John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Ben his brother.

Mortgaged to his ears for rolling stock already — big farm equipment, four tractors, a pick-up truck, a station wagon, two motorcycles, and now a school bus. His legacy from their father was one of the unluckiest; or so it seemed, from time to time, to Will Hodge Sr. (Ben would stand in his yard at the Other Place — as they all still called it, even now that Stony Hill was gone — a man still handsome though grown red-faced and heavy at fifty, his head tipped back, looking through the lower halves of his thick, dark-tinted steel-rimmed glasses at the newly delivered corn chopper, or the twenty-year-old wired-together baler, and the look on his face and in his stance was like a child’s, solemn, deeply satisfied, detached as a sunlit mystical vision from the dying tamaracks, tumble-down barns, and the high, orange-yellow old brick house that labored in vain to establish for Ben Hodge his spiritual limits. There were honeybees in the walls of the house, and in the bedroom where Ben and Vanessa slept in the Congressman’s grand old walnut bed there were coffee cans to collect the honey that dripped down the walls from the windowsills; set squarely in the center of the once-large kitchen was a bathroom (vented to the kitchen) that Ben had put in for the comfort of his (and Will Hodge’s) mother in her last year; and in the kitchen and pantry and livingroom walls there were plaster patches to recall the time when Ben Hodge would sit up late with his twenty-two, killing the rats his traps missed before they could nibble the sleeping old woman’s fingers. Destructions unnerving, in some metaphysical way unlawful, to Hodge. For if Hodge was by temperament a mender, a servant of substance, Ben was a dreamer, a poet, an occasional visiting preacher at country churches from here to good news where. He was blind to the accelerating demolition all around him, or saw it in his own queer terms, inscrutable to all but his good wife and, perhaps, children, both his own and the numerous children he and Vanessa took in. Among them Will and Luke. (So that it had been as Hodge had expected it would be — had even, strange to say, hoped it would be: the image had been reinforced for them both, the magnificent ghost of a lost time and place revitalized, made to seem fit for a world it could never survive in except by a calculated destruction of body for soul: a world well lost for poetry, for the beauty of sleek or angular machines, big motors roaring for as long as they lasted, profligate generosity, family talk. Well lost — the barns Hodge’s father had built, the trees he’d planted, the dew-white vineyard — but lost, past recovery. Lost.)

“Hah,” he said.

There was someone at the door.

Quickly, slyly, he dropped the apple core in the basket by his desk.

3

He knew the moment he opened the door that something serious had happened and that he was, himself, in some way, accused. The two policemen he’d known for years — stooped, bald Clumly and Dominic Sangirgonio — stood on the steps suspiciously casual, solemn-faced as Chinamen, not talking, looking at him as though they did not know him. Clumly looked drained, like a man just told he will be dead before morning. His eyes were full of rage. Clumly nodded, an act of will, and gave a smile-like twitch of the colorless lips on the face as white as a grub’s. The ice-blue eyes glittered. “Morning, Will,” he said loudly, as though Hodge were deaf. He bristled with impatience, and Hodge had a feeling the man’s mind was miles away, sorrowing, or burning after vengeance.

“Good morning,” Hodge said. He slid his lower lip over his upper, instinctively cautious, like a man in a room with a lion. He had a brief, peculiarly clear sense of the motionless, deserted street, the curb where a little while ago Will Jr’s Chevy had been, the sidewalk dappled with the shadows of leaves, the two men’s shoes on the rubber-matted steps. At last, grimly, Hodge smiled, annoyed at that infernal sense of himself as a small boy forever ready to be guilty of forgotten crimes. But Clumly, too, was like a boy — a man of over sixty, close to retirement. He stood angrily tapping the side of his pantleg with his hat — his white, perfectly hairless head still cocked. He wore his uniform, as always. Miller, too, wore his uniform, the wide belt, the gun. He folded his arms.

“Catching up on some work?” Clumly asked ferociously, looking past Hodge into the office. He looked like a bear, bending to peer in past Hodge.

“No, not really,” Hodge said, considering again. “Come in.”

Clumly glanced at him, then nodded, a jerk of the head. “We won’t be a minute,” he said.

Hodge held the door for them, then closed it behind them.

Hodge said nothing. Miller stood by the door, studiously examining the police cap; Clumly stood in the middle of the room, hands in coatpockets, scowling and looking around not as a friend but as a police professional. He asked, “What are you doing here on a Sunday, Will?”

“Will Jr came down,” Hodge said. “He needed some maps he’d left here.” He hooked his thumbs around his suspenders and stood, jaw protruding, waiting.

Clumly cocked his head, bending toward the desk to read the note on the tablet. A flush of irritation ran through Hodge, but he said nothing. Clumly read aloud, eyes glittering: “Obtain the release of Nick S.” He scowled, blushing at the same time, and glanced at Miller. “You won’t need this.” He put down the tablet. “He’s already out.”

Hodge waited, and later it would seem to him that Clumly had taken a good deal longer than necessary to come out with it: he would remember that absolute stillness of Miller, standing by the door looking fixedly into his hat, and Clumly himself, touching his nose with two fingers like a man baffled by a sudden and inexplicable change in a familiar landscape, studying Hodge’s jaw. He said, “He’s escaped. Killed a man. You’d better come down with us.”

“Poppycock!” Hodge exploded. “I don’t believe it.”

Again Clumly touched his nose, looking at Hodge as though he were not a man, an old friend, but some mysterious object brought back from the center of Africa or India, a contraption with no clear purpose or meaning, possibly dangerous. Under that stare, Will Hodge felt heavy as stone, freakish, sealed off from the usual flow of things as he’d been sealed off, in the old days, when his wife would turn briefly to look at him with revulsion. But Clumly, too, was transmogrified. He looked dead, as though there were no longer any intrinsic connection between the parts of his face — the round, yellowed ears, the red-veined nose, the white, sagging cheeks that lapped to the sides of his small, cleft chin like old drapery, or like dirty snow sinking into itself, or like bread-dough. The old man’s shirt was blue, his tie dark green. He’d been wearing that same limp uniform it must be a month.

“Mind if I use your phone?” he said.

Hodge waved him toward it.

Clumly went around behind the desk, sliding his finger along the top as he went, and sat down heavily. He dialed, waited, looking up fiercely at the shabby rosette in the center of the ceiling, then sat forward abruptly, slightly crossing his eyes to watch the receiver, and shouted into it. “Hello, Mikhail,” he said. “This is Clumly. Correct. That’s right. Listen. I’m at Will Hodge’s office.” His eyes grew cunning. “Will Jr has been here a little while back. He’s likely on his way up to Buffalo now. Tell the Thruway people if they see him, they should send him back. We need to talk to him.” He listened, foxy as the devil. “That’s right,” he said. “Correct.” He hung up the phone. He looked at Hodge again, still seething with rage but this time more as he might look at something human. Hodge was not comforted. He’d sent the State Troopers after Will, well as he knew him.