John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Kozlowski spit out the window. “You’re really feeling chipper this morning,” he said.

“I feel horrible,” Clumly roared — and well he might! However, he felt very good, there was no denying it. “Look there,” he said.

On both sides of the road the fields were piled high with wrecked cars; rusty, murdered-looking in the staring sunlight.

“That’s violence, Kozlowski,” Clumly said. “Say an average of one dead man to a car, or one dead woman or child, whatever you please. There’s a couple thousand dead men in there. Could be us, you know that? Man could come wheeling around the curve up ahead—”

The blood drained out of his face. As if he’d caused it to happen, a cattle truck careened around the corner and shot past them. For a time after that, neither of them spoke.

“All right,” Clumly said. “That’s violence. It’s everywhere you look, from kids in school to the President of the United States sending thousands of men to go die in Vietnam when it isn’t even a war. Never been declared. You cognizant of that, Kozlowski? And more dying that you never even hear about. Manchuria. That’s how we clean the slums. Turn left up there.” He pointed.

Kozlowski turned.

Clumly said, “They come off their run-down tenant farms that the Government’s taking over for a park or a Job Corps center or some industry is taking over to run big scale, they come North from their shanties where they grew up with nine, ten brothers and sisters and, not a job in sight, they look for work. No work. They’re black, for one thing, and not the right age, for another, and for another thing they’re full of impatience, so’s if they get a job they have a fight right away, or they come to work drunk, and they lose it. So then somebody like you or me goes in and arrests some kid for climbing a transom and they start shooting guns at us, and a crowd builds up, and then pretty soon the looting and burning starts. All the two-bit grocers and pawnbrokers and bartenders lose their places and collect their insurance and scram to someplace safe, and then the insurance companies say ‘That’s enough of that!’ and they quit insuring in places where there might just conceivably be trouble. Think of it, Kozlowski. Ghetto skins along by pawning and whining to the grocer to keep the kids alive, buying groceries on credit — no serious business anywhere in sight except for the houses of ill repute and the junky line — can’t even slip over to the posh sections for the stealing business, no cars to get there — and the place getting thicker and thicker with people, all boiling like white-hot lead, half of them ready to kill you on sight from pure jealousy and imaginary or real persecution — and now the insurance people pull out, pawnshops and grocers and taverns shut down, no more hope for them, nothing in sight but violence. They come crawling out into the city like rabid dogs, spilling over their limits, mugging people on daylight streets, killing people for sport, and raping women. We take shots at ’em. What do they expect? We catch ’em drunk and we throw the book at ’em. Why not? Violence on violence! But not here, you say. Thank God, not in Batavia.” He sucked in and out on the cigar, getting it going again. Kozlowski was scrooched down behind the wheel looking up at where the road wound into the trees at the top of the hill.

“Paxton place is up where the pine trees are,” Clumly said. He let out smoke with the words. He said hurriedly, “But noplace is exempt. Batavia may not be Rochester or Buffalo, no riots here, Negroes still finding jobs, one kind another. Grocery stores, cleaning out garages, mowing lawns, picking at the dump. But they know people in Buffalo and Rochester, they got friends there. Heat up one piece of a minority group and you heat up all of it, like a frying pan. And meantime you’ve got the country kids whose families have moved into town, had to sell off the farm. And then you’ve got the sons of the doctors and lawyers and preachers, with all the money they want and nothing to believe in. Drunk-driving the big cars their daddies bought ’em, no ideas in their heads but that they’re better than somebody else — tougher, smarter, more sex power. We had a case last year would’ve made your hair stand up. Couple kids pulled in at the Checkerboard Drive-In on West Main, had a girl in a blanket in the back seat. Good families, all three of ’em. Parked right next to one of our men — to mock him, must be. Cop got suspicious, reached in and pulled the blanket down. Naked she was. Turned out they were having a contest, they’d screwed that girl twenty-three times between them since noon. How ‘bout that, Kozlowski?”

“My goodness,” Kozlowski said dully. He’d come to the driveway now. He turned in and drove up to the porch, switched off the motor.

“It’s a hell of a world, Kozlowski,” Clumly said. He squinted at him, trying to see what he was thinking, but Kozlowski showed nothing. He merely nodded. Clumly looked up at the house, heart ticking painfully, and opened his car door. “Les go,” he said. “It’s almost ten. We better hurry this.”

Professor Combs met them. He was wearing the faded red bathrobe Paxton had had on when he died, or such was Clumly’s guess. He showed no embarrassment or alarm. He was old, and though he dyed his hair, he’d been through too much in his time to be bothered by the more trivial details of life and death.

“We’ve been expecting you,” he said. He had a wide, white nose, powdered-looking, perhaps just with age, and there were liver-spots on his temples. His cheeks were unnaturally red, maybe rouged. White hair grew out of his ears. He said, “I’ll take you to Elizabeth.”

“I hope we’re not getting you up,” Clumly said.

The Professor did not answer. He probably didn’t hear it. They stepped down from the entryway to the large white livingroom where apparently no one had spent more than half an hour in twenty years. The furniture hadn’t been dusted in months. The fireplace was empty except for a few scraps of paper that had been there so long they looked as if they’d been rained on.

“This way,” the Professor said.

They found Elizabeth Paxton on what had once been the first-floor sunporch, now a makeshift bedroom for the summer. The Professor’s clothes were there, hanging on the back of a peeling kitchen chair. The old woman’s own clothes lay in a heap beside the bed. She lay with the covers pulled over her, shoulders bare, bruised. But what was more shocking than all the rest, to Clumly, was the woman’s face. She made no effort this morning to hide the birthmark. She seemed to flaunt it. It was purple, brownish around the edges, and it stretched from the corner of her left eye across her wrinkled cheek to the right side of her chin.

“Good morning,” she said. She did not bother to smile and she showed no embarrassment.

Clumly nodded.

“Professor Combs told me to expect you,” she said. “Because of all your questions at the cemetery.” If she was annoyed or disgusted, she did not show that either. The Professor sat down on the edge of the bed and she reached out to cover his hand. His colored face was like a doll’s.

“You’ve been ill?” Clumly said.

“Not at all,” she said. “What makes you think so?”

He thought about it. It was as if whatever feeble life still remained in the big old house had slid toward this room, the two old people sharing one bed like corpses pushed in a ditch. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve and squinted.

“You came … for the funeral?” Clumly said.

The Professor didn’t hear it. He turned to Mrs. Paxton.

“For the funeral, yes,” she said.

“And he moved in, then?”

She had no intention of explaining. “Moved in, yes.”