John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“Nick, baby, you better not listen to that man,” the younger one said. “I’m telling you, he’s out to flip you.”

The older Indian ignored him. He said, “How do you do that? Who are you?”

“I don’t know how I do it,” the Sunlight Man said. “But I’ll tell you this: you better believe me. I may make mistakes here and there — I may get infected by mistakes in your mind — but the images are true. The fat man surrounded by legal books, the other fat man in the farm overalls, the dead woman in the hospital. You’re a child, almost, and headed for certain destruction, and nobody can save you but yourself. You better face it.”

“You see that too? — the cops killing me?”

“For Christ’s sake, Nick,” his brother said.

But Nick Slater insisted, “Can you?”

The Sunlight Man studied him and scratched absent-mindedly at his beard, smiling again. “No,” he said. “Sometimes I can know things and sometimes I can’t. I was in a train wreck once. Me, myself. I never dreamed it was coming.”

Walter Boyle turned away, feeling sick. He’d seen a train derailed one time. While the dust and steam were still thick as fog and there were people screaming, boys in T-shirts came running and broke in the windows and scrambled among the dead and injured, looting. The memory of his horror combined with his present horror in the face of what he half believed to be magic, and he began to shake. He pressed his back against the wall and covered his eyes.

In the morning the police did not come to take the bearded one away for more questioning. Boyle had half expected they wouldn’t. They weren’t supposed to be questioning him anyhow, as far as Walter Boyle could make out — both from the scraps he got from the guard who was talkative and from what he’d found in the Daily News. They were supposed to be merely holding him until he could be moved to the hospital for observation. Yet that wasn’t what stopped them from questioning him today. The Chief had been working on him day after day, sometimes with the cop called Miller, sometimes alone, for no earthly reason, as far as Walter Boyle could see, except that the bearded man was, well, fishy, and sometimes policemen could smell a thing like that. (Boyle was now certain, by the prickle in his skin every once in a while, that he’d seen him somewhere.) If they didn’t come for him today it was for one of two reasons: they had too many more important things to do, or they’d decided to leave him alone awhile, let him sweat. Boyle had seen the sweat treatment in the past. He’d seen it work when nothing else did. In fact he was convinced that if they ever got him, Walter Boyle, that would be the way. It was one of the reasons he’d developed his technique for getting through the hours whenever he was jailed: reading the paper over and over, disciplining himself to miss nothing, even the smallest ads, the personals, the numbers of the pages, though he’d remember almost none of it later. When the paper no longer gave him something to lean on, he would say to himself the hundreds of poems he’d memorized, for some reason no longer clear to him, in his childhood,

These joys are free to all who live,

The rich and poor, the great and low:

The charms which kindness has to give,

The smiles which friendship may bestow …

They got nowhere questioning the bearded man — Boyle could hear them almost clearly, in the room at the end of the hallway — and he’d seen that the sweat treatment was coming. And so they hadn’t come for him today. Instead they came for Boyle.

The Chief of Police was standing at his window smoking when they led Boyle in, and he didn’t bother to turn around. The room was thick with stale hamburger smell. There was a large white bag from one of those carry-out places on the Chief’s desk. The policeman called Miller nodded Boyle toward a chair, and the other of the younger policemen left — at a signal from Miller, perhaps; Boyle wasn’t sure. He waited, sitting bent forward. His leg tingled from the knee to the hip; it had gone to sleep while he was sitting back in his cell. It was hot and close, though not as bad as the cellblock, and the air here smelled freer. The Chief went on standing looking out, head almost hidden in the bluegray strata of smoke. Miller stood behind Boyle’s back.

At last, slowly, the Chief turned and took the cigar out of his mouth. “Coffee, Boyle?” he said.

Boyle shook his head then changed his mind, made a feeble gesture with his right hand then dropped it back to the chair arm. Miller went out and came back a minute later with old cups and a percolator with the cord dangling. He was scowling as he poured the coffee. The tape recorder stood on the Chief’s desk, tipped up on a stack of manilla envelopes, but no one made a move to turn it on. The Chief came to his desk, sat down, sipped his coffee, or rather gulped it, hot as it was.

“Boyle, we’d like some information,” he said.

Miller closed the door to the hallway leading to the cellblock, then stood nursing his coffee. He glanced at the clock over the Chief’s desk, above a picture of a huge badge and some writing.

“Yes sir?” Boyle said.

“Tell us what you know about the man with the beard.”

“The beard,” Boyle said.

They waited.

“I never saw him before,” Boyle said.

“You listen to his talk?”

Miller said, “Any talk about a jailbreak?”

Boyle shook his head. He couldn’t tell which of them to look at. “I don’t listen much,” he said. “A lot of—” He searched his mind. “Lot of talk.”

“Any talk about where he comes from?”

“Look,” Miller said.

Boyle folded his hands and squinted. “He says he went to a party for Tarzan, in Los Angeles,” he said dully.

The Chief looked over at Miller, who wasn’t impressed.

“What else?”

Boyle rubbed his chest where the sweat was dripping down inside his shirt, but he couldn’t stop the itching. “He says he can read people’s minds,” he said. It sounded cross. He didn’t believe it himself today, and he was annoyed at being pushed into saying it. More important, he felt something queer in the air, sharp and foul as the smell of something burning. Were they trying to trick him into admitting something?

Miller sighed. “How do you know that, Boyle?”

“I don’t. It’s just what he says. I don’t know him. I never saw him before.” Then, quickly, to change the subject back to safer ground: “He says he can see into the future. He told the Indians—”

They waited and he picked at his lip, trying to think what they were up to. “He told the Indians the woman they hurt will die. They believed him. I think they did.” He watched his interrogators suspiciously.

Miller sipped his coffee, scowling more darkly by the minute, eyebrows lifting up and out like wings, and now Boyle was sweating all over, burning up. The Italian cop was breathing deeply, like a man in bad air, his whole chest full of anger. There was a story of some cops in Elmira who’d used hypnotism. Without quite believing it was anything like that, Boyle said suddenly, “I want a lawyer.”

The Chief of Police squinted.

“Why?” Miller said. “Why did he tell the Indians the woman will die?”

“I don’t know. To scare them.”

Ominously, the Chief snapped his fingers and pointed at Boyle. “Maybe,” he said. It was as if, suddenly, they’d made him tell them what they needed. But he knew, nervous as he was, that it couldn’t be that.

“I don’t know,” Boyle said. “I hardly listen.”

“Drink your coffee,” Miller said.

The Chief’s cup was empty, and he refilled it. He said, “What you think, Miller?”