John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“But what would you have me become?” Craine would have added, drawing his pipe out and speaking acidly from the side of his mouth. “A master criminal? A philosopher?” And he’d have laughed, nasty, like a man always one step ahead of you, and he’d have pushed the pipe back in and splashed himself more Scotch.

He was right, of course. We’ve slipped past the age of exciting adventure, no question about it, though the fact may fill young people’s hearts with dismay and drive fools to malevolent fictions and secret societies. Craine had read about such things. Waiting in his office for the phone to ring — hunched forward at his desk (red skin, sharp bones), shoulder holster dangling from the back of his chair — or waiting for people he was shadowing to come through the doorways, he’d skimmed through innumerable books and magazines. He consumed the written word ferociously, indifferently, like a library fire. Never reading deeply, never with full attention — one ear always cocked toward the business of the moment — even when he slept, one ear tipped cautiously toward the ominous potential of the universe. But he read; he thought things over; he caught on. A puzzle solver from way back. His trade.

He’d read of West Coast fertility cults — even met a fellow once who had claimed to be a demon, the one time Craine had made a trip to San Francisco. Craine had perked up. “Demon?” he’d said, supposing it must be a slip of the tongue but straining to make out, with his watery eyes, some oddity in the eyes of the stranger. “In ancient times,” his aunt Harriet had told him solemnly, when Craine was about six, “demons were supposed to be all around us, even in us. Our Lord once chased a great flock of them into some pigs and made them run off a cliff.” His aunt had been a dabbler in things antiquarian, going through old bookshops, visiting museums. She’d placed in his bedroom (it had given him nightmares) a greenish black statue of the Horus bird. His aunt had been odd in a number of ways. She’d been a sleepwalker. Sometimes in the middle of the night she would drift downstairs and sit in darkness staring out the window.

The San Francisco demon had proved, of course, a disappointment. Plump-faced boy of twenty-one, slanted eyes, pink sunglasses. Craine had sighed, half-sneered, and turned away. It was everywhere, of course, that hunger to get free of the facts, float high above the patched and ragged earth as the plane he’d been on then — bound for San Francisco — floated high above the tinkle and pachinko of Nevada. Ah, spirituality! Alpha waves, Do-in, Silva Mind Control! Better Carnac’s tarot, his dowsing for telluric centers of the ancient gods’ power. That was sanity, in a man who’d had his head smashed. Yet the child in Craine hoped on, of course, like the rest of poor hopeful humanity; hoped on, scorning hope. Craine scowled, shook his head, and lit his pipe again, thinking of cancer. Hannah glanced in, moving past his door, but did not stop. The mail hadn’t come yet; they had nothing to do.

Craine understood how it was with the world. Zeus-cult revivals in Boston and New York, and here in the old, plain-brained Midwest, secret organizations of loyal Americans, disloyal Americans, people who hated Jews, people who hated gasoline, people who hated banks or universities or churches, women who hated men — the whole tiresome range of deranged human spirits whose personal and professional disappointments they’d nursed into cosmic monsters, foul, dark beasts as dreary as any to be seen late at night on the snowy TV of some run-down motel outside, say, Decatur — but monsters that in fact had the power to kill, given their bulk and mindlessness. Mesopotamian bulls, animation by Disney. Malevolence and stupidity huddle all around us, cowering in chrome-furnished bedrooms with their Playboy magazines, or gliding down the aisles of the A&P with a vengeful raised consciousness not even the Muzak can disarm. All empty. That was the miserable fact, the fact that remained. Gerald B. Craine would give you his word as a specialist in these matters, a man who’d been studying — or anyway outfoxing — the abnormal psyche for a quarter of a century: there were, at least among particular persons, no cat-women, she-devils, goddesses come back; there were only bores, fools, and lunatics — also some good people, though he could think of none — and there were therefore no openings for your old-time True Adventurer.

That was general knowledge in the world these days, though fools might struggle infernally to deny it, wearing charms, smoking pot, buying lottery tickets. Disillusionment was king, except with morons. It used to be, even here in southern Illinois, that a boy could aspire to be a lion tamer. Now if he was lucky he got a job as attendant for the kiddie-kar rides at the Murdale Plaza; or he saved up his money and rented an office like Craine’s, above the Baptist Book Store, with a view of the flower-lined hospital parking lot, sparrows on the window ledge, and got himself a pistol and a ball-point pen and a sign on the cracked, frosted glass of the door, GERALD B. CRAINE DETECTIVE AGENCY.

No business for a person in Craine’s condition. His bowels were the least of it.

His agency covered, in theory, the usual: civil and criminal investigating, guarding, patrolling, confidential and undercover, missing persons, industrial, personal injury…. He had a large staff, for a town like Carbondale: three, or, counting himself, four. He’d had sixteen people in his Chicago agency, but in a place like Carbondale, sixteen would be an army. When need arose, which it rarely did, he could expand his staff by stepping down the hall to the Hannon Agency, or Curtis, across the street, or by signing on a few university students or calling in various down-and-outs worse off than Craine himself, old business acquaintances — the usual practice, cheap labor. Put ’em in a uniform and prop ’em up in a conspicuous place and, if nothing else, they tended to discourage vandalism. He’d seen many a night when, discounting the police — which it was wise to discount in any case (sitting in the station, hardly answering the phone, watching TV in the cell-block with the prisoners) — the town had been placed in the sole guardianship of addicts and flat-out alcoholics. You could walk from the ABC Liquor Store, downtown, to that field with the cinder-block building on it, which the Carbondale Council called its industrial park, and you’d never encounter but two night watchmen with their peepers open — and those two, for all you could tell, dead.

But mostly the four of them were all the Gerald Craine Agency required — himself; his secretary, Hannah Johnson, who occasionally stepped in as a female operative, though she’d never been licensed; his man Tom Meakins; and that pushy, irascible little banty Emmit Royce, ex-Marine, big chin with a dimple in it — a man Craine ought never to have brought down from the city, but it was too late now. Fire Royce and the son of a bitch would shoot you. It was possible. Royce got meaner every year, like an old German shepherd. Forty pushups a day, despite his emphysema. Played with his gun like some hopped-up kid, had it always within reach and, in a joking way, would pull it on people, especially big, tough blacks from the Northeast, the Negro section. He’d do it anywhere — gas station, whorehouse, hardware store, some stinking, grimy public lavatory. “Gotchoo, you bastard!” Royce would cry, eyes glittering with excitement, icy as a dog’s eyes, and he’d push the gun tight into the black man’s jaw and with his free hand reach into the black man’s coat and relieve him of his heat. The black man would roll up his eyes in mock terror, playing, always, playing, though deadly for all that; then both of them would laugh and Royce would toss the gun back, with a fierce, sharp-toothed grin, saying, “Watch yourself, that’s all, you dumb black bastard!” Royce meant nothing by it, nothing whatsoever, merely keeping his hand in, but eventually someone was going to kill him — if not some irate black then some irate husband — it was a foregone conclusion. Yet time went by and nobody did it — Royce must be pushing forty-five by now — and Craine, when he recalled that it hadn’t yet happened, would be surprised, but only slightly. Detectives know better than most people do what incredible stupidity and inconvenience human beings will put up with.