Stillness & Shadows John Gardner (nice books to read .txt) 📖

of eyes following him, tacked to him like buttons, some observer single-minded as a cat. A light shudder passed over Craine’s shoulders and down his back, and he thought momentarily of the whiskey in its brown paper sack in his trench coat pocket, but he did not reach for it. He ran his tongue around his mouth—dry as dust from too much smoking—bent closer to his book, and, for an instant, squeezed his eyes shut.

He got an image, in the movie-house blackness inside his mind, of a face, bearded, bespectacled, as expressionless as stone. He was so startled by the sight—memory or vision—that he opened his eyes at once and, to his consternation, lost it. When he closed his eyes again all he saw was the image of Carnac sprawled at his map table as if he’d been propped there since time began. The books and walls around him had the dried-out, slightly rotted look that sooner or later came to everything in Carbondale, every line clean but moldy, like the wood of old pilings, or like deadmen at the rim of a swamp—the look of things submerged and then salvaged again, as if the Mississippi River had come boiling over the hills like a cancerous eruption, death-yellow in the sun, and had lain on the town for a week or so, dropping silt and gray slime, then receded at last, leaving behind it, when the dirt was washed away, that deep-down, ancient, decayed look. Oak boards, one imagined, were as soft as daddock, and one might have believed that even the concrete of the sidewalks was in secret sprouting seeds. It was only an impression; Carbondale had never been flooded in all its long history, or anyway not by the Mississippi River, twenty miles westward, beyond the county seat and walled off by wooded blue hills; but it was often enough soaked by torrential rains, storms of a kind Craine would have associated only with the tropics, before he came here: fat warm drops out of a black, roaring sky—it was tornado country—flash-flooding rains that turned the streets to yellow rivers and made the grass, the pokeweed and trumpet vines in vacant lots and the edges of people’s lawns shoot up lushly, obscenely, made althaea shrubs and redbud trees hang heavy as overgrown animals, hogs too fat to walk or obese, shaggy calves penned up at slaughtering time. Surrounded by all that churning vegetation, thousands of humming insects and hurrying birds, the town’s old oak trees, above buckling sidewalks, glowed darkly, like pensive observers full of gloom. After each rain the sun would come out and burn hot as a furnace, charging the world with muggy dampness and making huge, roiling clouds overhead and, soon, more rain.

The whole town smelled musty, Tully’s Tome Shop more than most places—not that the smell was one Gerald Craine disliked. The mustiness made him think (standing with his eyes closed, chin lifted above the book) of compost heaps, mulch in a greenhouse, attics where a man might explore for a week without exhausting the debris of some stranger’s past—old Collier’s magazines, crockery, stuffed trunks. That was the one real pleasure he got out of his work as a detective. The past—any past, or any but his own—even the history of some thin-lipped ex-mailman—had a spirit to it, a mysterious aliveness that could pull him up short every time. A childish pleasure, or “childlike,” rather, as his neighbor down the hall at the hotel had said, correcting him—not judging or condemning, simply observing, getting the facts lined up, accurate and precise, in his compulsive, poetical way; should’ve been a policeman. “I just record things,” he’d said one time, speaking of his poetry. Craine had watched him, not perfectly certain he understood. Maybe it was this: that poems were, to Craine’s neighbor—so Craine put it to himself—like the proofs of their existence effeminate, instable people put in journals. The weather, the temperature, sensitive impressions. There was a line in one of the books he’d published: Autumn, clear as the eyes of chickens.

Craine had paused over it, interested, but after that the poem had gone nowhere, no story, no characters—nobody home—just more sensitive impressions. He’d glanced warily at his neighbor, thinking—or toying with the possibility of thinking—“Sick mind”; but he hadn’t felt sure of himself. What an ordinary person, some objective observer, would have said, he knew, was “Craine, that’s ridiculous. Lots of perfectly healthy people write poetry.” That might be true and then again it might not. Mental aberration was an interesting business. Nine times out of ten most people missed it, but in Craine’s line of work you developed a careful eye for possibilities. What kind of grown-up, healthy person would go around noticing that a clear autumn day, especially in the late afternoon, was like the eyes of chickens? No harm, the objective observer would say. Live and let live was their motto, these objective observers—till somebody started to find bodies down under the house.

Eyes of chickens. It showed a kind of fixity—obsessiveness. Hinted at a kind of self-absorption, subtle hedonism, a curious detachment or withdrawal from the ordinary serious concerns of humanity that could make you uneasy, once you thought about it. Craine would keep an eye peeled, wait for more evidence. The man had a thing about chickens, possibly. His cat was called Rooster.

Yet he did seem harmless enough, Craine’s neighbor, and no doubt some people thought well of what he did. He’d published three of those skimpy little books—Craine had not read them, though he watched for them now, whenever he was in bookstores—and he taught English at the university. He was young—thirty-two—and bearded. Jewish. He wore suspenders and arm-garters. City boy’s hankering for the country, no doubt. Another mistake, and not without dark implications: potentially dangerous desire to live more lives than one. Except for the cat he’d taken in, and sometimes a girlfriend for the night, Craine’s neighbor lived alone. His room ticked and clicked. He was a