“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.
Then she lifted her hands a little, and touched the white riddled plaster-of-Paris mask, touching t on each side, just barely prodding the surface as though it were swollen and painful. “Look,” she commanded.
She held it here for me to look at. “Look!” she commanded vindictively, and jabbed her fingers into the flesh, hard. For it was flesh, it wasn’t plaster of Paris at all.
“Yes, look,” she said, “and we lay up there in that God-forsaken shack–both of us, my brother and me–we were kids–and it was the smallpox–and my father was a drunk no-good–he was off drunk, crying and drinking in a saloon if he could beg a dime–crying and telling how the kiddies, the sweet little angel kiddies, was sick–oh, he was a drunk lousy warm-hearted kid-beating crying Irishman–and my brother died–and he ought to have lived–it wouldn’t have mattered to him–not to a man–but me, I didn’t die–I didn’t die, and I got well–and my father, he would look at me and grab me and start kissing me all over the face, all over the holes, slobbering, and crying and stinking of whisky–or he’d look at me and say, ‘Jeez,’ and slap me in the face–and it was all the same–it was all the same, for I wasn’t the one that died–I didn’t die–I–”
It was all a breathless monotony, suddenly cut off. She had groped out for me and had seized the cloth of my coat in her hands and had stuck her bowed head up against my chest. So I stood there with my right arm around her shoulder, patting her, patting and making a kind of smoothing-out motion with my hand on her back that shook soundlessly with what I took to be sobs.
Then, not lifting her head, she was saying, “It’s going to be like that–it’s always been that way, and it’ll keep on–being like that–”
It_, I thought, and thought she was talking about the face.
But she wasn’t, for she was saying, “–it’ll keep on–they’ll kiss it and slobber–then they’ll slap you in the face–no matter what you do, do anything for them, make them what they are–take them out of the gutter and make something out of them–and they’ll slap you in the face–the first chance–because you had smallpox–they’ll some naked slut on skates and they’ll slap you in the face–they’ll kick up dirt in your face–”
I kept on patting and making the smoothing-out motion, for there wasn’t anything else to do.
“–that’s the way it’ll be–always some slut on skates–some–”
“Look here,” I said, still patting, “you make out. What do you care what he does?”
She jerked her head up. “What do you know, what the hell do you know?” she demanded, and dug her fingers in my coat and shook me.
“If it’s all this grief,” I said, “let him go.”
“Let him go! Let him go! I’ll kill him first, I swear it,” she said, glaring at me out of the now red eyes. “Let him go? Listen here–” and she shook me again–”if he does run after some slut, he’ll come back. He’s got to come back, do you hear? He’s got to. Because he can’t do without me. And he knows it. He can do without any of those sluts, but he can’t do without me. Not without Sadie Burke, and he knows it.”
And she lifted her face up, high, almost thrusting it at me, as though she were showing me something I ought damned well to be proud to look at.
“He’ll always come back,” she asserted grimly.
And she was right. He always came back. The world was full of sluts on skates, even if some of them weren’t on skates. Some of them wore grass skirts and some of them pounded typewriters and some of them checked hats and some of them were married to legislators, but he always came back. Not necessarily to be greeted with open arms and a tender smile, however. Sometimes it was a cold silence like the artic night. Sometimes it was delirium for every seismograph on the continent. Sometimes it was a single well-chosen epithet. For instance, the time the Boss and I had to do a little trip up to the north of the state. The afternoon we got back we walked into the Capitol and there, in the stately lobby, under the great bronze dome, was Sadie. We approached her. She waited until we had arrived, then said, without preliminary, quite simply, “You bastard.”
“Gee, Sadie,” the Boss said, and grinned his grin of the wayward attractive boy, “you don’t even wait to find out anything.”
“You just can’t keep buttoned up, you bastard,” she said, still simply, and walked away.
“Gee,” the Boss said ruefully to me, “I didn’t do a thing this trip, and look what happens.”
What did Lucy Stark know? I don’t know. As far as you could tell, she didn’t know anything. Even when she told the Boss she was going to pack her bag, it was, so he said, because he hadn’t thrown Byram B. White to the wolves.
But she didn’t pack the bag, even then.
She didn’t pack it because she was too honorable, or too generous, or too something, to hit when she thought he was down. Or about to go down. She wasn’t going to add the weight of her thumb to what closely resembled a tidy package of disaster lying on the scales with the blood seeping through the brown paper. For the impeachment of Byram B. White had become a minor issue. They had uncorked the real stuff: the impeachment of Willie Stark.
I don’t know whether or not they had planned it that way. Or whether they were forced into it before they planned when they figured the Boss was turning on too much heat and it was their only chance to get back on the offensive. Or whether they figured that the Lord had delivered the enemy into their hands, that they could get him dead to rights on the business of attempting to corrupt, coerce, and blackmail the Legislature, in addition to the other little charges of malfeasance and nonfeasance. Maybe they had some heroes lined up from among the ranks to testify that they had had the heat put on them. It would have taken a hero, too (or sound inducements), for nobody but a half-wit would have believed, in the light of the record, that the Boss was bluffing. But apparently they figured they had found, or bought, some heroes.
Anyway, they tried it, and for a brief interval life was a blur for speed. I gravely doubt that the Boss did any sleeping for two weeks. That is, bed sleeping. No doubt, he snatched something in the back of automobiles roaring down highways at night, or in a chair between the time one fellow went out of the door and the next came in. He roared across the state at eighty miles an hour, the horn screaming, from town to town, crossroads to crossroads, five, or six, or seven, or eight speaking in a day. He would come out on the platform, almost slouching out, lounging out, as though all the time in the world were before him and all the time were his. He would begin, easy, “Folks, there’s going to be a leetle mite of trouble back in town. Between me and that Legislature-ful of hyena-headed, feist-faced, belly-dragging sons of slack-gutted she-wolves. If you know what I mean. Well, I been looking at them and their kind so long, I just figures I’d take me a little trip and see what human folks looked like in the face before I clean forgot. Well, you all look human. More or less. And sensible. In spite of what they are saying in that Legislature and getting paid five dollars a day of your tax money for saying it. They’re saying you didn’t have bat sense or goose gumption when you cast your sacred ballot to elect me Governor of this state. Maybe you didn’t have bat sense. Don’t ask me, I’m prejudiced. But–” and now he wouldn’t be lounging with his head cocked a little on one side in that easy sizing-up way, looking out from under the eyelids that drooped a little, for now he’d thrust
, all at one, the heavy head forward, and the eyes, red from sleepless ness, would bulge–”I’ll ask you a question. And I want an answer. I want an answer before God and under the awful hand of the Most High. Answer me: Have I disappointed you? Have I? Then, leaning sharply, he would lift his right hand while the question still ringing in the air, and say, “Stop! Don’t answer until you look into the depth of your heart to see the truth. For there is where truth is. Not in a book. Not in a lawyer’s book. Not on any scrap of paper. In your heart.” Then, in a long pause, he would swing his gaze slowly over the crowd of faces. The, “Answer me!”
I would wait for a roar. You can’t help it. I knew it would come, but I would wait for it, and every time it would seem intolerably long before it came. It was like a deep dive. You start up toward the light but you know you can’t breathe yet, not yet, and all you are aware of is the blood beating in your own head in the intolerable timelessness. Then the roar would come and I would feel the way you do when you pop out of the water from a deep dive and the air bursts out of your lungs and everything reels in the light. There is nothing like the roar of as crowd when it swells up, all of a sudden at the same time, out of the thing is in every an in the crowd but is not himself. The roar would swell and rise and fall and swell again, with the Boss standing with his right arm raised straight to Heaven and his red eyes bulging.
And when the roar fell away, he said, with his arm up, “I have looked in your faces!”
And they would yell.
And he said, “O Lord, and I have seen a sign!”
And they would yell again.
And he said, “I have seen dew on the fleece and the ground dry!”
Then the yell.
Then, “I have seen blood on the moon!” Then, “Buckets of blood, and boy! I know whose blood it will be.” Then, leaning forward, grabbing out with his right hand as tough to seize something in the air before him, “Gimme that meat ax!”
It was always that way, or like that. And charging across the state with the horns screaming and blatting, and Sugar-Boy shaving the gasoline truck on the highway and the spit flaying from his mouth while the lips worked soundlessly and words piled up inside him before he could get them out, “The b-b-b-bas-tud!” And the Boss standing up on something with his arm against the sky (it might be raining, it might be bright sun, it might be night and the red light from sizzling gasoline flares set on the porch of a country store), and the crowd yelling. And me so light-headed from no sleep that my head felt big as the sky and when I walked I seemed to be tiptoeing on clouds of cotton batting.
All of that.
But this too: the Boss sitting in the Cadillac, all lights off, in the side street by a house, the time long past midnight. Or in the country, by a gate. The Boss leaning to a man, Sugar-Boy or one of Sugar-Boy’s pals, Heavy Harris or Al Perkins, saying low and fast, “Tell him to come out. I know he’s there. Tell him better come out and talk to me. If he won’t come, just say you’re a friend of Ella Lou. That’ll bring him.” Or, “Ask him if he ever heard of Slick Wilson.” Or something of the kind. And then there would be a man standing there with pajama tops stuck in pants, shivering, with face white in the darkness.
And this: the Boss sitting in a room full of smoke, a pot of coffee on the floor, or a bottle, saying, “Bring the bastard in. Bring him in.”
And when they had brought the bastard in, the Boss would look him over slow, from head to foot, and then he would say, “This is your last chance.” He would say that slow and easy. Then he would lean suddenly forward, at the man, and say, not slow and easy now, “God damn you, do you know what I can do to you?”
And he could do it, too. For he had the goods.
On the afternoon of the fourth of April, 1933, the streets leading to the Capitol were full of people, and they weren’t the kind of people you usually saw on those streets. Not in those numbers, anyway. The Chronicle_ that night referred to the rumor of a march on the Capitol, but affirmed that justice would not be intimidated. Before noon of the fifth of April there were a lot more wool-hats and red-necks and Mother Hubbards and crepe-de-Chine dresses with red-clay dust about the uneven bottom hem, and a lot of clothes and faces which weren’t cocklebur and crossroads, but county-seat and filling-station. The crowd moved up toward the Capitol, not singing or yelling, and spread out over the big lawn where the statues were.
Men with tripods and cameras were scurrying about on the edges of the crowd, setting up their rigs on the Capitol steps, climbing on the bases of the frock-coated statues to get shots. Here and there around the edge of the crowd you could see the blue coat of a mounted cop up above the crowd, and in the open space of lawn between the crowd and the Capitol there were more cops, just standing, and a few highway patrolmen, very slick and businesslike in their bright-green uniforms and black boots and black Sam Browne belts and dangling holsters.
The crowd began chanting, “Willie, Willie, Willie–We want Willie!”
I looked out of a window on the second floor and saw it. I wondered if the sound carried into the Chamber of Representatives, where they were yammering and arguing and orating. Outside it was very simple, out there on the lawn, under the bright spring sky. No arguing. Very simple. We want Willie–Willie, Willie, Willie!” In a long rhythm, with a hoarse undertone, like surf.
Then I saw a big black car pull slowly into the drive before the Capitol, and stop. A man got out, waved his hand to the cops, and walked to the bandstand there on the edge of the lawn. It was a fat man. Tiny Duffy.
Then he was speaking to the crowd. I could not hear his words, but I knew what he was saying. He was saying that Willie Stark asked them to go peaceably into the city, to wait until dark, to be back on the lawn before the Capitol by eight o’clock, when he would have something to tell them.
I knew what he would tell them. I knew that he would stand up before them and say that he was still Governor of the state.
I knew that, because early the previous evening, around seven-thirty, he had called me in and given me a big brown manila envelope. “Lowdan is down at the Haskell Hotel,” he said. “I know he’s in his room now. Go down there and let him take a peep at that but don’t let him get his hands on it and tell him to call his dogs off. Not that it matters whether he does or not, for they’ve changed their minds.” (Lowdan was the kingpin of the MacMurfee boys in the House.)
I had gone down to the Haskell and to Mr. Lowdan’s room without sending my name. I knocked on the door, and when I heard the voice, said, “Message.” He opened the door, a big jovial-looking man with a fine manner, in a flowered dressing gown. He didn’t recognize me at first, just seeing a big brown envelope and some sort of face above it. But I withdrew the brown envelope and some sort of face above it. But I withdrew the brown envelope just as his hand reached for it, and stepped over the sill. Then he must have looked at the face. “Why, Howdy-do, Mr. Burden,” he said, “they say you’ve been right busy lately.”
“Loafing,” I said, “just plain loafing. And I was just loafing by and thought I’d stop and show you something a fellow gave me.” I took the long sheet out of the envelope, and held it up for him to look at. “No, don’t touch, burn-y, burn-y,” I said.
He didn’t touch but he looked hard. I saw his Adam’s apple jerk a couple of times; then he removed his cigar from his mouth (a good cigar, two-bit at least, by the smell) and said, “Fake.”
“The signatures are supposed to be genuine,” I said, “but if you aren’t sure you might ring up one of your boys whose name you see on here and ask him man to man.”
He pondered that thought a moment, and the Adam’s apple worked again, harder now, but he was taking it like a soldier. Or he still thought it was a fake. Then he said, “I’ll call your bluff on that,” and walked over to the telephone.
Waiting for his number, he looked up and said, “Have a seat, won’t you?”
“No, thanks,” I said, for I didn’t regard the event as social.
Then he had the number.
“Monty,” he said into the telephone, “I’ve got a statement here to the effect that the undersigned hold that the impeachment proceedings are unjustified and will vote against them despite all pressure. That’s what it says–’all pressure.’ Your name’s on the list. How about it?”
There was a long wait, then Mr. Lowdan said, “For God’s sake, quit mumbling and blubbering and speak up!”
There was another wait, then Mr. Lowdan yelled, “You– you–” But words failed him, and he slammed the telephone to the cradle, and swung the big, recently jovial-looking face toward me. He was making a gasping motion with his mouth, but no sound.
“Well,” I said, “you want to try another one?”
“It’s blackmail,” he said, very quietly, but huskily as though he didn’t have the breath to spare. Then, seeming to get a little more breath, “It’s blackmail. It’s coercion. Bribery, it’s bribery. I tell you, you’ve blackmailed and bribed those men and I–”
“I don’t know why anybody signed this statement,” I said, “but if what you charge should happen to be true then the moral strikes me as this: MacMurfee ought not to elect legislators who can be bribed or who have done things they can get blackmailed for.”
“MacMurfee–” he began, the fell into a deep silence, his flowered bulk brooding over the telephone stand. He’d have his own troubles with Mr. MacMurfee, no doubt.
“A small detail,” I said, “but it would probably be less embarrassing to you, and especially to the signers of this document, if the impeachment proceedings were killed before coming to a vote. You might try to see about getting that done by late tomorrow. That should give you time to make your arrangements, and to figure out as graceful a way as possible. Of course, it would be more effective politically for the Governor to let the matter come to a vote, but he is willing to let you do it the easy way, particularly since there’s a good deal of unrest in the city about the matter.”
He wasn’t paying any attention to me, as far as I could tell. I went to the door, opened it, and looked back. “Ultimately,” I said, “it is immaterial to the Governor how you manage the matter.”