John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“Why yes, thank you,” he said. “Get the hamburger out of the refrig.”

She did so absently, trying to locate the center of her unrest. As she was unwrapping what was left of the hamburger she said aloud without meaning to, “What happened to us, I wonder.”

His hands stopped moving for an instant, under the faucet, then moved as before. “You belong on TV,” he said. He smiled, bowed, clutched his red hat and tipped it to her.

She watched his antics and said nothing. In the bathroom Luke was filling a glass of water, taking a pill. His headache was back, then. She should have known. Nick Slater lay on the livingroom couch asleep. She watched the stranger mixing the hamburger and the chopped-up plants in a yellow plastic bowl. Out of nowhere it came to her that he was Taggert Hodge. She knew it but didn’t believe it. If he’d been burned like that they would have heard, wouldn’t they? The false voice, the absurd gestures — were they all meant to fool her? Hardly breathing, she watched now his hands, now his eyes; but she couldn’t be certain. It was fifteen years. Taggert did card tricks, she remembered. He was good. But she thought the next instant, Not that good. The Sunlight Man was a pro, as good as anybody, and there was all the difference in the world between a few tricks with cards and the unbelievable things he did — the huge solid gun appearing in his hand from nowhere, certainly not from, say, his sleeve. Her heart began to race before she fully understood what she was about to do. She said, “Poor Tag.”

He showed no sign. None. Merely turned his head, saying, “Tag?”

“My brother-in-law,” she said. “I was thinking about him.”

He nodded, uninterested.

She couldn’t tell what to believe.

He didn’t talk at supper, nor did they. She was still uncertain. Luke ate nothing. Nick got out his cigarettes afterward, and when he lit the match the Sunlight Man started violently. She said nothing, merely filed it to think about later.

Then the Sunlight Man pushed back his chair. “Rise up and follow me,” he said. Nick rose slowly. Luke did not stir, merely sat pressing his temples with his fingertips. The Sunlight Man leaned down to him. “Are you deaf?” he hissed. She said, “Stop it. It’s his head.” But now Luke came awake and looked up at him, squinting. The Sunlight Man said coldly, “Come with me.” It couldn’t be Tag. He went toward the cellar door. After a moment Millie followed. “Go down,” he said. She obeyed, and then Nick and Luke came too. Looped in his left hand, the Sunlight Man had clothesline. “What are you going to do?” she said. He smiled. “You’d never believe it.”

Suddenly she knew. Perhaps it was because he forgot to change his voice, or perhaps in her blood, though not in her mind, she had known the truth all along. She went cold all over. “You!” she said.

His eyebrows lowered and he met her eyes — or looked through them; she could not tell.

“Don’t do this,” she whispered. “Luke’s sick.”

He seemed to reflect. His burnt face showed nothing. Then, eyes vague, he came down the steps toward them. In his right hand he had the gun.

I exist, she said in her heart, and no one else. She drew back her mind from the pain of the tight bonds on her wrists and ankles and around her waist, from the cold of the water around her feet, and from the gag biting deep into the corners of her mouth. I understand the reasons for your viciousness, your madness, but they’re yours, not mine: I have a life of my own, griefs of my own, and I warn you, I can match all your magic tricks sleight for sleight. I have no time for complications, I’ve spent too much already. Let all the rabbits in your hat — and all the false boxes, trick handkerchiefs — come out and save you from the things that are coming upon you. Luke writhed, banging the back of his head on the post he was tied to. She closed her eyes. What do you want of me? What?

They had found her brother Gil in a pile of straw in the corner of the barn, and he looked as if he were sleeping like a baby, they said, but he had killed himself. At the funeral she’d kept a face of stone. Hadn’t she talked with him, stewed with him, done everything in her power to prevent it? But in the end he had not thanked her for it; he’d grown to hate her. He couldn’t get a driver’s license because the first time he tried to kill himself, an overdose of sleeping pills, she’d made Will drive him to the hospital, and after that the thing was on his record. But she’d accepted his hatred, had shrugged it off as easily as she shrugged off Luke’s hatred, or Will Jr’s. Self-preservation. It was all one could find to cling to. It was enough.

She could hear him banging his head against the post, exactly as he’d banged his head against his crib when he was a baby. Die, she thought. Smash out your brains and die. Then: No, that’s stupid. We’ll beat him yet.

It came to her that she was shaking from head to foot. She was afraid.

She remembered: The first completely by accident, the lady in the car. Then the next one a little less by accident. Then last night the third one, only just barely by accident. Gil said: “Each time it comes closer, don’t it. Each time I come closer to really meaning it, really wanting to be dead. You can see where it’s heading.” “Be still,” she said. “Gil, baby. Be still.” She closed his eyes with her fingertips.

When she’d said, “Luke’s sick”—his own nephew — he had looked at her and he’d thought about it, and after a minute he’d drawn the gun. His eyes weren’t human.

She understood where it was heading.

1

Driving down the road with his jaw slung forward and his heart full of possibly righteous indignation — for though he did not ask for justice (no man gets justice, not even a king: the most powerful tyrant may demand his fair share, but not even God, the Lord of Hosts, can force those around him to think of Him as He deserves to be thought of), he did ask, at least, that he not be treated as an absolute fool — Will Hodge Sr grumbled and ground his teeth and said, “All right!” He had the accelerator clear to the floor, so that the Plymouth was roaring down the pot-holed macadam, steering wheel shaking like a house in an earthquake, at fifty miles an hour. It would smash the A-frame. Let it! Something in him, long idle, unsure of its use, had snapped into gear. For better or worse, he was a new man. All his life he’d been picking up other people’s pieces, accepting responsibilities that he knew very well were not his own — his brothers’ debts, his wife’s mistakes, his sons’ opinions, his own failure to measure up — and always, whatever he did, it was wrong, he was the fool, the clown, the villain: him, not them. “All right,” he said. “Be pragmatic.” The word had suddenly come to be full of meaning for him. John Kennedy’s genius, he’d read somewhere, was that he worked out one problem at a time. Kennedy knew that each solution might raise twenty new problems, the writer said; nevertheless, he sought no grand vision, no return to some state of the nation long gone, impossible to recapture. He dealt, one by one, with the troubles of the sick, the poor, the oppressed, sought not what ought to be but what would do. All right! So Hodge, too, would work. It was a thing his father the Congressman would have understood. He would have laughed at them, patching gray barns which time had stripped of use — the slaughter shed and smokehouse, the cider barn, the elegant three-story chickenhouse, impossible to heat, impossible to clean, too dark even on a sunny day for proper egg production. It was a glory to the eye, that chickenhouse: high, narrow windows with small panes (the glass in those days was more brittle than now, and the labor of building such complex sashes and puttying in all those hundreds of panes did not cost then what it would today); on each floor, square, high-ceilinged rooms on either side of a narrow hallway, doors neatly hinged and better constructed than the doors in a modern subdivision house: a veritable hotel for chickens! — and comfortable, darkly grandiose as a gentlemen’s club in the warm, obstructed light of a summer afternoon. But not for its beauty did Will Hodge Sr preserve that chickenhouse. It was a fine barn, like the others; worth a small fortune, and not just in cash but in family memories as well. A man shouldn’t let things go. And so, in short, he had patched the barns and had patched up lives, as well as he could. But in the end his daughter had burned down the chickenhouse, lighting papers in the incinerator when the wind was wrong, and for all his work the secret process of ruin that whispered in every leaf, that gnawed inside walls or boldly howled in the woods at night — the process of death, to name its name — had outraced him. And therefore he would live no more by grand visions he couldn’t understand, would no more seek the connections of things or grieve that, ignorant of them, he might be more guilty than he knew. “One mouse at a time, like a cat,” said Hodge.