John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

He wasn’t over his indignation at Clumly’s refusal to admit what had obviously happened last night at his, Will Hodge’s, apartment. He should be grateful, no doubt; Clumly’s stubborn blindness gave Taggert a break. Will Hodge wanted his brother to escape, of course: what they would do to a man involved in a policeman’s murder was terrible to think of. Not that Taggert should get off scot-free forever. Taggert wouldn’t want that himself, if his mind were right. But much as he wanted his brother to escape their hasty violence of pistols and rifles, he could not keep his mind on that. Taggert would never have gotten into jail in the first place, likely, if it weren’t for his knowledge that in a pinch there was always old Will to haul him out. “They use me,” he said aloud. He thought: with scorn. With unspeakable scorn Chief Clumly had said, Hooligans. That’s what it’ll be! And Will Hodge, though he knew it was Taggert he was trapping if he forced Fred Clumly to the truth — but knowing too, with the force of dynamite blasting through his veins, the rage of being taken for a fool by a muddled old fool like Clumly, and knowing in his numbed and prickling skin the indifference of Miller and the other policemen to whom he was merely the apartment owner, a clumsy obstruction to be walked around — but, worst of all, the shocking indifference, even scorn, yes, of his own brother, Tag, who had walked out quietly into the night, fallen angel once loved, leaving propped against the wall the horrible corpse of a woman who if she wasn’t a friend was anyway someone Will Hodge had known — Will Hodge, burning up like coal, had boomed out: Hooligans my hat! Small as two nails were Clumly’s eyes. The rain howled down in horror, slammed out of heaven. But what Hodge thought was: Tell a man often enough he’s dirt and sooner or later he’ll be mud in your eye. He smiled grimly and tightened his two-fisted grip on the steering wheel.

That was not all there was to it. When Will Hodge had awakened at the motel this morning, mind full of fury like hot red light, he was assaulted not only by the image of Clumly struggling to cover his stupidity and the old woman’s dead accusing eyes, but also by painful images of other times and places that were now all one with the hour in the apartment last night. And one image especially: in the yellow-beige motel room as sterile and gross as a doctor’s office he lived through again the mockery and wrath of the woman in Clumly’s office. He understood. Who wouldn’t be distraught, hearing of the murder of her son, seeing his shattered face in the morgue? He forgave her. With anger and forgiveness mingling in him like two writhing seas he had resolved to go see her and tell her in no uncertain terms that whatever he could do he would do, to the limit of his ability and, needless to say, at no cost to herself. He had dressed carefully, had even taken pains to cut the hairs in his nose (“Obscene,” his wife used to say; “not even pigs have hairs coming out of their noses!”) — and had cleaned his battered, chipped fingernails and polished his crooked shoes and checked his tie for stains and had gone to the house.

It was dark green. Cardboard in a second-story window. You expected Negroes in the houses next door, but this street was still Italian, mostly new Italian though, just off the boat. He rang the doorbell several times, then realized that perhaps it didn’t work, and so he knocked. Even now no one came. He glanced at his watch. Seven-thirty. He felt a blush prickling up through his neck and was tempted to step out of sight before anyone came. But he stayed. There wasn’t a sound from inside the house, and he went on waiting, gazing down the street toward the corner grocery store. Only seven-thirty. In the same way, once when he was a child of ten, he had agreed to ride to school on his wooden-wheeled bicycle with a group of friends from neighboring farms, and he’d gotten up and gone to their houses one after another and had waited and waited and finally had left without them, baffled and wounded by their cruel betrayal; he had found when he got to the school that he was hours ahead of his time. He held his watch to his ear now and found that it was running. At last he tiptoed down the porch steps and out toward the street. He’d have breakfast, though he wasn’t hungry. Then, behind him, he heard the Italian woman’s voice, thick with sleep: “Well?”

“Ah!” he said. He tipped his hat and on second thought removed it and held it over his belly. Then, coming a step toward the porch: “Excuse me. I didn’t mean to get you up.”

She was wearing man’s pajamas with a black plastic raincoat over them, no doubt the first thing she’d been able to lay her hands on. “What you want?” she said. She was holding the screen door open, and he could see beyond her the yellowed wallpaper of her livingroom, dark in the corners as the skin around old people’s eyes. The house behind her was sound asleep, like the neighboring houses. The whole city lay silent. The only sounds were the roar of a bus starting up a quarter-mile away and the twittering of robins.

“I’m sorry to bother you so early in the morning,” he said. If he were his brother Ben he might have carried it off by sheer gentleness of heart; if he were his father he would not have made the mistake in the first place. But he was, for better or worse, himself. Without preamble or excuse he said, “I wanted to tell you that whatever you may think of me, I intend to do everything in my power to bring your son’s murderer to justice.”

She looked at him for a long time, her mind apparently still cobwebbed with dreams. She closed her eyes. “Jesus.”

“Do you mind if I come in?” he said. “I haven’t got a warrant.” His laugh was like a bark. (A fool to laugh at such a time, he realized.)

She seemed to consider it. Finally she said, “Come on.” She rolled her head toward the door. The coarse, curly hair falling over her shoulder was like an Indian woman’s.

Hodge took off his hat and followed her through the livingroom to the kitchen. There were toys everywhere. It was a large family. In the livingroom there was a little girl’s stove, a sink, a long shelf of old but carefully preserved toys — boxes of games, sets of dishes, stuffed animals, matchbox cars on the coffee table. There were old newspapers and magazines: Mechanix Illustrated, Horoscope.

When he was seated at the narrow formica table in the kitchen, Hodge said, “I have sons myself, Mrs. Salvador.”

“You want coffee?” she said.

“That would be fine.” He said: “Mrs. Salvador—”

“All we got is instant,” she said.

“That’s fine.”

Her brown eyes looked past him, unalive. “What you think you can do? He’s dead. What do you want?” She put the pot of water on and turned up the gas. Before he could answer, she said, all in a burst, “You came to tell me you didn’t mean to help kill him. Is that it? Forget it. I was upset. I’m still upset, yes, but today better. It wasn’t your fault. You do your job. Ok. So do I. We all do. You got kids of your own, and if you was me … Ok. What difference, to blame or not to blame, when somebody dies? No good to talk about it.”

Hodge rubbed his legs and avoided her dead eyes. “I only came to say—”

“Ok.” She was far away, not listening.

“Your idea about attorneys—”

“Ok.” She had her back to him and stood as still as a woman withdrawing into stone. The plastic raincoat was cheap, slick black. Today he felt, as he had not felt yesterday, that he really was in some unclear way responsible.

“Mrs. Salvador,” he said, “if there’s anything in this world—”

The change was sudden and terrible. One moment she was like stone or old iron; the next, she had collapsed into grief, becoming a young girl, destroyed and helpless. She stood bent as a hunchback, her hands pressed to her face as if to keep it from shattering as the boy’s had done, and her back shook. He thought of leaping up and going to her, enclosing her in his arms; but he was not his brother Ben or his father, he could only sit, sick-hearted and formal as a wood-carving, waiting. He stared at the range, the circle of blue flame under the pot, steady black iron and blue flame against the jerking of her back, and at last he said, “There there, Mrs. Salvador.”