The Sunlight Dialogues (94 page)

“Maybe. Yes, certainly, I suppose. But you get me wrong, I think. I’m no scoffer, proud of having risen out of my middle-class morality. I have no pentecostal urge to declare the new dawn of fornication—no such thing! I have merely lost my feeling for what I have believed.” He pursed his lips, struggling to be precise. “It happens to many people, I suspect. I have known some.” He nodded. “And it seems to me it could be dangerous to pretend, when the feeling dies, that it’s there. There was a woman in our family—generations back, this was—who had a child that wandered off and was never seen again. She kept his room for him, dusted it and kept things tidy for years, and one day she began to see him when he wasn’t there, so they locked her up. That’s how it would be.” His expression went stern as it came to him that he’d run on more than the conversation required. But when he looked at Kleppmann it seemed to him that the old man understood that Will Hodge was not talking to him now, Kleppmann, but to himself. And strangely enough, Kleppmann had taken on a human look, though his eyes were not friendly. He was listening.

“Shameless, no,” Will said, “I’m not that. Taking my middle-class values from me is like pulling teeth, and when the value’s gone, how dizzying and jagged the abyss revealed to the tongue! But holes must not be denied.”

Kleppmann nodded, smiling again, a nervous flicker. “Up-mobility, it’s called.”

Will scowled. “It’s what?” Then: “Nonsense. Are you
purposely
misunderstanding?” Absurdly, he was furious. “I tell you the truth, Mr. Kleppmann, as a believer in Law. Law in the old sense, Justinian. I have never for one minute, so far as I know—” He was shaking his finger, and noticing the ridiculous gesture he lost track of what he was saying. Kleppmann was piling the meat onto trays. It was black. Will remembered again, abruptly. “I’m not social-climbing. Another thing entirely. I am stubbornly trying to understand, in my own rational middle-class terms, why it is that I no longer feel what I believe.”

Three men with white faces stood watching like birds at the rim of the fire’s influence.

“You say it again and again, though, don’t you. ‘Middle-class,’ ‘middle-class,’“ Kleppmann said.

“That’s pride, Mr. Kleppmann. My family’s been middle-class for centuries. Doctors, lawyers, ministers, farmers, a Congressman once. We’re all very proud of that.”

For the first time all night, Kleppmann looked at him levelly, not merely snatching an impression to manipulate with from behind his curtain, but scrutinizing his face. “We’re somewhat alike, you and I,” he said. He bent down for the meat.

It was not until hours later that they talked again. Kleppmann, at his wife’s suggestion, was showing Will to his room. Will still had the pistol, a great bulge in his suitcoat pocket which Kleppmann could not possibly have failed to notice. It seemed now more ludicrous than ever, as Will sat on the side of the bed in the large, farmhouse room, and Kleppmann stood remote but curious at the door.

Will said, “It’s come to me, I think. It’s the money. The tax business. They’ll beat me, you figure—because though God knows justice is on my side, I was never a ‘responsible officer,’ merely a legal consultant, whatever the fancy title they gave it, it’s not so clear that Federal law is neatly squared with justice.”

Kleppmann bowed as if to acknowledge that it might indeed be something along that line.

“You forget what ego-gratification I get out of honesty,” Will said.

Again Kleppmann bowed, admitting it might be so.

Will stood up and went to the window to look out. He felt cramped, here inside the house. But the fog was thicker now. He could barely see to the pillars of the high portico.

“Ego-gratification,” Will said with disgust. “I sound like the rest of them.”

“Ah well, one may as well be honest,” Kleppmann said. It sounded as though he were mimicking someone, and at first Will couldn’t think who. He remembered then. He could feel his neck swelling.

“Scoff if you like,” he said. “But consider this. You can’t get me through the tax business either. It’s true, they may beat me, and it’s true that I haven’t got even the cash to buy them off. Nevertheless, and you can call it what you like—ego-gratification, whatever—I’m as indifferent to jail as to scandal.” It sounded grandiose, and he tried to think of a better way to say it. He looked at his hands, white and soft as a woman’s. “I have this image of virtue. Idea of nobility. Something.”

Kleppmann nodded. “And you actually feel it,” he said.

“Sometimes.” He was not sure that even that was true, but he kept the doubt to himself.

“I understand, of course. Yes. If you were caught in shady dealings—not, in fact, that I have anything of that kind to propose, for all this strange talk of yours—it would be the end. Disbarred, or whatever the phrase is.”

“Good night,” Will said.

“You’re right.” He tipped his head, slow and poised, and glanced at his watch. “It’s after two. Forgive me.” He drew the door partway shut and added, “I look forward to talking more with you in the morning.”

And so, at last, he was alone.

He lay in the dark, drifting gently between daydream and nightmare.

One final question, Mr. Hodge.

There are no final questions.

One. I grant, and without reservation, that you are invulnerable. Yes. I can offer no reason under the sun why you should capitulate to my insidious suggestion. But let me ask, indifferently, for mere logic’s sake, is there any reason on earth why you should not?

“I know what I feel,” he whispered. In the deathly still farmhouse, the sound was like fire in straw.

And what do you feel for sure? the echoes asked.

There was an answer to that. He could not quite put his hand on it, but it was there, he would have it in a moment. He must wait.

The girl at Buz Marchant’s had a squeezed-shut face. She was a good girl, no doubt. Pretty, kind in the usual ways. Not intelligent, no, but not all saints were intelligent either. The thing was—he struggled to get hold of it, nail it down once and for all—but again it came merely to this: she had a face that marked her, singled her out not as the bearer of any particular virtue or defect but as, simply, the bearer of her singleness. In adolescent dreams one coupled with radiant beauties with indefinite and lovely faces, but then one day it all turned real, no longer airy wet-dream vision—a girl one knew, with a name, brittle hair, a chin just a little too deeply cleft. That was love, if it was anything. Not the other. Not the sunlight but the sunlight entrapped in the cloud.

“Bullshit,” he whispered.

Nevertheless, what was true of the girl was true of Mrs. Kleppmann too, and of Kleppmann. An objectness neither significant nor beautiful but there, singular; and they spoke words to him neither significant nor beautiful either; and by agreement, he understood them.

He understood, suddenly, what had gone wrong between him and Louise, and between him and his children, between his own mother and father, between, even, the Congressman and his sons. A kind of power failure, a sickly decline into vision. As simple as that. The discovery ran through his body like a shock and made his skin tingle, the way music did sometimes, or a brilliant point perfectly timed in a piece of litigation. All rhythm, he thought in wild excitement, pure matter in its rhythm. His head filled with an image of atoms going off, on, off, on, spinning—or planets, maybe, there was no telling now. He felt himself swinging in a wide arc around—someone. The face was obscure, a threatening shadow.

In the morning, what he remembered of all this seemed the usual dim-wittedness of dream, when the circuits are weak. Kleppmann spoke casually of horrors in Germany and scoffed at trials of war criminals as self-congratulation. They could not agree. Will Jr boarded the train for St. Louis at noon, integrity intact (conventions intact), though he had not had time, as yet, to work out his reasons. He would think it out on the train and plane, he told himself. But he didn’t. The truth was, there was no need. Kleppmann had chosen—for whatever reason, evil or good, despite his habit in such cases, and despite the hatred that flickered inside him like summer lightning, a hatred of life itself, perhaps (but tradition be damned)—to send him home alive.

XIX

Workmen in
a Quarry

The Caverns of the Grave I’ve seen,
And these I show’d to England’s Queen,
But now the Caves of Hell I view,
Who shall I dare to show them to?

—William Blake

1

Miller said, “They want you over at the Mayor’s at ten o’clock.”

Clumly nodded and moved on toward his office.

“I got some stuff for you,” Miller said.

“Bring it in.” He opened the door, took his hat off, and went to his desk. Miller came with his clipboard and two or three folders in the crook of his arm. Chief Clumly sat waiting, his elbows firmly planted. The two small eyes at the peak of his white, mole’s nose were as red as a wolfs. It was nine a.m. One hour yet before Mayor Mullen’s “investigation.”

Miller said, “Lot of activity last night. Some kids beat up a couple in a parked car, behind the racetrack.” He handed the reports to Clumly. “And somebody got into Salway’s Hardware last night. Took some money and some papers out of the safe and also—” he held the sheet to Clumly “—twenty-six guns, seventeen of them rifles. Got in the same way as at Francis and Mead. Could be the same outfit. Professional work.”

“You know when it happened?”

“Not for sure. Ed Tank was on prowl. He discovered it at eleven-thirty. There’s more.”

“Go ahead.”

“Early this morning, around five-twenty-five, a guy went into Greco’s Garage in Darien, took a whole lot of car parts. He must’ve hauled ’em off in a truck. The State Police—”

“How you know the time?”

“Trooper called in at five-twenty-five, said he was at Greco’s, going in to investigate. Then nothing. They found his car there burnt to a cinder.”

“Find the trooper?”

“Not a trace.”

Clumly half-closed his eyes, and they looked more than ever like a wolf’s. “Dead, you think?”

“I don’t know.”

Clumly said, “Sounds like vigilantes. You think so? Guns. Parts for bombs.”

Miller nodded. “That’s what it sounds like. The State Police have already got hold of the Federal.”

“Ok, that’s all?”

“Not quite,” Miller said. “You wanted a description of the man who registered in Paxton’s name at that ranch in Colorado. We got it. Man with a scarred face, yellow hair, and a yellow beard.”

“The Sunlight Man.”

He nodded. “As for the stone—the little white stone you gave me—it’s out of a deer. Very rare, they say. Forms inside the deer’s stomach, one deer in a thousand.”

“Anything else?”

“That’s all so far on the stone. But this: your hunch was right about Kathleen Paxton. She was transferred from the place in Palo Alto on August sixteenth. Shipped to Rochester. Papers signed by her brother.”

“You’ve got the address?”

Miller nodded and handed him the paper from his clipboard.

“Good work. First-rate. That’s all for now. Have Kozlowski wait for me. There’s just about time for—” He paused, thought better of it. “That’s all,” he said with finality. “Have Kozlowski wait.”

Miller brooded a moment, then nodded. He said, “Your wife was in.” After a moment: “She had some tapes she wanted me to hear.”

“You heard ’em?” He kept himself calm.

Miller nodded. “So did Uphill. He was right outside the door.”

Clumly tipped the desk with one finger. “All right,” he said. A whisper.

Miller nodded again, then saluted and went out.

Now that he was alone, Clumly jumped up and paced and made no attempt to contain his anger. The Sunlight Man had been laughing at him all the time. Taggert Hodge! No doubt had the whole damn family working for him. Keeping him up all day and night, wrecking his health, ruining his brains, robbing him of his job, robbing him even of the dignity a Chief of Police ought to have when he retired. No doubt out there someplace watching him right now. Disguised as a fireman maybe. How else would Uphill have known?

Clumly paused at the window and scowled, then abruptly went to the door and called Figlow. “I want that firehouse raided,” he said.

“What?” Figlow said.

“You heard me. Raid the firehouse. The Sunlight Man’s there, in disguise.”

Figlow put his fist on his mouth, eyebrows lowered. “Yes-sir,” he said.

Clumly stormed back to his desk. The paper the Judge had brought for him to read still lay there. He looked away from it guiltily. “Ok, my magical friend,” he said aloud, “you were right. Your time’s running out.” He looked at his watch. 9:30. Appointment with the Mayor at ten. Uphill would be there. Fred Clumly’s time, too, was running out.

“Kozlowski,” Clumly said, “we’re in an age of technology. A great time to be alive, but also a dangerous one.”

Kozlowski kept his eyes on the traffic.

“A time of great prosperity. Enormous buildings, enormous businesses, factories, institutions of learning! And what’s in the shadow of those glorious buildings? Hovels, Kozlowski. Misery and crime and despair. More violence than ever before in history. More sorrow and hopelessness and rage. America leads the world in it. The Russians are hurrying to catch up, of course—they’ll be mass-producing cars by next year, I read, and also refrigerators and I forget what-all else: turning out a glorious civilization by technology, pushbutton factories where no humans need apply. Ha. It’s something to think about. Khrushchev tried to boost the economy, but he was cowardly, come right down to it. There’s why Koseygen or whatever-his-name-is took over. Gross national profit has jumped this year, matched by gross national violence. Fact. They’re catching up with us!” Clumly rubbed his hands. “You ever stop to think just exactly what happens in slums, Kozlowski? They start out a little pocket of Negroes, say, who are living there while they look for a job that will move them out. No jobs. In 1900, fifty-six per cent of the total employed population was engaged in farming and fisheries and forestry. Now that’s down to I think it was seven per cent. Mechanization, Kozlowski. Technology. No matter what price supports you put in, no matter what kind of advertising you put on the doors of your pick-up truck—like
DRINK MORE MILK—
it’s over. Finished. Going to be six, seven companies doing all the farming in the whole damn country. As for industry, used to be in 1900 almost half the population was engaged in that, but it’s slipping by leaps and bounds. Industries bigger than ever, but now they’re mechanized. Telecontrol in the shop—you know what that is, Kozlowski? One machine, a man sitting in an office running all the whole damn plant, with maybe six, eight men with brooms and college educations keeping an eye on things in case anything happens to go wrong. And as for the office, who needs secretaries? They got computers can make out the check for the man at the telecontrol! What’s to happen to all that labor that’s no longer needed? Government, you say. But just think about it. 1900 there was sixteen per cent of the people in State and Federal government jobs. Now it’s forty per cent and rising. Doing what? Maybe sixteen different agencies all doing the same damn job, checking up on each other—providing they happen to know about each other’s existence. That’s insanity, boy. When a whole country’s got nothing to do but watch somebody, well sir, that’s insanity. Big brother, they say. Shoot! Watch the
little
brother!
That’s
the dangerous one! Keep on putting labor in the only place left for it to go and in another ten years there’ll be eighty per cent of the U.S. population in Government jobs, paying theirselves with their own taxes. That’s called incest, Kozlowski. You know what results when brothers and sisters reproduce?”