John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

He’d misunderstood reality, and so he died. And so I say this. Suppose you’re wrong.

Clumly snapped off the tape and stood thinking a moment, bent-backed as a beetle, his hand around his jaw.

Downstairs the telephone rang. Esther called, “Yoo hoo! Telephone, Fred!”

He bent lower and unplugged the tape recorder, then stood motionless, squinting, enclosing himself in silence.

1

Walter Boyle (or Benson) had a round face and round, surprised-looking eyes like a rabbit’s. Now, as he drove home to Buffalo, sitting far forward in his seat, as always, and clinging to the steering wheel with both hands, his eyes looked rounder and more surprised than ever. He was frightened and, for the first time in years, tormented by something he could even recognize himself as guilt. If he consciously tried to think back to the murder of the guard, his mind would shy away stubbornly, like a horse avoiding a bridge; nevertheless, the memory repeatedly came back, around unsuspected corners, and though his thought recoiled the way you would draw back your hand from a snake you’d mistaken for a vine, he could not escape reliving that moment — the dead guard’s hand reaching out to him — over and over. He had always known that there is violence in the world, he’d seen minor examples. But he had never fully grasped what he had known. It was equally impossible for Boyle (or Benson) to grasp the magician’s return to the jail to free an Indian who meant nothing to him, as far as you could see, or meant worse than nothing, an irritation. Insane, that was all there was to it. But Boyle was not convinced or comforted. He had not really grasped that there was madness in the world. Worst of all, though, was the pistol-whipping of the Indian who had stayed. Boyle had a certain respect for the police. He feared and disliked them, but he feared and disliked them less than do many citizens. He understood their rules and, as a professional, worked not so much against those rules as around and under and up inbetween them. But there were no rules behind the pistol-whipping. It was more insanity. And neither was there any rule to explain their calling him Benson, showing they were onto him, yet letting him off scot-free. The world was topsy-turvy, and Boyle was afraid of it. He felt that he was being tailed, that any moment or any day now the whole thing — whatever that meant — would blow up in his face. He dreaded meeting his wife or neighbors or what-was-his-name, the roomer. He felt, though the trial was behind him, accused, and felt everyone knew it. He, Walter Boyle, it seemed to him now (or seemed to some gloomy, befuddled alley of his mind), was personally responsible for the magician’s return and so, in effect, for the murder. He could have listened more carefully to the conversation of the magician and the Indian; he could have told the police more than he’d told them, or warned them about the break he had known was coming. And after it was over and the police were asking angry questions, their faces bright red, he could have told them at least who it was that had let the Indian out. It was his error — his refusal to answer them — that had led to the pistol-whipping.

Not that he consciously thought all this out or believed it. Boyle thought nothing. Nevertheless, he was a changed man, for whether or not he was able to think about it, he had seen the caves of Hell. All his life he had been a decent man, exactly like the best of his neighbors. A good American. He took pride in his work, as other men do, and pride, too — though he did not flaunt it publicly — in his judgments, his feelings, even his comfortable shape, size, and visage. He worked hard and earned money and kept hold of it — he was the farthest thing from a profligate. He knew the value of food, and, like anyone, he frequently ate too much; he took considerable pleasure in making love to his wife when he was able, once a month or so; he was never fanatic, and if he felt himself slipping into an extreme point of view he would check himself at once, relax every nerve; he had a healthy American’s envy of people slightly better off than himself. And though he said little, he was not by any means a milquetoast; indeed, he was as capable as anyone of manly fury. But for all his common decency, he now knew himself guilty; in fact, past pardon. He suffered and hunted for words. The world was full of danger, and something terrible was in store for him.

Half a block short of the driveway leading to the old barn in North Tonawanda where he always made his change, Boyle stopped the car and sat looking around him, making sure he was not being watched. There was no one. He started up again, drove down die driveway between high weeds, stopped to unlock the barn door, then drove the Rambler in. Inside, everything was in order. The Ford sat dusty and discarded-looking except for the clothes hanging behind the side window — Benson’s. Boyle undressed, down to his underwear and socks, removed the money from his billfold and put the billfold in the Rambler glove compartment. He stood a moment between the two cars, facing the closed barn door and rubbing his hands absent-mindedly, savoring the queer sensation of being neither Boyle nor Benson. At last he locked the Rambler and unlocked the Ford, dressed in the Benson clothes, took the Benson wallet from the glove compartment of the Ford, filled it with the money that linked his two natures, and put on his wedding ring. He opened the barn door, started up the Ford, backed out, got out again and locked the barn door behind him.

Even now he dreaded going home. On an impulse very unnatural for him, against all his rules, he parked his car in a downtown lot, thirty cents an hour, and got out to walk. He had no intention, at first, of walking all the way home from here — it was nearly two miles — but he started out, by accident, in the general direction of home.

Though the afternoon was in fact pleasant, somewhere in the seventies, Benson felt chilly. He felt so cold, and the light breeze seemed to him so piercing, that he shivered in his thin suit and walked as fast as he could. He thought about the people he’d seen in the jail — the Indian boy with his jaw broken, the cracked magician, the drunks, the teen-aged hoodlums the police had brought in after the escape — and, hardly aware that he was doing it, he began to compare them with the hustling Buffalo people all around him. As he passed department stores, wide, brightly lit office-supply stores, bookstores, tobacco shops, ladies’ shops, he was struck by the wolfish, but at the same time trim and prosperous, look of all these well-fed, neatly dressed customers and salespeople. There was nothing like this back in jail. These people too looked cross and impatient, but they looked busy, at least, and satisfied that their business was the most important business to be done. He passed an air-conditioned shoestore (a waft of chillier air swept across him), and beyond the double-width glass doors he caught a glimpse of a tan young man with a bright, false smile squeezing a cheap, too-small shoe on a fat woman’s bloated foot. It was not the shoesalesman’s business that the shoe was mere paper or that on that huge gray foot it was ridiculous. They were both cheats, the shoe man and the lady. (The thought flickered up momentarily and died.)

He passed an old woman with a gray, smashed face and above it a hat of shiny dark blue with light blue flowers on it. Benson’s guilt increased.