The Sunlight Dialogues (17 page)

“I’m sorry,” the drunk said. He was white as a sheet, leaning against the bars between his cell and the thief’s.

The thief waved the apology off almost sociably.

“S’like a sickness,” the drunk said. “S’like something wrong with me. I go on the wagon for maybe two muths …” He closed his eyes and stood unnaturally still.

“Don’t mention it,” the thief said. “Happens to everybody.”

“I got a daughter in high school. If she saw me now she’d be so ashamed—” He grimaced as if about to cry, but he was too sick. He gripped the bars.

“Go to sleep,” the thief said. “Talk about it in the morning.”

The drunk looked over at his pallet and seemed to think about whether he could make it that far. Then he leaned away from the bars and took two steps and fell toward his bed. He sprawled half on it and half off, motionless for a long time. All at once he sang out, “I use to work in Chicago, in a department store” and then, mechanically, he pulled himself onto the bed and went to sleep.

“Wages of sin,” the bearded man said. “You understand what his sin is, Benson?”

The thief looked panicky for an instant, then turned away. After a while he too stretched out for sleep, and the bearded man stood with his head cocked, watching. He stood that way for a long time, a heavy-hearted tramplike figure in the dimness of the cellblock. For all the clowning he’d gone through tonight, he looked miserable. Without looking at what he was doing, he began to tie and magically untie knots in the farmer’s handkerchiefs he’d gotten from Salvador. What he really needed was some pigeons, he said to Nick. He talked on and on and once closed his hands and opened them again and looked up as if startled by a beating of hundreds of wings. The handkerchiefs were gone, and Nick really did see pigeons for a moment. The Sunlight Man batted the air, grieved and tired but charged with frantic energy. “Get away! Shoo! Jesus!” Feathers whirred like motors and a barndust smell bloomed through Nick’s memory. Then they were gone.

“You’re really something,” Nick said. When he glanced at Verne he was sitting with his arms around his knees, scowling, not sure what to think.

The guard came and switched off the last of the lights, all but the end one in the hall. After that it was quiet for a long time. Nick was almost asleep, troubled by vague dreams of creatures, when the talking began.

“Don’t be fooled by clever hands, sir,” the Sunlight Man said. He’d be lying with the back of his head on his hands, as he always lay. “Entertainment’s all very well, but the world is serious. It’s exceedingly amusing, when you think about it: nothing in life is as startling or shocking or mysterious as a good magician’s trick. That’s what makes stagecraft deadly. Listen closely, friend. You see great marvels performed on the stage—the lady sawed in half, the fat man supported by empty air, the Hindu vanishing with the folding of a cloth—and the subtlest of poisons drifts into your brain: you think the earth dead because the sky is full of spirits, you think the hall drab because the stage is adazzle with dimestore gilt. So King Lear rages, and the audience grows meek, and tomorrow, in the gray of old groceries, the housewife will weep for Cordelia and despair for herself. They weren’t fools, those old sages who called all art the Devil’s work. It eats the soul.”

Nick turned his head. He could make out only the outline of the high dome, the seared nose, the uncertain frizzle of beard.

“And yet one is an artist, of course. No harm in it, if one knows where one stands. Nevertheless, don’t be fooled by visions of pigeons or monstrous turtles or crimson snakes. Consider this drunk, Herr Robert. American Bund. That surprises you, perhaps? Goes to meetings, Wednesday nights—or would if he knew about them—puts on a black armband with a swastika, or would. And yet he’s a proper citizen, you know. They’ll release him in the morning. And you, on the other hand …”

He fell silent. Nick tried to think about it. But his body felt too wide awake, tingling with suspense. It was the kind of awakeness he’d felt just after the accident, when they were bending over the man and woman, shining their flashlights on their faces and legs, talking to them and sometimes shouting to one another across the rain-wet grass.

“It’s too bad,” the bearded man said pensively. “But then, of course, it’s natural. Society must protect itself from whatever it thinks to be threatening it, and to Society, you seem a threat. Pity, of course. You’re not much of a threat, God knows. But intelligence is not the world’s strong point.” He sighed. Nick’s brother rolled over, struggling in his sleep, and swore.

“The thief and the drunk,” the Sunlight Man said. “There’s society. You find that remarkable? Ah, son, I’ve seen how you spy on our thief, all envy. ‘A professional,’ you think. ‘A cool one,’ you say. ‘A mystery.’ Poor fool. It’s the glitter of the stage, the dazzling exception, mere artifice. He’s a robot. It’s our precious Mr. Benson who put you here, Mr. Benson who’ll be your judge and jury and, if all goes well, executioner. Are you so mad as to think you’ve been thrown in jail because you hurt somebody? Damaged some property? Ridiculous! Listen. You’re here because in the sheer ignorance of youth and defiance, with the sullenness of some sharp-eyed Injun, you disrupted prediction. I don’t praise you for it. I find you mildly disgusting, to tell the truth. But I’m older, and so I allow for that. I’m sorry to see you die.”

“Shut up,” he said suddenly. He lay with his eyes locked open in the dark.

To his surprise, the bearded man said nothing more, and as the minute of silence stretched on into two and then three he felt what he mistook at first for relief. But gradually he realized he was no longer revolted by the senseless talk. Even at first perhaps it hadn’t really been disgust he’d felt. The man’s talk made him feel the way the police made him feel, treating him like an animal, torturing him for nothing. He’d wanted to kill him, the same as he’d wanted to kill the police, and at the same time he’d felt beaten before he started, as if nothing he did to the bearded man could have any effect whatever. He wasn’t human. Except that that wasn’t right either. With the police he felt like shutting his eyes, making himself limp. With the bearded man he felt like watching more intently, eyes as wide as when he stood in a clearing with Ben Hodge’s rifle, hunting.

Before he knew he would speak, he said, “Why are you here? I mean what are you after?”

The man laughed quietly in the darkness. “A ball on an inclined plane,” he said.

Nick waited.

“We’re all victims of our foolishness, one way or another,” the bearded man said. “The inertia of psychological patterns.” He paused. “To descend to the tiresome particular, I found myself involved in an affair of the heart. With the wife of a colleague, a fellow Senator unfortunately—concerning whom I prefer to say no more. Lady’s honor, you know. I’ve explained to them, of course, that my problem is glandular, but being fundamentally sensible people they are disinclined to trust me.”

“I don’t believe you,” Nick said cautiously. “There never was any lady.”

“Ah well, your privilege.” He chuckled. “There are still vast areas of freedom. Actually, though, you’re right. I was lying. The brutal truth is, I killed a poor carry-out boy at the A&P. Backed over him while he was loading the trunk of my car. His name was Larry.” The man spoke more rapidly, patting something nervously. “It was an accident,” he said. “It could have happened to anyone. I simply forgot. I have a great deal on my mind—responsibilities, troubles, worries. I may be drafted at any time. The trucking firm I work for is unsound, my sister is pregnant, my housekeeper’s dissatisfied with her wages. And so it was a slip-up. My mind wandered. Dear God in Heaven,
anyone
could have done it. But poor Larry, pauvre petit, poor harmless victim!” He pounded on the wall. “He lived with his mother.”

Nick Slater closed his eyes.

“You believe me this time?” the bearded man asked mildly.

Nick said nothing. He felt weightless. The thing was different from teasing. He knew, without needing words for it, that there was a limit to teasing, a certain point, not quite predictable but nevertheless definite and final, beyond which teasing would not go. But there was no such point with the Sunlight Man: he could go on as long as the world endured. He didn’t care; that was the secret. Even murderers cared, had some remotely human feeling. The Sunlight Man was as indifferent as a freight train driving a cow from its track.

“Blast!” the man said. Then, wearily, “All right. I see there’s no hiding it. I embezzled a large sum, it was thousands of dollars. Hundreds of thousands. I’m no piker! It bankrupt the firm that employed me—manufacturer of cyclone fences in a small town in northern Montana. I meant to go to Canada. It wasn’t my fault, though, the whole mess. As the Lord is my judge. It was because of my medical expenses. I’m a dying man, you know. That’s what makes me stink. I couldn’t stand it, at first—the dying, not the smell. I was half out of my mind, I can tell you. I’d run up to complete strangers on the street and I’d tell them all about it. It was awful, naturally. And the dreams I had! But then—oh bliss, sheer bliss!—I turned to Mormonism. I wish I could give you the faintest idea what peace, my friend, what unspeakable tranquility …”

Finally he was silent.

Nick lay listening to his brother’s breathing and to the stillness beyond that, smelling the sweat of the Sunlight Man and the acrid stench of the drunk’s sickness and wondering again, cold all over, why Will Hodge had not come to bail them out. But he would come, he insisted. The old man always came, sooner or later. Luke would get to him, or Ben, or Ben’s wife, or maybe Luke’s mother or Will Jr. He rubbed the sore shoulder and felt a sudden whelming of sorrow that had nothing to do, it seemed to him, with the bitter mockery of the man in the next cell. What if it were true that they would send him to the chair? But it wasn’t. He wasn’t guilty. He hadn’t wanted to go in the first place. “Listen,” he’d said, “let’s just go find us some girls.” But Verne was drunk, it had to be a joyride, and like a fool he’d gone along. It hadn’t been his fault, but just the same when the cops had found him lying in the weeds at the edge of the field (he could see the Volkswagen, sharp in the starlight, smashed, the convertible roof cocked up, and he could smell the gas and the sicksweet scent of the cigarettes of the people who came running down from the road) one of them had yelled, “Over here! Here’s one!” and when they’d found he wasn’t hurt much, they’d jerked him up and held him like some killer. “It wasn’t my fault,” he’d hollered at them, but the fat one had hit him in the chest, and when he was bent double in the grass, gasping, the man said, “Up.”

He said now, suddenly, “What did you mean?”

“Sir?” the man said.

“About all that stuff. Freedom. I don’t get it.”

“Just joshing you. Passing the time. Try and get some sleep, son.”

An hour later, when Nick woke up briefly, he heard the bearded one pacing in his cell. An image of the woman’s face came to him, a white oval half-turned to him, eyebrows raised, mouth open, buck-teeth protruding like a neat little awning above the black cavern of her mouth. She was like a doll, not human. Irrelevant to the careening of the car, the whirling lights. She’d said nothing. She hadn’t even screamed, as far as he knew. She had no name, no features. Nevertheless the car had lifted, in slow motion, all at once, and the Thruway sign had passed slowly to their left, and then they were gliding toward the sharply outlined wet weeds of the embankment, every water drop a precise little crystal, and the steering wheel in his left hand turned free, clutching air. “Oops!” Verne said. It was suddenly dark—the lights were smashed out—and time was hurtling again. The woman without voice or features was going to die. What was her name?

At noon the next day the police let the drunk go home. The thief returned to his patient silence, sitting like a figure made out of old rags, passing his bulging eyes slowly over the words in the
Daily News.
Nick’s brother dumped his dinner down the open, seatless toilet. The bearded man lay running his fingers through his beard and said nothing for hours at a stretch, merely announced once, sorrowfully, but as if to hide from them what was really in his mind, “No one writes to me. You’d think they’d at least send bills.” Will Hodge had still not come. When they asked the guard if the woman in the hospital was better, he said, “You’ll hear, buddy.”

Nick lay looking at the thief, trying to guess what went on in his mind, but it was useless. His brother said, “He works out crossword puzzles in his head.” No one answered, and after a minute Verne shook his head and said, “He’s a cool one,” and patted his stomach.

They were something, these old professionals. It was hard to know what to think of them. They never got taken, they worked out a system the cops couldn’t beat and they’d get along for years that way, some of them, and even if the cops knew damn well what they were doing, all they could do was bother them a little—lock them up for loitering, or arrest them on suspicion of something. He and Verne were different. The way they went at if it meant something, but they kept getting caught. One time they’d gone through the coatrooms at the First Presbyterian church and they’d gotten only six dollars, and in half an hour flat they were sitting in the can. When they got out on parole Luke Hodge was sitting there waiting in his pick-up truck to take Nick home, and Luke hadn’t spoken two words to him for a week. Then it was “Go get the eggs, Slater, if you’re man enough to sneak them from under the chickens.” And once at supper: “Big man, Slater—laying all the broads, slugging down the booze, pounding up on the little people.” He wouldn’t have said that to Boyle. He’d have called him Sir and discussed the weather with him. Luke’s eyebrows went out like a witch’s and his mouth was tensed. He had one of those headaches of his coming on, not that that excused it. Next day, when the headache was going full blast, he’d said, “Shovel good or you won’t get your allowance.” All at once it wasn’t worth the trouble and the gutter fork was right there in his hands and he let the thing fly and Luke Hodge was spluttering and howling and scraping the cow manure out of his ears and eyes and mouth, yelling “Yellowleg bastard, I’ll kill you!”