The Sunlight Dialogues (4 page)

“Fred?” she said.

He thought of the rouged, naked breasts of the waitress with the coffeepot. But the image no longer stirred him. He saw himself walking along a beach where the sand was tiny grits of color, blue and green and deep red and yellow, like minute pieces from a stained-glass window. Four men who looked vaguely like Mayor Mullen sat scowling, watching him approach, with towels around their waists. He looked toward the sea and wide green sky, distressed.

It occurred to him suddenly that he was hungry. Ravenous. He thought of going down to the refrigerator, or to the cellar, where he had, if he remembered right, two cases of Carting’s Beer.

“Do you hear something, Fred?” she asked softly.

There was someone in the yard. He heard it distinctly, or felt it through the walls and beams of the house and the dark packed earth below the grass. Both of them lay perfectly still. Minutes passed. Now the prowler was inside, feeling his way through the cluttered blackness from the cellar door toward the stairs that led up to the pantry. There were snakes down there, and spiders, and long, lean rats. He’s fished one out of the cistern a month ago. The prowler stood listening at the door to the pantry, head bent almost to the porcelain knob. Then nothing, not a sound for fifteen minutes. It came to him that his wife was asleep, he’d only imagined that she’d spoken to him. There was no one in the cellar, not the bearded, disfigured magician, as he’d thought, and not anyone else. In the gaunt, high-gabled wooden husk they were alone, as usual. He could just make out the darker places on the wallpaper, the crooked trail of vines and the large gray smudges, diagonally receding, a foot apart. Roses.

Hours later he awakened with a start, hungry. The night was silent. If I just had a sandwich, he thought. He could taste it. There was bologna—he could eat a whole package of it— and there was lettuce, crudely torn apart and somewhat wilted, thrust into a Baggie and tucked in the crisper drawer. And cheese, and salad dressing. Perhaps a little chicken. There was a pocket of water in his cheek and he swallowed, and he thought again of the beer. He’d have done it once, when he was younger; would have sat up in bed and slipped his feet over the side and would have gone down to stuff himself. But it was bad for you, that kind of thing. Not just because it made you fat, made your heart work harder than an old heart should, but bad in ways more insidious—the same as buying without shopping first for a reasonable bargain, or buying what you didn’t need, or not buying at all, on the other hand, because your mind was too much on the column of numbers written under “Deposits” in your bank book. He’d thought all that out long ago—it might as well have been centuries—and he knew he was not going down to the refrigerator, however seductive the images coming unbidden into his head. Again the thought of the coffeepot and the waitress came sliding into his mind. Now he was angry. A man sixty-four years old needed his sleep. What was wrong with him? he wondered. But the question was not difficult. Every nerve in his body was jangling because of that prisoner. Or partly that. He’d been nervous for months, to tell the truth; the prisoner was the final straw. What he needed right now was a pill.

Before he knew he would do it he swung out of bed and then padded, jaw clenched, to the bathroom to get the sleeping pills. At the bathroom door he paused, scowling; then, furtively, he went on to the head of the stairs. Not a sound behind him. Softly, like a man drawn by voodoo, he went down, avoiding the steps that squeaked, and felt his way to the kitchen.

He ate by the light from the refrigerator door. Then, stuffed, dry of throat and as hungry as ever, he went soundlessly down the cellar steps, lighting his way with the flashlight he kept at the top of the stairs for when fuses blew. In the flashlight’s dim glow the damp stone walls of the cellar were like walls of a dungeon. Drafts moved through the dark like fish. The air was moist and chilly. He thought he heard a rat scamper, but the next instant he wasn’t sure. He stood for a long time with his hand on the neck of the bottle, undecided whether to open it or not, his eyes tightly focused on a cobweb. It seemed to him, in the back of his mind, that here in the cellar, if he listened hard, he could hear what was happening in every house in the city: lovers talking on livingroom couches, murderers climbing through kitchen windows, cats eating mice, old men at Doehler-Jarvis shoveling coal.

Abruptly, awake and trembling from the cold, he put the bottle back and turned to go up. When he reached the livingroom he found that his wife had gotten up, as she did sometimes when she couldn’t sleep or woke up nervous. She had gotten out her sewing, a kind of dress she’d been working on, if he wasn’t mistaken, for years.

“Good night,” he said. He kissed her forehead.

“Good night, dear,” she said.

Clumly went up.

2

He felt better in the morning, as he always did, at least for a little while. Not because he had slept well but because it was morning. The world had expanded, warmed, gotten back its good sense. While Esther fixed breakfast he went out to stand on the front porch in his uniform, his hands behind his back, pot belly comfortably protruding, and he sucked in the clean, cool air. He faced the round orange sun that hung just clear of the trees and housetops four blocks away, at the end of the street which began just opposite his yard, and he said, like an old king satisfied with his accomplishments, “Ah.” The music of songbirds rose all around him like bubbles in a cup of ginger ale, a battle of sparrows and robins against jays. He watched Ed Wardrop start up his car and light a cigarette and pull out from the curb, and when the car turned onto LaCrosse and he saw Ed duck his head and glance over to see if he was there as usual, he nodded solemnly and waved, a little like the Pope. The younger Miss Buckland came out and called her cat.

He had papers up to his eyebrows down at the station, but they’d waited this long, he decided. They could wait one day more. It was a day for inspections, and for trying to talk with that lunatic, and this afternoon was Albert Hubbard’s funeral. (Flowers for Paxton, he reminded himself.) As a man got older he spent more and more of his time at funerals, or sending out funeral flowers, or standing in the hush where old friends were laid out in their livingrooms or at Turner’s or Burdett’s or Bohm’s.

Fred Clumly enjoyed funerals. It was a sad thing to see all one’s old friends and relatives slipping away, one after the other, leaving their grown sons and daughters weeping, soberly dabbing at their eyes with their neat white hankies, the grandchildren sitting on the gravestones or standing unwillingly solemn at the side of the grave while they lowered the coffin. But it was pleasant, too, in a mysterious way he couldn’t and didn’t really want to find words for. There stood the whole family—three, four generations—the living testimonial to the man’s having been; all dressed in their finest and at peace with one another; and there stood his business acquaintances and his friends from the church, the schoolboard he’d once been a member of, all quarrels forgotten; and there stood his friends from the Dairyman’s League or Kiwanis or the Owls or the Masons. The coffin rolled silently out of the hearse, and his friends, brothers, sons took the glittering handles and lowered him slowly onto the beams across the hole and then stood back, red-faced from their life’s work as truckers or farmers, or sallow-faced from the bank or grocery store or laundry. And there it was, a man’s whole life drawn together at last, stilled to a charm, honored and respected, and the minister took off his black hat and prayed, and Clumly prayed, with tears in his eyes and his police cap over his fallen chest, and so, with dignity, the man’s life closed, like the book in the minister’s hands.

Poor Albert Hubbard. He’d inherited his nursery business from his father and he’d built it up little by little for years, and then, maybe fifteen years ago now, he’d taken in his oldest son and, soon after that, his second oldest. The youngest had moved to Syracuse. Some kind of engineer. The sons had big ideas, and it must’ve been hard on poor old Albert. They filled up two acres with their greenhouses, and they bought up farmland for a half-mile in either direction. They could no more pay for it than fly. It’s the twentieth century, they said. They’d been away to college and learned about economics. You just keep up the interest, they said, don’t you worry about the principal. Old Albert got crankier and crankier. When Clumly would stop by he’d be potching along among the bins of plants, more plants than any ten nurseries could sell, and he’d be wearing the same old felt hat he’d worn twenty-five years ago, or it looked the same, and he’d have on the same old overalls and hightop shoes and his applepicker’s bib.

“Don’ you worry your head about them aphids,” he’d squeak, mimicking his sons, tipping his head down and looking up from under his shaggy eyebrows at Clumly. “We spray around here by the schedule, see, and if the aphids don’t know what the schedule is, don’t you worry, them plants is insured.”

“Well, times change,” Clumly would say.

“Pah! Times change! Why this next Depression’s gonna make that last one look like Heaven’s own feast for the blessed.” He’d move down a plant, shaking his head. “Wal, mebby I’ll be dead by then. I hope so.”

Now he was. Soul rest in peace.

A jay walked up to the porch steps as though Clumly were not there. “Morning, young fella,” Clumly said. The bird looked at him, intelligent, about to speak. Then Esther called, and Clumly went in to eat.

“You look fresh as a daisy,” Esther said. Even when she spoke cheerfully, it was a whine.

“I still get around,” he said. He began on his eggs.

Prowlcar 19. Kozlowski. Father had a farm out on Tinkham Road. Clean little house, clean little barn, Holstein cows and sheep and a couple of work-horses standing around the willow trees by the pond behind the barn. The old woman had expected her son to take over when the old man had died—buried alive when a pea-vine wagon turned over on him, six months ago now—another poor mortal ground under by the load—but Kozlowski had other ideas. He hated farming. Hated being tied down to the milking three-hundred-and-sixty-five days every year, hated trying to outguess the weather, hated more than anything else the everlasting tedium of setting out fenceposts, cleaning stables, unsnarling rope and old harness leather and baling twine, or mending bags, or crawling out of bed to run after the cows when they got through the fence and took off at a run through some neighbor’s cornlot, no more knowing where they were going than how to spell. He was a small man, with a red face and small red hands and hair the color of dust. He hardly ever spoke. Thoughtful. He sat in the prowlcar, sheepish-looking as usual, waiting for Clumly to catch up.

Clumly locked his car door and hurried to the back drive gate where Kozlowski waited. “Morning, Stan.”

Kozlowski grinned.

“Mind if I ride around?” Clumly asked. He felt exhilarated, like a man slightly drugged.

“That all you got to do?”

Clumly laughed grittily and went around the front of the car to the rider’s side, patting the fenders as he passed. Kozlowski watched him get in and smiled dutifully when the door slammed shut, but he was thinking his own thoughts.

“How’s it going?” Clumly said.

Kozlowski shrugged. He pulled out onto the street. The radio sputtered. He stopped for the Main Street light.

“Lot of the boys get annoyed when I come ride around with them,” Clumly said. The car smelled richly of new gas. He’d just been to the pump, Clumly deduced. He sat back more and reached inside his jacket for a cigar. “They get the wrong idea, you know. Cigar?”

Kozlowski shook his head. The light changed. He started up.

Clumly chuckled. “I drove prowlcar for seventeen years. You cognizant of that?”

“No fooling,” Kozlowski said.

“Yessir. Well, I was younger then. But I’ll tell you one thing. We worked like the devil in those days. Eight
P.M.
till eight
A.M.
in the morning, that was my hours for I don’t know how long. And the pay? Son, you couldn’t get a garbage man for the pay we got then. Nine dollars a day. Just as true as I’m setting here.” He opened the glove-compartment and looked inside, then closed it again.

“Garbage men make a lot of money,” Kozlowski said.

A car shot past them and abruptly slowed down, no doubt noticing that they were police. Clumly leaned forward to watch the driver, then leaned back, letting it go. “Well, I kept my nose clean,” Clumly said, “and I put in an hour’s work for an hour’s pay. I worked up through the ranks.”

Kozlowski nodded.

“Life’s been good to me,” Clumly said. It was a good cigar. The day would be another scorcher, but the breeze coming in through Clumly’s window still had the scent of morning in it, even here in the middle of town. He said: “But I miss the old days, that’s the truth. I don’t say I’d give up what I’m making and go back to patroling—both jobs have their remunerations. But you’re freer out on patrol, I will say that. Nobody watching you all the time, keeping you honest.” He shot a glance at Kozlowski.

“I don’t mind it,” Kozlowski said.

“Of course you don’t,” Clumly said heartily. He shifted in the seat, trying to get more comfortable, then closed his eyes a minute. “Well, a lot of the boys get the wrong idea,” he said. “The way I figure, we do this job of ours together. A man can’t run a police force if he doesn’t trust his men.”

Kozlowski nodded again. He turned down Jackson and crossed the one track remaining from the days when the New York Central depot used to be here in the center of town. Clumly pointed to the square brick house on the left. “Know that place? It used to be Edna’s. House of ill repute.”

“I’ve heard that,” Kozlowski said.

“That’s it,” Clumly said. “We run her out of business a dozen times. Maybe two dozen times. Sent her up the river and I don’t know what all. But she always came back, just as regular as tomorrow. It was a kind of joke around town for a good long while. Lot of people used to think it was a good thing to have a place like that, and I know cops that would turn their heads and not notice when she was set up again till sooner or later a complaint come in. They weren’t crooks, you know. They weren’t taking bribes, nothing like that. They just had a theory, that was all. Well, takes all kinds.”