The Boss had stood up and padded across in his sock-feet, holding out his hand, saying, "Hello, Hugh."
Hugh Miller shook hands, and stepped into the room, and I started to edge out the door. Then I caught the Boss's eye, and he nodded, quick, toward my chair. So I shook hands with Hugh Miller, too, and sat back down.
"Have a seat," the Boss said to Hugh Miller.
"No, thanks, Willie," Hugh Miller replied in his slow solemn way. "But you sit down, Willie."
The Boss dropped back into his chair, cocked his feet up again, and demanded, "What's on your mind?"
"I reckon you know," Hugh Miller said.
"I reckon I do," the Boss said.
"You are saving White's hide, aren't you?"
"I don't give a damn about White's hide," the Boss said. "I'm saving something else."
"He's guilty."
"As hell," the Boss agreed cheerfully. "If the category of guilt and innocence can be said to have any relevance to something like Byram B. White."
"He's guilty," Hugh Miller said.
"My God, you talk like Byram was human! He's a thing! You don't prosecute an adding machine if a spring goes bust and makes a mistake. You fix it. Well, I fixed Byram. I fixed him so his unborn great-grandchildren will wet their pants on this anniversary and not know why. Boy, it will be the shock in the genes. Hell, Byram is just something you use, and he'll sure be useful from now on."
"That sounds fine, Willie, but it just boils down to the fact you're saving White's hide."
"White's hide be damned," the Boss said, "I', saving something else. You let that gang of MacMurfee's boys in the Legislature get the notion they can pull something like this and there's no telling where they'd stop. Do you think they like anything that's been done? The extraction tax? Raising the royalty rate on state land? The income tax? The highway program? The Public Health Bill?"
"No, they don't," Hugh Miller admitted. "Or rather, the people behind MacMurfee don't like it."
"Do you like it?"
"Yes," Hugh Miller said, "I like _it__. But I can't say I like some of the stuff around it."
"Hugh," the Boss said, and grinned, "the trouble with you is you are a lawyer. You are a damned fine lawyer."
"You're a lawyer," Hugh Miller said.
"No," the Boss corrected, "I'm not a lawyer. I know some law. In fact, I know a lot of law. And I made me some money out of law. But I'm not a lawyer. That's why I can see what the law is like. It's like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain't ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbones to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind. The best you can do is do something and then make up some law to fit and by the time that law gets on the books you would have done something different. Do you think half the things I've done were clear, distinct, and simple in the constitution of this state?"
"The Supreme Court has ruled–" Hugh Miller began.
"Yeah, and they ruled because I put 'em there to rule it, and they saw what had to be done. Half the things _weren't__ in the constitution but they are now, by God. And how did they get there? Simply because somebody did 'em."
The blood began to climb up in Hugh Miller's face, and he shook his head just a little, just barely, the way a slow animal does when a fly skims by. Then he said, "There's nothing in the constitution says that Byram B. White can commit a felony with impunity."
"Hugh," the Boss began, soft, "don't you see that Byram doesn't mean a thing? Not in this situation. What they're after is to break the administration. They don't care about Byram, except so far as it's human nature to hate to think somebody else is getting something when you aren't. What they care about is undoing what this administration has done. And now is the time to stomp 'em. And when you start out to do something–" he sat up straight in the chair now, with his hands on the overstuffed sides, and thrust his head forward at Hugh Miller–"you got to use what you've got. You got to use fellows like Byram, and Tiny Duffy, and that scum down in the Legislature. You can't make bricks without straw, and most of the time all the straw you got is secondhand straw from the cowpen. And if you think you can make it any different, you're crazy as a hoot owl."
Hugh Miller straightened his shoulders a little. He did not look at the Boss but at the wall beyond the Boss. "I am offering my resignation as Attorney General," he said. "You will have it in writing, by messenger, in the morning."
"You took a long time to do it," the Boss said softly. "A long time, Hugh. What made you take such a long time?"
Hugh Miller didn't answer, but he did move his gaze from the wall to the Boss's face.
"I'll tell you, Hugh," the Boss said. "You sat in you law office fifteen years and watched the sons-of-bitches warm chairs in this state and not do a thing, and the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Then I came along and slipped a Louisville Slugger in your hand and whispered low, 'You want to step in there and lay round you a little? And you did. You had a wonderful time. You made the fur fly and you put nine tin-horn grafters in the pen. But you never touched what was behind 'em. The law isn't made for that. All you can do about that is take the damned government away from the behind guys and keep it away from 'em. Whatever way you can. You know that down in your heart. You want to keep your Harvard hands clean, but way down in your heart you know I'm telling the truth, and you're asking the benefit of somebody getting his little patties potty-black. You know you're welching if you pull out. That," he said, softer than ever, and leaned toward Hugh Miller, peering up at him. "is why it took you so long to do it. To pull out."
Hugh Miller looked down at him a half minute, down into the beefy upturned face and the steady protruding eyes. There was a shadowed, puzzled expression on Hugh Miller's face, as though he were trying to read something in a bad light, or in a foreign language he didn't know very well. Then he said, "My mind is made up."
"I know your mind's made up," the Boss said. "I know I couldn't change your mind, Hugh." He stood up in front of his chair, hitched his trousers up, the way a fellow has to who is putting it on some around the middle, and sock-footed over to Hugh Miller. "Too bad," he said. "You and me make quite a team. Your brains and my brawn."
Hugh Miller gave something which resembled an incipient smile.
"No hard feelings?" the Boss said, and stuck out his hand.
Hugh Miller took it.
"If you don't give up likker, you might drop in and have a drink with me some time," the Boss said. "I won't talk politics."
"All right," Hugh Miller said, and turned toward the door.
He had just about made the door, when the Boss said, "Hugh." Hugh Miller stopped and looked back.
"You're leaving me alone," the Boss said, in semicomic woe, "with the sons-of-bitches. Mine and the other fellow's."
Hugh Miller smiled in a stiff, embarrassed way, shook his head, said, "Hell–Willie–" let his voice trail off without ever saying what he had started to say, and then Harvard Law School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands and pure heart, was with us no longer.
The Boss sank down on the foot of the bed, heaved his left ankle up over his right knee; and while he meditatively scratched the left foot, the way a farmer does when he takes off his shoes at night, he stared at the closed door.
"With the sons-of-bitches," he said, and let the foot slip off the knee and plop to the floor, while he still stared to the door.
I stood up again. It was my third try for getting out of the place and getting back to my hotel for some sleep. The Boss could sit up all night, night after night, and never show it, and that fact was sure hell on his associates. I edged toward the door again, but the Boss swung his stare to me and I knew something was coming. So I just stopped and waited for it, while the stare worked over my face and tried to probe around in the gray stuff inside my head, like a pair of forceps.