John Gardner - October Light

“You could at least have noticed what fishingboat it was,” he whimpered.

“Maybe somebody else did,” the officer said. “I’ll ask around.”

But nobody had.

Dr. Alkahest closed his eyes, clenched his fists, and made a vow. Life was precious, never to be repeated, despite all the wide-eyed memories of the transmigrationists. He would do what he must; it was decided. The man unwilling to fight for what he wanted did not deserve what he wanted. He smiled, eyes still closed. His jaw was firm now; a change had come over him. He could not but lament the impending calamities; nonetheless, his sleep was sound.

Meanwhile, at its pier in San Francisco, a vague shape in the tea-brown fog, the Indomitable sits waiting, moving a little like something alive, with the gentle lappings of the water supporting its bulk. Old Captain Fist appears on deck, holding his overcoated belly with one hand, leaning with the other on his cane. He is still very sick and walks with the greatest care, as a kindness to his stomach. After a moment the girl, Jane, appears beside him, wearing jeans, a man’s workshirt, and an oil-grimed baseball cap, red, white, and blue. She stands balanced and wary as a cat. “All clear?” she asks softly.

From the dock above, Mr. Goodman answers, “All clear.”

Captain Fist makes his way carefully, carefully to the side and stretches up a trembling hand. Mr. Goodman reaches down, takes the Captain’s hand and gently pulls, almost lifts, him to the dock. Jane climbs after him lightly.

“Wait here,” Captain Fist says, without troubling to glance at Mr. Goodman. His old eyes stare like two bullet holes into the city.

Mr. Goodman waits. The Captain and the handsome young woman in the patriotic cap move away toward the lights.

It was a little past midnight when the old woman was roused from her reading by the squawk of a chicken and the thunderous rumble of her niece’s car pulling up into the driveway. She couldn’t believe so much time had passed, or that the novel, mere froth that it was, had so held her attention. She was always fast asleep by eleven at the latest, except, on occasion, when friends came to visit and Estelle played piano or Ruth recited poems; and even allowing for the way he’d upset her and, come to that, nearly killed her, that brother of hers — he was insane, that’s all; always had been — even allowing for the way he’d gotten her all riled up, treating her like an animal, depriving her of her most ordinary human rights till she was trembling and shaking and so weak at the knees she’d been afraid, coming up the stairs backwards, protecting her face with her hands, that she’d collapse and fall on him, and serve him right (she was shaking again now, remembering) — even allowing for all that, it was hard to believe it was fifteen minutes past midnight!

She put down the paperback, opened to her page, on the white-painted square-topped wicker table beside the head of the bed — higher than the bed, an awkward, foolish excuse for a table if ever there was one, wicker-wrapped legs angling out past a useless little shelf down underneath (the table, she was sure, was a remnant from the years her niece Virginia had occupied this room) — and got up to go over to the clock on the desk to make certain she was seeing right. She was, it seemed.

It was a grayish-black clock made of onyx, or something made to simulate onyx — it weighed twenty-five pounds if it weighed one ounce — with ostentatious pitted gold pillars on the front, Roman columns, and Roman numerals so unevenly spaced it took study to be sure of what hour it was, let alone what minute. It stood in front of the mirror on the top of the closed oak desk, to the right of the glassed-in bookcase, level with her eyes. She couldn’t help noticing, looking above her blue plastic spectacle-rims at the hands on the clock, that her eyes, in the mirror behind it, were red, ruined by her weeping, and perhaps made redder still by all that reading. She was not a great reader, she’d be quick to admit — certainly not a person who ordinarily read trivia! That’s what he’s brought us to, she thought, and her lips and white, white cheeks began to tremble. By “us” she meant herself and her late husband Horace.

Horace, her husband of thirty-five years, would never have read such a book as hers. He’d read only the finest literature, authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Dos Passos, and Thomas Wolfe. She had not read them clear through herself, but she knew, if only by the fact that he read them, that they were profoundly serious-minded authors, “heavy,” as they say, full of difficult philosophy and memorable prose and keen insights into human nature. It was wonderfully comforting, hearing him read her memorable passages just as she was drifting off to sleep, prose that rolled over her dimming mind like the ocean over tumbling wrecks at sea. Sometimes as he read he would choke a little with emotion. She would pat his elbow. Heaven only knew what he would think of her — gentle Horace Abbott with his mild gray eyes and soft dentist’s hands — if, standing, ghostly, at her shoulder, he should find her reading trash. Her eyes filled with tears, not so much of self-pity as righteous indignation, for she was thinking again of her television set, and, taking her embroidered hankie from the sleeve of her nightie, where she’d tucked it, she angrily blew her nose. “We’ll get even, Horace, you wait and see,” she whispered to the empty room. Her husband had been dead for twenty years — twenty years exactly this Halloween. Dead of a heart attack. Someone had been in the room with him; they were gone when she got there.

Her niece’s car was still rumbling, down below, though Virginia was in the house now; the old woman could hear them talking. It was odd, she thought, that Virginia’d gone and left the engine running, eating the gas up at sixty cents a gallon; but then she remembered. Sometimes when they turned off the motor the car wouldn’t start again. Last Sunday afternoon when they’d come over after church (Sally’s church, not theirs; Lewis was an atheist), they’d had to work two full hours to get the old thing running. It was a terrible car, a Chevrolet four-door (she and Horace had had Buicks). But Virginia and her husband were poor, of course. Virginia’s husband Lewis — Lewis Hicks — was shiftless and dull-witted — or at any rate that was Sally Abbott’s opinion, not that she condemned him; it was a free country. He had just a little touch of Indian in him. His great-great-great-great-grandfather had been a Swamp-Yankee. It was well known. Lewis had never gotten past eighth grade and was now just a handyman, a painter of porches, fixer of old pumps, shingler of barn and woodshed roofs, installer of screens and storm-windows, and in the winter, a gluer of old broken pictureframes and caner of chairs. He’d worked for her some, years ago, when she’d sold antiques. The Chevrolet, bluish-gray with brown patches, was a menace: she, for one, refused to ride in it. To take the thing out on the highway should be a criminal act. There were great rusted holes you could put your whole leg through, the front left headlight had been smashed out for months, and the back had been crashed into by a hit-and-run so that they had to hold the trunk shut with electric wire.

She stood twisting the hankie in her two hands, as if trying to wring it out, wondering what they could be saying so long, James and Virginia. She ought to get that Dickey home to bed; tomorrow was a school-day. Picking up the book, not noticing she was doing it, she went over to the tall narrow door — the door to the hallway, the one James had locked (there were two other doors, the closet door and the one by the foot of the bed that went up to the attic) — to see if she could hear what they were saying. She couldn’t. Even with her good ear pressed to the wood, all she could catch was a faint rumble and vibration in the wood — ordinary chat of the kind you might expect in the middle of the night, her telling him, no doubt, the gossip from her meeting of the Rebekahs, or whatever, him saying just enough to keep her there, the way an old man will when his daughter comes by, and over by the fireplace or on the overstuffed plush couch, little Dickey curled up asleep with his deformed, one-eyed Snoopy.