The Sunlight Dialogues by John Gardner Read Free Book Online Page A

and Kozlowski stood toying with the badge.
    “All right,” Clumly said weakly. “That’s all. Things have been pushing a little, lately. Just the same, all I said in the car—” He thought about it. “We have to enforce the law,” he said. “If a cop starts making exceptions—the fabric of society—” He had a funeral to go to this afternoon. The thought distracted him and he glared at Kozlowski to get his train of thought back. He said, “You ever see that man with the beard before?”
    Kozlowski looked puzzled.
    “In here,” Clumly said. He got up, knowing it was an odd thing to do, and led Kozlowski down the hallway to the cellblock. He held the door open and pointed. “Him.”
    Kozlowski studied him, then shook his head.
    Clumly turned back toward his office. “All right,” he said. “That’s all. Think it over.”
    Kozlowski nodded. He remembered he still had his hat on and reached up to touch it. “Yes sir,” he said. He left.
    Alone again, Clumly sat down and racked his brain to make out what had happened. But he didn’t get time. Miller looked in almost at once. “Got time for a public relations call? Old Lady Woodworth wants you. At her house, this afternoon, maybe.”
    The words would not get straight in Clumly’s mind, and he strained to think. He was hungry again.
    “About the robbery,” Miller said. “Cops ain’t doin their jobs. Gonna telephone the Gov’nah.”
    At last he understood. “You think it’s that man we got, that Walter Boyle?”
    “Not a chance.” Miller turned away.
    Clumly sighed, grew calmer. There was something important he’d meant to do this morning. He remembered all at once that he’d thought there was a prowler in the yard last night. He tried to think what had made him change his mind. It was possible. They’d had case after case, these past two months. A plague of them, most of them in broad daylight, ever since spring. And some of them were dangerous—the Negro boy in the red shirt who’d beaten that woman on Ellicott Avenue half to death with the handle of a mop. He was still at large. Maybe he should call his wife, see that everything was all right. Sometimes they got into your basement and stayed there for hours, waiting. He closed his eyes. Behind him, in the cellblock, the bearded lunatic was singing. His voice was high and sweet, strangely sad. He’s as sane as I am, Clumly thought, and this time he was certain of it. When will he make his move?
    Calmly, purposefully, Clumly got up and walked back to the cellblock. “You,” he said. “Keep it down.”
    The bearded one smiled, all innocence, and blew him a kiss.
    3
    Ben and Vanessa Hodge were at the funeral too. They made them all, these days, like Clumly. Ben was a member of the Presbyterian Session, as Hubbard had been, and before that, a long time ago now, he’d sold milk and butter to the Hubbards. Hodge was a wide, benign man in white socks, with a face as orange as the bricks of his house and hands like rusty shovels. He gave sermons here and there, at country churches from Genesee County to the Finger Lakes, wherever someone happened to know him. He knew stories, more than an average man, and when he told them the stories would grow clearer and clearer until the moral stood out like a pearl-handled nickel-plated pistol on a stump. He didn’t read much. He put in fourteen-hour days in the rush seasons of the summertime, except on Sundays, and in the winter, when he wasn’t out plowing off country roads with his wired-together Farmall tractor or milking his Holsteins or forking out ensilage or manure, he lay with his face turned into the cushions of his davenport and his monumental rear end hanging over, sleeping like a bear. He made up the sermons while he worked his land or while he rode through the foothills near Olean, late at night in the summer, on his old Horex motorcycle. His voice was high and sharp, as if he was calling from across a windy wheatfield.
    He stood by the casket