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.