by John Gardner
… no sense of divertisement. Ifs a great responsibility, accepting the role of policeman. I suffer for you. Do you know why you hunt? Do you understand the Order you struggle to preserve? Alas, gentlemen, I suffer for your victims, too. The poor kid that goes through town with his muffler open, the old man that runs his cart down the center of Main, the kids that skinny-dip in the Reservoir, those Indian boys, or me, or that poor fool Benson.
CLUMLY: Tell us why you burned the papers in your billfold.
PRISONER: Because I wasn’t out of matches.
Miller flicked off the tape.
“I don’t see it,” Clumly said.
“Listen. Boyle told us this Sunlight Man can see things. He told us the guy predicted that woman will die—the one the Injuns put in the hospital.”
“Is she dead?”
“Not yet. But she’ll die. The point is, the Sunlight Man made Boyle halfway believe he really could do it, even though Boyle doesn’t want to believe it. And the Indians believe it. Salvador says—”
“What are you driving at?” He broke wind again and frowned.
“Salvador says the man does it all the time, tells them things he can’t possibly know.”
“But you don’t believe all that?”
“I don’t know. How can I? There’s things in this world would surprise a person. That’s my honest opinion. You ever seen what a fortune teller can do with cards? I mean they tell you facts, not just vague stuff, some of them. Or palmists. There was one at our church one time—made your hair stand up. There may be lots of things we don’t like to admit to. Flying saucers, ghosts, I don’t know what. Ok, so maybe there is all that stuff and maybe not—who cares? But if some of it comes along and you can use it … this time for instance. If it’s true, if it just happened to be more than a joke, say.”
“Now wait a minute. Are you saying you’re going to get the Sunlight Man to come here and tell us—”
“No. Hell no! He’s told us already! Listen again.” He turned back the tape and played it once more, squinting at it.
skinny-dip in the Reservoir, those Indian boys, or me, or that poor fool Benson
He snapped it off.
“Benson!” Clumly said. His back crawled. Miller nodded. Clumly said, chewing, “Hmp. Even if I accept your wild theory that he can read people’s minds, how do we know it’s not a slip of the tongue—how do we know he didn’t mean to say Boyle?”
“Don’t move,” Miller said. He crossed to the door and went to the outer office. He came back with his clipboard, the pencil dangling by a string. He pushed the clipboard toward Clumly and quoted without looking at it, “Walter Arlis Benson, 362 Maple Street, Kenmore, New York. Male. Blue eyes. Height, 5–8. Weight 190. Married. Occupation, salesman.”
Clumly glanced at him.
“I talked to his wife on the phone this afternoon. He’s out of town on a trip, been out for three weeks. Doesn’t know when to expect him back. I can have her here tomorrow for an identification.”
“You told her—”
He shook his head.
“Holy smoke,” Clumly said. Face drawn into a fixed wince, he turned the tape back once again and listened. Then he got up, lit a cigar, and went to stand in the doorway to the other office. At last he said, “You may be right.”
“A hundred dollars says yes.”
He puffed at the cigar, building up smoke, shaking his head slowly. “It’s a hell of a thing. Crooks build up a system you can’t beat, and then all of a sudden—” He was uneasy. As if talking to himself, he said, “You almost didn’t tell me. You told me the business about Salvador, and you were about to leave. If I hadn’t asked you right out if there wasn’t something else—” He was whining, he noticed.
Miller shrugged, grinning. “You gotta admit it’s a crazy damn piece of police work.”
But Clumly shook his head. It was coming clearer. “When’s she due to arrive here? Who brings her—Buffalo police?”
“Who, Chief?”
“Who, who, who!” he roared. “The Benson woman.”
“Sorry,” Miller said. “Ten o’clock. With the Buffalo fuzz, right.”
Clumly came back to his desk. “Call it off,” he said.
“What?”
“Call it off. You heard me. No identification, no nothing.”
“For Christ’s sake, Chief—” But he moved toward the door.
“And this, Miller. When they fire me and make you Chief, then you be Chief. Not yet.”
“You mean you plan to let Boyle walk out free? Just walk out the door when you know damn well how to tie him? Boy! the State’s Attorney will do cartwheels.”
“I don’t know what I’m gonna let Boyle do. I need to think about it.”
“Let me get this straight. You think I was butting into your business, and you’ve decided if you can’t get Boyle yourself, nobody gets him for you. That it?”
“Of course not.”
“Whatever you say, boss.” He raised his hands and smiled, angry.
Clumly sat down, partly because of his gas problem, and put his chin on his fists. He remembered again that Miller had taken some of the papers from the clutter on his desk, and he couldn’t tell whether to be grateful or indignant. It came to him (some secondary part of his mind still grinding grist) that maybe the Sunlight Man knew Walter Boyle from somewhere. As simple as that. And if so … He filed it to think about later. Miller stood waiting, and Clumly sighed. “It was good thinking, Miller. I’m cognizant of that. It was a good hunch, damn good thinking. But you have to give me time. I’m not up with you yet. Whole thing’s got implications I’ve got to think through. Sorry. No hard feelings.”
Miller looked at him. “Ok. No hard feelings.” He went out. There were hard feelings.
Clumly shut his eyes. The station was quiet now. If he let himself he could hear the scratching, tunneling sound, the creature waking up, or anyway feel it moving toward him, coming from the darkness outside the city limits, maybe, to smash down the door with its fingertips and have them before they knew it. Clumly snorted.
“Home,” he said suddenly, aloud. It was getting late.
He ought to go out somewhere with his wife, get his work off his mind. He should take her to dinner—except that dinner would already be fixed, waiting for him. Out on the town, then. Over to Bohm’s Mortuary, where Paxton was laid out.
His wife’s minister was there when he got home. Clumly himself had no patience with ministers or churches, not that he had anything serious against them. He was not an atheist, simply disliked religion. Sermons left him full of a vague turmoil of questions, irritation at answers not sufficiently convincing—right answers, maybe, but answers not explained to his satisfaction. There were questions of fact—why the fish weren’t killed when the other things were in Noah’s flood, why Christ prevented the stoning of the adulteress but blasted the barren fig tree in a fit of pique. It was true that the questions were of no importance, no interest, even; nevertheless, he felt there were things that weren’t getting said, loopholes left open, problems of contradiction and confusion. As for singing, Clumly was tone-deaf. And as for the offering, it was not clear to him that the work of the church was a thing he ought to invest in. He never went to church, except to drive his wife and pick her up after the service. But for her sake he tolerated the minister’s visits. She was very religious. She got copies of Today magazine in braille, which cost him plenty, and kept them piled like old telephone books on the wicker hamper in the bathroom. She gave his money not only to the church but to the Children’s Home, the old-folks’ home in Rochester, even a thing called the Jewish Orphans’ Fund. When they were first married, she would kneel beside the bed for fifteen minutes every night to pray, moving her lips, and when she found it bothered him she had taken to praying in the bathroom before she came in. She never nagged him about his opinions, he would give her that. Indeed, the truth was, she was as fine a Christian woman as a man could know, except maybe for the drinking. At the hea
d of their bed she had a cloth she’d laboriously embroidered before the operation, when the last of her eyesight went. A poem.
We thank Thee, Lord, for all Thy care,
For strength to earn, the chance to share,
For laughter, song, and friendships deep
And all the memories we keep.
It did not seem to Clumly very poetic, but he was no judge.
She and the minister sat across from one another in the livingroom, talking. Clumly shook the man’s hand more or less politely, and exchanged a few words, then walked on in to the kitchen to get his supper from the oven. He carried the gray stew to the dining-room table and sat with his back to them where, though he couldn’t help hearing what they said, he didn’t have to see them. After the hamburger he felt stuffed to the throat, yet his chest was still sending up anxious signals of hunger, like a lover’s. He was halfway through the meal before he realized he still had his hat and gun on. He got up, paused a moment, cautiously broke wind, then put the hat on the top shelf of the clothespress and hung the gun on the nail where it belonged. When he turned to the table again the minister was standing there in his black coat and hat, getting ready to say good-bye.
“It’s so good of you to come, Reverend,” she said.
“Don’t you mention it,” he said. He was old, emaciated, a simperer with false teeth that whistled.
“Good night, Chief,” he said. He stretched out his hand.
“Good night, sir,” Clumly said. He shook hands with the man, furtively broke wind again, and sat down.
“God bless you,” the minister said.
“Same to you,” Clumly said. He nodded as if thoughtfully, smelling gas.
Still the man hovered at his elbow. “You know,” he said, “I have the strangest feeling.” He smiled. His dimple flickered into sight then faded into his cheek. “I feel—” he began. He looked at the ceiling, smiling. “There’s a great deal of love in this house,” the minister said. “One can sense these things. So many homes, you know, have no love in them at all, poor things. An absence of the Holy Spirit.” His teeth whistled sharply. She stood behind him with her head meekly tipped. She was high.
“Mmm,” Clumly said. He dabbed at the stew with his bread.
“I imagine you’re very busy down there at the police station these days. You look tired, to tell the truth. I can sense that too. But confident.” He beamed. “I like a man of confidence.”
“Gets harder every year,” Clumly said. He pursed his lips.
“I imagine it does.”
Clumly tilted his head to look at him. Like a skinny buzzard in glasses he looked, and a black hat in his claws. More gas escaped. Hurriedly Clumly went on, as if absurdly hoping to distract them. “It’s a funny business, police work.” He squinted. “It’s the times, partly. Everything in transition. Sometimes you feel like you’re flying by the seat of your pants.” He felt a blush stirring in his neck. “Excuse me.” Then, quickly: “I’m talking about hunches, funny feelings you get.” He turned his chair a little to face the man more directly. He pointed at the minister’s hat over his breast, and said like a lecturer (he had an odd sense of standing back listening to himself, dispassionate and critical, and with another fragment of his mind he waited for more trouble behind him), “We’ve got a man down there now, an ugly bearded fellow we picked up for a prank. Trifling little thing you’d never think about twice, nine times out of ten. But I’ll tell you something. I’ve got a feeling about this man. A feeling in my belly.”
The minister looked sympathetic. “The poor soul,” he said.
“They want you to run a tight ship, get your paperwork done, delegate authority to the men below you, put in so much time and no more on any one certain case. Well I’ll tell you something. I’m responsible. I’m directly responsible for every man in my department, and for the welfare of every man, woman, and child in the City of Batavia.” Esther looked bored. He got up to pace, poking the air with his cigar, and made it to the far end of the room in the nick of time.
“A grave responsibility,” the minister said.
“Correct.”
She came nearer.
“Now this bearded man, he may be nothing but a tramp, for all I know. But I have this feeling about him. It’s like a creature working up from the center of the earth, scratching and scratching. You follow me?” He could feel the pressure building up again in his abdomen, and wondered if the man would ever leave.
The minister’s eyes widened a little and he drew the chair beside the table closer to where Clumly now stood and sat down.
“Well then what’s my job?” Clumly said. “You see the question? The Mayor wants one thing, the men underneath me want another. You follow me?”
“Yes. Yes. Terrible.” Clumly’s wife, coming up behind him, put her hand on Clumly’s shoulder, and the minister noticed. He smiled and showed his dimple. “But your good wife is with you.”
“Mmm,” Clumly said. “So here’s what it comes to. If my hunch is right, the most important thing I can do is stop that man before he makes his move. But if I’m wrong—”
“Horrible,” the minister said.
“Poor Fred,” she said. “Was the stew all right?”
“Mmm,” Clumly said. “Well I don’t mind telling you it’s giving me the shakes. The man can read minds.”
“You don’t say!”
“Sure as hell. Excuse me, Reverend.” He squinted, listening carefully to what he was saying.
“Oh no, not at all.”
“And what’s more,” Clumly said, “we can turn that power of his to good use. We can harness it. Like the atom.”
“No!”
“Yessir. But should we? It’s like voodoo. It’s a moral problem.” He paused, struggling to control his own problem, but also squinting at the minister to see what he thought.
The minister frowned, his whole face drawing in to give intensity to his eyes, and at last he saw it. “Like wire-tapping!” he said.
Clumly sat back and set his fist on the table. “Correct!”
The minister rubbed the bridge of his nose to a shine. At length he said, “What will you do, Chief?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Clumly said, cagey. His jaw grew firmer. “I have to think it out.”
The minister slid his hat onto the table and pressed his hands together. He closed his eyes and prayed, “Dear Heavenly Father, fount of all wisdom and abundant mercy, we pray Thee that Thou wilt shed Thy light on this Thy humble servant in his hour of dilemma, and that Thou wilt guide him and minister unto him and lead his steps aright in the name of Thy beloved Son, Our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen.”
“Amen,” Clumly’s wife said softly, her face tipped up. It shone like the face of a saint.
“Amen,” said Clumly. His jaw was set like rock.
A long silence.
“Well,” the minister said. “So this man can read minds!”
“That’s not half of it, Reverend,” Clumly said. He leaned closer. “He knows the future!”
“No!” said the minister.
“Yessir.”
“Well, I’ll be darned,” the minister breathed.
BARROOOM, roared Chief Clumly’s rear end. Neither his wife nor the minister batted an eye.
“That’s Nature,” said Clumly with a terrible smile. “Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln—Nature is no respecter of persons. Fact.”
They laughed loudly, like people at a wake.
After that he talked solemnly, pedantically, of the Sunlight Man’s uncanny powers, and the more he talked the surer he was that all he was saying (and all they said, too) was nonsense. The thing was a trick. Their gullibility seemed now to Chief Clumly almost dangerous, and his responsibility weighed on him more heavily than before.
He dreamed that night that he was back at sea, standing on the bridge plotting his ship’s course by the stars. It was a wooden ship that rode low in the water, perhaps because its planks were heavy as boards that have lain in
the earth for years. But the sea was calm as oil in a barrel, and all was in control. The crew was restless, below and behind him, darting here and there like shadows on the deck and below the deck, or staring up at him anxiously out of their lifeboats. He knew well enough what their trouble was. Unbelievers, heretics, usurers, perverts, suicides. But he had them in control, everything in control. All was well. However, there was a storm coming, he knew by the fact that, one by one, the stars were going out. Far in the distance he could hear a mighty wind rising, a sound of sighs and wails and shrieks reverberating in the blackness, a babble of languages. “Steady on course,” he said soberly. “Full speed ahead.” Now the struggling winds were like groans of pain and there were thudding noises as the winds buffeted the sea, sounds like clubs banging on backs, sometimes cracking bones, an ungodly racket. It was closer now—he kept his ship steady on—exhilaration filling his chest—and the howls like agony and rage rained down on him and up from his sailors like pebbles and sand before a whirlwind. “Steady on!” he roared. And now he could see the other ship, not approaching, as he’d thought, but fleeing like a pirate toward the calmer water he saw glowing, deep red-gold, on the horizon. The captain in black was bent forward like an ape, whipping his sailors, urging them to still greater effort, and the speed of his flight made his beard whip over his shoulder. His red eyes rolled. Clumly cupped his mouth between his hands and howled, “Beware, beware, you guilty souls!” He raised his pistol, steady on, and fired. The bearded man sank like a shadow through the ship and down into the sea. It was suddenly daylight, and both ships’ crews were singing. He felt serene. The round-backed old sailor at his side, bearded and scarred from many wars and many wives, was smiling. “What sea is this?” asked Clumly, with a comfortable sense of authority. The sailor looked down, inspecting its texture. He smiled again, a man perhaps not to be trusted. He said thoughtfully, “Metaphysics.”
Clumly sat up in the blackness of the bedroom, wringing his hands. “What’s the meaning of this?” he asked crossly. Then, understanding, he whispered to himself, “A dream. Just a damned dream!” He was hungry as the devil, and the room stunk like an outhouse. His wife slept on.
