"What?"
"Something I don't ever want to forget," he said.
"What's that?"
"That when they come to you sweet talking you better not listen to anything they say. I don't aim to forget that."
So that was it. Tiny was the fellow who had come in a big automobile and had talked sweet to Willie back when Willie was a little country lawyer.
But was that it? Or rather, was that all of it? I figured there was another reason. The Boss must have taken a kind pride in the fact that he could make Tiny Duffy a success, He had busted Tiny Duffy and then he had picked up the pieces and put him back together again as his own creation. He must have taken a lot of pleasure in looking at Tiny's glittering rig and diamond ring, and thinking that it was all hollow, that it was a sham, that if he should crook his little finger Tiny Duffy would disappear like a whiff of smoke. In a way, the very success which the Boss laid on Tiny was his revenge on Tiny, for every time the Boss put his meditative, sleepy, distant gaze on Tiny, Tiny would know, with a cold clutch at his fat heart, that if the Boss should crook a finger there wouldn't be anything but the whiff of smoke. In a way, Tiny's success was a final index of the Boss's own success.
But was that it? In the end, I decided that there was one more reason behind the other reasons. This: Tiny Duffy became, in a crazy kind of way, the other self of Willie Stark, and all the contempt and insult which Willie Stark was to heap on Tiny Duffy was nothing but what one self of Willie Stark did to the other self because of a blind, in ward necessity. But I came to that conclusion only at the very end, a long time afterwards.
But now Willie had just become Governor and nobody knew what would come afterwards.
And meanwhile–while the campaign was on–I was out of a job.
My job had been political reporting for the _Chronicle__. I had a column, too. I was a pundit.
One day Jim Madison had me in to stand on the Kelly-green carpet which surrounded his desk like a pasture. "Jack," he said, "you know what the _Chronicle__ line is in this election."
"Sure," I replied, "it wants to elect Sam MacMurfee again because of his brilliant record as an administrator and his high integrity as a statesman."
He grinned a little sourly and said, "It wants to elect Sam MacMurfee."
"I'm sorry I forgot we were in the bosom of the family. I thought I was writing my column."
The grin went off his face. He played with a pencil on his desk. "It's about the column I wanted to see you," he said.
"O. K.," I replied.
"Can't you put some more steam in it? This is an election and not a meeting of the Epworth League."
"It is an election, all right."
"Can't you give it a little more?"
"When what you got to work with is Sam MacMurfee," I said, "you haven't even got a sow's ear to make a silk purse out of. I'm doing what I can."
He brooded over that for a minute. Then he began, "Now just because the Stark happens to be a friend of yours, you–"
"He's no friend of mine," I snapped. "I didn't even see him between last election and this one. Personally, I don't care who is ever Governor of this state or how big a son-of-a-bitch he is. But I am a hired hand, and I do my best to suppress in my column my burning conviction that Sam MacMurfee is one of the fanciest sons-of–"
"You know the _Chronicle__ line," Jim Madison said heavily and studied the spit-slick, chewed butt of his cigar.
It was a hot day, and the breeze from the electric fan was on Jim Madison and not on me, and there was a little thread of acid, yellow-feeling saliva down in my throat, the kind you get when your stomach is sour, and my head felt like a dried gourd with a couple of seeds rattling around in it. So I looked at Jim Madison, and said, "All right."
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"I mean in the way I said it," I said, and started for the door.
"Look here, Jack, I'm–" he began, and laid the cigar butt down on the ash tray.
"I know," I said, "you got a wife and kids and your boy's in Princeton."
I said that and kept on walking.
There was a water cooler outside the door, in the hall, and I stopped by it and took one of the little cone-shaped cups and drank about ten of them full of ice water to wash the yellow thing out of my throat. Then I stood there in the hall with my stomach full of the water like a cold bulb inside me.
I could sleep late, and then wake up and not move, just watching the hot, melted-butter-colored sunlight pour through the cracks in the shade, for my hotel was not the best in town and my room was not the best in the hotel. As my chest rose and fell with my breathing, the sheet would stick damply to my bare hide, for that is the way you sleep there in the summertime. I could hear the streetcars and the blatting of automobile horns off yonder, not too loud but variegated and unremitting, a kind of coarse, hoarse tweedy mixture of sounds to your nerve ends, and occasionally the clatter of dishes, for my room gave on the kitchen area. And now and then a nigger would sing a snatch down there.
I could lie there as long as I wanted, and let all the pictures of things a man might want to run through my head, coffee, a girl, money, a drink, white sand and blue water, and let them all slide off, one after another, like a deck of cards slewing slowly off your hand. Maybe the things you want are like cards. You don't want them for themselves, really, though you think you do. You don't want a card because you want a card, but because in a perfectly arbitrary system of rules and values and in a special combination of which you already hold a part the card has meaning. But suppose you aren't sitting in a game. Then, even if you do know the rules, a card doesn't mean a thing. They all look alike.
So I could lie there, though I knew that I would get up after a spell–not deciding to get up but just all at once finding myself standing in the middle of the floor just as later on I would find myself, with a mild shock of recognition, taking coffee, changing a bill, handling a girl, drawing on a drink, floating in the water. Like an amnesia case playing solitaire in a hospital. I would get up and deal myself a hand, all right. Later on. But for the present I would lie there and know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. For God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look either one of Them straight in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human constitution is the same.
Lots of nights I would go the bed early, too. Sometimes sleep gets to be a serious and complete thing. You stop going to sleep in order that you may be able to get up, but get up in order that you may be able to go back to sleep. You get so during the day you catch yourself suddenly standing still and waiting and listening. You are like a little boy at the railroad station, ready to go away on the train, which hasn't come yet. You look way up the track, but can't see the little patch of black smoke yet. You fidget around, but all at once you stop in the middle of you fidgeting, and listen. You can't hear it yet. Then you go and kneel down in your Sunday clothes in the cinders, for which your mother is going to snatch you bald-headed, and put your ear to the rail and listen for the first soundless rustle which will come in the rail long before the little black patch begins to grow on the sky. You get so you listen for night, long before it comes over the horizon, and long, long before it comes charging and stewing and thundering to you like a big black locomotive and the black cars grind to a momentary stop and the porter with the black, shining face helps you up the steps, and says, "Yassuh, little boss, yassuh."