He had nibbled the apple, pulpy as it was, to the bright black seeds. He wondered where it had come from and why he had not eaten it before. “Client,” he thought. “Some farmer.” And then: “Odd.” If he were not Hodge—invincible Hodge!—he would have thought of Snow White, poison; or of Adam and Eve; or of love grown older. He thought: “Snow-apple,” and was distinctly pleased that he still remembered the name.
Beyond the closed Venetian blinds, in the parking lot between the office and the back wall of the Methodist church, small children were playing a singing game he remembered from a long, long time ago:
McGregor got up and he gave her a thump,
Gave her a thump, gave her a thump. . .
Again the rueful smile came. Italian kids. He’d seen them there often, glancing over his spectacles briefly, absent-mindedly, as he passed the window with a sheaf of papers for Betty in the outer office to sort and file. But he couldn’t remember having noticed before what sort of game they played. He wondered, briefly, whether Will would remember it too, and whether he would associate the game with the long green hills of Stony Hill Farm or with some other place, Albany, say, in Hodge’s belated law-school days, or Buffalo, or Leroy, or Ben’s place. The question entered and left his mind in a single instant, no more than a trifling impulse of the blood, a question he would no more have asked if Will were there than he would pause now to consider it. The world it came from was not his world. That was his immunity to the Old Man’s power, and also it was his weakness. His mind glanced from the children playing in the parking lot to the sooty church window, one small pane of which was broken, to the sill he’d forgotten to fix at home. He felt himself at the edge of some unpleasant recollection, but the instant he knew it was there it was gone, and he was waiting again, reading the scrawled note on the corner of his desk: Obtain the release of Nick S. On a smaller sheet there was another note, in Betty’s hand: Check ins. pol. on converted School Bus for Ben.
Ben his brother.
Mortgaged to his ears for rolling stock already—big farm equipment, four tractors, a pick-up truck, a station wagon, two motorcycles, and now a school bus. His legacy from their father was one of the unluckiest; or so it seemed, from time to time, to Will Hodge Sr. (Ben would stand in his yard at the Other Place—as they all still called it, even now that Stony Hill was gone—a man still handsome though grown red-faced and heavy at fifty, his head tipped back, looking through the lower halves of his thick, dark-tinted steel-rimmed glasses at the newly delivered corn chopper, or the twenty-year-old wired-together baler, and the look on his face and in his stance was like a child’s, solemn, deeply satisfied, detached as a sunlit mystical vision from the dying tamaracks, tumble-down barns, and the high, orange-yellow old brick house that labored in vain to establish for Ben Hodge his spiritual limits. There were honeybees in the walls of the house, and in the bedroom where Ben and Vanessa slept in the Congressman’s grand old walnut bed there were coffee cans to collect the honey that dripped down the walls from the windowsills; set squarely in the center of the once-large kitchen was a bathroom (vented to the kitchen) that Ben had put in for the comfort of his (and Will Hodge’s) mother in her last year; and in the kitchen and pantry and livingroom walls there were plaster patches to recall the time when Ben Hodge would sit up late with his twenty-two, killing the rats his traps missed before they could nibble the sleeping old woman’s fingers. Destructions unnerving, in some metaphysical way unlawful, to Hodge. For if Hodge was by temperament a mender, a servant of substance, Ben was a dreamer, a poet, an occasional visiting preacher at country churches from here to good news where. He was blind to the accelerating demolition all around him, or saw it in his own queer terms, inscrutable to all but his good wife and, perhaps, children, both his own and the numerous children he and Vanessa took in. Among them Will and Luke. (So that it had been as Hodge had expected it would be—had even, strange to say, hoped it would be: the image had been reinforced for them both, the magnificent ghost of a lost time and place revitalized, made to seem fit for a world it could never survive in except by a calculated destruction of body for soul: a world well lost for poetry, for the beauty of sleek or angular machines, big motors roaring for as long as they lasted, profligate generosity, family talk. Well lost—the barns Hodge’s father had built, the trees he’d planted, the dew-white vineyard—but lost, past recovery. Lost.)
“Hah,” he said.
There was someone at the door.
Quickly, slyly, he dropped the apple core in the basket by his desk.
3
He knew the moment he opened the door that something serious had happened and that he was, himself, in some way, accused. The two policemen he’d known for years—stooped, bald Clumly and Dominic Sangirgonio—stood on the steps suspiciously casual, solemn-faced as Chinamen, not talking, looking at him as though they did not know him. Clumly looked drained, like a man just told he will be dead before morning. His eyes were full of rage. Clumly nodded, an act of will, and gave a smile-like twitch of the colorless lips on the face as white as a grub’s. The ice-blue eyes glittered. “Morning, Will,” he said loudly, as though Hodge were deaf. He bristled with impatience, and Hodge had a feeling the man’s mind was miles away, sorrowing, or burning after vengeance.
“Good morning,” Hodge said. He slid his lower lip over his upper, instinctively cautious, like a man in a room with a lion. He had a brief, peculiarly clear sense of the motionless, deserted street, the curb where a little while ago Will Jr’s Chevy had been, the sidewalk dappled with the shadows of leaves, the two men’s shoes on the rubber-matted steps. At last, grimly, Hodge smiled, annoyed at that infernal sense of himself as a small boy forever ready to be guilty of forgotten crimes. But Clumly, too, was like a boy—a man of over sixty, close to retirement. He stood angrily tapping the side of his pantleg with his hat—his white, perfectly hairless head still cocked. He wore his uniform, as always. Miller, too, wore his uniform, the wide belt, the gun. He folded his arms.
“Catching up on some work?” Clumly asked ferociously, looking past Hodge into the office. He looked like a bear, bending to peer in past Hodge.
“No, not really,” Hodge said, considering again. “Come in.”
Clumly glanced at him, then nodded, a jerk of the head. “We won’t be a minute,” he said.
Hodge held the door for them, then closed it behind them.
Hodge said nothing. Miller stood by the door, studiously examining the police cap; Clumly stood in the middle of the room, hands in coatpockets, scowling and looking around not as a friend but as a police professional. He asked, “What are you doing here on a Sunday, Will?”
“Will Jr came down,” Hodge said. “He needed some maps he’d left here.” He hooked his thumbs around his suspenders and stood, jaw protruding, waiting.
Clumly cocked his head, bending toward the desk to read the note on the tablet. A flush of irritation ran through Hodge, but he said nothing. Clumly read aloud, eyes glittering: “Obtain the release of Nick S.” He scowled, blushing at the same time, and glanced at Miller. “You won’t need this.” He put down the tablet. “He’s already out.”
Hodge waited, and later it would seem to him that Clumly had taken a good deal longer than necessary to come out with it: he would remember that absolute stillness of Miller, standing by the door looking fixedly into his hat, and Clumly himself, touching his nose with two fingers like a man baffled by a sudden and inexplicable change in a familiar landscape, studying Hodge’s jaw. He said, “He’s escaped. Killed a man. You’d better come down with us.”
“Poppycock!” Hodge exploded. “I don’t believe it.”
Again Clumly touched his nose, looking at Hodge as though he were not a man, an old friend, but some mysterious object brought back from the center of Africa or India, a contraption with no clear purpose or meaning, possibly dangerous. Under that stare, Will Hodge felt heavy as stone, freakish, sealed off from the usual flow of things as he’d been sealed off, in the old days, when h
is wife would turn briefly to look at him with revulsion. But Clumly, too, was transmogrified. He looked dead, as though there were no longer any intrinsic connection between the parts of his face—the round, yellowed ears, the red-veined nose, the white, sagging cheeks that lapped to the sides of his small, cleft chin like old drapery, or like dirty snow sinking into itself, or like bread-dough. The old man’s shirt was blue, his tie dark green. He’d been wearing that same limp uniform it must be a month.
“Mind if I use your phone?” he said.
Hodge waved him toward it.
Clumly went around behind the desk, sliding his finger along the top as he went, and sat down heavily. He dialed, waited, looking up fiercely at the shabby rosette in the center of the ceiling, then sat forward abruptly, slightly crossing his eyes to watch the receiver, and shouted into it. “Hello, Mikhail,” he said. “This is Clumly. Correct. That’s right. Listen. I’m at Will Hodge’s office.” His eyes grew cunning. “Will Jr has been here a little while back. He’s likely on his way up to Buffalo now. Tell the Thruway people if they see him, they should send him back. We need to talk to him.” He listened, foxy as the devil. “That’s right,” he said. “Correct.” He hung up the phone. He looked at Hodge again, still seething with rage but this time more as he might look at something human. Hodge was not comforted. He’d sent the State Troopers after Will, well as he knew him.
“Hell of a business,” Clumly said.
Grimly, Hodge studied the man’s bald dome. “Yes it is,” he said.
Clumly sighed, eyes going vague, his mind far away again. “Well, let’s go.” He stood up.
It was only when he was standing in the parking lot—a square like the courtyard of a dirty castle, high brick walls on three sides and most of the fourth, the air thick with the smell from the cleaners’, the cinders and dirt under Hodge’s shoes rutted and dented, baked hard as pottery—that the horror of the thing came over him. It seemed to him now that any fool should have seen that it would end this way, Nick Slater killing somebody merely to get out of jail, Will Jr dragged into it, and Hodge himself in some nebulous way responsible. It came to him that he hadn’t even thought to ask who it was that had been killed.
He watched the black and white police car nose out into the street, the red light flashing, dappled sunlight sliding on the roof as it moved, then opened the door of his elderly Plymouth and squeezed behind the wheel. It was baking hot inside the car, and it smelled of stale cigarette smoke. He sat a moment catching his breath before painfully reaching his key toward the ignition. He ground on the starter, and at last the engine caught. “All right,” Hodge said. He rolled down the window, grunting, then started for the jail.
“Blame little monkey,” he said.
But he could not get rid of his extreme uneasiness. It was almost less an emotion than a physical sensation, as if the whole world had risen up against him. The heat and light of the August sun made his head ache and hurt his eyes, and the rasp of the car motor, the sporadic bumping of metal against metal somewhere up close to the left front wheel, were unnaturally loud, cutting. Nick Slater’s face rose up in his mind, remarkably distinct, the hair as long as a woman’s, coal black and slicked down like the hair of one of those motorcycle people at a dance. The expression on the face—the thin, wide lips, the far-apart eyes, the nostrils flared like the nostrils of a horse—was a baffling mixture of joy and terror. It was an image without background, as it first came to him, and only after concentrating a moment could Hodge draw in the rest. It was at the Fireman’s Carnival, in the middle of July. Hodge had been standing with his daughter and her husband, doing nothing, taking in the noise and turbulent motion and color of the place, a Kewpie doll clutched in his two square hands, a cardboard box containing a goldfish hanging from one finger (he remembered it all very clearly now, the explosions of color in the overcast sky, the nasal shouts of the barkers and hucksters on all sides of him, the dancing girls ancient and sickly in repose, leanjawed as Baptist Sunday-school teachers with the eyes of old tigers, and above it all, mystical and hushed, mindlessly turning as if forever, the Ferris wheel: Mary Lou had said, “Ride the Ferris wheel, Dad?” “No sir,” he had snorted, smiling grimly, shocked by the realization that he could do it, no one would stop him, though it would kill him). All at once some kind of commotion broke out, over by the frozen-custard truck: a crowd shouting and running, someone howling “Police!” “What’s happened?” they all asked each other. “A fire,” someone said, and they all passed it back. But it wasn’t a fire, it was a firecracker, they learned. Some Indian had thrown one right into the crowd, and the men in the crowd had gone after him. Luckily for everybody, the police had caught him first. “There he is!” the man at Hodge’s back yelled. The police had him up on the dancing girls’ platform to protect him from the crowd, and in the glow of colored lights all around the platform eyes and noses were tipped up to look, and at the back of the crowd there were people jumping up and down, trying to see. “Why that’s Luke’s boy!” Hodge said. His son-in-law shook his head, hands in his pockets. He was six-foot-nine. “Durned if it ain’t.” He seemed not especially impressed. They had handcuffs on the boy. Hodge pushed through the crowd toward the platform, growling “K’out the way there, k’out the way!” in that heavy voice he’d inherited from his father the Congressman; and when he got there, puffing, still holding on to the Kewpie doll and the box with the goldfish, he heaved his great weight up the makeshift wooden steps and said, “What seems to be the trouble here?” The two policemen, sheriffs men, young fellows both of them, seemed more nervous than the boy. “I never did it, Uncle Will,” the Indian said, clowning, mimicking a child. “They seen me standing there, and all it is, they figured I did it.” But his breath stunk of beer, and his look was wild. “I’ll talk to you later,” Hodge said. The policemen, it turned out, were inclined to believe Nick Slater’s story, if only to be rid of him. No one seemed to have seen him throw the firecracker, in any case, and if Hodge wanted to take charge of the boy, that would be fine with them. Hodge snorted with disgust, but agreed to it. Nick was in no position to go through more court trouble. Hodge had gone directly to the car with him, and there, some distance from the honking and whirring of the carnival machines, the oceanic murmur of the crowd, he had said, “Luke know you came here?” The boy sat back almost on his shoulders, his knees up over the dash. “Psshew,” he said, “I thought I was one dead Redman.” His smile was still wild, and he was breathing hard. He shaped a gun with his right hand and fired twice, silently, at the crowd. Hodge said sternly, “I asked you a question.” Nick folded his arms, black against the white of his clean, neatly pressed shirt, and mused. At last he said, “Your Honor, I fear I must refuse to answer, on the grounds that the answer might cremate me.” Hodge snorted. “Listen, though,” Nick said. He looked at Hodge sideways, his face solemn now. “Thanks.” Suddenly he grinned, his white teeth huge and square.
“Dang fool,” Hodge said, troubled by some memory he could not make out.
A crowd had gathered around the high brownstone and concrete imitation castle set back among dying elms and maple trees. Except for the barred windows along the sides of the place, it might have been a library, or an old post office, or a school. The men from the hospital were just closing the light blue ambulance doors as Hodge drove up. He parked in front of the fire hydrant, switched off the engine, and sat watching, squinting against the brightness of the day, as they climbed into the ambulance and pulled away from the curb. A block from the jail they stopped behind the traffic waiting for a red light. He was dead then, yes.
“A man never knows from one minute to the next,” Hodge said. He patted his cigarette pocket though he hadn’t smoked for a month. He got out and walked up onto the lawn, watching the people. The grass on the lawn was as dry as excelsior and almost as brown. The dirt was dry as sand full in the sun. Hodge found Walt Sprague was there in the crowd, a client. Hodge started past him.
“Well hello there, Counsellor,
” Sprague yelled, jerking his head. He was chewing. “You come over to see the excitement, did you?”
Hodge laughed, horselike. “What happened?” he said. The people were talking all around them just loudly enough that Sprague didn’t hear. Hodge repeated it. On the steps, trying to peek in, there was a queer-looking young man in a black Amish hat and clothes like a tramp’s.
“They had a jailbreak, thass what they say,” Sprague said. His voice was high and barren as a clay hill, and his long, burnt-dry face was folded and whiskered like a dog’s. He wore a T-shirt and baggy bib-overalls. “I guess they killed somebody, too. I never seen it, myself. I was over there acrost the street getting my tractor fixed. I seen the crowd all coming around and I come right on over. Some young fellow. I seen them bring him out. I-talian, looked like. Policeman.”