John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

And so he couldn’t stand it. The old man asked and required nothing. He was a place to be, no more demanding or self-conscious than the land, or a bird, or somebody else’s cow, not insistently kind like his wife Vanessa, who would weep when they came home drunk at night, would visit them in jail when they got into trouble, would have cocoa ready when they came in from plowing off the roads with Hodge’s old tractor, and yet not professionally indifferent either, like Miss Bunce who sat listening with that prim smile, fiddling with her yellow plastic bracelet. He was wide and happy, as easy-living as a cow in a creek, and when he preached those sermons he was famous for, the people would laugh as though the walls of the church had been lifted away and the aisles were all planted in bluegrass and daisies, or they’d weep into their hankies and make out rainbows in their tears. So the responsibility that was not even demanded of Nick had overwhelmed him.

He’d said it to his brother late one night, sitting at the counter in the Palace of Sweets where the girls would come when Mancuso’s Theater let out, and his brother couldn’t get it, no more than he ever got anything, because Verne was an idiot — some kind of half-breed, Jim Tree used to say: half-Injun, half-shit. Verne said, grinning, showing all his square teeth, “He can’t do that to you, we’ll burn up the sumbitch’s barn,” and Nick had said, “Jesus, you got dogsick between your ears.” And so it had had to be Luke he told, Ben Hodge’s nephew, because Luke was twenty-two, only four years older than Nick himself, and because Luke had more or less been raised by Ben Hodge, had all the old man’s ways except for things inside — and because Luke knew already. They’d stood at the corncrib at Luke’s place, leaning their backs against the splintery, powder-dry, rotten gray slats of lath, and Nick had explained. It was coming on dark. They’d just finished letting the cows out. From where they stood they could see the whole valley, blue-gray miles and miles of it, clear to where the Attica Prison stood like an old-time castle, and fog was rolling in from the south. He’d said, “Take girls. You see one, a pretty one, and you know you’re dressed sharp and your hair’s ok, and you know you can do it. I mean you can get in her pants. It fills up your chest and you haven’t got a choice, and you don’t have a choice with the next one either, or the next or the next, and every time it’s the same thing, the sickness feeling: you have to, she even wants you to. And what I’m telling you is, it’s no different. A gas station with the lights off, standing there shining and slick in the dark — it can make you sweat. All right. Or a big car with the keys in it. I mean those things are beautiful.” Luke said, “That’s stupid.” Dully, stating a fact. And Nick had nodded. “Just the same, I’m coming to your place. You tell your Uncle Ben you’ve changed your mind, you need me.” Luke’s face was white against the dusk of sky and trees. “You think I’m crazy too?” he said. Nick frowned. “You got no choice.” Which was true. The same thing that made it impossible for Nick to stay on with Ben Hodge made it impossible for Luke to leave him there. At Luke’s, from then on, Nick could work or not, whatever he pleased. They merely waited, and when his probation was up and nothing to stop him, he would be gone.

But now his brother had screwed him up with that joyride, and the parole would be off. And so maybe he had no choice now but to jump his bail when it finally came and get moving. He had to think it out, figure where he would head for and what he would do. South America maybe. He lay watching the old professional as if the humped, calm body itself might give him some signal.

He said, glancing at Verne, “You think he likes it? — the old man?”

“Who? Likes what?” He pursed his big lips. He was sitting on the floor, looking at another of the used Superman comics the guard had brought.

Nick nodded toward the thief. “What he does,” Nick said.

Verne said, “That old bastard, I bet you it’s the same thing to him as selling shoes.”

He thought about it. The bearded man leaned on the bars, stroking his beard, watching and listening to something inside his own skull.

“Sometimes I could kill him,” Nick said, nodding toward the thief.

Verne grinned. “You ain’t lucky enough. Only way you could kill a guy would be to fall on him out of a window.”

Nick said, “Where’s that lawyer?”

They’d been asking it for a week now, and they knew where he was.

“They’re going to fry you,” the bearded man said. “All the lawyers are dead.”

“Even if she dies,” Nick’s brother said, “they won’t give us more’n two, three years. It was manslaughter.”

The bearded man opened his hands and rolled his eyes up. “Fzzzzt.”

“Mister, you got a mean streak,” Verne said. He shook his finger. “I mean you are a mean, mean man.”

“I am the Truth,” he said.

Nick’s hand flashed out faster than a snake, but the man was out of reach. The man’s eyes widened a little, then narrowed and almost closed. He sank into thought. You could see him falling away like a rock in the water.

6

It made no difference to Walter Boyle what the Indians and the bearded one said or did. Live and let live was his motto. Nevertheless, lying wide awake in the middle of the night, listening because he had no choice, he wished the whole pack of them dead. When the guard, Salvador, said once of the bearded man, “That fella’s sick, you know? Christ, who needs to test him to find it out?”—Boyle had been tempted almost into talking about it. But he lit the cigarette the guard had given him and merely peered at it nearsightedly, saying neither yes nor no. He’d said, “They talk a lot. It’s hard to sleep.” That was all.

It hadn’t been so bad in the beginning, when the Indians ignored the man’s prattle. The Indians were people you wouldn’t want to meet all alone at night in the city park, but they were two cells away and they didn’t say much. He could put up with them for a while. And the talk was all right — like a faucet dripping, or like a pump thumping away in the basement of a house you were going over. He’d heard it before, talk like that, at bus stations and tobacco stores, at coffee shops when there was a college nearby, like in Buffalo. But when the Indians started to listen, his feelings changed. It wasn’t good, giving people like that ideas. Besides, the bearded man was crazy. That pacing, for instance. And Boyle would swear — almost swear — he’d heard the bearded man crying once, sitting in pitch darkness, early in the morning. He knew pretty well what that meant. He’d had a neighbor once that had acted strange and had cried a lot, and one day he’d killed himself. He was an engineer at Boeing, sharp as a tack, people said. His wife came home about two in the morning and the radio was playing but there weren’t any lights on, and she’d gone in and found him on the davenport, with the rifle on the floor — he’d fired it with his bare foot. She’d come over, all wild, and made Walter Boyle go in with her. They’d had to push the davenport over the edge at the city dump, later. She was over at his house until almost dawn, after the police left, phoning all her relatives and crying and crying and talking to Boyle’s wife. He’d gone to bed.

The Sunlight Man was babbling again about freedom — sitting in the dark in a small-town jail and babbling about freedom. And they were listening, or anyway one of them was. The younger one would be asleep by now — the fat, toadlike one with the matted hair like a wet cat’s.

Though it was late, there was still traffic on the street below. It was a Saturday night, the night the crowd from the racetrack was always heaviest. They’d be bumper-to-bumper for miles. He tried to focus on the sound of the traffic, but still snatches of the talk pressed through. For most people there is no such thing as freedom, this position would hold. Not me, you understand. Boyle was not one to call the guard. And yet the man had said he would keep them quiet — not the guard who was on duty now but the younger one, the Italian. It was a kind of promise. Boyle thought suddenly, with unusual ferocity, “They have no respect for the other person.” It wasn’t good for him to lose sleep this way, night after night. He’d be fifty-six in January, and the doctor had told him he must begin slowing down, try not to take his work home with him, get a hobby … something to relax his mind and nerves. “Do you have any hobbies?” the doctor had said.