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

mused with the part of his mind not reading), he’d never bat an eye. He had no relatives, no friends, no possessions he cared about; he had no future, no past—a creature moving comfortably outside Time, as he’d tried to explain to McClaren.

His mind toyed briefly (his eyes moving over the page, left to right and downward, steadily) with the thought of Hannah Johnson’s sharp memories. He’d seen it many times, how she dipped into her past as if the whole thing were running like a movie in her head, Greer Garson and Alan Ladd—her husband T.J., just home from the war, grinning like a fool in his uniform; the birth of her children, their baptism days; the big house they lived in on Sycamore, up among the whites, before T.J. got in trouble. She spent half her time harking back or casting forward. A curious way to live, it seemed to Craine. He glanced over his shoulder; someone slipped into a doorway. Craine remembered, abruptly, something from his navy years—he’d served on a submarine in World War II. A few frozen images: his commanding officer with wrinkles around his eyes and his hand on his chin; a sunrise on the Pacific like a cheap picture postcard. And he remembered, less dimly, though dimly enough, some three, maybe four of the books he’d read then; it was there that he’d picked up his reading habit. The 42nd Parallel; a biography of Lincoln; a book on the formation of the universe—the slow collapse of dust clouds into solid, hot masses: creation as the closing of a fist. Try as he might, he could bring back nothing of the cabin, not even the bunk he read on or the color of the blankets. He could remember warm light, soft and yellow, as in a house, but he couldn’t remember the source. Casting back farther, back into his childhood, he could call back, except for an image of Aunt Harriet at the piano—nothing whatsoever. Now he was imagining—or rather dreaming, nodding over the book—that he was in dispute with someone about memory. He sat at a huge iron desk, trembling and defensive. “Why should I?” he snapped, cantankerous, full of business. He was both himself and the other man, it seemed. “Nothing?” he asked mildly—or the observer asked; the identification was not so clear now. “Nothing at all,” Craine answered with a touch of defiance, whimpering in his dream. The observer, bearded and bespectacled, was on guard; he knew himself at the edge of some old unpleasantness. “Nothing!” Craine said firmly, angrily, in the darkness.

He waved his hands, explaining, and even as he did so he remembered traces of what it was that he could not remember. He was fishing from the bank on his uncle’s farm with his trim-bearded father, who was somehow a woman, his father aloof, his cuffs cocked high above his citified socks, his pose as patient and serene as the sunlight in the snakegrass around them. All this Craine saw, though staring down in intense fascination and half-mystical alarm at the slow-moving, clay-yellow water, thick gumbo, from which the deadmen would rise. He knew what was down there, or some of it: snapping turtles, gars, enormous slick frogs, and at the bottom, where the wood and flesh of the deadmen turned slowly to earth— bewhiskered catfish. When the line went taut Craine’s heart leaped, terrified, seeing already what would happen in an instant—the fish wildly fluttering above the water, like his heart, spinning in the light like a large silver coin, then thumping to the grass, where it would flop and suck for breath, already dying, laboring against air. His father’s neat hands were like a doctor’s, touching it. His glasses blinked light. Little Craine stared, wide-eyed, and held his breath. So it went again and again, each time less frightening. After a while one got used to these things, death and life touching, like his father’s pale fingers on the fish. The threat drew back a ways, retreated into the shadows of the nettles, then farther, into the trees. He sat in warm sunlight, the world grew increasingly rational; his father cleaned his glasses. Though Craine’s heart beat rapidly, perhaps he had already begun to forget. Soon nothing would remain, of this or of anything else from his childhood, except at night. At night, years later (so he told the icy observer, hurriedly whispering), he would dream of murderous black catfish, slow-moving as zeppelins, prowling among the stars.

“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