by John Gardner
“What?” the older Indian said.
Once more the Sunlight Man raised one finger to his lips, and this time he winked. “Sh!” he said. “They’re listening!”
After breakfast he began to talk again, and now it was worse than before. He was like a spoiled child insisting on attention—winking, leering, ranting, pretending to weep.
The younger Indian said suddenly, “Hey, shut up, will you?”
“Shut up,” the Sunlight Man echoed, snatching off his cap and rolling his eyes up. “If only one could! But think of the implications! Staggering! If I close myself in … if every one of us closes himself in … and we can do it, of course, a simple manipulation of the switch called Will, what evils would be banished! what terrifying ghosts would be laid!
“Enough. No bombast.” He leaned toward the Indians, perspiration on his forehead like drops of dew on the corpse of a mushroom.
“Take an instance. I went to a party once in Los Angeles, through a friend of a friend. It was supposed to be for Tarzan. Imagine the scene: a warm Saturday night and all over Southern California the smoke had begun to rise heavenward. The summer moon was hidden, the smog was glorious—blood red and the deep translucent brown of soy sauce. It was a holy time. The people had all wrung out their swimsuits and they stood now, tanned and glistening, drinking martinis in the wide windows of the one-floor huts overlooking the freeways.
“It was in the Bel Air neighborhood, this party. The best neighborhood in the city, so exclusive that for years and years they wouldn’t even let in movie stars. Clark Gable had to live in Brentwood. William Powell’s three-hundred-thousand-dollar house went up just outside the gates in Westwood. But the Depression came along, and Bel Air decided to take even the money of the vulgar and crass. But I digress.
“I was greeted at the door by a lady in a hairdo that must have cost two hundred dollars, and it was almost all she had on. ‘Is this the Tarzan party?’ I said. ‘Who?’ she said. ‘Here, have a glass of champagne and meet the gang.’ So I did. It was wall-to-wall sofas and sliding glass doors and lampshades as big as the world. The party was in full swing, and you could’ve heard it to San Juan Capistrano. They introduced me as the Wolf Man. On the porch they were playing rock ’n roll, colored lights going over the orchestra, and the shriek of it all would have brought down the roof except that the roof was made of colored plastic—it had no shame. There must have been four hundred people there—dozens of ‘starlets,’ if you know what I mean, a lion trainer dressed in black leather, girls in leopard bikinis, press agents, camera people, a huge chimpanzee and something that looked to be a lynx but might’ve been a snow-leopard with its tail cut off, an old woman with glasses on a stick, waiters with name tags, a man dressed as a Canadian Mountie, and a Russian merchant seaman with steel-rimmed glasses. There were others. Who can remember! Somebody said there was a rape out by the swimming pool, but it was crowded there, there was no way to be sure. There were girls with topless swimsuits, though, and who knows what it may have led to? Nobody mentioned Tarzan all night long, and I never saw him. Well—I have never left your question, you see—how do you close in from that? Ah! Or are you already closed in, there? I don’t mean anything complicated. No! That much pure body and maybe you’re back to pure soul, that’s what I mean. Do I make myself clear? Some people might say it was a holy event, beyond sensualism—that the whole age is a holy event. I don’t say it. But the code you suggest, each of us locked in the cell of himself …” He dashed to the bars and seized them as if with pleasure. “In the ancient conflict of the Jews and the Babylonians,” he said—but there he was cut off. The police came for him, to question him, and he went away between two of them, quietly, as if full of remorse for the sins of all mankind.
The older Indian stood rubbing his jaw, watching him led away. “Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Shut up,” the other one said.
After a long time, the older of the Indians said, “That’s quite a trick, you know?”
“Aah?” the younger said.
The older one stood in the center of their cell with his lean arms stretched out and head tipped back, and he tried to lift one leg straight out to the side and hold it steady. But the knee was bent and he wobbled off balance, and it came to them both at the same time that the thing was almost impossible.
The younger one shrugged. “Practice. That’s all it is.”
“Yeah, I know,” the older one said. He was musing.
2
The thief, Walter Boyle, seemed to hear nothing of what the Sunlight Man said. He sat in his cell like a creature neither alive nor dead, an ash pile which might or might not still hold some heat. He was a short man. His neck and arms and legs were sallow and thin. He did exercises every morning, slowly and methodically, combed his few wisps of graying hair with his short, square fingers, polished his thick glasses, revealing naked, for a minute or two, his protrusive, heavy-lidded eyes, then sat waiting like a hopeless and indifferent barber in a run-down shop, reading the day-old paper he’d gotten from the guard the night before. He was memorizing it, you would have thought. He seemed oblivious to the smell of the place and of his bearded neighbor, oblivious too to the man’s talk, the sullen anger of the two young Indians. Boyle looked at no one, at least in the beginning, and never asked or answered questions except for a word now and then to the guards. It was as if he was busy, adding up sums in his head. At night before he went to sleep he would kneel beside his pallet for a minute, cross himself, and mumble something. He seemed to see nothing amusing or out-of-the-way in this. It was his habit. He was a fool, perhaps, as the older of the Indians—the tall one—pronounced him, but he was not a religious crank. He was a small-time professional thief who travelled from one Western New York town to another, knocked inconspicuously on people’s doors and, if he got no answer, tried the door and, if it was unlocked, went in. He took nothing but cash, impossible to identify even if he should be caught with it on him, and he never worked except by daylight. He made enough to get by and, generally speaking, he was not dissatisfied. In twenty-two years he’d been arrested only four times and had never been convicted except on charges of no significance. He wouldn’t be convicted on the felony charge this time either.
He was a man not easily distressed. He had a faculty for thinking nothing, when necessary, merely bathing in sensation—the rumble and clank of the trucks passing in the street outside, the noise of a television somewhere nearby, a gas station bell, voices. (It was the hottest time of year in Western New York, and the people who lived in the large, declining houses across from the jail would sit on their porches talking and drinking beer until well after sundown.) The thief heard the bearded man’s chatter without noticing the words, merely catching here and there a single phrase—some blasphemous outcry—that stayed with him, briefly, as a minor irritant, like a small segment of some flat-voiced fieldbird’s song, teasing him almost but not quite to curiosity. After the first day he began sometimes to glance furtively at the new prisoner, without real prejudice or even particular interest, merely as one might glance at some fat, harmless snake to see what he was doing; and then sometimes—but less often—he would glance at the Indians. He had no strong feeling about the bearded man, except for a queer sense that he’d seen him before somewhere, which in fact he had; but the Indians, especially the older one, he disliked. Why he disliked them he did not know or care, and even if you had told him what the reason was, he might not have recognized the truth. He was a painstaking, meticulous thief, a man who would never harm a soul or steal on mere impulse. They, on the other hand, were hooligans.
On the third day, sitting with his paper as usual, running his eyes along the words, he came awake to the sharp impression that the older Indian was watching him and had been doing so for a long time. He peeked between his shoulder and the pinked edge of the Daily News and saw that his impression had not been wrong. The Indians were in the cell beyond the bearded man’s, and the older one was lying catlike on his
pallet, hands under the side of his head, pretending to listen to the bearded man but staring at Boyle with sleepy-looking eyes. Boyle looked back at his paper and then, slowly, as if indifferently, turned his back. He began to listen.
“You have to try to be realistic,” the Sunlight Man was whining quietly, as if speaking to himself, working out a problem in geometry, “it was an accident, yes. You know that and I know that. Not to speak pompously, what is there in this world but accident—a long, bitter chain of accidents, from algae to reptiles to tortoises and rodents to man? By accident all our poor mothers had children, and by accident some of the children died young and the others grew up to be either policemen or outlaws. Nevertheless, where the Law is concerned—”
“You eat shit,” the older of the Indians said. He stood at the front of their cell like a red-brown grasshopper of monstrous height, his hands on the bars. “Nothing personal, understand.” He bared his teeth in a mock-grin. The teeth were large and even.
“I understand, certainly,” the Sunlight Man said, smiling back the exact same smile. He waved disagreement away. “Nevertheless, as I was saying, where the Law is concerned, there can be no fiddle-faddle about Absolute Truth. They’ll electrocute you if they can, and that’s that. You’re innocent victims, that’s obvious. But just the same, the jury will solemnly deliberate, the attorneys will frown their commiseration, the judge will mournfully rap his gavel, and out you’ll go like, excuse the expression, a light.” He sighed profoundly, pulled off his cap and crushed it, slowly, thoughtfully, in his hands.
“Why you doing this?” the older of the Indians said. His voice was reedy and intense, his ape’s face impassive, and again the thief, Walter Boyle, felt revulsion. He stopped listening, but it was not as easy as usual. He named in his mind the towns he had worked through. Portage, Castile, Perry, Warsaw, Alexander. “Warsaw,” he said to himself again, almost aloud. It was a strange name, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, exactly; interesting. Like the town itself. An old town set in the pocket of high wooded hills like mountains. He turned the name over and over, worrying it until it became mere sound. But even now he was not quite rid of the Indian’s thoughtful stare.
That night when the guard brought supper Boyle said quietly, with his round back turned to the others, “What did they do?”
The guard—young, mild-faced Mickey Salvador—said nothing for an instant, perhaps because he was a new man and didn’t know whether he should answer such questions or not. Walter Boyle kept his eyes on the tin plate. “The Indians,” he said testily.
At last Salvador said, “Put a couple people in the hospital, I guess.” He came nearer. “It was all in the paper. They were hitchhiking, the Indians, and they tried to take over these people’s car. It was a Volkswagen. Whole mess ended up in a ditch. They never got a scratch, the Indians. Drunk.”
Boyle nodded. He had read about it, or anyway had passed his eyes down over it slowly and thoughtfully; remembered a picture, a snatch of headline.
“That woman dies, the thing’ll end up a murder charge.”
Boyle stood motionless, as if thinking about it, but in fact he had let it drop out of his mind, the vague, uncharacteristic impulse satisfied.
“She may do it, too,” the guard said. “I guess she’s still unconscious. It caved her head in.” He added quickly, though Boyle was turning away now, “The Indians got friends, though; that’s lucky for them. Older one, he lives with the son of a lawyer here in town, he’s his guardian or something, I forget.” He turned gruff suddenly, perhaps annoyed that he’d talked so much. “Keep it down in here.” He went back up the hall. In five or ten minutes he was back again with a Lois Lane comic for the Indians. The younger one thanked him and squatted over it, reading, fat knees jutting out like a frog’s.
Later, when he was drinking his coffee, Boyle glanced over at the Indians again, and again the older one was watching him, the younger one still reading. For a long moment Boyle met the boy’s stare angrily, and then, as he’d done before, he turned his back. This time, however, he continued to watch, furtively, past his shoulder.
The bearded man began to pace, scratching his beard and part of one rutted, leathery cheek. He stopped abruptly, put his fists on his hips, and glared at the Indians. “Can’t make you see reason, can I? I tell you you’re doomed, defunct, cold dead, and you go right on thinking what you’ll do when you get out, wondering how you can get our friend here to let you in on his professional secrets. It’s criminal!” He let his hands drop. “Youth,” he said, full of contempt. “Optimism. What can wake you up?”
The older one pointed at him. “You just worry about you.”
“Oh, I do,” he said. “I worry plenty, believe me. But I’m not running out of time as fast as you are. It would be different if you understood exactly where you stand, if you understood what it is to be alive and how dead you are when you’re dead. Forgive my talking so personal.” He laughed. “I feel responsible for you. How can I explain?” Then, pompously: “Human consciousness—an overwhelming joy, a monstrous torture, the most fantastic achievement of the whole fantastic chronicle of time and space: you have it in you but you haven’t opened up to it yet, and suddenly it will be too late! Horrible! What’s my role? What must I do?” He squeezed his eyes shut, mock-sorrowful, and clenched his fists.
“You’re crazy, mister,” the Indian said. “You’re really crazy as shit.”
He nodded, paying no attention. He stood perfectly still for a long time, in a state like thinking, and at last Walter Boyle saw him reaching his decision—or walking into it, accepting it like a man accepting a coat held up behind his shoulders. “Listen,” the Sunlight Man said. He was studying the floor, smiling craftily, like a man about to dig up the Cardiff Giant. “Your name is Slater. Vernon … LaVerne …” He paused. “Nicholas. That’s it. Nicholas Slater. Vernon is your brother.”
“Sure. You heard ’em saying it.”
“Maybe.” He leered. “You have friends, you think. An old family in town.” He studied the floor still more intently. “Hodge,” he said. He glanced at the Indian as if to see if he was right, but the tall boy’s face showed nothing. The Sunlight Man turned away and began to walk very slowly, each step exactly as long as the last one, as though he were measuring. He pressed his hands to the sides of his head, and though he had his eyes open he did not seem to be seeing. “It’s confusing,” he said, “hard to pick the strands out. There are two of them, these Hodges. Yes! One of them is a judge, I think, and the other one is a farmer, his brother. They’re married to the same woman. Is that possible?” He shook his head. “No, something wrong there. But a connection, perhaps a secret. Perhaps when they were young—” He’d lost the thread, unless he was pretending, and stood motionless, as if trying to find it. It came suddenly and violently. “Ben Hodge. Ben Hodge was your guardian, and he’s always helped you by means of his brother the judge, because this Ben Hodge is a generous man. But you’ve exceeded his limits this time, he holds back his hand, and his brother the judge has some reason to dislike you. And so you’re stranded. You know it. You wait for the judge to come, you make excuses for his delay, but you know he won’t come. And even so you go on hoping for the best. The woman in the hospital—she’s lying in a bed with a high, chromium wheel on each side, something wrong with her back—the woman in the hospital is still all right. She’ll get better, you think, and your crime won’t be serious.” Again he stood motionless, but not straining this time. Brooding on what he knew. “She’s going to die.”
“Nick, baby, you better not listen to that man,” the younger one said. “I’m telling you, he’s out to flip you.”
The older Indian ignored him. He said, “How do you do that? Who are you?”
“I don’t know how I do it,” the Sunlight Man said. “But I’ll tell you this: you better believe me. I may make mistakes here and there—I may get infected by mistakes in your mind—but the images are true. The fat man surrounded by legal books, the other fat man in t
he farm overalls, the dead woman in the hospital. You’re a child, almost, and headed for certain destruction, and nobody can save you but yourself. You better face it.”
“You see that too?—the cops killing me?”
“For Christ’s sake, Nick,” his brother said.
But Nick Slater insisted, “Can you?”
The Sunlight Man studied him and scratched absent-mindedly at his beard, smiling again. “No,” he said. “Sometimes I can know things and sometimes I can’t. I was in a train wreck once. Me, myself. I never dreamed it was coming.”
Walter Boyle turned away, feeling sick. He’d seen a train derailed one time. While the dust and steam were still thick as fog and there were people screaming, boys in T-shirts came running and broke in the windows and scrambled among the dead and injured, looting. The memory of his horror combined with his present horror in the face of what he half believed to be magic, and he began to shake. He pressed his back against the wall and covered his eyes.
In the morning the police did not come to take the bearded one away for more questioning. Boyle had half expected they wouldn’t. They weren’t supposed to be questioning him anyhow, as far as Walter Boyle could make out—both from the scraps he got from the guard who was talkative and from what he’d found in the Daily News. They were supposed to be merely holding him until he could be moved to the hospital for observation. Yet that wasn’t what stopped them from questioning him today. The Chief had been working on him day after day, sometimes with the cop called Miller, sometimes alone, for no earthly reason, as far as Walter Boyle could see, except that the bearded man was, well, fishy, and sometimes policemen could smell a thing like that. (Boyle was now certain, by the prickle in his skin every once in a while, that he’d seen him somewhere.) If they didn’t come for him today it was for one of two reasons: they had too many more important things to do, or they’d decided to leave him alone awhile, let him sweat. Boyle had seen the sweat treatment in the past. He’d seen it work when nothing else did. In fact he was convinced that if they ever got him, Walter Boyle, that would be the way. It was one of the reasons he’d developed his technique for getting through the hours whenever he was jailed: reading the paper over and over, disciplining himself to miss nothing, even the smallest ads, the personals, the numbers of the pages, though he’d remember almost none of it later. When the paper no longer gave him something to lean on, he would say to himself the hundreds of poems he’d memorized, for some reason no longer clear to him, in his childhood,
