John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Miller looked down.

The Chief scowled and lowered his eyebrows. He took a hamburger out of the bag as if unaware that he was doing it, crumpled the tissue wrapping and threw it in the wastebasket, where there were two or three such wrappings already, and bit in like a werewolf.

Miller thought for a long time. Then: “I think you got some kind of fixed idea, Chief. You know what that is?” He went over to the window suddenly and bent down to look out, holding the cup in his two hands, and his eyes searched the street as though he were expecting someone, or were afraid somebody he didn’t want to see was on his way. The sunlight fell over his shoulders and down to one elbow, and when he moved his arm the light looked alive. He said, speaking fast, “It’s when some little piece of nothing gets ahold of you, like lint on the brain, and you can’t shake it loose.”

After a minute the Chief shifted the food into his cheek and said, “You think our Sunlight Man is a little piece of nothing?”

“I think he’s a magician went out on a drunk and painted a sign on the street. Or maybe he’s a schoolteacher, and he’s playing with us because he’s afraid he’ll lose his job if they find he’s been in jail. Or maybe he’s a rabbi. Why not? Or maybe he’s King Tut come back from the dead. What’s the difference who he is? I don’t know what I think. What I do know is, that man has gotten you tied up in knots. Maybe he reminds you of your mother or something — and all the time the Mayor asking questions and the paper talking about Police Efficiency-”

“All right,” Chief Clumly said. He dusted his hands. “I know all that.”

Miller turned to point the cup at him. “Put it this way. Say I believe you. Say there’s something that really stinks about this man, besides his armpits and his rotten clothes — say our Sunlight Man’s planning the biggest little caper since Alonzo J. Whiteside invaded the Buffalo bank — and say you nip it in the bud. Stop whatever he’s up to before it starts, and who’s going to know it? What you going to say to the papers? Headline: BANK NOT HELD UP. PLANE NOT DIVERTED TO CUBA. All anybody’s going to know is we never caught the kids with the mop-handles or the man with the gray coat, never could locate that pack of dogs that bit the Jensen kid. Or him.” He turned to point the cup at Boyle. “We may as well send him home right now. We could nail him, you know damn well we could.” The Chief scowled, trying to stop him, but he went on. “You know how they work, people like Boyle. Someplace not too far from here there’s a quiet suburban guy whose wife thinks he’s in the selling business, and he didn’t come home from his last trip — he’ll do that sometimes, nothing to worry her, always comes back, not the type to take up with another woman. A man with two identities. Find that nice quiet suburban house, get a history on him, and we’ve got this Boyle, or whatever his name is, locked up till hell freezes over. But we’re running out of time. We go into court with no more case than we’ve got—” He stopped.

“All right,” Clumly said. He was sitting very still, no expression whatever on his face. He looked from Miller to the cold cigar — he’d just now picked it up again — and kept his eyes on it.

“Just tell me one thing you’ve got on him, this Sunlight Man of yours.”

Clumly pushed out his lower lip, then sucked it in again, and said nothing. At last, thoughtfully, he raised the cigar to his lip and lighted it. When it was going, he took another gulp of coffee.

“Ok,” he said. “I’m cognizant of all that.” He nodded toward Boyle. “Take him away.”

Miller came over and waited while Walter Boyle stood up. As they went down the hall, Miller didn’t bother to hold his arm, and at the cell he didn’t bother to give him the usual shove. When he was leaving, after the cell was locked, Miller paused a moment and looked past his shoulder at the scarred and bearded man in the cell beside Boyle’s. The Sunlight Man signed the air with a cross, solemnly, and Miller frowned. Then he left. Nick Slater, the older of the Indians, yelled after him, “Hey officer! Where in hell’s our lawyer?” Miller ignored him.

“No lawyer,” the bearded prisoner croaked softly. “No lawyer coming. Wake up child! Behold the universe.”

All at once Boyle knew where it was he’d seen the man before, or rather, had it on the tip of his tongue. But again the memory darted away from his mind’s grasp and sank back, little by little, into darkness.

3

Nick Slater awakened out of his nightmare and believed it was the cold that had made him wake up. It was well after midnight, perhaps not long before dawn. There was no sound of trucks from the street in front, no sound of voices, not even the police radio two or three rooms away, somewhere beyond the hallway that led out from the cells. It was raining. He could hear the steady, comforting hiss and for a moment it seemed to him that he could smell it. His shoulder still ached, maybe something he’d gotten in the wreck, maybe something the police had done, he could no longer remember. Though he couldn’t see a thing, he knew at once that his brother was still asleep beside him, flat on his back, the way he always slept, like a dead man. His terror came over him again — a rush of car lights, the policemen — and for a second he shut his eyes.

Something made him think — the cold, perhaps — of the old woman with whom he’d spent his childhood. The old woman had braided silver hair and a face so withered and wrinkled it looked like a net. Her two half-blind eyes floated in small nets of red. He hadn’t thought of her in years, yet the memory of her gazing blankly up at him from the faded yellow chair she had hardly ever left was vivid now.

And then he was thinking of Ben Hodge, remembering a trivial incident that had come to his mind repeatedly since the wreck. Ben Hodge had said, with his huge red hands hanging between his knees, the flesh around his eyes boiled-looking, now that he had his glasses off, “Everybody suffers some. Especially at your age. It’s an easy thing to get pushed out of all due proportion. You’re not so bad off, all things considered. Young. Smart. Got the whole world by the scruff.” Always full of wisdom, Ben Hodge. Sitting there like the King of the Beggarmen on the seat of the new manure-spreader with cowshit splattered all over his back and his floppy felt hat, dangling his glasses between his two hands, getting ready to clean them when he got to it, when he finished handing down wisdom. Except that the old man was right enough, high-falutin old fart. Nick had known it all along himself. Behind Ben, that day, the birches stood out like cuts against the dark trees behind, and above the woods, like a halo around the old man’s hat, the sky was streaked with orange. Nick had said, “Sure, sure, sure,” and had felt disgusted with himself for saying it even as he said it. He wondered what it was in him that made him turn on even Ben Hodge. The old man had looked at his glasses, sorry to have spoken. The man seemed, that instant, like a fat, wrinkled child dressed up in grown-up clothes, as harmless as a cow, and Nick had looked down at the sharp gray stubble by the spreader tire to get hold of himself. A feeling of deadness came up through his arms. David, Ben’s Negro helper, stood at the rear of the spreader, wiping his hands off on his jeans and looking toward the house. He hadn’t heard or seen.

Out of the dark came the croak of the bearded man in the middle cell: “Can’t sleep?”

He raised his head silently to see if he could make the man out. The light at the far end of the hallway was burning, and he could see the shaggy silhouette. “Christ,” he whispered, too softly for the man to hear, and clenched his fists. The pain in his right shoulder was worse, and he remembered hitting. The grass had been wet. All his sensations had been unnaturally precise. He could feel each bead of sweat on his forehead, and he could tell the difference between the sweat and the drops of water from the grass. He could hear the man grunting and calling to his wife. He was moving, flopping about near the wreck, like a fish.