John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

As he was sitting down at his desk again, Figlow remembered he’d left the gun out and swung his eyes to where he’d left it. How he hadn’t missed it when he got up in the first place, from the unnatural lightness of his holster, he could never say, later. Mind on something else, it must be — the stutter of news from the State Police and from Luke’s house, or the business with Ed Tank, the talk that must’ve made Ed think he was dealing with a madman. Whatever it was, he swung his eyes now to where he’d put down the gun and his heart stopped. He leaned forward slowly, like a man leaning over a cliff a mile high, looking where the gun would have fallen if it was that, and at the same time he saw there was nothing on the floor he became aware of the smell in the room, thick as death. The skin of his face was stinging from the pounding of his blood and he had no strength in his legs, but he managed to sit down. The front drawer was open a little, and though he knew it was not where he’d put the gun — and knew, in fact actually seemed to see through the back of his head, that the Sunlight Man was directly behind him, standing in front of the file cabinets, smiling at him out of a face burnt black as coal — he opened the drawer farther and groped inside it. The gun was there. His fingers closed around it but had no more feeling than pieces of wood, and he thought, It’s some crazy joke! If he spun to fire he would be dead before he got the shot off, and if he didn’t spin, he would be dead with a hole in his back. He seemed to think all this slowly and deliberately, and to think, at the same time, a thousand things more — about the weakness spreading all through his body, and the line between thinking of killing and killing, and about how he hadn’t had his supper and how his daughter had baggy eyes and dust-dry hair, might very well be pregnant — but in reality only a split second elapsed between the moment he closed his fingers on the gun and the moment he turned, caught the stupid, weakling smile, the crossed arms, the body tilted far off balance, as if standing in shoes firmly nailed to the floor. What made the smile terrible was that the eyes were weeping. And it came to Figlow that it was a joke. The Sunlight Man had no intention of shooting him. He had come to give up, broken by grief, but in the madness of his trickster vanity or maybe just human vanity he could not resist one final laugh at the childish credulity of man, one last indifferent or partly indifferent sneer, or maybe one final ridiculous pretense that he was still indifferent, still had dignity. By the time the joke came clear, it was too late. Figlow had shot him through the heart.

7

Ben Hodge sat stunned in the roaring, flickering grist room, sitting on the piled-up bags of oats, hands on the oatbags on either side, legs wide apart and as solid as pillars, chin thrown forward, neither rueful nor belligerent, merely and finally itself. No grain poured down the chute now; the machine ran empty, howling like all the damned at once, and in front of the shed the tractor running the gristmill belt roared angrily, full of empty malevolence. Above the roar, or under it, like a sound of hurrying water under ice, he could hear David beating out rhythms on the pumphouse pipes. Through the open door he could see night sky and Orion like a huge man bending to look in. Ben Hodge’s mind was full of memories and pain, not separate instants and not a flow of time either, but all his life without walls or progression, like a small idea of eternity, or like the state sometimes induced in very sick people by powerful sedatives. His brother was dead, and he could make of it neither an abstract truth nor a story; it was itself, an event outside time, complete as an apple. In his blood, not his mind, he heard the drumming rhythm from the pipes, and in them too he could hear no progression: time flowed around them like a river around a stone: each beat stood eternal and inviolate, leading in no direction, implying nothing. I am, the drumming said, and nothing else. The final truth, he seemed to understand by this queer twist his brain had taken, had nothing to do with human thought or human story; unspeakable. He could look into the gristmill’s open side, and he knew the knives were spinning at incredible speed, might snip off his hand if he reached through the hole, and the hand would be as if it had never been; yet the knives were invisible, almost unreal at that speed — not knives, in any case: a dangerous ghost.

He only half-registered the lights flashing across the barn wall opposite the grist room. In the same trance, he understood without knowledge that a car door had slammed and that someone was coming toward him. The dark of the sky went darker and a man as big as Orion stood bending forward looking in.

“Uncle Ben?”

He understood that it was Will Jr who had spoken. He would answer in a moment; for now he said nothing.

The shape went on standing in the doorway, the eyes no doubt searching through the dim and flickering room that opened out around the underfed lightbulb and perhaps made him out at last. (He could not see Will Jr’s eyes.) After another moment the shape withdrew. The roar of the tractor changed, became freer; he’d shoved the clutch in. Then the motor went off. The belt went on turning for a while, strangely quiet. Will Jr came back.

“You heard?” he said.

Hardly aware that he was doing it, Ben nodded.

“What a thing,” Will said.

That was right. Thing. He nodded again. Now Will came over to him. He bent down, leaning on his knees.

“You ok, Uncle Ben?”

“I’m all right.” His voice was soft, a little creaky, as if from lack of use. Then, slowly, like a man coming to life again, he raised his hands to his face. There was no feeling in his fingers. “How are you?” he said. An absurd, trifling question, he might’ve thought if he stood outside it; but it was not trifling. It was as large and self-contained as the death, and it was the walls of the room that opened out from their two solid figures, the walls of night that opened out around the barn, that was trifling.

“I’m all right,” Will said. “You scared me.”

He nodded, then reached up, and Will helped him to his feet. “Your wife?” Ben said. Another tentative step behind the world.

“Just fine.” Will Jr frowned for a second, thinking about it, then said with curious finality, “We’re all fine, Ben. Fine.” He took Ben’s arm and they started toward the doorway. Then, standing outside where there was a cool breeze and they could look up at the slanting barn roofs and the tops of the tamaracks and the wide flat roof of the big brick house, Will Jr said, “How the devil did it happen?”

It was a hard question. His mind fumbled with it for a moment, then let it fall away. He listened to the drumming. It had grown linear again, like a horse crossing a field. “It’s a long story,” he said evasively. They started toward the yellow lighted windows of the house. Everything was blurry, like print one could not break past to the word.

“Are you all right, Will?” he asked. Almost a whisper.

“We’re fine,” Will said, and Ben understood that it was true.

In the kitchen Vanessa talked and talked, turning the whole thing over and over, trying to make out the sense in it. Ben and Will Jr were as quiet as two old rocks in the Genesee.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Chief of Police Fred Clumly said — his hand was shaking violently and he knew before it fell that the note they’d handed him was going to fall, though he could not feel it as it slipped between his ringers, all his physical sensations squeezed down and focused to a burning white point at the pit of his throat, could not even know after it had fallen that it had, not even by the eyes of the people who sat silent, dutiful, and sleepy, his own eyes swimming (for he was, whatever else, good-hearted)—“ladies and gentlemen,” said Clumly, “I have the sorrowful duty to tell you the terrible, tragic news that one of our number is dead.”