The Sunlight Dialogues (65 page)

He dropped out of school; volunteered for the Peace Corps but didn’t get in; burned his draft card; marched to Mississippi and came home profoundly disillusioned with Negroes; moved to Buffalo, N.Y., where according to a friend there were going to be riots any day. The cliché might have gone on and on except for the accident of his moving in with the Bensons.

He himself could not have told you how or why it happened, but one night, sitting in the kitchen, drinking bourbon and telling his tragic story to Mrs. Walter Benson (old enough to be his mother), he’d found himself making sexual advances. She had not exactly returned them, but she had not exactly rejected them either. She had said, “I’m so confused!”—but she had not looked confused. In the morning, looking down at her with pity and disgust (her false teeth were crooked), Ollie Nuper had been unable either to flee in revulsion or confess to her that she was revolting to him. Looking at himself in the bathroom mirror he had said to himself, in abject misery, “Well, you’re not so pretty yourself.” The girl he’d lived with at U. Conn. had hit it on the head. “Your face isn’t really so
ugly,”
she had said, “it’s just, well,
silly.”
And so now the great hater of hypocrisy had fallen into a life of gloomy hypocrisy. He spent hours waiting on Marguerite Benson—taking her shopping or off to movies he himself couldn’t stand, talking with her politely about Thorstein Veblen and Bertrand Russell and Karl Marx (her false teeth clicking all the while she talked), swivving her night after night with a look of wild rapture on his face and a prayer that it soon be over in his head. It was worse by far than any marriage, God knew, and he hoped America would burn in Hell for bringing him to this.

Who would believe what he went through? He took her to Niagara Falls and sat, lodged in all that traffic, with his arm around her, watching as much as it was possible to see of the colored lights on the water and mist. He soothed her when she cried about how she’d betrayed her husband and he repeated over and over that it was their passion that had done it (not even she believed that, he knew, but it comforted her to hear it; it made her feel younger). He told her—surely he was out of his mind!—that if she drove him from her he would kill himself. With an ice pick. He even took her to the sooty, stinking wharf to watch the sooty, stinking ships come in from Detroit. He wondered where the devil her husband was, why the devil he didn’t come home and free him but the answer was obvious, of course. He’d left for good. He’d seen his chance and he’d grabbed it. Pow! Like that. And that was what Ollie Nuper should do, no question about it! But he couldn’t. A man should be honest, face right up to what he’d done and call a spade a spade. Or jump off a bridge.

Besides, in the back of his mind he knew it was all going to turn out all right. Things always did. Also, there was a girl named Gretchen Niehaus who, when he told her what trouble he was in, told him that he had the most beautiful, most generous soul she had ever been privileged to meet. She was a painter, twenty-eight years old (seven years older than Ollie was), a loyal member of the Party. That was where he’d met her. She lived in a trailer on Grand Island, and any time he could make it, she said—even if only for a cup of tea—she would be grateful. She was golden brown except for her breasts and hips, which were white as snow, and if he liked, she said, he could tie her up with clothesline.

Of all this, Walter Benson was not yet aware. He huddled on the floor of the car, out of sight, with his left hand over the back of his head and his right hand inching back and forth under the seat, hunting for some weapon. A wrench, a screwdriver, anything. His fingers closed around some sort of spraycan. Dear God! It would do! He closed his eyes thankfully and gave himself up to the sensation of hurtling through space. Under his hand the floor was filthy, like the space behind a refrigerator that has stood for a long time in an old, old house.

4

It seemed to Walter Benson that they’d been driving for hours when, finally, the car slowed almost to a stop and pulled off the road into what felt like a new-plowed field with innumerable stones in it, or bricks, or possibly treestumps. With his ear pressed flat to the floor he heard the clutch thump in, the bump of the gear going into neutral, the louder thump of the clutch being released. Then the motor went off, and the night was suddenly still. They were in the country. He could hear crickets and a kind of whispering noise, a pump somewhere, it might be. The car door opened and the overhead light went on, filling him again with momentary panic. But Nuper got out immediately and slammed the door shut behind him. Benson lifted his head a little and drew the spraycan up close to his chest, prepared to spray whatever was in it directly into Nuper’s eyes the moment he reached through the window or opened the door. But nothing happened. Nuper’s footsteps were going away, very quiet on the unpaved ground, yet loud as heartbeats in Walter Benson’s ears. He raised his head to look out.

The car was parked in a ruined orchard. Nuper was already out of sight in the darkness, but Benson could still hear him. He was going toward what appeared to be an abandoned farmhouse. Quickly, before the man could come back, Benson squeezed his chest and belly through the window and dropped, with what seemed in his own ears a terrific racket, to the ground. He lay perfectly still, listening. Nuper continued on his way.

The grass was full of the scent of apples. Benson felt around in front of him and found three that were large and hard as rocks except for the small bruised places where they’d hit when they fell. He dropped them into his suitcoat pockets where he could get at them quickly if he needed to throw them, then got part way up and rubbed his cramped knees and rump. He scowled, wondering whether or not he should follow the roomer and, after a moment, without reaching any decision, began to follow. Apples lay everywhere and he had to scuff his feet a little to keep from twisting his ankles on them, but at last he came out into the open, where the yard around the farmhouse began.

The house had apparently been empty for years. Decay and neglect hung over everything. Pieces of the tin sheeting on the roof were bent back, no doubt the work of a storm, and some of the weather boarding had been wrenched off the walls. The front porch had rotted away and broken down, and nothing was left of the steps except the supports on which they’d once rested. Some of the windows were boarded up, some merely gaped, devoid of glass—perhaps children had torn the boarding off. When he poked his head over the sill he could see nothing definite except the two gaping windows on the next wall, but he had an impression of old wallpaper and bare floors, no furniture. There was no sign anywhere of Ollie Nuper.

Then, rounding the front corner of the house, he saw the trailer parked right up against the side wall like a small animal huddling up to the dead carcass of its dam. The trailer was as dark as the house, yet he sensed that it was lived in. He crept closer, crouching so near to the ground he was almost on hands and knees. He heard a woman’s voice say softly, “Is that you, Ollie?” And then Nuper’s voice: “It’s me. I let myself in.” A light came on in the trailer window. A candle. “Mmmmm!” the woman said. Walter Benson puckered his lips, then pressed his good ear tight to the warm tin wall of the trailer.

He listened to them for half an hour, only drawing his ear away now and then from disgust or to clean out the wax with his finger. It was outrageous that the man could come here from doing what he’d done with Marguerite and do it all over again with another woman. Worse yet, he talked and talked about it, telling this second woman how the first one disgusted him, how ashamed and miserable he was. Were there others besides this one, and did he say these same things about Marguerite to them?

The night was hot and there was a low, monotonous whistling of some bird out in the bushes grown up around the dilapidated barn, east of the house and trailer. From time to time distant sheet lightning lit up the barn and what was left of what had once been a garden. Thunder rolled, far away, and a black cloud covered nearly a quarter of the sky. He could hear cocks crowing, far, far in the distance. He felt as sullen and thundery as the night.

Suddenly he straightened up like a man who has reached a decision, turned on his heel, and stalked, almost without any effort at secretiveness, to the ruined barn. There would surely be something there that you could kill a person with. “It was a terrible crime they did to me,” he said to himself. The woman in the trailer was now as guilty as the roomer. “I admit I was partly responsible myself. Let them send me to the electric chair. I don’t care what they do. It was a terrible crime, that’s all.” Almost instantly, as though fate had left it there waiting for him, there sprang to his hand a wide, rusty fork-like thing without a handle. It would do. It had one, two, three, four, broken-one, five tines. Gripping it tightly in two hands, bringing it down with all one’s force …
Horrible!
he thought. He was pleased.

He stepped out of the barn again and started back toward the now silent trailer. Were they asleep, then? Well, all right, he would kill them in their sleep. He was not a vindictive man. He felt very excited. The black cloud had grown and was spread over the whole sky, and now forked lightning lit up the yard and outlined the metal trailer and the house with its crumbling porch, and thunder rolled directly overhead. He slowed his walk, listening. The birds were silent. The leaves began to rustle and a breeze stirred Benson’s hair, what little he had. He paused irresolute for a moment and not fully aware what it was that had distracted him from his purpose. An instant later large, warm drops began to fall, drumming on the burdock leaves behind him and the roof of the house in front of him. There was a brilliant flash of pure white all around him and then a terrible silence. Before he could count three a violent roar exploded directly over him and went rolling along the sky, and then came hurtling rain. He threw down the fork and ran back to the barn, clutching at his collar and trying to cover his face with his elbows.
I’ll do it after the storm,
he thought. He huddled against the wall inside the barn. He was already soaked to the skin, and the barn seemed no help. He looked up. There was no roof, not even so much as a beam. Rain poured down on him like a punishment from Heaven. The world went white again and the thunder struck and rolled away, and he was terrified. He remembered how his mother had hidden under the bed whenever it thundered. Wind lashed the trees and made the barn walls shudder and sway.
This is no joke,
he thought. And now, suddenly, he was horrified by the magnitude of the crime he had meant to commit.

For fear that the barn would collapse on top of him, he fled across the lawn and around the trailer to the front of the house and climbed in one of the open windows. Here the storm was noisier than ever, but at least the rain could not get at him, part of the house roof still held. The draft going through here, not to mention the wetness of his clothes, would give him a case of pneumonia, no doubt, but better pneumonia than be buried alive under the barn. And this, dear God! was what he had come to, a man fifty-six years old, with a known bad heart. (He seized the word boldly, like a penance, and seized it again.) A known bad heart! He had brought it on himself, all of it. There was no question about that. None! And were there people dying somewhere in the night because of him, because of Walter Benson? Horrible! he thought. He covered his face with his hands and crouched in the corner, sick with the burden of his wickedness. “Asleep since the day he was born,” the Sunlight Man had said. How true! Precious Mother of God, how true! He would call the police first thing in the morning and tell them all he knew. As for Ollie Nuper …

The lightning flashed again and the thunder boomed, but Walter Benson was tremendously at peace, weeping with joy and terror. “Bless them,” he whispered, thinking of the man and woman in the trailer. “Praise God,” he whispered. He thought of the Indian boy with the broken jaw and whispered, “Bless him too, and God be with him, and with all of us! While we obey His commands we are at peace!”

When he awakened in the morning he had the beginning of a very bad cold and the roomer’s car was gone from the orchard. The road was full of mudpuddles. It was a long way home. He stood hugging himself and shivering and working his throat. “The Lord is just,” he thought hopefully, sick at heart. “Praise the Lord.”

He shuddered once, so violently that he nearly fell down, then climbed out through the window and started toward the road. His
Pocket Book of Favorite Poems
was ruined, but Walter Benson was never at a loss for poetry. He swung his thin arms to keep the blood moving and tipped his face up and straightened his humpback as much as possible, and recited aloud to himself as he walked:

“These joys are free to all who live,

     
The rich and poor, the great and low:

The charms which kindness has to give,

     
The smiles which friendship may bestow,

The honor of a well-spent life,

     
The glory of a purpose true,

High courage in the stress of strife,

     
And peace when every task is through …”

The blue morning ahead of him danced with sunlight.

XI