John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“Praise the Lord,” Craine said loudly, belligerently, reeling; but somehow — indeed, it was a miracle — he did not fall.

He made his way across to the Post Office, went carefully up the steps and inside. To kill time he went to the window, set the Bible on the counter, and asked for postage stamps.

“Is that you, Craine?” the small, lean black man at the window said. He smiled, clean of eye as a scout master. He was an orderly person. His rubber stamps were ranked like lead soldiers on the ink pad. He was a good man as well, Craine cunningly deduced, and a loyal citizen; at any rate, like Craine, like Socrates, he was not among the Wanted.

Craine glanced mysteriously behind him and raised one finger to the fur near where his mouth was.

The man leaned forward, lips pursed as if to kiss him, eyes rolling. “What’s happening?” he whispered. He had, it seemed, one small imperfection. The thought of murder, arson, regimental rape was exciting to his soul.

Craine lowered his glasses, winked portentously, and again raised the skinny, crooked finger to his mouth. The man looked past him, blinking rapidly. Except for Craine, the man at the window, and someone in back throwing boulders into a truck, there was no one at all in the post office. Craine paid for the stamps, picked up the Bible, turned carefully — the floor was marble — and made his way back to the door, shakily trying to put the stamps in his wallet, the Bible clamped so tightly under his right elbow that his shoulder stood up sharply, like the shoulder of a hawk. When he pulled at the pitted brass handle on the door — relic of a former, nobler age, an age in which letters still had human significance (comfort for the prisoner, relief for the destitute, perhaps some thundering, heartfelt rebuke for the capricious politician) — it seemed to him at first that the door had somehow gotten locked since he’d come in. But then he pushed, and it swung open so easily, for all its imperatorial height, that if he hadn’t been clinging to the handle he would certainly have fallen. He made it down the steps to the sidewalk, started toward the corner, then stopped, turned, and boldly — one might have thought angrily — looked back. The girl in the beard, the thick, round glasses, ducked quickly behind a parked Volkswagen just down from the plate-glass front window of Carter’s store. Her reflection stood hunched like a scrawny pheasant, head erect, rear end out, beak tipped. Royce, leaning against an electric pole not ten feet away from her, shook his head and grinned. Light flashed from Royce’s hands, and Craine made out that he was paring his nails with a jackknife. At the Ben Franklin Store, thick with the smell of ammonia and cheapness and the deafening chatter of unclean birds, Craine set down the Bible, scratched under the beard, and pretended to study brooms. “They don’t make ’em like they use to,” Craine told the salesgirl.

“I just sell ’em, mister,” she said. She was square and blond, large-bosomed, regally bored. When she was old her chin and nose would meet.

A woman with a shopping cart went cautiously past Craine. There was an animal, a huge black-eyed woodchuck, that made a strange clicking noise on the cart’s lower shelf. Craine started violently, so that the bottle in the lining of his coat banged hard against his ankle, and again he almost fell; but nothing happened, the cart and woodchuck moved on calmly down the aisle, out of sight behind the remarkable kelly-green pant legs of the woman’s slacks, legs like two shocking-green elephant’s legs, or two trees wading into a sewage lagoon.

Craine glanced suspiciously at the salesgirl. She stared back at him, straight through him, as if she thought he might be handing out Watchtowers . She had a mouth like an infant’s. “You, young lady,” Craine told the salesgirl, suddenly jerking the pipe from his lips and stabbing the bit in the direction of her face, “you, you scarlet woman, are the sole reason the world’s in the miserable condition it’s in to day .” He leaned toward her slightly, a trifle unsteadily, studying her mammoth, fallen breasts. “Cow,” he said. “Prick teaser.”

“You want me to call the manager?” she said.

Near the front of the store, Elaine Glass was pretending to look at paperback novels. Royce stood right beside her. As Craine was watching her (the store was now moving, steadily, evenly, like a merchant ship, and the identity of the girl in the beard had momentarily slipped Craine’s mind), she turned and squinted down the aisle at him, and then, belatedly, jerked away her face and snatched out, quick as a cat, and caught hold of a book.

Behind his false beard, Craine smiled at the salesgirl. “You natives here in Little Egypt,” he said thoughtfully, “have a curious way of speaking. You just set your mouth in one position and talk.

Now for the first time the salesgirl looked at him. “How come you got on that false beard?” she said.

“False?” Craine barked. He leaned still nearer, threateningly, and she drew back from the stink. “I keep up with the times, you she-devil, you foul reprobate, you scandalous little crotch!” he snarled. “The times are false. Look at these brooms!”

She tried to pretend he’d gone away. She unwrapped a stick of gum. Her eyes flicked up at him. “Mister,” she said, “go fuck yerself.”

Craine smiled his murderous, yellow-toothed smile, started away from her, then cautiously went back, touching the brim of his hat with two fingers. “I almost forgot the Good Book,” he said and pointed, then bowed, smiled timidly, and gathered it in his arms.

At the front door he stood for a long time trying to remember why he’d come. Abruptly he went out onto the sidewalk, turned right, and started walking. He stopped again.

Standing with the whiskey bottle weighing down his coat, his eyebrows arched, eyes screwed small, smells all around him from the hippie soap-and-candle shop, Craine thought suddenly of his aunt Harriet, experiencing for no clear reason, and to his great surprise, a burst of memory. Two sets of images came: first an image of his aunt at her dressing table, carefully putting on rouge, then powdering over it. Her hair was copper-colored, shiny as shellac, tightly finger-waved; her slip was blue, as blue as her prints of Maxfield Parrish — small-breasted, naked girls, blue mountains. She had a long nose. Perhaps she was going to a Bible-study meeting — she was fervidly religious, though she no more spoke of it than she spoke of her rabbit’s foot or her aversion to nuns and black cats — or perhaps she was going with her friend Arline, a fellow teacher at the high school, to some lecture. His aunt taught French and Latin. Her room smelled of bath salts, powder, and perfume — artificial lilac, light blue, pink, and ivory-yellow bottles — a scent he had never encountered in connection with a human being since, except once on a younger woman who was nothing like his aunt — a terrible, revolting encounter he had long since blotted out, or virtually blotted out. Her name was Alice; she’d nearly pinned a rape charge on him, though it was she who’d invited him to her prissy little room — town outside Chicago — and she who … memory failed him; he’d been drunk. He could remember almost nothing more about Aunt Harriet; nothing but the fact that her eyes were a startling blue, the eyelids and lashes like a rabbit’s. He hadn’t seen a photograph of his aunt in years and had nothing to jog his memory, but his impression was that, except to the small boy he’d been at the time, she was not pretty. She had yellow-white combs and brushes with pale pink flowers on them, roses. These he remembered with absolute clarity. He had no memory of his parents and did not think of them now, merely studied, for the moment the memory burned, his aunt’s expression: pursed lips, narrowed eyes. He saw her face in the mirror, and his own, behind hers, and saw her little jump of alarm as she realized he was there, at the open door. The memory was intense and painful; he was not sure why. No doubt soon after the moment he remembered, some neighbor had come in to look after him while Aunt Harriet went out, perhaps some neighbor he disliked. His aunt’s hind end, on the dressing-table bench, was to his child eye, in some inexpressible way, mysterious. Even now, in the memory, the lines of her hind end were as mysterious as some blurred old legend or inexplicable ruin. He’d been looking at that part of her the instant before he met her eyes. “Gerald!” she’d cried, startled, then had blushed at having jumped, and had laughed her feathery little laugh. What charged the memory, needless to say, was not the slightly blurry recollection of his aunt, but his own long-forgotten anguish — love and shame. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” he’d said, or something of the sort, and she’d said, smiling eagerly, as if in terrible panic, “Of course not, dear!” and then, in quite a different tone, “Hmm,” and she’d studied him narrowly.