Stillness & Shadows

by John Gardner

  They had arrived at Tully’s desk now, and Craine again stepped back to let Tummelty go first. The bulldog looked up mournfully, then down with a weary groan. “Opera,” he seemed to say. Craine slightly widened his eyes. Out on the street a truck passed, making the door rumble. “Oh! Oh, thank you!” Dr. Tummelty said, glancing at Craine as if he’d spoken. He laid the dictionary on the desk in front of Tully, who opened it without bothering to look up, read the price written in red pencil inside the cover, and wrote it down on a sales slip.

  “Lovely weather,” the doctor said, holding out a twenty-dollar bill.

  Tully frowned and continued to frown; chewing hard, as if thinking it over, checking the truth of the statement from various angles, by various calculations, including Scripture.

  “The magnifying glass is my own,” the doctor said.

  Now Tully did look up, the creases growing darker around his button chin. Light sparked off his spectacles, and his mouth pursed more tightly, still chewing. Again Craine’s mind tricked him, for it seemed to him that Tully said, just audibly, “Ye think my damn place looks like a pawnshop? Ye think I’m in the Goddamn antique bidness? I’m in books and maps, mister, or doctor, whatever ye call yerself. I’m in the readin bidness. History! Works of the soul, doctor!” But Tully’s mouth wasn’t moving, except to chew. Craine bent closer, making sure. No, no question about it. Whatever he was thinking, Tully was keeping it to himself. Craine should have known, of course. They rarely spoke, these old crocodiles. “Warm ott,” they’d say, or “Little cooler today,” to show they weren’t downright opposed to speech; but that was the end of it—even as they spoke their eyes drifted leftward in their milky slits, then right again, slowly, as if reading the horizon—and then back they sank into their sullen, raging silence. They were born furious, the people of southern Illinois. You could see it in the babies at the hospital. Beef-eaters, hyperglycemics. Red, round faces, as round as the bone-white electric clock that stared inhumanely from the white wall behind them, the clockface dazzling, the white wall dazzling, designed to blind them or anyway to teach them to observe the world asquint, and squint they did, squint they would, from the cradle to the grave. Sternly, gingerly, the nurses held them up like blanketed dolls that might have bombs inside them, which in fact they did, hearts tick-tick-ticking toward the hour appointed, hardly seconds away as astronomers count time—held them up to the wide, glinting window—he’d been there with a client just a week ago—and red-faced, rolling-eyed, the newborns shook their fists and showed the hell-pit blackness inside their wailing mouths, Southern Baptists already: Time is Misery.

  Tully took the twenty and looked down once more, scowling, still chewing, though as always he had nothing in his mouth but the taste of the injustice of things. He opened the desk drawer, took out change, put in the twenty-dollar bill, paused, slowly and carefully making sure he’d done everything right—Craine could see him as a schoolboy, rechecking his columns of addition in panic—then counted one more time, pulling at each bill, and at last gave the doctor his change and the gray, scribbled sales slip. Craine laid the book on Sanskrit on Tully’s desk and put a dollar on top of it. Tully took the dollar, opened the book to hunt nearsightedly for the price—50¢ in red—wrote the sales slip, furiously chewing, and reopened the cash drawer.

  “It has fascinating implications, this new split-lobe psychology,” Dr. Tummelty murmured confidentially. “You know what I mean, the left lobe governing one set of faculties—reason, logic, mathematics, language—the right lobe governing a different set—emotion, our feeling for melody and color, all that’s ‘feminine,’ so to speak—”

  “Yes, right,” Craine said quickly, almost gruffly, edging toward the door, pocketing his sales slip and change. The vague sense of dread had flared up in him, much stronger. He could feel the eyes on him, some angry young woman, he’d swear to it, though there was no young woman in sight. Something flashed in his mind, white as snow, too brief to catch. Dr. Tummelty came after him, part of his attention on dusting the dictionary with his handkerchief—the magnifying glass was in his pocket now—then folding the hankie, dust in, to keep his suit coat clean. The suit coat was elegant, silvery gray, as soft and thick as a rabbit’s coat. He must have gotten it up in St. Louis or, more likely, Chicago. There were no such suits for sale here in Carbondale, much less Murphysboro; checks and plaids were what the crocodiles wore, though maybe at Sohn’s you could find a suit fit for a student.

  Beyond Dr. Tummelty, in the dimness of floor-to-ceiling stacks, the young man who’d just come in stood poking his head out, watching Craine. He wasn’t the one who’d been spying on him, such was Craine’s opinion. Electricity was different. The moment Craine’s eyes met his, the boy looked down and, like a groundhog, drew his head back. Two-heads Carnac was nowhere to be seen, though Craine seemed to sense him everywhere, as if he’d turned himself into the ceiling, the floor, the walls.

  “You’re familiar with the idea of complementarity in physics?” Dr. Tummelty was asking. Gently, he touched Craine’s arm to draw his attention back. Craine squinted, waiting. If it weren’t for the slight alcoholic haze, he’d have noticed long ago that there was something peculiar in the way Dr. Tummelty had latched onto him, clinging like a burr. Someone else, of course, would have dismissed it at once as an old man’s loneliness. (That, as Craine often remarked, was why Craine was the detective, not someone else.) “It’s not a concept I fully understand,” Dr. Tummelty said, “but I gather it suggests that the physical universe may be constructed in completely different ways, so that it shows itself to us in one way or another depending on how we look at it. Ask questions that assume light travels in waves, and the universe obliges us by answering in waves. Ask questions that assume light flows in particles, and the universe answers you in particles. There’s no resolving the conflict—no ‘wavicles,’ as some scientific wag once expressed it. The universe is this, but also that—that’s complementarity, if I haven’t got it wrong. It’s a fascinating business. Look at it one way in isospin space … isospin space … and an object’s a proton; look at it another, and it’s a neutron. Science, religion … rationality, intuition …”

  Craine glanced at him, then down again, half eager to move on, half arrested, his scalp prickling; the sensation that someone was observing him was increasing by leaps and bounds. (Without his knowing it, his hand drew his pipe toward his mouth. His teeth caught the bit and his hand reached into his coat to look for matches among the paper scraps.) The only time he’d heard the bell above the door, he was almost certain, was when the boy in the oversized red sweater came in. Was the girl still there, then? the young woman in the long black cloak? Was she police?—was that it? But if so, why him? He squinted, chilled. Why not, after all? It was the oldest trick in the handbook: pin it on some drunk. His head gave a little involuntary jerk and his mouth fell open. Never! They knew him! Never in a million years! But the flushing in his chest told him otherwise. He strained to clear his wits, get cold sober for an instant—just one clear-headed instant was all he’d need—but all he could get, strain as he might, was a surge of witless fear that made him jerk his right hand toward the bottle. He stopped himself by such ferocious force of will that his hand hung there shaking like a machine.

  “Suppose the two lobes see whole different universes, both of which are there,” Dr. Tummelty said, still touching Craine’s arm, searching his eyes as if with feigned innocence—as if someone had hired him to check Craine out, or maybe delay him while a trap was set—“one universe superimposed on the other, so to speak. Or interdigitated. On the one hand, the universe Carnac sees; on the other hand …” He studied Craine as if to make out what he thought. Waving his left hand, dismissing innumerable objections, he hurried on: “Suppose in addition to physical particles—quarks and anti-quarks, neutrinos, muons—there are spiritual particles—prayerons, say.” He smiled, looking over Craine’s head, not quite joking. “Suppose that in that accident Two-heads had, some curious rewiri
ng of his brain resulted, something analogous to the operation formerly done in Tibet, we’re told—the opening of the mystic … so to speak … third eye. I don’t say I believe all that, mind you, but one of the things we’ve been learning lately—”

  “Mmm,” Craine said. “Here, let me get that door for you.” Like a man stepping over a crevasse, Craine threw one foot forward.

  As his stretched hand went for the doorknob an explosion of barking went off behind him. Craine jumped, violently and awkwardly, throwing one arm out but nearly falling even so, and swung his long sharp nose around in the same motion, just in time to see a gray paper airplane come to rest in the shadowy space between his feet and Tully’s desk. Tully stared at him, his caved-in mouth wide open, black as a pit. The airplane had been made from the page of some old book. The dog, half up on his feet, barked once, twice more, then stopped, embarrassed, looking around over his shoulder at Wilbur Tully.

  “Hyah!” Tully yelled, throwing all the force of his fury, all his rage at the universe, at the dog. Craine shrank, cringed as the dog did, averting his gaze. His eye landed on the airplane. On one wing, in pencil, Carnac—or someone—had drawn a picture of a large, staring eye with enormous lashes.

  “Goddamn you!” Tully was bellowing. “Goddamn you sons of bitches!” The yell came out distinctly, nothing ever clearer, but his mouth was, all the while, tight shut.

  “You all right, Detective?” Dr. Tummelty asked, catching Craine’s arm.

  “Fine,” Craine said, and jerked his arm back, harder than he meant to. His weak eyes searched wildly, trying to make sure it was Carnac who’d done this, but he couldn’t make out even the back of the store. “Never better!” he said, and gave a quick, fierce cackle. He lunged forward, snatched the door open, and stepped out into the light.

  Two

  The day was blindingly bright and clear, the sky and the sunlit walls of buildings charged with that yellow-white, tropical brilliance of sunlight unexpectedly encountered after hours in a movie theater, except worse, more like the darkness of Mammoth Cave or the center of the earth. Pain shot in through his eye sockets. Coming out into the daylight had been a mistake, he saw; but after all that business he could hardly go back. He shaded his eyes with the book on Sanskrit, then, gradually adjusting to the dazzle in every atom on the sunstruck street, groped forward, lowering the book, reaching out vaguely, like a swimmer, his shoes stumbling close to obstructions in his path, then away again, his right elbow now clamped tightly on the book. His eyes adjusted more and, leaning close, touching things, he began to get his bearings. The grainy configurations in telephone poles, the finely sifted dust on car and truck fenders, the humps and jagged cracks in the sidewalk—grass pushing up through them, insects thriving on them, ants and wood ticks, ladybugs, mosquitoes—took on at last, even for Craine’s thick-spectacled eyes, their proper definition, that and somewhat more, the unnatural sharpness of objects observed through the lens of slight drunkenness—a sharpness less unnatural to Craine than to most people, and one he accepted with pleasure now, anchoring his mind by it as he straightened from his inspection of the cracks at his feet and unsteadily turned left, heading downtown in the direction of his office. He paused once, feeling those eyes on him, and glanced back over his shoulder at Tully’s, just in time to see Carnac come flying out onto the sidewalk as if thrown. A moment later, in great distress, the old doctor emerged, his arms extended, one reaching back toward Tully’s door, the other (the one that held the book) toward Carnac. He resolved his dilemma in favor of Carnac, hurrying to him, chasing the hat for him, then helping him to his feet. Two small black children stopped to look and one of them bent over, picked up something from the sidewalk—a feather—and held it toward the doctor. The doctor took it from her, bowing and smiling, and held it toward Carnac, who stood furiously slapping at the seat of his choir robe, his narrow shoulders hunched. That was as much as Craine saw of the event; people on the sidewalk came flowing around them, hiding them from view. Craine set off again toward his office.

  The street—“the strip,” as they called it these days—was crowded with life, as always—students in old Volkswagens, on motorcycles and bicycles, standing by store windows, holding hands, looking in; farmers in their pickups poking along toward the depot or Dillengers’ feed store; town and university people bustling through their errands; cats in upstairs apartment windows or preening on the painted-brick hems of porches; cardinals and blue jays, nuthatches, sparrows in the bushes and trees or up on tarpaper roofs; and everywhere—sleeping in doorways, tied by their leashes to parking meters, sniffing at the gutters, the coats of passing strangers—particolored, brown, gray, black, and pepper-speckled dogs. He passed Low’s Jewelry, where the clock in the window ran backwards, the clockface reversed, and like a man who has bitten into a lemon, he screwed his mouth up tight and squeezed his eyes shut, offended by the obstreperous clutter of things, toying with the idea of going back to his hotel room to bed. When he opened his eyes, it was of course all still there, slightly left of where he’d thought it would be, a universe stuffed like an old spinster’s hope chest with junk … “Junk!” he said aloud, angrily, clenching his fist, though he was conscious of no emotion.

  “Morning, Craine,” Denham said, nodding from the door of his old tobacco shop. “Fine weather.”

  Craine nodded, touched the brim of his hat, returned his hand to the neck of the bottle in his overcoat pocket, and hurried on. The sense of being watched was still with him, still strong. It gave solidity to his step, determination. He walked cocked forward, as if pushing against wind—wind, small planets, meteors, imploded stars—his lips sucked in, his eyes slightly bulging behind the thick, tinted glasses, and from time to time he would glance over his shoulder, as if hearing again Carnac’s warning. No wonder, of course, reinforced as the warning was by the doctor’s opinion, however tentative and mysterious, on the possible trustworthiness of Two-heads’ miswired mind. All very well to mutter, “Maniac, maniac!”; the fact remained, he could feel those hostile eyes on him. He glanced nervously at his watch. A door opened to his left, whispering “Sh!”—so much like a human warning that he jumped and, for an instant, stopped muttering. He studied the man now emerging from the aqueous dimness inside, an old, bearded Negro, then turned and looked carefully back in the direction from which he’d come. No sign, or anyway none he could make out. Beyond twenty-five feet, the world, to Craine, was like the floor of a clean, bright ocean. His hand, unbeknownst to him, reached up to his mouth with two fingers. His shadow on the sidewalk, stooped and hatted, lay patiently waiting for him to move again.

  Abruptly he darted forward and turned left down the alley beside the dimestore. At the office, they’d wonder what on earth had become of him, but no matter; it was high time he settled this. If he was smart, of course, he’d go straight to the office and get help; this business of being tailed was no joke, Lord knew—maybe tailed by the cops, hoping to set him up, maybe by some lunatic who got his kicks, or hers, out of rolling old drunks, maybe pouring gas on ’em and lighting ’em. “Better play it smart,” Craine whispered, pausing, narrowing his eyes. He whispered it again, then again, then again, varying the delivery and intonation, getting it just right. But even as he spoke he forgot the point of it, that he should go back to the office and get help. He clamped the book on Sanskrit more tightly under his arm and walked bent farther forward, almost running. The echoes of his footsteps whispered on the dark brick walls and grumbled among garbage cans. He looked behind him—no one there, or no one he could see in the alley’s dim light, large blocks of shadow. When he emerged he turned right into what once had been the A&P parking lot, now half grown up in weeds, then left at the street, then left again at the corner, doubling back toward Tully’s. The eyes still seemed to be following him, if ever they had been. Yet the streets were busy; no way to be sure. He intensified his effort, cranked up his cunning. Once, turning suddenly, he spotted Two-heads Carnac at the back of an old building, sorting thro
ugh large cardboard boxes. Craine flattened himself more against the wall, then crept away. Carnac sorted on, holding first one box, then another, up to the sun. “Hoo! Ha! Nah bad! Sum-bitch!” He smiled like a man sorting paintings.

  So Craine continued for another twenty minutes. Turning corners, moving through the town’s decayed center, he would step off quickly in the new direction, then stop, hidden by the brick or wood of the building on the corner he’d just rounded, and would light his pipe, squinting, waiting, his right hand wandering with a mind of its own toward the whiskey bottle. Once or twice, drawing out the bottle, sack and all, he took a quick restorative. So far as he could tell, no one who came around the corner was the one he was waiting for. He saw old women with shopping bags, their eyes forlorn; fat businessmen angrily gesturing and talking or simple-mindedly beaming, dreaming of profits—makers of instruments of torture, for all he knew (America was the number one manufacturer of instruments of torture, he’d read); students on fire escapes or skipping across streets, some with long hair, some with Afros; a minister with whom he’d done business once; doctors, college professors, most of them young, full of twitches and fierce opinions, their faces as innocent as the faces of children; heavy-booted asparagus- and hog-farmers, bespectacled, scholarly, awkward down off their tractor seats, all with that look of slight confusion, as if they suspected that somehow they’d been tricked. Craine knew the whole dreary catalogue of their troubles, past, present, future—the troubles peculiar to each of them, from the old women to the fanners. Mortal tribulation was his stock in trade. But their troubles were not what he was thinking about now. People noticed him, some of them, but hardly registered the fact, hurrying on; and after a moment he would hurry on behind them, moving more or less in a spiral that would lead to his office.