“Spade?”
Kozlowski nodded. “Like in poker.”
Clumly frowned, full of gloom, but he let it go. The squad car swung into the alley, fenders slipping past the gray-black bricks on either side as smoothly as the walls of a boat in a dark, narrow channel, and after a moment they came out in the dead-white brightness of the parking lot like a stagnant sea. There were a lot of cars, on the far side, and the front door of the Grange, where the Dairyman’s League was meeting, stood open. The light in the entryway was yellow, as if it were lit up by candlelight, and you could see the beginning of the stairway. “Park up in front,” Clumly said, and Kozlowski slid past the glinting rows of cars and pulled in at the No Parking sign where the sidewalk began. He turned off the motor, the radio still on, crackling, and they sat.
Clumly said, “You ever listen to that Oswald stuff?”
Kozlowski looked bored. “No sir.”
“You know what I mean,” Clumly said. “What’s-his-name Oswald, the one that shot President Kennedy. It’s very interesting. You realize all ten of the newspaper reporters or whatever they were that interviewed Ruby—all ten of ’em are dead now? Car accidents, things like that? It’s very interesting.”
“That part of your speech?” Kozlowski said.
“I was just mentioning it, that’s all. Not in the speech. Listen.” He leaned forward and partly turned in the seat, to face him better. “What do you make of those three frames of that movie that are in there backwards? Somebody turned ’em around, I mean. J. Edgar Hoover himself says so. They make it look like he was shot from behind, but if you put ’em in frontwards—in the right order, I mean—it appears he was shot from in front.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Well hell you know what’s the difference. It means Oswald didn’t—”
“No, I know that. I mean what’s the difference if Oswald did it or not? I mean, you drag me here to be your bodyguard or something, and the troopers are out hunting for the Sunlight Man, and you sit there and talk about Oswald.”
“It’s interesting, that’s all.” He sulked.
“Sure.”
“Suppose it was a conspiracy,” he said. He could see well enough in Kozlowski’s face how absurd it was to be sitting here stewing about such a thing tonight. But the urge was on him, and he was not in a mood to shake it off. “Suppose it was,” he said again.
“I’m supposing.”
“Who would it all be pointing to, in that case? The way it was all done so smooth, I mean. The way not even the F.B.I. can figure it out. And the What’s-its-name Commission, the way they just called in certain witnesses and not the others, so people say. That look like the Russians to you? They can’t all be Russian spies—the whole U.S. Congress. So who does it point to?”
“You’re off your damn rocker.” He pushed back in his seat a little, getting out a cigarette.
“Tell me the truth, that’s all,” Clumly said. Two men and a woman went up the steps and into the hall. Four or five more were standing under the trees around the side, smoking cigarettes. “I just want truth. I’m too old for all the rest. Who?” Clumly said.
Angrily, Kozlowski said, “You want me to say it was Johnson, right? Ok. It was President Johnson. Ok?”
Clumly sucked at the cigar and brooded. “He’s from Texas,” he said.
“Jesus,” Kozlowski said. He threw his match out the window and spit after it.
“The trouble with you, Kozlowski,” he said, “you’re afraid to face the possibilities. You believe in flying saucers?”
“Look.”
“I read about a town in New Hampshire—”
“You going in? You’ll be late.”
“I’ll just finish this smoke,” he said. He sulked. “A man should know the truth.”
“That cigar’ll take you half an hour if you don’t get it lit first.”
Clumly laughed, dry as a dog’s laugh, and hunted for a match.
At the police station, Figlow sat at his desk going through his reports. The coffee in his blue tin cup was cold, but he went on sipping at it from time to time, to drive down the bite of his cigarettes. The coffee had a skin of silver on it, like oil-slick.
When Ed Tank came in and stood in the doorway with his motorcycle helmet hanging under his arm, Figlow looked up sharply, then nodded and said nothing.
“No more news?” Tank said.
He shook his head.
“Seems like they’d be here with the Indian by now. You think anything could’ve went wrong?”
“They’ll be here.” He looked at his watch. “Be half an hour yet anyway, maybe more.” It was true, they couldn’t possibly make it in less than that, but he too had been wondering where they were.
“Beautiful night,” Tank said. He rolled his head a little, pointing over his shoulder.
“Harvest moon,” Figlow said, “yeah. Night for werewolves.” He laughed.
Tank came over and pulled himself a cup of coffee and sat down beside Figlow’s desk. “That all you heard?” he said at last. “The kid just gave up, that’s all?”
He nodded and looked back at the papers. “Somebody saw him go in, I guess. That’s what they say. Troopers circled the barn and put the light on him and he came out. All there was to it.”
“I’d like to been there.”
“Sure.”
“Anybody would, I guess.” He lowered his square head toward the cup and lifted the cup just off the table and sipped.
Figlow looked back at the papers. “Not me,” he said.
“The hell you wouldn’t”
“I’m telling you. Suppose he’d come out shooting.”
“So?”
“So look.” He stared at the bitten-off end of the pencil a moment longer, then laid it down on the paper. Then, frowning, he swivelled his chest and clumsily reached over his lap with his left hand, unsnapped his pistol and drew it out. He held it sideways toward Tank. “Look at the thing,” he said. “Look.”
“Shoot, man, I seen guns.”
“Right. Feel how heavy. No, take it. Feel how heavy the damn thing is.”
“I got my own.”
“Sure, sure. But feel the damn weight of the thing.”
Tank studied him, then bent his head toward the coffee again.
“I don’t know,” Figlow said. He was thinking—not seriously, just playing with the thought—that if he were, say, crazy, he could turn that pistol and before Ed Tank knew what was happening he could blow Tank’s head off. He was no more going to do it than fly. The thing was, he could. He knew how solid the line was between thinking about it and doing it—as solid as the line between thinking off-hand about suicide and driving off a cliff. Nevertheless, he was thinking about it; wondering. They were bringing back the Indian boy, and who knew? Maybe the Sunlight Man would come and let him out again, or try. And maybe Figlow would be sitting here alone when the Sunlight Man came.
Tank drained the cup, raising his head as he did it, and steam went up past his forearm toward the light. “It’s these desk jobs,” he said, and wiped his mouth. “Out on a bike, a night like this, you don’t get spooked like that.” He stood up, grinning.
Figlow grinned back and gave a half-nod. Then he pushed the gun to the front of the desk and picked up the pencil again.
Chief Clumly said, sitting in the car with Kozlowski, “Because I need you here. Is that good enough? If something comes through on this radio while I’m in there making my speech, I want to know about it, that’s why. And don’t you say, ‘Nothing’s coming.’ I know different.”
Kozlowski turned his head, slightly tipped.
“And don’t ask me how I know either,” Clumly said testily. “Say it’s a hunch I’ve got.”
“Is it?”
“I don’t know. No. Not a hunch.”
“That’s what Miller said. Been expecting it all day. Saw three crows over his left shoulder or something.” He spit out the window.
They were all inside no
w, waiting for him, maybe. But Clumly went on stalling, waiting for the news. They’d have a business meeting first, probably. They did that sometimes, and after the business they had the speaker to finish them off. When he leaned toward the windshield and looked up he could see sky above the Grange Hall, wide globes full of moonlight, and around them, though there was no breeze down here, swiftly moving clouds. Cold weather coming, it might be.
“He’s run out of time, see?” Clumly said. Then, thoughtfully: “Both of us have. Anyway, he knows it’s over, for now, for here.”
“For here?”
“Maybe he’ll head out. If he does, that’s the last we’ll hear of him—till we read about him turning up in Mexico, say, or Peru, maybe, or Australia. And then again maybe he won’t.”
“And if he stays?”
Clumly shook his head. “Don’t know,” he said. And yet it seemed to him that he did know, had gotten that close to inside the man’s head—or if he didn’t know would anyway recognize after he saw it that it was right, exactly as it had to be. He concentrated, trying to see what it was that he knew was going to happen; and though it was ridiculous, like straining to remember the future, it seemed to him he almost had it, but it wouldn’t come quite clear. The yellow light inside the Grange looked for an instant like fire.
“You better go in,” Kozlowski said. “You got people enough on your back.”
“In a minute I will,” he said.
Ten seconds later word came that they’d picked up Millie Hodge at her son’s place, Luke’s, and gotten her story. Two policemen and a couple of neighbors were digging behind the garage for the murdered man’s body. Clumly listened in silence. He said at last, “Poor fool.”
“He won’t get away then?” Kozlowski said.
“Either way,” he said, “poor fool just the same.” And then, as though the news from Luke’s farm were somehow a conclusion, Clumly tamped out his cigar, sighed like the old man he was, and opened the car door to get out. He stood a minute straightening his coat and tugging at his trousers below the pockets—his underwear had gotten twisted up around him—all the time staring at the Grange Hall door with a mixture of dread and determination (because, it came to him, they’d all be in there, they were always at the Dairyman’s League meetings, political reasons likely—the Mayor, maybe the Fire Chief, somebody from the Daily News as well—and one way or another he must brave it out, act out his last official act as though nothing were out of the ordinary), then, heaving another sigh, he started up the walk.
To Kozlowski, sitting in the car behind him, his bent-forward walk looked like stealth, and he thought, “Poor old nut.”
All Figlow knew was this: he was sitting alone, no longer pretending to do paperwork, giving all his attention to the infuriatingly slow reports that came by fits and starts from the snapping, humming radio, and wondering where the devil they were with that Indian. Twice he went back to the cells, troubled by the silence there, but there was nothing wrong. The man that had dirty magazines at the G.L.F. feedstore was sitting on his bench, leaning against the back wall, staring, and the drunk-and-disorderly Pieman had brought in this afternoon was asleep. The next cell was empty—the firebug had gotten off on bail, in the care of his parents. In the end cell the younger of the Indians sat reading his one battered comic, as usual. He looked up when Figlow came in, but only for a minute. The Indian almost never spoke any more. When the Presbyterian minister came to visit him, he’d go right on reading, and even when May Bunce came, from Probation, he ignored her.
As he was sitting down at his desk again, Figlow remembered he’d left the gun out and swung his eyes to where he’d left it. How he hadn’t missed it when he got up in the first place, from the unnatural lightness of his holster, he could never say, later. Mind on something else, it must be—the stutter of news from the State Police and from Luke’s house, or the business with Ed Tank, the talk that must’ve made Ed think he was dealing with a madman. Whatever it was, he swung his eyes now to where he’d put down the gun and his heart stopped. He leaned forward slowly, like a man leaning over a cliff a mile high, looking where the gun would have fallen if it was that, and at the same time he saw there was nothing on the floor he became aware of the smell in the room, thick as death. The skin of his face was stinging from the pounding of his blood and he had no strength in his legs, but he managed to sit down. The front drawer was open a little, and though he knew it was not where he’d put the gun—and knew, in fact actually seemed to see through the back of his head, that the Sunlight Man was directly behind him, standing in front of the file cabinets, smiling at him out of a face burnt black as coal—he opened the drawer farther and groped inside it. The gun was there. His fingers closed around it but had no more feeling than pieces of wood, and he thought, It’s some crazy joke! If he spun to fire he would be dead before he got the shot off, and if he didn’t spin, he would be dead with a hole in his back. He seemed to think all this slowly and deliberately, and to think, at the same time, a thousand things more—about the weakness spreading all through his body, and the line between thinking of killing and killing, and about how he hadn’t had his supper and how his daughter had baggy eyes and dust-dry hair, might very well be pregnant—but in reality only a split second elapsed between the moment he closed his fingers on the gun and the moment he turned, caught the stupid, weakling smile, the crossed arms, the body tilted far off balance, as if standing in shoes firmly nailed to the floor. What made the smile terrible was that the eyes were weeping. And it came to Figlow that it was a joke. The Sunlight Man had no intention of shooting him. He had come to give up, broken by grief, but in the madness of his trickster vanity or maybe just human vanity he could not resist one final laugh at the childish credulity of man, one last indifferent or partly indifferent sneer, or maybe one final ridiculous pretense that he was still indifferent, still had dignity. By the time the joke came clear, it was too late. Figlow had shot him through the heart.
7
Ben Hodge sat stunned in the roaring, flickering grist room, sitting on the piled-up bags of oats, hands on the oatbags on either side, legs wide apart and as solid as pillars, chin thrown forward, neither rueful nor belligerent, merely and finally itself. No grain poured down the chute now; the machine ran empty, howling like all the damned at once, and in front of the shed the tractor running the gristmill belt roared angrily, full of empty malevolence. Above the roar, or under it, like a sound of hurrying water under ice, he could hear David beating out rhythms on the pumphouse pipes. Through the open door he could see night sky and Orion like a huge man bending to look in. Ben Hodge’s mind was full of memories and pain, not separate instants and not a flow of time either, but all his life without walls or progression, like a small idea of eternity, or like the state sometimes induced in very sick people by powerful sedatives. His brother was dead, and he could make of it neither an abstract truth nor a story; it was itself, an event outside time, complete as an apple. In his blood, not his mind, he heard the drumming rhythm from the pipes, and in them too he could hear no progression: time flowed around them like a river around a stone: each beat stood eternal and inviolate, leading in no direction, implying nothing. I am, the drumming said, and nothing else. The final truth, he seemed to understand by this queer twist his brain had taken, had nothing to do with human thought or human story; unspeakable. He could look into the gristmill’s open side, and he knew the knives were spinning at incredible speed, might snip off his hand if he reached through the hole, and the hand would be as if it had never been; yet the knives were invisible, almost unreal at that speed—not knives, in any case: a dangerous ghost.
He only half-registered the lights flashing across the barn wall opposite the grist room. In the same trance, he understood without knowledge that a car door had slammed and that someone was coming toward him. The dark of the sky went darker and a man as big as Orion stood bending forward looking in.
“Uncle Ben?”
He understood that it was Will Jr
who had spoken. He would answer in a moment; for now he said nothing.
The shape went on standing in the doorway, the eyes no doubt searching through the dim and flickering room that opened out around the underfed lightbulb and perhaps made him out at last. (He could not see Will Jr’s eyes.) After another moment the shape withdrew. The roar of the tractor changed, became freer; he’d shoved the clutch in. Then the motor went off. The belt went on turning for a while, strangely quiet. Will Jr came back.
“You heard?” he said.
Hardly aware that he was doing it, Ben nodded.
“What a thing,” Will said.
That was right. Thing. He nodded again. Now Will came over to him. He bent down, leaning on his knees.
“You ok, Uncle Ben?”
“I’m all right.” His voice was soft, a little creaky, as if from lack of use. Then, slowly, like a man coming to life again, he raised his hands to his face. There was no feeling in his fingers. “How are you?” he said. An absurd, trifling question, he might’ve thought if he stood outside it; but it was not trifling. It was as large and self-contained as the death, and it was the walls of the room that opened out from their two solid figures, the walls of night that opened out around the barn, that was trifling.
“I’m all right,” Will said. “You scared me.”
He nodded, then reached up, and Will helped him to his feet. “Your wife?” Ben said. Another tentative step behind the world.
“Just fine.” Will Jr frowned for a second, thinking about it, then said with curious finality, “We’re all fine, Ben. Fine.” He took Ben’s arm and they started toward the doorway. Then, standing outside where there was a cool breeze and they could look up at the slanting barn roofs and the tops of the tamaracks and the wide flat roof of the big brick house, Will Jr said, “How the devil did it happen?”
It was a hard question. His mind fumbled with it for a moment, then let it fall away. He listened to the drumming. It had grown linear again, like a horse crossing a field. “It’s a long story,” he said evasively. They started toward the yellow lighted windows of the house. Everything was blurry, like print one could not break past to the word.