The Sunlight Dialogues (75 page)

“Thank you,” Hodge said.

“Thank you yes or thank you no?”

“Thank you yes.”

She fixed the coffee and handed it to him. Then she fixed one for herself.

“If there’s anything at all I can do—” Hodge said.

She sat down across from him.

“I have sons myself,” he said.

“That’s good,” she said. “God protect them. May they all grow up and be President.”

After that they sat in silence, drinking their coffee. He looked at her young but wrinkled hand on the table, looked at the gray of her pajamas where the raincoat collar opened to reveal it, looked at the suggestion of hair on her upper lip. His heart went out to her. Then he heard the old woman’s slippers on the stair, and after a while she appeared in the doorway, gray hair straggling down around her face like bad rain, fat shoulders bent from the miserable weight of a lifetime.

“Eh,”
she said. “
Il caffé s’ é raffreddato; O é troppo freddo O é troppo caldo. Ma a te che t’importa?
”

“Mama, this is Mr. Hodge,” the girl said. “The lawyer.”

“Sar
à
inverno presto,”
the old woman said.
“Di giorno
è
troppo caldo, e cos
ì
pare che di notte si sta bene, e a letto si gela.”

“Mama,” the girl said, “have some coffee.” To Hodge she said, without troubling to look at him, “Mama’s deaf as a post. Good thing, for everybody.”

“Coffee,” the old woman sneered. “Coffee for Mama.
Cara Madre. Diamole caffè e puo darsi che muore, e noi faremo una festa.
Good morning.”

“Good morning,” Hodge said.

She stood at the stove rubbing her rear end with both hands and scowling bitterly. “Coffee,” she said. “God forgive.” Then she was silent, looking around her shoulder at him, taking his measure. He realized he had his thumbs hooked inside his suspenders like a banker, and that his glasses were far down his nose. You couldn’t blame her if she didn’t understand that he came to them as a servant. Nevertheless, she came sideways from the stove toward the table and extended her hand, twisted and veined like old cypress root, to the back of the chair at the end. She had her coffee in the other hand. Slowly, steadying herself on the chair, she came the rest of the way. Over her old yellowish blue nightdress she had a black afghan.

“Sta buona, Mammà,”
the girl said.

The old woman let herself into the chair. She pointed at Hodge.
“Chi è lui?”
she said.

“Mr. Hodge,” the girl said. “The lawyer.”

She pursed her lips as if to spit.
“Dapertutto,”
she said.
“In tutti gli armadi, in tutte le foglie.”
She studied him, and he took off his glasses to polish them on his shirt. The girl, the dead policeman’s mother, seemed not to be listening any more. She sat with her hands over her eyes, her back no longer shaking, not a muscle twitching in fact; it was as if she were holding her breath or maybe refusing to draw it in. The old woman stretched out her hands like gray branches, and the gray hair hanging around her head was like oak moss around stone. At the ends of her powerful arms, her hands shook like leaves. “When we came to this country the lawyers is all waiting: ‘Mortgage! Mortgage!’ ‘Mortgage you,’ we say. And the police say, ‘Can’t dump the trash. Ten dollars.’ And the priests say, ‘Ten dollars for your sins.’ ‘What sins?’ we say, ‘what sins we made?’ I could tell you. In all the leaves, all the cupboards. We go down and get water, there’s a lawyer sitting there waiting in a boat. We get coal by the tracks, it’s almost dark, all gray in the sky, nothing moving but the what-you-say … pigeons, and there’s a freight car with the door open, it’s full of police.
Madonna mia!
At night in the house we are looking out the window and there’s priests. All over the yard, little priests all bones and black cloth and eyes like fish. I could tell you.”

“Mamm
à
,”
the girl said,
“sta buona.”

“You think crazy old woman? Ignorant old wop?” she leered.

“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
Che la diritta via era smarrita.

E quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura

Questa selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte …”

“She knows all of it—so she says,” the girl said.

Hodge said, “What is it?”

“Who knows?” the girl said wearily. “It’s long.”

“Tanto è amara, che poco è piu morte:

Ma per trattar del ben ch’ i’ vi trovai,
Dirò dell’ altre …
”

The old woman had her eyes closed now, hands folded under her chin, head tipped up as though the thing she was saying were a prayer.

“It takes days,” the girl said. “She gets started and she won’t stop. Her father made her learn it for a punishment. This country, they call her a ignorant old wop.”

“I’m sorry,” Hodge said.

“Ah,” the girl said indifferently. “Nobody’s fault.”

He looked at the coffee and couldn’t drink it. The old woman mumbled on, spitting a little, her eyes clamped shut. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday morning, he remembered. Even so, he wanted nothing.

“Mammà,”
the girl said. It had no effect. Outside the kitchen window the light was yellowing after the early gray. It was going to be hot. The narrow stretch of yard between Salvador’s house and the next was unnaturally green after last night’s rain. You could feel the sogginess of the earth underneath. Sparrows flew by and vanished beyond the wire clotheslines at the side of the garage.

He said, “Can I give you money?”

The corners of the girl’s mouth turned down, and the old woman mumbled more loudly for a moment.

“I feel—responsible,” he said. “You were wrong to say it’s my fault, maybe, but I feel, just the same—”

The old woman bowed her head, shutting him out.

“Allor fu la paura un poco queta

Che nel lago del cor m’era durata
La notte ch’ i’ passai con tanta pieta.”

“Please go,” the girl said. “What can you do? It’s all right. Today I am ok.” She stood up.

Hodge nodded and, after a moment, obeyed. On the porch—the old woman still muttering behind them—Hodge said, “If there’s anything—”

“Nothing,” she said.
“E’ la vita.”
Her eyes were dead. It was as if he had left already.

And so Will Hodge drove angrily now, wounded with helpless wrath and frustration, heading west toward the Indian Reservation.

He hardly noticed at first the figure hurriedly walking beside the road a half-mile ahead of him—looked at the figure, took in all the details, yet hardly noticed it was there. It was a small, more or less unbelievable man in a wide black hat, the kind Amish men wear, and he was hurrying mightily, short legs bobbing, cheerfully stomping through the world, fists swinging harmlessly, big feet toeing out, back bent as though it were imperative that he get there first with the tip of his hat and his (head tipped sideways, like the head of a swimmer) nose. When the Plymouth came in range the young man turned and stuck out his thumb. Will Hodge slowed down, still without thinking. He was hardly more than a boy; in his twenties. He had a beard, wide moustache, some kind of perhaps Indian trinket hanging on his shirt. His face was hidden, because over his eyes he had enormous round sunglasses as black as the Amish hat crammed down on his dangling black hair. Under his left arm he had a black metal box, a suitcase.

“Indian Reservation?” Hodge said.

“Yeah!” the young man said with surprising enthusiasm. “I’d appreciate that!” His head bobbed.

He swung the car door open and jumped in, nodding with pleasure, bowing like a Chinaman, and settled the black box comfortably in his lap. Hodge mused. The young man was not an Indian. He was one of those wild young people they have in big cities. “Is that where you were going?” Hodge said.

“Yeah, great!” the young man said, nodding again and grinning and reaching up with a jerk to tip his hat. “I
would
have been going there if I’d knew.”

Hodge frowned and pulled back onto the road. He stole another quick glance at that hat, the glasses, the metal box. At last Hodge said, “Where are you from?”

“New York,” the young man said. “And San Francisco. All over the place. Things really happening!”

“Mmm,” Hodge said. The boy continued nodding, bobbing his head to some rhythm going on inside it and, after a little while began to whistle. He had a button on his chest beside the trinket.
Fun City Needs the Feenjon,
it said. The boy smiled, delighted, and leaned toward him and put his finger under the button to turn it so Hodge could read it better, and as Hodge read it again, screwing his mouth toward his right cheek, the boy smiled more broadly still. Then he folded his hands and went back to whistling.

Hodge drove on. There was an excitement in his chest. The boy’s showing up exactly when and where he had seemed portentous—whether portentous of good or bad he could not say. He said, “Excuse me. What are you? That is, are you Amish?” He knew he was not.

The boy nodded with extreme pleasure. “I’m sorry, excuse me. My name’s Freeman.” He reached out with another quick jerk to shake Will Hodge’s hand.

“Ah!” Hodge said. “Yes. My name’s—” For a second he couldn’t remember. “Hodge. Will Hodge. I’m an attorney.”

“Great!” the boy said. “You live around here? And do your practice?”

“Batavia.” He said it with satisfaction, though why he felt so satisfied he could not have explained. The boy’s clownish pleasure in things put a spell on him.

“Great little town! I was in jail there,” the boy said. His hands leaped out to grip imaginary bars and his face filled with horror and amazement. Then he smiled. He bobbed his head again and now he was singing. “Indian Reservation!” he said abruptly. “Great! A visit? Or is that where you do, uh, your thing?”

“Why,” Hodge said, “actually—” It all came flooding back over him, and he felt his jaw go tense. He could feel the young man’s strangely friendly scrutiny, and it made him more tense than ever. As if to make things easier, the boy pulled off the huge black glasses, folded them carefully, and opened the box in his lap to put them away. Inside the box there were compartments covered in red velvet, frayed but still noble, and in the compartments there were objects. There was a carefully shined flute, some brightly colored stones in a plastic bag, some rattlelike things, dried lilypods perhaps, a toothbrush, numerous bits of glass, wire, metal, wood, flower seeds, and plastic. Hodge looked hastily back at the road and jerked the steering wheel to avoid the baked-mud shoulder.

“Excuse me for being so personal,” Freeman said, “but you’re acting—like up-tight. Is that because of me?”

Hodge looked at him in alarm. “No, no,” he said. “Not at all.” They passed bright yellow fields where a week or two ago there had been wheat, and overhead the sky was amazingly blue. The maple trees between the fields and sky were bright green.

“What country!” the boy said. “Psychedelic!” He waved both hands. “I lived in country like this one time, with a friend of mine that’s in Los Angeles now. Kentucky then. But it was different, right”—his hands were describing it. Then, suddenly, he grew still with thought. “Man, you send out bad vibrations. Trouble?”

Hodge felt panicky and angry at the same time. The macadam stretched away ahead of him, straight and blue. It was a startling thing, he was finding out—as Miller and Ed Tank had found out before him—though Hodge didn’t know about that yet. The boy’s queer directness, openness—rudeness it would be in the world Hodge knew—stood outside all the rules he understood. But long before he understood it, Will Hodge felt, perfectly clearly, what it meant: they had dropped—Freeman’s kind—the defenses constructed by centuries of civilization: they did not need them: they had nothing to defend. Only their hats, the clothes on their backs, their toys. Hodge, like any man of sense, might scoff at such notions in the abstract. But there was no resisting that childlike openness except by denying that it was real, and Hodge was not one to deny that the real was real: a cow, a chairleg, the dilated pupil of an eye.

The boy too stared at the road, Hodge knew without looking. “Listening to troubles is one of the special numbers I do,” the boy said. “I can also do a thing where I sit like a toad and mind my business.” When Hodge glanced at him the boy was watching him out of the corner of his eyes, his innocently grinning head tipped forward, meek. His hands and feet seemed to have grown larger.

“Sometimes talk’s no great help,” Hodge said sternly. He watched the yellow fields sliding past, a farmer’s lane with a wooden bridge, a patch of dark woods smoky with fog like the long thin sigh of a dragon, a black-green pond.
Like a child,
he thought. He’d heard that that was what they were like, though he hadn’t believed it. He remembered the word for them:
hippies.
Free lovers, he’d heard; yes, like Millie. Except, the boy was all gentleness, not like her. More like a sacrificial lamb or, say, a loyal dog, except that he would take the beating from anybody, not just a master. Like a child, then, that was it. Moving from place to place to duck the draft, maybe, because he wouldn’t kill and wouldn’t fight the Government either. He’d heard they did that. (But the yellow and green land sliding by, so beautiful in the hippie’s eyes, had gophers and gopher-snakes in it, chickens and foxes, cannibalistic fish in every creek, and in a month the bright green trees would be red with death.)

“You have parents?” Hodge said, squinting.

Freeman nodded and suddenly smiled. “They’re beautiful people. Hung up here and there, like anybody, but beautiful.” His head began bobbing again, full of joy.

Hodge drove on, thinking now of his own father, how he’d followed his father through fields and woods, carrying the gun or the bait pail, his child-arm aching from the weight of it and his side aching from walking farther and faster than he could. He was afraid to drop behind. There were wild things out in these woods and swamps, and at night the high hills over his shoulder would furtively change their places.

He thought of the Italian woman mumbling her poem. She’d go on like that for days, the girl had said. A shudder passed through him.