John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“Paxton’s dead,” he said as though his brother were there in the car with him.

But Tag would know by now. Millie still kept touch, that is, wrote to him, though she never got a letter back — fond of Tag because Tag was an ally, a fellow destroyer of the Congressman’s image, whether he wanted to be or not. She’d have written; maybe it was that that had brought him here. What was he thinking — that great, corrupted mountain of political and private craft, lying there staring with empty sockets at his coffin lid? The world will learn. Sure as day. But not from me.

Hodge grunted. “Well, poor Paxton,” he said aloud. He thought of Clumly.

There was a sharp, ugly smell in the downstairs hall, and he paused a moment, scowling. “Something burning,” he said. The smell was so thick it was impossible to know where it came from. “Hang,” he said fiercely. “I must’ve left the kettle on.”

He caught hold of the railing and went up the carpeted stairs to his apartment as quickly as he could pull his weight along, then hunted in the dimness of the hallway for his key. Puffing, still muttering angrily to himself, he got the door open and went in. But there was nothing on the stove in the kitchen. He stood scowling, jaw protruding, still holding the key in his hand. The sky beyond the kitchen window was darkened now — there was a shower of a rain building up — and it threw a green cast across the gray of the floor and the pale blue of the kitchen walls. “Must be downstairs,” he said. He pocketed the key and hurried back down, puffing, slapping his hand on the railing as he went. Mrs. Palazzo’s door was open. He stuck his head in and called to her. No answer. He called again. He wiped away the sweat that was dripping into his eyes. The smell was intense here, and he was afraid to wait longer. He went down the long hallway, calling “Hello?” ahead of him and came to the kitchen-dinette. That was it, all right. The saucepan on the stove was bright red and collapsing, the bottom melting into the burner. “Holy Crimus,” he said. He turned off the burner and went to the sink for a towel and caught hold of the melting handle to pull away the saucepan. “Consarned devil of a thing,” he said to himself. “Where the heck did that woman go?” The back door was open. He went over to close it, reflected for a moment, then stepped out onto the porch to look around. No sign of her. Smell of ozone in the air. Lights were on in the back windows of the houses on the next street. He went back into the house, muttering, and began to look through the rooms, snapping on the lights. His heart was racing now, and he was sweating rivers. The TV was on in the front parlor, but the sound was turned off. On the coffeecart there was a kitchen glass with wine in it. “Darned strange,” he said, lowering his eyebrows until his eyes looked like caves. Suddenly he was afraid. The house was dangerously quiet. He shuddered. He left the room at once and went across the yard to the next-door neighbors.

No one had seen her. But in the warmth of the toy-cluttered livingroom, with his neighbor on the lumpy yellow couch with a bottle of beer on his stomach — Joe something, Hodge had forgotten the name — the panic he’d felt seemed childish. “I just wondered if she might have come over here and got talking,” Hodge said.

“Nope,” his neighbor said.

The wife said, holding a baby in her arms, “Why don’t you try Faners? That’s probably where she is.” Her hair was black and stringy.

Hodge nodded. “Thanks. I’ll try there.” He watched Ed Sullivan waving his unfriendly arm at the glittering curtain. “Ladies and gentlemen—”

The wife said something and he missed the name of the performer, but it was a man, tall, with a fat face. He smiled and bowed all around and began to yell. He looked insane, and it made Hodge shiver.

“Want a beer?” Joe said.

“No thanks. I better run along.”

A boy with huge eyes and a dimple peeked from behind the ironing board piled high with clothes. He had a blond crewcut, and at first it looked as if his head had been shaved. Hodge nodded, said his thanks again, and went out.

The Faners, on the other side, had not seen her either. She probably went to the corner store, they said. She was probably right in the middle of cooking and she found she was missing something — cinnamon, you know, or salt, or something — so she ran to the store. Got talking. That’s probably what happened. Hodge saw that they were right. The truth was that the grim business down at the police station had shaken him about as badly as a man could be shaken — the blood in the hallway, and Clumly’s strange behavior, and then that Salvador woman throwing all the blame on him. He saw the picture in his mind again, more clear than the porch where he stood.

“You want me to come over with you, Will?” Bob Faner said, standing at the door. He looked up at the gathering clouds.

“No, no,” Hodge said. “Don’t trouble. I just thought I’d check. I’m sure everything’s all right.”

Faner looked at him and smiled vaguely, still willing. He was tall, silver-haired. Looked a little like a minister.

“Thanks again,” Hodge said.

“No trouble at all, Will,” he said. “If you need me just say the word.” He laughed. He was a good man, Faner. A dentist.

And so he returned. He entered the front door muttering crossly, annoyed that he’d gotten himself upset, and he went up the front stairs slowly this time and paused at the top for a full minute to catch his breath and quiet his jangling nerves. He opened his door. “Dang monkeybusiness,” he said to himself. He snapped on the light. The real point, it came to him in a rush of anger, was that Clumly’s tomfoolery was dangerous. If he did get hold of Tag … Who could know for sure what that Tag was capable of? Who knew what Nick himself might do, for that matter? He was a scared boy now. Again Hodge was shaken by a rush of mingled terror and guilt, as if every word the dead policeman’s mother had said were true. He made himself coffee at the kitchen sink, using hot water from the faucet, and started for the bedroom with it to change his clothes. Still the house was unnaturally quiet, as if hiding something. Through the livingroom window he saw a flash of far-away lightning. A shiver ran low on his back, between his shoulders. When he pushed open the bedroom door, the light from behind him broke across open dresser drawers and clothes strewn all over the floor.

“My God!” he said. The coffeecup rattled on the saucer in his hand. He put the cup down on the dresser quickly, without even stopping to snap on the light, and went for the phone beside the bed. There was no dial tone. It was cut. Hodge wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. He was shaking and his hands were hot. When he looked back toward the lighted doorway he saw Mrs. Palazzo, like a propped-up doll, sitting against the darkness of the wall with her head tipped onto her shoulder. Her dead eyes shone.

But not from me, they said.

And now the house was full of noise, a roar like wind in a cavern, and he smelled her blood.

“Tag,” he whispered. “Tag! For the love of God!”

It was late afternoon. Every line of the enormous willow trees on each side of the road, every rut and tuft of grass and weedy pile of round gray stones on the hillside pastures, every crack and shingle on the black barn standing severe as the angel of death on the nearest of the hills — on its roadward side the sharp white warning: Chew Red Man Tobacco — was unnaturally precise, as though time and motion had stopped and the world were a corpse. Nothing moved but the truck, its shadow flying beside it like a monstrous owl hunting, dropping for an instant where gullies fell away below the road, briefly rising where the macadam shirted a knoll, dangerously swift. The light on the hills was green. There was a storm coming.