"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.