John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

He waved his hands, explaining, and even as he did so he remembered traces of what it was that he could not remember. He was fishing from the bank on his uncle’s farm with his trim-bearded father, who was somehow a woman, his father aloof, his cuffs cocked high above his citified socks, his pose as patient and serene as the sunlight in the snakegrass around them. All this Craine saw, though staring down in intense fascination and half-mystical alarm at the slow-moving, clay-yellow water, thick gumbo, from which the deadmen would rise. He knew what was down there, or some of it: snapping turtles, gars, enormous slick frogs, and at the bottom, where the wood and flesh of the deadmen turned slowly to earth— bewhiskered catfish. When the line went taut Craine’s heart leaped, terrified, seeing already what would happen in an instant — the fish wildly fluttering above the water, like his heart, spinning in the light like a large silver coin, then thumping to the grass, where it would flop and suck for breath, already dying, laboring against air. His father’s neat hands were like a doctor’s, touching it. His glasses blinked light. Little Craine stared, wide-eyed, and held his breath. So it went again and again, each time less frightening. After a while one got used to these things, death and life touching, like his father’s pale fingers on the fish. The threat drew back a ways, retreated into the shadows of the nettles, then farther, into the trees. He sat in warm sunlight, the world grew increasingly rational; his father cleaned his glasses. Though Craine’s heart beat rapidly, perhaps he had already begun to forget. Soon nothing would remain, of this or of anything else from his childhood, except at night. At night, years later (so he told the icy observer, hurriedly whispering), he would dream of murderous black catfish, slow-moving as zeppelins, prowling among the stars.

“That’s your explanation?” The interrogator sneered, though — raising his hand — he tried to hide it. Craine’s language had been maudlin, a fault the stranger could not abide.

“It is, sir. That’s my explanation. Yes, sir.”

Speaking aloud, Craine wakened himself. He stared around the room.

The book had closed itself, sinking between his legs. The room seemed more miserable and drab than before, paltry in comparison to wherever it was that he’d been in his dream — he could remember none of it, not an image, not a word; he had only a vague sense of the dream’s intensity, whether joyful or ominous he could hardly say, but emphatically alive, more alive than anything in this world was.

The music was still playing in his neighbor’s room, and again he experienced an intense, drunken wish — totally out of character, he would have said — to talk with someone; that is, talk with Ira Katz. The image of the young man came clearly into his mind, the dark, ragged beard, strangely gentle eyes that reminded him of. … He searched his wits. When it came to him, he laughed aloud, two sharp barks. Reminded him of Christ Our Lord! Craine got up from his chair and dropped the book in the seat, still laughing, but soundlessly now, bent half double as if borne down by the irony of things. Abruptly, he stopped laughing and frowned, deep in thought. It was interesting, after all, that he should feel as apparently he did about the Jesus of his childhood. He wiped sweat from his forehead, then pulled at the tip of his nose with two fingers, as if shaping it like clay, trying to make it still longer, all the while seeing in his mind’s eye the picture on the wall of the Sunday school room, Jesus in the Garden . Stupid, sentimental. Light beaming down out of heaven like a spotlight in a theater. All the same, there was something there, however buried in foolishness. The man had a kindly face — acquainted with sorrow, as the saying went. (Ira Katz, Craine had a feeling, would not like the idea of being identified with Christ Our Lord. Craine smiled, showing his rat teeth. Never mind; it was interesting.) He stood looking around the room, trying to think of some excuse, some errand that would justify a visit to his neighbor. On the table across from the bed stood his hot plate, salt and pepper, half-filled sugar bowl. Craine nodded as if at some suggestion from the walls, the mice. He took a cup — a cracked white one, the only one he had — from the top of the refrigerator, dusted out the inside with his fingers, and started toward the door. He paused, reconsidering, then went back for his suit coat and whiskey bottle, put on the suit coat, put the bottle in the right hand pocket, picked up the cup, and started for the door again. Again he paused, looking around, hunting through his pockets with his left hand, then, shifting the cup to the left hand, hunting with his right. He found papers and empty match folders, but no matches. In the top dresser drawer, among more slips of paper, rolled socks, and his second pistol, he found a matchbook, nearly full, that said Ace Hardware. He dropped it in the pocket of his shirt, beside his pipe, shifted the cup to his right hand again, ran back to the chair for his tobacco pouch, then hurried out.

At his neighbor’s door, as soon as his hand touched the handle, a kind of nightmare came over him. He seemed to be standing not in the dim, shabby hallway but somewhere outside, under trees. Someone was coming toward him, hands raised as if to catch him. Though it was dark, he could almost see the face. Then he was standing in the hallway again, frightened and for some reason sick with guilt. He stood for a long time, listening, head bowed and cocked to one side. Nothing came to him; whatever it was had fallen away, back into darkness. He raised his hand from the doorknob and, softly, knocked. After a moment he knocked again. Inside, someone turned down the stereo.

“Coming,” Ira Katz called. “Just a minute.”

“I wonder, Mr. Katz,” Craine said, twisting his face to an obsequious smile, holding the cup in both hands by the fingertips, his shoes toeing inward, “if you could spare me a cup of sugar?”

Ira Katz looked from Craine’s face to the strap of his shoulder holster and down to his cup, then back at his face, not suspicious, exactly, but thinking, grinning nervously, his mind half there, half somewhere else, dark brown eyes gazing out at Craine like those of some Talmudist roused for a moment to reflection on the present. He was always like that for a minute or two when Craine dropped in on one errand or another. Craine smiled on, waiting for it to pass. The room smelled thickly of chicken — or possibly fish — and cooked cabbage, also coffee, a suggestion of burnt toast. Craine’s hunger died away. “I seem to have run out of sugar,” he said.

The young man’s eyes were dark and heavy-lidded, not in the sleepy-looking or secretly cunning or bedroomy way but in another more complex and troublesome to Craine, as if Ira Katz had seen to the heart of things, had suffered and forgiven all the evils of humanity for maybe thousands of years and was doomed to continue in the same way down through the centuries for thousands more, perhaps — weary, full of personal and impersonal griefs, faintly grinning with alarm, no less innocent or compassionate than the day he began, but bereft of all hope for himself or his fellow man. It was an illusion, no doubt — or largely that — an accidental effect of the structure of his bones, his eyebrows, the flecked brown pupils of his eyes; but from earliest childhood, Craine surmised (his face momentarily shrewd, almost cunning), Ira Katz had imposed that illusion without knowing it, so that people had trusted him, confided in him, poured out their fears and woes as Gerald Craine would do now, given half a chance, not that Craine greatly admired himself for it. In the course of time— or so Craine imagined, and he was usually correct about these things — Ira Katz had become, if he wasn’t from the beginning, what his face made him seem, a man put on earth to bear the sorrows of the whole human race. Craine pushed the cup out toward him, half-smiling, half-grimacing again. Abruptly, as if Craine’s ludicrous request had only now broken through, Craine’s neighbor smiled more openly, a large, boyish smile full of gleaming teeth, on all sides of it a fury of black moustache and beard.