John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“Hell of a business,” Clumly said.

Grimly, Hodge studied the man’s bald dome. “Yes it is,” he said.

Clumly sighed, eyes going vague, his mind far away again. “Well, let’s go.” He stood up.

It was only when he was standing in the parking lot — a square like the courtyard of a dirty castle, high brick walls on three sides and most of the fourth, the air thick with the smell from the cleaners’, the cinders and dirt under Hodge’s shoes rutted and dented, baked hard as pottery — that the horror of the thing came over him. It seemed to him now that any fool should have seen that it would end this way, Nick Slater killing somebody merely to get out of jail, Will Jr dragged into it, and Hodge himself in some nebulous way responsible. It came to him that he hadn’t even thought to ask who it was that had been killed.

He watched the black and white police car nose out into the street, the red light flashing, dappled sunlight sliding on the roof as it moved, then opened the door of his elderly Plymouth and squeezed behind the wheel. It was baking hot inside the car, and it smelled of stale cigarette smoke. He sat a moment catching his breath before painfully reaching his key toward the ignition. He ground on the starter, and at last the engine caught. “All right,” Hodge said. He rolled down the window, grunting, then started for the jail.

“Blame little monkey,” he said.

But he could not get rid of his extreme uneasiness. It was almost less an emotion than a physical sensation, as if the whole world had risen up against him. The heat and light of the August sun made his head ache and hurt his eyes, and the rasp of the car motor, the sporadic bumping of metal against metal somewhere up close to the left front wheel, were unnaturally loud, cutting. Nick Slater’s face rose up in his mind, remarkably distinct, the hair as long as a woman’s, coal black and slicked down like the hair of one of those motorcycle people at a dance. The expression on the face — the thin, wide lips, the far-apart eyes, the nostrils flared like the nostrils of a horse — was a baffling mixture of joy and terror. It was an image without background, as it first came to him, and only after concentrating a moment could Hodge draw in the rest. It was at the Fireman’s Carnival, in the middle of July. Hodge had been standing with his daughter and her husband, doing nothing, taking in the noise and turbulent motion and color of the place, a Kewpie doll clutched in his two square hands, a cardboard box containing a goldfish hanging from one finger (he remembered it all very clearly now, the explosions of color in the overcast sky, the nasal shouts of the barkers and hucksters on all sides of him, the dancing girls ancient and sickly in repose, leanjawed as Baptist Sunday-school teachers with the eyes of old tigers, and above it all, mystical and hushed, mindlessly turning as if forever, the Ferris wheel: Mary Lou had said, “Ride the Ferris wheel, Dad?” “No sir,” he had snorted, smiling grimly, shocked by the realization that he could do it, no one would stop him, though it would kill him). All at once some kind of commotion broke out, over by the frozen-custard truck: a crowd shouting and running, someone howling “Police!” “What’s happened?” they all asked each other. “A fire,” someone said, and they all passed it back. But it wasn’t a fire, it was a firecracker, they learned. Some Indian had thrown one right into the crowd, and the men in the crowd had gone after him. Luckily for everybody, the police had caught him first. “There he is!” the man at Hodge’s back yelled. The police had him up on the dancing girls’ platform to protect him from the crowd, and in the glow of colored lights all around the platform eyes and noses were tipped up to look, and at the back of the crowd there were people jumping up and down, trying to see. “Why that’s Luke’s boy!” Hodge said. His son-in-law shook his head, hands in his pockets. He was six-foot-nine. “Durned if it ain’t.” He seemed not especially impressed. They had handcuffs on the boy. Hodge pushed through the crowd toward the platform, growling “K’out the way there, k’out the way!” in that heavy voice he’d inherited from his father the Congressman; and when he got there, puffing, still holding on to the Kewpie doll and the box with the goldfish, he heaved his great weight up the makeshift wooden steps and said, “What seems to be the trouble here?” The two policemen, sheriffs men, young fellows both of them, seemed more nervous than the boy. “I never did it, Uncle Will,” the Indian said, clowning, mimicking a child. “They seen me standing there, and all it is, they figured I did it.” But his breath stunk of beer, and his look was wild. “I’ll talk to you later,” Hodge said. The policemen, it turned out, were inclined to believe Nick Slater’s story, if only to be rid of him. No one seemed to have seen him throw the firecracker, in any case, and if Hodge wanted to take charge of the boy, that would be fine with them. Hodge snorted with disgust, but agreed to it. Nick was in no position to go through more court trouble. Hodge had gone directly to the car with him, and there, some distance from the honking and whirring of the carnival machines, the oceanic murmur of the crowd, he had said, “Luke know you came here?” The boy sat back almost on his shoulders, his knees up over the dash. “Psshew,” he said, “I thought I was one dead Redman.” His smile was still wild, and he was breathing hard. He shaped a gun with his right hand and fired twice, silently, at the crowd. Hodge said sternly, “I asked you a question.” Nick folded his arms, black against the white of his clean, neatly pressed shirt, and mused. At last he said, “Your Honor, I fear I must refuse to answer, on the grounds that the answer might cremate me.” Hodge snorted. “Listen, though,” Nick said. He looked at Hodge sideways, his face solemn now. “Thanks.” Suddenly he grinned, his white teeth huge and square.

“Dang fool,” Hodge said, troubled by some memory he could not make out.

A crowd had gathered around the high brownstone and concrete imitation castle set back among dying elms and maple trees. Except for the barred windows along the sides of the place, it might have been a library, or an old post office, or a school. The men from the hospital were just closing the light blue ambulance doors as Hodge drove up. He parked in front of the fire hydrant, switched off the engine, and sat watching, squinting against the brightness of the day, as they climbed into the ambulance and pulled away from the curb. A block from the jail they stopped behind the traffic waiting for a red light. He was dead then, yes.

“A man never knows from one minute to the next,” Hodge said. He patted his cigarette pocket though he hadn’t smoked for a month. He got out and walked up onto the lawn, watching the people. The grass on the lawn was as dry as excelsior and almost as brown. The dirt was dry as sand full in the sun. Hodge found Walt Sprague was there in the crowd, a client. Hodge started past him.

“Well hello there, Counsellor,” Sprague yelled, jerking his head. He was chewing. “You come over to see the excitement, did you?”

Hodge laughed, horselike. “What happened?” he said. The people were talking all around them just loudly enough that Sprague didn’t hear. Hodge repeated it. On the steps, trying to peek in, there was a queer-looking young man in a black Amish hat and clothes like a tramp’s.

“They had a jailbreak, thass what they say,” Sprague said. His voice was high and barren as a clay hill, and his long, burnt-dry face was folded and whiskered like a dog’s. He wore a T-shirt and baggy bib-overalls. “I guess they killed somebody, too. I never seen it, myself. I was over there acrost the street getting my tractor fixed. I seen the crowd all coming around and I come right on over. Some young fellow. I seen them bring him out. I-talian, looked like. Policeman.”