Роберт Уоррен - All the king's men

The whole arrangement seemed so crazy and so logical that after I had hung up the phone I burst out laughing and could scarcely stop. Before I stopped, as a matter of fact, I found that I was not laughing at all but was weeping and was saying over and over again, "The poor old bugger, the poor old bugger." It was like the ice breaking up after a long winter. And the winter had been long.

After a great blow, or crisis, after the first shock and then after the nerves have stopped screaming and twitching, you settle down to the new condition of things and feel that all possibility of change has been used up. You adjust yourself, and are sure that the new equilibrium is for eternity. After the death of Judge Irwin, after I got back to the city, I felt that way. I felt that a story was over, that what had been begun a long time back had been played out, that the lemon had been squeezed dry. But if anything is certain it is that no story is ever over, for the story which we think is over is only a chapter in a story which will not be over, and it isn't the game that is over, it is just an innings, and that game has a lot more than nine innings. When the game stops it will be called on account of darkness. But it is a long day.

The little game the Boss was playing was not over. But I had nearly forgotten all about it. I had forgotten that the story of Judge Irwin, which seemed so complete in itself, was only a chapter in the longer story of the Boss, which was not over and which was itself merely a chapter in another bigger story.

The Boss looked across the desk at me as I walked in, and said, "God damn it, so the bastard crawled out on me."

I didn't say anything

"I didn't tell you to scare him to death, I just told you to scare him."

"He wasn't scared," I said "What the hell did he do it for then?"

"I told you a long time back when the mess started he wouldn't scare."

"Well, why did he do it?"

"I don't want to discuss it."

"Well, why did he do it?"

"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.