The Sunlight Dialogues (30 page)
No one had seen her. But in the warmth of the toy-cluttered livingroom, with his neighbor on the lumpy yellow couch with a bottle of beer on his stomach—Joe something, Hodge had forgotten the name—the panic he’d felt seemed childish. “I just wondered if she might have come over here and got talking,” Hodge said.
“Nope,” his neighbor said.
The wife said, holding a baby in her arms, “Why don’t you try Faners? That’s probably where she is.” Her hair was black and stringy.
Hodge nodded. “Thanks. I’ll try there.” He watched Ed Sullivan waving his unfriendly arm at the glittering curtain. “Ladies and gentlemen—”
The wife said something and he missed the name of the performer, but it was a man, tall, with a fat face. He smiled and bowed all around and began to yell. He looked insane, and it made Hodge shiver.
“Want a beer?” Joe said.
“No thanks. I better run along.”
A boy with huge eyes and a dimple peeked from behind the ironing board piled high with clothes. He had a blond crewcut, and at first it looked as if his head had been shaved. Hodge nodded, said his thanks again, and went out.
The Faners, on the other side, had not seen her either. She probably went to the corner store, they said. She was probably right in the middle of cooking and she found she was missing something—cinnamon, you know, or salt, or something—so she ran to the store. Got talking. That’s probably what happened. Hodge saw that they were right. The truth was that the grim business down at the police station had shaken him about as badly as a man could be shaken—the blood in the hallway, and Clumly’s strange behavior, and then that Salvador woman throwing all the blame on him. He saw the picture in his mind again, more clear than the porch where he stood.
“You want me to come over with you, Will?” Bob Faner said, standing at the door. He looked up at the gathering clouds.
“No, no,” Hodge said. “Don’t trouble. I just thought I’d check. I’m sure everything’s all right.”
Faner looked at him and smiled vaguely, still willing. He was tall, silver-haired. Looked a little like a minister.
“Thanks again,” Hodge said.
“No trouble at all, Will,” he said. “If you need me just say the word.” He laughed. He was a good man, Faner. A dentist.
And so he returned. He entered the front door muttering crossly, annoyed that he’d gotten himself upset, and he went up the front stairs slowly this time and paused at the top for a full minute to catch his breath and quiet his jangling nerves. He opened his door. “Dang monkeybusiness,” he said to himself. He snapped on the light. The real point, it came to him in a rush of anger, was that Clumly’s tomfoolery was dangerous. If he did get hold of Tag … Who could know for sure what that Tag was capable of? Who knew what Nick himself might do, for that matter? He was a scared boy now. Again Hodge was shaken by a rush of mingled terror and guilt, as if every word the dead policeman’s mother had said were true. He made himself coffee at the kitchen sink, using hot water from the faucet, and started for the bedroom with it to change his clothes. Still the house was unnaturally quiet, as if hiding something. Through the livingroom window he saw a flash of far-away lightning. A shiver ran low on his back, between his shoulders. When he pushed open the bedroom door, the light from behind him broke across open dresser drawers and clothes strewn all over the floor.
“My God!” he said. The coffeecup rattled on the saucer in his hand. He put the cup down on the dresser quickly, without even stopping to snap on the light, and went for the phone beside the bed. There was no dial tone. It was cut. Hodge wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. He was shaking and his hands were hot. When he looked back toward the lighted doorway he saw Mrs. Palazzo, like a propped-up doll, sitting against the darkness of the wall with her head tipped onto her shoulder. Her dead eyes shone.
But not from me,
they said.
And now the house was full of noise, a roar like wind in a cavern, and he smelled her blood.
“Tag,” he whispered. “Tag!
For the love of God!”
The story seems to begin with the creation of mankind by the
goddess Mama.
—A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia
It was late afternoon. Every line of the enormous willow trees on each side of the road, every rut and tuft of grass and weedy pile of round gray stones on the hillside pastures, every crack and shingle on the black barn standing severe as the angel of death on the nearest of the hills—on its roadward side the sharp white warning:
Chew Red Man Tobacco—was
unnaturally precise, as though time and motion had stopped and the world were a corpse. Nothing moved but the truck, its shadow flying beside it like a monstrous owl hunting, dropping for an instant where gullies fell away below the road, briefly rising where the macadam shirted a knoll, dangerously swift. The light on the hills was green. There was a storm coming.
Under her wide black brand-new hat, Millie Hodge sat erect and rigid as a stake, on principle showing no sign of leaning when the antique truck hurled into a curve—the right wheels spitting up gravel from the shoulder to strike at the floorboards like rattlesnakes at a pane of glass, the shuddering truckfenders barely missing the white triangular concrete posts—merely tensed the muscles of the arm lying flat on the window to the right of her and braced her left foot more firmly on the littered red rubber mat, her left leg a shaft of iron below the relaxed right leg crossing the left at the shin, the right foot casually tapping air with the deadly precision of a clock. Even if he were to roll the truck over the embankment into the Tonawanda, brown-green and motionless in August, thick as bad soup and faintly smelling of city sewage and horse- and cow- and pig-manure from the outer edges of Buffalo and the heart of Batavia and the villages, barnyards, hundred back pastures it slid down through—even if he were to slam the truck into a concrete abutment—she’d be outside the reach of her son’s childish anger, invulnerable even if he killed her, which he would not. Not on purpose. The narrow macadam road straightened out, falling away through an arch of darkening basswood trees toward the railroad underpass where long ago she had stood every Monday and Wednesday evening waiting for a lift to Batavia. Luke slowed a little, not bothering to pretend he had not sped up to scare her on the curve, then stepped on the accelerator again for the approach to the underpass and the hairpin curve just beyond. It was a blind curve, and if they came on some lumbering piece of farm equipment there they would be done for: he was not the expert driver he liked to think. She was afraid, all right. If shouting at him would have stopped him, she would have shouted; but it wouldn’t, and she did not waste her shouts or curses or tears on nothing. It was a cunning she had been born with, to know what she could do and couldn’t and when helpless to keep it hidden, watch and wait; or a natural cunning refined after fifty-two years into an art. She was a bitch. She made no bones about it. (So Millie Hodge, teeth clenched, her hat pinned firmly to her head, the wind snapping strands of her tightly pinned hair.) Bitchiness was her strength and beauty and hope of salvation. Luke’s bitchiness was inept and sentimental by comparison, mere callow petulance. He had no philosophy. He took it on faith that the curve would be free, that the truck would not be smashed to atoms against some cleat-track diesel tractor or buried under crazily tilting wings in the iron womb of a baler. She herself never made such mistakes, had not made them even when she was young.
But the curve was free, and the truck rushed on, past Webb’s and Burkmeister’s and Ford’s and Mahoney’s, the motor screaming like a buzzsaw cutting through ironwood, the rattles from every hinge and bolt filling the cab with a noise like chattering leaden bells or wasps stirred up to rage. She did not need to look at her son to know that his jaw was tightly set, his witch’s eyebrows slightly drawn in, his gray eyes glinting, unblinking, like a madman’s.
Little bastard,
she thought; and even though his troubles were unreal, mere play troubles, neurotic phantoms, she was sorry for him; coldly, objectively, but also bitterly sorry that he had to be young, if only for a time, and idiotic. His temper fits gave him splitting headaches—histamine headaches, according to the doctor in Rochester. (He’d diagnosed it even before he’d heard the symptoms, or so he claimed later, from no more than a glance at Luke’s painfully flawless handwriting. He was a cocky man, the doctor, red- and round-faced as a wino, and ugly, sitting with his legs apart, soft hand lovingly laid on his crotch.) They were half-day-long sieges of pain that would fill up Luke’s skull, more fierce than the fiercest hangover, until he could see, hear, think of nothing but the dry fire in his brain, and at last he would faint. He’d been born unlucky: he had an enormous tolerance for pain.
But he would not lose consciousness now, while he was driving. If the headache were that far along he would long ago have forgotten his anger, would have forgotten even what steering wheels were for; he would be clinging to her hand, his eyes clamped shut, beyond even praying that he might pass out, merely waiting for it, and she, Millie Hodge, with heart painstakingly fashioned of ice, knowing herself beyond any trace of ordinary motherly hate or love (crushed tight, until time if it moved all around her had nothing left to do with her), would be wishing with every nerve in her body that the burning brain were hers, not his. Not because he was her son and not for duty or charity or guilt. She’d been through it many times, a thing far worse for her than for him because Luke knew nothing, in that last hour, while her mind rushed on over thoughts as precise and sharp as the rods of an iron fence: had been through it and out of it to the light again, forced into the shabby role for which she had not the faintest desire and from which she drew, she devoutly believed, no satisfaction (she knew what satisfaction was, knew where she would prefer to be)—the role of God or archetypal mother or stone at the center of the universe—because by senseless accident she had borne sons.
I exist. No one else. You will not find me sitting around on my can like some widow, or whining for the love of my children.
Half a mile from the old place he began to slow down, and the feeling of dread that had been waiting far back in her mind, closed off like a room ghoulishly sealed up after the death of a child, opened suddenly to her consciousness. Already they were passing the century-old stone wall half-buried in woodbine and purple nightshade, and pear and apple and cherry orchard, the remains of the vineyard now grown up to thistle and ragweed and Queen Anne’s lace. They came to where tamaracks stretched dead limbs across the road, throwing parallel arched shadows like the bones of a fish—the truck moving quietly now, and slowly—and she knew he was going to stop.
Damn him to hell,
she thought. As always in the light of a late afternoon before a storm, the place was unreal, a scene from some greenish, dimly remembered childhood dream that hovered between the hope of escape and nightmare. She compressed her lips, the rush of strong, indefinite emotions channeling efficiently into anger. She said, “Why are you stopping?”
He ignored her. “Stony Hill Farm,” he said. He smiled, lugubrious, and as always when he smiled the center of his forehead pinched down and the outer ends of his eyebrows lifted, making him look more than ever evil, witchlike (but artificially so: she had watched him practice it in front of their oval bedroom mirror as a child, and later, when Luke was in his teens, she had watched him put it on for girls, poor adorable Werther, born for woe—with ears sticking out like Dumbo’s) so that for an instant her anger became mingled pity and disgust. He said: “The dear old homestead of the Hodges. Will you look at that!” His voice was thin and intense. The headache was bad now, she knew, and she thought,
Good.
But the easy spite brought no pleasure. He had never lived there, and his reasons for wanting to have lived there or to live there now, claim Stony Hill for his barony, were repulsive to her; nevertheless his grief and indignation were as real as if their cause were real. Somehow, God knew how, she was to blame, and his anger was just. She felt a sudden, sharp desire to be somewhere thousands of miles away—in some German university lecture hall, or walking in London early in the morning, or sitting on worn old steps in Rome, with her shoes off, a scent of sewage and flowers in the air.
“I said, look,” he said. All righteousness.
As if casually, she turned her head.
Nothing she saw shocked her. She had expected and grown used to it long ago. She had planned it, in a way, or so it seemed to her now—as to him. She had perhaps begun planning the destruction of Stony Hill years before she knew she was going to get it from the Hodges and sell it for trash. Though she knew there were people living there—the Negroes Will Jr had found for her when she wanted to sell it—it looked abandoned, the wind-wrecked remains of a farm no longer fit for an Arab to pitch his tent on, or a shepherd to put up his sheep in. Only a small patch of the wide, sloping lawn was mowed, a square directly in front of the balustered and pillared porch. The rest of it, to the left and right and rising beyond the deeply shadowed walnut trees to the nearest of the barns, was grown up like fallow pasture except for, here and there, a burnt-out black patch where it looked as if some dragon had recently lain. The globes she remembered on the lightning rods of the three barns visible from the driveway gate were gone now, the rods themselves crooked or broken off. The high, square silo was precariously tilted, and patches of siding were missing from the barn walls. But the house was worse. The pillars on the front porch were gouged as if by woodpeckers, there were squares of cardboard in some of the windows, nothing was painted, nothing any longer upright. A wide new door had been neatly sawed into the side of the house, the wooden frame left unpainted, and over the gap hung a Sears Roebuck aluminum screen with a large italic
M.
There were toys lying here and there in the grass, half hidden—a mud-caked bicycle, a rust- and oil-blackened wagon—on the porch steps a naked, headless doll. In the shelter of the wide old walnut trees there was a black Cadillac with a heavily pitted chrome visor.
