The Sunlight Dialogues (36 page)

“The man in the car, for his sanity’s sake, becomes something of a diner-hopper, and since he cannot hear his radio while sitting with whomever he finds there to talk to, the radio which he of course must hear if he’s to go where he’s needed in the large patrol area one prowlcar covers, he learns to live not only with the isolation of the new man of silver but also with guilt.

“There, ironically enough, is the crux of it: guilt. The policeman cannot be perfectly sure he is doing his best for the department that has won from him his loyalty (it is interesting that in police slang, headquarters is known as ‘the house’); he cannot be sure he is doing the best he might for his family (the pay is bad, there are risks, and the work wrecks one’s nerves); and to the extent that his original selection and training have done their job, the old civilized man within him cannot always be perfectly content that the job is civilized.

“Yet for all that, we might note, the man on patrol has it better than the man who must work with prisoners. The voice at the other end of the prowlcar radio is not sullen or hostile, and though prowlcars have their distinctive smell—the same smell as school buses or taxicabs or any other vehicle regularly and without any trace of affection serviced and stored in a large garage—at least prowlcars do not, like cellblocks, stink. Patrolmen grow increasingly mechanical, with experience, withdrawing to something like a permanent state of light trance. Guards, forced by their circumstances to make a sharper distinction between
us
and
them,
may grow brutish. The prevalence of alcoholism, marital failure, neurosis, and psychosis among guards is notorious. This is particularly noticeable among guards in large prisons; but every city or country jail provides its instances. Indeed, taken as a general class, cellblock policemen are the graphic symbol of what has been called the power-failure of civilization, the black gap between Actual and Ideal. In the lumbering old Leviathan, they are the heartbeat that misses. The fault is not theirs, nor yet ours either. An occurrence more than a fault: a necessary waste of human spirit.”

The article was signed “A. Taggert Hodge, Phoenix, 1959.” A mistake of some kind. The Congressman had been dead by then, and Phoenix pointed to Taggert Faeley, the youngest of the Hodges.

Clumly frowned. The Judge was right; it was all very interesting, though not true. What would Will Sr say if you showed him that? Clumly smiled. But he would not show him, naturally; he was not completely heartless.

He frowned again. He folded the article and dropped it into the wastebasket, then on second thought retrieved it and put it in his drawer and locked it there. The whole thing was disgusting, unbalanced maybe, and yet it was just true enough to make a man stop and think. He closed his eyes.

Chief Clumly himself was not one of those people the article talked about; he could state it for a fact. He was changed very little, all things considered, from what he’d been as a young man, standing on the ship with the smell of the ocean in his nose and his heart beating lightly. Merely older, heavier of heart. Who could escape it? Neither was Miller or Kozlowski or even Figlow the kind of man young Hodge imagined cops to be. (Clumly knew his men. That was what he was paid for.) Every one of them had joined up, originally, by accident, with no serious intention of remaining in the work very long. Kozlowski, for one, was mildly scornful of, and mildly amused by, the uniform he wore. He scolded jaywalkers with a severity he secretly found comic, and now and then, with an unexpected, momentarily baffling smile, he let them know it. Once, when he’d found children throwing bricks at a blind horse in an East Main Street field, he’d reacted with indignation which—it was plain to see, or anyway plain to Clumly, watching and listening to the talk at the station—had nothing to do with his function as preserver of the peace. He would have done the same and would have felt the same if he had seen the thing while driving a tractor between two fields on a neighbor’s farm. It was not the crime he reacted to, but the stupidity and cruelty of the thing. As he would have chased heifers that had broken through a fence, he’d chased the three boys down in his prowlcar, penned them in at the corner of the Sylvania fence, leaped out red-faced with rage and, exactly as he’d have done if he were not a policeman, delivered them to the station. The only real tie he felt with the police department he served was his general, and not especially intense, liking for the men he worked with—a tie no different from the one he had felt with the baseball team he played on, back in high school. He watched Chief Clumly (Clumly saw) with remote fascination partly because he was different from the others—a narrow-minded, stiff-hearted old man, a mystery. He observed as a city man might observe a cow with the wuthers. He had no expectation of being in this business long, and so while he was here he would see what he could see. Ah, Kozlowski!

Miller, too, had joined up, originally, by accident. He’d grown up in Batavia, among the Northern Italians on the better side of town, not among the Sicilians that he too looked down on. (Clumly’s race on his mother’s father’s side.) He had a ruddy face like an Anglo-Saxon and brown hair, and he was taller than most of Batavia’s Sicilians grew. He’d served with the Marines in World War II, a young man at the time, broad-shouldered and grinning and innocent. Clumly had heard it all until he might as well have been there. Miller hated the Japs in the same abstract way he hated the cowmen who fenced off their waterholes in the Luke Short novels he was always reading. He was a first-rate Marine in the same way he’d been a first-rate football player before and was a first-rate volleyball player in the South Pacific: he enjoyed fighting, though before the fight started, in the time of waiting, he was afraid. Once the landing was on, or the jungle fight, the fear dropped away and he fought like a man in a War picture—and was even conscious that that was how it was. Only once did it occur to him that they really might kill him, when he was dragging his boots through a marsh between trees at dusk, and people were being hit around him, the same as in a landing except that that night, in the dimness and confusion, he couldn’t tell even vaguely where the shots were coming from. He was hit three times in the stomach, and as he sank into the snake-grass, losing consciousness, sinking, in fact, into the deepest and calmest blackness he had ever experienced in his life, he had believed at last in death. They’d sent him home and he’d married a girl he’d gone with most of his life—a Protestant, and so, with a shrug, because his parents were the kind who would bite their lips and weep a little and forgive it, he too became a Protestant, a Methodist like his wife, whatever that meant. To support her, he’d taken a temporary job, as he’d thought at the time, as a cop.

Even now, middle-aged, he looked like the man on a Marines poster, at least when he had his uniform on. When he sat at home in his undershirt, barefoot, watching TV—Clumly had visited now and then—you saw that his arms and shoulders were not as thick as they’d once been, that his chest had sunk, and that his trunk was wider all around, though not exactly fat. His normal tone of voice was friendly teasing, even when he asked his wife Jackie for a shirt or asked his sons if they’d finished their homework. He was the same with, for instance, the mailman if he saw him on a Saturday morning: “You’re late with the bills again, ain’t you?” he’d say, as if belligerently; but then when the mailman’s moment of uncertainty had passed, or had stretched out long enough, Miller would grin, abruptly and warmly, and cock his eyebrows, and he and the mailman would laugh. Clumly, watching (having stopped by for some reason), would feel proud of Miller. Yes. He told no long, involved jokes like the Mayor’s, but he was fond of short quick jokes, old as the hills, and he used them over and over, whenever they would fit.
The kid wanted a watch for Christmas, so we let ’im.
With his teasing and his jokes and his comically monstrous threats he ruled his wife and four boys like a tyrant. They loved and feared him. He was a father, but almost not part of the family. When the belligerent, jovially teasing voice would not work, it was hard for him to speak. He would sit by the TV, in his private circle of gray-blue light, watching wrestling or some old detective movie, and his wife and boys would play Password or Chinese Checkers or Monopoly in the yellower light of the diningroom at his back. Sometimes, on a sudden impulse his family did not dare resist and, in any case, rarely wanted to resist, he would take them all to a drive-in movie or a stock-car race or a hockey game. And sometimes, with that same mock-belligerence, he would announce to Jackie that they were going to the VFW Hall to dance.

Miller’s family was not fooled by his boyish manner. They knew him earnest and just and restless—a first-class mechanic, typist, square-dancer, home-workshop carpenter, radio repairman, you name it. Without talking about it, he lived by rule—a tight rule he’d perhaps never troubled to think out but would never, come hell or high water, slip from. He drank with the others at the VFW Hall, but no man could say he had ever seen Miller drunk, not even high. He drove his car fast, eyes glinting over the high cheekbones, nose like an axe; but he drove with the precision of a professional racer. It seemed, in fact, that he never even laughed except by choice. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the lingering images of a thousand bad moments he had calmly come through: an eight-year-old boy on Chandler Place who’d been hanged by his playmates, a farmer’s wife, out on Ellicott Street Road, stabbed twice with a pitchfork, and other scenes no less terrible, though not as striking: head-on collisions, fires and the Tonawanda’s floods, children run over and crippled or killed, violence, drunkenness, sickness. Once, before the time of the Creek Road overpass, a man who had two children in his car had tried to outrun Miller’s siren by crashing through the crossing gates. The train hit them broadside, and the car exploded like a bomb. Miller could tell about the things he’d seen with a kind of detachment, almost light-heartedness, that would have made you think, if you did not know him, that his emotions ran no deeper than rainwater washing down a street. But it wasn’t so. He was as shocked by such things as Clumly was himself. Maybe more so. The images ate at his generous heart and at times tinged his mock-belligerent cheerfulness with alum. Once in a while, after one of his jokes, he would forget to throw in the open, boyish smile. At such times he seemed much older than he was. Since the beginning, he’d had it in the back of his mind that one of these days he’d get out of police work; but the images he carried with him had made him put it off, year by year—so Clumly guessed—until one day it had come clear to him that, for better or worse, he was going to die a cop.

In Miller there was not an ounce of what young Hodge, in his article, had called “schizophrenia.” He acted in his own right, as surely as Kozlowski did, and unlike Kozlowski he acted out of more than a native feeling for right: he believed law important and valuable, not simply in theory—Miller was no theorist—but in his blood and bones. In his blood and bones he believed in boxing and wrestling but hated a street brawl, which had no rules. His whole body tensed with joy to the clatter and slam of a stock-car race, but with speeders he was a tormenter out of hell. He used his uniform as he used his voice, as an unself-conscious assertion of lawful authority. His virtue and defect was that he thought he knew better than other men, in the same way that he knew better than his wife and sons; and, generally speaking, the truth was that he did. He accepted the responsibility laid on him like a mantle by both nature and society, if Hodge’s article was right, and, overworked, forever lonely—for all the good humor in his disposition—he preserved his good health by the voluntary self-abandonment of watching television or dancing at the VFW Hall or building mahogany knickknack shelves—he had literally hundreds of them—in his basement. And Clumly knew one thing more. Miller was superstitious. Where he got it, who could say?—some spark of true religion, maybe, in a generally indifferent Catholic childhood; or perhaps it was simply a snatch at absolute control by a soul uncommonly conscientious but imperfectly informed on the ins and outs of time and space, struggling through a labyrinthine universe full of surprises. He had the kind of superstition which runs not to avoiding black cats, walking around ladders, or carrying talismans, but to nervous presentiment and an obscure sense of the stirrings of omens and portents. He distrusted this tendency he had: he jokingly denied it and mocked what he saw of it in others. He was the first to scoff at talk of flying saucers, or prowling ghosts, or healing by faith: nevertheless, he read whatever happened into his hands on such subjects, and he frequently glanced at his horoscope in the
Daily News,
scoffed to the others at what he read, and, if any of it seemed to come true, took what he no doubt imagined was merely casual note of the fact. He’d been the first to mock Clumly’s indefinite hunch about the Sunlight Man and had found good reason for laughing it off as an old man’s nervousness. Nevertheless, he too had waited uneasily, had commented over and over that the weather was wrong for the time of year (in some way he could not pinpoint), and, when finally the old man’s hunch had proved right, Miller had felt, you would have sworn, a peculiar relief. The feeling had not lasted. He was troubled now by dreams which he could not remember afterward and which, in retrospect, did not seem to have been dreams at all, but something else. So he’d told Figlow, Clumly listening at the keyhole. “Beats all, the way the boss knew all along,” he said, grinning thoughtfully. “Shit,” Figlow said. “Pure guessing.”

Figlow, too, believed he knew better than other men, including Clumly. Their stupidity sometimes astounded him and at other times merely filled him with mild disgust. When a man came in to pay eighty dollars’ worth of parking tickets—such things happened sometimes—he was incredulous. “It’s crazy,” he would say, shaking his head. He had a wife he could barely stand the sight of: she ran up bills and actually seemed not to understand that with a charge account you still, sooner or later, had to pay. She worked as a waitress at The Red Ozier, and he suspected, without any real evidence, that she had lovers. He suspected his daughter, too. She was fifteen. By accident he had found out she was taking the pill.