John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Kozlowski studied him, then shook his head.

Clumly turned back toward his office. “All right,” he said. “That’s all. Think it over.”

Kozlowski nodded. He remembered he still had his hat on and reached up to touch it. “Yes sir,” he said. He left.

Alone again, Clumly sat down and racked his brain to make out what had happened. But he didn’t get time. Miller looked in almost at once. “Got time for a public relations call? Old Lady Woodworth wants you. At her house, this afternoon, maybe.”

The words would not get straight in Clumly’s mind, and he strained to think. He was hungry again.

“About the robbery,” Miller said. “Cops ain’t doin their jobs. Gonna telephone the Gov’nah.”

At last he understood. “You think it’s that man we got, that Walter Boyle?”

“Not a chance.” Miller turned away.

Clumly sighed, grew calmer. There was something important he’d meant to do this morning. He remembered all at once that he’d thought there was a prowler in the yard last night. He tried to think what had made him change his mind. It was possible. They’d had case after case, these past two months. A plague of them, most of them in broad daylight, ever since spring. And some of them were dangerous — the Negro boy in the red shirt who’d beaten that woman on Ellicott Avenue half to death with the handle of a mop. He was still at large. Maybe he should call his wife, see that everything was all right. Sometimes they got into your basement and stayed there for hours, waiting. He closed his eyes. Behind him, in the cellblock, the bearded lunatic was singing. His voice was high and sweet, strangely sad. He’s as sane as I am, Clumly thought, and this time he was certain of it. When will he make his move?

Calmly, purposefully, Clumly got up and walked back to the cellblock. “You,” he said. “Keep it down.”

The bearded one smiled, all innocence, and blew him a kiss.

3

Ben and Vanessa Hodge were at the funeral too. They made them all, these days, like Clumly. Ben was a member of the Presbyterian Session, as Hubbard had been, and before that, a long time ago now, he’d sold milk and butter to the Hubbards. Hodge was a wide, benign man in white socks, with a face as orange as the bricks of his house and hands like rusty shovels. He gave sermons here and there, at country churches from Genesee County to the Finger Lakes, wherever someone happened to know him. He knew stories, more than an average man, and when he told them the stories would grow clearer and clearer until the moral stood out like a pearl-handled nickel-plated pistol on a stump. He didn’t read much. He put in fourteen-hour days in the rush seasons of the summertime, except on Sundays, and in the winter, when he wasn’t out plowing off country roads with his wired-together Farmall tractor or milking his Holsteins or forking out ensilage or manure, he lay with his face turned into the cushions of his davenport and his monumental rear end hanging over, sleeping like a bear. He made up the sermons while he worked his land or while he rode through the foothills near Olean, late at night in the summer, on his old Horex motorcycle. His voice was high and sharp, as if he was calling from across a windy wheatfield.

He stood by the casket with one hand laid over the other in front of him, looking down at the powdered, painted face, or through it into the white silk cushions or the cold dirt under the house. Vanessa was beside him, with her pink-gloved hand hanging on to the tight arm of his suitcoat and her upside-down-milkpail-shaped flowered pink hat tipped queerly above the hair that had been bright red once but was now like old cotton fluff. She was short and wide and walked the way a domino would. When they came away from the casket, Vanessa hobbling on her two gimpy legs and smiling crookedly, like an alligator, Clumly nodded to them.

“Lo there,” Hodge said, loud as a plank breaking in the hush of the funeral parlor. But before they could get to Clumly, an old lady he didn’t know went up to them, shaking and clutching at Vanessa with one white, liver-spotted claw.

Clumly wiped his forehead with his handkerchief (it was ninety in the shade, and though it had been cool in the mortuary when he first came in, the crowd had warmed it by now) and moved over to stand nearer Hubbard’s sons. They’d be talking about Vietnam, he expected, or about unions ruining the country (which they were; he’d said so himself a hundred times). He leaned toward them a little, listening, pretending to watch the friends and relatives filing past the casket. He’d guessed wrong. They were talking about houses.

“It’s that old gray house on the Lewiston Road,” the older one of the brothers was saying. “Used to be the Sojda place, next to Toals’.”

“On the hill,” the other one said.

“That’s it. With the big gray barn and the stonewall fence.”

“I know the place.”

“Arson, they think.” The older one shook his head. He was small and lean and sharp-nosed, foreign-looking; a little like a Spaniard, or like an old-time alchemist wasted away to pure alum and sharp bits of bone. He was the brains of the nursery business. The other one was short and soft, with a purplish cast to his face and hands. Looked like he belonged in a feedstore, sitting, in the middle of winter, by the stove. There was no sign of the third son. The two older boys’ wives were with them, but neither of them spoke. People said the two wives had terrible fights, at home. In public, they were like stones.

“Been a lot of arson lately,” the younger one said. “Naturally, the cops never catch the ones that did it.”

The older one shook his head crossly. “Beats all,” he said. “Cops wouldn’t catch ’em if they came in and locked themselves up.”

Clumly shrank away. The floral smell which he always thought pleasant at funerals now seemed cloying. It thickened the air and made it hard for him to breathe. He fumbled for a cigar, then remembered he mustn’t smoke here. When he glanced up, the younger Hubbard’s wife was staring straight at him. He nodded and threw a confused, ghastly smile which he vaguely intended as consolation for the bereaved. He meant to leave and took one step, but the younger Hubbard saw him and said, “Chief Clumly,” and stretched out his hand. Clumly turned, caught at the hand and shook it. “So sorry,” Clumly said. “Fine man, your father.”

“A blessing,” the boy said. It struck Clumly that the young man’s eyes were red-rimmed. He was disconcerted.

“Blessing, yes,” he said. “Poor devil.”

The older brother reached over sadly — as if irritably, as well — and shook Clumly’s hand. “So glad you could get away,” he said.

The smell of the flowers was overwhelming, and the softness of the carpet made Clumly feel unsteady. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Your father was—”

Both sons nodded. Their wives stood with their arms stiffly at their sides, watching.

“Hear about the fire last night?” the older one said. “The old Sojda place. Arson, according to the State Police. Right to the foundation, they say.” His eyes narrowed. “I guess you people been having your hands full too.”

It seemed to Clumly an accusation, and he said, “Short-handed, that’s the trouble.” He winced as if he’d bit into a lemon.

“I can believe it,” Hubbard said sympathetically, but still he was watching Clumly narrowly, as if with disgust. “I understand you finally caught one of those housebreakers. That true?”

“Well, not a housebreaker exactly.” Clumly looked down, evading the chilly eyes. “Thief, yes. One of the pros. If we can prove it.” Instantly he wished he could pull his last words back.

“You can’t prove it, you think?”