John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Cautiously, Craine reached for his book and slid it across the table toward his belly. “Of course not,” he hissed. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

But the cat was onto him.

In his dingy, grim-walled hotel room that evening, Craine sat motionless, breathing shallowly, like an invalid trying to make out whether he’s better or worse. He’d come to that familiar part of the day when healthy, happy men pause for a moment, relax with a beer, and look out over their lawns, their children’s bicycles, the new Toyota wagon, taking stock; a time men like Craine spend carefully not thinking, drinking whiskey and smoking strong tobacco without a flicker of thought about cancer or heart attack, since they’ve been drinking and smoking for six, seven hours now, and if they’re going to stop — as perhaps they will, who knows what will happen from one day to the next? — they can stop tomorrow, first thing in the morning, which is still a long way off. Despite the day’s unsettling events — not that much worse than any other day’s, he could see now, putting it all in perspective — his situation was not yet critical. What one had to bear in mind, he thought, gesturing with his pipe stem as if to an audience in the street below, was that (McClaren was right) when the mind plays tricks, it has reasons. His face began to twist like the face of a State’s Attorney conducting a difficult trial. In the end, of course, there could be only one reason — not drink, overwork, even loss of conviction; all those were mere evasions of the bottom line: psychological pain. Craine nodded, a movement so slight that only the sharpest eye could have caught it in the mottled dusk. So the question was, he thought, his face twisting more, what was he doing, unbeknownst to himself — what was he doing that he hadn’t been doing for the past twenty years — that was causing psychological pain? Craine pursed his lips to a sudden small O and stared blankly, eyes slightly widened, as if some fool, some irrumpent stranger, had broken in on his thoughts to raise the question. He frowned, trembling, pretending to consider, then cleared his throat, relit his pipe, and looked down at his book.

As he sat at his window, reading the old tome on Sanskrit by the failing light outside, the shadows on the street grew longer and sharper, eerily alive, it seemed to Craine — jumping up like panthers when a truck cut through them, or fluttering like starlings in a sudden gust of wind — until once, when he looked out, he saw that their blocks and lines had vanished, or rather had spread everywhere, consuming the street. He heard sharply clicking footsteps, a young woman running. Distress stirred in him, but of course it was nothing, just night again. Voices came up to him, children playing football in the empty dirt lot of the railroad depot across from where he sat. The depot was old, once grand as a palace, chimneys all over it like headstones on a hill, black as coal, their corbeling ornate and clean-cut against the gray, still starless sky. He thought for an instant of the view from his window in Johns Hopkins Hospital — Osier dome and the streets of Baltimore — then concentrated, resisting memory, on the depot. The building had been padlocked and boarded up for years, and like everything else faintly tinged with nobility in Little Egypt (nobody could say there was much along that line), the depot was said to be haunted. Craine had no patience for country superstitions, but it was easy to believe that if anything anywhere was haunted, the Carbondale depot was the place. The ghosts would not be of the dangerous kind: weary black men pushing baggage carts, lean old conductors implacably chewing the insides of their cheeks, countrified young men dressed up to travel …striped cardboard suitcases, haircuts shaped by bowls …Craine focused on the book, resisting a minute rise of sadness. “Ghosts,” he muttered. He closed out, just in time, an image of children around a fireplace in a cabin at the edge of a dark mountain lake. “Not likely,” he said aloud. Nothing in the depot but heavy old boards half rotted out, crumbling concrete, rusty iron; pigeonshit and rats.

The children in the shadow of the depot had been playing for hours now, he was dimly aware, or clearly aware with one small part of his brain — playing as if they’d begun just a moment ago, as if time had been suspended — as it was for Craine, at least so long as he could escape into dozing, as he managed to do from time to time, or could engross himself in his Sanskrit book. Their faces were surprised and indignant when the father of one of them called, poking his head out the window of his old black panel truck — the truck just visible in the rising flood of darkness—“Stephen! Stephen!” and then, a moment later, when the boy had walked over to him — the man still shouting, so that the rest of the players would be sure to hear—“It’s getting dark out, boy! You got your mothah worried sick!” Craine gazed out guiltily, as if it were he who’d stayed out too long. Beyond the makeshift playing field, the railroad tracks gleamed dully, more dully every minute, gradually disappearing.

His sense of being watched was not as strong as before, nowhere near so. If he could be sure that someone had actually been watching him, he would have to say now that they’d quit for the day, gone home. Yet something of the weird discomfort was still there, a ghostly residue like the dread a man feels the morning after. That was why he sat by the window to read, the window shade up, the room growing steadily darker around him, his bottle dull amber in the windowsill, his pipe between his teeth, Scotch glass in his gray left hand. He was presenting himself for his enemy’s inspection, if the observer was his enemy (his sense of the whole thing was more and more unsure), stating by the act of sitting there that he had nothing he knew of to be ashamed of, nothing, and was not in the least afraid, not at all, not “worried,” as the restaurant cat had claimed, not even anxious; nothing of the kind. By his presence at the window he made plain to all the world that if the stranger would come up and knock on his door, like a civilized being, Gerald Craine would be happy to talk, make an effort to explain, put forward his defense.

His calm was an illusion, of course. When for a moment it seemed to him that the stranger had really done it, had climbed the narrow, dimly lit stairs and stood quietly knocking at his door even now, Craine started violently, bursting from the depths of his absorption like a rabbit, such terror in his chest that he thought he was having a heart attack. His hand jerked, splashing whiskey from his knee to his chin; then he sat silent and jittering, holding his breath, mouth wide open, waiting for the knock to come again. It didn’t. Slowly, his heart still painfully beating, he put the book down on the floor beside his shoe, put the glass on the windowsill to the right of him, put the pipe in his pocket, rose silently from the armchair, and, carefully avoiding the floorboards that creaked, crossed to stand listening at the door. Except for the scramblings of mice in the wall and the sea roar in his ears, there was nothing. At last, with his right hand on the handle of the gun in his shoulder holster, he reached out with his trembling skinny left hand, turned the knob, and jerked the door open. Across the hall, in front of his neighbor’s door, a shabby person in a suit was bending over, trying to poke a pamphlet through the door crack. At Craine’s feet lay a similar pamphlet. He stooped to pick it up. What Does God Require of Me? he read. When Craine looked up from the pamphlet, the shabby person was smiling at him and nodding. Craine glared, his emotions in a turmoil, feeling at the same time both encroached upon and curious, even eager to find out what the pamphlet said. That too was the whiskey, he understood. If he thought about what he thought, he didn’t give a hoot in hell what God required of him.