John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

It wasn’t true. They were out on the lawn, standing bunched together in horror, their figures reflecting the churning red light. For some reason the Sunlight Man could not see them. He was seeing nothing whatever. An image in his mind.

“You wouldn’t burn the house,” Clumly said.

The Sunlight Man laughed.

He glanced at the house, then back at the man. At last he said, “You’re free.” Then: “I’m outside my jurisdiction in any case.”

“Ah, justice!” the Sunlight Man said. “Ah, duty!” Then he grew serious. “An unfair accusation. There are no obligations, I realize that. There are merely unconstrained acts of holy love and hate, that is to say, of life and death, both of which are selfless, and between them …” He brooded on it.“ … gloomy confusion.”

“You think too much,” Clumly said.

He nodded. “That’s my crime.”

“You’ll be caught.”

The Sunlight Man nodded. “You think I’ll be arrested by ‘higher’ authorities?”

Clumly thought. “I believe so,” he said. He rubbed his jaw. “Yes. That is what I believe.” He listened to the roar of the fire. The siren was howling now in Alexander.

“It’s time for you to get out. I’ll need the car.”

He nodded and felt behind him for the handle, then opened the door. When he was out and the Sunlight Man had slid over to the driver’s seat, the Sunlight Man rolled down the window. “You realize you’re letting me go. I mean, I wouldn’t want a misunderstanding. You’re freeing me.” He was staring past Clumly at the fire.

Clumly nodded.

“Good. Well, good evening, then. I want you to know, I feel friendly toward you, Fred.” Clumsily, he started the car.

Clumly put the pistol in his pocket. The siren was coming closer. He watched the prowlcar cross the overgrown lawn like a drunken animal and pull out on the road. When the taillights were out of sight he started toward the porch. Kozlowski came from the darkness of the trees behind him.

Clumly looked at him. “Why didn’t you interfere?”

“I’ll drive you back,” Kozlowski said. “Car’s the other side of the house.”

“Why didn’t you interfere?” he said again.

Kozlowski put his fists on his hips and looked at the ground. “Interfere with which of you?” he said.

They walked to the car. The house was red. The silo toppled and sparks flew up like receding stars. The barn beside the silo was now on fire too. Flames wheeled upward high into the night. A timber fell, silent in the roar of the fire.

As soon as it was dark Luke Hodge got up from the couch and, without a word to any of them, went out to the woodshed piled high with junk and took his heavy driving shoes down from their nail beside the door. The shoes were squaretoed and soft from many applications of crankcase oil, and the laces were clean new thongs as soft as chamois. He bent down and pulled the shoes on, tugged each of his socks up snug inside, then sat down on the stone step between the woodshed and the kitchen, straightened the tongues of his shoes and, at last, as meticulously as a racing skater preparing for a meet, laced the shoes up tight and knotted them. Next, as deliberately as he’d put on his shoes, he pulled on his light denim jacket, his gloves, his driving cap. When he was finished he went down the steps into the garage, stood there a moment with his hands on his hips, looking around at the clutter of bolts, wrenches, electric wire, old machinery, grease-soiled boxes, tools, rags, bicycle tape, scraps of leather, discarded manuals, weldingrods, bits of crockery, like a man taking his last look at home. He bent down to pick up a screwdriver from the grit and sludge on the garage floor, dropped it on the loaded workbench, then walked up the hill toward the barn to bring around the truck.

It was cold tonight, and the dark barn had a forlorn look already, as though it had been years ago that he had left. The whippoorwills were calling as usual, down at the corner of the lower pasture, and the chickens were already settled for the night, only the leghorns visible, queer puffs of white in the plumtrees to the right of the driveway. When he looked over his left shoulder he could see the lights of the prison, stretched across the valley like a village. Cars passed now and then on the highway, a mile below him, and somewhere over his head there was a plane; he couldn’t see it, but he could hear it. He could see the glow where Stony Hill was burning. He shook his head and looked back at the ground and, after a moment, took a breath and quickened his step.

What was strange was that he had known from the beginning that he would be the one. It figured. He was the one who’d been put in the middle, the one who had no choice but to understand both sides, however he fought; no choice even when he wanted to hate them all but to understand they were not hateable, merely human, short-sighted, limited, tired, stupid. At the cottage on Godfries’ Pond one time he’d sat on the little gray rowboat dock with Will Jr and Ben Jr — he remembered it as if it was yesterday: a night like tonight, chilly, a kind of dying of summer, sky full of lifeless, opaque light, a large, vague circle around the moon. The water moved listlessly against the palings and the pebbly shore, and now and then a boat would bump softly against the burlap on the dock or a fish would jump. Behind where the three of them sat there were radios playing softly in the cottages, and people talking, occasionally a laugh. Will and Ben were in their teens then, and he, Luke, was no more than four or five. And yet even then he’d known, without having the words for it, that he hung helpless between them the same as he hung helpless between his father and mother. He could no longer remember what Will and Ben had said or even what it was they were talking about; he could remember only the feeling of being between them, knowing what both of them meant (however wordless his knowledge was, a knowledge of their faces more than a knowledge of their talk), and knowing they were both right but mutually exclusive, as antithetical as the black trees hanging motionless over the motionless water and under the dead, luminescent sky. Will was going to do splendid things — rebuild Stony Hill maybe. It might have been that. He talked about that sometimes. And Ben, Ben was going to do nothing — seize the cachexic day, understand himself, transmogrify into a hayfield standing in the rain. No matter what it was they said. It might have been about girls, or war, or it might have been about their fathers, or beer, or college. No matter. Luke had known, as if the knowledge were implicit in the trees and sky, knowledge beyond mere words or even feelings, that all their high and narrow hopes were doomed: each would glide toward the other one’s death as the two sides of the pond glided gently and relentlessly toward the grassy outlet where the streams crossed and fell away to the river. He had said it with bitter irony in the past, but not tonight: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with Luke . … From the beginning he had been the one marked — by brute situation as much as by any gift of his — to understand them all; and finally — he could say it now without pretentiousness and without a self-deprecatory curl of the lip, for he knew at last, knew he had never hated any of them, the hatred was mere self-defense, the howling of a child not yet ready to put on his destiny like an old wool coat — finally, he knew, he was the one who’d been marked. His luck.

He slid the barn doors open and climbed up into the cab of the truck and started it. Then he sat, leaning his elbows on the steering wheel, letting the engine warm up. The barn was full of motor echoes, like music. Warm, gassy air came up through the maze of slots on the gearshift beside him, to the right of his hip, and he thought fleetingly of dropping a rag over it, but he decided not to bother, to wait until the air got hot and oppressive. He shoved the clutch in and eased into first. The clumsy old Road Ranger shuddered and after a moment, like a cracking dam, began to move. He flicked on the lights, switches 4 and 7. Holy numbers.