The Sunlight Dialogues (25 page)

“Mind if I use your phone?” he said.

Hodge waved him toward it.

Clumly went around behind the desk, sliding his finger along the top as he went, and sat down heavily. He dialed, waited, looking up fiercely at the shabby rosette in the center of the ceiling, then sat forward abruptly, slightly crossing his eyes to watch the receiver, and shouted into it. “Hello, Mikhail,” he said. “This is Clumly. Correct. That’s right. Listen. I’m at Will Hodge’s office.” His eyes grew cunning. “Will Jr has been here a little while back. He’s likely on his way up to Buffalo now. Tell the Thruway people if they see him, they should send him back. We need to talk to him.” He listened, foxy as the devil. “That’s right,” he said. “Correct.” He hung up the phone. He looked at Hodge again, still seething with rage but this time more as he might look at something human. Hodge was not comforted. He’d sent the State Troopers after Will, well as he knew him.

“Hell of a business,” Clumly said.

Grimly, Hodge studied the man’s bald dome. “Yes it is,” he said.

Clumly sighed, eyes going vague, his mind far away again. “Well, let’s go.” He stood up.

It was only when he was standing in the parking lot—a square like the courtyard of a dirty castle, high brick walls on three sides and most of the fourth, the air thick with the smell from the cleaners’, the cinders and dirt under Hodge’s shoes rutted and dented, baked hard as pottery—that the horror of the thing came over him. It seemed to him now that any fool should have seen that it would end this way, Nick Slater killing somebody merely to get out of jail, Will Jr dragged into it, and Hodge himself in some nebulous way responsible. It came to him that he hadn’t even thought to ask who it was that had been killed.

He watched the black and white police car nose out into the street, the red light flashing, dappled sunlight sliding on the roof as it moved, then opened the door of his elderly Plymouth and squeezed behind the wheel. It was baking hot inside the car, and it smelled of stale cigarette smoke. He sat a moment catching his breath before painfully reaching his key toward the ignition. He ground on the starter, and at last the engine caught. “All right,” Hodge said. He rolled down the window, grunting, then started for the jail.

“Blame little monkey,” he said.

But he could not get rid of his extreme uneasiness. It was almost less an emotion than a physical sensation, as if the whole world had risen up against him. The heat and light of the August sun made his head ache and hurt his eyes, and the rasp of the car motor, the sporadic bumping of metal against metal somewhere up close to the left front wheel, were unnaturally loud, cutting. Nick Slater’s face rose up in his mind, remarkably distinct, the hair as long as a woman’s, coal black and slicked down like the hair of one of those motorcycle people at a dance. The expression on the face—the thin, wide lips, the far-apart eyes, the nostrils flared like the nostrils of a horse—was a baffling mixture of joy and terror. It was an image without background, as it first came to him, and only after concentrating a moment could Hodge draw in the rest. It was at the Fireman’s Carnival, in the middle of July. Hodge had been standing with his daughter and her husband, doing nothing, taking in the noise and turbulent motion and color of the place, a Kewpie doll clutched in his two square hands, a cardboard box containing a goldfish hanging from one finger (he remembered it all very clearly now, the explosions of color in the overcast sky, the nasal shouts of the barkers and hucksters on all sides of him, the dancing girls ancient and sickly in repose, leanjawed as Baptist Sunday-school teachers with the eyes of old tigers, and above it all, mystical and hushed, mindlessly turning as if forever, the Ferris wheel: Mary Lou had said, “Ride the Ferris wheel, Dad?” “No sir,” he had snorted, smiling grimly, shocked by the realization that he could do it, no one would stop him, though it would kill him). All at once some kind of commotion broke out, over by the frozen-custard truck: a crowd shouting and running, someone howling “Police!” “What’s happened?” they all asked each other. “A fire,” someone said, and they all passed it back. But it wasn’t a fire, it was a firecracker, they learned. Some Indian had thrown one right into the crowd, and the men in the crowd had gone after him. Luckily for everybody, the police had caught him first. “There he is!” the man at Hodge’s back yelled. The police had him up on the dancing girls’ platform to protect him from the crowd, and in the glow of colored lights all around the platform eyes and noses were tipped up to look, and at the back of the crowd there were people jumping up and down, trying to see. “Why that’s Luke’s boy!” Hodge said. His son-in-law shook his head, hands in his pockets. He was six-foot-nine. “Durned if it ain’t.” He seemed not especially impressed. They had handcuffs on the boy. Hodge pushed through the crowd toward the platform, growling “K’out the way there, k’out the way!” in that heavy voice he’d inherited from his father the Congressman; and when he got there, puffing, still holding on to the Kewpie doll and the box with the goldfish, he heaved his great weight up the makeshift wooden steps and said, “What seems to be the trouble here?” The two policemen, sheriffs men, young fellows both of them, seemed more nervous than the boy. “I never did it, Uncle Will,” the Indian said, clowning, mimicking a child. “They seen me standing there, and all it is, they
figured
I did it.” But his breath stunk of beer, and his look was wild. “I’ll talk to you later,” Hodge said. The policemen, it turned out, were inclined to believe Nick Slater’s story, if only to be rid of him. No one seemed to have seen him throw the firecracker, in any case, and if Hodge wanted to take charge of the boy, that would be fine with them. Hodge snorted with disgust, but agreed to it. Nick was in no position to go through more court trouble. Hodge had gone directly to the car with him, and there, some distance from the honking and whirring of the carnival machines, the oceanic murmur of the crowd, he had said, “Luke know you came here?” The boy sat back almost on his shoulders, his knees up over the dash. “Psshew,” he said, “I thought I was one dead Redman.” His smile was still wild, and he was breathing hard. He shaped a gun with his right hand and fired twice, silently, at the crowd. Hodge said sternly, “I asked you a question.” Nick folded his arms, black against the white of his clean, neatly pressed shirt, and mused. At last he said, “Your Honor, I fear I must refuse to answer, on the grounds that the answer might cremate me.” Hodge snorted. “Listen, though,” Nick said. He looked at Hodge sideways, his face solemn now. “Thanks.” Suddenly he grinned, his white teeth huge and square.

“Dang fool,” Hodge said, troubled by some memory he could not make out.

A crowd had gathered around the high brownstone and concrete imitation castle set back among dying elms and maple trees. Except for the barred windows along the sides of the place, it might have been a library, or an old post office, or a school. The men from the hospital were just closing the light blue ambulance doors as Hodge drove up. He parked in front of the fire hydrant, switched off the engine, and sat watching, squinting against the brightness of the day, as they climbed into the ambulance and pulled away from the curb. A block from the jail they stopped behind the traffic waiting for a red light. He was dead then, yes.

“A man never knows from one minute to the next,” Hodge said. He patted his cigarette pocket though he hadn’t smoked for a month. He got out and walked up onto the lawn, watching the people. The grass on the lawn was as dry as excelsior and almost as brown. The dirt was dry as sand full in the sun. Hodge found Walt Sprague was there in the crowd, a client. Hodge started past him.

“Well hello there, Counsellor,” Sprague yelled, jerking his head. He was chewing. “You come over to see the excitement, did you?”

Hodge laughed, horselike. “What happened?” he said. The people were talking all around them just loudly enough that Sprague didn’t hear. Hodge repeated it. On the steps, trying to peek in, there was a queer-looking young man in a black Amish hat and clothes like a tramp’s.

“They had a jailbreak, thass what they say,” Sprague said. His voice was high and barren as a clay hill, and his long, burnt-dry face was folded and whiskered like a dog’s. He wore a T-shirt and baggy bib-overalls. “I guess they killed somebody, too. I never seen it, myself. I was over there acrost the street getting my tractor fixed. I seen the crowd all coming around and I come right on over. Some young fellow. I seen them bring him out. I-talian, looked like. Policeman.”

Hodge nodded. “Salvador,” he said.

The fat woman to Sprague’s left turned to look at Hodge angrily. She turned away again at once and hissed to the woman beside her, “Salvador.”

“They don’t train ’em right,” Sprague said. “Whole town run by graft. Whole durn
country
run by graft. Dang Democrats must be out of their minds. Put a Baptist cowboy in the White House.”

The angry woman turned her head again. “What you saying about Democrats?”

“I said they’re crazy, ma’am,” Sprague said. He touched his hatbrim. “Ain’t that so, Counsellor?”

Hodge nodded absent-mindedly and started for the steps.

Clumly was at his piled-deep desk, slyly pretending to read the Sunday funnies as if he had nothing on earth to do—as if the crowd in the outer office had nothing whatsoever to do with him. He glanced up then down at the paper quickly, pretending he had not bothered to look up, and for a moment Hodge was—for no real reason, it seemed to him the next moment—furious. What the devil was Clumly up to? But Hodge kept his temper. This was no time for fury. That was one of the things you learned at Law, the ability to choose the time. He said, “They said it was Salvador.”

Clumly nodded, looking up now. His eyes were ice.

“What happened?”

“Who knows? He was here alone, just one other man, at the desk. Sunday and all. Your boy knocked out the man at the desk and tied him up and got the cell door open some way or another—it was shut again when we come in—and Salvador must’ve pulled his gun, only he didn’t have sense to use it. Your boy got hold of it, tipped it up, maybe. Anyway, he was shot up through the chin.” Clumly pointed, tipping his head back. “Come look.”

He got up from the desk and led Hodge to the hallway leading to the cellblock. (It was almost empty now. Two policemen, a Negro, one man in a suit, maybe from the paper.) As soon as the hall door was open Hodge caught the smell. It was like the heavy scent of cow’s blood, the smell that had filled the slaughterhouse at Stony Hill. When he looked, the stuff was everywhere, sticky now, like dark paste—a wide puddle on the floor, stains on the wall, even spots on the ceiling. One of the cops—it was Clarence Pieman—and the Negro called Baltimore, were just beginning the cleaning. Hodge looked, jaw slung forward, and felt, strange to say, nothing. He was intensely aware of the sharp separation of bloodstain and wall, aware of the sharp lines in the tile, the stipple of the gray plaster, the smell; but every trace of the fierce churning of emotion that had sickened him before was gone. He felt, mainly, a keen curiosity more scientific than morbid.

“Poor devil,” he said soberly, shaking his head.

He removed his glasses to polish them, then replaced them and bent forward to look more closely.

Clumly rubbed his hands. He had that vague look again, like a man with grave responsibilities who’s forgotten where he is. “It must have been something,” he said. “He must have stumbled around like a chicken with its head cut off.”

“I was thinking that too,” Hodge said.

“It must have been something for the boy, eh?” Clumly said. “Think of it!” He scowled then, musing, perhaps thinking of something else entirely. “He must have gotten blood all over him. Blood all over the gun, too.” He glanced at Hodge. “Just the same, he took it with him.”

“The gun?”

Clumly nodded, suddenly back to reality and dangerous. His eyes came into focus on Hodge’s jaw and seemed to lock there. At last he put his hand on Hodge’s arm and turned him back to the office.

“Any idea where he went?” Hodge said.

“Vanished like smoke.” He touched his nose. “It’s as if he had somebody out there waiting for him. We’ll find him, of course. No worry about that. Have a seat.”

Hodge lowered himself into the chair by the desk while, behind him, Clumly crossed to the outer office door and talked to one of the men. Hodge’s chest and back and arms were pasted to his shirt. The fat he carried made him sweat more than most men. He only half-listened to the talk in the outer office, trying to adjust in his mind the irreconcilable images—the new man, Salvador, as he’d seen him last, filtering coffee through a piece of screen, and that other image, too intense for ordinary reality, the blood-spattered hallway. The man in the outer office said they had reached Mickey Salvador’s family. Clumly came back, and behind him a short, middle-aged policeman with a pink face, no chin. The man leaned against the desk and crossed his shins and switched on the tape recorder. Clumly began his questions; Hodge answered mechanically.

Not even Clumly was really interested in the questions. Sometimes in the middle of a sentence he would pause to fiddle with the knobs on the police radio beside the tape recorder—reports from the State Police at the roadblocks, or men out talking, beating the bushes, circling in on nothing—and sometimes, before Hodge had answered, Clumly would change his mind and say, “No, skip it.” He turned over some papers. He said abruptly “Funny thing, Will Jr’s coming to see you just when he did.”

“Well it’s not exactly—” Hodge began.

But Clumly stood up; the question was not serious. He went to stand by the window, as though the questioning were over, but he didn’t send his man away. He seemed to have forgotten.

Clumly shook his head, tapping the windowframe and looking out. “Kids,” he said. “They must be something, I guess. That younger one I mean, yours. What’s his name? Luke? I imagine there’s times you’d like to wring his neck.”

“He’s a monkey all right,” Hodge said, on guard.

The man watching the tape recorder had not yet switched it off.

Hodge frowned. He tried to hear what they were saying out by the desk.