John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“Blast!” the man said. Then, wearily, “All right. I see there’s no hiding it. I embezzled a large sum, it was thousands of dollars. Hundreds of thousands. I’m no piker! It bankrupt the firm that employed me — manufacturer of cyclone fences in a small town in northern Montana. I meant to go to Canada. It wasn’t my fault, though, the whole mess. As the Lord is my judge. It was because of my medical expenses. I’m a dying man, you know. That’s what makes me stink. I couldn’t stand it, at first — the dying, not the smell. I was half out of my mind, I can tell you. I’d run up to complete strangers on the street and I’d tell them all about it. It was awful, naturally. And the dreams I had! But then — oh bliss, sheer bliss! — I turned to Mormonism. I wish I could give you the faintest idea what peace, my friend, what unspeakable tranquility …”

Finally he was silent.

Nick lay listening to his brother’s breathing and to the stillness beyond that, smelling the sweat of the Sunlight Man and the acrid stench of the drunk’s sickness and wondering again, cold all over, why Will Hodge had not come to bail them out. But he would come, he insisted. The old man always came, sooner or later. Luke would get to him, or Ben, or Ben’s wife, or maybe Luke’s mother or Will Jr. He rubbed the sore shoulder and felt a sudden whelming of sorrow that had nothing to do, it seemed to him, with the bitter mockery of the man in the next cell. What if it were true that they would send him to the chair? But it wasn’t. He wasn’t guilty. He hadn’t wanted to go in the first place. “Listen,” he’d said, “let’s just go find us some girls.” But Verne was drunk, it had to be a joyride, and like a fool he’d gone along. It hadn’t been his fault, but just the same when the cops had found him lying in the weeds at the edge of the field (he could see the Volkswagen, sharp in the starlight, smashed, the convertible roof cocked up, and he could smell the gas and the sicksweet scent of the cigarettes of the people who came running down from the road) one of them had yelled, “Over here! Here’s one!” and when they’d found he wasn’t hurt much, they’d jerked him up and held him like some killer. “It wasn’t my fault,” he’d hollered at them, but the fat one had hit him in the chest, and when he was bent double in the grass, gasping, the man said, “Up.”

He said now, suddenly, “What did you mean?”

“Sir?” the man said.

“About all that stuff. Freedom. I don’t get it.”

“Just joshing you. Passing the time. Try and get some sleep, son.”

An hour later, when Nick woke up briefly, he heard the bearded one pacing in his cell. An image of the woman’s face came to him, a white oval half-turned to him, eyebrows raised, mouth open, buck-teeth protruding like a neat little awning above the black cavern of her mouth. She was like a doll, not human. Irrelevant to the careening of the car, the whirling lights. She’d said nothing. She hadn’t even screamed, as far as he knew. She had no name, no features. Nevertheless the car had lifted, in slow motion, all at once, and the Thruway sign had passed slowly to their left, and then they were gliding toward the sharply outlined wet weeds of the embankment, every water drop a precise little crystal, and the steering wheel in his left hand turned free, clutching air. “Oops!” Verne said. It was suddenly dark — the lights were smashed out — and time was hurtling again. The woman without voice or features was going to die. What was her name?

At noon the next day the police let the drunk go home. The thief returned to his patient silence, sitting like a figure made out of old rags, passing his bulging eyes slowly over the words in the Daily News. Nick’s brother dumped his dinner down the open, seatless toilet. The bearded man lay running his fingers through his beard and said nothing for hours at a stretch, merely announced once, sorrowfully, but as if to hide from them what was really in his mind, “No one writes to me. You’d think they’d at least send bills.” Will Hodge had still not come. When they asked the guard if the woman in the hospital was better, he said, “You’ll hear, buddy.”

Nick lay looking at the thief, trying to guess what went on in his mind, but it was useless. His brother said, “He works out crossword puzzles in his head.” No one answered, and after a minute Verne shook his head and said, “He’s a cool one,” and patted his stomach.

They were something, these old professionals. It was hard to know what to think of them. They never got taken, they worked out a system the cops couldn’t beat and they’d get along for years that way, some of them, and even if the cops knew damn well what they were doing, all they could do was bother them a little — lock them up for loitering, or arrest them on suspicion of something. He and Verne were different. The way they went at if it meant something, but they kept getting caught. One time they’d gone through the coatrooms at the First Presbyterian church and they’d gotten only six dollars, and in half an hour flat they were sitting in the can. When they got out on parole Luke Hodge was sitting there waiting in his pick-up truck to take Nick home, and Luke hadn’t spoken two words to him for a week. Then it was “Go get the eggs, Slater, if you’re man enough to sneak them from under the chickens.” And once at supper: “Big man, Slater — laying all the broads, slugging down the booze, pounding up on the little people.” He wouldn’t have said that to Boyle. He’d have called him Sir and discussed the weather with him. Luke’s eyebrows went out like a witch’s and his mouth was tensed. He had one of those headaches of his coming on, not that that excused it. Next day, when the headache was going full blast, he’d said, “Shovel good or you won’t get your allowance.” All at once it wasn’t worth the trouble and the gutter fork was right there in his hands and he let the thing fly and Luke Hodge was spluttering and howling and scraping the cow manure out of his ears and eyes and mouth, yelling “Yellowleg bastard, I’ll kill you!”

That’ll be the day.

Then it was old Ben Hodge’s place, and that was no better, though it had seemed it at first. The old man would send him up in the silo to get out the ensilage, and Nick would sit up there talking to himself and singing, relaxed as he’d be if he’d eaten some pill, full of the eerie sensation of calm that came from saying No more, I took all the shit from you I can and then shutting them out, like a door closing in the back of his brain: concentrating on forgetting them until they were more than forgotten, as dead as if they never were born. He would sit listening to the echo of his singing coming back all around him as it would at the bottom of a well, unaware that the cattle were down there waiting, totally blind to Ben Hodge’s waiting, deaf as a stone to the sound of his clambering up the silo chute — not just pretending not to hear, stone deaf — deaf to his greeting if he gave any greeting, and blind to his huge shape squeezing through the square concrete silo door; or if not deaf and blind, then this, at least: no more aware than a sleeping man of a familiar figure coming into his bedroom and closing a window and leaving again. Ben Hodge would say nothing and wouldn’t even bear a grudge but would get out the ensilage himself, perhaps talking, until slowly, without batting an eyelash, Nick would rise out of his waking sleep to a clean sensation of cold and damp and the ensilage smell as sweet and clean as the smell of cold horse piss, and he would hear him talking, telling jokes as if nothing had happened. It was something to watch that old man fork out ensilage. He was big as a cow, more than two-hundred-fifty pounds, and if he’d wanted to he could have lifted the corner of the barn. He’d load the fork so full the ensilage would hardly go down the chute. He was all right. When you came across him and he didn’t expect you he’d be singing at the top of his voice, or sometimes yodeling. You could hear him some mornings a mile away, singing to himself on the tractor. If a cow kicked him he would knock her to her knees, but with people he was patient. And then they’d begun to talk sometimes, late at night, sitting in the milkhouse or in the kitchen along with Ben’s wife Vanessa, and Ben would tell him about all the boys he’d had out here working for him in his time, and all the boys his father the Congressman had reclaimed before him, little shits (that wasn’t Ben Hodge’s word) who’d come around at last and had farms of their own now, or good jobs at Dohler, Sylvania, the tannery, the gypsum mines — fine men, he loved them like sons. Verne called it bragging, because Verne was stupid. Ben Hodge looked at you, watched you as though your face was a part of the talk. He said, “What are you thinking?” and it wasn’t for politeness. He lived outside time, indifferent to the wisdom of age or the rights of station, indifferent even to that studied and fatuous indifference of people like Miss Bunce, the probation officer, whose every gesture was a parody of people like Hodge. So that the boys he’d brought up, and those his father had brought up, were things that had happened; not examples or lessons, but things that had happened, to look at, think out, and judge all over again to find out what was true. Everything in the world was an instance for Hodge. The swallows that nested, generation after generation, on the beams of his falling-down garage. The dog whose leg he’d cut off with the scythe. The cow that got drunk from the soup at the bottom of the silo. The chickens, the pigs, the dead rat under the ice-box. And he, Nick Slater, would sit unspeaking, listening to it exactly as he listened to the Sunlight Man now, aware in his blood that there were no required opinions, though there were right answers, still uncertain. And the more he listened the more clearly he knew that it was true that Ben Hodge was a father to the boys he’d raised. He sweated out their troubles, cried like a woman at their weddings, lent them money and could even borrow from them, indifferent even to their idea of what he was. And beyond all that, when they went bad — when they ended up in prison or beat their wives — he went on feeling as he’d felt before, indifferent even to goodness. So that Nick had been at once awed and sickened, had come to see the world from a new ground, from inside the old man’s feelings. Verne wouldn’t work, the six weeks he’d lived there, and Nick had been ashamed, furious, but the old man said, “Well, well,” thoughtfully, and “Well,” resigned to it. Nick, when he was drunk, would talk for hours with Verne, reasoning with him, and at last to get rid of him Verne would say, “Ok, ok, I’ll be better from now on, you watch.” And the old man would say to Nick, “Take it easy.” Late at night, when the old man came in from riding his motorcycle, he’d open the door a crack and look in at them to see that they were sleeping, and if the covers were off Verne’s back, the old man would fix them, as if he was their mother.