But it was too late. Clumly sighed. “I know it’s possible. I don’t mind. A mood I’m in.”
The Sunlight Man’s hand shook. “I’d like not to have been forced … to make a choice.”
“It’s up to you.”
The Sunlight Man wiped his forehead with the back of his glove. “You’re still alive, yes.” Then, getting himself in control: “All right, we have to go now.”
“We.”
“Both of us. No grand disappearance. You force me.”
Clumly nodded and turned to step through the door. When he looked back the Sunlight Man was looking at the pistol, scowling. At last he came out and closed the door behind him. The thought of the suspended chair inside, the oil lamp still burning, was vaguely unsettling to Clumly.
“To your car,” the Sunlight Man said.
Clumly went to the driver’s side and put his hand on the doorhandle, then waited. The Sunlight Man said nothing. They both looked back at the silo, and at last the Sunlight Man said, “I could destroy all that with a wave of my hand, you know. As easily as I could destroy you.”
“I believe you.”
“Perhaps you don’t,” the Sunlight Man said. He frowned, wrestling with some problem, then abruptly laughed a little wildly. He stopped as suddenly as he’d started. “Well, get in.”
Clumly opened the door, and the Sunlight Man went around to the far side, aiming the gun at Clumly as he went around the hood. When he’d gotten in, he said, “But I think I’ll let you destroy it. Look at the silo again.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Clumly said. And yet—idiotically, he would tell himself later—he looked. The instant his eyes struck the place it seemed to explode into flame. It was as if all the walls had been bathed in gasoline. And yet Clumly had smelled nothing, inside it—or nothing but the Sunlight Man’s stench. “There was no need,” he said.
The Sunlight Man smiled, looking at the fire, and that instant, responding to an instinct he had forgotten he had, Clumly shot out his hand and closed it on the gun. It came free easily, and though the Sunlight Man started, the wild look that came over his face seemed as much one of pleasure as of alarm. A second later, as if nothing had happened, he was looking again at the fire. Everything in the car or around it was yellow-red, reflecting the glow. “My wife and I climbed that silo once,” he said. Then: “My move, isn’t it,” the Sunlight Man said. “I move the horsebarn next.”
This time Clumly did not turn, but he heard the explosion. The glow was more intense now. He said, “Why?”
The Sunlight Man looked at his gloved hands. “A demonstration,” he said. “You see, your next move is to let me go. Otherwise, I move the house. And there are people inside.”
It wasn’t true. They were out on the lawn, standing bunched together in horror, their figures reflecting the churning red light. For some reason the Sunlight Man could not see them. He was seeing nothing whatever. An image in his mind.
“You wouldn’t burn the house,” Clumly said.
The Sunlight Man laughed.
He glanced at the house, then back at the man. At last he said, “You’re free.” Then: “I’m outside my jurisdiction in any case.”
“Ah, justice!” the Sunlight Man said. “Ah, duty!” Then he grew serious. “An unfair accusation. There are no obligations, I realize that. There are merely unconstrained acts of holy love and hate, that is to say, of life and death, both of which are selfless, and between them …” He brooded on it.“ … gloomy confusion.”
“You think too much,” Clumly said.
He nodded. “That’s my crime.”
“You’ll be caught.”
The Sunlight Man nodded. “You think I’ll be arrested by ‘higher’ authorities?”
Clumly thought. “I believe so,” he said. He rubbed his jaw. “Yes. That is what I believe.” He listened to the roar of the fire. The siren was howling now in Alexander.
“It’s time for you to get out. I’ll need the car.”
He nodded and felt behind him for the handle, then opened the door. When he was out and the Sunlight Man had slid over to the driver’s seat, the Sunlight Man rolled down the window. “You realize you’re letting me go. I mean, I wouldn’t want a misunderstanding. You’re freeing me.” He was staring past Clumly at the fire.
Clumly nodded.
“Good. Well, good evening, then. I want you to know, I feel friendly toward you, Fred.” Clumsily, he started the car.
Clumly put the pistol in his pocket. The siren was coming closer. He watched the prowlcar cross the overgrown lawn like a drunken animal and pull out on the road. When the taillights were out of sight he started toward the porch. Kozlowski came from the darkness of the trees behind him.
Clumly looked at him. “Why didn’t you interfere?”
“I’ll drive you back,” Kozlowski said. “Car’s the other side of the house.”
“Why didn’t you interfere?” he said again.
Kozlowski put his fists on his hips and looked at the ground. “Interfere with which of you?” he said.
They walked to the car. The house was red. The silo toppled and sparks flew up like receding stars. The barn beside the silo was now on fire too. Flames wheeled upward high into the night. A timber fell, silent in the roar of the fire.
XXII
Luke
Hidden dragon. Do not act.
—The I Ching
As soon as it was dark Luke Hodge got up from the couch and, without a word to any of them, went out to the woodshed piled high with junk and took his heavy driving shoes down from their nail beside the door. The shoes were squaretoed and soft from many applications of crankcase oil, and the laces were clean new thongs as soft as chamois. He bent down and pulled the shoes on, tugged each of his socks up snug inside, then sat down on the stone step between the woodshed and the kitchen, straightened the tongues of his shoes and, at last, as meticulously as a racing skater preparing for a meet, laced the shoes up tight and knotted them. Next, as deliberately as he’d put on his shoes, he pulled on his light denim jacket, his gloves, his driving cap. When he was finished he went down the steps into the garage, stood there a moment with his hands on his hips, looking around at the clutter of bolts, wrenches, electric wire, old machinery, grease-soiled boxes, tools, rags, bicycle tape, scraps of leather, discarded manuals, weldingrods, bits of crockery, like a man taking his last look at home. He bent down to pick up a screwdriver from the grit and sludge on the garage floor, dropped it on the loaded workbench, then walked up the hill toward the barn to bring around the truck.
It was cold tonight, and the dark barn had a forlorn look already, as though it had been years ago that he had left. The whippoorwills were calling as usual, down at the corner of the lower pasture, and the chickens were already settled for the night, only the leghorns visible, queer puffs of white in the plumtrees to the right of the driveway. When he looked over his left shoulder he could see the lights of the prison, stretched across the valley like a village. Cars passed now and then on the highway, a mile below him, and somewhere over his head there was a plane; he couldn’t see it, but he could hear it. He could see the glow where Stony Hill was burning. He shook his head and looked back at the ground and, after a moment, took a breath and quickened his step.
What was strange was that he had known from the beginning that he would be the one. It figured. He was the one who’d been put in the middle, the one who had no choice but to understand both sides, however he fought; no choice even when he wanted to hate them all but to understand they were not hateable, merely human, short-sighted, limited, tired, stupid. At the cottage on Godfries’ Pond one time he’d sat on the little gray rowboat dock with Will Jr and Ben Jr—he remembered it as if it was yesterday: a night like tonight, chilly, a kind of dying of summer, sky full of lifeless, opaque light, a large, vague circle around the moon. The water moved listlessly against the palings and the pebbly shore, and now and then a boat would bump softly against the burlap on the dock or a fish would
jump. Behind where the three of them sat there were radios playing softly in the cottages, and people talking, occasionally a laugh. Will and Ben were in their teens then, and he, Luke, was no more than four or five. And yet even then he’d known, without having the words for it, that he hung helpless between them the same as he hung helpless between his father and mother. He could no longer remember what Will and Ben had said or even what it was they were talking about; he could remember only the feeling of being between them, knowing what both of them meant (however wordless his knowledge was, a knowledge of their faces more than a knowledge of their talk), and knowing they were both right but mutually exclusive, as antithetical as the black trees hanging motionless over the motionless water and under the dead, luminescent sky. Will was going to do splendid things—rebuild Stony Hill maybe. It might have been that. He talked about that sometimes. And Ben, Ben was going to do nothing—seize the cachexic day, understand himself, transmogrify into a hayfield standing in the rain. No matter what it was they said. It might have been about girls, or war, or it might have been about their fathers, or beer, or college. No matter. Luke had known, as if the knowledge were implicit in the trees and sky, knowledge beyond mere words or even feelings, that all their high and narrow hopes were doomed: each would glide toward the other one’s death as the two sides of the pond glided gently and relentlessly toward the grassy outlet where the streams crossed and fell away to the river. He had said it with bitter irony in the past, but not tonight: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with Luke. … From the beginning he had been the one marked—by brute situation as much as by any gift of his—to understand them all; and finally—he could say it now without pretentiousness and without a self-deprecatory curl of the lip, for he knew at last, knew he had never hated any of them, the hatred was mere self-defense, the howling of a child not yet ready to put on his destiny like an old wool coat—finally, he knew, he was the one who’d been marked. His luck.
He slid the barn doors open and climbed up into the cab of the truck and started it. Then he sat, leaning his elbows on the steering wheel, letting the engine warm up. The barn was full of motor echoes, like music. Warm, gassy air came up through the maze of slots on the gearshift beside him, to the right of his hip, and he thought fleetingly of dropping a rag over it, but he decided not to bother, to wait until the air got hot and oppressive. He shoved the clutch in and eased into first. The clumsy old Road Ranger shuddered and after a moment, like a cracking dam, began to move. He flicked on the lights, switches 4 and 7. Holy numbers.
They were waiting for him when he pulled up next to the house. He set the emergency and got out to open the sliding side door in back. As soon as it was open, Nick Slater came out, as quick and silent as a shadow in the woods, darted through the patch of light from the kitchen window, and slid the rifle into the truck, then climbed in after it.
Taggert stayed where he was, leaning against the garage door, looking thoughtfully at the truck. Luke’s mother stood on the woodshed steps behind him, ugly as death, her white arms folded.
“You coming?” Luke said.
His uncle looked at him exactly as he’d looked at the truck. He probably couldn’t have said himself what prevented his getting in, it seemed to Luke; still, he hesitated. His lower lip was drawn a little, his eyebrows lowered, in the look of a man trying to remember something. Abruptly, as if coming to himself, he nodded. He picked up the suitcases, one in each hand, half-turned his head toward Luke’s mother in a kind of nod, then came to the truck door. He set the suitcases down, then lifted the larger one up toward where Nick was reaching for it, trying to hurry him up. Luke helped him with the second one—they were as heavy as bags of concrete—then bent over and interlocked his hands to help his uncle in. His uncle put his hand on Luke’s shoulder but again hesitated. When Luke glanced up at his face, the eyes had a glitter in them and the lips were pursed. Luke said, “We better move.”
He nodded and lifted his shoe to Luke’s locked hands. The man got in easily, almost without any effort on Luke’s part, and Luke reached for the door.
“Leave it open so we can see,” his uncle said.
Luke obeyed.
His mother said quietly, behind him, “Be careful.”
He nodded, irritated, and walked to the cab. Then, just as he was about to get in, he changed his mind, turned abruptly, and strode back to where his mother stood watching. Before she knew what he was going to do, he kissed her cheek and took one of her hands and pressed it and tried to meet her eyes. He couldn’t. He looked at the line where her forehead met her hairline—looked hungrily, the way he’d looked, earlier, at the cluttered garage.
“Are you all right?” she said.
He nodded, a brief jerk back and to one side, then turned and ran back to the truck. He jumped in, eased into first, switched on the headlights, and started up. He drove slowly, getting into no gear higher than sixth, until he reached the highway. This was not the time to be stopped by some trooper. Then, when he’d turned onto 98, he moved up through the gears to twelfth. His chest filled with excitement and fear.
He was curving up into the mountains now, coming sooner than he meant to to the place. He loved the rough old battered road with its sudden curves and jolts and dips, its lazy towns with their yellow lights and enormous, comfortable trees, and between the towns glimpses of moonlit river, black and white cows in the blackness of a field, isolated farmhouse lights, once in a while a gas station with old-fashioned handcrank pumps. He’d driven it often, carrying gypsum, or television parts from Sylvania, or batteries, or cameras from Eastman. In the valleys he came into feathery patches of fog, and he would slow for them, but then as the road rose higher he came to open spaces incredibly wide and beautiful. He saw shooting stars. He could no longer see the glow of Stony Hill.
He was not afraid. He had no regrets. Yet even now he went over and over it, trying to know for sure that he was right.
She’d made his father read books, whatever books were popular with the college professors she slept with that year, and he would read them, impatient and irritable but gutless, and he would find them stupid and would know no words to express his feeling, or none she understood. They were tripe, he said. Just tripe. They had nothing to do with anything. And she would take it for a proof of his stupidity and would not even tell him why she thought—why her college professors thought—they were masterpieces. But sometimes he—Luke—or Will Jr would read them, and they would talk about the books and his father would listen and suddenly break in, trying, as feebly as ever, to say what he meant. They talked about Pierre. Will Jr said it was full of pointless froth, mere tiresome palaver, a tiresome rumble of symbolism. She said it was profound, the story of their life. Will Jr said Pierre was Melville and if Melville denied it he was a liar or, more likely, a fool. Suddenly, explosively, his father said, sitting watchful in his corner, “Hah!” which meant he agreed. She said fiercely, hardly turning in his direction, “For heaven’s sake stick to things you understand!” He was abashed. But Luke had cried out, close to tears, “He’s right, anyone can see he’s right.” And then Will Jr came into it, defending his father, and she made quips and smashed every word he said and fought him with all the viciousness she knew how to muster—she knew plenty—and all at once Luke, the one perpetually caught in the middle—was defending her, talking about symbolism. Though he might have as easily taken Will’s side, because he too was right, they were both right but on terms that could never be reconciled. It was a stupid novel, it was a brilliant novel. She always won, and she always had to win again, and she never could win. And as for his father, he worked and slept and grew fatter and fatter, let his hair grow out in his nose and ears, carried a smell like a Polish wedding, could not tell a painting from a hole in the wall unless it was a painting of horses or a barn, went to sleep and snored like a bull at the movies, called the bathroom the restroom, wore armbands and suspenders and smelled of tobacco, and her objections to all this were to him not only fo
olish but dangerously immoral. Will Jr had not had to judge it: he’d grown up with Uncle Ben, before they were in a position to bring the family together, so he, Luke, who’d spent only three summers with Uncle Ben, was the one driven to understand them. He could understand—how could he help it?—why she had to destroy all her husband’s name meant, why she’d gotten Stony Hill and sold it to the Billingses, why she’d mocked him and tormented him and tried to stir up enmity between him and his brothers. And he could understand why his father hated her, believed her insane, even toyed once—but tentatively, clumsily, robbed of all confidence in himself—with having her arrested. And so all his life he had alternated between trying to make peace between them and hating them both, and in the end he had found he had no choice but to cling to them stupidly, voluntarily allow himself to be pulled apart, snarling first at one, then at the other, with angry love. He was now repulsive to them both. To each he seemed the image of the other.
They were wrong. He was himself. Or rather he was the impossible union of both of them, the closing of the circle. More than that.
What was incredible was that it was he, of all people, who was going to achieve their crackpot dream. He became more keenly aware of the wind rushing by, the vastness of space before him and time behind. It was as if the idea came not from his own mind but from someone seated in the truck beside him, eagerly dictating thoughts in his ear. You, Luke, are the ghost. That’s what they’ve wanted, what all of them struggled toward and missed and fell away from into disillusionment, or self-hatred, or compromise. Because of a simple error, the notion that when it came it would be what it was the first time, a thing of this world.
He leaned forward over the steering wheel, peering ahead, searching out the thought. He’d come to another small town now, a few houses, all with their lights out, a store with only the neon burning in front, a single traffic light. It turned red as he watched, a quarter-mile away in front of him, and it dawned on him, but only dimly, far in the back of his mind, that he was going more than sixty. He hit the brake and shifted down and got stopped just in time, an instant before it turned green. He shifted up again, automatically, his mind never leaving its hurtling train of thought, and before he reached the outer limits of the village he was almost back on sixty. The whispering dictator hurried on, snatching at straws.