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

atheists pissing on altars. Righteousness, patriotism, “good manners” on one side, crouching in fear and brave comradery beside the cannons that cautiously peeked out, small dark O’s of alarm, above the battlements; on the other side, in the woods beyond the moat, Flint’s bedraggled cult, ready to die like heroes—nay, martyrs—for General Fornication; Anarchists United —outrageous idea—willing and eager to die for freedom from the accidental chains of geography and geometry, the rivers, mountain ranges, invisible dotted lines that invest one set of hills with unholy majesty far beyond that of all other green tumescences and can send you to prison if you fail to see the glow; and somewhere, sulking behind the worshippers of flesh and the anarchists, the unwashed and uncivil—tanned, half-naked bums huddled on the heat vents of the sidewalks of Washington, D.C., in the middle of winter, kings of disgust to whom style, even thank you and please, is more loath than Treblinka …

He, for one, had nothing against any of them. Perhaps, when he was young he’d imagined that he was working for Law & Order, but he’d been disabused of such foolishness long since. In the mindless game Winning-or-Losing-One’s-Case, he served whoever got him when the teams chose up. In that, he was no different from any other, in his opinion. Take a perfectly good, decent Republican young man from the pastures of Ohio, put him in a large university—in English, sociology, or political science—his conscience would drive him to the Democratic Party within the year. Send him to BankAmerica as a responsible executive, and reason—common decency—would turn him Republican within the month. Make him a policeman, within a week he’d start memorizing football scores. One must talk, after all; share interests with the people one’s surrounded by. What kind of humbug, in a city of rapists, holds out for the dignity of womanhood? No crime; no shame. Reality! So the life force rose up sometimes as an elephant, sometimes as a tree. No harm; Craine had no objection—no serious objection. Nevertheless, having noticed that the whole game was rigged, one had to concentrate, make small adjustments, to keep on playing.

Ironically, Craine had been the darling of his doctors, a marvel of good attitude. He healed as if magically, seemed hardly to notice the pain or confinement. The first cut in his abdomen had infected—no fault of Craine’s; the intestines are known to be a filthy place—and so he’d lain for weeks with gray packing in the wound, which nurses came to change every three, then four hours, and doctors would come, every three or four days, to pick at a little with their knives. Craine read, slept, read. “It must make you want to scream, just lying here like this,” his surgeon, a woman, had said to him once, not looking at him, running her eyes over his chart. She was lean as a sapling; hard-boned, sharp-eyed. Her blond hair was cut like pillow feathers. Her chin was like an Indian’s stone knife. “Well, no,” Craine had said. Sometimes, troubled by intestinal cramps (this was later, after his second operation, when he’d begun to be mobile), he’d considered screaming. It was the worst pain he’d ever experienced, and where pain was concerned, Craine was no novice. He’d been shot, wrecked in cars, beaten, et cetera, the usual fol-de-rol of his witless occupation. But the idea of screaming was tiresome and depressing, especially the idea of screaming over a thing so unheroic, even bestial, as intestinal cramps. Screaming, even if the cause was Justice or Truth or earthquakes in Chile, seemed to Craine a little babyish, a foolish exaggeration of one’s importance in the world—though groaning was all right, a little honest groaning could be a blessed thing, like healthy defecation. Inhale: silence; exhale: groan. Like the rhythm of the womb. It was not, like screaming, an appeal for pity or even interest. A noise, simply; a temporary annoyance of one’s neighbors, like traffic sounds or bells of a clock tower out of tune, a noise that, making no demands, could be endured, tuned out. He’d clenched his teeth and hobbled up and down the hospital corridors—the usual cure for intestinal cramps—inching along like a ninety-year-old man, gripping in his right hand, half-leaning against it, the aluminum tree from which his tubes and bottles hung.

Friends—acquaintances—came by, sent cards, wakened him with phone calls, sent flowers. It was astonishing that he, testy, cold-blooded old bastard that he was, should be so rich in friends or anyway acquaintances. Showed what a remarkable capacity people had for self-delusion. Yet there he was lying a little, of course. It was standard practice, in Craine’s profession, to give the client every possible benefit of the doubt; standard practice to lay yourself out for every asshole that hired you. Snarl as he might, it was Gerald Craine’s nature to assume that even the most despicable of mortals had something to be said for him, at any rate as much as could be said for the miserable bastards who rose up against him. He defended the indefensible, blanched at nothing, mothered the monstrous; and this was his reward, a roomful of friends whose names for the most part escaped him. If anyone had pushed him, he’d have admitted more: that he was glad to see them. Sometimes when one of them came grinning through the door, Craine’s eyes, to his shame and indignation, would well up with tears. He was tempted to say to himself, “Life means more than you thought, you old fart. Look how many people, as the saying goes, ‘care.’ ” He imagined an army—Craine’s people against the world. A woman he’d helped with her divorce years ago came, packed like a pigeon, in a tweedy suit, and gave him a “friendship ring.” Her lips were shiny as wax, like the lips of a cadaver in state. A young man, formerly of Carbondale, now fisherman on a boat on the Chesapeake Bay, told Craine how Craine had changed