The Sunlight Dialogues (106 page)

Meaningless. Evil.

“Duty is evil,” she said aloud. She smiled.
Drunk as a pig. If anyone should see me

They were pounding now. Banging on the door like the Gestapo or something. It amused her, the thought of poor gentle Miller and wordless Kozlowski and that trembling little tame rabbit John Figlow, or whoever was there, banging the door like the whole German army under orders to kill all Jews.

“Just a moment,” she called.

The banging stopped.

She moved toward the dining room, holding the pistol in one hand, the bottle in the other.
I feel better now, thank you,
she thought.
Quite sober.
Standing in the livingroom she said, “I’m sorry, you can’t come in.”

“Mrs. Clumly?” someone called. A voice she couldn’t place.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s my duty to keep you out. You don’t have a warrant, do you?”

Silence.

Eventually, Officer Tank’s voice: “Mrs. Clumly, we need to talk to you.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Another silence. Then, loud as gunshots, a knocking.

“For Christ’s sake, Esther, let us in.” It was Miller this time.

She smiled.

It might have been all civilization, for all she cared, out there banging and asking admission. She said, “What do you want?”

“We want to talk,” Miller said.

She waited.

He was quiet for a long time. They were whispering something.

“Mrs. Clumly,” Miller said softly, almost too softly to hear. “It’s about—what we talked about. You remember?” Another silence. She could hear the house waiting, observing with detachment but a certain remote curiosity. In the cellar, nothing stirred. Then Miller’s voice: “Esther, the tapes.”

She squeezed. The explosion filled the room and the gun kicked into her stomach so hard all her breath went out, and the world was full of the violent smell of the gunpowder or whatever it was as she fell down gasping and amazed. She heard plaster falling from the ceiling. And then they were howling as if they’d all been shot in the left hind leg, and there were doors opening all up and down the street, and the second explosion was louder than the first and the third explosion still ten times louder, and Ed Tank screamed as if he’d gone stark crazy, “Mrs. Clumly put down that gun before you kill yourself!” They were banging again. She heard the hinges break.

At last, with vast satisfaction, as though huge iron chains had been sawed from her legs and her eyes, were opened and her womb filled with life, she fainted.
More brave than was intended,
she said in her mind.

4

Arthur Hodge Jr, brother to Will Sr and Ben, sat, all triangles and squares, hooking colored wires together in a pattern so intricate no ordinary man could have read the chart. He was making what he called, by some queer lapse of mind or twist of humor, a Victrola, to anyone else a stereo phonograph. He was a lover of music and did not understand, since he’d forbidden it, that what his seven daughters would play on his machine would be music by, at best, the Jefferson Airplane. The phone rang. His oldest daughter answered. She brought him the news.

“Terrible,” Art Jr said. He frowned, reaching a judgment. “It’s a mistake.”

5

Walter Benson, sometimes Boyle, was not sure even now what his opinion was. It was a comfort to have Mr. Nuper dead, and it was surprising to find how little anxiety he felt about ever being caught for his part in it. Nevertheless, even though it was done now, which theoretically ought to have ended it, it was still not exactly settled in Benson’s (or Boyle’s) mind whether or not he’d done right. It was a foolish question to be worrying about, but he felt cheated. A man deserves to have some feeling about what he has done or hasn’t done. As he’d stood that night in the squishy, clayey mud of the creekbed, ruining his good shoes, panting and puffing as he struggled to get the dead-weight, incredibly uncooperative body (in death as in life) down into the mouth of the sluice, he had thought, “What kind of man are you, Benson, or Boyle, to have no feeling at a time like this?” But it was useless, he felt nothing. It was a fact. He felt—(he squinted in the darkness, analyzing)—a certain panic, for though the road was isolated, some lovers might come along, or some fool who’d taken the wrong turn, looking for Niagara Falls. But he did not feel
much
panic, actually. No more, certainly, than he felt when he slipped through the door of what might or might not be an empty house. The main thing he felt was a kind of generalized annoyance—at the squishyness of the mud, which made him fall twice onto one knee, smearing his trousers and the hem of his coat; at the way Marguerite would keep wondering, now, whatever had happened to that nice young man; at the general irresolution of life. He found himself thinking, almost angrily,

But the gingham dog and the calico cat

Wallowed this way and tumbled that,

     
Employing every tooth and claw
     In the awfullest way you ever saw,

And, oh! how the gingham and calico flew!

Nevertheless, he finally got the whole body in; the next few rains would dispose of it. He worked his way back up to the road, got into his car and sat there a moment panting, waiting for his emotions to return; but there was nothing, or nothing but the jingle banging in his head.

And some folks think unto this day
That burglars stole that pair away!

     
But the truth about the cat and pup

     
Is this: they ate each other up!
Now what do you really think of that?

And all the way home the jingle went on jingling, no matter what he tried to think of.

I never got around to that book, he thought now. A book on Cuba that Nuper said it would do him good to read. He, Benson-boyle, had known well enough it would do him no good, but he’d more or less meant to read it just the same, heaven knew why. He’d meant to look over the bills, too. How many days had he been home now? But they could wait, like everything else.

Poor Benson! Or Boyle. He sits humpbacked at his diningroom table, squinting at his newspaper as though he’s been sitting here for centuries. He can hear his wife puffing, moving around in the livingroom, straightening up. He doesn’t move a muscle. Someone in Texas has been murdering people from a tower, shooting women and children and college professors. In Chicago someone has been killing nurses. There will be more, he thinks. Someone does something like that, and pretty soon all the other lunatics start on it too. Young punks. Crazy people. Sometimes it seems as if everybody in the world has gone insane. It frightens him, to tell the truth. He thinks of the policeman with eyes like two bullets, beating the Indian boy with the butt of a gun, then of the men in the black armbands, protectors of their noble vision, swinging even with Ben-sonboyle’s car on the narrow road, then pulling past Nuper, forcing him to the shoulder.

“Walter?” she says. She pokes her puffy white head through the door.

But he concentrates. There was something important that he meant to do, or meant to decide on. The light coming off the imitation cut-glass salt shaker distracts him a little, and he concentrates harder, until he hardly notices the light. Absurd syllables come into his head:

I dimly guess from blessings known

     
Of greater out of sight,
And, with the chastened Psalmist, own

     
His judgments too are right.

It is not what he was groping for, and he thinks, angrily, that he too seems to have gone insane; but he hasn’t, of course. He was never more sane in his life, God knows. Nevertheless, there was something he had to get done that he hasn’t done.

When she calls again he has a momentary sense of disorientation, cannot think what room he’s sitting in, and so understands that he must have dropped off there, for a minute.

“Are you coming to bed?” she asks. And then: “Walter!”

“Ah!” he says, not turning.

It has all come back to him, all at once. He was standing in a place where the sky was dark green—an eclipse, perhaps—and there are black towers, and men moving about, workmen. One touched him on the shoulder—an old, old man with sparse white stubble and tiny, close-set eyes—and called him by his name.

Benson shudders. Whatever the message was, delivered to him in that queer, sudden dream, he has lost it now. No matter.

The doorway behind him is empty now. Marguerite has gone upstairs. He can hear the radio directly over his head. Sooner or later he must get her out of the house, he knows, and in her absence get rid of Nuper’s things (must figure out how to dispose of them too, of course, sooner or later) and then tell her he came back for them. Let it slide and sooner or later she’ll begin to worry and call the police. When is it that she goes shopping? he wonders. What day is today?

The trouble is, he feels mysteriously weary all the time now, more tired when he wakes up than when he goes to sleep. Dreams, perhaps. But if he dreams he cannot remember afterward, usually. The truth is, he is half-dreaming even now, sliding off into the sunless, underwalter world where the workmen are moving about, taking down scaffolding of some kind, muttering to themselves, never looking at him. Tomorrow, he thinks suddenly. Tomorrow. He is back in the familiar, gloomy room.

And now Marguerite is calling again. “Water, come listen to this!”

She has the news on. He hears the rumble of the voice, but not the words.

When she calls again he stirs himself, pushes back the chair and lifts his vast (as it seems to him) weight and makes his way to the stairs.

“It’s over,” she says when he comes in. “You should’ve been quicker.”

“Over?” he says.

“They caught that Indian boy,” she says. “He’s back in jail. The one that broke out, you know, down in Batavia. They found him in a barn, down near Warsaw, and he gave himself up. They haven’t caught up with the other one yet.”

He nodded.

“Five miles from where they found him, there was an accident. A truck driver killed. The police believe there may be some connection.”

He nodded, standing carefully balanced, touching the doorframe.

“The truck driver was—something. His guardian or something.”

He nodded again, and after a moment it came to him that he’d seen him, he’d come to the jail.

“It’s funny,” she said, “the way that other one keeps getting away. It’s not natural.”

He nodded again. “Well, they’ll find him,” he said. “They’ll trace him drown … They always do.” His voice came out weak, and she seemed to notice it.

“They don’t even know who he waves,” she said.

“They’ll find out all right. Someone—” This time the voice was too loud. He shrugged and closed himself up as he would in jail. He looked hard at the radio beside the bed as if to watch the music coming out.

He’d kept driving, of course. The men with black armbands weren’t people to get mixed up with. And half a mile farther on he’d pulled into the woods and switched off the motor and lights and had waited. And he heard a car coming and saw that it was Nuper’s but had the fleeting impression that Nuper was not diving. Then the other car passed. He’d sat thinking a long time; then, cautiously, he’d gone back to the place. Nuper was sitting on a stump, naked, blindfolded. He’d been shot through the back of the head. A car passed on the road, and he thought
The police!
If anyone had seen him here—had seen Benson, that is, or Boyle—there would be hell to pay. They’d discover the body, put two and two together … What could he do? What would any grown man who’d seen a thing or two in this wicked world … And it was of course not exactly a murder, all things considered. An execution. He was sweating rivers.

At last she turned her prying eyes away. After a moment she put her puffy hands to the sides of her blurred face and shook her head. “I wonder what ever happened to Mr. Nuper,” she said. “Sometimes I think—”

He laughed, startling himself. “He’ll turn up. They always do,” he said.

Much later, suddenly opening his eyes wide in the darkness, he thinks, “I was one of them, yes. We were digging for something, a deep, deep hole, and it was dark as pitch. And one of the workmen said, ‘Here it is! A hand!’ We scraped the dirt off the arm and shoulder and then the head, and we looked at the dead face (and yet it was still dark, I think—a strange dream; illogical) and someone said, ‘Why it’s
him!’
and the others all looked and nodded and shook their heads the way you would at a funeral, but I looked and looked and I couldn’t make out who it was. ‘Who?’ I said. ‘I don’t recognize him.’ And then they were all looking at me in the darkness and—then I woke up. What can it mean?”

Nevertheless, he felt no guilt, as far as he could tell. One can get used to anything, it came to him. In a week, a month, the whole thing would no doubt be almost drowned out of his mind. Such things happen, no doubt. He felt again the momentary sensation of nausea he’d felt that night when he first saw Ollie’s body sitting white as a young girl’s on the stump.
Fssss,
he thought, and—
horriblel!
He closed his eyes and almost instantly he was dreaming again, walking very carefully on the glass roof of a greenhouse. Down below him, in the dim, aqueous light, fronds moved back and forth slowly, like thinking creatures. It was perhaps all just as it should be; he was of two minds.
And there will I keep you forever,
he thought.

     
Forever and a day,
Till the wall shall crumble to ocean,
     And moulder in dark away.

His heart sped up. It was a beautiful poem. Beautiful.

6

“It’s damned foolishness, that’s all,” Kozlowski said. “You don’t need me there, and this is a hell of a night to tie up a man that might be some use.”

“Maybe so,” Clumly said. He was in no mood to be giving out explanations, not that he had one. “Turn the radio up.” Kozlowski obeyed, but they were saying nothing important now. It was five minutes ago that word had come through that the Indian had given up. They were still out there, beating the bushes for the Sunlight Man, but you could see they were already beginning to get it: he’d given them the slip, as usual. Maybe he was right there with them, helping them hunt. It was a thought. It was the kind of thing he’d think funny. Clumly took the cigar out of his mouth and held it up toward the windshield to look at it. “Maybe he’s right there with them,” he said, “helping ’em hunt.”