Chapter One. MASON CITY 8 страница

The train pulls away, faster now, and the woman is back there in the house, where she is going to say. She'll stat there. And all at once, you think that you are the one who is running away, and who had better run fast to whatever you are going because it will be dark soon. The train is going pretty fast now, but its effort seems to the through a stubborn cloying density of air as though an eel tried to swim in syrup, or the effort seems to be against an increasing and implacable magnetism of earth. You think that if the earth should twitch once, as the hide of a sleeping dog twitches, the train would be jerked over and piled up and the engine would spew and gasp while somewhere a canted‑up wheel would revolve once with a massive and dreamlike deliberation.

But nothing happens, and you remember that the woman had not even looked up at the train. You forget her, and the train goes fast and is going fast when it crosses a little trestle. You catch the sober, metallic, pure, late‑light, unriffled glint of the water between the little banks, under the sky, and see the cow standing in the water upstream near the single leaning willow. And all at once you feel like crying. But the train is going fast, and almost immediately whatever you feel is taken away from you, too.

You bloody fool, do you think that you want to mild a cow?

You do not want to milk a cow.

Then you are at Upton.

In Upton I went to the hotel, totting my little bag and my typewriter through the gangs of people on the street, people who looked at me with the countryman's slow, full, curious lack of shame, and didn't make room for me to pass until I was charging them down, the way a cow won't get out of the way of your car in a lane until your radiator damned near bats her in the underslung slats. At the hotel I ate a sandwich and went up to my room, and got the fan turned on and a pitcher of ice water sent up and took off my shoes and shirt and propped myself in a chair with a book.

At ten‑thirty there was a knock on the door. I yelled, and in came Willie.

"Where you been?" I asked him.

"Been here all afternoon," he said.

"Duffy been dragging you round to shake hands with all the leading citizens?"

"Yeah," he said, glumly.

The glumness in his voice made me look sharply at him. "What's the matter?" I asked. "Don't the boys around here talk nice to you?"

"Sure, they talk all right," he said. He came over and took a chair by the writing table. He poured some water into one of the glasses on the tray beside my bottle of red‑eye, drank it, repeated, "Yeah, they talk all right."

I looked at him again. The face was thinner and the skin was pulled back tighter so that it looked almost transparent under the cluster of freckles. He sat there heavily, not paying any attention to me as though he were mumbling something over and over in his mind.

"What's eating you?" I asked.

For a moment he didn't act as if he had heard me, and when he did turn his head to me there seemed to be connection between the act and what I had said. The act seemed to come from what was going on inside his head and not because I had spoken.

"A man don't have to be Governor," he said.

"Huh?" I responded in my surprise, for that was the last thing I ever expected out of Willie by that time. The showing in the last town (where I hadn't been) must have been a real frost to wake him up.

"A man don't have to be Governor," he repeated, and as I looked at his face now I didn't see the thin‑skinned, boyish face, but another face under it, as though the first face were a mask of glass and now I could through it to the other one. I looked at the second face and saw, all of a sudden, the heavyish lips laid together to remain you of masonry and the knot of muscle on each cheek back where the jawbone hinges on.

"Well," I replied belatedly, "the votes haven't been counted yet."

He mumbled over in his mind what he had been working on. Then he said, "I'm not denying I wanted it. I won't lie to you," he said, and leaned forward a little and looked at me as though he were trying to convince me of the thing which I was already surer of than I was of hands and feet. "I wanted it. I lay awake at night, just wanting it." He worked his big hands on his knees, making the knuckles crack. "Hell, a man can lie there and want something so bad and be so full of wanting it he just plain forgets what it is he wants. Just like when you are a boy and the sap first rises and you think you will go crazy some night wanting something and you want it so bad and get so near sick wanting it you near forget what it is. It's something inside you–" he leaned at me, with his eyes on my face, and grabbed the front of his sweat‑streaked blue shirt to make me think he was going to snatch the buttons loose to show me something.

But he subsided back in the chair, letting his eyes leave me to look across the wall as though the wall weren't there, and said, "But wanting don't make a thing true. You don't have to live forever to figure that out."

That was so true I didn't reckon it was worthwhile even to agree with him.

He didn't seem to notice my silence, he was so wrapped up in his own. But after a minute he pulled out of it, stared at me, and said, "I could have made a good Governor. By God–" And he struck his knee with his fist–"by God, a lot better than those fellows. Look here–" and he leaned at me–"what this state needs is a new tax program. And the rate ought to be raised on the coal lands the state's got leased out. And there's not a decent road in the state once you get in the country. And I could save this state some money by merging some departments. And schools–look at me, I never had a decent day's schooling in my life, what I got I dug out, and there's no reason why this state–"

I had heard it all before. On the platform when he stood up there high and pure in the face and nobody gave a damn.

He must have noticed that I wasn't giving a damn. He shut up all of a sudden. He got up and walked across the floor, and back, his head thrust forward and the forelock falling over his brow. He stopped in front of me. "Those things need doing, don't they?" he demanded.

"Sure," I said, and it was no lie.

"But they won't listen to it," he said. "God damn those bastard," he said, "they come out to hear a speaking and then they won't listen to you. Not a word. They don't care. God damn 'em! They deserve to grabble in the dirt and get nothing for it but a dry gut‑ruble. They won't listen."

"No," I agreed, "they won't."

"And I won't be Governor," he said, shortly. "And they'll deserve what they get." And added, "The bastards."

"Well, you want me to hold you hand about it? Suddenly, I was sore at him. Why did he come to me? What did he expect me to do? What made him think I wanted to hear about wt the state needed? Hell, I knew. Everybody knew. It wasn't any secret. What it needed was some decent government. But who the hell was going to give it? And who cared if nobody did or ever did? What did he come whining to me for about that? Or about how bleeding much he wanted to be Governor because he lay and thought about it in the night? All that was in me as I suddenly felt sore at him and asked him snottily if he expected me to hold his hand.

He was looking at me slowly, giving me the once‑over, reading my face. But he didn't look sore. Which surprised me, for I had wanted to make him sore, sore enough to get out. But there wasn't even surprise in his look. "No, Jack," he finally said, shaking his head, "I wasn't asking for sympathy. Whatever happens I'm not asking you or anybody else for sympathy." He shook himself heavily, like a big dog coming out of the wet, or waking up. "No, by God," he said, and he wasn't really talking to me now, "I'm not asking anybody in the world for it, not now or ever."

That seemed to settle something. So he sat down again.

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

"I got to think," he replied. "I don't know and I got to think. The bastards," he said, "if I could just make 'em listen."

It was just at that time Sadie came in. Or rather, she knocked at the door, and I yelled, and she came in.

"Hello," she said, gave a quick look at the scene, and started toward us. Her eye was on the bottle of red‑eye on my table. "How about some refreshment?" she asked.

"All right," I replied, but apparently I didn't get the right amount of joviality into my tone. Or maybe she could tell something had been going on from the way the air smelled, and if anybody could do that it would be Sadie.

Anyway, she stopped in the middle of the floor and said, "What's up?"

I didn't answer right away, and she came across the writing table, moving quick and nervous, the way she always did, inside of a shapeless shoddy‑blue summer suit that she must have got by walking into a secondhand store and shutting her eyes and pointing and saying, "I'll take that."

She reached down and took a cigarette out of my pack lying there and tapped it on the back of her knuckles and turned her hot lamps on me.

"Nothing," I said, "except Willie here is saying how he's not going to be Governor."

She had the match lighted by the time I got the words out, but it never got to the cigarette. It stopped in mid‑air.

"So you told him," she said, looking at me.

"The hell I did," I said. "I never tell anybody anything. I just listen."

She snapped the match out with a nasty snatch of her wrist and turned on Willie. "Who told you?" she demanded.

"Told me what?" Willie asked, looking up at her steady.

She saw that she had made her mistake. And it was not the kind of mistake for Sadie Burke to make. She had made her way in the world up from the shack in the mud flat by always finding out what you knew and never letting you know what she knew. Her style was not to lead with the chin but with a neat length of lead pipe after you had stepped off balance. But she had led with the chin this time. Somewhere way back inside of Sadie Burke there had been the idea that I was going to tell Willie. Or that somebody was going to tell Willie. Not that she, Sadie Burke, would tell Willie, but that Willie would be told and Sadie Burke wouldn't have to. Or nothing as specific as that. Just floating around in the deep dark the idea of Willie and the idea of the thing Willie didn't know, like two bits of drift sucked down in an eddy to the bottom of the river to revolve slowly and blindly there in the dark. But there, all the time.

So, out of an assumption she had made, without knowing it, or a wish or a fear she didn't know she had, she led with her chin. And standing there, rolling that unlighted cigarette in her strong fingers, she knew it. The nickel was in the slot, and looking at Willie you could see the wheels and the cogs and the cherries and the lemons begin to spin inside the machine.

"Told me what?" Willie said. Again.

"That you're not going to be Governor," she said, with a dash of easy levity, but she flashed me a look, the only S O S, I suppose, Sadie Burke ever sent out to anybody.

But it was her fudge and I let her cook it.

Willie kept on looking on her, waiting while she turned to one side and uncorked my bottle and poured herself out a steady‑er. She took it, and without any ladylike cough.

"Told me what?" Willie said.

She didn't answer. She just looked at him.

And looking right back at her, he said, in a voice like death and taxes, "Told me what?"

"God damn you!" she blazed at him then, and the glass rattled on the tray as she set it down without looking. "You God‑damned sap!"

"All right," Willie said in the same voice, boring in like a boxer when the other fellow begins to swing wild. "What was it?"

"All right," she said, "all right, you sap, you've been framed!"

He looked at her steady for thirty seconds, and there wasn't a sound but the sound of his breathing. I was listening to it.

Then he said, "Framed?"

"And how!" Sadie said, and leaned toward him with what seemed to be a vindictive and triumphant intensity glittering in her eyes and ringing in her voice. "Oh, you decoy, you wooden‑headed decoy, you let 'em! Oh, yeah, you let 'em, because you thought you were the little white lamb of God–" and she paused to give him a couple of pitiful derisive _baa's__, twisting her mouth–"yeah, you thought you were the lamb of God, all right, but you know what you are?"

She waited as though for an answer, but he kept staring at her without a word.

"Well, you're the goat," she said. "You are the sacrificial goat. You are the ram in the bushes. You are a sap. For you let 'em. You didn't even get anything out of it. They'd have paid you to take the rap, but they didn't have to pay a sap like you. Oh, no, you were so full of yourself and hot air and how you are Jesus Christ, that all you wanted was a chance to stand on your hind legs and make a speech. My friends–" she twisted her mouth in a nasty, simpering mimicry–"my friends, what this state needs is a good five‑cent cigar. Oh, my God!" And she laughed with a kind of wild, artificial laugh, suddenly cut short.

"Why?" he demanded, still staring steadily at her, breathing hard but not showing anything. "Why did they do it? To me?"

"Oh, my God!" she exclaimed and turned to me. "Listen to the sap. He wants to know why." Then she swung to him again, leaning closer, saying. "Listen, if you can get this through your thick head. They wanted you to split the MacMurfee vote. In the sticks. Do you get that or do you want a picture? Can you get that straight, you wooden‑head?"

He looked at me, slow, wet his lips, then said, "Is it true?"

"He wants to know if it's true," Sadie announced prayerfully to the ceiling. "Oh, my God!"

"Is it true?" he asked me.

"That's what they tell me," I said.

Well, it hit him. There was no denying it. His face worked as though he might try to say something or might bust out crying. But he didn't do either one. He reached over to the table and picked up the bottle and poured out enough into a glass to floor the Irish and drank it off neat.

"Hey," I said, "take it easy, you aren't used to that stuff."

"He ain't used to a lot of things," Sadie said, shoving the bottle toward him on the tray. "He ain't used to the idea he's not going to be Governor. Are you, Willie?"

"Why can't you lay off?" I said to her.

But she didn't even notice me. She leaned toward Willie, and repeated, coaxingly this time, "Are you, Willie?

He reached for the bottle and did it again.

"Are you?" she demanded, not coaxing now.

"I was," he said, looking up to her, the blood up in his face now, the tousle of hair hanging, his breath coming heavy. "I was," he said, "before, but I'm not now."

"Not what?" she said.

"Not used to it."

"You better get used to it," she said, and laughed, and shoved the bottle in his direction.

He took it, poured, drank, set the glass down deliberately, and said: "I better not. I better not get used to it."

She laughed again, that wild artificial laugh, chopped off the laugh, and echoed, "He says he better not get used to it. Oh, my God!" Then she laughed again.

He sat there heavy in his chair, but not leaning back, the sweat beginning to pop out of his face and run down slow and shining over the flesh. He sat there, not noticing the sweat, not wiping it away, watching her laugh.

All at once he heaved up out of the chair. I thought he was going to jump at her. And she must have thought so too, for her laugh stopped. Right in the middle of the aria. But he didn't jump her. He wasn't even looking at her. He flung his glance wide around the room, and lifted his hands up in front of him, as though he were ready to grab something. "I'll kill 'em!" he said, "I'll kill 'em!"

"Sit down," she said, and leaned quickly toward him to give him a shove on the chest.

His pegs weren't too steady, and he went down. Right in the chair.

"I'll kill 'em," he said, sitting there, sweating.

"You won't do a God‑damned thing," she announced. "You won't be Governor and you won't get paid for not being and you won't kill them or anybody else, and you know why?"

"I kill 'em," he said.

"I'll tell you why," she said, leaning. "It's because you're a sap. A triple‑plated, spoon‑fed, one‑gallus sap, and you–"

I got up. "I don't care what kind of games you play," I said, "but I don't have to stay here and watch you."

She didn't even turn her head. I went to the door, and out, and the last I heard she was defining what kind of a sap he was. I figured that that might take anybody some time.

I took in a good deal of Upton that night. I saw the folks coming out of the last show at the Picture Palace, and I admired the cemetery gates and the schoolhouse by moonlight, and I leaned over the railing of the bridge over the creek and spit in the water. It took about two hours. Then I went back to the hotel.

When I opened the door of the room, Sadie was sitting in a chair by the writing table, smoking a cigarette. The air was thick enough to cut with a knife, and in the light of the lamp on the table the blue smoke drifted and swayed and curdled around her so that I got the impression I might have been looking at her sitting submerged in a tank full of soapy dishwater at the aquarium. The bottle on the table was empty.

For a second or two I thought that Willie had left. Then I saw the finished product.

It was lying on my bed.

I came in, and shut the door.

"Things seem to have quieted down," I remarked.

"Yeah."

I walked over to the bed and inspected the item. It was lying on his back' The coat was pushed up under the armpits, the hands were crossed piously on the bosom like the hands of a _gisant__ on a tomb in a cathedral, the shirt had pulled up some from its moorings under the belt and the two lowest buttons had come unbuttoned so that a triangular patch of slightly distended stomach was visible–white, with a few coarse dark hairs. The mouth was parted a little, and the lower lip vibrated with a delicate flabbiness at each measured expulsion of breath. All very pretty.

"He rared around some," Sadie said. "Telling me what he was going to do. Oh, he's gonna do big things. He's gonna be President. He's gonna kill people with his bare hands. Oh, my God!" She took a drag on her cigarette and spewed the smoke out and then fanned the backwash away from her face with a savage, slapping motion of her right hand. "But I quieted him down," she added, with an air of grim, suddenly spinsterish, satisfaction, the kind your great‑aunt used to wear.

"Is he going to the barbecue?" I asked.

"How the hell do I know?" she snapped. "He wasn't screaming about any little detail like a barbecue. Oh, he's a big operator. But–" She paused, and did the drag and spew and fanning routine–"I quieted him."

"It looks like you slugged him," I observed.

"I didn't slug him," she said. "But I hit him where he lives. I finally got across to him the kind of sap he is. And that quieted him."

"He's quiet now, all right," I said, and walked over toward the table.

"He didn't get that quiet all of a sudden. But he got quiet enough to sit in a chair and hang on to the bottle for support and talk about how he'd have to break the news to some God‑damned Lucy."

"That's his wife," I said.

"He talked like it was his mammy and would blow his nose for him. Then he said he was going right to his room and write her a letter. But," she said, and looked over at the bed, "he never made it. He made the middle of the floor, and then heaved for the bed."

She rose from the chair and went over to the bed and looked down at him.

"Does Duffy know?" I asked.

"I don't give a damn what Duffy knows," she said.

I went over to the bed, too. "I guess we'll have to leave him here," I said. "I'll go over to his room and sleep." I leaned over and hunted for his room key in the pockets. I found it. Then I took a toothbrush and some pajamas out of my bag.

She was still standing by the bed. She turned to me. "It looks like you might at least take the bastard's shoes off," she said.

I laid down my truck on the side of the bed, and did it. I picked up the pajamas and toothbrush and went over to the table to switch off the lamp. Sadie was still by the bed. "You better write that letter to that Mamma Lucy," she said, "and ask where to ship the remains."

As I laid my hand on the switch, I looked back at Sadie standing there looking down at the remains, with the left arm, the arm toward me, hanging straight down and a cigarette hanging out of the tip of two fingers and unreeling its spinner of smoke slowly upward, and with her head leaning forward a little while she expelled smoke meditatively over her again outthrust and gleaming lower lip.

There was Sadie, who had come a long way from the shanty in the mud flats. She had come a long way because she played to win and she didn't mean to win matches and she knew to win you have to lay your money on the right number and that if your number doesn't show there's a fellow standing right there with a little rake in your money and then it isn't yours anymore. She had been around a long time, talking to men and looking them straight in the eye like a man. Some of them liked her, and those that didn't like her listened when she talked, which wasn't too often, because there was reason to believe that when those big black eyes, which were black in a way which made it impossible for you to tell whether it was blackness of surface or blackness of depth, looked at the wheel before it began to move they could see the way the wheel would be after it had ceased to move and saw the little ball on the number. Some of them liked her a lot, like Sen‑Sen. That had at one time been hard for me to get. I saw a package done up in the baggy tweed or droopy seersucker suit according to the solstice, and the pocked face with the heavy smear of lipstick and the black lamps in it and above it the mob of black hair which looked as though it had been hacked off at ear length with a meat cleaver.

Then one time, suddenly, I saw something else. You see a woman around for a long time and thing that she is ugly. You think she is nothing. Then, all of a sudden, you think how she is under that baggy tweed or droopy seersucker. All of a sudden, you see the face which is there under the pock‑marked mask and is humble, pure, and trusting and is asking you to lift the mask. It must be like an old man looking at his wife and just for a second seeing the face he had seen thirty years before. Only in the case I am talking about it is not remembering a face which you have seen a long time back but discovering a face which you have never seen. It is future, not past. It is very unsettling. It was very unsettling, temporarily. I made my pass, and it didn't come to a thing.

She laughed in my face and said, "I've got my arrangements, and I stick to my arrangements as long as I've got my arrangements."

I didn't know what the arrangements were. That was before the day of Mr. Sen‑Sen Puckett. That was before the day when she gave him the benefit of her gift for lying it on the right number.

Nothing of this passed through my mind as I put my hand on the switch of the lamp and looked back at Sadie Burke. But I tell it in order that it may be known who the Sadie Burke was who stood by the bed meditating on the carcass as I laid my hand on the switch and who had come the way she had come by not leading with her chin but who had led with her chin that night At least, that was the way I figured it.

I turned the switch, and she and I went out of the door, and said good night in the hall.

It must have been near nine the next morning when Sadie beat on my door and I came swimming and swaying up from the bottom of a muddy sleep, like a piece of sogged driftwood stirred up from the bottom of a pond. I made the door and stuck my head out.

"Listen," she said without ant build‑up of civilities, "Duffy's going out to the fair grounds, and I'll ride with him. He's got a lot of big‑shotting to do out there. He wanted to get the sap out pretty early, too, to mingle with the common herd, but I told him he wasn't feeling too good. That he'd be out a little later."

"O. K.," I said, "I'm not paid for it, but I'll try to deliver him."

"I don't care whether he ever gets there," she said. "It won't be skin off my nose."

"I'll try to get him there anyway."

"Suit yourself," she said, and walked off down the hall, twitching the seersucker.

I looked out the window and saw that it was going to be another day, and shaved, and dressed, and went down to get a cup of coffee. Then I went to my room, and knocked. There was some kind of a sound inside, like an oboe blatting once deep inside a barrel of feathers. So I went in. I had left the door unlocked the night before.

It was after ten by that time.

Willie was on the bed. In the same place, the coat still wadded up under his armpits, his hands still crossed on his chest, his face pale and pure. I went over to the bed. His head didn't turn, but his eyed swung toward me with a motion that made you think you could hear them creak in the sockets.

"Good morning," I said.

He opened his mouth a little way and his tongue crept out and explored the lips carefully, wetting them. Then he grinned weakly, as though he were experimenting to see if anything would crack. Nothing happened, so he whispered, "I reckon I was drunk last night?"

"That's the name it goes by," I said.

"It's the first time," he said. "I never got drunk before. I never even tasted it but once before."

"I know. Lucy doesn't favor drinking."

"I reckon she'll understand though when I tell her," he said. "She'll see how it was I came to do it." Then he sank into meditation.

"How do you feel?"

"I feel all right," he said, and pried himself up to a sitting position, swinging his feet to the floor. He sat there with his sock‑feet on the floor, taking stock of the internal stresses and strains. "Yeah," he concluded, "I feel all right."

"Are you to the barbecue?"

He looked up at me with a laborious motion of the head and an expression of question on his face as tough I were the fellow who was supposed to answer. "What made you ask that?" he demanded.

"Well, a lot's been happening."

"Yeah," he said. "I'm going."

"Duffy and Sadie have already gone. Duffy wants you to come on out and mingle with the common herd."

"All right," he said. Then, with his eyed fixed on an imaginary spot on the floor about ten feet from his toes, he stuck his tongue out again and began to caress his lips. "I'm thirsty," he said.

"You are dehydrated," I said. "The result of alcohol taken in excess. But that is the only way to take it. It is the only way to do a man any good."

But he wasn't listening. He had pulled himself up and padded off into the bathroom.

I could hear the slosh of water and the gulping and inhaling. He must have been drinking out of the faucet. After about a minute that sound stopped. There wasn't any sound at all for a spell. Then there was a new one. Then the agony was over.

He appeared at the bathroom door, braced against the doorjamb, staring at me with a face of sad reproach bedewed with the glitter of cold water.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-28