That’ll be the day.
Then it was old Ben Hodge’s place, and that was no better, though it had seemed it at first. The old man would send him up in the silo to get out the ensilage, and Nick would sit up there talking to himself and singing, relaxed as he’d be if he’d eaten some pill, full of the eerie sensation of calm that came from saying No more, I took all the shit from you I can and then shutting them out, like a door closing in the back of his brain: concentrating on forgetting them until they were more than forgotten, as dead as if they never were born. He would sit listening to the echo of his singing coming back all around him as it would at the bottom of a well, unaware that the cattle were down there waiting, totally blind to Ben Hodge’s waiting, deaf as a stone to the sound of his clambering up the silo chute—not just pretending not to hear, stone deaf—deaf to his greeting if he gave any greeting, and blind to his huge shape squeezing through the square concrete silo door; or if not deaf and blind, then this, at least: no more aware than a sleeping man of a familiar figure coming into his bedroom and closing a window and leaving again. Ben Hodge would say nothing and wouldn’t even bear a grudge but would get out the ensilage himself, perhaps talking, until slowly, without batting an eyelash, Nick would rise out of his waking sleep to a clean sensation of cold and damp and the ensilage smell as sweet and clean as the smell of cold horse piss, and he would hear him talking, telling jokes as if nothing had happened. It was something to watch that old man fork out ensilage. He was big as a cow, more than two-hundred-fifty pounds, and if he’d wanted to he could have lifted the corner of the barn. He’d load the fork so full the ensilage would hardly go down the chute. He was all right. When you came across him and he didn’t expect you he’d be singing at the top of his voice, or sometimes yodeling. You could hear him some mornings a mile away, singing to himself on the tractor. If a cow kicked him he would knock her to her knees, but with people he was patient. And then they’d begun to talk sometimes, late at night, sitting in the milkhouse or in the kitchen along with Ben’s wife Vanessa, and Ben would tell him about all the boys he’d had out here working for him in his time, and all the boys his father the Congressman had reclaimed before him, little shits (that wasn’t Ben Hodge’s word) who’d come around at last and had farms of their own now, or good jobs at Dohler, Sylvania, the tannery, the gypsum mines—fine men, he loved them like sons. Verne called it bragging, because Verne was stupid. Ben Hodge looked at you, watched you as though your face was a part of the talk. He said, “What are you thinking?” and it wasn’t for politeness. He lived outside time, indifferent to the wisdom of age or the rights of station, indifferent even to that studied and fatuous indifference of people like Miss Bunce, the probation officer, whose every gesture was a parody of people like Hodge. So that the boys he’d brought up, and those his father had brought up, were things that had happened; not examples or lessons, but things that had happened, to look at, think out, and judge all over again to find out what was true. Everything in the world was an instance for Hodge. The swallows that nested, generation after generation, on the beams of his falling-down garage. The dog whose leg he’d cut off with the scythe. The cow that got drunk from the soup at the bottom of the silo. The chickens, the pigs, the dead rat under the ice-box. And he, Nick Slater, would sit unspeaking, listening to it exactly as he listened to the Sunlight Man now, aware in his blood that there were no required opinions, though there were right answers, still uncertain. And the more he listened the more clearly he knew that it was true that Ben Hodge was a father to the boys he’d raised. He sweated out their troubles, cried like a woman at their weddings, lent them money and could even borrow from them, indifferent even to their idea of what he was. And beyond all that, when they went bad—when they ended up in prison or beat their wives—he went on feeling as he’d felt before, indifferent even to goodness. So that Nick had been at once awed and sickened, had come to see the world from a new ground, from inside the old man’s feelings. Verne wouldn’t work, the six weeks he’d lived there, and Nick had been ashamed, furious, but the old man said, “Well, well,” thoughtfully, and “Well,” resigned to it. Nick, when he was drunk, would talk for hours with Verne, reasoning with him, and at last to get rid of him Verne would say, “Ok, ok, I’ll be better from now on, you watch.” And the old man would say to Nick, “Take it easy.” Late at night, when the old man came in from riding his motorcycle, he’d open the door a crack and look in at them to see that they were sleeping, and if the covers were off Verne’s back, the old man would fix them, as if he was their mother.
And so he couldn’t stand it. The old man asked and required nothing. He was a place to be, no more demanding or self-conscious than the land, or a bird, or somebody else’s cow, not insistently kind like his wife Vanessa, who would weep when they came home drunk at night, would visit them in jail when they got into trouble, would have cocoa ready when they came in from plowing off the roads with Hodge’s old tractor, and yet not professionally indifferent either, like Miss Bunce who sat listening with that prim smile, fiddling with her yellow plastic bracelet. He was wide and happy, as easy-living as a cow in a creek, and when he preached those sermons he was famous for, the people would laugh as though the walls of the church had been lifted away and the aisles were all planted in bluegrass and daisies, or they’d weep into their hankies and make out rainbows in their tears. So the responsibility that was not even demanded of Nick had overwhelmed him.
He’d said it to his brother late one night, sitting at the counter in the Palace of Sweets where the girls would come when Mancuso’s Theater let out, and his brother couldn’t get it, no more than he ever got anything, because Verne was an idiot—some kind of half-breed, Jim Tree used to say: half-Injun, half-shit. Verne said, grinning, showing all his square teeth, “He can’t do that to you, we’ll burn up the sumbitch’s barn,” and Nick had said, “Jesus, you got dogsick between your ears.” And so it had had to be Luke he told, Ben Hodge’s nephew, because Luke was twenty-two, only four years older than Nick himself, and because Luke had more or less been raised by Ben Hodge, had all the old man’s ways except for things inside—and because Luke knew already. They’d stood at the corncrib at Luke’s place, leaning their backs against the splintery, powder-dry, rotten gray slats of lath, and Nick had explained. It was coming on dark. They’d just finished letting the cows out. From where they stood they could see the whole valley, blue-gray miles and miles of it, clear to where the Attica Prison stood like an old-time castle, and fog was rolling in from the south. He’d said, “Take girls. You see one, a pretty one, and you know you’re dressed sharp and your hair’s ok, and you know you can do it. I mean you can get in her pants. It fills up your chest and you haven’t got a choice, and you don’t have a choice with the next one either, or the next or the next, and every time it’s the same thing, the sickness feeling: you have to, she even wants you to. And what I’m telling you is, it’s no different. A gas station with the lights off, standing there shining and slick in the dark—it can make you sweat. All right. Or a big car with the keys in it. I mean those things are beautiful.” Luke said, “That’s stupid.” Dully, stating a fact. And Nick had nodded. “Just the same, I’m coming to your place. You tell your Uncle Ben you’ve changed your mind, you need me.” Luke’s face was white against the dusk of sky and trees. “You think I’m crazy too?” he said. Nick frowned. “You got no choice.” Which was true. The same thing that made it impossible for Nick to stay on with Ben Hodge made it impossible for Luke to leave him there. At Luke’s, from then on, Nick could work or not, whatever he pleased. They merely waited, and when his probation was up and nothing to stop him, he would be gone.
But now his brother had screwed him up with that joyride, and the parole would be off. And so maybe he had no choice now but to jump his bail when it finally came and get moving. He had to think it out, figure where he would head for and what he would do. South America maybe. He lay watching the old professional as if the humped, calm body itself might gi
ve him some signal.
He said, glancing at Verne, “You think he likes it?—the old man?”
“Who? Likes what?” He pursed his big lips. He was sitting on the floor, looking at another of the used Superman comics the guard had brought.
Nick nodded toward the thief. “What he does,” Nick said.
Verne said, “That old bastard, I bet you it’s the same thing to him as selling shoes.”
He thought about it. The bearded man leaned on the bars, stroking his beard, watching and listening to something inside his own skull.
“Sometimes I could kill him,” Nick said, nodding toward the thief.
Verne grinned. “You ain’t lucky enough. Only way you could kill a guy would be to fall on him out of a window.”
Nick said, “Where’s that lawyer?”
They’d been asking it for a week now, and they knew where he was.
“They’re going to fry you,” the bearded man said. “All the lawyers are dead.”
“Even if she dies,” Nick’s brother said, “they won’t give us more’n two, three years. It was manslaughter.”
The bearded man opened his hands and rolled his eyes up. “Fzzzzt.”
“Mister, you got a mean streak,” Verne said. He shook his finger. “I mean you are a mean, mean man.”
“I am the Truth,” he said.
Nick’s hand flashed out faster than a snake, but the man was out of reach. The man’s eyes widened a little, then narrowed and almost closed. He sank into thought. You could see him falling away like a rock in the water.
6
It made no difference to Walter Boyle what the Indians and the bearded one said or did. Live and let live was his motto. Nevertheless, lying wide awake in the middle of the night, listening because he had no choice, he wished the whole pack of them dead. When the guard, Salvador, said once of the bearded man, “That fella’s sick, you know? Christ, who needs to test him to find it out?”—Boyle had been tempted almost into talking about it. But he lit the cigarette the guard had given him and merely peered at it nearsightedly, saying neither yes nor no. He’d said, “They talk a lot. It’s hard to sleep.” That was all.
It hadn’t been so bad in the beginning, when the Indians ignored the man’s prattle. The Indians were people you wouldn’t want to meet all alone at night in the city park, but they were two cells away and they didn’t say much. He could put up with them for a while. And the talk was all right—like a faucet dripping, or like a pump thumping away in the basement of a house you were going over. He’d heard it before, talk like that, at bus stations and tobacco stores, at coffee shops when there was a college nearby, like in Buffalo. But when the Indians started to listen, his feelings changed. It wasn’t good, giving people like that ideas. Besides, the bearded man was crazy. That pacing, for instance. And Boyle would swear—almost swear—he’d heard the bearded man crying once, sitting in pitch darkness, early in the morning. He knew pretty well what that meant. He’d had a neighbor once that had acted strange and had cried a lot, and one day he’d killed himself. He was an engineer at Boeing, sharp as a tack, people said. His wife came home about two in the morning and the radio was playing but there weren’t any lights on, and she’d gone in and found him on the davenport, with the rifle on the floor—he’d fired it with his bare foot. She’d come over, all wild, and made Walter Boyle go in with her. They’d had to push the davenport over the edge at the city dump, later. She was over at his house until almost dawn, after the police left, phoning all her relatives and crying and crying and talking to Boyle’s wife. He’d gone to bed.
The Sunlight Man was babbling again about freedom—sitting in the dark in a small-town jail and babbling about freedom. And they were listening, or anyway one of them was. The younger one would be asleep by now—the fat, toadlike one with the matted hair like a wet cat’s.
Though it was late, there was still traffic on the street below. It was a Saturday night, the night the crowd from the racetrack was always heaviest. They’d be bumper-to-bumper for miles. He tried to focus on the sound of the traffic, but still snatches of the talk pressed through. For most people there is no such thing as freedom, this position would hold. Not me, you understand. Boyle was not one to call the guard. And yet the man had said he would keep them quiet—not the guard who was on duty now but the younger one, the Italian. It was a kind of promise. Boyle thought suddenly, with unusual ferocity, “They have no respect for the other person.” It wasn’t good for him to lose sleep this way, night after night. He’d be fifty-six in January, and the doctor had told him he must begin slowing down, try not to take his work home with him, get a hobby … something to relax his mind and nerves. “Do you have any hobbies?” the doctor had said.
Boyle had squinted, feeling naked and vulnerable with his shirt and glasses off, and the doctor had pressed, “Golf? Pinochle? Model ships? I have a brother-in-law does that, model ships.” (The office looked down on the heart of Buffalo, Sheridan Drive, huge office buildings like imprisoning walls of smoky granite and brick and concrete that might have been a thousand years old. Boyle had sat looking with his hands behind his back, his shirt in one hand, miserably racking his brains for some healthful interest. Ships. He and Marguerite would go down to the docks sometimes and watch them unload the coal boats—black ships, black earth, black freight cars under the black steel scaffolding. She loved water, even here where it smelled of oil and was thick and green as cold pea soup, with something like spittle floating on the top, and pieces of paper, and rubbers. “Faraway Places” was her favorite song. She called to the gulls and waved to the people pulling out for Crystal Beach, over in Canada, across the lake. But Boyle had no feeling for ships. None. Often when he went with her he would take along a newspaper.) The doctor was studying him, smiling politely (he was a sly little Jew, around thirty: Kleiss, or Fleiss, something like that). Boyle blurted out in sudden desperation, as though he could feel his health falling away like the pigeons dipping swiftly between smoky buildings toward the street: “I memorize poetry, sometimes.” He added at once nervously, for fear the doctor might misunderstand or, worse, disbelieve him:
The little toy dog is all covered with dust,
Yet sturdy and staunch he stands;
The little toy soldier is red with rust …
He stopped, blushing scarlet.
“Excellent!” the doctor exclaimed, and he seemed downright delighted by it, as though it were the best cure possible. “Go on. I didn’t mean to interrupt. Say the rest.” He called the nurse in to hear it, but Boyle would perform no more, could only smile as he’d done (he remembered suddenly and vividly) in grade school when Mrs. Wheat called the Principal to hear him.
And so when Boyle had left the office he’d felt thirty years younger—no doubt partly because he had finally told someone his secret, and the man had not laughed. He felt as if nothing could ever worry him again as long as he lived, and he said almost aloud as he walked past the glittering, grave-cold storefronts, “Do not say that thou art weary, O my soul, do not say, ‘This Life is grief, the Strife is grim. …’”
He had worries, nevertheless. He had always done all right, as well as most people did these days, and yet he’d never gotten ahead. Now, with his later years creeping up on him, he couldn’t help thinking about the future. What would happen to them if he too should get sick, the way Marguerite had done? (She’d been employed at a bakery until two years ago, but then one morning she’d fallen downstairs—she was heavy and couldn’t see her feet—and she’d broken her hip and been laid up for over a year. Even now she wasn’t right.) Where would the money come from then? What would happen to the house?
There were worse things than that. Marguerite had gotten more and more to be a worrywart, these past few years. She knew he could never be positive how long he’d be away, and for a long time she’d seemed resigned to it—resigned even to his failing to phone for sometimes weeks at a time. And she knew, too, that there was nobody in this world more safe than he wa
s. They’d been boyfriend and girlfriend for thirteen years before he’d popped the question. “I know Walter Benson like the back of my hand,” she liked to say. (Benson was his name at home.) But lately, for all that, his extended stays seemed to worry her more and more.
“Walter, I get so worried,” she said. She sat on the top step of the green back porch, fanning herself; the cotton dress stuck to her thighs and shoulders, and there were sweat patches. He was sitting on the metal chair in the neatly clipped grass below her. He liked the baking July sun. Always had.
He looked at her, then past her. He nodded. “Gotta fix that screen door.”
“Walter,” she said, “you’re a thousand miles away.” She began to cry.
It was that that had made him decide to put in a want-ad for a boarder, someone who’d be there at night to make the place feel safer, keep prowlers away and chew the fat with her from time to time. And so now Walter Boyle had another worry. Would the man pay promptly? Would he smoke in bed and set the house afire? What were those tons of mimeographed papers lying among hamburger wrappers in the back of his car? In the back window he had a thing hanging, a leadlike ball with raised letters on it, like letters from some kind of printing machine.
Boyle sighed.