John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“How in hell did he do it?” the Mayor said. “I don’t believe you, Clumly! I’m talking to you frankly. I never heard such a story.”

Police Chief Clumly laughed.

9

Two days later the lawyer had still not come to help the Indians. Eventually the court would appoint them one. But in the meantime, Boyle couldn’t help but see, the thing was building up, at least in the older one. He began to pace now as badly as the Sunlight Man had done, but rapidly, and he would keep it up for hours at a stretch, until his movement was like a stirring of some sickness in Walter Boyle’s blood. When they talked at all, the Indians talked of the bearded prisoner’s escape. Boyle felt himself on the verge of shouting at them, but he kept himself quiet. He sat more still than ever and tried to concentrate, without even a trace of success now, on thinking nothing at all. At other times the older Indian would stand in a single position for so long you would have thought he had turned into stone. Worst of all, though, was the Indian’s talk. Sometimes he spoke not to his brother but directly to Boyle, or, rather, directly at Boyle’s carefully impassive back. It was as if he knew Boyle wouldn’t answer and was testing how far he could be driven. “Hey, mister. How come they don’t send us a lawyer? There’s a law against that, isn’t there? It’s shit, man. What do you do when there’s nobody to protect you? Hey listen. What do you do?” Once he said, “I’ll tell you one thing, baby. They won’t keep us like this much longer, without no lawyer. I’ve had it. Truth. You tell your old buddy the guard.”

Then something else. When the guard came in they made excuses to get him to come close. They tried it just once on the night man. He was old and tough, shrewdly and impersonally vicious. Whether you needed it or not, he shoved you hard when he put you through the door, and he’d listen to no sass. But the day man could be tricked. He would stand by the bars and answer their taunts or the irritable questions of the older one, and Walter Boyle couldn’t help seeing trouble brewing. He sometimes had a confusing urge to warn the man or, better yet, say a word to the Chief when he came in, as he once in a while would do, to look the place over. He was a changed man now, that Chief. He’d been shaken by the man’s escape. It had broken him — or no, much worse than that. When a man was broken he gave everything up, had no interest in struggling any more. Chief Clumly still had his fight in him, but all his power was closed like a fist around one thing, that magician. Boyle would see him in the hallway, would see the one called Miller come up to him and ask him something, holding out a sheaf of papers on a clipboard, and the Chief would turn away as though he had neither seen nor heard. “Old man’s really mad,” the young guard said. “He ain’t hisself. I bet if you stood in his way he’d plow right through you.” Far into the night the Chief’s light stayed on, at the end of the hallway, and Boyle could hear him pacing pacing pacing. And something else. Sometimes he’d come out in the hallway softly, like a burglar, and go toward the door to the main office and stand there bent almost double, listening. He seemed to take on weight, as though his flesh was changing little by little into stone. One day in the cellblock the one called Miller showed the Chief that the bearded prisoner had left his little white stones, the ones he would spread on the floor and look at sometimes. Clumly rattled the stones in his hand and stared straight ahead like a railroad engine thinking. Miller said, “Maybe we should check them. Somebody in the magic trade might know something about them. You think so?” Clumly went on bouncing the stones in his hand, and then, still staring straight ahead, he pawed Miller to one side casually, slowly, like a bear, and walked with the stones in his hand back to his office. Very late the second night, a man with preternaturally white hair came in—“That would be the Mayor,” Salvador said — and went into the office where Clumly was pacing, and Boyle heard them talking for almost an hour, that is, Boyle heard the Mayor talking. Clumly said nothing, and in his mind Boyle could see him sitting on the corner of his desk, scowling like a freight train, bouncing those little white stones in his hand. The Mayor came out the hallway door by mistake and stood looking at Boyle in the hallway’s dimness like a cat watching an intruder in an alley, then turned on his heel and went through to the front office, and there he said: “That man’s out of his mind.” “You telling me,” the sergeant at the desk said. “I tell you that man’s insane,” the Mayor said. “You telling me,” the sergeant said.

And so, for one reason or another, Walter Boyle said nothing to the Chief, merely watched the thing build up. They were going to make a break. It was certain as Doomsday, but whenever he had a chance to warn the Chief, what he felt was only the weakening rush of anxiety that meant that this time he could still say it if he wanted; and each time he didn’t, the odds that he would speak, sometime later, went down a little more. At last his trial was just three days off, and he knew that if things went right he would soon be out. He felt not relieved but more nervous than ever. The thing might blow up almost any time, and the hours between now and his escape from being involved in it took forever.

That noon the guard who was the talker said, “They’re not bad kids, really.” He jerked his head toward the Indians. “They sure are polite. But that woman died, you know.”

Boyle nodded.

“Makes you a little sick to think about it,” Salvador said. “They could get life or something. The D.A.’s dead set, I hear.”

“They can’t get life,” Boyle said crossly. Immediately it annoyed him that he’d allowed himself to be drawn into it.

“Well, that’s what people say,” Mickey Salvador said.

“People are damn fools,” Boyle said.

“Well, maybe,” Salvador said. He looked baffled, slightly hurt.

Ass, Boyle thought. Stupid ass. “Good coffee,” he said. That night he had a confused dream in which the jail caught fire and a judge whispered something to him, something he missed, and winked slyly. There were also large animals of a kind he couldn’t identify, and a great many dead chickens in wooden cages. He woke up sick with exhaustion, saying to himself a poem he had not known he knew — a poem of hope. The words were full of the dream’s mysterious light.

Tomorrow’s bridge, as I look ahead,

Is a rickety thing to view;

Its boards are rotten, its nails are weak,

Its floor would let me through. …

In the morning, a Sunday, he exercised and washed and combed his hair more slowly and carefully than usual, and he never once glanced in the Indians’ direction. He heard their talk and carefully did not notice the words, and when they paced — even though their shadows fell almost to the edge of his cell — he carefully did not notice that they were pacing. It was still all right, he thought. They weren’t yet to the boiling point. He listened to the music of Sunday morning traffic outside, lighter than on other days, less urgent and aggressive, as if the very pavement understood six days shalt thou labor. He was going to make it, it came to him. He was going to be gone by the time their violence exploded.

But he was wrong.

After the escape, he could say nothing. He would be held as a witness if he said a word, and perhaps they would even put a picture of him in the Buffalo Courier Express. The big, hairless Chief of Police closed his fist around Boyle’s collar and thundered at him, “Asleep hell! You’d just ate breakfast! Now you listen to me and you listen good. You tell us what you saw or by God, Walter Benson, I’ll put you on ice for life. You better believe it.” Boyle shook like a leaf at the old man’s use of his other-life name. Yet he kept his silence, praying. He could hear the crowd talking, shuffling around behind him, in the hallway. The floors and walls creaked and groaned. “I was asleep,” he said meekly. The policeman jerked him closer, as powerful as a diesel crane, for all his age, and he shook him with the indifferent violence of a thrashing machine. The man’s face was red, blazing with anger. Then suddenly Clumly pushed him away with all his might, and Boyle slammed against the wall so hard he believed his back was broken. “Bring in the brother again,” he said. They brought in the younger brother, and the policeman hollered, “What was this man doing when it happened?” He pointed his shaking finger at Boyle, and his eyes shot fire.