John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Mullen leaned forward slowly. “What are you talking about?”

“Mouse turds,” Clumly hissed. “Horse manure.”

“You’re like a madman.”

Clumly nodded. “It’s the Times.” At last he fell silent.

Moss said, “What he’s saying makes sense.” His eyes fixed on Mullen.

“But is he competent?” Mullen said. “I’m talking very frankly, you understand. This is just an informal chat.”

Moss drew back, then turned his head to look once more at Clumly.

Uphill said, “I’ll lose men because of this morning. And don’t fool yourself. That’s the reason he done it.”

“I’ve got work to do,” Clumly said. “If you’re through with all this-”

Mullen’s head turned. “All right, Fred. You may go. You can wait in the hall.”

Clumly stood up.

“I’m sorry about this,” Mayor Mullen said. His head was thrust forward and tipped.

“I can see that. Let me know what you decide.”

The Mayor looked at him. “I’m truly sorry.”

“You sound like you’ve decided already.”

Nobody spoke. Clumly turned to the door.

It was Moss who brought the news. He stood with his head tipped, weight despairingly on one leg. He smiled, gently cynical, cigarette poised in his lean hand, between his thumb and four fingers. “It was a foregone conclusion, right?” he said. He looked past Clumly’s shoulder. “Who can escape if he’s investigated? I couldn’t. Nobody could, right? Our best judgment is that you should step down. We realize it may be a mistake. We all make mistakes.”

Clumly nodded, his right hand clutching his left.

“Finish out the day,” he said. He looked off into space, and it was as if he was thinking what he would do in Clumly’s place. He would finish out the day. He did not seem to guess that his heart would be broken.

An informal investigation, the Mayor had said. Clumly wept. “He lied to me,” he said. “The Mayor told me”—he sobbed—”told me a lie.”

Clumly cried for a long time. Mr. Moss brought him coffee, and Mr. Peeper went out and got him two donuts and would not hear of letting Clumly pay for them. “It’s just one of those unfortunate occurrences,” he said miserably. “This whole business is a mess,” he said. At last Clumly went to the room which said GENTLEMEN and washed his face.

Kozlowski said, “You got a message. On the radio. I wrote it down.” He held out a slip of paper.

“Good morning Chief Clumly,” the message said. “I invite you to one last conference. Here are my instructions …”

Clumly read no further. Mouth open, heart drained, he looked at Kozlowski.

“You going, Chief?”

Clumly could not think. He said, a kind of whimper, “Quit fooling with me, Kozlowski.”

Kozlowski pursed his lips, at last realizing what had happened. “Sorry,” he said, then: “They found the trooper.”

Clumly scarcely heard it. “When you listen to the tapes …”

“The Sunlight Man?” He looked incredulous. “He’ll kill you. It’s a fact.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think—”

“He’ll kill you.”

“It doesn’t matter.” He would have wept, if he weren’t wept out. He said abruptly, “Come with me. Watch.”

“Not on your life. Not alone.” He switched on the motor, shifted, pulled out onto the street. “What are you after? Tell the truth.”

For a long time Clumly said nothing. At last he sniffed. “You make a man think, Kozlowski.”

Kozlowski cracked the door, like a farmer, and spit. At last he said, “It’s a funny feeling, riding around with a dead man.”

3

He went on as before, but he looked preoccupied. That afternoon they visited Kathleen Paxton. The sign on the iron gates said Pleasant Hills. The gates stood open. Kozlowski drove in. Once out of the trees, the driveway dipped sharply and they could see the broad, mercurial Genesee River, and, right up against the river, on the nearer bank, the high, many-gabled house. “Used to be the Bell place,” Clumly said. “Canal money. I don’t know how long it’s been a hospital. Ten, fifteen years.”

A furtive old man stood in the turn-around with a watering can. As they drove up, he ran away.

“Like a prison,” Kozlowski said.

Clumly said vaguely, “People say it’s a snakepit. I wouldn’t know. Lot of shock treatments here. Lot of people say they’re a medieval torture. They work the same way as a blow on the head with a hammer. Some psychiatrist says. Read it in the Reader’s Digest. Then there’s other people say a shock treatment does some good, reorganizes the brain patterns, something. It makes you wonder. You know that in any profession there’s bound to be some incompetents, dishonest people, people full of malice — schoolteachers, doctors, lawyers, dentists. So you know it’s possible these shock treatments really are a kind of crime against the public. But then again, you know there’s always the radicals, too — teachers that don’t think there should be grades, the ministers who say you should quit paying taxes if the money’s going for war. Hard to tell which is which if you’re not some kind of a specialist. It’s like high-speed dentist’s drills.” He sighed. “Some dentists’ll tell you a high-speed drill is the only thing to have, and then others’ll say it breaks down the structure of the tooth. What’s a man to do? Things work ’emselves out, eventually — the right side ends up winning, I s’pose — but that’s no help if you’re sitting in a dentist’s chair before it’s been decided.” Again, a sigh. “It used to be you could tell when a man was wrong just by the way he went at it: you could tell those American Nazis were wrong by how red their faces got. Same with the Communists. But this House Un-American Activities Committee, for instance — what’s a man to do when on one side there’s all those kids with beards and on the other side that man from I think it’s Texas? I saw on TV where one of those rioters from Berkeley stood up in front of the camera and told how her parents were hypocrites and liars and how she was better, shacking up with some long-haired dope addick or whatever, and I thought, Now there’s a lunatic if I ever see one, but then I read about how all these professors are right there behind her, saying all how a university is the experiment grounds for the future and how it’s not enough to theorize about how society ought to be fixed, you have to act, even if some of the actions don’t turn out. It’s hard to know where you stand any more. The same thing with shock, if you know what I mean. You feel like you ought to be doing something, come out, one side or the other. But who’s to say? I went in the drugstore, couple days ago, I ordered a ham on rye. Came out all fat, not enough meat for a horsefly, and a piece of lettuce looked like maybe they found it on the floor behind the stove. I says, “Wait a minute now, this ham on rye’s not fit for a person to eat.” Waitress says, “Don’t look at me, sir. I just work here.” Everybody just works here. If the sandwiches are gonna be fit to eat, somebody’s got to behave as if he owned the place. Suppose it was your kid they were gonna give shock treatments to. You willing to leave it to the specialists? But what’s a man to do! What’s this world coming to, Kozlowski?”

“Should we go in?” Kozlowski said.

“Mmm,” Clumly said, startled. He opened his door. He got out and waited while Kozlowski came around and stood beside him. Clumly hooked his thumbs inside his belt and squinted at the porch. He couldn’t see too good. He sighed.

Slowly, as though they were personally to blame for the misery and pain inside, they went up the steps, rang at the locked door, and stood with their heads bowed, waiting.