John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Hodge bent his head and looked up-from-under at him through his shaggy eyebrows. He slid his jaw out. “Write it to Taggert Hodge,” he said.

The old man blanched. Hodge had expected something like that, had more or less expected the jerk of the lips, too, and the closing of the checkbook. “My lawyer will be in touch with you,” Paxton said.

Hodge nodded. “Fine.”

But as once more he turned to leave, the old man said, “What’s your game, Hodge? You knew I wouldn’t do that.” Eyes mere slits.

Hodge pursed his lips. At last, slowly, as if thoughtfully, watching his stubby, scuffed shoes as he moved, he crossed to Paxton’s desk. The old man waited, and though he seemed in command as usual, Hodge could sense that all his power was drained from him now, because for once in his life he couldn’t tell which battlements to defend. That was what Hodge was counting on, though now he was already suspecting he’d made a mistake. But Paxton’s hands were liver-spotted, his mouth pale. Wolf without teeth. It could work, he thought, and doubted it. He put his hands in his suitcoat pockets and balled them to fists. He said, “You control grown sons like babies. They haven’t got a dime of their own.”

“That’s my business,” Paxton said, baffled. He wasn’t confident of it. You could see the wheels spinning in his head.

Hodge met his red-veined eyes as still as dust and pressed quickly. “Set them up in something. Put them on their feet.”

“You know I can’t do that. What in hell are you talking about?”

“Why can’t you?”

Paxton hung fire. “My sons hired you?”

It was a question he’d forgotten to expect. He said again, “Why can’t you?”

After a moment, quietly, the old man said, “Because they’re sick, irresponsible, and dumb.”

Hodge nodded, panicky. “I’ll see you in court.” The phrase, totally unplanned, pleased him and gave him a feeling of hope.

But Paxton shook his head. “Wait up.” He took a deep breath and then another, the deep breaths of a man very sick himself. “What have they promised you?” he asked.

“Nothing.” It was the truth, strictly speaking, but he was on bad ground. The sons had said they couldn’t help Taggert with Kathleen’s treatment, because the old man held the pursestrings. He’d thought at the time, They’re weaklings. They’d do it if we found the right pressure.

Still the old eyes searched him, cunning and baffled and something else too; after an instant Hodge caught what it was: wounded.

“Little fools,” he said. “Going to you of all people! I never would have believed they had the guts.”

“But you’ll take the deal,” Hodge said. He had lost.

Paxton shook his head, but it didn’t mean no; not yet. “They’re fools,” he said. There was pity in it as well as disgust. Then, icily: “You should have advised your clients they’ll be disinherited. You warned them?”

Hodge had gone too far — the old man would talk to his sons and the whole shabby trick would be out. “My clients?” he said, clumsily. “Your sons are no clients of mine. You jump to conclusions.”

Paxton’s rage flared up and died away again in an instant. A semi came rumbling past the window, and whatever it was that the old man said to himself Hodge missed. The phone rang on the desk. Paxton ignored it. He closed his eyes for a moment, frowning, and breathed deeply again. “I see,” he said at last, and Hodge knew it was true. Assuming all motives in the world were hate and selfishness, Paxton had guessed right again. “You think you can get them to support their sister.” He did not bother to look up for confirmation. He was himself again, firm and full of lightning. “You miscalculate. They’ll be bankrupt inside six months.” He remembered the checkbook. As if in terrible weariness or worse, he opened the desk drawer with his right hand and with his left slid the checkbook over and let it fall in. He got up and went to the window to look without interest at his trackbarns. “You all think I’m wrong,” he said. “All of you. Even her.” Hodge couldn’t tell if he meant Kathleen or his wife.

The old man’s office was cold. Hodge lowered his chin to his chest and waited for it to be over.

But then something happened, inside Paxton’s mind. Hodge would never know what, though he had his guesses. Without turning from the window, Paxton said, “All right.” A silence, and then, after another moment, “You win.” He took another deep breath. He would say no more.

Hodge withdrew. He had succeeded, he had not won. But he’d gone there, at least he’d done that.

It was in April, two months later, that Paxton went into the hospital with the first of his heart attacks. Hodge understood.

Now he frowned. Stores were closing, the lights of the city dying out. It came to him that in his moon-gathering — his self-pity, to name its name — he had failed to register the arrival of the square dark red Hudson, shiny as wine, which he recognized instantly, now that he noticed it, as Judge Sam White’s old car. It was parked in front of the police station, empty. He’d gone in, then; no doubt to talk to Clumly. It was not usual for the Judge to come out in the world except for brief midday visits to his office. Uphill was gone from in front of the firehouse, and so had most of the men who’d been sitting there. Hodge tipped his head, musing, then opened his door quietly and got out. Hands in pockets, he walked in the direction of the fire-house until he had a clear view of Clumly’s office through the window. He couldn’t see the Judge, but Clumly was there all right, standing in the middle of the room, nodding to someone and looking at a paper in his hands.

Behind Hodge, someone said, “Funny things going on over there.” A high thin country voice.

He turned. It was one of the firemen, a young man with milky white hair and thick glasses. Hodge nodded, trying to make out the fireman’s features. He gave the fireman no answer, and the silence grew.

“Winter’s coming,” the young man said at last. “They’ll be hoarfrost soon. You wouldn’t believe it, a hot night like this, but it’s coming. First hoarfrost. After that — ice.”

“It’s hot all right,” Hodge said. “Not a breath stirring.”

Clumly was still there, nodding at the paper in his hands.

“The horses have long coats,” the fireman said. “Happened early last year, too. Storms coming, bad ones. We’ll be fighting fires and they’ll be ice on our boots. I don’t like it.”

Hodge looked at him. Still he could make out no features, only the whiteness of the young man’s face and hair against the darkness of the firehouse wall. The glasses glittered with pinpoints of light. At last Hodge grunted as a sign of agreement and moved away toward his car.

“You believe in omens?” the man called after him.

Hodge sucked his upper lip under his lower and was silent.

Ten minutes later, Hodge seated in his car again, the Judge came out, walking slowly, as if not from age and drunkenness but by laborious choice, and climbed tortuously into his car and ground on the starter, with the key off perhaps, and at last got the motor going. Oil fumes billowed up. The square car started very smoothly and inched down the street, solemn and oblivious, like an old Phaeton carriage from another time and place, unhurried, dire of purpose.

Then Clumly’s office light went off, and the same instant — not by coincidence, Hodge had a feeling — the bearded Freeman appeared beside the Plymouth, opening the door.

“You brought food?” Hodge said — though even now, after all this time, he wasn’t hungry.

“I forgot,” Freeman said lightly and shrugged like a minstrel-show Negro. He was watching the police station.