John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

The Old Man knew the secret, that was all. He knew how to see into all of them, feel out their hearts inside his own, love them and hate them and forgive them: he understood that nothing devoutly believed is mere error, though it may only be half-truth, and so he could give them what they needed. That was what it meant, the line his father was always quoting. . “There are always politicians. Good politicians. The people turn this way and that, unsure what they want, unsure how to get it, unsure whether it’s good for them. . ” Something like that. He got up outside himself to where he could act as though he himself, his own life, were irrelevant. That’s all it’s ever taken.

He was coming to the place he’d decided on, and was afraid. He felt as he’d felt a thousand times in his grandfather’s barn or his Uncle Ben’s, perched on a beam, uncertain whether or not he had the nerve to leap into the hay ten feet below — except that it was worse now, an uncertainty so violent his body rose up in revolt. Sweat ran like rain between his eyebrows and pasted his shirt to his back and trickled down his belly. He had a headache coming on, rushing over him faster than a headache had ever done before, sharp points pressing in through his skull from every side. He had to squint to tolerate the headlights. But in spite of all that, his mind was clear, it seemed to him, clearer than it ever had been before, and he knew he was not wrong, not fooling himself, not crazy. He was no Jesus Christ stretched on a rood for the salvation of mankind, but he understood the joy of that, and the terror and pain. He had no grand cause: a petty joy for a petty creature. Better than Ben Jr, who’d died in a war he didn’t like; better than Old Man Hardesty who’d gone down almost without knowing what had hit him.

Now he was there; the long bridge opened out ahead of him, an eighth of a mile away, silver girders reaching out across the silent pitch-dark valley, the black further side of it just beginning to come into view — up over his head, stars, motionless and perfect as the infinite span between the heartbeats of God. He bore down on the accelerator and flexed the fingers soaking wet inside his gloves. The bridge rushed toward him, and he was conscious of the rush and at the same time conscious of the infinite time it took the truck to reach the place, and now suddenly all his pain vanished as if by magic and he was reading the sign twenty feet from the bridge—35 MPH — as though he had all eternity to read it. He heard himself saying aloud — very loud in the hollow darkness of the cab— I’m sorry. Then a jolt, a tremendous tearing noise of steel behind him, and he was weightless, falling, hair flying in his eyes, the truck turning over and over like a lop-sided boulder. A shock of violent heat and light went through him and he saw the ground and a tree, and the same instant he was dead.

Nevertheless, the sacrifice was in vain. The Sunlight Man and Nick Slater were not in the truck. They’d jumped out in the last little village, taking the suitcases with them. The Sunlight Man could not have said himself why he did it. A hunch that pulled like a cable. Another piece — he might have said — of luck.

Except that the Sunlight Man wouldn’t have made that mistake, even for a moment. His luck had already run out long ago. Though he didn’t die in the crash, it was of course Luke’s crash that killed him.

1

The old man stood on the bridge, big as an elephant, shaking with sobs, staring down with tear-blinded eyes at where the lights were, the air around him still filled like a cup with the smell of the truck’s explosion in the bottom of the valley, and on the ground beside him lay the bloodsoaked gloves the police had brought up for identification, and the ridiculous Eagle Scout ring and the shoe and the half-burnt cap. He sobbed in great whoops. He was a huge and erect man, at least as ordinary mortals run, and his voice boomed out all the length of the night to beyond where August stars were falling like scratches. If he was guilty of limitations of foresight, or subtlety, or humor, or taste — if he had been foolish in his time and partly unworthy — his grief was anyhow absolute and most profound and better than justice or mercy or wisdom or any of the other great words of the ancient schools.

He knew all right why his son was dead, and who he had meant to protect and redeem, and why. Hodge waited, bellowing his grief at the night, until they brought him the certain word that there were no other bodies, only Luke. Then, little by little, his sobbing stopped and, empty of heart, indifferent to all but his grief, he was able to think in ways that had been closed to him before. He thought clearly now, with absolute indifference to himself, beyond the pleasure or pain of vengeance, beyond any taint of satisfaction or reward or even common dignity, beyond even shame at his having failed to act directly, impersonally before. His son’s sacrifice, however impure it may have been, had purified Will Hodge. He was indifferent to the hunt, indifferent to the crimes already committed or yet to be committed, whether the crimes of cops or of robbers: it was necessary, merely, that order prevail for those who were left, when the deadly process had run itself down; necessary to rebuild.

He said (he could not see the man he talked to, had only the blurry impression of a youngish face, a State Trooper’s cap, a cigarette), “He wasn’t driving on — business. He was helping your so-called Sunlight Man and the Indian boy escape. If they’re not in the wreckage, they’re somewhere on the road between here and Attica, or they’re riding with some travelling salesmen as hitchhikers. You’ll get them. It hasn’t been long.”

“You’re sure of all this?”

Hodge nodded. “Chief Clumly can tell you.” After a moment: “He’s been meeting with your Sunlight Man. Been having long talks.”

“Meeting him and doing nothing? Letting him go?”

Hodge scowled. He said, “No doubt he has his reasons.”

The trooper stood in front of him a moment longer, as if thinking about it, then took the cigarette from his mouth and went around the side of the car to his radio. Hodge turned, blinking the tears from his eyes, hands behind his back, and walked away. His mind was full of images.

Luke had been blond when he was a child. Beautiful and odd and unnaturally gentle. You could put him in a room …

Once — a matter of days ago, but it felt like centuries — it had seemed to him urgent that he do as he’d done, that he act, finally, take the bull by the horns, not simply gaze timidly from behind his tree as he’d done all those centuries upon centuries before. But now all that seemed trifling, a kind of delusion of grandeur. Not where it was at, Freeman would say. Because of course he had not acted, had merely put himself in position to act, watching them all, out-guessing them, growing fatter and fatter on his sense of power, unmoved by any argument for ending the hunt.

He stood with his hands in his coatpockets, studying emptiness.

To the stars he said, “You wanted to see me on my can, is that it?” It was all right, if that was what it was. What mattered was that it might be that and it might not, because it was possible that stars, too, had happened to notice how the world stretched out from a broken bridge — had seen it all in ant’s perspective — or that they knew beforehand, without ever having had to see from the bridge where Hodge had stood.

Freeman’s voice said, inside his mind, or Ben’s, maybe, “You can’t just walk out. But then again it’s no good to get up too close. You know what I mean.”

Hodge scowled, then got in the car. Little by little his system learned to tolerate what he’d seen. He stopped at a gas station and phoned his wife, that is, ex-wife, to tell her what had happened. He would know only long afterward that Tag had repaired the line no more than an hour before. After that, he drove to the police station in Batavia to wait. There he tried to phone Will Jr to tell him, but he was away. Hodge told the policemen, Clarence Pieman and Figlow, the news, wept and told the whole story, with all the details, and told how the troopers were hunting for them now, and wept, and moved beyond his vision of distances. His mind held, not as warring principles but as a solemn resolution, the length and breadth of the valley stretching out as if endlessly from the burning wreck, and the close-knit pattern in the wallpaper of Will Jr’s livingroom. Figlow sat at his desk, silent, and the desklight shining on his tipped-down forehead made his eyes seem only shadows. Beyond him, Hodge could make out vaguely in imagination the hairy intellectual face of Freeman, who could walk out and who, also, had no doubt wanted to see Will Hodge, Attorney, on his can. Which was all words.