The Sunlight Dialogues Read Free Page B

Clumly to a grublike, virtually hairless monster, and he’d stopped writing, hoping to spare her. But his parents had sought her out and spoken to her, of course. She’d written to his buddy. Dog, they called him. He looked like a fancy dog with a too-erect head and large pink eyes. (Clumly could no longer remember the boy’s real name. Walter Brown?) Dog had told her how it was with Clumly—how he felt about her and how he felt about, poor devil, himself. And so Clumly’s love had bravely borrowed the money for a bus trip to Texas. “You look as beautiful as ever to me,” she said in her soft voice, and they both wept. Her voice was unmysterious, faintly alarming. Dog came to the hospital and wept too. She read to him from a book in braille about Sir Lancelot, some story of adventure and romance so touching and foreign to them both that it made them blush and stop the reading for a while from embarrassment and fear. They were married, soon afterward, there in the hospital. That was all far in the past now, nearly forgotten; and even that night when she’d locked herself in the bathroom he could remember the beginning of it all no more clearly than one remembers a dream days later. She’d been plain to start with, except for her chestnut-colored hair. As she grew older she grew pinched and sickly-looking as a witch, and her hair became streaked with wiry gray. She began to tipple wine a little when he wasn’t at home. Standing at the bathroom door that night, calling to her through it, he saw the years stretched out before him like a cheap hall rug in a strange and unfriendly hotel, and he thought—with such violence that it made him shaky—how it had felt to be totally free, standing looking down at the prow of a ship dimly lighted at night, with the ocean stretching away on all sides ambiguous as an oracle and glinting with unearthly silver, as calm and steady in its rhythm as the blood in your veins. Though he’d firmly put it behind him, he had not in all his years forgotten that vision, that temptation. One’s struggle with the devil never ends. But he’d made her come out of the bathroom at last, groaning and stretching out her arms to him, and if there were hairs in the food tonight, or last night, or sometime last year, Clumly did not know it. If her slip showed or she smelled of wine, he did not notice it. Chief of Police Fred Clumly had renounced the world.
    She said, “You look tired, Fred.” Clumly’s wife went out of her way to find phrases like “you look” or “I see that …” They all did that, blind people. He had a theory it was something they taught them at the Blind School, the same as they taught them to walk slightly faster than normal people, with their heads drawn back so they wouldn’t hit first with their chins.
    “Aye-uh,” he said. “Tired. Gets harder every year.” For all his annoyance, he spoke kindly, as was right. He glanced at her. She was shaking her head, the eyes turning with the face, and he looked down again.
    After a moment she said—too loudly, as always, as though her voice had to be loud to get past the darkness she inhabited—”Vanessa Hodge called.”
    “Mmm,” he said. He pushed the last of the gray stew against his bread and put it in his mouth, then wiped his hands on his napkin.
    “It’s about those Indian boys you’ve got locked up. Hodges are their guardians, you know. Or they used to be. Poor Hodges.”
    He pushed the plate away and drew the coffeecup closer.
    “It’s been terrible for the Hodges. Poor Vanessa’s not up to snuff since that little stroke or whatever it was, and she’s not getting any younger. Even when things are running smoothly, she doesn’t get around like she used to. She said they’d come in at all hours of the night, and sometimes their drunken friends with them. She said one night last winter Ben found that oldest boy lying on his bed just as naked as the day he was born, not a cover on him. She said when Ben