Someone in the cellar. It had happened once before, the last time Tag had slipped back. It had been Will’s house then. Hodge ground on the starter and the Cleatrac exploded to life. He shoved in the clutch, shifted to third, and went clattering down the headland. At the furrow he pivoted left and dropped the plows. It must be midnight by now. The headlights inched forward toward the wide black silence and the stars. He could hear behind him, or thought he could, the whisper of the mollboards turning the black, firm earth, exposing old arrowheads, it might be, or pottery shards, or bits of murdered Indians’ skulls. He plowed on, silent. A crop of spring wheat to get in.
2
The Sunlight Man worked in haste, sawing, hammering, knotting, wiring at the bench in Luke Hodge’s garage. The pistol lay on the vise, where he could snatch it up in an instant. “Ridiculous,” he said to himself aloud once. But he could not let himself think about that. It was, for some reason not clear to him, necessary. He had meant to go to Ben, had instead gone to Clumly—had at any rate set up a meeting with Clumly. It was, he could only explain, necessary. What he must say he could not say to a brother; it must be to the coldly reasonable unreason of officialdom. It did not require all this lunatic equipment, of course. (The formless clutter of Luke’s garage was changing, little by little, to a clutter of toggled magician’s devices: false boxes, a bomb made of fertilizer and flour, a crudely fashioned thing of leather and cloth which, released in a dimly lit room, would be unmistakably a bird.) With a part of his mind he was resolved to go straight to the heart of the matter when he met with Clumly. Another part insisted upon preparation for jokes, the laughter of despair. He might not use them, he thought. But he understood he was fooling himself. He would use them. His prisoners were in the cellar, Millie gagged, full of bitchery and rage, Luke passive and despairing as himself, Nick silent as a snake, sunk into his mind. He would not think about them. The thought of Millie’s naked breasts, sharply revealed in the lightning flash, filled him with an obscene and bestial hunger that mocked his grief and disgusted him. In the gas chambers, no doubt, they copulated. But he would not. Nor would it be a gas chamber for him. He would make himself plain, knowing all along that what he had to say could never be plain to Clumly’s kind, and then, the absurd gesture finished, he would be gone without leaving a trace. Why he must make the gesture he did not know. He would make it, and afterward, “silence, exile, cunning.” He could escape easily enough. In Luke’s truck, perhaps; property of Paxton Corp.; a fitting irony. It was Kathleen’s father he’d have said it to, if destiny had allowed it.
The Old Man, not old then, stared at him with mindless eyes, comfortable in the leather chair, the magazine—Taggert’s magazine—closed indifferently over his finger.
“I’ll make you a proposition,” he said.
“You didn’t like the article?”
He ignored it. “I’ll put you on your feet. I owe you that. I’ll make an honest man of you, and you annul the marriage.”
“Bluntly spoken,” Hodge said.
“And I’ll assume all hospital expenses.”
“Because you owe her that.”
That, too, he ignored. “Take it or leave it.”
“And if I leave it?”
“You’ll take worse.”
“I believe it,” he said. “I know your history. Just the same, I think I’ll chance it.”
Paxton leaned forward, put the magazine on the chair-arm with distaste, and stood up. “I won’t debate my history with you.”
“Of course not,” Hodge said. “Even if you won, it would be vulgar, and a man like you can’t afford vulgarity. That’s for old families.” A nasty cut. He’d been a master of the nasty cut in those days. “But then, no need for debate. I know why you work as you do, the rationalizations. A thousand old saws in defense of shooting an organizer through the head. To the victor belong the spoils. He who hesitates is lost. Finders keepers losers weepers. In Rome do as the Romans do. Let sleeping dogs lie—you being, in this case, the sleeper. And above all, It’s a Free Country.”
“I should like to leave now.”
Hodge remained in front of the door, leaning on his arm. “Shouldn’t you, though. To push buttons, pull strings. A man of influence.”
Paxton stood waiting, patient. He had curly gray hair around his ears; the rest was black.
“You don’t care to debate it, naturally. I must defend all points of view myself, my own antagonist. It’s my training, however. The defense insists, ladies and gentlemen of the jury—”
“You’re unbalanced.” He showed, as usual, no sign of emotion.
“Yes. The defense insists that this gargantua you see before you has his reasons. This cyclops. This grendel. He was poor in his youth. He suffered much. He saw those around him—his fellow poor—tossed blindly on the current of their uncertain emotions, saw them reach out in all directions, undecided, feeble. It came into his mind that a man must have a purpose—some single, undeviating, divinely inexorable purpose. Purity of heart. He must get power, seize it come hell or high water and cling to it. And he has done so. Whom has he opposed? The kind of people he has known since childhood—working people, businessmen unsure of their positions, the weak, the scatterbrained. He has prevailed, and there can be only one reason: he was right. He has done much good. He has given men jobs when there were no jobs to be had. That is a fact. I ask, I implore, I demand that this man be given justice!”
Paxton closed his hand around his lapel and looked at the floor. “You’re making a fool of yourself.”
Only then was Hodge furious. For all his power over men, over his family, even over Kathleen, Paxton was not worth the opposition of a Hodge. He was not cunning enough to know viciousness when he heard it, so idiotic that he believed in full confidence that his antique saws were parries. He had no brain, had not even physical strength in which Hodge might spark some fire to answer his own. He had nothing but his monstrous righteousness. His daughter had married against her father’s choice, and now, going mad, must be saved from her demonic husband—a man known to be dishonest in business (what wonder if the poor child raved, set fires to curtains?).
Hodge said, “Are you really blind to it?—that it’s you who drove her mad?”
“I will not discuss it.”
“No, of course. Will merely correct it. Find her a pretty garden, perhaps. Buy her keepers.”
“Mr. Hodge, I have engagements. I’ll see you in court.”
Hodge calmed himself. He could understand the Old Man’s side. That was the horror. So one understood Germany, or the Chinese Communists, or Africa. The clear head’s burden. Thus by abstraction he fought the urge to murder his father-in-law, because she loved him. He stepped back from the door, letting him through. “I’ll see you in hell,” he said calmly.
The Old Man nodded—a strange thing, now that Hodge thought about it. Soberly nodded as if to say, “That’s so.”
He’d been working faster and faster, as if in flight from the memory burning in his head.
From the magazine, too, he had debts. They were slight, compared to the rest. They were among the debts he had meant to pay off, because Mollman was a friend of sorts, a former classmate, and besides that, a rare printer, the kind who took on obscure magazines from faith in them, gave honest prices and did a first-rate printing job. He even made a go of it—the riskiest business in the world, not even a business, as a matter of fact. No arty little journal really paid. You supported them by sweat and begging and living off the hog’s toes. So Hodge had planned to pay, the same way others paid, by sacrifice. But he had not gotten to it; never would. Whatever bills came, month by month, he threw out with the trash. He would read them, pay up, when his ship came in. So he’d told himself. But his ship was sunk. He admitted that now. He would have to start all over, maybe Argentina. He must not think about it. Deadly Opinions, he’d called it. A subscription list of two hundred, mostly unpaid. He had somewhere card-catalogs of names, a bundle of unreturned manuscript
s, packets of galley proof.
He would think about the weather.
The night was pleasant.
that time of night when the troublesome cares of humanity drift from our hearts and on seas of luxury streaming in gold we swim together, and make for a shore that is nowhere
(To the white-mantled maidens
of Tanagra I sing my sweet lays,
I am the pride of my city
for my conversational singing)
Greater love hath no man than this: that he give up his head for his beloved.
“That’s enough,” he said. He thought of striking his hand with the hammer.
“I need a drink,” he said. That, at least, was true, but he did not stop working.
The inability to act, except absurdly. Familiar plague of his existence. He’d been doing it, walking the same circle, round and round, since before the time …
It was not true that he himself was blameless. Had the Old Man sensed that, for all the sharp-steel brutality of his mind?
In the beginning, before he knew that the sickness was serious, he had been unfaithful to her in his thought. She’d made demands, was forever interrupting his work, insisted on knowing everywhere he went, constantly spoke of his scuffed shoes, his untrimmed hair. She complained that he was getting fat.
“You’re sick,” he said, lashing out viciously, and she answered that he was the sick one, and made him believe it. They would have terrible fights, frequently about her father. Then it would all be as it had been before, for a while. He would notice the beauty of her walk, would sit on the bed watching her fix her face for a party, and he would reach out to touch her when she passed. Then it would happen again, and he would endure it for a time, withdrawing to his thoughts. Sometimes she would go rigid with anger, would talk gibberish; and he, though he held her, soothed her, assured her of his love, would be full of secret hate. The Old Man had started it perhaps, but he himself had pushed it along. He had drawn back into his mind, and when she beat him with her fists, ludicrously futile, he had endured her violence with scorn. What she said of him was cruel and false, and because it was painful he had developed defenses. There were plenty of people who did not find him fat, ugly, stupid, malicious, whatever it was she accused him of at the moment. They became his battlements against her. He began to long with all his heart to be rid of her, not to be with some other woman—her cruelty made him hate all her kind—but merely to be free, to prove himself in some battle worth the trouble. And at the same time, precisely because he was no longer able to believe in any of them, he wanted to couple with every woman he saw. It was true, he would see later, that he was sick. He would realize with a shock of horror why it was that he’d been able to win her so easily from her father: it was no victory, the same regime.
But he had not known that yet and would not make it out until too late, after he had won by destroying her, had snapped her mind because he would not learn what his father’s life taught: stop, listen, wait.
It takes strength to listen and wait, and neither one of us was strong. To desire too much, to think oneself unfit—
Not a circle, a spiral inward (introversion) to a madness of cool objectivity.
Nothing passes belief when a god’s intention
We weren’t ready yet, either of us; we loved each other and were at war for fear that we didn’t deserve what we took. Withdrew by separate paths. You forward to madness, and as for me—
Deadly Opinions. He had meant it to be ironic, but the title told the truth. Thoughts of a mind half god, half goat. It was like that, yes. He had written once.
Burning nights and days in his sullen grove,
Funereal as onyx, hind legs splayed,
Sick and omnivorous, the ruptured goat
Participates in the antics of the brain.
His monstrous groin cries out to mount the wind
As the mind cries out for subtleties worth thought
And the heart for a sacrifice as thick as time:
Hunger and surfeit gathered in one red heat.
His eyes are blank as stones. He has no name,
No physics for his rage. Collects his force,
Attacks and painfully couples; then, alone,
Broods once more on anger; finally dies.
I am unhinged by that fierce unholy image:
Fed up with gentleness, and sick with thought,
I will tear down my kingdom hedge by hedge,
Make war on the scree-gashed mountains, lord the night!
I turn to life! In every glittering maid
I’ll plant my burning wrath till the last flame
That cracks my chest is spent away to head
And the parched ribcage cools to easy dying.
I’ll learn to mock responsibilities,
These cold whereases capping the living well
That churns, beneath the ground, by fiercer laws.
I’ll have no truck with words. Discretion. Guilt.
I’ll put on joy, or something brother to joy;
Butt down the delicate gates I’ve helped to firm.
I’ll turn blind eyes on tears, stone ears on sighs,
No more the pale good friend. A mindless storm.
For I have cause! I’ve proved what reason is—
Paid with contempt, indifference. Honored laws
I do not need; made peace with foolishness
That steals my hurtling-downhill time and laughs.
I too have blood to burn. I know the case
Of those I am of use to. A human voice
Making the time pass, keeping the night outdoors.
No more! Go hire pale virgins in my place!
Virgins. Who smile, who weep, who ask to be loved.
I am no raging goat (nor meant to be):
A kindly ass in glasses, lightly moved,
Sniffing back tears at the movies tenderly.
Or worse. A ruptured goat with a thinking head,
Aware that maidens fall betrayed not by
My pagan code but out of their own dumb need
As I fall headwords, raging thoughtfully.
Where is the man, while body and head make war?
Holy Abstraction, catch us up as we fall!
Turn us to saints. Distract us out of earth
To love of things celestial and unreal!
Make me the singer of lovers’ agonies,
No victim now, pale comforter to victims,
Some kindly grandmother with inward eyes
Forgiving harmless fools for slight destructions.
Make me the mindless brute in Plato’s cell,
Walled from sense, bereft of the flesh’s curse:
Teach me the trick of granite, burning yet still,
A seeming rest in a tumbling universe.
Such was his betrayal. Infinitely subtle compared to her father’s, and for that reason more deadly. There was no atonement for it, no court to hear his confession or defense.
He stood, hands on hips, surveying his work, and saw that it would do. He began to load it into Luke Hodge’s car. When he was finished he rubbed his hands and nodded. “Poor old bastard,” he said.
When God made Clumly
He was old and sick,
Where he should’ve put ’is head
He put his prick.
He made a quick trip to the cellar to check his prisoners, then started for his meeting. “Poor lunatics,” he said, sinking toward grief.
3
The front door of the church was unlocked. Clumly had had a hunch it might be. He looked all around with the greatest possible care and saw no one. The corner of Liberty and Main was gray and deserted, full of dead, pale light from the streetlamps, the fluorescent nightlights of the appliance store across the street, the floodlights reaching up like hopeless prayers toward the steeple of St. Joseph’s, across Main. Farther along toward the center of town the gray took on a pinkish cast, only faintly satanic, from the neons burning like flares above commerc
ial doorways as dark as coal bins. A long, glittering car passed, heading west on Main, and after a moment a semi heading in the opposite direction pulled up at the light, which had turned red now, and waited. The light changed; the truck made a hissing noise like a sigh and started up. Quickly, Chief Clumly opened the arched door just enough to let himself in, glanced over his shoulder one last time, threw down his cigar, suppressed an annoying yawn, and ducked into the cool, funereal darkness of the vestibule. He pulled the door shut behind him and stood bent over, hands clasped, small eyes peering into the blackness, listening. There was not a sound, but he could feel the maniac’s presence and, what was more, could smell it. The church reeked. He moved the tips of his fingers to the handle of his pistol and started toward the sanctuary door, only a pale gleam of wood in the almost perfect darkness. He was sick with weariness; he hadn’t been up so late in years. The floor creaked with every step he made. Twice he turned abruptly, believing there was a man behind him on the stairway that led up to the balcony and, beyond that, the steeple. At the sanctuary door he paused to listen again. His head ached. Still nothing. It was lighter here, the smell even stronger. The sanctuary walls were gray—they would be white by daylight—and held a faint glow of uncertain color that came filtered through the stained-glass windows along the side. As his eyes got used to the semidarkness he found he could make out the pulpit and font, the crenellations of the wall behind, the carved symbols on the panels of the elevated choir loft. On the minister’s tiered dais stood three high-backed chairs, old and dignified, and hanging above the chairs an elaborately ornamented lamp, not burning tonight although it was a symbol, Clumly had somewhere heard, of some kind of everlasting fire. Suddenly something burst into motion right under his nose—a bat, he thought as his alarm subsided—or perhaps some kind of bird. Before he knew what that fierce whirring was he had lifted his hand to his face, ducking back, and had let out a whispered cry; but immediately he saw the thing flying along the right wall and knew it was nothing supernatural. He reached down once more to touch the pistol. The pistol was gone.
“You’re right on time,” someone said the same instant. A deep voice full of anger like a glow of red light inside the skin. The high arched ceiling, the walls of wood and rock like plaster, the sea of gleaming pews falling away toward the altar made the voice seem even deeper, perhaps—and nearer—than it was. Clumly reached inside his coat and clicked on the small, flat tape recorder he’d tucked there, then smiled craftily, though his heart pounded, and took two more steps, his head cocked to listen for any hint of a footstep, the rustle of a curtain, some sign of where the man stood hidden. The skin of his arms prickled and all his body felt hot. At last he saw what he was looking for. In the central altar chair something moved, a darkness more intense than the darkness of the chair itself. It was only a slight movement, at the start, no more than a heart’s intuition of movement, like a stirring of some creature millennia old in a mountain of Siberian ice. But the intuition grew, and now he was moving forward toward the altar, raising his arms with grim and macabre dignity, half Miltonic dream of Lucifer, half whitefaced mechanical man in drab, once-black, moth-eaten clothes, responding with tin emotions to the demand of a drive in a museum of horrors. Incredibly, he must have been sitting there all the time. Yet here, a hundred feet away from where he sat, the pistol was gone.