John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“You called the ambulance?” Craine said.

Katz nodded. He was looking down at Carnac. “Shouldn’t we do something?” he asked. “Wash off the blood or something?” Then, quickly, as if interrupting himself, “Jesus, what do you think happened?”

“Offhand,” Craine said, “I’d say somebody pounded the shit out of him.”

He would have thought it was obvious — in fact he’d said it before — but all of them jerked up their heads at him at once, as if thinking they too might have the shit pounded out of them. “Listen,” Craine said suddenly, pointing at Ira Katz, “did you hear anything? A car? Something that might’ve been a scuffle?”

Katz thought, then shook his head. Half a mile away, a siren began to wail. The people who’d been looking in from outside began to leave, two by two, three by three.

One of the men who’d come in — a short, splotchy man with frizzled gray hair — said, “How long you think he’s been laying here?” He glanced at the door as he spoke, thinking of getting out.

“No telling,” Craine said.

The man nodded soberly, pulling the front of his coat together, struggling painfully over whether or not it would be morally acceptable to leave.

Craine leaned toward him, sly. “Listen,” he said, “if I were you I’d make a run for it.”

The man stared and blinked, then laughed. “No,” he said, blushing, “it’s all right. I have an appointment, that’s all I was thinking. It’s all right.” He blushed more and pushed his hands into his pockets.

The police car pulled up, and, a few minutes later, the ambulance.

The patrolman was Jimmy Throop, fat and officious. The cloth of his pant legs, when he bent down on one knee to look at Carnac, was as tight as skin. He peeled his gloves off, then put one hand gently on the underside of Carnac’s chin — no nurse at Johns Hopkins could have done it more gently. With the other hand he lifted the eyelid. “Mareezus, Craine,” he said.

Craine scowled and said nothing.

Throop laughed, boyish, as if afraid he’d offended. His dimple showed. “If you’re gonna have these wild parties, you should warn us in advance!”

“Next time for sure,” Craine said.

Throop had bright straw-yellow hair and freckles. He was big as a horse, maybe two hundred seventy pounds, mostly fat; farmboy from Makanda. Craine knew him well. When Throop was a rookie, the first job he’d been sent on was a female drunk and disorderly. She’d refused to be arrested and had hit him in the jaw, though she was only a third his size. Believing it was wrong to hit a lady, he’d called home for help. He’d never live it down, but as a matter of fact he wouldn’t willingly hit a lady even now. The part he liked best in policework, he said, was speaking on bicycle safety in the schools.

“It’s something, this town,” Throop said, sliding his hat off. “Months of quiet, and now suddenly two in one night — first the woman, now Carnac!”

“Woman?” Craine said.

“Woman with some kind of funny name, like — April?”

Craine glanced up the stairway. “Dead?” he asked.

“Gone to glory,” Throop said. He gave his head a little shake, not smiling now, embarrassed.

“Where’d you find her? What happened?”

“She was sitting in somebody’s van, no clothes on. It wasn’t in the van that she was killed though. Mud and leaves on her.”

Craine breathed softly, his right hand automatically going for the whiskey. “That’s all you know?”

“That’s all we know.”

Katz was coming down the stairs now. For some reason, Craine kept his mouth shut. Behind them on the street, the ambulance siren started growling.

Over breakfast, at the diner where he always ate, crowded at this hour with working people and thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of fresh coffee, Craine skimmed his paperback, his ears shut tight against the talk all around him. The book spoke of how the pit viper can see waves of light we cannot see, namely infrared, and so lives happily in dark places. Craine didn’t necessarily believe what he read; he had his own opinions. But his cheek muscles twitched and he sucked at his teeth, interested. He closed his book and for a long time stared blankly. People spoke to him, asking him things, passing behind him to reach the stools still empty, farther down; he did not hear them. At the window, a bearded, stooped figure stood watching, then fled. Craine did not notice.

“Coffee, Mr. Craine?” asked the woman behind the counter.

He jumped, both hands flying, then glared at her, shaking, covering his embarrassment with anger. “Coffee,” he snapped at her, stalling while he thought. “Coffee, yes. Don’t I always have coffee?” He glanced at the Scotch in its sack, as if not quite sure.

She wearily shook her head, threw a look at the man to the left of him, and poured.

Craine smiled in sudden panic and gave his neighbor a wink. He was himself again, he thought; hard as iron; no ambitions, no regrets. He watched the sway of the woman’s seat as she moved away again, then, catching himself, frowned. It seemed to him now, though perhaps it was in his mind (he was certain of what he saw, yet it was queerly like a dream and he was assailed by doubt), that the shabby man on the stool to the left of him — a miner perhaps, bearded, uncombed, with milky blue eyes — leaned close to him and whispered, spraying toast from his lips, “ ‘Shall the body be raised from the dead?’ That’s what Our Savior asked the Pharisees and Sadducees. Some said one thing and some said another — the texts were indefinite, there were conflicting traditions. Said Our Savior, ‘You are quite mistaken!’ ”

Craine looked at the man, almost certain it was the same one who’d come to him last night with the pamphlet. The man stared back mildly, his narrow lips trembling with emotion. Craine drank the coffee down scalding hot and called to the waitress for another. “I didn’t sleep much,” he explained to the bearded man beside him. “As a Christian, I’m sure you’ll understand my predicament. I can’t seem to wake myself up.” Craine laughed, slightly spitting.

Another man, the man on his right, asked furtively, “You hear about the murder, Craine?” He glanced around, making sure no one had heard him.

“I can’t answer that,” Craine said, “don’t crowd me!” Then he whispered, “He’s right here in this room!”

“Really?” the man asked, stiffening.

“Shit, how do I know?” Craine snapped, strangely angry. He remembered his dream of preaching, those golden curls. “What the hell do you people expect of me?” he whispered.

The man on the right, then the man on the left, drew back a little. With both hands, trembling, Craine raised his coffee cup and drank.

Hereafter, the narrative loops. In several variants, the first line of what follows is the first line of the book. There is a definite break between the capture of Elaine Glass — with its assault on Emmit Royce — and the unit thereafter where Crainefirst talks with the girl. The chairman of the English department, Professor Davies — an early name for Detective Inspector McClaren — seems, to this reader at least, constructed in haste. But a novel so concerned with time and perceived causality can incorporate a glitch or two in its program; the elements here introduced are, clearly, part of the plot.

Craine’s work was a bore. His associates were bores, his clients were bores, the people he spied on were pitiful bores whose secrets, when he finally nosed them out, were boring beyond all description. “If I were you, Craine,” some observer might have said to him, perceiving Craine to be too old, too decrepit, for the kind of work he did — and discerning, behind that whiskey-fog, a mind still keen enough for nobler occupation—“If I were you, Craine, I’d seek employment more suitable.” “Good point,” Craine would have snapped. He had knots in his shoestrings. His fingers shook so badly, till noon or so, that he had to use two hands to elevate his glass. (He’d been an all-day drinker for fifteen years.) Often when he visited old friends in Chicago, former business associates, he was mistaken for a bum. He had wrinkled clothes, dim, bloodshot eyes behind thick, tinted glasses, and in his facial cracks, drab gray whiskers.