The Sunlight Dialogues (63 page)
That some Elephants have not only written whole sentences, as
Æ
ilan ocularly testifieth, but have also spoken, as Oppianus delivereth, and Christophorus
à
Costa particularly relateth (although it sound like that of Achilles’ Horse in Homer), we do not conceive impossible.
—Sir Thomas Browne
1
Walter Boyle (or Benson) had a round face and round, surprised-looking eyes like a rabbit’s. Now, as he drove home to Buffalo, sitting far forward in his seat, as always, and clinging to the steering wheel with both hands, his eyes looked rounder and more surprised than ever. He was frightened and, for the first time in years, tormented by something he could even recognize himself as guilt. If he consciously tried to think back to the murder of the guard, his mind would shy away stubbornly, like a horse avoiding a bridge; nevertheless, the memory repeatedly came back, around unsuspected corners, and though his thought recoiled the way you would draw back your hand from a snake you’d mistaken for a vine, he could not escape reliving that moment—the dead guard’s hand reaching out to him—over and over. He had always known that there is violence in the world, he’d seen minor examples. But he had never fully grasped what he had known. It was equally impossible for Boyle (or Benson) to grasp the magician’s return to the jail to free an Indian who meant nothing to him, as far as you could see, or meant worse than nothing, an irritation. Insane, that was all there was to it. But Boyle was not convinced or comforted. He had not really grasped that there was madness in the world. Worst of all, though, was the pistol-whipping of the Indian who had stayed. Boyle had a certain respect for the police. He feared and disliked them, but he feared and disliked them less than do many citizens. He understood their rules and, as a professional, worked not so much against those rules as around and under and up inbetween them. But there were no rules behind the pistol-whipping. It was more insanity. And neither was there any rule to explain their calling him
Benson,
showing they were onto him, yet letting him off scot-free. The world was topsy-turvy, and Boyle was afraid of it. He felt that he was being tailed, that any moment or any day now the whole thing—whatever that meant—would blow up in his face. He dreaded meeting his wife or neighbors or what-was-his-name, the roomer. He felt, though the trial was behind him, accused, and felt everyone knew it. He, Walter Boyle, it seemed to him now (or seemed to some gloomy, befuddled alley of his mind), was personally responsible for the magician’s return and so, in effect, for the murder. He could have listened more carefully to the conversation of the magician and the Indian; he could have told the police more than he’d told them, or warned them about the break he had known was coming. And after it was over and the police were asking angry questions, their faces bright red, he could have told them at least who it was that had let the Indian out. It was his error—his refusal to answer them—that had led to the pistol-whipping.
Not that he consciously thought all this out or believed it. Boyle thought nothing. Nevertheless, he was a changed man, for whether or not he was able to think about it, he had seen the caves of Hell. All his life he had been a decent man, exactly like the best of his neighbors. A good American. He took pride in his work, as other men do, and pride, too—though he did not flaunt it publicly—in his judgments, his feelings, even his comfortable shape, size, and visage. He worked hard and earned money and kept hold of it—he was the farthest thing from a profligate. He knew the value of food, and, like anyone, he frequently ate too much; he took considerable pleasure in making love to his wife when he was able, once a month or so; he was never fanatic, and if he felt himself slipping into an extreme point of view he would check himself at once, relax every nerve; he had a healthy American’s envy of people slightly better off than himself. And though he said little, he was not by any means a milquetoast; indeed, he was as capable as anyone of manly fury. But for all his common decency, he now knew himself guilty; in fact, past pardon. He suffered and hunted for words. The world was full of danger, and something terrible was in store for him.
Half a block short of the driveway leading to the old barn in North Tonawanda where he always made his change, Boyle stopped the car and sat looking around him, making sure he was not being watched. There was no one. He started up again, drove down die driveway between high weeds, stopped to unlock the barn door, then drove the Rambler in. Inside, everything was in order. The Ford sat dusty and discarded-looking except for the clothes hanging behind the side window—Benson’s. Boyle undressed, down to his underwear and socks, removed the money from his billfold and put the billfold in the Rambler glove compartment. He stood a moment between the two cars, facing the closed barn door and rubbing his hands absent-mindedly, savoring the queer sensation of being neither Boyle nor Benson. At last he locked the Rambler and unlocked the Ford, dressed in the Benson clothes, took the Benson wallet from the glove compartment of the Ford, filled it with the money that linked his two natures, and put on his wedding ring. He opened the barn door, started up the Ford, backed out, got out again and locked the barn door behind him.
Even now he dreaded going home. On an impulse very unnatural for him, against all his rules, he parked his car in a downtown lot, thirty cents an hour, and got out to walk. He had no intention, at first, of walking all the way home from here—it was nearly two miles—but he started out, by accident, in the general direction of home.
Though the afternoon was in fact pleasant, somewhere in the seventies, Benson felt chilly. He felt so cold, and the light breeze seemed to him so piercing, that he shivered in his thin suit and walked as fast as he could. He thought about the people he’d seen in the jail—the Indian boy with his jaw broken, the cracked magician, the drunks, the teen-aged hoodlums the police had brought in after the escape—and, hardly aware that he was doing it, he began to compare them with the hustling Buffalo people all around him. As he passed department stores, wide, brightly lit office-supply stores, bookstores, tobacco shops, ladies’ shops, he was struck by the wolfish, but at the same time trim and prosperous, look of all these well-fed, neatly dressed customers and salespeople. There was nothing like this back in jail. These people too looked cross and impatient, but they looked busy, at least, and satisfied that their business was the most important business to be done. He passed an air-conditioned shoestore (a waft of chillier air swept across him), and beyond the double-width glass doors he caught a glimpse of a tan young man with a bright, false smile squeezing a cheap, too-small shoe on a fat woman’s bloated foot. It was not the shoesalesman’s business that the shoe was mere paper or that on that huge gray foot it was ridiculous. They were both cheats, the shoe man and the lady. (The thought flickered up momentarily and died.)
He passed an old woman with a gray, smashed face and above it a hat of shiny dark blue with light blue flowers on it. Benson’s guilt increased.
The taxi drivers with their golfer’s shirts and dirty-yellow imitation bandsmen’s hats looked equally fat and satisfied, and so did the hotel doormen with their padded coats and buttons down their backs and gold epaulettes on their shoulders. He looked at fat, darksuited businessmen, gloomy as Indians, graying at the temples, hurrying along in small shoes that shone on the sidewalk like tinted steel, and it seemed to him that they were grimly satisfied with their lives of hard bargains and tricky deals. Like wolves, all of them, the same as the people in the jail, but these were the wolves who made it. Even the women. He could have been afraid of them, if he’d let himself. They walked in tight clothes that shone like knives, and their soft, pretty faces or square, blunt faces knew just how to get what they wanted, some by a pretense of helplessness, some by a sweet false gaiety, some by foxy irony or bellowing or crying or endless timid whining. It was not a street, it was a battlefield, and though they might smile from time to time, Walter Benson was not fooled; they were at war, and every man-woman-child of them was fighting for himself. If some of the salesmen were polite, they were polite because that would make the sale. If it worked just as well, they’d have gladly cracked open the customer’s jaw with a pistol. If he, Benson, were to step through the low revolving door and snatch the woman in the green dress, the young one picking through the used-looking talcum bottles on the counter, and hurl her to the floor and smash her head against the marble tile (or whatever it was), not a one of them would lift a finger to save her. They would scream, duck down, look out for Number One. A sobering thought. It filled his chest with a coldness.
He came into the scruffier section now; the department stores and banks and expensive shops had fallen away behind Mm; ahead of him lay the hunting grounds of less powerful thieves, shoemakers working at basement windows, a medical supply store with Maidenform corsets and bras in the window, a body shop with a red and yellow sign,
YOU WRECK ’EM I FIX ’EM.
He passed two painters working on the front of a beauty salon. Their sleeves were rolled up on their lean brown arms and showed their swollen veins. One of them was swearing. The sign over his head said
CHARLES OF PARIS,
and there was a picture of a lady with bright blue hair. Charles of Paris would pay those painters through the nose, and Charles’ customers would pay, after that, because it wasn’t enough, just getting along, just making ends meet, paying the bills: a man had to get ahead, retire to the country, a cottage on Silver Lake. He passed a restaurant where people were eating hamburgers in a quick, nervous, wolfish way as though they had important work and could only spare a minute. Some of the people eating were old men who sat alone and had their hats on. By the window sat a man with lifted eyebrows, pouting lips, and a fixed stare; he seemed to be struggling to remember something. In the back of his mind Walter Benson had a feeling he was to blame for all this, too. He walked still more quickly, lost in reverie, and before he knew it he was hurrying down McKinley, his own street.
He slowed down, suddenly remembering his weak heart—his bad ticker as he put it to himself, a phrase less frightening to him. His dread of meeting his wife washed over him again. He’d been away a long time, this time. He could hardly blame her if Marguerite was cross with him, driven past the limits of her patience. What had never entered his mind before came absolutely clear to him now: it wasn’t a kindness he’d done her, bringing that roomer in; it was more work, more worry. Why hadn’t he thought of that?
He walked on toward his house, still a block away, and as he walked he hunted through his suitcoat pockets without the faintest idea what it was he was hunting. In his inside coat-pocket he came upon
The Pocket Book of Favorite Poems.
Finding it gave him a just barely perceptible touch of comfort. Even so, walking up to his own front porch he felt more like Walter Boyle than like Walter Benson. He glanced over his shoulder, then went up the steps and tried the door. It was locked.
That was something he could not possibly have expected. Marguerite never went out any more, not since she’d broken her hip that time. Had she fallen down again? He tried the doorbell. No answer. He went over to the window behind the porch swing-chair and peered in, but except for the familiar old brown overstuffed chairs and davenport, the mantelshelf with the pictures of her family on it, the standing lamps, and the television, the artificial flowers, there was nothing. It was as if she’d died. The thought alarmed him, and he went around to the side door, where he had a key beside the meter.
Inside, everything was as usual, except that Marguerite was gone. The plants in the kitchen, in clay pots set on old kitchen dishes, were in perfect health; the linoleum shone as usual; everything was clean and excessively neat. Only one trifling irregularity caught his eye, a paperback book on the kitchen table,
Castro’s Revolution.
It was not the kind of thing she would read. The roomer, then, Benson decided. Leaning over it, he noticed that there was a newspaper clipping in it for a bookmark. He opened the book and, because the print of both the clipping and the book itself was very small, carried it to the window beside the washing machine where he could see. The clipping was about a Negro church being bombed. As for the book, the pages were cluttered with underlining, and along the margin at one point there was a wild, vertical bar in bright red ink.
Walter Benson blinked his protruding eyes and pursed his lips and read through it twice. Then he closed the book on his finger and stared up at the wall as if half-expecting a voice to come out of the wall and explain. At last, glancing over his shoulder again, he put the book down exactly where he’d found it and went over to the refrigerator to get himself an Orange Crush. It came to him that she might be in the back yard, working over her flowers, say, so he carried the pop with him to the back door and out onto the porch. She was not there either. The lawn hammock was there, though, and all at once it looked inviting. He went down the rickety steps and across the lawn and got cautiously into the hammock, where he lay on his round back, arms hanging out on either side, almost relaxed though he was still not easy about her being away. Benson closed his eyes.
Here in the back yard it was like being in the middle of the forest, miles from civilization. True, he could see the back yards of all the people on this side of the block, or if not the yards then the trees and garage roofs; and true, he could hear the traffic of the city, the roar of an occasional jet overhead, the televisions a little ways off; but this was, nevertheless,
his
yard, and even though he could be seen by anyone who bothered to look from a nearby yard or some upstairs window, he felt private here: he felt he was himself. He caught the scent of a barbecue and felt, one moment, pleased by it, the next, restless again. Suppose something had happened to her? Suppose she’d been murdered in her bed, or no (he had looked in her bed), lured out of the house and murdered in the street. He wondered for the hundredth time whether the police had worked out, finally, what he’d failed to tell them, that it was no one else but the Sunlight Man who’d come to let the Indian out. Could it be he was planning some terrible murder and needed the Indian’s help? The murder of Benson himself?
