The Sunlight Dialogues (32 page)

“Then I’ll be there,” he said.

They jounced across the tracks and had half a mile of city streets to pass before they reached the school and the night class, half a mile with nothing to say because they’d gone as far as either of them dared. She sat primly erect, her hands folded (her mother’s voice: “Don’t you ride with no stranger. Your father’s out of his mind, that’s all, girl your age running all over the county in the dead of night. Oh what are we comin to! Lord have mercy! And I sweat and I slave and a daughter of mine known far and wide as walking the streets in the dead of night! Your father’s out of his mind, he’s lost and damned, and us confounded!”). Ben walked his fingers on the wheel and studied each passing tree as if watching for a squirrel, and he whistled “Jesse James.” He was safely around the corner, out of sight, and Millie was standing clutching her notebook on the high-school steps, when she began, helplessly, to laugh.)

Luke was scowling at her, irritated by the smile, and she felt old. But he said nothing, turned to look out his window and down the dark hill falling away toward the lights of the prison. His protruding ears were elephantine when you saw him from behind. How sad for a would-be Romantic hero, she thought, and smiled again, detached and wearily fond, as though she were looking at her son from beyond the grave. They turned off the dirt road onto the narrow bumpy driveway that lifted them past the cowbarn and chickenhouse and the parked tractor-trailer to the weedy yard and the house. He stopped the pick-up beside the gas pump, beside the old car, and turned off the motor but left the lights on, shining into the cluttered garage. Unreal. Like looking into a cave by torchlight, or knowing the thoughts of a horse. With the junk out of it, the garage would be wide enough for three good-sized cars, but Luke kept open only space enough for his Chevy coupe, no space for the truck or for tractors. There was an old wooden hammermill—it had been here when his father had bought the place for him—or rather when he’d seized it by foreclosure (Will Hodge Sr was a whiz at that)—huge stacks of half-rotten burlap bags, piled-up used lumber, balls of string, baling wire, axe-handles, rusted milkcans, oil barrels, boxes of bolts, an electric fan for the cowbarn, old radios, frocks, boots, an acetylene torch, bedsprings—the ones the Runians had died on. Here, as at Ben’s place, there were swallows’ nests on the beams. The whole garage, in fact, showed Ben’s fine hand—as though working those summers for his Uncle Ben, Luke Hodge had learned to scorn all his sober, potching father represented, had turned with sudden violence on his father’s deliberate, painstaking life of ugly, neat repair: repainted banisters, plugged up holes, jacked up floors, wired up chairs, new lintels for sagging doorways. No doubt it was because of his Uncle Ben, too, that Luke had gotten the Indian. All their lives Ben and Vanessa had been taking in strays—from prison, from the Children’s Home, from friends with troubles. And so Luke must do it too, of course. Pass on the kindness, emulate the hero. (It had not occurred to her before. She had taken Luke’s own explanation, that Will Jr had badgered him into it. But she knew she was right: it wasn’t his brother’s fault but his Uncle Ben’s; and she was sorrier for him than ever: as always, she’d been there before him.)

She said, “What was he arrested for this time?”

He went on staring into the garage. “Who?”

“Nick, of course.”

The corner of his mouth drew back. “Who cares? I come home and they call me up and they tell me he’s there, him and his brother. Tried to steal a car from somebody, ended up killing this woman.”

“They were drunk?”

“Naturally. Somebody gave the little bastard some booze and he went out helling it up with his brother.”

“His brother must be crazy. How old is he?”

Luke shook his head, the muscles of his face tense. “It’s not just his brother. It’s both of them. He’s worse, for Christ’s sake.”

“Do you really think so?” It was too much to hope for. Luke was a sentimental idiot, and Nick Slater was officially in his keeping.

Luke didn’t seem to have heard her.

She said, “Well, you mustn’t think about it. It will all come out in the wash. Father will think of—” She paused, distracted by her having slipped into calling him “Father,” as though nothing had happened.

Luke groped with his left hand for the lightswitch, found it, and turned the truck lights off. “Let’s go in,” he said. “I need a fucking pill.”

There was a gentle south wind and a flickering of lightning to the west. The air was weighted, the storm much closer now. When she glanced over at the house it looked eerie in this light, as if made not of wood and stone but of strange jewels—of jasper and sapphire and chalcedony and emerald. She shuddered. She jerked at the doorhandle until it caught, then forced the door open with her shoulder. When she was down, she saw that Luke had made no move to open his door, sat pressing the heels of his hands to his forehead. She remembered his fierce rage earlier, utterly forgotten now, on his side, at least, as though it were not himself but someone else whose life she had mysteriously ruined—as though he were a four-year-old again, and she his gentle and innocent mother. She thought:
Jesus’ nuts.
(Sol Ravitz would be sitting in the lecture hall, his big left hand wrapped around his pipe, pretending he was not still smoking, here where smoking was forbidden, his kingly bald head tipped back as if with arrogance, knees up on the seat in front of him. When the speaker came out—she couldn’t even recall who was speaking tonight—Sol would close his hand tightly over the pipebowl, smothering the pipe, and would applaud by slapping his knee with his long right puddingsoft hand with hairybacked fingers. In the row in front of him—Sol would be in the very last row—some college student would be elbowing another discreetly, saying, “You know who that is, the bald one? That’s Ravitz, on TV.” And Millie, if she were there, would poke him in the ribs and say, “You have been spotted.” Ah, how he would grin!) She reached up her hand. “Can I help you down, Luke?” After a moment he slid toward her. “Thank you.” There was anger in his voice, but now it was not anger directed toward her. Thinking of Sol, but standing here under the eaves of Luke’s garage, giving her son her shoulder to lean on like some long-suffering, docile old mother—aware that whatever was between them, whether his anger or his crippled love, was meaningless, pointless, a time to get through because it was there—she felt a cruel urge to laugh. She stood here for the moment nameless, a human presence, nothing more; a kind of ghost; not out of charity or duty or guilt but because she stood here. “By the virtue of the fact,” as Sol would say. Who knew nothing of the virtue of pure fact, fact prior to words, shocking and unnatural.

“I’m all right,” he said, shaking her hand loose. He started ahead of her through the darkness of the garage toward the steps into the kitchen. She waited until he had the door open and the light on, then picked her way through the trash. When she reached the kitchen he was already in the bathroom taking a pill, playing his own physician, as usual. He came back at last and went over to the green wooden table and sat down. It wouldn’t take long, but it would hold him only for a while. She took off her hat and hung it on the back of one of the green wooden chairs. Then she too sat down. She took her mirror from her purse and once more settled her red-brown hair (but before the rinse it was white as snow). It was soft to the touch. She noted the fact with satisfaction. She lit a new cigarette.

“I’m sorry to be doing this to you,” he said. Already the pill was beginning to take effect.

Two steaks lay still wrapped in white butcher paper, oozing blood, on a grease-blackened cookie sheet on the table. It was what he always gave her when he invited her out. It was as if it were all he’d ever heard of. “Shall I put on a barbecue fire?” she said.

“I’ll manage,” he said. A whine.

“Fine and dandy.”

He went on just standing. She wished he would offer her a drink, but she could get by. He would remember when the pain was eased a little more. Outside, the wind was howling now, making the pines moan, a kind of mindless choral singing. He would have to make his fire inside the garage. A clap of thunder shook the walls and lightning filled up the windows. The rain came hard and all at once. In a matter of seconds it was as though it had been raining for hours.

“It must give you great satisfaction,” he had said, and she: “You’ll never know the half of it.” That wasn’t exactly true. He would never know the particulars, but sooner or later he would know how it was, when he grew past imagining himself unique and, more ludicrous yet, tragic. What did he do up here nights, alone? Wander from room to room, no doubt, looking at the garbage that had been in the house when his father got it for him, turn the things over in his hands—broken candlesticks, pewter pitchers, books with clumsy old-fashioned engravings, rickety tables, chamber pots, letters—imagining they carried the history not of the Runians whom no one remembered any more (two old sisters, fat and colorless, with growths on their necks and arms and legs and protruding through the cheap cotton-print dresses that covered their loose, fallen bellies, the last of what might have been despite all evidence some noble old line, or the last except for the dull-witted nephew who had smashed their skulls with a ball-peen hammer, imagining the mattresses or cookie jars or the upright piano to be crammed with a king’s ransom in old dollar bills: finding instead for all his trouble and perhaps grief (because the nephew had lived with his aunts as a child) nothing but dust, pressed roses, and corset hooks, so that after he’d buried his aunts like dead calves in the manure pile—trueborn country boy—and washed the caked blood from his hands and arms, he’d been too disappointed to run away, too sunk in angry gloom and disgust to talk sense to the Baptist minister when he came to call, and was waiting there still when two days later the sheriff came, and was waiting yet, hands folded on his knees, a mile from here, in the prison)—the history not of the Runians but of Luke Hodge, Esq., and his ancestors, a fallen splendor. He was twenty-two and tortured by headaches, not lucky like his brother or his mother, both of whose nervous troubles showed up in the form of rectal bleeding. So he had to be excused, for now. He would come to his senses, eventually. It was a time to be gotten through.

God help us to wise old age.

She had stood on the rock ledge overlooking the quarry, her hands folded behind her back, Ben standing beside her, his hands in his pockets. In the glassy water the reflection of the moon was as clean and distinct as the moon itself, but off to the right, where the hills rose more sharply and there were locusts and skeletal crabapple trees, there was fog moving in, coming onto the water slowly, tentatively, like a skater trying the thickness of ice on a pond. Millie was cold; she’d left her sweater in the car, but she knew it might be dangerous to admit she was chilly. He might give her his sweater, and then again he might snap at the chance to take her home. She knew well enough that Ben felt guilty, bringing her here. All night she had sensed that there was something troubling his mind. She would know later that she had guessed at once what the trouble was, but she had not yet admitted that she knew.

After a long time he said, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it.”

She nodded, knowing he was watching her though pretending not to. “I like it that you like pretty things,” she said. She looked toward her shoes, for a moment, embarrassed and conscious that her embarrassment was attractive to him. There was a light wind that picked at her collar and unfurled her skirt, and she knew that that too was good. He slid his hands out of his pockets and folded his arms, and she let her hands drop casually to her sides. Sooner than she had imagined he would dare, he closed his right hand around her left. The reflection of the moon grew sharper.

“It makes you want to make speeches,” he said, “or say poetry or something.”

“What does?”

He waved toward the water and she laughed.

“I heard you speak, Ben,” she said. He had been in the VFW contest. He was the best of them all but his brother Tag had beaten him. All the Hodges had beautiful voices, deep and resonant as their father’s, and they looked on a platform as if they’d been born there. Ben talked as if softly, though it filled all the room, and thoughtfully, as if he were letting you hear him think it out for the first time, speeches filled with fine images and pleasant ways of saying things and sudden connections that made your heart beat faster for a minute, so that people leaned forward, here and there in the audience, exactly the way they might lean forward when the pole-vault bar was at eleven feet, higher than any Batavian had in those days ever gone. He was beautiful, splendid, or so she believed; but Tag, four years or more younger than he was, had wild yellow curls and light blue eyes: he could do amazing things with his face and voice, a comedian; he could make you laugh when all your family had just been drowned in a cistern, her mother said. He won not because he was better than Ben but because for a boy of fourteen he was a genius. His speech said nothing, it was out of a library book.

She said again, because he hadn’t answered, “I went to the contest and heard you.”

He nodded. “I saw you.”

“Ben,” she said, “tell me what’s the matter.”

After a long time he said, “Millie, I’m in love with you.”

She turned to face him, taking his other hand, dead serious for all her excitement. “Is that so bad?”

He met her eyes, saying nothing, and she thought over and over, like a command,
Ben, kiss me. Ben!
Then suddenly he took her in his arms, and he kissed her lips and cheek and throat, so that she could say it out loud at last, “Oh Ben, my dear, dear Ben!”—or absurdly believed she could, imagining herself unique and, more ludicrous yet, tragic (an error which not even over thirty years later, unconsciously pressing the back of her hand to her forehead, sitting in her son’s kitchen, could she fully accept, she knew, for what it was)—and “Ben, I love you, I’ve waited so long for you to kiss me.” His hand came to her armpit gentle, then went to her waist and inside her blouse and brassiere to close on her breast, all his beautiful timidity replaced by a beautiful boldness, and she wanted to scream. Now she was not cold but burning up, saying, “Do what you want with me, anything!” (and saying mentally thirty years later, a word picked up from Solomon Ravitz,
Oy).
He began to take away his hand and she clung to his arm, trying to keep him from it. “Ben, what’s the matter?”