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

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