The Sunlight Dialogues (13 page)

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 …

They got nowhere questioning the bearded man—Boyle could hear them almost clearly, in the room at the end of the hallway—and he’d seen that the sweat treatment was coming. And so they hadn’t come for him today. Instead they came for Boyle.

The Chief of Police was standing at his window smoking when they led Boyle in, and he didn’t bother to turn around. The room was thick with stale hamburger smell. There was a large white bag from one of those carry-out places on the Chief’s desk. The policeman called Miller nodded Boyle toward a chair, and the other of the younger policemen left—at a signal from Miller, perhaps; Boyle wasn’t sure. He waited, sitting bent forward. His leg tingled from the knee to the hip; it had gone to sleep while he was sitting back in his cell. It was hot and close, though not as bad as the cellblock, and the air here smelled freer. The Chief went on standing looking out, head almost hidden in the bluegray strata of smoke. Miller stood behind Boyle’s back.

At last, slowly, the Chief turned and took the cigar out of his mouth. “Coffee, Boyle?” he said.

Boyle shook his head then changed his mind, made a feeble gesture with his right hand then dropped it back to the chair arm. Miller went out and came back a minute later with old cups and a percolator with the cord dangling. He was scowling as he poured the coffee. The tape recorder stood on the Chief’s desk, tipped up on a stack of manilla envelopes, but no one made a move to turn it on. The Chief came to his desk, sat down, sipped his coffee, or rather gulped it, hot as it was.

“Boyle, we’d like some information,” he said.

Miller closed the door to the hallway leading to the cellblock, then stood nursing his coffee. He glanced at the clock over the Chief’s desk, above a picture of a huge badge and some writing.

“Yes sir?” Boyle said.

“Tell us what you know about the man with the beard.”

“The beard,” Boyle said.

They waited.

“I never saw him before,” Boyle said.

“You listen to his talk?”

Miller said, “Any talk about a jailbreak?”

Boyle shook his head. He couldn’t tell which of them to look at. “I don’t listen much,” he said. “A lot of—” He searched his mind. “Lot of talk.”

“Any talk about where he comes from?”

“Look,” Miller said.

Boyle folded his hands and squinted. “He says he went to a party for Tarzan, in Los Angeles,” he said dully.

The Chief looked over at Miller, who wasn’t impressed.

“What else?”

Boyle rubbed his chest where the sweat was dripping down inside his shirt, but he couldn’t stop the itching. “He says he can read people’s minds,” he said. It sounded cross. He didn’t believe it himself today, and he was annoyed at being pushed into saying it. More important, he felt something queer in the air, sharp and foul as the smell of something burning. Were they trying to trick him into admitting something?

Miller sighed. “How do you know that, Boyle?”

“I don’t. It’s just what he says. I don’t know him. I never saw him before.” Then, quickly, to change the subject back to safer ground: “He says he can see into the future. He told the Indians—”

They waited and he picked at his lip, trying to think what they were up to. “He told the Indians the woman they hurt will die. They believed him. I think they did.” He watched his interrogators suspiciously.

Miller sipped his coffee, scowling more darkly by the minute, eyebrows lifting up and out like wings, and now Boyle was sweating all over, burning up. The Italian cop was breathing deeply, like a man in bad air, his whole chest full of anger. There was a story of some cops in Elmira who’d used hypnotism. Without quite believing it was anything like that, Boyle said suddenly, “I want a lawyer.”

The Chief of Police squinted.

“Why?” Miller said. “Why did he tell the Indians the woman will die?”

“I don’t know. To scare them.”

Ominously, the Chief snapped his fingers and pointed at Boyle. “Maybe,” he said. It was as if, suddenly, they’d made him tell them what they needed. But he knew, nervous as he was, that it couldn’t be that.

“I don’t know,” Boyle said. “I hardly listen.”

“Drink your coffee,” Miller said.

The Chief’s cup was empty, and he refilled it. He said, “What you think, Miller?”

Miller looked down.

The Chief scowled and lowered his eyebrows. He took a hamburger out of the bag as if unaware that he was doing it, crumpled the tissue wrapping and threw it in the wastebasket, where there were two or three such wrappings already, and bit in like a werewolf.

Miller thought for a long time. Then: “I think you got some kind of fixed idea, Chief. You know what that is?” He went over to the window suddenly and bent down to look out, holding the cup in his two hands, and his eyes searched the street as though he were expecting someone, or were afraid somebody he didn’t want to see was on his way. The sunlight fell over his shoulders and down to one elbow, and when he moved his arm the light looked alive. He said, speaking fast, “It’s when some little piece of nothing gets ahold of you, like lint on the brain, and you can’t shake it loose.”

After a minute the Chief shifted the food into his cheek and said, “You think our Sunlight Man is a little piece of nothing?”

“I think he’s a magician went out on a drunk and painted a sign on the street. Or maybe he’s a schoolteacher, and he’s playing with us because he’s afraid he’ll lose his job if they find he’s been in jail. Or maybe he’s a rabbi. Why not? Or maybe he’s King Tut come back from the dead. What’s the difference who he is? I don’t know what I think. What I do know is, that man has gotten you tied up in knots. Maybe he reminds you of your mother or something—and all the time the Mayor asking questions and the paper talking about Police Efficiency-”

“All right,” Chief Clumly said. He dusted his hands. “I know all that.”

Miller turned to point the cup at him. “Put it this way. Say I believe you. Say there’s something that really stinks about this man, besides his armpits and his rotten clothes—say our Sunlight Man’s planning the biggest little caper since Alonzo J. Whiteside invaded the Buffalo bank—and say you nip it in the bud. Stop whatever he’s up to before it starts, and who’s going to know it? What you going to say to the papers? Headline:
BANK NOT HELD UP. PLANE NOT DIVERTED TO CUBA.
All anybody’s going to know is we never caught the kids with the mop-handles or the man with the gray coat, never could locate that pack of dogs that bit the Jensen kid. Or
him.”
He turned to point the cup at Boyle. “We may as well send him home right now. We could nail him, you know damn well we could.” The Chief scowled, trying to stop him, but he went on. “You know how they work, people like Boyle. Someplace not too far from here there’s a quiet suburban guy whose wife thinks he’s in the selling business, and he didn’t come home from his last trip—he’ll do that sometimes, nothing to worry her, always comes back, not the type to take up with another woman. A man with two identities. Find that nice quiet suburban house, get a history on him, and we’ve got this Boyle, or whatever his name is, locked up till hell freezes over. But we’re running out of time. We go into court with no more case than we’ve got—” He stopped.

“All right,” Clumly said. He was sitting very still, no expression whatever on his face. He looked from Miller to the cold cigar—he’d just now picked it up again—and kept his eyes on it.

“Just tell me one thing you’ve got on him, this Sunlight Man of yours.”

Clumly pushed out his lower lip, then sucked it in again, and said nothing. At last, thoughtfully, he raised the cigar to his lip and lighted it. When it was going, he took another gulp of coffee.

“Ok,” he said. “I’m cognizant of all that.” He nodded toward Boyle. “Take him away.”

Miller came over and waited while Walter Boyle stood up. As they went down the hall, Miller didn’t bother to hold his arm, and at the cell he didn’t bother to give him the usual shove. When he was leaving, after the cell was locked, Miller paused a moment and looked past his shoulder at the scarred and bearded man in the cell beside Boyle’s. The Sunlight Man signed the air with a cross, solemnly, and Miller frowned. Then he left. Nick Slater, the older of the Indians, yelled after him, “Hey officer! Where in hell’s our lawyer?” Miller ignored him.

“No lawyer,” the bearded prisoner croaked softly. “No lawyer coming. Wake up child! Behold the universe.”

All at once Boyle knew where it was he’d seen the man before, or rather, had it on the tip of his tongue. But again the memory darted away from his mind’s grasp and sank back, little by little, into darkness.

3

Nick Slater awakened out of his nightmare and believed it was the cold that had made him wake up. It was well after midnight, perhaps not long before dawn. There was no sound of trucks from the street in front, no sound of voices, not even the police radio two or three rooms away, somewhere beyond the hallway that led out from the cells. It was raining. He could hear the steady, comforting hiss and for a moment it seemed to him that he could smell it. His shoulder still ached, maybe something he’d gotten in the wreck, maybe something the police had done, he could no longer remember. Though he couldn’t see a thing, he knew at once that his brother was still asleep beside him, flat on his back, the way he always slept, like a dead man. His terror came over him again—a rush of car lights, the policemen—and for a second he shut his eyes.

Something made him think—the cold, perhaps—of the old woman with whom he’d spent his childhood. The old woman had braided silver hair and a face so withered and wrinkled it looked like a net. Her two half-blind eyes floated in small nets of red. He hadn’t thought of her in years, yet the memory of her gazing blankly up at him from the faded yellow chair she had hardly ever left was vivid now.

And then he was thinking of Ben Hodge, remembering a trivial incident that had come to his mind repeatedly since the wreck. Ben Hodge had said, with his huge red hands hanging between his knees, the flesh around his eyes boiled-looking, now that he had his glasses off, “Everybody suffers some. Especially at your age. It’s an easy thing to get pushed out of all due proportion. You’re not so bad off, all things considered. Young. Smart. Got the whole world by the scruff.” Always full of wisdom, Ben Hodge. Sitting there like the King of the Beggarmen on the seat of the new manure-spreader with cowshit splattered all over his back and his floppy felt hat, dangling his glasses between his two hands, getting ready to clean them when he got to it, when he finished handing down wisdom. Except that the old man was right enough, high-falutin old fart. Nick had known it all along himself. Behind Ben, that day, the birches stood out like cuts against the dark trees behind, and above the woods, like a halo around the old man’s hat, the sky was streaked with orange. Nick had said, “Sure, sure, sure,” and had felt disgusted with himself for saying it even as he said it. He wondered what it was in him that made him turn on even Ben Hodge. The old man had looked at his glasses, sorry to have spoken. The man seemed, that instant, like a fat, wrinkled child dressed up in grown-up clothes, as harmless as a cow, and Nick had looked down at the sharp gray stubble by the spreader tire to get hold of himself. A feeling of deadness came up through his arms. David, Ben’s Negro helper, stood at the rear of the spreader, wiping his hands off on his jeans and looking toward the house. He hadn’t heard or seen.

Out of the dark came the croak of the bearded man in the middle cell: “Can’t sleep?”

He raised his head silently to see if he could make the man out. The light at the far end of the hallway was burning, and he could see the shaggy silhouette. “Christ,” he whispered, too softly for the man to hear, and clenched his fists. The pain in his right shoulder was worse, and he remembered hitting. The grass had been wet. All his sensations had been unnaturally precise. He could feel each bead of sweat on his forehead, and he could tell the difference between the sweat and the drops of water from the grass. He could hear the man grunting and calling to his wife. He was moving, flopping about near the wreck, like a fish.

“I can’t say I blame you,” the bearded man said. He wasn’t whispering or making any show of speaking quietly, but the infuriating voice was almost more faint than the rain. When he closed his eyes it seemed not to come from any single point but from everywhere. “It’s disquieting, the thought of one’s own death. And you’re young, of course.” He sighed, but Nick could imagine the leer. “Well, be philosophical. As a great man once said, ‘The world’s a hospital.’” He sighed again.

Nick said between his teeth, “Shut up, I’m warning you. I’m gonna call the friggin guard.”

“No harm. But I’d help you if I could.”

“Fuckhead,” he whispered to himself.

“When you think about it,” the voice said, infinitely weary, “the world is more like a jailhouse than like a hospital. No matter how cynical we try to be, the food is never what we secretly expected; the beds rob us of our sleep and health; the company lacks zest, not to mention how it smells; the toilets are a cruel, cold shock; and at the end of it all, instead of the justice we have a right to expect, as feeling creatures—
fzzzt!
the electric chair. If we had any sense we’d hang ourselves and be done with it.”

“Do it,” he thought ferociously, but still he said nothing, as though there were some faint hope of stopping the man by ignoring him. The voice stirred up in him a churning of strong, confused emotion—anger and fear, but worst of all a powerful but vague longing that had no name, a feeling something like what he’d gone through at night in his childhood when he heard the train, a mile away, going through the oak-woods over at the edge of the Reservation. There was a dirt floor in Mrs. Steeprock’s house, cold and smooth as the worn, worthless brown coins in her snakegrass box. He would cross to the foot-wide window in the dark and there he would see the long bloom of white light moving quickly south, up over the trees, riding the undersides of clouds. She said once, “What is it?” looking in from the kitchen where she sewed, and when he shrugged sullenly, turning away from the window again, she came to him and bent down, as if she were grieved, to study his face. He hadn’t remembered that particular night for a long time. It was strange that it was still in his mind, clear as ever.