John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

They were waiting for him when he pulled up next to the house. He set the emergency and got out to open the sliding side door in back. As soon as it was open, Nick Slater came out, as quick and silent as a shadow in the woods, darted through the patch of light from the kitchen window, and slid the rifle into the truck, then climbed in after it.

Taggert stayed where he was, leaning against the garage door, looking thoughtfully at the truck. Luke’s mother stood on the woodshed steps behind him, ugly as death, her white arms folded.

“You coming?” Luke said.

His uncle looked at him exactly as he’d looked at the truck. He probably couldn’t have said himself what prevented his getting in, it seemed to Luke; still, he hesitated. His lower lip was drawn a little, his eyebrows lowered, in the look of a man trying to remember something. Abruptly, as if coming to himself, he nodded. He picked up the suitcases, one in each hand, half-turned his head toward Luke’s mother in a kind of nod, then came to the truck door. He set the suitcases down, then lifted the larger one up toward where Nick was reaching for it, trying to hurry him up. Luke helped him with the second one — they were as heavy as bags of concrete — then bent over and interlocked his hands to help his uncle in. His uncle put his hand on Luke’s shoulder but again hesitated. When Luke glanced up at his face, the eyes had a glitter in them and the lips were pursed. Luke said, “We better move.”

He nodded and lifted his shoe to Luke’s locked hands. The man got in easily, almost without any effort on Luke’s part, and Luke reached for the door.

“Leave it open so we can see,” his uncle said.

Luke obeyed.

His mother said quietly, behind him, “Be careful.”

He nodded, irritated, and walked to the cab. Then, just as he was about to get in, he changed his mind, turned abruptly, and strode back to where his mother stood watching. Before she knew what he was going to do, he kissed her cheek and took one of her hands and pressed it and tried to meet her eyes. He couldn’t. He looked at the line where her forehead met her hairline — looked hungrily, the way he’d looked, earlier, at the cluttered garage.

“Are you all right?” she said.

He nodded, a brief jerk back and to one side, then turned and ran back to the truck. He jumped in, eased into first, switched on the headlights, and started up. He drove slowly, getting into no gear higher than sixth, until he reached the highway. This was not the time to be stopped by some trooper. Then, when he’d turned onto 98, he moved up through the gears to twelfth. His chest filled with excitement and fear.

He was curving up into the mountains now, coming sooner than he meant to to the place. He loved the rough old battered road with its sudden curves and jolts and dips, its lazy towns with their yellow lights and enormous, comfortable trees, and between the towns glimpses of moonlit river, black and white cows in the blackness of a field, isolated farmhouse lights, once in a while a gas station with old-fashioned handcrank pumps. He’d driven it often, carrying gypsum, or television parts from Sylvania, or batteries, or cameras from Eastman. In the valleys he came into feathery patches of fog, and he would slow for them, but then as the road rose higher he came to open spaces incredibly wide and beautiful. He saw shooting stars. He could no longer see the glow of Stony Hill.

He was not afraid. He had no regrets. Yet even now he went over and over it, trying to know for sure that he was right.

She’d made his father read books, whatever books were popular with the college professors she slept with that year, and he would read them, impatient and irritable but gutless, and he would find them stupid and would know no words to express his feeling, or none she understood. They were tripe, he said. Just tripe. They had nothing to do with anything. And she would take it for a proof of his stupidity and would not even tell him why she thought — why her college professors thought — they were masterpieces. But sometimes he — Luke — or Will Jr would read them, and they would talk about the books and his father would listen and suddenly break in, trying, as feebly as ever, to say what he meant. They talked about Pierre. Will Jr said it was full of pointless froth, mere tiresome palaver, a tiresome rumble of symbolism. She said it was profound, the story of their life. Will Jr said Pierre was Melville and if Melville denied it he was a liar or, more likely, a fool. Suddenly, explosively, his father said, sitting watchful in his corner, “Hah!” which meant he agreed. She said fiercely, hardly turning in his direction, “For heaven’s sake stick to things you understand!” He was abashed. But Luke had cried out, close to tears, “He’s right, anyone can see he’s right.” And then Will Jr came into it, defending his father, and she made quips and smashed every word he said and fought him with all the viciousness she knew how to muster — she knew plenty — and all at once Luke, the one perpetually caught in the middle — was defending her, talking about symbolism. Though he might have as easily taken Will’s side, because he too was right, they were both right but on terms that could never be reconciled. It was a stupid novel, it was a brilliant novel. She always won, and she always had to win again, and she never could win. And as for his father, he worked and slept and grew fatter and fatter, let his hair grow out in his nose and ears, carried a smell like a Polish wedding, could not tell a painting from a hole in the wall unless it was a painting of horses or a barn, went to sleep and snored like a bull at the movies, called the bathroom the restroom, wore armbands and suspenders and smelled of tobacco, and her objections to all this were to him not only foolish but dangerously immoral. Will Jr had not had to judge it: he’d grown up with Uncle Ben, before they were in a position to bring the family together, so he, Luke, who’d spent only three summers with Uncle Ben, was the one driven to understand them. He could understand — how could he help it? — why she had to destroy all her husband’s name meant, why she’d gotten Stony Hill and sold it to the Billingses, why she’d mocked him and tormented him and tried to stir up enmity between him and his brothers. And he could understand why his father hated her, believed her insane, even toyed once — but tentatively, clumsily, robbed of all confidence in himself — with having her arrested. And so all his life he had alternated between trying to make peace between them and hating them both, and in the end he had found he had no choice but to cling to them stupidly, voluntarily allow himself to be pulled apart, snarling first at one, then at the other, with angry love. He was now repulsive to them both. To each he seemed the image of the other.

They were wrong. He was himself. Or rather he was the impossible union of both of them, the closing of the circle. More than that.

What was incredible was that it was he, of all people, who was going to achieve their crackpot dream. He became more keenly aware of the wind rushing by, the vastness of space before him and time behind. It was as if the idea came not from his own mind but from someone seated in the truck beside him, eagerly dictating thoughts in his ear. You, Luke, are the ghost. That’s what they’ve wanted, what all of them struggled toward and missed and fell away from into disillusionment, or self-hatred, or compromise. Because of a simple error, the notion that when it came it would be what it was the first time, a thing of this world.

He leaned forward over the steering wheel, peering ahead, searching out the thought. He’d come to another small town now, a few houses, all with their lights out, a store with only the neon burning in front, a single traffic light. It turned red as he watched, a quarter-mile away in front of him, and it dawned on him, but only dimly, far in the back of his mind, that he was going more than sixty. He hit the brake and shifted down and got stopped just in time, an instant before it turned green. He shifted up again, automatically, his mind never leaving its hurtling train of thought, and before he reached the outer limits of the village he was almost back on sixty. The whispering dictator hurried on, snatching at straws.