John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

So the work was a bore. They’d called Craine an artist, in his Chicago days, and they were right; that was his problem. He knew all the tricks and had practiced them for years with weary mastery until, bored to drink (he remembered no details), he’d thrown it all away and come down here to Carbondale, to semiretirement, where diligence and thought were unnecessary. “Maybe do some reading,” Craine had said. A joke of sorts. He’d been known even then for his insatiable consumption of the word. “Maybe take a course or two. College town,” he’d said. But here it was even worse, he’d discovered. Craine himself, though head of the agency, had done more than his share of sitting all night in an old pickup truck inconspicuous as a stump, with a bottle beside him, his pipe in his hand, trying to read by the moonlight through the window and waiting for some housewife — her husband off throwing their money at the ponies — to come sneaking down the back-porch steps and away through the bushes to her cabdriver lover. He’d done more than his share of skimming through old papers at the Southern Illinoisian or scrawled official records at the Murphysboro Courthouse, figuring out who was the cunninger liar, his client’s enemy, his client’s enemy’s lawyer, or his client; and more than his share of questioning some poor bastard about people the man knew no more about than he knew about the night of his conception. It had made Craine testy, cranky-philosophical. “I’ve had it,” he said aloud. He got an image of himself, walking bent over, the skirt of his overcoat nearly dragging on the ground. He’d had it, no question. He talked to himself pretty constantly, often about what some would call extraordinary things. “All that can happen in the universe does happen. Primary law of physics. Ha!”

Odd as an ostrich, no question about it — as Detective Inspector McClaren was aware. What a windfall for him: a direct connection between Craine and the latest of the victims! Craine’s mind shied back.

They all knew he was harmless. The people of Carbondale were tolerant of oddity, excused him more quickly than he excused himself. If he got seriously drunk in some bar and lashed out at astrologers and witches, quoting Scripture, bewailing the experience of Samson, they said, “Amen, brother,” and bought him more whiskey. (People would sometimes tell him later what he’d done.) If he leaped in horror at nothing, they patted him and calmed him. He did no harm, old Craine. Everybody knew it. His checks were good, he’d never been known to womanize, like Royce (Two-heads Carnac was, at times, a flasher). Despite his line of business it was acknowledged on every hand that, except if he were pushed to an extraordinary degree, old Craine would never hurt a fly. They watched him cross the street, teetering like an acrobat, clutching the paper sack in which he carried his Scotch, or they watched him stop abruptly and ask questions of a door, and they smiled and shook their heads. “Poor crazy Craine,” they said. (He knew what they said.) They told the story of his shoot-out, twenty years ago now, with the psycho on the Marshall Field roof. He was nothing to worry about, except maybe to Hannah.

She stared daggers whenever he poured Scotch into his glass, and made remarks under her breath. Sometimes, after he’d left the office, she’d get up from her desk and grab her purse and follow him, staying out of sight. Usually Craine was aware of her behind him, spying on him, hounding him. She was big as a courthouse and black as coal, hard for even an old drunkard to miss. He would grin wickedly and make cunning little feints, circling like a fox until he’d lost her, and then — at Sohn’s, for instance — he’d watch from behind a clothes rack as she went up to the girl at the register and said, “Honey, you seen Mr. Craine?”

One morning when she was tailing him — he hadn’t been aware of it that time, as it happened — some fool had jostled him as he was about to cross the street and he’d slammed down flat on his back. As he’d lain there swearing, slightly dazed among crumpled cigarette packs and gum wrappers, Hannah had run up and set her fat, clay-dark legs like the columns of some squat Ethiopian temple, had reached down her arms as if Craine were her child, huge tears in her eyes — he’d stared in amazement — and she’d said, “Oh Mistah Craine!” Later, on his back in his foul gray bed in his foul gray hotel room that looked out on the tracks, Craine had scowled at the window as if in fierce disagreement with it — he couldn’t see the tracks, only the gleaming wires leading off toward nowhere — and later still, sitting on the toilet with his pipe in his mouth and his trousers around his shoes, a book in his lap and his glass of Scotch on the linoleum beside him, he’d suddenly looked up from his reading— Tarzan and the Ant Men —and snapped his fingers and said, “Bingo!” If he’d meant something by it, he’d forgotten what he meant that same instant.

No doubt of it; his work — or his solitary ways, or his “drinking habit,” as Hannah called it — had unhinged him. It worried him a little, but not much. (Did it? He thought about it, frowning. It did not.) Certainly it never made him doubt the morality of the work he did, never made him feel, like Tom Meakins, theologically uneasy.

“It’s a shame, this work we do,” Meakins had once told him. Or words to that effect. When Craine slid his eyes up from his magazine, Meakins was shaking his big, pink, baggy-eyed baby’s head and sadly looking down past his pink and blue suspenders at a surveillance report he’d just now typed — likely some wife who’d been fucking the mailman, and Meakins didn’t blame her, or some faithless husband whose better half was snaggle-toothed and stupid. He was a large man, Tom Meakins — red-headed when Craine had first hired him, years ago. Now Meakins was balding, the hair around his ears turning yellowish white. Sweated perpetually; fatter than a mule. It was a wonder Tom Meakins had never had, so far, a heart attack. He was a family man — five daughters, all fatter than he was and two of them prostitutes, not even call girls: Calumet City. Meakins had once mentioned it, speaking louder than he meant to, sitting in the nickering darkness of the Cypress, watching cowboys running and shooting each other on the screen above the bartender’s head. He spoke of his daughters’ prostitution with sorrow and a touch of distaste but no definite condemnation. They still visited him in fact, every two, three years, dyed blond and painted, wide as church doors, smelling up the world like smoldering incense or a roomful of flowers at a funeral parlor. That easy forgiveness of his daughters was nothing exceptional, for Meakins. If a dog came up and bit him on his own front walk, Meakins would work it out that he’d had it coming. He could be hard when absolutely necessary, of course, capable even of squeezing off a shot if his life depended on it — though there was no way on earth he could Work up the cocksure, pure lunatic meanness of that damn. fool Royce, heart black as bile, black as cobra’s blood, living for the day when his next chance came to kill somebody.

Meakins, poor devil, had no such clarity of purpose. Existed in a condition of sorrowful bafflement, loving father and husband, self-sacrificing heart, a man obsessively aware that there are always two sides. Craine gave him, for the most part, legwork, paperwork; and though his squeamishness was, to Craine, a source of irritation, he made no attempt to reform him. They’d grown old together, “worn out in the service,” as Meakins said. From the lugubrious tone (his voice, however, was high, like a boy’s), you’d have thought he had in mind some kind of church service. But Craine more or less understood Tom Meakins; had a good deal in common with the man, in fact. Meakins too had been drinking too much since God knew when. His belly and hind end were as soft as Bunny Bread; his huge, rumpled trousers hung limply from his suspenders like some poor woman’s wash from a clothesline. On his right hand, his gun hand, he was missing two fingers, and you couldn’t help but trunk, from the looks of him, that he’d lost them by pure carelessness, maybe just misplaced them in the junk on his desk. He was, like Royce, a doomed man. Self-destructive tendency, indifference to disaster.