John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“I don’t know,” the Indian said.

The Chief was panting like a steam engine, the Indian still as a giant toad, staring at the floor with his thumbs hooked inside his pants and a strip of brown belly showing. “But you know who opened that cell door, right?”

“No sir, I never even noticed. Never saw him before.”

The Chief looked at the one called Miller. “Lock the door,” he said.

Miller locked the door — the crowd was growing, beyond it — and the muscles around his eyes were tense.

“Keep back,” someone said. “Everybody back.”

Clumly drew out his pistol slowly and held it by the handle. After a minute he turned it around, looking at it, breathing hard, and held it by the barrel.

“I swear it,” the Indian said. He was trembling. “I never saw him before in my life. I swear.”

The butt of the pistol came in as swift and indifferent as a steel sledge, and the first blow broke the cheekbone.

“Take it easy,” Miller whispered. “Have you gone crazy?”

The Chief’s eyes were as empty as shotgun barrels. He put away the pistol. “Get them out,” he said.

Unable to stop himself, Boyle hissed, “He stayed, for heaven’s sake. He could have broke out too. What the devil do you people want?”

Nobody heard. The room was full of the smell of blood from the hallway. It was like a slaughterhouse. There was a crowd there, another crowd outside. When Miller opened the hallway door the noise of the crowd grew suddenly louder, like a sound of big motors at the opening of a hatchway, or the rumble of trainwheels between cars.

Later, in the cellblock, the Indian said, cutting through the noise of the crowd, though hardly opening his jaw — his face was swollen and nobody had bothered to look at it yet—“What made him come back?” His voice was thick. He’d been crying.

“Shut up,” Boyle said.

The whole thing flooded his mind again, the scrubbed, neatly dressed lunatic — a black, new suit, a black Stetson hat with a small red feather like a lick of flame — the pistol moving back and forth in his hand. The guard clumsily hurried to unlock the cell. The lunatic said, “Out. Quick!” Then he was shouting with a dead, shrill laugh, “Behold, I am the Door!” His scarred, shrunken forehead glistened with sweat.

The older brother, the tall, thin Indian, jumped out at once, but the younger one stayed. “You’re crazy!” he said. “We be dead before we get to the street.” The cell door swung shut, knocking the younger brother back. There was no asking twice. They started down the hall. Something happened then, the Indian for some reason grabbed at the gun, panicked, and the gun went off, loud as a bomb in the concrete room. Then a scuffing and flailing, horrible and wet. The bearded one yelled, jumping back from the blood — his voice was like the screech of a rat burning in a furnace, to Walter Boyle—“Run for your life! You’re free!”

Boyle shook violently, hurling up in secret a plea to Heaven. In his unreasoning terror he was certain they would turn back and shoot him too. He even thought he saw it happening, but he was wrong, they were running away. He waited to hear shots, but none came. The man at the desk in front sat gagged and roped (Boyle learned later), he’d never even seen who it was that had tied him there. And there was no one else to stop them. He saw the dead guard’s eyes. He’d died reaching for something — reaching out toward Boyle.

Sunday morning, Boyle thought. The whole place empty as a tomb.

Walter Boyle said shakily, his hands in his pockets, staring dully at the Indian, “I was asleep.” It was then that, with terrific force, the memory he’d been hunting for exploded into his mind: he had seen the Sunlight Man before. It must be fifteen, twenty years ago. It was in Buffalo, the first time Boyle had been arrested. He was my lawyer, Boyle thought. He wasn’t burned like that then. What was his name?

Then, as if they’d guessed, they came at him out of the crowded hallway, pouring into the cellblock like water from a sluice. “You see it?” a man said. Newspaper.

“I was asleep,” he whispered.

He closed his eyes, and now, mysteriously, he was asleep, falling away in a green sky to a nightmare of black boats, sooty workmen, black scaffolding rising out of the blackened earth, and Marguerite standing between rusty rails, fat white shoulders bare in her summer dress. As far as the eye could see there was nothing moving but the hurrying, reeling, gliding gulls, screeching rhythmically over the sluggish black water, their wide wings reaching. His chest filled with revulsion. “I didn’t see it. I was asleep,” he angrily whispered.

He remembered the lawyer’s name. It was Taggert Hodge.

1

For all their physical amplitude, the fat old man and the fatter man in middle-age, Will Hodge Sr and Will Hodge Jr, were diminished by the old-style sobriety of the room. The shabby law office in which they sat — the high, dark walls of legal books as patient and indifferent as a well gone dry or an old philosopher writing his will, their bindings glossy and old as the County (older than W. B. Hodge Sr by three generations, stamped Taggert V. Hodge, Batavia, N.Y.), deep-toned as oil paintings, cracked like bamboo, solemn and superannuated as the engraving of the Roman Colosseum hanging above the door — made Hodge and son insignificant creatures of the fleeting instant, light and brittle as a pair of Giant American Beetles on a stick moving swiftly and casually downriver. Will Hodge the elder wore wide suspenders and arm garters (his suitcoat hung on the rack by the door) and a wide tie fastened with a paper clip; his son, a gray tweed double-breasted suit which, though old, had been worthily maintained: one might easily have mistaken him for a Secretary to the Governor, or a Professor of History, or the owner of a chain of feed-stores. They sat across from one another, looking at the floor and smiling as if ruefully, almost evilly, one might have thought (mistakenly), their jaws slung forward, their two large backs identically hunched below their shaggy, balding domes, shaggy eyebrows identically lowered, each man a caricature of the other, both humbler versions of the white-haired, militarily erect and awesomely fat United States Congressman who had tyrannized what was in effect the same room in another part of town before Will Hodge Jr was born. In small ways he tyrannized it yet.

Once Will Hodge Sr would have said he was immune to his father’s power. The subtle trap in which he’d found himself when the old man died had all the attributes of a cage except the essential one: he did not mind it. Craftily, ruefully, squinting up from under his eyebrows at his troubled life, Will Hodge Sr recognized that the cage was there, understood it as one understands that someday one will no doubt die — that one might, if one were a twenty-year-old poet or a fool, make howling melodrama of it, but the fact would remain no more than it was, for all one’s howling — an indifferent limit, a wall closing out what a man who had business to attend to had no good reason to be curious about. Thus Hodge; who by character and constitution preferred and, for all his seeming insensitivity, immensely enjoyed the useful, immediate, palpable: ruefully smiling to himself at the neatness of phrase in a null and void affidavit, ruefully grinning at the firm, responsible solidity of the newly wired-up round of a chair (the veritable image of his soul: good wire, no loop without its function, a small detail in relation to the whole but necessary, however distasteful to people inclined toward elegance, and admirable in its small way: superfluously strung: final) so that, knowing he was not his father, he had been satisfied with what he was, had cleverly revelled in it: had not built huge barns as the Congressman did — the austere gray buildings of Stony Hill Farm, each barn stern and intransigent under its sharp, high gables and neatly louvered cupolas lifting up lightning rods like safeguards against sorcery (gleaming copper, with globes of blue glass, or bluish green, like hypnotists’ globes of 1900) — but had neatly, skillfully patched up the barns his father had built; had perched on beams some forty feet up from the rocky barnyard, his stubby legs clamped around the time- and hay-polished wood, shoes interlocked, big jaw slung forward (Hodge the inexorable!), ruefully grinning, driving out old pegs and driving in new: as pleased by the power and authority of his eight-pound maul as his father had been by the building of the whole estate. Hodge, Will Hodge Sr, was no carpenter, properly speaking, but a toggler. The patching he did — with baling wire, pitchfork handles, restraightened nails, whatever lay at hand — was visible at a glance and, also, visibly satisfactory. Like Hodge. His whole life was an ingenious toggle, a belated but painstaking shoring up against last year’s ruin, destructions in no way his own but his to repair. (Unless his uneasy suspicion was right and the destructions were, after all, his own: effects, mysterious to him, of his limits.) Knowing he was not his father, he had long since overcome the temptation to struggle in vain to become his father. He was Hodge the immune and invulnerable, comfortable in the cage of his limitations. Or within a hair of it. For if he would have said once that he was immune to his father the Congressman’s power, the power of the Image in which he, Will Hodge, had been imperfectly created, he knew better now. What the old man was unable to manage directly (and would not have wanted to manage anyhow, being a moral person) his ghost had managed indirectly: he tyrannized Hodge — if a thing so trifling was worth a big word like tyranny — through Millie his wife (or former wife), Will Jr, and Luke, his sons. Will Hodge Sr felt no indignation or regret.