John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

But all the while, the Negro boy in the milkhouse played on, wincing from the effort, baring his teeth, his eyes clamped shut. His arms ached, and the sweat ran off him in rivers. The sounds shooting out from his fingertips and palms and knuckles and the heels of his hands were like things alive, like birds or bats, and they flew to the cinderblock walls and struggled and escaped.

And until he stopped, the mindless, sullen air was full of wings;

4

The paper in Clumly’s trembling fingers shook so badly he couldn’t read it. He didn’t need to. He’d gone over it a hundred times at least since the stranger had delivered it to Esther last night. (She whimpered with fright as she told it.) He’d come up on the porch just a little after midnight — she was certain of the time, or thought she was — when Clumly was hearing the monologue of the Sunlight Man at the Presbyterian church, and he’d knocked sharply, as only a policeman would knock, or an agent of the German Gestapo in one of those movies. She’d gotten on her robe and slippers and turned off the radio and hurried down. “Who is it?” she’d said. The deepest voice she’d ever heard had answered quietly, “Message for Chief of Police Fred Clumly, ma’am. My name’s Warner. Open your door an inch and I’ll slip my card in.” She opened the door and groped for the card and pretended to study it in the pitch-dark room. “All right,” she said, and opened the door somewhat wider. She had an impression (it was hard to know how she formed her impressions) of a huge man in a coat. He was tall, at any rate. His voice seemed to come from at least two feet above her, which would make him at least seven feet, eight inches tall. And one other thing was certain, too. He had a sickening smell. It was like hoofrot, she said, or like burning flesh. It was like a cancer smell and like a sewer on a hot, wet day. He smelled like a goat, like an outhouse, like fire and brimstone. She was frightened, half-convinced she was confronting some monstrous apparition. But when he spoke again his voice partly allayed her fears. “You have to sign for it ma’am,” he said. She took the pencil and pad he placed in her hands and signed where he showed her she must sign. The smell made her feel faint. At last he said, “Good. That will do. Here’s the message.” He handed her a paper airplane. Clumly had scowled furiously, sitting up in bed, hearing the nightmarish account. “You must have made a mistake about the time,” he said. But she wasn’t mistaken. She’d been sewing and listening to the midnight news on the radio when he came — she couldn’t sleep — and after he left she’d checked the clock. It had occurred to Clumly that perhaps his own watch had been wrong, perhaps the man had tricked him into going late to his appointment. But his watch was right now. He remembered all at once the Sunlight Man’s first words last night: You’re right on time. And so it seemed certain, it had not been midnight at all when he entered the church. (If anything was certain, it was certain that the Sunlight Man would lie.) “Well, thank you,” he’d said to his wife. Then, reassuringly: “You did the right thing.” He’d waited until she had left the room, then unfolded the paper airplane. It was a map, drawn by, one would have sworn, a child. A kind of pirate’s treasure map. Some roads, a railroad — DL — some words along the bottom, badly spelled.

He stood now, in the murderous heat, pressing the map against the semaphore post to steady it enough that he could read it. He hadn’t much farther to go. He glanced at his watch. It was five after three. In ten minutes he was supposed to be there. He had no way of knowing whether he’d recognize the place of the appointment when he finally got there, and no way of knowing that the Sunlight Man would be waiting. But he had no choice. That is, he had chosen.

He trudged on, trying not to think. His ankles ached from turning and twisting on the cinders and stones of the railroad bed, and the raw place on his left foot, from a cinder he’d gotten inside his shoe and not stopped to take out until much too late, was stinging now. His brown police shirt was soaking wet — it couldn’t have been wetter if he’d jumped in the creek that wandered in and out along the railroad embankment — and his crotch was chafed and raw. His ears would be blistered by sunset. He had burdock leaves hanging out of his hat now to shade his ears and neck, but he hadn’t thought of it until the sun had already done its work. The heat was incredible. Had the devil known it would be like this? The woods to his left stood motionless, wilting and steaming in the heat. To the right he looked down on fields and pastures where cows lay unmoving beside dried-up creekbeds or stood huddled in the shade of locust groves. The rails of the track gleamed blindingly, and Clumly had no sunglasses with him. When he closed his eyes and gently pressed the lids to soothe them he saw the rails in red-vermillion, as bright as the arc of a welding torch. The world stretching out all around him was enormous — dry, hot, dull, and, above all, indifferent as the Sunlight Man’s wooden gods. It did queer things to his mind. He felt like a man out walking against his will on some desolate mountainside. He could see for miles, behind him, in front of him, and off to the right — piles of smooth round stones, white as bone in the sunlight; smoothly nibbled pasture; here and there a lacy grove that gave no particular shade; a solitary pine tree; a row of dead elms; overhead, blue sky, white clouds, the sun burning down like a pure white, sightless eye. As far as one could see in any direction, there was scarcely a house or a barn. In all this silence and emptiness, the slightest tricks of his mind took on ludicrous importance. A song came into his head and refused to leave:

Old Molly Hare,

What you doin’ there?

Sittin’ in the fireplace

Smoking my cigar.

It was the only verse he knew.

And this, even more infuriating: when he’d first come up onto the tracks, miles ago now — he’d parked on the Creek Road and climbed up where the Little Tonawanda went under the railroad bridge — he’d watched a freight train pass. It had entered his mind that one might put a bullet on the tracks, the train would fire it. It was a foolish thought, a child’s whimsical reflection that would have entered and left almost unnoticed at any other time. But now as he walked through the seemingly endless afternoon he could not get the idiotic thought out of his head. He tried to distract himself with memories of the days long ago when he’d stood on the deck of the Carolina, soaking up heat like this but smelling the water and getting, now and then, a tingle of spray. “That was the life,” he said aloud. But to no avail. He had to do it, and at last, craftily, looking all around him first — he bent over, slipped a bullet from his belt, and placed it on the track. Then he hurried on. He felt relieved, and the relief, like everything else, was exaggerated. He felt, crazily, like a new man entirely. Then he began to believe he was being followed. It became for him almost a certainty. He even thought he caught a glimpse, once, of a man with snow white hair peeking out from behind a tree.

Then Clumly stopped, and his fists closed tight. The place he’d been told to come stood directly in front of him, a hundred yards down the track. “Idiot!” he thought in a rage. The Sunlight Man’s map had made one omission: it did not include the Francis Road. Incredibly, Clumly had not noticed. He had walked miles to a point that he could have reached by car. He touched the burning-hot handle of his revolver and for a moment found he was thinking, with perfect seriousness, of murder. He got hold of himself.