John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Clumly sucked at the cigar and brooded. “He’s from Texas,” he said.

“Jesus,” Kozlowski said. He threw his match out the window and spit after it.

“The trouble with you, Kozlowski,” he said, “you’re afraid to face the possibilities. You believe in flying saucers?”

“Look.”

“I read about a town in New Hampshire—”

“You going in? You’ll be late.”

“I’ll just finish this smoke,” he said. He sulked. “A man should know the truth.”

“That cigar’ll take you half an hour if you don’t get it lit first.”

Clumly laughed, dry as a dog’s laugh, and hunted for a match.

At the police station, Figlow sat at his desk going through his reports. The coffee in his blue tin cup was cold, but he went on sipping at it from time to time, to drive down the bite of his cigarettes. The coffee had a skin of silver on it, like oil-slick.

When Ed Tank came in and stood in the doorway with his motorcycle helmet hanging under his arm, Figlow looked up sharply, then nodded and said nothing.

“No more news?” Tank said.

He shook his head.

“Seems like they’d be here with the Indian by now. You think anything could’ve went wrong?”

“They’ll be here.” He looked at his watch. “Be half an hour yet anyway, maybe more.” It was true, they couldn’t possibly make it in less than that, but he too had been wondering where they were.

“Beautiful night,” Tank said. He rolled his head a little, pointing over his shoulder.

“Harvest moon,” Figlow said, “yeah. Night for werewolves.” He laughed.

Tank came over and pulled himself a cup of coffee and sat down beside Figlow’s desk. “That all you heard?” he said at last. “The kid just gave up, that’s all?”

He nodded and looked back at the papers. “Somebody saw him go in, I guess. That’s what they say. Troopers circled the barn and put the light on him and he came out. All there was to it.”

“I’d like to been there.”

“Sure.”

“Anybody would, I guess.” He lowered his square head toward the cup and lifted the cup just off the table and sipped.

Figlow looked back at the papers. “Not me,” he said.

“The hell you wouldn’t”

“I’m telling you. Suppose he’d come out shooting.”

“So?”

“So look.” He stared at the bitten-off end of the pencil a moment longer, then laid it down on the paper. Then, frowning, he swivelled his chest and clumsily reached over his lap with his left hand, unsnapped his pistol and drew it out. He held it sideways toward Tank. “Look at the thing,” he said. “Look.”

“Shoot, man, I seen guns.”

“Right. Feel how heavy. No, take it. Feel how heavy the damn thing is.”

“I got my own.”

“Sure, sure. But feel the damn weight of the thing.”

Tank studied him, then bent his head toward the coffee again.

“I don’t know,” Figlow said. He was thinking — not seriously, just playing with the thought — that if he were, say, crazy, he could turn that pistol and before Ed Tank knew what was happening he could blow Tank’s head off. He was no more going to do it than fly. The thing was, he could. He knew how solid the line was between thinking about it and doing it — as solid as the line between thinking off-hand about suicide and driving off a cliff. Nevertheless, he was thinking about it; wondering. They were bringing back the Indian boy, and who knew? Maybe the Sunlight Man would come and let him out again, or try. And maybe Figlow would be sitting here alone when the Sunlight Man came.

Tank drained the cup, raising his head as he did it, and steam went up past his forearm toward the light. “It’s these desk jobs,” he said, and wiped his mouth. “Out on a bike, a night like this, you don’t get spooked like that.” He stood up, grinning.

Figlow grinned back and gave a half-nod. Then he pushed the gun to the front of the desk and picked up the pencil again.

Chief Clumly said, sitting in the car with Kozlowski, “Because I need you here. Is that good enough? If something comes through on this radio while I’m in there making my speech, I want to know about it, that’s why. And don’t you say, ‘Nothing’s coming.’ I know different.”

Kozlowski turned his head, slightly tipped.

“And don’t ask me how I know either,” Clumly said testily. “Say it’s a hunch I’ve got.”

“Is it?”

“I don’t know. No. Not a hunch.”

“That’s what Miller said. Been expecting it all day. Saw three crows over his left shoulder or something.” He spit out the window.

They were all inside now, waiting for him, maybe. But Clumly went on stalling, waiting for the news. They’d have a business meeting first, probably. They did that sometimes, and after the business they had the speaker to finish them off. When he leaned toward the windshield and looked up he could see sky above the Grange Hall, wide globes full of moonlight, and around them, though there was no breeze down here, swiftly moving clouds. Cold weather coming, it might be.

“He’s run out of time, see?” Clumly said. Then, thoughtfully: “Both of us have. Anyway, he knows it’s over, for now, for here.”

“For here?”

“Maybe he’ll head out. If he does, that’s the last we’ll hear of him — till we read about him turning up in Mexico, say, or Peru, maybe, or Australia. And then again maybe he won’t.”

“And if he stays?”

Clumly shook his head. “Don’t know,” he said. And yet it seemed to him that he did know, had gotten that close to inside the man’s head — or if he didn’t know would anyway recognize after he saw it that it was right, exactly as it had to be. He concentrated, trying to see what it was that he knew was going to happen; and though it was ridiculous, like straining to remember the future, it seemed to him he almost had it, but it wouldn’t come quite clear. The yellow light inside the Grange looked for an instant like fire.

“You better go in,” Kozlowski said. “You got people enough on your back.”

“In a minute I will,” he said.

Ten seconds later word came that they’d picked up Millie Hodge at her son’s place, Luke’s, and gotten her story. Two policemen and a couple of neighbors were digging behind the garage for the murdered man’s body. Clumly listened in silence. He said at last, “Poor fool.”

“He won’t get away then?” Kozlowski said.

“Either way,” he said, “poor fool just the same.” And then, as though the news from Luke’s farm were somehow a conclusion, Clumly tamped out his cigar, sighed like the old man he was, and opened the car door to get out. He stood a minute straightening his coat and tugging at his trousers below the pockets — his underwear had gotten twisted up around him — all the time staring at the Grange Hall door with a mixture of dread and determination (because, it came to him, they’d all be in there, they were always at the Dairyman’s League meetings, political reasons likely — the Mayor, maybe the Fire Chief, somebody from the Daily News as well — and one way or another he must brave it out, act out his last official act as though nothing were out of the ordinary), then, heaving another sigh, he started up the walk.

To Kozlowski, sitting in the car behind him, his bent-forward walk looked like stealth, and he thought, “Poor old nut.”

All Figlow knew was this: he was sitting alone, no longer pretending to do paperwork, giving all his attention to the infuriatingly slow reports that came by fits and starts from the snapping, humming radio, and wondering where the devil they were with that Indian. Twice he went back to the cells, troubled by the silence there, but there was nothing wrong. The man that had dirty magazines at the G.L.F. feedstore was sitting on his bench, leaning against the back wall, staring, and the drunk-and-disorderly Pieman had brought in this afternoon was asleep. The next cell was empty — the firebug had gotten off on bail, in the care of his parents. In the end cell the younger of the Indians sat reading his one battered comic, as usual. He looked up when Figlow came in, but only for a minute. The Indian almost never spoke any more. When the Presbyterian minister came to visit him, he’d go right on reading, and even when May Bunce came, from Probation, he ignored her.