Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

“Thank you very much,” Craine said. “Thank you.”

McClaren was looking at his watch again. He’d put money on the table, though the waiter had brought no check. “It’s been a pleasure getting to know you,” he said. “Can I drop you off someplace?”

“No, I’m heading for my office,” Craine said, and reached across the table for the whiskey sack. It occurred to him that he’d forgotten to get lunch. McClaren came toward him. Too late, Craine realized that the hand was coming for his crazybone again.

“Well, take care of yourself,” McClaren said, and grinned. He gave the crazybone a squeeze, then drew his hand back.

“I’ll do that. Thank you very much.” He moved with them toward the door. Somehow he bumped a table, and the soy sauce went over the edge and thumped on the rug. Eggers stopped quickly to pick it up, looking sheepish as if he’d knocked it off himself. “It jumped me,” Craine explained, pointing to the table with his whiskey sack. “You have to keep watching every minute.”

They smiled politely.

“Most people don’t realize how much things move in this world, ” Craine said. “They don’t mean to make trouble, I recognize that. But you know how it is, things get boring for them.”

Now McClaren had the door open. Eggers put on his cap, one hand in front, one in back, getting it just right.

“You think it’s the Lord, eh?” Craine said, “—hounding me for my sins?”

Eggers smiled vaguely, slightly hurt.

It occurred to Craine that he couldn’t go out there, not yet. Where the sun hit the chrome on the cars along the street, it was like looking at the light of a welding torch. And there was, of course, that other problem. Whoever it was would be waiting—standing on the sidewalk opposite, perhaps, reading a book, waiting as if all eternity were not too long. Book! he thought, and looked down. He had the whiskey sack in one hand; the other hand was empty. “I forgot my book,” he cried. “It’s back there on the table.”

“Well—” Eggers said.

McClaren tipped his dome and half-smiled, solemn. “I’m glad I ran into you,” he said. He raised his hand to touch the side of his glasses. “Drop by the office sometime. We’ll do this again.”

“Yes, good,” Craine said. “Thank you very much.” He willed them out the door, and at last, when the door swung shut behind them, he turned quickly, furtively, and went back for his book.

“Worried?” someone said. He started violently, raising his hands in self-defense. In the chair opposite the book, where McClaren had been sitting, sat a large gray cat, one paw extended toward the table. “Worried? ” the cat said again, pretending to yawn, watching him ironically.

Cautiously, Craine reached for his book and slid it across the table toward his belly. “Of course not,” he hissed. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

But the cat was onto him.

Three

In his dingy, grim-walled hotel room that evening, Craine sat motionless, breathing shallowly, like an invalid trying to make out whether he’s better or worse. He’d come to that familiar part of the day when healthy, happy men pause for a moment, relax with a beer, and look out over their lawns, their children’s bicycles, the new Toyota wagon, taking stock; a time men like Craine spend carefully not thinking, drinking whiskey and smoking strong tobacco without a flicker of thought about cancer or heart attack, since they’ve been drinking and smoking for six, seven hours now, and if they’re going to stop—as perhaps they will, who knows what will happen from one day to the next?—they can stop tomorrow, first thing in the morning, which is still a long way off. Despite the day’s unsettling events—not that much worse than any other day’s, he could see now, putting it all in perspective—his situation was not yet critical. What one had to bear in mind, he thought, gesturing with his pipe stem as if to an audience in the street below, was that (McClaren was right) when the mind plays tricks, it has reasons. His face began to twist like the face of a State’s Attorney conducting a difficult trial. In the end, of course, there could be only one reason—not drink, overwork, even loss of conviction; all those were mere evasions of the bottom line: psychological pain. Craine nodded, a movement so slight that only the sharpest eye could have caught it in the mottled dusk. So the question was, he thought, his face twisting more, what was he doing, unbeknownst to himself—what was he doing that he hadn’t been doing for the past twenty years—that was causing psychological pain? Craine pursed his lips to a sudden small O and stared blankly, eyes slightly widened, as if some fool, some irrumpent stranger, had broken in on his thoughts to raise the question. He frowned, trembling, pretending to consider, then cleared his throat, relit his pipe, and looked down at his book.

As he sat at his window, reading the old tome on Sanskrit by the failing light outside, the shadows on the street grew longer and sharper, eerily alive, it seemed to Craine—-jumping up like panthers when a truck cut through them, or fluttering like starlings in a sudden gust of wind—until once, when he looked out, he saw that their blocks and lines had vanished, or rather had spread everywhere, consuming the street. He heard sharply clicking footsteps, a young woman running. Distress stirred in him, but of course it was nothing, just night again. Voices came up to him, children playing football in the empty dirt lot of the railroad depot across from where he sat. The depot was old, once grand as a palace, chimneys all over it like headstones on a hill, black as coal, their corbeling ornate and clean-cut against the gray, still starless sky. He thought for an instant of the view from his window in Johns Hopkins Hospital—Osier dome and the streets of Baltimore—then concentrated, resisting memory,