“I know what I feel,” he whispered. In the deathly still farmhouse, the sound was like fire in straw.
And what do you feel for sure? the echoes asked.
There was an answer to that. He could not quite put his hand on it, but it was there, he would have it in a moment. He must wait.
The girl at Buz Marchant’s had a squeezed-shut face. She was a good girl, no doubt. Pretty, kind in the usual ways. Not intelligent, no, but not all saints were intelligent either. The thing was—he struggled to get hold of it, nail it down once and for all—but again it came merely to this: she had a face that marked her, singled her out not as the bearer of any particular virtue or defect but as, simply, the bearer of her singleness. In adolescent dreams one coupled with radiant beauties with indefinite and lovely faces, but then one day it all turned real, no longer airy wet-dream vision—a girl one knew, with a name, brittle hair, a chin just a little too deeply cleft. That was love, if it was anything. Not the other. Not the sunlight but the sunlight entrapped in the cloud.
“Bullshit,” he whispered.
Nevertheless, what was true of the girl was true of Mrs. Kleppmann too, and of Kleppmann. An objectness neither significant nor beautiful but there, singular; and they spoke words to him neither significant nor beautiful either; and by agreement, he understood them.
He understood, suddenly, what had gone wrong between him and Louise, and between him and his children, between his own mother and father, between, even, the Congressman and his sons. A kind of power failure, a sickly decline into vision. As simple as that. The discovery ran through his body like a shock and made his skin tingle, the way music did sometimes, or a brilliant point perfectly timed in a piece of litigation. All rhythm, he thought in wild excitement, pure matter in its rhythm. His head filled with an image of atoms going off, on, off, on, spinning—or planets, maybe, there was no telling now. He felt himself swinging in a wide arc around—someone. The face was obscure, a threatening shadow.
In the morning, what he remembered of all this seemed the usual dim-wittedness of dream, when the circuits are weak. Kleppmann spoke casually of horrors in Germany and scoffed at trials of war criminals as self-congratulation. They could not agree. Will Jr boarded the train for St. Louis at noon, integrity intact (conventions intact), though he had not had time, as yet, to work out his reasons. He would think it out on the train and plane, he told himself. But he didn’t. The truth was, there was no need. Kleppmann had chosen—for whatever reason, evil or good, despite his habit in such cases, and despite the hatred that flickered inside him like summer lightning, a hatred of life itself, perhaps (but tradition be damned)—to send him home alive.
XIX
Workmen in
a Quarry
The Caverns of the Grave I’ve seen,
And these I show’d to England’s Queen,
But now the Caves of Hell I view,
Who shall I dare to show them to?
—William Blake
1
Miller said, “They want you over at the Mayor’s at ten o’clock.”
Clumly nodded and moved on toward his office.
“I got some stuff for you,” Miller said.
“Bring it in.” He opened the door, took his hat off, and went to his desk. Miller came with his clipboard and two or three folders in the crook of his arm. Chief Clumly sat waiting, his elbows firmly planted. The two small eyes at the peak of his white, mole’s nose were as red as a wolfs. It was nine a.m. One hour yet before Mayor Mullen’s “investigation.”
Miller said, “Lot of activity last night. Some kids beat up a couple in a parked car, behind the racetrack.” He handed the reports to Clumly. “And somebody got into Salway’s Hardware last night. Took some money and some papers out of the safe and also—” he held the sheet to Clumly “—twenty-six guns, seventeen of them rifles. Got in the same way as at Francis and Mead. Could be the same outfit. Professional work.”
“You know when it happened?”
“Not for sure. Ed Tank was on prowl. He discovered it at eleven-thirty. There’s more.”
“Go ahead.”
“Early this morning, around five-twenty-five, a guy went into Greco’s Garage in Darien, took a whole lot of car parts. He must’ve hauled ’em off in a truck. The State Police—”
“How you know the time?”
“Trooper called in at five-twenty-five, said he was at Greco’s, going in to investigate. Then nothing. They found his car there burnt to a cinder.”
“Find the trooper?”
“Not a trace.”
Clumly half-closed his eyes, and they looked more than ever like a wolf’s. “Dead, you think?”
“I don’t know.”
Clumly said, “Sounds like vigilantes. You think so? Guns. Parts for bombs.”
Miller nodded. “That’s what it sounds like. The State Police have already got hold of the Federal.”
“Ok, that’s all?”
“Not quite,” Miller said. “You wanted a description of the man who registered in Paxton’s name at that ranch in Colorado. We got it. Man with a scarred face, yellow hair, and a yellow beard.”
“The Sunlight Man.”
He nodded. “As for the stone—the little white stone you gave me—it’s out of a deer. Very rare, they say. Forms inside the deer’s stomach, one deer in a thousand.”
“Anything else?”
“That’s all so far on the stone. But this: your hunch was right about Kathleen Paxton. She was transferred from the place in Palo Alto on August sixteenth. Shipped to Rochester. Papers signed by her brother.”
“You’ve got the address?”
Miller nodded and handed him the paper from his clipboard.
“Good work. First-rate. That’s all for now. Have Kozlowski wait for me. There’s just about time for—” He paused, thought better of it. “That’s all,” he said with finality. “Have Kozlowski wait.”
Miller brooded a moment, then nodded. He said, “Your wife was in.” After a moment: “She had some tapes she wanted me to hear.”
“You heard ’em?” He kept himself calm.
Miller nodded. “So did Uphill. He was right outside the door.”
Clumly tipped the desk with one finger. “All right,” he said. A whisper.
Miller nodded again, then saluted and went out.
Now that he was alone, Clumly jumped up and paced and made no attempt to contain his anger. The Sunlight Man had been laughing at him all the time. Taggert Hodge! No doubt had the whole damn family working for him. Keeping him up all day and night, wrecking his health, ruining his brains, robbing him of his job, robbing him even of the dignity a Chief of Police ought to have when he retired. No doubt out there someplace watching him right now. Disguised as a fireman maybe. How else would Uphill have known?
Clumly paused at the window and scowled, then abruptly went to the door and called Figlow. “I want that firehouse raided,” he said.
“What?” Figlow said.
“You heard me. Raid the firehouse. The Sunlight Man’s there, in disguise.”
Figlow put his fist on his mouth, eyebrows lowered. “Yes-sir,” he said.
Clumly stormed back to his desk. The paper the Judge had brought for him to read still lay there. He looked away from it guiltily. “Ok, my magical friend,” he said aloud, “you were right. Your time’s running out.” He looked at his watch. 9:30. Appointment with the Mayor at ten. Uphill would be there. Fred Clumly’s time, too, was running out.
“Kozlowski,” Clumly said, “we’re in an age of technology. A great time to be alive, but also a dangerous one.”
Kozlowski kept his eyes on the traffic.
“A time of great prosperity. Enormous buildings, enormous businesses, factories, institutions of learning! And what’s in the shadow of those glorious buildings? Hovels, Kozlowski. Misery and crime and despair. More violence than ever before in history. More sorrow and hopelessness and rage. America leads the world in it. The Russians are hurrying t
o catch up, of course—they’ll be mass-producing cars by next year, I read, and also refrigerators and I forget what-all else: turning out a glorious civilization by technology, pushbutton factories where no humans need apply. Ha. It’s something to think about. Khrushchev tried to boost the economy, but he was cowardly, come right down to it. There’s why Koseygen or whatever-his-name-is took over. Gross national profit has jumped this year, matched by gross national violence. Fact. They’re catching up with us!” Clumly rubbed his hands. “You ever stop to think just exactly what happens in slums, Kozlowski? They start out a little pocket of Negroes, say, who are living there while they look for a job that will move them out. No jobs. In 1900, fifty-six per cent of the total employed population was engaged in farming and fisheries and forestry. Now that’s down to I think it was seven per cent. Mechanization, Kozlowski. Technology. No matter what price supports you put in, no matter what kind of advertising you put on the doors of your pick-up truck—like DRINK MORE MILK—it’s over. Finished. Going to be six, seven companies doing all the farming in the whole damn country. As for industry, used to be in 1900 almost half the population was engaged in that, but it’s slipping by leaps and bounds. Industries bigger than ever, but now they’re mechanized. Telecontrol in the shop—you know what that is, Kozlowski? One machine, a man sitting in an office running all the whole damn plant, with maybe six, eight men with brooms and college educations keeping an eye on things in case anything happens to go wrong. And as for the office, who needs secretaries? They got computers can make out the check for the man at the telecontrol! What’s to happen to all that labor that’s no longer needed? Government, you say. But just think about it. 1900 there was sixteen per cent of the people in State and Federal government jobs. Now it’s forty per cent and rising. Doing what? Maybe sixteen different agencies all doing the same damn job, checking up on each other—providing they happen to know about each other’s existence. That’s insanity, boy. When a whole country’s got nothing to do but watch somebody, well sir, that’s insanity. Big brother, they say. Shoot! Watch the little brother! That’s the dangerous one! Keep on putting labor in the only place left for it to go and in another ten years there’ll be eighty per cent of the U.S. population in Government jobs, paying theirselves with their own taxes. That’s called incest, Kozlowski. You know what results when brothers and sisters reproduce?”
Kozlowski spit out the window. “You’re really feeling chipper this morning,” he said.
“I feel horrible,” Clumly roared—and well he might! However, he felt very good, there was no denying it. “Look there,” he said.
On both sides of the road the fields were piled high with wrecked cars; rusty, murdered-looking in the staring sunlight.
“That’s violence, Kozlowski,” Clumly said. “Say an average of one dead man to a car, or one dead woman or child, whatever you please. There’s a couple thousand dead men in there. Could be us, you know that? Man could come wheeling around the curve up ahead—”
The blood drained out of his face. As if he’d caused it to happen, a cattle truck careened around the corner and shot past them. For a time after that, neither of them spoke.
“All right,” Clumly said. “That’s violence. It’s everywhere you look, from kids in school to the President of the United States sending thousands of men to go die in Vietnam when it isn’t even a war. Never been declared. You cognizant of that, Kozlowski? And more dying that you never even hear about. Manchuria. That’s how we clean the slums. Turn left up there.” He pointed.
Kozlowski turned.
Clumly said, “They come off their run-down tenant farms that the Government’s taking over for a park or a Job Corps center or some industry is taking over to run big scale, they come North from their shanties where they grew up with nine, ten brothers and sisters and, not a job in sight, they look for work. No work. They’re black, for one thing, and not the right age, for another, and for another thing they’re full of impatience, so’s if they get a job they have a fight right away, or they come to work drunk, and they lose it. So then somebody like you or me goes in and arrests some kid for climbing a transom and they start shooting guns at us, and a crowd builds up, and then pretty soon the looting and burning starts. All the two-bit grocers and pawnbrokers and bartenders lose their places and collect their insurance and scram to someplace safe, and then the insurance companies say ‘That’s enough of that!’ and they quit insuring in places where there might just conceivably be trouble. Think of it, Kozlowski. Ghetto skins along by pawning and whining to the grocer to keep the kids alive, buying groceries on credit—no serious business anywhere in sight except for the houses of ill repute and the junky line—can’t even slip over to the posh sections for the stealing business, no cars to get there—and the place getting thicker and thicker with people, all boiling like white-hot lead, half of them ready to kill you on sight from pure jealousy and imaginary or real persecution—and now the insurance people pull out, pawnshops and grocers and taverns shut down, no more hope for them, nothing in sight but violence. They come crawling out into the city like rabid dogs, spilling over their limits, mugging people on daylight streets, killing people for sport, and raping women. We take shots at ’em. What do they expect? We catch ’em drunk and we throw the book at ’em. Why not? Violence on violence! But not here, you say. Thank God, not in Batavia.” He sucked in and out on the cigar, getting it going again. Kozlowski was scrooched down behind the wheel looking up at where the road wound into the trees at the top of the hill.
“Paxton place is up where the pine trees are,” Clumly said. He let out smoke with the words. He said hurriedly, “But noplace is exempt. Batavia may not be Rochester or Buffalo, no riots here, Negroes still finding jobs, one kind another. Grocery stores, cleaning out garages, mowing lawns, picking at the dump. But they know people in Buffalo and Rochester, they got friends there. Heat up one piece of a minority group and you heat up all of it, like a frying pan. And meantime you’ve got the country kids whose families have moved into town, had to sell off the farm. And then you’ve got the sons of the doctors and lawyers and preachers, with all the money they want and nothing to believe in. Drunk-driving the big cars their daddies bought ’em, no ideas in their heads but that they’re better than somebody else—tougher, smarter, more sex power. We had a case last year would’ve made your hair stand up. Couple kids pulled in at the Checkerboard Drive-In on West Main, had a girl in a blanket in the back seat. Good families, all three of ’em. Parked right next to one of our men—to mock him, must be. Cop got suspicious, reached in and pulled the blanket down. Naked she was. Turned out they were having a contest, they’d screwed that girl twenty-three times between them since noon. How ‘bout that, Kozlowski?”
“My goodness,” Kozlowski said dully. He’d come to the driveway now. He turned in and drove up to the porch, switched off the motor.
“It’s a hell of a world, Kozlowski,” Clumly said. He squinted at him, trying to see what he was thinking, but Kozlowski showed nothing. He merely nodded. Clumly looked up at the house, heart ticking painfully, and opened his car door. “Les go,” he said. “It’s almost ten. We better hurry this.”
Professor Combs met them. He was wearing the faded red bathrobe Paxton had had on when he died, or such was Clumly’s guess. He showed no embarrassment or alarm. He was old, and though he dyed his hair, he’d been through too much in his time to be bothered by the more trivial details of life and death.
“We’ve been expecting you,” he said. He had a wide, white nose, powdered-looking, perhaps just with age, and there were liver-spots on his temples. His cheeks were unnaturally red, maybe rouged. White hair grew out of his ears. He said, “I’ll take you to Elizabeth.”
“I hope we’re not getting you up,” Clumly said.
The Professor did not answer. He probably didn’t hear it. They stepped down from the entryway to the large white livingroom where apparently no one had spent more than half an hour in twenty years. The furniture hadn’t bee
n dusted in months. The fireplace was empty except for a few scraps of paper that had been there so long they looked as if they’d been rained on.
“This way,” the Professor said.
They found Elizabeth Paxton on what had once been the first-floor sunporch, now a makeshift bedroom for the summer. The Professor’s clothes were there, hanging on the back of a peeling kitchen chair. The old woman’s own clothes lay in a heap beside the bed. She lay with the covers pulled over her, shoulders bare, bruised. But what was more shocking than all the rest, to Clumly, was the woman’s face. She made no effort this morning to hide the birthmark. She seemed to flaunt it. It was purple, brownish around the edges, and it stretched from the corner of her left eye across her wrinkled cheek to the right side of her chin.
“Good morning,” she said. She did not bother to smile and she showed no embarrassment.
Clumly nodded.
“Professor Combs told me to expect you,” she said. “Because of all your questions at the cemetery.” If she was annoyed or disgusted, she did not show that either. The Professor sat down on the edge of the bed and she reached out to cover his hand. His colored face was like a doll’s.
“You’ve been ill?” Clumly said.
“Not at all,” she said. “What makes you think so?”
He thought about it. It was as if whatever feeble life still remained in the big old house had slid toward this room, the two old people sharing one bed like corpses pushed in a ditch. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve and squinted.
“You came … for the funeral?” Clumly said.
The Professor didn’t hear it. He turned to Mrs. Paxton.
“For the funeral, yes,” she said.
“And he moved in, then?”
She had no intention of explaining. “Moved in, yes.”
“Mmm,” Clumly said. He glanced at Kozlowski. He was standing with his back to them, looking out at the lawn, where three sparrows were standing on the rim of the birdbath, drinking.