way it is too easy, and so it isn't fun any more. And then you get so you don't get mad any more, it has happened so often. But those aren't the reasons. It is just that those people who say that to you–or don't say it–aren't right and they are wrong. If it were absolutely either way, you wouldn't have to think about it, you could just shut your eyes and let them have it in the gut. But the trouble is, they are half right and half wrong, and in the end that is what paralyzes you. Trying to sort out the one from the other. You can't explain it to them, for there isn't ever time and there is always that look on their faces. So you get to a point in the end where you don't even let them have it in the gut. You just look at them, and it is like a dream or something remembered from a long time back or like they weren't there at all.

So I just looked at the squirt face.

There were other people there. They were looking at me. They expected me to say something. Or do something. But somehow I didn't even mind their eyes on me. I didn't even hate them. I didn't feel anything except a kind of numbness and soreness inside, more numbness than soreness. I stood there and looked at him and waited the way you wait for the pain to start after you have been hit. Then, if the pain started, I would give it to him. But it didn't start, and there was just the numbness. So I turned around and walked away. I didn't even mind the eyes that were following me or the snatch of a laugh somebody gave and cut off short because it was a funeral.

I walked on down the street with the numbness and soreness in me. But what had happened at the gate hadn't given it to me. I had had it before I came.

I went on down the Row toward the Stanton house. I didn't imagine she'd want to see me right then, but I intended to leave word that I would be at the hotel down at the Landing till late afternoon. This, of course, if something didn't break about the Boss's condition But when I got to the Stanton house I learned that Anne wasn't seeing anybody. Katy Maynard and the nurse weren't superfluous any more. For when Anne entered the house she went into the living room and stood there just inside the door and looked slowly all over the place, at the piano, the furniture piece by piece, the picture above the fireplace, the way a woman looks over a room just before she sails in to redecorate that place and rearrange the furniture (that was Katy Maynard's way of putting it), and then she just gave down. She didn't even reach for the doorjamb, or stagger, or make a sound, they said. She just gave down, now it was over, and was out cold on the floor.

So when I got there, the nurse was upstairs working on her, and Katy Maynard was calling the doctor and taking charge. There wasn't any reason for me to stay. I got in my car and headed back to the city.

But now the Boss was dead, too, and I was back at the Landing. My mother and her Theodore were off on a trip and I had the house to myself. It was as empty and still as a morgue. But even so, it was a bit more cheerful than the hospitals and cemeteries I had been hanging around. What was dead in this house had been dead a long time, and I was accustomed to the fact. I was even becoming accustomed to the fact of the other deaths. They had shoveled it over Judge Irwin, and Adam Stanton, and the Boss.

But there were some of us left. And Anne Stanton was among those left. And I was.

So back at the Landing again, we sat on the gallery side by side, when there was sun–the lemon‑pale sun of late autumn–and the afternoon made its shortened arc over the onyx‑mottled waters of the bay, which stretched south to the autumn‑hazy horizon. Or when there wasn't any sun, and the wind piled the sea up over the beach, even to the road, and the sky seemed to be nothing but gusty rain, we sat side by side in the living room. Either place, we never talked much those days, not because there was nothing to say but because there might be too much and if you once started you would upset the beautiful and perilous equilibrium which we had achieved. It was as though we each sat on the end of a seesaw, beautifully balanced, but not in any tidy little play yard but over God knows what blackness on a seesaw which God had rigged up for kiddies. And if either of us should lean toward the other, even a fraction of an inch, the balance would be upset and we would both go sliding off into blackness. But we fooled God, and didn't say a word.

We didn't say a word, but some afternoons I read to Anne. I read the first book I had laid hand to the first afternoon when I found I couldn't sit there any longer in that silence which bulged and creaked with all the unsaid words. It was the first volume of the works of Anthony Trollope. That was a safe bet. Anthony never upset any equilibriums.

In a peculiar way those late‑autumn days began to remind me of the summer almost twenty years before when I had fallen in love with Anne. That summer we had been absolutely alone, together, even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of floating island or magic carpet which being in love is. And now we were absolutely alone, but it was a different kind of floating island or magic carpet. That summer we had seemed to be caught in a massive and bemusing tide which knew its own pace and time and would not be hurried even to the happiness which is surely promised. And now again we seemed to be caught in such a tide and couldn't lift a finger in its enormous drift, for it knew its own pace and time. But what it promised we didn't know. I did not even wonder.

Now and then, however, I wondered about something else. Sometimes when I was sitting beside her, reading or not talking, and sometimes when I was away, eating breakfast or walking down the Row or lying awake. There was a question without an answer. When Anne had told me about Adam's last, wild visit to her apartment–how he rushed in and said he wouldn't be pimp for her and all that–she had said that some man had telephoned Adam to tell him about her and Governor Stark.

_Who?__

In the first days after the event I had really forgotten the fact, but then the question came. At first, even then, the question didn't seem important to me. For nothing seemed very important to me then, in the pervasive soreness and numbness. Or at least what seemed important to me then had nothing to do with the question. What had happened was important, but not the cause of what had happened in so far as such a cause was not in me myself.

But the question kept coming back. Even when I wasn't thinking of it, I would suddenly be aware of its gnawing like a mouse's tooth stitching away inside the wainscoting of my mind.

For a while I didn't see how I could ask Anne. I couldn't ever say anything to her about what had happened. We would sit forever in our conspiracy of silence, forever bound together in that conspiracy by our awareness of our earlier, unwitting conspiracy to commit Adam Stanton and Willie Stark to each other and to their death. (If we should ever break the conspiracy of silence we might have to face the fact of that other conspiracy and have to look down and see the blood on our hands.) So I said nothing.

Until the day when I had to say it.

I said, "Anne, I'm going to ask you a question. About–about–it. Then I'll never say another word about it to you unless you speak up first."

She looked at me without answering. But I could see in her eyes the recoil of fear and pain, and then the stubborn mustering of what forces she had.

So I plunged on, "You told me–that day when I came to your apartment–that somebody had telephoned Adam–had told him–had told him about–"

"About me," she said, finishing the sentence on which I had, for the moment, wvered. She hadn't waited for the impact. With whatever force she had she was meeting it head‑on.

I nodded.

"Well?" she queried.

"Did he say who had telephoned him?"

She thought a minute. You could see her, even as she sat there, lifting the sheet off that moment when Adam had burst in on her, like somebody lifting the sheet off the face of a corpse on a marble slab in a morgue and peering into the face.

Then she shook her head. "No," she said, "he didn't say–" she hesitated–"except that it was a man. I'm sure he said man."

So we resumed our conspiracy of silence, while the seesaw wavered and swayed beneath us and the black clawed up at us and we clung on.

I left the Landing next day.

I got to town in the late afternoon, and put in a call to Sadie Burke's apartment. There was no answer. So I tried the Capitol, on the off chance that she would be there, but there was no answer on her extension. Off and on during the evening I tried her apartment number, but with no luck. I didn't go around the Capitol to see her in the morning. I didn't want to see the gang who would be there. I didn't ever want to see them again.

So I telephoned again. Her extension didn't answer. So I asked the switchboard to find out if possible where she was. After two or three minutes the voice said, "She is not here. She is ill. Will that be all, please?" Then before I could put my thought in order, I heard the click of being cut off.

I rang again

I rang again.

"This is Jack Burden," I said, "and I'd like to–"

"Oh–Mr. Burden–" the switchboard said noncommittally, or perhaps in question.

There had been a time and it hadn't been very long back when the name _Jack Burden__ got something done around that joint. But that voice, the tone of that voice, told me that the name _Jack Burden__ didn't mean a damned thing but a waste of breath around there any more.

For a second I was sore as hell. Then I remembered that things had changed.

Things had changed out there. When things change in a place like that, things change fast and all the way down, and the voice at the switchboard gets another tone when it speaks your name. I remembered how much things had changed. Then I wasn't sore any more, for I didn't give a damn.

But I said sweetly, "I wonder if you can tell me how to get in touch with Miss Burke. I'd sure appreciate it."

Then I waited a couple of minutes for her to try to find out.

"Miss Burke is at the Millett Sanatorium," the voice then said.

Cemeteries and hospitals: I was back in the swing of things, I thought.

But the Millett place wasn't like the hospital. It didn't look at all like a hospital, I discovered when I turned off the highway twenty‑five miles out of the city and tooled gently up the drive under the magnificent groining of the century‑old live oaks whose bough met above the avenue and dripped stalactites of moss to make a green, aqueous gloom like a cavern. Between the regularly spaced oaks stood pedestals on which classic marbles–draped and undraped, male and female, stained by weathers and leaf acid and encroaching lichen, looking as though they had, in fact, sprouted dully out of the clinging black‑green humus below them–stared out at the passer‑by with the faintly pained, heavy, incurious unamazement of cattle. The gaze of those marble eyes must have been the first stage in the treatment the neurotic got when he came out to the sanatorium. It must have been like smearing a cool unguent of time on the hot pustule and dry itch of the soul.

Then at the end of the avenue the neurotic reached the sanatorium, which graciously promised peace beyond the white columns. For the Millett Sanatorium was what is called a rest home. But it had been built more than a century back for vanity and love by a cotton snob to whom money n no object, who had bought near a shipload of shining marble statues in Rome for his avenue, and who had probably had a face like brutally hewed cedar and not a nerve in his body, and now people who were descended from such people, or who had enough money (made in the administration of Grant or Coolidge) to assume that they were descended from such people, brought their twitches, tics, kinks, and running sores out here and rested in the high‑ceiling rooms and ate crawfish bisque and were soothed by the voice of a psychiatrist in whose wide, unwavering, brown, liquid, depthless eyes one slowly drowned.

I almost drowned in those eyes during the one‑minute interview I had in order to get permission to see Sadie. "She is very difficult," he said.

Sadie was lying on a chaise longue by a window which gave over a stretch of lawn sloping down to a bayou. Her chopped‑off black hair was wild and her face was chalk‑white and the afternoon light striking across it made it look more than ever like the plaster‑of‑Paris mask of Medusa riddled with BB shot. But it was a mask flung down on a pillow and the eyes that looked out of it belonged to the mask. They did not belong to Sadie Burke. There wasn't anything burning there.

"Hello, Sadie," I said, "I hope you don't mind me coming to see you."

She studied me a moment out of the unburning eyes. "It's O. K. with me," she said.

So I sat down and hitched my chair up closer and lighted a cigarette.

"How you getting on?" I asked.

She turned her head in my direction and gave me another long look. For an instant, there was a flicker in the eyes as when a breath of air touches an ember. "Look here," she said, "I'm getting on all right. Why the hell shouldn't I be getting on all right?"

"That's fine," I said.

"I didn't come out here because there was anything wrong with me. I came because I was tired. I wanted a rest. That's what I said to that God‑damned doctor. I said, 'I'm here to get a rest because I'm tired and I don't want you messing around and trying to swap secrets with me and find out if I ever had any dreams about red fire engines.' I said, 'If I ever started swapping secrets with you I'd burn your ears off, but I'm here to rest and I don't want you in my hair.' I said, 'I'm tired of a lot of things and I'm God‑damned tired of a lot of people and that goes for you, too, Doc.' "

She pushed herself up on one arm and looked at me. Then said, "And that goes for you, too, Jack Burden."

I didn't say anything to that and I didn't move. So she sank back down, and into herself.

I let my cigarette burn up my fingers and lighted another one before I said, "Sadie, I reckon I know how you feel and I don't want to be bringing everything up again, but–"

"You don't know a thing about how I feel," she said.

"Some idea–maybe," I said. "But what I came for was to ask you a question."

"I thought you came because you were so damned fond of me."

"As a matter of fact," I said, "I am. We've been around a long time together and we always got along. But that's not–"

"Yeah," she interrupted, and again thrust herself up on one arm, "everything and everybody just got alone fine. Oh, Jesus, just fine."

I waited while she sank back and turned her eyes from me across the lawn below toward the bayou. A crow was making its way across the clear air above the tattered cypress tops beyond the bayou. Then the crow was gone, and I said, "Adam Stanton killed the Boss, but he never got that idea by himself. Somebody primed him to do it. Somebody who knew the kind of man Adam was and knew the inside of how he took the job at the medical center and knew–"

She didn't seem to be listening to me. She was watching the clear air above the tattered cypresses where the crow had gone. I hesitated, and then, watching her face, went on. "–and knew about the Boss and Anne Stanton."

I waited again and watched her face as I handed those names to her, but it didn't show a thing. It simply looked tired, tired and not giving a damn.

"I found out one thing," I continued. "A man called Adam that afternoon and told him about the Boss and his sister. And some more stuff. You can guess what stuff. So he went wild. He went to see his sister and jumped her and she didn't deny it. She isn't the kind of person who could deny it. I guess she was sick of having a secret and she was almost glad not to have it any longer and–"

"Yeah," Sadie said, not turning to me, "tell me how noble and high‑tone Anne Stanton is."

"I'm sorry," I said, and felt the blood flushing my face. "I guess I did get off the point."

"I guess you did, all right."

I waited. Then, "That man who called up Adam, do you have any notion who it was?"

She seemed to be turning that question over in her mind. If she had heard it, for I couldn't be sure.

"Do you?" I asked.

"I don't have any notion," she said.

"No?"

"No," she said, still not looking at me, "and I don't have to have any. Because, you see, I know."

"Who?" I demanded. "Who?" And came up out of my chair.

"Duffy," she said.

"I knew it!" I exclaimed, "I ought to have known it! It had to be."

"If you knew it," she said, "what the hell you come messing around me for?"

"I had to be sure. I had to know. Really know. I–" I stopped and stood there at the foot of the chaise longue and looked down at her averted face, which the sunlight lay across. "You say you know it was Duffy. How do you know?"

"God damn you, Jack Burden, God damn you," she said in a tired voice, and turned her head to look up at me. Then looking at me, she thrust herself up to a sitting position, and burst out in a voice which all at once wasn't tired any more but angry and violent, "God damn you, Jack Burden, what made you come here? What always makes you mess in things? Why can't you leave me alone? Why can't you? Why?"

I stared down into her eyes, which in the pain‑contorted face were burning now and wild.

"How do you know?" I demanded softly.

"God damn you, Jack Burden, God damn you," she said like a litany.

"How do you know?" I demanded, more softly than before–I was almost whispering–and leaned down toward her.

"God damn you, Jack Burden," she said.

"How do you know?"

"Because–" she began, hesitated, and tossed her head in a desperate tired way like a fevered child on a pillow.

"Because?" I demanded.

"Because," she said, and let herself fall back on the cushions of the chaise longue, "I told him. I told him to do it."

That was it. That was it, and I hadn't guessed it. My knees gave slowly down, like a pneumatic jack letting down the weight of a car to the floor, and I was back in my chair. There I was and there Sadie Burke was, and I was looking at her as though I had never seen her before.

After a minute, she said, "Stop looking at me." But there wasn't any heat in what she said.

I must have continued to look, for she said, as before, "Stop looking at me."

Then I heard my lips saying, as though to myself, "You killed him."

"All right," she said, "all right, I killed him. He was throwing me over. For good. I knew it was for good that time. For that Lucy. After all I had done. After I made him. I told him I'd fix him, but he turned that new sick smile of his on me like he was practicing to be Jesus and took my hands in his, and asked me to understand–understand, Jesus!–and just then like a flash I knew I'd kill him."

"You killed Adam Stanton," I said.

"Oh, God," she breathed, "oh, God."

"You killed Adam," I repeated "Oh," she breathed, "and I killed Willie. I killed him."

"Yes," I agreed, and nodded.

"Oh, God," she said, and lay there staring up at the ceiling.

I had found out what I had come to find out. But I kept on sitting there. I didn't even light a cigarette.

After a while she said, "Come over here. Pull your chair over here."

Дата добавления: 2015-10-28