by John Gardner
“That’s your explanation?” The interrogator sneered, though—raising his hand—he tried to hide it. Craine’s language had been maudlin, a fault the stranger could not abide.
“It is, sir. That’s my explanation. Yes, sir.”
Speaking aloud, Craine wakened himself. He stared around the room.
The book had closed itself, sinking between his legs. The room seemed more miserable and drab than before, paltry in comparison to wherever it was that he’d been in his dream—he could remember none of it, not an image, not a word; he had only a vague sense of the dream’s intensity, whether joyful or ominous he could hardly say, but emphatically alive, more alive than anything in this world was.
The music was still playing in his neighbor’s room, and again he experienced an intense, drunken wish—totally out of character, he would have said—to talk with someone; that is, talk with Ira Katz. The image of the young man came clearly into his mind, the dark, ragged beard, strangely gentle eyes that reminded him of. … He searched his wits. When it came to him, he laughed aloud, two sharp barks. Reminded him of Christ Our Lord! Craine got up from his chair and dropped the book in the seat, still laughing, but soundlessly now, bent half double as if borne down by the irony of things. Abruptly, he stopped laughing and frowned, deep in thought. It was interesting, after all, that he should feel as apparently he did about the Jesus of his childhood. He wiped sweat from his forehead, then pulled at the tip of his nose with two fingers, as if shaping it like clay, trying to make it still longer, all the while seeing in his mind’s eye the picture on the wall of the Sunday school room, Jesus in the Garden. Stupid, sentimental. Light beaming down out of heaven like a spotlight in a theater. All the same, there was something there, however buried in foolishness. The man had a kindly face—acquainted with sorrow, as the saying went. (Ira Katz, Craine had a feeling, would not like the idea of being identified with Christ Our Lord. Craine smiled, showing his rat teeth. Never mind; it was interesting.) He stood looking around the room, trying to think of some excuse, some errand that would justify a visit to his neighbor. On the table across from the bed stood his hot plate, salt and pepper, half-filled sugar bowl. Craine nodded as if at some suggestion from the walls, the mice. He took a cup—a cracked white one, the only one he had—from the top of the refrigerator, dusted out the inside with his fingers, and started toward the door. He paused, reconsidering, then went back for his suit coat and whiskey bottle, put on the suit coat, put the bottle in the right hand pocket, picked up the cup, and started for the door again. Again he paused, looking around, hunting through his pockets with his left hand, then, shifting the cup to the left hand, hunting with his right. He found papers and empty match folders, but no matches. In the top dresser drawer, among more slips of paper, rolled socks, and his second pistol, he found a matchbook, nearly full, that said Ace Hardware. He dropped it in the pocket of his shirt, beside his pipe, shifted the cup to his right hand again, ran back to the chair for his tobacco pouch, then hurried out.
At his neighbor’s door, as soon as his hand touched the handle, a kind of nightmare came over him. He seemed to be standing not in the dim, shabby hallway but somewhere outside, under trees. Someone was coming toward him, hands raised as if to catch him. Though it was dark, he could almost see the face. Then he was standing in the hallway again, frightened and for some reason sick with guilt. He stood for a long time, listening, head bowed and cocked to one side. Nothing came to him; whatever it was had fallen away, back into darkness. He raised his hand from the doorknob and, softly, knocked. After a moment he knocked again. Inside, someone turned down the stereo.
“Coming,” Ira Katz called. “Just a minute.”
Four
“I wonder, Mr. Katz,” Craine said, twisting his face to an obsequious smile, holding the cup in both hands by the fingertips, his shoes toeing inward, “if you could spare me a cup of sugar?”
Ira Katz looked from Craine’s face to the strap of his shoulder holster and down to his cup, then back at his face, not suspicious, exactly, but thinking, grinning nervously, his mind half there, half somewhere else, dark brown eyes gazing out at Craine like those of some Talmudist roused for a moment to reflection on the present. He was always like that for a minute or two when Craine dropped in on one errand or another. Craine smiled on, waiting for it to pass. The room smelled thickly of chicken—or possibly fish—and cooked cabbage, also coffee, a suggestion of burnt toast. Craine’s hunger died away. “I seem to have run out of sugar,” he said.
The young man’s eyes were dark and heavy-lidded, not in the sleepy-looking or secretly cunning or bedroomy way but in another more complex and troublesome to Craine, as if Ira Katz had seen to the heart of things, had suffered and forgiven all the evils of humanity for maybe thousands of years and was doomed to continue in the same way down through the centuries for thousands more, perhaps—weary, full of personal and impersonal griefs, faintly grinning with alarm, no less innocent or compassionate than the day he began, but bereft of all hope for himself or his fellow man. It was an illusion, no doubt—or largely that—an accidental effect of the structure of his bones, his eyebrows, the flecked brown pupils of his eyes; but from earliest childhood, Craine surmised (his face momentarily shrewd, almost cunning), Ira Katz had imposed that illusion without knowing it, so that people had trusted him, confided in him, poured out their fears and woes as Gerald Craine would do now, given half a chance, not that Craine greatly admired himself for it. In the course of time— or so Craine imagined, and he was usually correct about these things—Ira Katz had become, if he wasn’t from the beginning, what his face made him seem, a man put on earth to bear the sorrows of the whole human race. Craine pushed the cup out toward him, half-smiling, half-grimacing again. Abruptly, as if Craine’s ludicrous request had only now broken through, Craine’s neighbor smiled more openly, a large, boyish smile full of gleaming teeth, on all sides of it a fury of black moustache and beard.
“I don’t know,” he said, “let me see.” He took the cup from Craine’s hands and, preparing to turn away, gave Craine’s face one more quick look. “Come in?” he asked. He held the door open wider. Craine glanced left, down the hallway in the direction of the bare lightbulb dangling in front of his own door, then looked at Ira Katz’s doorway again and, after an instant, hurried through. He felt a brief afterflash of the nightmare or vision, the man coming after him in the dark; then it was gone. He was suddenly aware of the ticking, clicking, and knocking of his neighbor’s clocks. There was no sound from the stereo. The record had ended; the turntable arm was at rest in its gray metal cradle, the red light glowing like a ruby on the amplifier.
Ira Katz, in stocking feet, went through the kitchen door, opposite the door to the hallway, and switched on the light. “I don’t even know if I have any or not,” he said. “I hardly ever use it.” He put the cup on the counter and stood with his fists on his hips, looking around as if the kitchen were someone else’s. He wore a blue work shirt, the sleeves rolled up past the biceps—the muscles were large and tanned, like a laborer’s—black suspenders, black slacks pulled up tight by the suspenders, and below the cuffless pant legs, black stretch socks of the kind old men wear. The cat called Rooster came silently into view, an enormous tiger-stripe with Chinese eyes, walking and stretching at the same time, as if wakened from a snooze. He stood looking up at Ira Katz for a moment, then with great dignity rubbed his head against Ira’s leg. Ira ignored it, reaching up and opening a cupboard. “Ah!” he said.
Craine looked away and tried to put his hands in the pockets of his suit coat. The left one went in easily; the right one bumped against the bottle and kept poking, witless, Craine’s mind too far away to help. In the livingroom, laid out to the right of where Craine stood, swaybacked pine and used-brick bookshelves covered all the walls, right up to the window looking out on the street and up to the sides of the door to the bedroom and bathroom, opening off the end of the livingroom to the left. On the tops of the bookshelves, on t
he narrow table that held the stereo, on the stereo speakers, on ornate old wall shelves and on the rickety tables at each side of his overstuffed chairs—grungy and misshapen, as old as Craine—Ira Katz had his antique timepieces—clocks, fancy watches, here and there an hourglass. Except for the hourglasses, most of them were running; none was in complete agreement with any other about the time. Craine moved unsteadily, hardly knowing he was doing it, toward the farther of the chairs. Propped among the clocks and silver watches on the table beside it stood two photographs, one of them a picture of a straw-yellow-blond-headed smiling young woman, the other a snapshot of two solemn dark children holding a kite, one—the elder—a boy, the other one a girl. Craine bent over to look more closely. The pictures were new, or at any rate Craine had never noticed them before. They glinted in the light from the wooden floor lamp behind the chair. As Ira Katz came back into the room with the sugar, Craine straightened up and pointed. “Yours?” he asked, and smiled one-sidedly, accidentally ironic.
The young man glanced in the direction of the photograph and snapshot, his expression clouding for an instant, then smiled and, just perceptibly, nodded. “You’re in luck,” he said, and held the sugar toward Craine. “It’s not quite a cup, but you’re welcome to what there is.”
Reluctantly, grimacing, Craine approached to take the cup from him. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much.” He glanced toward the door but remained where he was. His neighbor stood waiting, watching him. “You’re right,” Craine said, and gave a sharp little laugh, “sugar’s poison. You’re smart to stay clear of it.” He leaned toward his neighbor, explaining quickly, confidentially, almost losing his balance, steadying himself with a hand on the wall, “Pancreas can’t handle it except if vitamins come with it, the way they do when you eat fruit. Take sugar without vitamins—sugar with your coffee, you know, or sugar in a candy bar—the pancreas has to steal vitamins from elsewhere. Robs you of nutrients—thief in the night! I’m a detective, that’s why I’m informed about these things.”
His neighbor smiled. It wasn’t clear that he got the joke.
“The worst of it,” Craine said, touching his neighbor’s arm with the sugar cup and leaning in closer, “is that the sugar turns to fat—fat on your heart among other things. It’s a murderer, in the end. First a little harmless pilfering, you know, a little vitamin snatching when nobody’s on the look-out, but then one thing leads to another, as we know—” He chuckled and winked. The young man looked at him strangely.
The cat came in from the kitchen and rubbed against Ira’s leg. As before, Ira seemed not to notice. “I don’t really have any theories about it,” he said, slightly smiling, apologetic. “I’ve got friends who are health nuts, macrobiotics … But personally—” He shrugged. “I had a girlfriend who used to use honey for everything.” An obscene image came into Craine’s mind. He doubted that Katz had intended it. “I got hooked on it,” Katz said. He leaned down to touch the cat’s large head with two fingertips. The cat pushed up against him.
Craine took a sideways step toward the door, then paused, eyes furtively darting around. “Must be hard to know what time it is, with all these clocks,” he said.
Ira Katz smiled and nodded, glancing at the clocks, then straightened up again. After a long moment he said, “Can I offer you a glass of wine?”
“Oh, no, no, thank you very much,” Craine said, and took another quick step toward the door. Again he stopped, grinning, unconsciously closing his hand on the neck of the bottle in his pocket. “Wine and I don’t get along, Mr. Katz. I had an operation on my colon, five, six months ago—I think I may have told you—and ever since, one little glass of wine and whoosh!—where’s the rest room?”
“Rest room?” Ira Katz raised his eyebrows.
“Whenever I drink wine,” Craine explained. “Also coffee, but less so.” He made his face look as if a thought had just occurred to him. “But I’ll tell you what. I’ve got a little Scotch here!” He drew out the Scotch and, too eagerly, held it toward his neighbor. “Scotch and beer go through the kidneys.”
Katz looked sadly at the bottle—resigning himself to the waste of a perfectly good evening, perhaps—then up at Craine’s face. “It wasn’t serious, I hope—the operation.”
“Cancer of the colon,” Craine said. He opened the front of his suit coat as if showing off his wounds. “But they got it all out, they say. Clean as a whistle.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” He turned toward the kitchen, reaching out and touching the door frame. “I’ll stick with wine, I think. You want water and ice?”
“No, thank you,” Craine said, “wrecks the color.” He grinned. As Ira Katz went back into the kitchen, Craine strode, slightly staggering, to the middle of the livingroom and stood looking around, bent forward, as if taking possession. In the kitchen behind him the cat said something Craine didn’t catch, some irritable question, and Ira Katz said something back to him. Above the ticking of the clocks Craine heard a growling sound, something like “Ow, ow, ow!”—an electric can opener, it came to him—then the sound of a spoon hitting the side of the plastic cat dish, and his neighbor’s voice, talking softly. The cat said nothing. Craine set his cup of sugar on the nearest of the bookshelves, between two tall clocks, and bent close to read the top row of titles. A long stretch of them—French paperbacks—were called Situations. At last Ira Katz came in with a fat Almadén bottle, a wineglass, and an empty glass for Craine.
“Have a seat,” he said, and gestured vaguely, letting Craine choose his chair.
Craine, as usual, chose the chair that seemed less likely to be his neighbor’s favorite, the one farthest from the photograph and snapshot, took the glass his neighbor held out to him, and carefully—steadying the bottle against the rim of the glass—splashed in Scotch. His neighbor, standing by the other chair, pouring wine for himself, smiled with just his mouth, like a man lost in thought, then finally seated himself—his head under the lamp so that the black hair shone brown in a ring exactly like a halo around his head—put the bottle on the carpet to the right of his feet, raised his glass as if to say “cheers,” and took a small sip. Craine took a slightly larger sip, then set the wobbly glass down. For a long, awkward moment, they sat listening to the clocks. The cat came wandering in from the kitchen, his wide head tipped, eyes grumpy, to see what they were doing. At last he went over to lie down with his head against Ira Katz’s shoeless left foot. As if by magic, the instant the cat closed his eyes all the clocks began chiming, first one, then another. Ten o’clock.
“Ten o’clock!” Craine said, surprised.
His host half-smiled and nodded. The cat lay quiet as a doorstop, pretending to be asleep.
Craine got his pipe out, loaded it, and lit it, all the while frantically trying to think what he might say.
Ira Katz leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. After a moment he asked, “Is something wrong, Craine?”
Craine jumped at the terrible simplicity of the thing and, to cover himself, reached for the Scotch glass on the table beside his chair. “I’ve been thinking about what we talked about the last time we talked,” he said. He shot a look at Ira, but the poet’s eyes showed nothing. Craine put the pipe down in his lap to hold the glass with both hands and keep it steady. He drank, then leaned forward. The lines and colors of the books in the lamplight behind Ira’s head were slightly sharper and brighter than they ought to be, intensified by the whiskey. Ira Katz waited, slightly smiling, his eyes sad and distant.
“We were talking about novels, you remember, and detectives and exi—” He paused, stopped cold by a memory lapse, struggling in vain after the word, though he knew it as he knew his own name.
“Existentialists?”
“That’s it!” He took another gulp, then put the glass down and picked up his pipe. “Existentialists, yes!” He paused, feeling awkward about leaping so abruptly into serious conversation. Katz looked bored, as if the word existentialists annoyed him. No doubt it did. He’d kn
ow, as a university man, the stupidity of all those big words, all that talk, talk, talk. Craine listened to the clocks—a patternless, frantic clicking like a random beating of electrons—then in spite of himself, in spite of Katz’s displeasure and his own sure knowledge of the uselessness of it all, pressed on: “We were talking about how the existentialists feel about detective novels. It was interesting, and the more I got to thinking about it, the more interesting it got. You don’t like them, I think—these existentialists—but I believe that’s what I am myself—what we have to be, us detectives.”
Ira waited. His shadow lay perfectly still, draped over the cat and reaching halfway to Craine. Another shadow, fainter, stretched up the wall behind him and to the right of him, cast by the dim light coming from the bedroom.