John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“I’m as sane as you are,” he said. “Note, sirs, my deportment.” He was full of an anguish of love and hexameters. He decided to go see her father.

“Wait up!” he shouted.

The boy stopped running and glanced at him.

“Where’s the fire, son?” he said. He roared with laughter. The boy backed away a little, and instantly, to show what perfect control he had, Hodge turned sober, pressed his hands together, elbows out, fingers up, like a man praying, and walked on.

Nevertheless, it was not necessarily true that he was insane.

But Clumly was insane. You could see it in his nose.

Old Man Clumly

Won’t go far,

Fucks his wife with a

Wrecking bar.

Two little eyes as

Red as blood

Little limp penis

Brown as mud!

Live like you should, boys,

Don’t you sass!

Hell’s a-smoulder

Up his ass!

He was sweating. It wasn’t true even that he hated Clumly. And not necessarily true that Clumly was mad. What he felt about Clumly,

It was hard to say. He had known him long ago, in the days when Clumly was in his prime, not Chief yet: an officious, sharp-eyed, sharp-witted little man, not yet gone fat. He did push-ups in those days; his arms and chest were as solid as truck tires, and that was how his talk was, too, steaming with dangerous conviction. When he talked about the Communists the veins in his temples would pump. You would see him at church, sitting in his heavy, black wool coat, arms folded over his chest, solid and out-of-place as a cannonball. When the minister prayed — it was Dr. MacClean, in those days — Clumly would sit with his head erect, stubbornly not bowing. Taggert Hodge, sitting in the pew where his family had sat for a hundred years, felt violated. He was religious, like all his family. It was not a matter of pride with him, and much less righteousness. He had lived with his father, had seen the works of love, and therefore knew in his very blood that God was huge and unkillable and good, a pressure of history laying to earth one by one all the barriers the piddling creature had lifted up — the walls between races, colors, creeds, and continents. The hymns they sang brought tears into his eyes. They were the essence of his past (the long, singing rides home from town in the buggy and later the Pierce Arrow) and they were the essence of his culture’s past, as well. It did not trouble him that he could not believe, as his mother and perhaps his father did, in the literal resurrection of the dead, the virgin birth, and the rest. He believed in the joy of life, the banquet of the blessed on earth. He believed that life in the world was a highway, and all the traffic lights were stuck on green. More than believed it: knew it was true by the open sign of his father’s life and many more lives like it. Clumly, beady-eyed, bald as a snake, was ominous. His brother Will would not discuss it. “Judge not that ye be not judged,” he said. As for Ben, “Well, yes and no,” he said, as always. Ruth said piously, “You never know what’s happening in the other person’s mind.” His father glanced at her, smiling with one corner of his mouth, having something he might have said, but was silent. What he said, later, was (smiling again), “How do you see so good with your eyes shut, boy?”

He’d had dealings with Clumly afterward, when he was in law. Not often, luckily. “A man of principle,” people said, which was to say as inflexible as a chunk of steel, with a heart so cold that if you touched it you’d stick as your fingers stick to iron at twenty below zero. Taggert Hodge had had a client who’d gotten a little drunk and taken a danceband home to his house on the south side of town for a party. The neighbors complained — the band was right out on the front porch blatting away like Resurrection Morning — and when Clumly and his crew came to raid they had their police dogs with them. Hodge’s client was incensed. “The principle of it,” he said later; but that night it was not abstract words but a principle leaping in his blood. He came reeling down off his porch like a madman, swinging a four-foot two-by-four at the nearest of the dogs. Clumly drew his gun. Luckily, the man was shocked sober and quit. Because, though there was no proving it now, Clumly was going to shoot him. Hodge saw the man’s eyes telling the story and knew it was true. There are such men. You knew it a long time before you ever met one. Hodge had met many since then — a Professor of Education, when Hodge was working on his high-school credential, trying to start over in a new profession; a Hollywood actor of TV bit parts he’d met in Los Angeles; a man who ran a bookstore in St. Louis. Or Old Man Paxton.

But Clumly had changed in the years Hodge had been gone. He was a puzzle now. Capable, it might be, of things more monstrous than anything he could have dreamed of before; yet modified, too, like a Hegelian thesis generating its own antithesis. It was not that he had mellowed: there was not a hint of that in him. If his arms and belly were flabby it was not because he’d gone soft inside. The opposite. All that had gone into fiber before had drawn inward, leaving flaccidity outside, solid granite at the core. Touching his arm was like touching the flesh of a thing newly dead, but if you weighed him you’d find he weighed tons. He was, like all his kind, an iron fence; but the fence was not square and neat, it was a labyrinth; and Hodge, in Clumly’s presence, felt a mysterious temptation to try his luck in its wanderings. He might have asked Will or Ben about him, if things stood otherwise. Might have asked the thief in the next cell, Walter Benson, what he knew. He’d been tempted, in fact. He had a feeling, almost a conviction, that Benson had recognized him. If it was true, there was nothing to lose. But without deciding to say nothing, he had said nothing. He had merely waited, playing his deadly serious games, watching with a morbid curiosity he himself could not understand, and then the feeling had come that it was time to get out, and effortlessly, almost without plan, he’d gotten out. It was another of those mysteries of luck, as if all he’d read into the Babylonian rituals was true.

He could hear her walking, downstairs. If the Indian had fallen asleep she’d have the gun. It did not frighten him, and not because she would not shoot. No one would shoot more quickly and lightly or forget the error more easily when she learned who it was that she’d killed. He felt no fear because he was feeling, just now, nothing. His emotions had all gone out of him into the darkness around him, making it heavy and charged as thunder-weather, more a presence in the room than he was himself. He was trembling, but not with feeling; growing abstract. The house around him seemed to pitch and yaw very slowly, and the rain was still falling like floods coming down off the backs of mountains, settling in thick torrents of mud where a man might find God only knew what — huge eggs of unnatural production, hatching quickly in all this angry heat, strange creatures crawling out of them, howling on the hills. Of all this he was only half-aware.

It’s sorrow that changes a man. But there was no sorrow in the life of the Chief of Police. That was his crime. There was only order, lifted against the world like rusty chickenwire to keep out a smell of cows.

(He heard her take a step on the stairs and stop, listening upward.)

There were only Clumly’s ancient codes, the tortuous carvings on his tablets. Only in brass or stone can codes be maintained; and even so, the wind nibbles at the edges of the runes, and the rain beats down, taking its microscopic, dusty bites. Thou shalt not commit adultery, for instance. Why? Is love a thing so timid, withered by a breath? (I have watched leaf-shadows play over ladies’ knees and the white of their thighs. I did not find them less clean for the leaves’ affection.) The Sexual Revolution, they called it. The New Morality. But it was older, in principle, than time. King David murdered because his age could not know it. For better or worse, the new age was coming, or the age-old principle coming to life. Not an end to marriage and family but a new beginning, an end to old tyrannies, a beginning of agreement. The truth is always larger than you think. That was what he would have liked to say to Clumly. I’ve seen how they live, this underground culture you hate. Gentle people with mild eyes, who can fix their hearts as firmly as you or I. They close their hands on what they love by choice, not lashed to life like bloated, black, drowned sailors to a spar. They share their flesh like food. And when they choose, at last — when they resolve — it’s with a finality that humbles us, reveals to us what we are. No doubt it was just as well that he could not say it. One knew well enough there was no breaking down those doors, double-locked and night-locked and chained. Let time unfold the arguments, since it would.