The Sunlight Dialogues (42 page)

He could hear her walking, downstairs. If the Indian had fallen asleep she’d have the gun. It did not frighten him, and not because she would not shoot. No one would shoot more quickly and lightly or forget the error more easily when she learned who it was that she’d killed. He felt no fear because he was feeling, just now, nothing. His emotions had all gone out of him into the darkness around him, making it heavy and charged as thunder-weather, more a presence in the room than he was himself. He was trembling, but not with feeling; growing abstract. The house around him seemed to pitch and yaw very slowly, and the rain was still falling like floods coming down off the backs of mountains, settling in thick torrents of mud where a man might find God only knew what—huge eggs of unnatural production, hatching quickly in all this angry heat, strange creatures crawling out of them, howling on the hills. Of all this he was only half-aware.

It’s sorrow that changes a man. But there was no sorrow in the life of the Chief of Police. That was his crime. There was only order, lifted against the world like rusty chickenwire to keep out a smell of cows.

(He heard her take a step on the stairs and stop, listening upward.)

There were only Clumly’s ancient codes, the tortuous carvings on his tablets. Only in brass or stone can codes be maintained; and even so, the wind nibbles at the edges of the runes, and the rain beats down, taking its microscopic, dusty bites. Thou shalt not commit adultery, for instance. Why? Is love a thing so timid, withered by a breath? (I have watched leaf-shadows play over ladies’ knees and the white of their thighs. I did not find them less clean for the leaves’ affection.) The Sexual Revolution, they called it. The New Morality. But it was older, in principle, than time. King David murdered because his age could not know it. For better or worse, the new age was coming, or the age-old principle coming to life. Not an end to marriage and family but a new beginning, an end to old tyrannies, a beginning of agreement. The truth is always larger than you think. That was what he would have liked to say to Clumly. I’ve seen how they live, this underground culture you hate. Gentle people with mild eyes, who can fix their hearts as firmly as you or I. They close their hands on what they love by choice, not lashed to life like bloated, black, drowned sailors to a spar. They share their flesh like food. And when they choose, at last—when they resolve—it’s with a finality that humbles us, reveals to us what we are. No doubt it was just as well that he could not say it. One knew well enough there was no breaking down those doors, double-locked and night-locked and chained. Let time unfold the arguments, since it would.

She was coming up the stairs now, stealthy. There was no doubt of it then. She had the gun. Though still he felt nothing, the air around him sickened. Was he to be responsible for the world? The sour smell of the cellblock was behind them, and the policeman full of rules he only dimly understood walked trembling ahead of the Indian boy who tiptoed though there was no need, his flat face twisted up like twisted iron, a rage of rules. And a rule said to the policeman, “Duck and turn!” and another howled to the Indian, “Get the gun!” The room exploded and fire leaped out of the walls, and the policeman fell back, thrashing and gurgling. They began to run, stepping lightly through the flames. It was not his fault. He could construct a fault, but not one he believed. He was not the one who had englished the tottering world off course, slammed home this debauchery of laws to crucify the living heart and nail the dead in place with a stake of ash.

Nor was it his fault that Millie was coming down the hallway with a tread absurdly light to attack his trance. Like a man asleep, he stood up, or part of him stood up, and moved without a sound toward the door.
(Erxias, where is all this useless army gathering to go?)
She stood outside the door, motionless, listening for his breathing. The doorknob turned, so noisily, as it seemed to him, that it might have wick’d the dead. He stood across the room in the absolute blackness and watched himself watching the doorknob. Then a breeze came. The door was opening. He slipped the gun from her hand so lightly, he knew by practice, that she would not know for a moment that it was gone. “The tigress strikes,” he whispered, the same instant.

She started back and realized the gun was gone.

“La bête féroce,” he whispered. “Do not think I cannot guess why you have come.” He began a wild patter of lunatic talk, patting her cheek, tousling her hair, hissing, howling, whining. She did not realize until too late that she was naked to the waist. A lightning flash filled the room and revealed his face. She screamed, though an instant before, crazily, she had been willing; almost willing. The Sunlight Man lifted his arm to hide his ugliness and backed away. He shook with anger and believed for a moment in the fire breaking out at his feet.

“Keep it down in there,” Clumly said.

Kathleen’s father stood at his shoulder, dead.

4

Ed Tank slid out of his prowlcar and hurried to the barn door. There he stopped, bent forward, listening. Hearing nothing, he drew his pistol and went in. A tangle of old rope, a harrow that had not been used in years, two old woodstoves leaned against the wall for storage; otherwise nothing. He could take in the whole barn at a glance—there had been no hay in the mows for a long time. Light came through holes in the roof. He came out again and went around the side, and there, sitting against an old barrel, was what he was after.

He saw at once that it was not the Sunlight Man but somebody else, a short young man wearing a heavy black coat and a black Amish hat, though the morning was already hot. His beard was small and scraggly. The young man nodded, curiously polite and remote. Ed Tank put the gun in its holster.

“What you doing here?”

“Just resting.”

It might be true. There was a battered metal suitcase by his leg. He might be some kind of tramp just passing through. Tank scowled and scratched his stomach. “You better come with me.”

“Ever you say,” he said. He leaned forward and rose to his feet. He bent over for the suitcase. The hem of the black coat came almost to the ground.

“What’s your name?” Tank said.

“Freeman,” he said. He smiled and held out his hand as if to shake.

Tank ignored it, then thought perhaps he shouldn’t have. Might be a harmless nut, one of those halfwits you heard about, wandering around from place to place. There were birds on the fence, he didn’t know what kind, watching them.

“What’s yours?” the young man said.

“Mine?”

“Your name.”

He studied him. At last he said, “Officer Tank.”

“Ah!” the boy said. Again he held out his hand, and this time, thinking he must be crazy as he did it, Tank accepted the handshake.

“Am I bothering someone?” the boy said.

“You’ll find out down at headquarters.” He moved guiltily toward the car and the boy came, as if voluntarily, beside him. The sun was still low but it had lost its redness. Houses and trees stood out clean and sharp and sounds were very clear—the bell-like ring of a milkcan cover being knocked off the can, the sound of a compressor starting up. Tank reported in. Then he started up the motor, backed away from the barn, and turned toward the crumbling-asphalt street.

“Law Street,” the boy said, seeing the sign. He smiled.

Tank said, “You live around hereabouts?”

“New Jersey,” the boy said. “I’m just visiting.”

“Who?”

“Oh, nobody special. Just visiting. Nice country.”

Miller bounced the empty flowerseed packet up and down in his palm. Tank leaned against the door with his arms folded. “How many of these you take?” Miller said.

“I don’t know,” the boy said. He sat with his arms around the hat in his lap. “As I say, I was hungry.”

“Mmm,” Miller said.

“Did I break some particular law?” the boy said as if concerned.

Miller looked at him, thinking about other things. At last he said, “Not any law that’s written down.”

“Ah,” the boy said. He nodded. “An unwritten law.” He did not smile.

“How old are you?” Miller said.

“Twenty-four. How old are you?”

“Pretty old.” He dropped the package in the wastebasket. “You’re just passing through, right?”

The boy nodded.

“Good. Keep passing and we’ll forget about this.”

“Keep passing?” He showed nothing at first. Then little by little a look of incredulity came. He tipped his head. “Excuse me, are you saying I must go, whether I prefer to go or not?”

“I’m advising—”

“I don’t understand. It seems to me—” He opened his hands to show his amazement. “Why in the world should I leave?”

“Look, take it easy on us, will you? Just vanish.”

Head tipped, he stared fixedly at Miller. “I’m sorry about your unwritten law, but that’s your bag, it seems to me. Since I’m thoroughly inoffensive and a great respecter of law, and since I’m not ready just yet to move away from here—”

Ed Tank broke in, “What if everybody started eating morning-glory seeds?”

The boy shrugged. “It might be a good thing. I’m no philosopher, but it seems to me like you people could use some. Meaning no offense. Pretty colors, funny shapes—” He gestured.

“It looks like we’ll have to lock him up,” Miller said.

“For what?” the boy said.

“We’ll think of something.”

The boy shrugged sadly, resigned to it already.

Ed Tank said, “A person doesn’t have a right to destroy his own mind.”

The boy smiled hopelessly.

Miller said, “Suppose you start pushing this stuff. Pretty soon we got kids all over town that are hooked on it, maybe dead, some of ‘’em.”

“That’s fantastic,” the boy said. “Why compared to plain beer—” He saw it was hopeless. “I was hungry. I told you that. Even if I knew the stuff was psychedelic, as long as there’s no law—”

“Do you realize what you’re doing to your
mind?”
Miller said.

The boy sighed. “Your information’s bad. But I’m no converter. Two thousand years of wrong information—”

“Ok, book him,” Miller said.

The boy sighed. He put on the black hat to show his sorrow.

5

Clumly avoided the trial. There was no need for him there, though he usually went in cases like Boyle’s, to make sure there were no slip-ups. But Miller could handle it if anybody could. The jury might send Walter Boyle up to Attica on the strength of nothing more than Miller’s grin. Miller could win them like a child. He sat solemn-faced as a girl in church. His shoulders and chest and arms and legs were the kind that gave you confidence in American law enforcement, yet his eyes were mild: he would not maltreat your son when he broke a school window. And Boyle, on the other hand, looked so much like a thief that if you saw him in the movies, sneaking into a house, you’d have laughed. His eyes roved constantly, full of fear and suspicion and malice, and he sat with his head ducked, the hump on his back almost higher than the round, graying head. He wrung his fingers and sat with one toe on the other, and once in a while he would jerk, looking over his shoulder. When he was agitated, a tic came over him, a spasmodic smile of fright that went up his left cheek. All right. That was damn near all they had on him, that was the truth.

Always the grim fact remained that no one had seen what he did in the houses he knocked at and entered; it was impossible to prove that he had not stood just inside the partly opened door, waiting for some answer to his call. And impossible to prove that the money in his car was not his own.

“Circumstantial,” the defense would say. And would make his point with homely illustrations—the same illustrations he’d been inspired to use last time and the time before, it might be, but skillfully, feelingly presented, nonetheless, like comforting poems he’d committed to memory years ago. And Boyle would probably go free.

He hadn’t wanted to see it, so he’d stayed away. There was another reason, too. Miller had said this morning in Clumly’s office, in front of Kozlowski, “It’s all right here, Chief, the case against Benson. You sure you won’t change your mind?”

Clumly had taken the folder from him and had looked at it. More mere circumstance, that was true, but such a weight of it that it might wake up even Sam White. Correlations of Benson’s absences from home and burglaries in a neat semicircle around Buffalo. An old record of minor offenses by Benson, from the days of his apprenticeship. And three larceny arrests, no convictions, against Walter Boyle.

“You’ve been busy,” Clumly said.

Miller waited.

He shook his head. “It won’t stand up anyway, Miller. A good defense—”

“It might.”

“The answer’s no.”

“I could take it to the D.A. myself, you realize.”

“You could. It’s up to you.”

“For Christ’s sake, boss. Be reasonable.”

“No.” He flushed. “I don’t choose to be reasonable. I’m sick of it.”

Miller said, “They’ll eventually get your head for this.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“They’ll get you sure as hell.”

He grinned without humor, and his white face squeezed like a fist around his secret, his one way out. “Maybe,” he said again.

But when Miller left, Clumly did not feel sure of him. It might be he
would
take it to the D.A. Or it might be that even if Miller kept quiet, the D.A. would find some way to make him speak on the stand. Clumly himself had as much as told him last night on the phone that they had more on Boyle than they’d given him. And so he hadn’t wanted to watch.

When Miller went out, Kozlowski said, “What’s all that?”

“That’s the Future,” Clumly said. “It’s the next five hundred years.”

Kozlowski studied him.

Clumly said, looking at the floor, “Well, never mind.” And then: “We’re doing some shifting around, that’s what I called you for. You’re to work under Miller now. Cops-and-robbers stuff.”

“Yes sir.”

He seemed neither pleased nor displeased. A puzzling man. It was that, the bafflement that came of talking with a man without visible emotions, that urged Clumly on.

“Listen, I’ll tell you a story,” he said. “Five years ago we had a series of armed robberies. Crook named Roy-something, turned out. Over on the East Side. Negro fellow. Little Polish grocery stores, barbershops, beauty parlors run in one room of somebody’s house—that kind of thing. There was a drugstore down there, and we decided to stake it. Dirty little place, not making a dollar—same as all those little places, poor neighborhood, druggist not doing well enough to hire a helper or need one. You follow me? Well this drugstore had a little balcony along the wall over the front door, looked down on the counters full of the usual bottles with faded labels, displays of stale candy, toothbrushes, fillum, combs—you get the picture. We put a man up there in the balcony to wait. Well, we were lucky, it only took three days. Negro came in, pulled his gun on the druggist, and our man up there in the balcony shot him through the head. What you say to that?”