The Sunlight Dialogues (104 page)
Luke obeyed.
His mother said quietly, behind him, “Be careful.”
He nodded, irritated, and walked to the cab. Then, just as he was about to get in, he changed his mind, turned abruptly, and strode back to where his mother stood watching. Before she knew what he was going to do, he kissed her cheek and took one of her hands and pressed it and tried to meet her eyes. He couldn’t. He looked at the line where her forehead met her hairline—looked hungrily, the way he’d looked, earlier, at the cluttered garage.
“Are you all right?” she said.
He nodded, a brief jerk back and to one side, then turned and ran back to the truck. He jumped in, eased into first, switched on the headlights, and started up. He drove slowly, getting into no gear higher than sixth, until he reached the highway. This was not the time to be stopped by some trooper. Then, when he’d turned onto 98, he moved up through the gears to twelfth. His chest filled with excitement and fear.
He was curving up into the mountains now, coming sooner than he meant to to the place. He loved the rough old battered road with its sudden curves and jolts and dips, its lazy towns with their yellow lights and enormous, comfortable trees, and between the towns glimpses of moonlit river, black and white cows in the blackness of a field, isolated farmhouse lights, once in a while a gas station with old-fashioned handcrank pumps. He’d driven it often, carrying gypsum, or television parts from Sylvania, or batteries, or cameras from Eastman. In the valleys he came into feathery patches of fog, and he would slow for them, but then as the road rose higher he came to open spaces incredibly wide and beautiful. He saw shooting stars. He could no longer see the glow of Stony Hill.
He was not afraid. He had no regrets. Yet even now he went over and over it, trying to know for sure that he was right.
She’d made his father read books, whatever books were popular with the college professors she slept with that year, and he would read them, impatient and irritable but gutless, and he would find them stupid and would know no words to express his feeling, or none she understood. They were tripe, he said. Just tripe. They had nothing to do with anything. And she would take it for a proof of his stupidity and would not even tell him why she thought—why her college professors thought—they were masterpieces. But sometimes he—Luke—or Will Jr would read them, and they would talk about the books and his father would listen and suddenly break in, trying, as feebly as ever, to say what he meant. They talked about
Pierre.
Will Jr said it was full of pointless froth, mere tiresome palaver, a tiresome rumble of symbolism. She said it was profound, the story of their life. Will Jr said Pierre was Melville and if Melville denied it he was a liar or, more likely, a fool. Suddenly, explosively, his father said, sitting watchful in his corner, “Hah!” which meant he agreed. She said fiercely, hardly turning in his direction, “For heaven’s sake stick to things you understand!” He was abashed. But Luke had cried out, close to tears, “He’s right, anyone can see he’s right.” And then Will Jr came into it, defending his father, and she made quips and smashed every word he said and fought him with all the viciousness she knew how to muster—she knew plenty—and all at once Luke, the one perpetually caught in the middle—was defending her, talking about symbolism. Though he might have as easily taken Will’s side, because he too was right, they were both right but on terms that could never be reconciled. It was a stupid novel, it was a brilliant novel. She always won, and she always had to win again, and she never could win. And as for his father, he worked and slept and grew fatter and fatter, let his hair grow out in his nose and ears, carried a smell like a Polish wedding, could not tell a painting from a hole in the wall unless it was a painting of horses or a barn, went to sleep and snored like a bull at the movies, called the bathroom the restroom, wore armbands and suspenders and smelled of tobacco, and her objections to all this were to him not only foolish but dangerously immoral. Will Jr had not had to judge it: he’d grown up with Uncle Ben, before they were in a position to bring the family together, so he, Luke, who’d spent only three summers with Uncle Ben, was the one driven to understand them. He could understand—how could he help it?—why she had to destroy all her husband’s name meant, why she’d gotten Stony Hill and sold it to the Billingses, why she’d mocked him and tormented him and tried to stir up enmity between him and his brothers. And he could understand why his father hated her, believed her insane, even toyed once—but tentatively, clumsily, robbed of all confidence in himself—with having her arrested. And so all his life he had alternated between trying to make peace between them and hating them both, and in the end he had found he had no choice but to cling to them stupidly, voluntarily allow himself to be pulled apart, snarling first at one, then at the other, with angry love. He was now repulsive to them both. To each he seemed the image of the other.
They were wrong. He was himself. Or rather he was the impossible union of both of them, the closing of the circle. More than that.
What was incredible was that it was he, of all people, who was going to achieve their crackpot dream. He became more keenly aware of the wind rushing by, the vastness of space before him and time behind. It was as if the idea came not from his own mind but from someone seated in the truck beside him, eagerly dictating thoughts in his ear.
You, Luke, are the ghost. That’s what they’ve wanted, what all of them struggled toward and missed and fell away from into disillusionment, or self-hatred, or compromise. Because of a simple error, the notion that when it came it would be what it was the first time, a thing of this world.
He leaned forward over the steering wheel, peering ahead, searching out the thought. He’d come to another small town now, a few houses, all with their lights out, a store with only the neon burning in front, a single traffic light. It turned red as he watched, a quarter-mile away in front of him, and it dawned on him, but only dimly, far in the back of his mind, that he was going more than sixty. He hit the brake and shifted down and got stopped just in time, an instant before it turned green. He shifted up again, automatically, his mind never leaving its hurtling train of thought, and before he reached the outer limits of the village he was almost back on sixty. The whispering dictator hurried on, snatching at straws.
The Old Man knew the secret, that was all. He knew how to see into all of them, feel out their hearts inside his own, love them and hate them and forgive them: he understood that nothing devoutly believed is mere error, though it may only be half-truth, and so he could give them what they needed. That was what it meant, the line his father was always quoting .
. .
“There are always politicians. Good politicians. The people turn this way and that, unsure what they want, unsure how to get it, unsure whether it’s good for them .
. .”
Something like that. He got up outside himself to where he could act as though he himself, his own life, were irrelevant. That’s all it’s ever taken.
He was coming to the place he’d decided on, and was afraid. He felt as he’d felt a thousand times in his grandfather’s barn or his Uncle Ben’s, perched on a beam, uncertain whether or not he had the nerve to leap into the hay ten feet below—except that it was worse now, an uncertainty so violent his body rose up in revolt. Sweat ran like rain between his eyebrows and pasted his shirt to his back and trickled down his belly. He had a headache coming on, rushing over him faster than a headache had ever done before, sharp points pressing in through his skull from every side. He had to squint to tolerate the headlights. But in spite of all that, his mind was clear, it seemed to him, clearer than it ever had been before, and he knew he was not wrong, not fooling himself, not crazy. He was no Jesus Christ stretched on a rood for the salvation of mankind, but he understood the joy of that, and the terror and pain. He had no grand cause: a petty joy for a petty creature. Better than Ben Jr, who’d died in a war he didn’t like; better than Old Man Hardesty who’d gone down almost without knowing what had hit him.
Now he was there; the long bridge opened out ahead of him, an eighth of a mile away, silver girders reaching out across the silent pitch-dark valley, the black further side of it just beginning to come into view—up over his head, stars, motionless and perfect as the infinite span between the heartbeats of God. He bore down on the accelerator and flexed the fingers soaking wet inside his gloves. The bridge rushed toward him, and he was conscious of the rush and at the same time conscious of the infinite time it took the truck to reach the place, and now suddenly all his pain vanished as if by magic and he was reading the sign twenty feet from the bridge—35
MPH—
as though he had all eternity to read it. He heard himself saying aloud—very loud in the hollow darkness of the cab—
I’m sorry.
Then a jolt, a tremendous tearing noise of steel behind him, and he was weightless, falling, hair flying in his eyes, the truck turning over and over like a lop-sided boulder. A shock of violent heat and light went through him and he saw the ground and a tree, and the same instant he was dead.
Nevertheless, the sacrifice was in vain. The Sunlight Man and Nick Slater were not in the truck. They’d jumped out in the last little village, taking the suitcases with them. The Sunlight Man could not have said himself why he did it. A hunch that pulled like a cable. Another piece—he might have said—of luck.
Except that the Sunlight Man wouldn’t have made that mistake, even for a moment. His luck had already run out long ago. Though he didn’t die in the crash, it was of course Luke’s crash that killed him.
1
The old man stood on the bridge, big as an elephant, shaking with sobs, staring down with tear-blinded eyes at where the lights were, the air around him still filled like a cup with the smell of the truck’s explosion in the bottom of the valley, and on the ground beside him lay the bloodsoaked gloves the police had brought up for identification, and the ridiculous Eagle Scout ring and the shoe and the half-burnt cap. He sobbed in great whoops. He was a huge and erect man, at least as ordinary mortals run, and his voice boomed out all the length of the night to beyond where August stars were falling like scratches. If he was guilty of limitations of foresight, or subtlety, or humor, or taste—if he had been foolish in his time and partly unworthy—his grief was anyhow absolute and most profound and better than justice or mercy or wisdom or any of the other great words of the ancient schools.
He knew all right why his son was dead, and who he had meant to protect and redeem, and why. Hodge waited, bellowing his grief at the night, until they brought him the certain word that there were no other bodies, only Luke. Then, little by little, his sobbing stopped and, empty of heart, indifferent to all but his grief, he was able to think in ways that had been closed to him before. He thought clearly now, with absolute indifference to himself, beyond the pleasure or pain of vengeance, beyond any taint of satisfaction or reward or even common dignity, beyond even shame at his having failed to act directly, impersonally before. His son’s sacrifice, however impure it may have been, had purified Will Hodge. He was indifferent to the hunt, indifferent to the crimes already committed or yet to be committed, whether the crimes of cops or of robbers: it was necessary, merely, that order prevail for those who were left, when the deadly process had run itself down; necessary to rebuild.
He said (he could not see the man he talked to, had only the blurry impression of a youngish face, a State Trooper’s cap, a cigarette), “He wasn’t driving on—business. He was helping your so-called Sunlight Man and the Indian boy escape. If they’re not in the wreckage, they’re somewhere on the road between here and Attica, or they’re riding with some travelling salesmen as hitchhikers. You’ll get them. It hasn’t been long.”
“You’re sure of all this?”
Hodge nodded. “Chief Clumly can tell you.” After a moment: “He’s been meeting with your Sunlight Man. Been having long talks.”
“Meeting him and doing nothing? Letting him go?”
Hodge scowled. He said, “No doubt he has his reasons.”
The trooper stood in front of him a moment longer, as if thinking about it, then took the cigarette from his mouth and went around the side of the car to his radio. Hodge turned, blinking the tears from his eyes, hands behind his back, and walked away. His mind was full of images.
Luke had been blond when he was a child. Beautiful and odd and unnaturally gentle. You could put him in a room …
Once—a matter of days ago, but it felt like centuries—it had seemed to him urgent that he do as he’d done, that he act, finally, take the bull by the horns, not simply gaze timidly from behind his tree as he’d done all those centuries upon centuries before. But now all that seemed trifling, a kind of delusion of grandeur. Not where it was at, Freeman would say. Because of course he had
not
acted, had merely put himself in position to act, watching them all, out-guessing them, growing fatter and fatter on his sense of power, unmoved by any argument for ending the hunt.
