John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

She said, “You look tired, Fred.” Clumly’s wife went out of her way to find phrases like “you look” or “I see that …” They all did that, blind people. He had a theory it was something they taught them at the Blind School, the same as they taught them to walk slightly faster than normal people, with their heads drawn back so they wouldn’t hit first with their chins.

“Aye-uh,” he said. “Tired. Gets harder every year.” For all his annoyance, he spoke kindly, as was right. He glanced at her. She was shaking her head, the eyes turning with the face, and he looked down again.

After a moment she said — too loudly, as always, as though her voice had to be loud to get past the darkness she inhabited—”Vanessa Hodge called.”

“Mmm,” he said. He pushed the last of the gray stew against his bread and put it in his mouth, then wiped his hands on his napkin.

“It’s about those Indian boys you’ve got locked up. Hodges are their guardians, you know. Or they used to be. Poor Hodges.”

He pushed the plate away and drew the coffeecup closer.

“It’s been terrible for the Hodges. Poor Vanessa’s not up to snuff since that little stroke or whatever it was, and she’s not getting any younger. Even when things are running smoothly, she doesn’t get around like she used to. She said they’d come in at all hours of the night, and sometimes their drunken friends with them. She said one night last winter Ben found that oldest boy lying on his bed just as naked as the day he was born, not a cover on him. She said when Ben touched him he thought he was dead. As cold as clay. She said Ben said he never knew before that when they say ‘ stone drunk’ that’s exactly what they mean.”

Clumly sucked in the lukewarm Sanka and said nothing. He minded the way she went on and on and the blankness of her face, as though it were not a woman talking but the face of a horse on the merry-go-round, but though he minded, even now after all these years, he did not think about it. He was thinking of the bearded one from California. Could be he really was a little crazy. You heard sometimes about people going crazy from a bad burn. He prattled and babbled from morning to night, bothering the guards, bothering the other prisoners, and when he saw you watching him he made faces, or said a prayer for you, or he jerked up his hands like an animal about to claw you. But it didn’t really seem like lunacy to Clumly. It seemed like an act, no less an act than those magic tricks he did, and the fact that the man went on with it day after day made Clumly uneasy. What went on inside their minds, people like that? Oh, they’d find out he was sane all right. Clumly would bet ten dollars on that. He was sane but he didn’t think the same as other people. He was up to something. Over and over, the past few days, Clumly had found himself going over the jail routine, as if expecting a break — he felt like a man told to lock up Houdini — or searching his brain for where he’d seen before that face he knew he had never before laid eyes on. He waited for trouble from the prisoners, but there was nothing, and he knew all the while that there would be nothing. This morning, a little surprised at himself, he’d checked the pistol he hadn’t had out of its holster for God knew how long. His hand was shaking like an old, old man’s.

She was saying, “The oldest one would come wake them up at three in the morning, just as drunk as could be, and he’d say, ‘ It’s all taken care of now. He’ll be a different person tomorrow.’ Three in the morning. Imagine. Poor Ben has to get up at dawn to milk the cows.”

“That’s all over,” Clumly said abruptly. “They’re out of the Hodges’ hands.”

“It’s that bad?” she asked. Her face drooped to a pattern of upside-down V’s.

“Aye-up.” He finished the Sanka and pushed away the cup.

She poured herself more tea and said nothing for a moment, merely moved her lips, talking to herself. He was aware that he’d cut her off curtly. Her life wasn’t perfect either, God knew. At last, since life must go on, she said, “You’re still keeping that madman, I suppose?”

“Still keeping him,” he said. To keep her from saying more he opened the paper.

But she said, “I don’t suppose he’s dangerous.”

“Not there in the bucket,” he said.

She raised her teacup, distressed by his tone, and she touched a button on her blouse with her left hand. He watched her drink and then lower the cup again slowly, lowering her left hand to the saucer to guide the cup down. He felt sorry for her, fleetingly, and looked up at the light above the table, then down at the Daily News. At first, because he’d been looking at the light, it seemed that the paper was empty, no news whatever today, neither good tidings nor bad. But after a moment he could see once more, vermillion print that gradually settled to black. There was a picture of a wrecked tractor-trailer and the Thruway behind it, a hundred yards or so away. He’d heard it all on the police radio this morning. He turned to the comics and read them slowly and solemnly, word for word. Then he read the obituaries.

“Clive Paxton died,” he said.

“No!” she said.

“Seventy-six.”

She had heard he was ailing. He’d left a pretty penny to his sons and that poor sad daughter of his, you could bet on that. They didn’t live here any more, they’d moved away to places like Florida and California and Paris France. “Poor Elizabeth,” she said. Clumly made himself a note to send flowers.

He was in bed ahead of her, as always. He lay in the dark listening, his mind almost comfortably blank at last. He heard the water running in the sink, the noise she made brushing her teeth, the clatter of, perhaps, the soap dish falling, and, after a while, the flush of the toilet. She came through the darkness of the hall and opened the door very quietly, to keep from waking him in case he should be asleep. He listened to her taking out the bobby pins, dropping them softly one by one in the chipped seashell on her dresser. At last she turned down the covers on her side (he lay with his back to her) and climbed into bed. He didn’t need to watch to see it all in bitter clarity: her long skinny legs, more agile than his, as ghostly white as the white silk nightie, the long, webbed feet as limber as the feet of an ape. Her lips would still be moving. Or had they stopped? He had a feeling she was looking at him with her blind eyes, as she did sometimes — watching him with every nerve in her body. He lay motionless. She drew the sheet and coverture to her bony chest and lay still on her back, her head pressed firmly into the pillow, her nose, even sharper when her eyes were out, pointing at the ceiling. She looked like a chicken in bed. He lay on his side with his hands folded, his small, close-set eyes fixed on the wallpaper a foot away, staring at it as a mouse would stare at a place where he once saw a cat. Through the springs of the mattress he could hear their two heartbeats, his own slow and awesome as the nightlong pounding of a big ship’s engines on a calm sea, hers quick and light as squirrel feet. He was imagining it, he knew. She lay as motionless as a dead chicken. It wouldn’t surprise him if, turning, he found that her feet were sticking in the air.

“Fred?” she said.

He thought of the rouged, naked breasts of the waitress with the coffeepot. But the image no longer stirred him. He saw himself walking along a beach where the sand was tiny grits of color, blue and green and deep red and yellow, like minute pieces from a stained-glass window. Four men who looked vaguely like Mayor Mullen sat scowling, watching him approach, with towels around their waists. He looked toward the sea and wide green sky, distressed.