John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“Now wait,” he said. A pain like a small lump of flame closed off his throat, and before he could get back his voice, the woman had turned like wheeling fire and was gone. The room still rang.

Hodge sat down, and still he couldn’t speak. Justice, he thought. Hah!

Clumly gave him a glass of water, and he sipped it. It helped.

“I can see why you want my job,” Clumly said, squinting at him as he would at a mouse in a cage. “I wouldn’t want yours!”

“I never said I wanted your job, Clumly,” he said.

“Mebby you didn’t,” Clumly said.

Hodge scowled, aware that something was going by him.

“You care to stay while I talk to your boys, Will?” Clumly said then. Though the voice was gentle, the eyes glittered more brightly than ever, as though the woman had thrown new coal on the fire inside him.

“Lord no!” Hodge said. He got up, quickly for a man of his proportions, and hurried toward the door.

Clumly leaned against his desk and puffed at the cigar, musing. “Ciao,” he said.

Hodge left.

He paused on the steps to adjust to the breathless heat outside, heat so intense that it made the hairs on your arms curl. Two policemen were busy dispersing the crowd, or trying to. There Clumly caught him again.

“Hodge! Wait a minute! I forgot something.”

Hodge turned, sagging, and Clumly ducked back inside for a moment. A reporter from the Daily News drew Hodge over to the side of the steps to ask questions. “I can’t tell you a thing,” Hodge said. “I’m sorry.” The man persisted, a stupid fellow, as it seemed to Hodge; his eyes and voice were slow, and here in the rush of events he seemed out of place, like an old Ford truck on a racetrack. He had a permanently startled look, like a sheep aware of thunder. “I’m sorry,” Hodge said again. The man — Bob Swift, his name was — asked about the Indians and Hodge grew angry.

Then Clumly was back to thrust a picture in front of him. “You know this man, Hodge?”

“No,” Hodge said.

“Look again,” Clumly said.

Slowly and deliberately, steadying himself against the as yet unintelligible howling of indefinite memories, Hodge took the police photograph between his thick first finger and thumb and studied it. Then he knew. The burn-scarred, crassly bearded face was the wreck of the eldest brother’s life, and the gentle eyes looking out through that monstrous corruption of flesh were to Hodge like tokens brought back from the dead as a sign. But Hodge stood on legs like pillars, and for all the roiling blast of his emotions, his mind was like a stovelid. He pursed his lips. “Who is this?” he said when he could speak.

“You don’t know him?” Clumly said.

“Do you?”

Clumly squinted at him, judging, then shook his head. “It’s the prisoner that got away,” he said. “We call him the Sunlight Man.”

“Yes,” Hodge said. “I heard on television.”

“All right, just wanted to check.” Clumly went on watching him, but Hodge showed nothing. At last the Chief took back the picture, nodded, turned, went in.

Hodge walked mechanically to his car. No one in the crowd could have guessed. Calmly, deliberately, his lips pursed, he drove out of sight of the police station before he gave way to his grief.

4

“To tell the truth, I’ve come for advice,” Clumly said.

The Judge stood with his head tipped, one white hand closed around his pipe, the other around his whiskey. The drapes of his study were closed, as usual, and the room was dark with legal books, old leather chairs, a typing desk with black oilcloth draped over the machine and part of the messy stack of papers — perhaps the local history he was said to be writing. On the large desk by the draped window there were more such papers, yellow with age; above them a skeletal, globelike thing that put you in mind of sorcery. “Legal advice?” he said.

Clumly shook his head. “No, not exactly.”

The Judge closed the door and went soundlessly to his chair. “Sit down,” he said.

They sat.

At length Clumly said, “I made a bad mistake this morning.”

The Judge waited.

“I lost control. Hit a boy with a gun.” He looked for some sign, though he knew better. The Judge went on smoking, withdrawing into his yellow clouds, as he always did on such occasions. “I’ve been pressed lately. I imagine you’ve heard. I don’t know what it is, exactly. Sometimes I think …” He stopped to work it out and remained silent for a long time. “I’ve been thinking I ought to resign,” he said, at last.

The Judge said nothing.

“My health’s bad,” Clumly said. “My mind seems to wander. It’s not working right.” Panic seized him for a moment, then passed. “No, that’s not it. I can work all right. It’s worse than that. You get old and you get impatient with things. Roadblocks. People in the way, making everything harder than it is. My men, for instance — the pay they get. You can’t keep a police department going if the city won’t pay. But I tell ’em what I need, I spell it out for them, and — nothing. Irrelevant questions, forms, I don’t know what.

“And then, judgment. Man works for years, he learns certain things, learns to get certain hunches, you might call it, he knows he can trust. But they don’t let him work from his hunches, y’ see. Pretty soon the hunches get confused.

“No, that’s not it either.” Again he fell silent.

“Well, this impatience. Talk about that. Men aren’t properly trained, they start running their job their own way, you can’t count on ’em. Things get out of hand, and you do all you can to get it all straightened out but all the time there’s new troubles coming behind you — kids robbing the meters, for instance, or drunken drivers, or somebody turning in false alarms, and old ladies groaning about this and that — pretty soon you’re out of patience and without meaning to you’ve broken somebody’s jaw.”

The Judge said mildly, “You broke the Indian’s jaw?”

“Mmm,” Clumly said, nodding slowly. He knew he had not told the Judge it was the Indian. “He saw that man come in and let him out. He could’ve said.”

“You knew though, in any case.”

“Correct. Yes. But he could have said. That’s it, right there. It’s not real problems, it’s the lack of cooperation, you might say. The general nuisance. All the same, it was a bad mistake, letting go. Bad for morale, for one thing. And for another thing, it’s dangerous. The whole fabric of Society—”

He mused.

The Judge smoked on.

“We get so many of ’em, in and out down there at the police station, we begin to stop noticing they’re people. When you think about it—” He paused again, all at once remembering the prostitute, Rosemary, on Harvester Avenue. That was what had gone wrong, all right. Because of Kozlowski, it might be, he had seen that she was human. “It makes your blood run cold,” he said.

The Judge said, “Sometimes a man needs to be cold-blooded.”

Clumly frowned, considering.

“When I was young,” Clumly said, “there was a man, a Chief of Police here in Batavia, by the name of Poole. They had a parade for him when he retired. It was something, really something. You may remember it. You see, they kept it a surprise from him. He goes down to the station, the last day, and he works all day and the men don’t so much as mention that he’s retiring today, unless he brings it up. He felt bad enough about that, all right. But then when he goes out through the front door that last afternoon, wham! There they are! ‘Surprise!’ they all yell, ‘Surprise! Surprise!’ And then the drum majorettes start dancing and twirling their sticks and the Batavia Junior-Senior High School Band begins to play, and St. Joseph’s Drum and Bugle Corps, and the people are all singing