I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down: Collected Stories

by William Gay

  They said Waters was a meter reader. Do you remember ever seeing him up here?

  Who?

  Waters. The man they found in the woods. Did you ever see him?

  I don’t know. I may have. They all wear those yellow hardhats and they all look alike to me. Why?

  Well, everybody has been talking about him.

  They certainly have around here, she said. Why don’t we just let it be.

  He fell silent. He studied her where she lay. He’d never thought about her leaving, the rest of his life without her. Her still somewhere in the world getting up in the morning and going to bed at night, living her life and yet no part of his. He’d always felt that she had saved him from something. Who knew what, perhaps she’d saved him from himself. Yet she’d always been a person of silences, of dark places you couldn’t see into. He would have liked to see the world through the eyes she saw it with, but her vision of it seemed posted off-limits, no trespassing. It seemed as best he could judge a serene world of chrome and ice and you went through it unscathed. Nothing touched you, nothing hurt you, nothing branded you with its mark to show you’d even been there.

  I wonder what he was thinking while he was smoking nearly a pack of cigarettes, he said aloud. She didn’t answer. He knew she was awake. He could tell by the pitch of her breathing. She was lying naked in the warm dark. Her breathing changed when she slept. He used to lie awake and listen to it, a sort of reassurance that she was there.

  He hadn’t been talking to her anyway. He had just thought of Waters, sitting on the dead beech, perhaps the gun in his lap. Was it dark? Was the sun in his eyes? Staring at nothing, then at the drifted leaves between his boots that had shifted to reveal a chasm of unreckonable depth.

  Suddenly, she turned to face him and reached her arms to enfold him. She raised on one elbow and kissed his throat. Bobby, she said, just let it alone. It’s nothing to us. We didn’t even know him. It’s nobody’s fault. Can’t you see that none of it even matters? We’ve got our own lives to go on with. She took his hand and placed it on her naked breast. Marvelously, his hand passed through it into nothing, past the brown nipple and the soft flesh and the almost imperceptible resistance of the rib cage and into a vast gulf of space where winds blew in perpetuity and the heart at its center was seized in bloody ice. Rolling against him and sliding her hand up his thigh, she was a ghost, less than that, like nothing at all.

  THE HIGH SHERIFF’S CAR sat idling noiselessly in Pettijohn’s front yard. With his cup of morning coffee, Pettijohn crossed the lawn toward it. A flicker of annoyance crossed his face, then there was no look there at all.

  Mornin, son. I get you up?

  I’ve been up.

  What happened to your face?

  I got hurt at work.

  What do you work at, sortin wildcats?

  Pettijohn didn’t reply.

  I thought you might want to know how it all came out.

  How did it all come out?

  They decided there’s no question he shot himself. The angle of the shot and all.

  Roller was sitting with his hands clasping the steering wheel and he was peering through the windshield toward the distant woods as intently as if they touched him with the same vague sense of unease Pettijohn had been feeling.

  Well? Pettijohn said.

  Well what?

  I appreciate all this news coverage or whatever it is. But I can’t help wondering what makes me important enough for the high sheriff to drive out and report the result of an inquest.

  The truth is, I wanted to talk to you some more. It occurred to me you might have remembered something. Seeing him pass your house, hearing a shot, anything.

  No. I told you. I’m not here all the time. I have to make a living. Some folks can’t drive around the county asking questions and get paid for it. My wife’s here all the time. You could ask her.

  Actually, I figured she told you I was out here Monday morning. And if there’s a soul on this round earth that knows less about Randy Waters than you do, you’re married to her.

  Pettijohn was silent.

  Oh well, it’s a small thing anyway, Roller said. It just sticks in my craw, where he was. How he got there.

  He came in on those log roads. The way you got him out.

  The problem for me is no vehicle. Did somebody let him out to hunt, and if they did, why don’t they speak up? He lived in Ackerman’s Field. Did he tote that shotgun all the way from town just looking for enough privacy to shoot himself? Now, what gets me about them woods is what he was doing there in the first place.

  Hunting. Scouting a place to put up a deer stand. You hear gunfire back in there every weekend, when deer season opens.

  I don’t know. Maybe. Like I said, it’s a small thing. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation don’t care. He shot himself. His wife has no idea why. I just have a fondness for stories, and that’s not a story. It might be a beginning, or an end, but it’s damn sure not a story.

  Maybe he didn’t even kill himself. Maybe somebody blew him away and hauled him back in there and dumped him out and went about their business.

  Roller eased the car into reverse, stopped it with a foot on the brake. The pitch of the engine changed.

  Oh, I’m satisfied he did it. Our boy Waters had problems. He’d tried it all and none of it worked. Drugs, booze, women. Did I say he tried it a few years back? His folks or whoever got him up and carried him to old Doc Epley. There had been a bad car wreck over by Mormon Springs and Epley had blood all the way to his elbows and he was busy as a one-legged man in a ass-kickin contest. “Put him over on that cot and I’ll get to him when I can,” Epley told them. “I got folks here tryin to live.” There’d been a kid in that wreck and Epley done everything he could and then it died anyway. After he got Waters patched up, he got a tube of lipstick off his nurse’s desk and drew a big X right over Waters’ heart. “There, by God,” he told him. “You ever try it again, there’s you a map to go by.”

  God Almighty.

  It might have been harsh, but it did the trick. He didn’t have no trouble findin it this time.

  WOODS HERE SOMBER and ancient. Pettijohn passed under great live oaks and cypresses and beeches with distended groping arms like gothic trees in a fairy-tale wood. The glade was sepulchral. Light came falling through the latticework of branches and it had the quality of light filtered through stained glass. It stood in greengold columns, shimmered with the movement of the trees.

  Dark oval of earth, so stained with the body’s seepings. So unhallowed a resting place. In the nights, the beasts would quarrel and contest territorial rights, how’d a body sleep? By day the sun would sear the flesh and scald the blind eyes, vultures tilt on the updrafts and glitter in the sun like some hybrid of flesh and chrome.

  He sat on the windfall beech and smoked cigarettes and thought about things. As if by placing himself where Waters had been and echoing his motions he’d gain some insight into the workings of his mind. There were clues could he but find them. A story could he but read it. It sticks in my craw, too, Roller, he thought. And I like a story as well as the next one.

  He arose and toed the cigarette out in the dirt and looked about. Directly, he wound through the winter huckleberries following a path so faint it might have been a ghost path, a dream of a footpath. He moved along with confidence for he now knew where he was going: They were his woods. The ground began to climb gently in an earth bulwark and leveled out, and he came through a spinney of sassafras onto the rim of the abandoned pond.

  There seemed clues in abundance here. What to make of all this? Two old lawn chairs tilted by the wind. Nestled in the roots of an elm half a liter of a red wine called Tokay rosé and in the brush a folded blanket, still sodden and mildewed from the fall rains. An empty plastic bottle that had contained suntan lotion. A glint of the sun off metal drew him farther, to where a tiny gold crucifix lay half buried in the packed clay. He dipped it in the water and wiped it clean on the tail of his shirt. An ea
rring. He dropped it into a shirt pocket and stood up. He remembered what Reuben had said about haunted woods and he grinned a rueful grin and figured him right. He reckoned these woods haunted, but he could not have said by what.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  SHE WAS SITTING on the sofa with a book open on her lap, and she had her legs stretched out across the coffee table. He leaned and laid the crucifix between her smooth tan calves. You must have lost an earring, he said.

  She leaned forward and picked it up. Thanks, she said. You gave me those. Where was it?

  He had no way of knowing what look he had on his face, but when she looked up at him hers went opaque and guarded, as if a curtain had fallen behind her eyes.

  He went into the kitchen and made a glass of iced coffee. He held the cold glass against his forehead. He had a headache he seemed to have been born with, and the ice seemed to help it.

  She went with her book through the doorway to the bedroom. When he’d drunk half the coffee, he followed her into the room. Her book lay on the night table, a torn strip of paper to mark her place, and she had a suitcase open on the bed and she was stacking clothes in it. He could see his reflection in the mirror across. His image was dark and warped looking in the faulted glass.

  Don’t start, she said.

  I’m not going to start. I just want to know one thing.

  She turned. She looked at him as if she’d never seen him before. No, she said. You never want to know just one thing. You have to know it all. That’s what’s the matter with you, and it’s been the ruin of you.

  The ruin of me? What about you? You knew all the goddamn time he was out there. There in the brush with the dogs fighting over him, pulling him apart. What made him do it? Did he get in over his head and you brushed him off? Did he break it off and you were about to tell his wife? Or did you shoot him yourself?

  She went on serenely packing clothes. By my count, that’s way more than one thing, she said. She glanced up at him and smiled. Besides, I sort of got the impression that that sheriff thought you knew a lot more than you were saying. Perhaps you did it yourself.

  All right. Forget all that. It doesn’t matter who killed him. The only thing I want to know is what you thought about.

  What I thought about?

  After all he’d been to you. Lying on that blanket with you. Nights when you were in bed with me and he was lying out there with things crawling over his face, what did you think about?

  She gave him a slight frown of incomprehension. I never did think of that at all, she said.

  He had crossed the room before he knew what he was doing. Perhaps he’d meant to strike her, but the motion that started as a blow ended with a hand laid gently on her shoulder. His thumb could feel the small knob of bone beneath the flesh. The hand subsided, dropped uselessly to his side. He couldn’t think of anything to say. He went back and leaned against the wall and watched her.

  After a time, she went out with the suitcase. As she went through the doorway, she picked up the book from the night table. The screen door slapped to on its keeper spring. The Ford cranked. He heard it turning in the driveway, retreating down the hill. Everything grew very quiet. The house seemed to be listening intently. It seemed to be waiting for him to make the next move.

  He went out and sat down on the stone steps. The day seemed to grow still and he sat and smoked and grew still along with it. Suddenly, he realized it was almost night. He’d sat down in broad daylight and now it was the darkest shade of twilight and the cries of whippoorwills were washing over him from out of the trees.

  At length he rose and went around the house and through the backyard. He stood at the fence and watched. The horizon had almost merged with the darkness. It was dissolving rapidly, like a horizon cut from paper and dropped into acid. The spiky tops of the cypresses marked the spot where the body had lain. Where the bodies had lain. In an uneasy moment of revelation, he divined that the woods were not yet finished with him, that he had barely tapped the reservoir of their knowledge. It seemed to him that this dark quarter acre of death and assignation would go on and on whispering to him secrets he did not want to hear as long as he had the strength to listen.

  Bonedaddy, Quincy Nell, and the Fifteen Thousand BTU Electric Chair

  BONEDADDY BOWERS had not had a driver’s license since 1989 but that did not deter him on his appointed rounds. Cops he met raised a casual hand, Hey, Bonedaddy. He was a laidback good old boy of twenty-seven who was not going to hurt anybody or cause any real harm unless you were a sixteen-year-old virgin or a factory worker on the nightshift with a restless wife home listening for the sound of the gutted mufflers of Bonedaddy’s truck.

  Bonedaddy liked George Jones, the Buffalo Bills, professional wrestling, cold longneck bottles of Bud with water beading on the side. He liked pliable young girls he could mold to his liking, soft summer nights beside the Tennessee River, consoling the distraught wives of inattentive young husbands. That Bonedaddy, folks said, shaking their heads. Women sensed something in Bonedaddy that men did not that went beyond his dark good looks, an unpredictable thread of danger that ran through his character like a faultline, a bright streak of precious metal in a fissured strata of rock. Had Bonedaddy not met his comeuppance he might have continued running sixteen-year-old virgins until he had to hobble after them with a walking stick, waylay them on the way to the mailbox after his social security check.

  His comeuppance, though he had no way of knowing her as such, was sitting at the Sonic drive-in drinking a cherry Coke the first time he noticed her. She was a girl named Quincy Nell Qualls, five months past her sixteenth birthday, and she was a virgin. She had blondwhite hair and Nordic blue eyes and she was sitting behind the wheel of a little red Gremlin hatchback and when Bonedaddy looked down at her from the window of his pickup truck something passed between them tangible as an electric shock.

  Good God, Bonedaddy said. He had scooted across the truck seat and rolled the glass down on the passenger side.

  She didn’t reply. She looked up at him with her guileless blue eyes as clear as springwater. Bonedaddy had no way of knowing that he had been under observation, that she had kept up with his comings and goings as studiously as an ornithologist might ponder the migratory habits of birds. It was the first warm day of May and she could feel the weight of the sun on her face and she knew she looked good in it.

  You’re Candace Qualls’ little sister, right?

  I’m Candace’s sister.

  God. You grew up. I never noticed you before. I guess I never paid any mind to you after me and Candace broke up.

  Bonedaddy could do that and had done it, work his way through a whole family of sisters. In his ten years on the road he’d gone through as many as three or four stairstep sisters. Folks grinned and said that Bonedaddy was a caution, the moment a girl was out of pigtails Bonedaddy would be standing at the front door, his hand raised to knock.

  Where’s she at now? Up at UT Martin taking premed.

  Me and her were pretty hot stuff there for a while.

  All the time Bonedaddy and Candace were pretty hot stuff Quincy Nell had been watching from the sidelines. She had already determined that she was going to marry Bonedaddy. She loved him, and Candace didn’t. Candace was marking time and waiting to go away for college. Quincy Nell loved everything about him. She loved the straight fall of his long hair that was as black and shiny as a ravens wing. She loved the thin scar curving down his left cheek that never tanned and that he told everyone he got knife fighting although in actuality it had been caused by a bumper jack kicking out when he was fifteen years old. Everybody in Clifton knew that he had not been in a knife fight so he mostly used that story picking up women in the string of honkytonks across the Perryville bridge. She loved him with a childlike devotion, and she would have died for him, though she didn’t figure she’d have to go nearly that far.

  Last time I paid you any mind you was a kid. You still get hot playin Softball and pull your T-shirt off?

>   No, she said. I don’t do that anymore.

  Say me and you ought to get together tonight. You want to ride over cross the river where they have that dance?

  No, she said. I can’t. I’ve got a date tonight.

  Bonedaddy studied her in bemused silence. She knew she had him. Bonedaddy could never stand the sound of the word no, it aroused in him enormous efforts of acquisition, and she knew that before the weekend was gone Bonedaddy would have his bone-white Toyota truck parked in her front yard and he himself would be parked on the shady end of the porch talking up her father.

  SHE HAD A DATE THAT NIGHT with Robert Earl Crouch. They drove to Columbia and went to the bowling alley but there was no one there they knew. There was no movie she wanted to see at the multiplex either so they drove back to Clifton and parked on a long point of land grown up with wild mimosa that overlooked the river. Under the starlight the rimpled surface of the river looked hammered and it glittered with a thousand points of light. Sometimes a tug went upriver pushing a barge, the sound of the tug’s motor and distant foreign voices drifted to them on the soft warm wind.

  Robert Earl kissed her and she kissed him back. He had always smelled like Dentyne chewing gum but lately she had noticed that he smelled like Stetson aftershave. He cupped her right breast and she moved his hand.

  Quit it, she said.

  Do what? he asked in disbelief. His voice carried a tinge of quiet outrage, he’d been disenfranchised of a privilege that had been a given for some months.

  What’s the matter with you, Quincy Nell?

  There’s nothing the matter with me. You don’t care what I want. You never want to do what I want to do. All you care about is yourself.