The Sunlight Dialogues (19 page)

The little toy dog is all covered with dust,

Yet sturdy and staunch he stands;

The little toy soldier is red with rust …

He stopped, blushing scarlet.

“Excellent!” the doctor exclaimed, and he seemed downright delighted by it, as though it were the best cure possible. “Go on. I didn’t mean to interrupt. Say the rest.” He called the nurse in to hear it, but Boyle would perform no more, could only smile as he’d done (he remembered suddenly and vividly) in grade school when Mrs. Wheat called the Principal to hear him.

And so when Boyle had left the office he’d felt thirty years younger—no doubt partly because he had finally told someone his secret, and the man had not laughed. He felt as if nothing could ever worry him again as long as he lived, and he said almost aloud as he walked past the glittering, grave-cold storefronts, “Do not say that thou art weary, O my soul, do not say, ‘This Life is grief, the Strife is grim. …’”

He had worries, nevertheless. He had always done all right, as well as most people did these days, and yet he’d never gotten ahead. Now, with his later years creeping up on him, he couldn’t help thinking about the future. What would happen to them if he too should get sick, the way Marguerite had done? (She’d been employed at a bakery until two years ago, but then one morning she’d fallen downstairs—she was heavy and couldn’t see her feet—and she’d broken her hip and been laid up for over a year. Even now she wasn’t right.) Where would the money come from then? What would happen to the house?

There were worse things than that. Marguerite had gotten more and more to be a worrywart, these past few years. She knew he could never be positive how long he’d be away, and for a long time she’d seemed resigned to it—resigned even to his failing to phone for sometimes weeks at a time. And she knew, too, that there was nobody in this world more
safe
than he was. They’d been boyfriend and girlfriend for thirteen years before he’d popped the question. “I know Walter Benson like the back of my hand,” she liked to say. (Benson was his name at home.) But lately, for all that, his extended stays seemed to worry her more and more.

“Walter, I get so
worried,”
she said. She sat on the top step of the green back porch, fanning herself; the cotton dress stuck to her thighs and shoulders, and there were sweat patches. He was sitting on the metal chair in the neatly clipped grass below her. He liked the baking July sun. Always had.

He looked at her, then past her. He nodded. “Gotta fix that screen door.”

“Walter,” she said, “you’re a thousand miles away.” She began to cry.

It was that that had made him decide to put in a want-ad for a boarder, someone who’d be there at night to make the place feel safer, keep prowlers away and chew the fat with her from time to time. And so now Walter Boyle had another worry. Would the man pay promptly? Would he smoke in bed and set the house afire? What were those tons of mimeographed papers lying among hamburger wrappers in the back of his car? In the back window he had a
thing
hanging, a leadlike ball with raised letters on it, like letters from some kind of printing machine.

Boyle sighed.

Marguerite would be sitting there right now, of course, worrying where on earth he was, and it was a week yet before his trial. It wasn’t healthy, a man that was fifty-five years old, with a known bad ticker, lying in a drafty jail cell not getting his sleep and worried sick. And what if they should find him guilty this time? It seemed impossible, they had nothing on him, nothing that would stick. But he was worried. The man with the beard, that was the thing. Benson, he had said. Boyle shuddered.

The bearded one said now, scornfully, as if set off by something the Indian had said, “Pain! Let me tell you about pain, boy. You get inside my skin for one week, you go live for just one day with my blind, crippled mother with her ‘Bruce did you this’ and ‘Bruce did you that‘—or you talk for one hour with my poor palsied father, or watch him—pitiful!—sweeping the sewers of Dallas, Texas, with his knobby knees bumping and his shrunken head bobbing—an heir to the crown of Poland once!—then
maybe
you’ll know something about pain! O Father, forgive them! They know not whom they screw.”

Boyle clamped his eyes shut and pressed his hands to his ears. Still the voice ranted on, but it was faint now, and it seemed to come from behind him instead of in front. He could feel his pulse against the heels of his hands and could hear it thumping like a streetcar hitting rail joints. It frightened him. He heard the Indian laugh shortly, full of scorn. Then, for a while, it was quiet. He tried to sleep, but he couldn’t for a long time. The bed was narrow and hard as a rock, and a wrinkle in his shirt, underneath him, poked into his flesh. He thought of Marguerite lying like a mountain in the middle of their queen-size bed, her mouth collapsed with the teeth out, her legs wide apart and her arms thrown out to the sides. How good it would feel to crawl up beside her, nudge her great bulk over with his back (his feet braced against the cool wall) and give himself up to that mattress! Even the fold-down seat in the Rambler would be fine compared to this. All sensation had gone out of his arms and legs now, so that he had a feeling of falling, possibly dying. To help check his fear he imagined himself stretched out in the Rambler with his shoes in the open glove-compartment and the doors of the car locked. He usually parked just off the main street of whatever little town he was passing through. Back streets made him nervous. If there was a Y.M.C.A. or a cheap hotel where he was working or in any of the towns within driving distance, he stayed there. He had seen things in his time all right. Poor people, sick people, crazy people. The world was getting worse. That was why he and Marguerite were childless. It was criminal to bring children to a world like this. But he could get along, of course, himself. When he finished for the day he would settle with a paper and would pass his eyes along the words, or he would memorize poetry by Edgar A. Guest, or would doze. At home he would sit in his yard with a bottle of orange pop (he was not a drinker) or would water the flowers or, rarely, watch television, and he could not really say he was dissatisfied.

When his wife Marguerite entered his thoughts, cutting a large mimeographed paper into tiny, irritating scraps and smiling at something he couldn’t see, he realized he was asleep. “Thank God,” he thought, and was awake again for an instant, but only for an instant.

After that he heard nothing at all until, hours later, it seemed, the anarchist gave a kind of gasp, not loud but somehow chilling. “Go ahead,” he whispered, “touch it. It’s blood all right. Taste it. In remembrance of Me.”

“What’s he doing?” the younger Indian said. He sounded as if he’d been asleep.

“Opened up his wrist somehow,” the older one said. “It’s to prove how great he is.”

“It’s blood,” the bearded one said. He sounded wild now, angry, or maybe frightened. “Taste it, go ahead.”

“Is he killing himself?” the younger one said, growing interested.

The older one grunted.

“I
could,”
the Sunlight Man said, proudly. “I’d never bat an eye.” He laughed wildly, and Boyle thought, dead sure he was right:
Faking. Why?

They said nothing. Boyle began to sweat.

“Mother Jesus, he really is loopy, you know that? I mean somebody must’ve spun him around too much in the swing.”

“Free,
not loopy!” the Sunlight Man exclaimed. “Capable of gratuity!” He laughed with delight. “Also loopy, however. A difficult matter to define. A withdrawal from reason.”

“Yeah, sure,” the younger of the Indians said. “That’s neat. Keep it up.”

After a minute the bearded man’s laughter changed to whimpering. “It hurts,” he said. “Ow.” Finally he was quiet. Now Boyle could smell the blood. He wrung his fingers.

The older one said in the thick silence, “He is crazy.” He seemed to muse on it. In his mind, Boyle could see the older Indian lying on his back staring up into the dark, turning it over. “But also he’s pretending.”

In the morning they saw there was a long, clotted gash on the anarchist’s left arm, from his elbow to his wrist, and there was blood spattered on his already filthy trousers. He showed it off to the guard and did his shuffling dance and gave Walter Boyle the finger. Boyle turned away.

The guard was uneasy, probably about what the Chief would say. He said, “What happened? You, Boyle, you see it?”

“I was asleep,” he said.

“Since the day he was born,” the Sunlight Man yelled. He clapped his hands, his elbows going out, and leered at them. “Asleep since the day he was born.”

“Shut up, Mac,” the guard said. He went to get the Chief and, after that, the doctor. That afternoon they took the bearded one away. When he was leaving, he said, “I’ll be back, my friends. If I’m not, think of me when they’re strapping you into the chair.”

The one called Miller said, “You. Can it.”

The Chief of Police had his hand on his chin, and his eyes were narrowed to needles of icy blue.

They went out with the prisoner.

7

At ten-thirty that night the woman died. Nick and Verne Slater knew already by the time Luke Hodge came to tell them, the following morning. The guard had heard it on the radio and gave them the news with their breakfast. Luke stood with his hands in the pockets of his old bib-overalls and looked past them while he talked. He had a deep, resonant voice, like all the Hodges, but unlike the others he was thin, almost girlish, with big, lean ears, so that the voice was ridiculous, as though he had a loudspeaker in his chest. His ears stuck straight out from his deeply tanned, girlish face.

Verne said, “I guess that makes it worse for us?”

“Sorry,” Luke said.

Nick said, “Where’s your old man been? We need us a lawyer.”

He pretended to know nothing about it. He lifted his eyebrows, still looking past them and reached with two fingers for the Kents in his shirt pocket. “He’ll be in, probably. You know how he is. Busy all the time.”

“Like shit,” Nick said.

“Don’t look at
me,”
he said. “I didn’t even know he hadn’t been in.” He lit the cigarette and shook out the wooden match without offering them a smoke. Verne grew sullen.

“Nobody been here at all,” Verne said. “It’s more than a fucking week. You’d think the whole town was in Florida having vacation. I wouldn’t minded too much for my brother. But me, I’m just a baby.”

“I can see it must’ve been rough,” Luke said. He looked at his feet, the corner of his mouth drawn back, letting smoke out.

Nick said, “How come you came now?”

“I thought you’d want to hear.”

Nick nodded, squinting and snapping his fingernail lightly, again and again, at one of the polished nickel bars. “It must be unpleasant for you, having to tell us.”

Luke glanced at him for a second, then away. “Not too bad,” he said.

Nick smiled, fighting the fear building up inside. “No, not too bad, I guess.”

“Sorry,” Luke said, and this time it was not ironic. He’d pulled back inside himself; his face seemed to close up, and you might as well be standing in some other room.

Verne said, “Hey, look. Give a bastard a puff, will you?”

Luke stared right through him, deaf, and Verne looked surprised.

“It’s all right,” Nick said, touching Verne’s arm. Then to Luke: “There’s a guy says they’ll give us the chair. Is that true? Can they?”

“You’ll have to talk to Dad. I got no idea.”

“If he shows,” Nick said.

Again Luke swept his glance toward him and past, uneasy, and no doubt they were thinking the same thing. The deal was off. Ben Hodge had nothing to do with it now. There was no more question of waiting out the probation. And so Luke Hodge was out from under, it was done with.

Nick’s legs were unsteady. When Luke was scraping the cow manure off, Nick had leaned back on the whitewashed stone cowbarn wall and had laughed till he could hardly see. It wasn’t as if it would kill him, a little cow manure. And Luke had asked for it, he knew that himself. What about all those other times—running their asses off in the haylot to get in the bales before the rain came, or combining wheat till eleven at night because tomorrow there might be wind? But that had been back in the beginning. A lot had happened.

“Ok,” Nick said, “thanks for coming by.” Strange to say, he felt relieved, in a way, as if the breaking of the lifeline were not so much a failure of hope as a release into wide, calm drifting. He was on his own, with nobody to turn to. He was partly glad.

Still Luke didn’t leave. He said, talking to the floor, “Take it easy. I’ll tell the old man to come talk to you.”

“We’d really like that,” Verne said. “We really would enjoy it.”

Nick said nothing, exploring the weird sensation, a pleasant numbness of emotion. He felt taller.

Then, not looking at either of them, Luke relented and handed the pack of cigarettes and the matches through the bars and turned to go.

Nick ignored it. He went and sat on the pallet, after Luke was gone, and hung his head between his knees and waited for the feeling to die. Later he said, “I’ll tell you something. We got to break out.” He glanced over at the thief. Boyle seemed to be paying no attention, studying his paper.

“Don’t be crazy,” Verne said. “Just take it easy. The old man’ll fix it.” After a moment, “He’s done it before.”

“Just keep quiet, will you?” Nick said. “There
is
no old man. Christ, don’t you get anything?”

“Quiet as a mouse,” Verne said, eyes wide. “Watch me.—What you mean?”

It was at noon, when Salvador brought them their lunch, that they learned that the Sunlight Man had escaped. In the end cell, Boyle jerked his head around, pale, and smiled as though he were responsible for it all.

8

Short-handed. So to Kozlowski he said—Kozlowski in the act of checking out for the night—“Kozlowski, you! Hold up.” The Sunlight Man stood with his hands handcuffed behind his back, his head thrown forward, chin up, beard jutting out.

“You want something, Chief?”—Kozlowski.