John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. The blood’s in the hallway, not in the cellblock, and the cell door was shut. Why would your Indian take time to shut that door behind him, when he was breaking out? Or how’d he get out in the hall by himself? Why stop to merely knock out the man in front and tie him up, when he’d murdered the other one? How’d he disappear so quick? It’s a mystery. Correct. The kind you read about.” He went on squinting a moment longer at Hodge’s face. But he was not up to meeting Hodge’s anger, finally, too tired for that, or too busy with anger of his own, and he turned away and fished in his shirt pocket for a cigar. “All right,” he said. “So somebody came here, and we need to know who.” He sucked his mouth in.

“Ask them right out,” Hodge said. “If either Will or Luke was here, they’ll tell you.”

“Correct,” Clumly said. His disgust grew. He lit the cigar and shook the match. “Because they’re Hodges. Pillars of the community.” The anger was building up pressure now, reddening his face. “A little extreme in their opinions, maybe”—he chuckled crossly—“but Hodges through and through. Good upbringing. Noble ideals. Solider than Uphills, even Woodworths. Some people wouldn’t understand that, naturally.” He laughed, as cold as a stone again, then leaned toward Hodge. “My father was a drunkard. A plumber originally, but later a professional drunkard. I used to ask myself Why? — all that drinking. No trouble, you understand; a responsible drunkard. Toward the end he wouldn’t work but once a year, at Christmas. He was Santa Claus.” Little by little the far-away crafty look was coming back, the pressure of rage inside him still building, and now Hodge had a feeling, wordless but sure, that he partly understood. “What was wrong with him? I used to wonder. Just a youngster, you know. He was a good enough plumber — or so people said. My mother wasn’t a hard woman to live with, little too religious maybe, but not bad — not all that bad.” He blew out smoke and watched it spread out in the air. Suddenly Clumly smiled without humor and snapped his eyes back onto Hodge. They were the eyes of a stranger. “His problem was metaphysical.” He laughed again. Even the voice was a stranger’s.

“What’s gotten into you?” Hodge said sternly.

“Metaphysical.” He quoted: “‘of the nature of being or essential reality. Very abstract, abstruse, or subtle: often used derogatorily of reasoning.’ He had a perfectly good life, nothing wrong with it that you could see. Just the same, he got to be a drunkard.” He sucked at the cigar and again blew out smoke, his grub’s face compressed tight. His hand trembled, holding out the cigar. “They arrested him for theft once. I use to visit him at the jail. ‘Mr. Hodge will take care of me,’ he said. Tipped his eyes to heaven. And Mr. Hodge did. God bless the Hodges. Made a speech that would’ve made statues weep. Your old man that was. He was good, yes. Pure magic. My old mother standing there, hanging on to his coattails and my father blowing his nose and crying — they were like sticks, my mother and father, and your father, by Heaven, he was big as a room, and his head thrown back like he thought there was somebody painting his picture. ‘God bless you,’ my old mother said, and I said the same myself — I was ten or eleven—‘Dear God, bless Mr. Hodge!’” He spat at the wastebasket and sucked again at the cigar. It seemed to dawn on him at last that all he was saying was pointless — plain mad, in fact. He cast about, panicky, it seemed to Hodge, as if hunting for some way back that would not make his wandering off too noticeable. Abruptly, he clenched his fists. “I’ll tell you how it is, Will. If I thought your father might’ve opened that cell door I’d put him on the carpet, same as you, same as your boys. No faith, you know? No faith at all. That’s what they pay me for.”

Hodge said nothing.

Clumly nodded, fingertips still trembling, calming himself by will. “Listen, forget it. You see how it is. We never had a jailbreak in thirty years, now we get one it has to be complicated with … I don’t know which way’s up, I even use the forms they give you for times like this.” Then he was angry again, the blood rushing up in his neck. “Shoot. You know how to do my job better than me — take it, Hodge. Maybe you do. Everybody else does, they think. I keep a clean office, pretty well, whatever people say. I know what the talk is. I never drink, that’s one thing I can say. Their criticizing goes off of me like water.” His face was shaking.

He turned to the door before the knock came. “Come in.”

Hodge pursed his lips.

Miller said, “Hodge boys are here. Both of ’em. And Salvador’s mother.”

Clumly puffed at the cigar, still trembling, looking at the floor. “She been to the morgue?”

Miller nodded. “She wants to talk to you.”

“Send her in.”

Miller went out, and Hodge started to follow, but Clumly stopped him. “You stay, Will. You want my job, this might be good experience.” He leered.

Mrs. Salvador came in.

Hodge had probably seen her before; he thought he had. Hundreds of times, it might be — sitting on some run-down porch on Liberty Street, or South Jackson, the old Italian section, talking with some woman exactly like her except slightly fatter or slightly thinner, the same cheap clothes, dark, limp, her hair as black as midnight, garlic coming out of her pores like soap from a sponge. They talked lightning Italian, paused suddenly to laugh, called out fiercely to their children in the street, who merely shrugged or showed no sign at all of having heard, and behind the younger women, protected by them as by battlements, there would be an old one with iron-gray hair, rocking slowly back and forth, saying nothing. When they were young they were beautiful, and then they got married and moved in with Mama and got mean, and then they got fat. When they came to his office for legal advice — tax troubles, some lawsuit, or to ask timidly about an annulment — they grew mysteriously smaller, more childlike, and Hodge, for all his plowhorse dignity, was distressed.

He had expected her to come in weeping, but she was not, and it came to him that Salvador’s face must have been blown to smithereens: it wasn’t time yet for grief. Her eyes were violent. She settled them on Clumly first, then turned her head slowly toward Hodge.

“You his lawyer?” she said. “The Indian?”

(“Like ice,” he would say later, again and again.) The voice shocked him.

“Mr. Hodge is the boy’s guardian,” Clumly said.

“No, Luke’s the boy’s guardian,” Hodge said at once, defensively. Immediately he was annoyed at his pettiness. “Luke’s my son.”

“I pray to the Virgin your son may burn in hell.” Dark as her skin was, the flush of her cheeks showed clearly.

Hodge said nothing.

“This is a terrible tragedy, Mrs. Salvador,” Clumly said. He tipped his head toward her. “Won’t you sit down?” The color was draining out of him again.

The woman ignored him. As though he were not in the room, she said to Hodge, spitting, “I know you people, you do-gooders with your fat bellies and your fat smiles, helping killers get out of jail so they can kill some more. You stupid! I see you in the newspaper, how you smile for the camera when you just got Frank Cirotti out of jail, you get some foolish old woman to say Frank he’s not guilty when everybody knows he’s guilty, yes! — so now maybe sometime pretty soon he can rape some poor little kid.”

“Mrs. Salvador,” Clumly said. But he was enjoying it.

Light came off her skin like shocks. “So now you’re happy, yeah. You got my boy dead with all your helping crooks. How many people you think you killed so far? You. You’re like poison.”