The Sunlight Dialogues (20 page)

“Correct,” he said.

And so they were in Car 19, Kozlowski at the wheel, Chief Clumly beside him, in the back seat Figlow and the prisoner. It had rained again last night, but the rain had left no coolness: a thickness of muggy air like the thickness in a cellblock.

“Vets’ Hospital,” said Clumly.

“Positive,” Kozlowski said.

Clumly shot him a look, then let it pass. It was hell running a police department. Element of personalities. Pure hell. He said, sitting forward, screwing up his eyes, “Hell of a thing, Kozlowski. See the cut on that man’s arm?” Very serious, bringing Kozlowski into it. That was the way.

Kozlowski twisted his head around; then he looked back where he was going. “Can’t see it. He’s sitting on it,” he said.

“It’s a grave indignity, having to sit on your hands,” the Sunlight Man said. “Abandon fingers, all ye who enter here.”

“Can’t you keep that man quiet?” Clumly said.

Figlow hit him in the ear.

And so they went through the high brick gates of the Veterans’ Hospital and shot up the long driveway to the hospital front door.

“Ok, buster. Out”—Figlow.

“Don’t hit me”—the Sunlight Man—”I’m obeying you. Look!”

Figlow hit him.

“You wait here, Kozlowski,” Clumly said. “I’ll check him in, and then Figlow can stay and stand guard. Check?”

“Positive,” Kozlowski said.

Clumly bit his lips. Out of patience, he shook his finger and said, “Quit that.” He turned on his heel and went to the door, where Figlow was waiting with the rifle in the Sunlight Man’s ribs.

“In, buster,” Figlow said.

The Sunlight Man walked ahead of them and his head bobbed slowly up and down in time with his steps. And now a room with half-dead rubber plants, a black formica-topped coffee table (round) with six-month-old magazines in plastic covers and pamphlets:
Your Social Security, The Older Veteran.
An old man with no teeth, dressed in pajamas and a dirty, sagging bathrobe, stood watching, working his mouth. His hair was wiry and uncombed as blown-down wheat.

“Wait here,” said Clumly.

When Clumly was back again with the room number, Figlow said, “Will somebody spell me later, Chief? I forgot my lunch.”

“God damn,” Clumly said. He thought a minute. “Go see if there’s some kind of machine or something. You got money?” He gave Figlow fifty cents.

And so they waited, Clumly and the old man in the pajamas and bathrobe and Sunlight.

The old man said, chomping his loose lips, “Some kind of crimnul?” Squinting like a citizen.

“That’s right,” Clumly said.

The old man walked around them. Stood. “Dangerous?” he said.

Clumly scowled at him and decided to ignore him. He nodded the Sunlight Man to a chair and sat down across from him, the rifle pointed casually at the prisoner’s head.

“He stinks,” the old man said. A matter of fact. Clumly glanced at his watch.

The Sunlight Man said meekly, “Is it really necessary that I sit on my hands?”

Clumly glared at him but considered. At last, against his better judgment, he said, “Ok, up.” He got up himself. When the Sunlight Man’s hands were cuffed in front of him, they sat down again. Clumly glanced at his watch. “Aren’t you supposed to
be
somewhere?” he said to the old man.

Nothing.

Again they waited. The Sunlight Man said, leaning closer, so that his head bumped Clumly’s shoulder, “I’m sorry it’s been hard on you. A lot of police get the wrong idea when they arrest me. The way I figure, we do this business together, the cops and the robbers. This is a democracy. You follow me?”

Clumly tapped the rifle barrel nervously, his heart quaking, but he couldn’t make out what it was that frightened him. “No talking,” he said.

The Sunlight Man nodded meekly. “I just wanted to tell you before we part that I understand your position. I have very great respect for you.” He patted Clumly’s knee with his cuffed-together hands. “I wish you the best. I mean that.” His voice was vibrant with sincerity, but when Clumly shot him an alarmed glance, the Sunlight Man was leering at him, showing his yellow teeth. Clumly leaped up and crossed to the door to look down the hallway for Figlow. Still no sign.

“Also,” the Sunlight Man said, behind him, “I want to give you something, before we part.” He was standing now.

Clumly turned his head.

“First, this.” He held out Clumly’s wallet. Chief Clumly’s heart stopped cold. When Clumly didn’t reach for the wallet, the Sunlight Man dropped it on the coffee table.

The old man in pajamas pursed his loose lips and scratched his head. His eyes grew larger.

“And now this.” He held out Clumly’s old brass whistle.

Clumly covered his mouth with his hand. It came to him that his time had run out, but even now he could not make out what it was that was going to happen.

“This.” The bullets from Figlow’s rifle.

“This.” His keys.

“This.” His pistol.

“And this.” Figlow’s pistol.

“And finally, sir, this.” He gave him the handcuffs.

The bearded man turned to leave.

Suddenly Clumly found his voice. “Don’t try it,” he roared. He aimed the pistol at the Sunlight Man’s back, dead on, but the man kept walking. Clumly’s heart was hammering. “Figlow!” he yelled. He tipped up the pistol and fired at the ceiling. Click. The Sunlight Man turned, smiling, scratching his hairy ear. “Ah yes,” he said, “I forgot.” He held out his empty hand, closed it, opened it again. There lay the bullets. Calmly, he held them out to Fred Clumly. Cunningly—a sudden flash of genius—Clumly caught hold of the bearded man’s hand, squeezed with all the force he had and hurled the man clumsily to the floor. They rolled, bellowing, blowing like horses. Clumly raised his fist, murderous, to hit him in the neck, but he caught himself just in time. It was as if he’d gone crazy. He felt outraged and terrified. A whooping noise began to come from his mouth, uncontrollable. The man underneath him, staring up with bugging eyes, was the old man in the bathrobe.

How?
Chief Clumly would ask himself later, distraught, raising his clenched fists in the blackness of his bedroom.
How did he do it?
A tortured cry as old as mankind, the awed and outraged howl of sanity’s indignation: for there is more to a magician’s tricks than the lightning of his hands, hands softer, gentler on your shoulder than the wind stirred by a butterfly’s passing, yet surer than a knife. The great deceiver has no heart. He neither loves nor hates unless, conceivably, he loves himself. And why he comes to us again and again to amaze and mock us, no mortal man can guess.

Kozlowski jumped.

“All hell’s broke loose,” Figlow yelled. “Give me that radio.”

“What happened?”

“The prisoner’s escaped,” he said, “and the boss has flipped his lid.”

“You’re kidding!”

“See how I’m laughing.”

In a matter of minutes there were five more cars at the hospital, Kozlowski waiting at the front door, Clumly and Figlow around in back. But he must have been out already. It was only the beginning. They waited half the night, standing with their rifles in their arms on the searchlight-gray lawn, and inside, they tore the place apart. A little after midnight the Mayor arrived, and Wittaker with him.

“How in hell did he do it?” the Mayor said. “I don’t believe you, Clumly! I’m talking to you frankly. I never heard such a story.”

Police Chief Clumly laughed.

9

Two days later the lawyer had still not come to help the Indians. Eventually the court would appoint them one. But in the meantime, Boyle couldn’t help but see, the thing was building up, at least in the older one. He began to pace now as badly as the Sunlight Man had done, but rapidly, and he would keep it up for hours at a stretch, until his movement was like a stirring of some sickness in Walter Boyle’s blood. When they talked at all, the Indians talked of the bearded prisoner’s escape. Boyle felt himself on the verge of shouting at them, but he kept himself quiet. He sat more still than ever and tried to concentrate, without even a trace of success now, on thinking nothing at all. At other times the older Indian would stand in a single position for so long you would have thought he had turned into stone. Worst of all, though, was the Indian’s talk. Sometimes he spoke not to his brother but directly to Boyle, or, rather, directly at Boyle’s carefully impassive back. It was as if he knew Boyle wouldn’t answer and was testing how far he could be driven. “Hey, mister. How come they don’t send us a lawyer? There’s a law against that, isn’t there? It’s shit, man. What do you do when there’s nobody to protect you? Hey listen. What do
you
do?” Once he said, “I’ll tell you one thing, baby. They won’t keep us like this much longer, without no lawyer. I’ve had it. Truth. You tell your old buddy the guard.”

Then something else. When the guard came in they made excuses to get him to come close. They tried it just once on the night man. He was old and tough, shrewdly and impersonally vicious. Whether you needed it or not, he shoved you hard when he put you through the door, and he’d listen to no sass. But the day man could be tricked. He would stand by the bars and answer their taunts or the irritable questions of the older one, and Walter Boyle couldn’t help seeing trouble brewing. He sometimes had a confusing urge to warn the man or, better yet, say a word to the Chief when he came in, as he once in a while would do, to look the place over. He was a changed man now, that Chief. He’d been shaken by the man’s escape. It had broken him—or no, much worse than that. When a man was broken he gave everything up, had no interest in struggling any more. Chief Clumly still had his fight in him, but all his power was closed like a fist around one thing, that magician. Boyle would see him in the hallway, would see the one called Miller come up to him and ask him something, holding out a sheaf of papers on a clipboard, and the Chief would turn away as though he had neither seen nor heard. “Old man’s really mad,” the young guard said. “He ain’t hisself. I bet if you stood in his way he’d plow right through you.” Far into the night the Chief’s light stayed on, at the end of the hallway, and Boyle could hear him pacing pacing pacing. And something else. Sometimes he’d come out in the hallway softly, like a burglar, and go toward the door to the main office and stand there bent almost double, listening. He seemed to take on weight, as though his flesh was changing little by little into stone. One day in the cellblock the one called Miller showed the Chief that the bearded prisoner had left his little white stones, the ones he would spread on the floor and look at sometimes. Clumly rattled the stones in his hand and stared straight ahead like a railroad engine thinking. Miller said, “Maybe we should check them. Somebody in the magic trade might know something about them. You think so?” Clumly went on bouncing the stones in his hand, and then, still staring straight ahead, he pawed Miller to one side casually, slowly, like a bear, and walked with the stones in his hand back to his office. Very late the second night, a man with preternaturally white hair came in—“That would be the Mayor,” Salvador said—and went into the office where Clumly was pacing, and Boyle heard them talking for almost an hour, that is, Boyle heard the Mayor talking. Clumly said nothing, and in his mind Boyle could see him sitting on the corner of his desk, scowling like a freight train, bouncing those little white stones in his hand. The Mayor came out the hallway door by mistake and stood looking at Boyle in the hallway’s dimness like a cat watching an intruder in an alley, then turned on his heel and went through to the front office, and there he said: “That man’s out of his mind.” “You telling me,” the sergeant at the desk said. “I tell you that man’s
insane,”
the Mayor said. “You telling me,” the sergeant said.

And so, for one reason or another, Walter Boyle said nothing to the Chief, merely watched the thing build up. They were going to make a break. It was certain as Doomsday, but whenever he had a chance to warn the Chief, what he felt was only the weakening rush of anxiety that meant that this time he could still say it if he wanted; and each time he didn’t, the odds that he would speak, sometime later, went down a little more. At last his trial was just three days off, and he knew that if things went right he would soon be out. He felt not relieved but more nervous than ever. The thing might blow up almost any time, and the hours between now and his escape from being involved in it took forever.

That noon the guard who was the talker said, “They’re not bad kids, really.” He jerked his head toward the Indians. “They sure are polite. But that woman died, you know.”

Boyle nodded.

“Makes you a little sick to think about it,” Salvador said. “They could get life or something. The D.A.’s dead set, I hear.”

“They can’t get life,” Boyle said crossly. Immediately it annoyed him that he’d allowed himself to be drawn into it.

“Well, that’s what people say,” Mickey Salvador said.

“People are damn fools,” Boyle said.

“Well, maybe,” Salvador said. He looked baffled, slightly hurt.

Ass,
Boyle thought.
Stupid ass.
“Good coffee,” he said. That night he had a confused dream in which the jail caught fire and a judge whispered something to him, something he missed, and winked slyly. There were also large animals of a kind he couldn’t identify, and a great many dead chickens in wooden cages. He woke up sick with exhaustion, saying to himself a poem he had not known he knew—a poem of hope. The words were full of the dream’s mysterious light.

Tomorrow’s bridge, as I look ahead,

     
Is a rickety thing to view;
Its boards are rotten, its nails are weak,

     
Its floor would let me through. …

In the morning, a Sunday, he exercised and washed and combed his hair more slowly and carefully than usual, and he never once glanced in the Indians’ direction. He heard their talk and carefully did not notice the words, and when they paced—even though their shadows fell almost to the edge of his cell—he carefully did not notice that they were pacing. It was still all right, he thought. They weren’t yet to the boiling point. He listened to the music of Sunday morning traffic outside, lighter than on other days, less urgent and aggressive, as if the very pavement understood six days shalt thou labor. He was going to make it, it came to him. He was going to be gone by the time their violence exploded.