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

by William Gay

  What is it? Bender asked. His voice sounded like a harsh rasp and he felt he could not bear just one more thing. Not one more thing. He felt some enormous dark weight settling over him and smothering him. He wondered that he could place left foot in front of right, string one word in a coherent sequence after another.

  Of course it was Bellwether. He saw Bender as he closed the door of the cruiser. Bender?

  What is it?

  Do you not know enough to get in out of the rain?

  Bender raked his wet hair out of his eyes. Water coursed down his face. He grinned weakly.

  What the hell are you doing out in this mess?

  Bender took a deep breath. He forced himself to think. I thought lightning struck something. It came a hell of a clap of thunder and the power went off a second then came back on. I thought it might have hit my pump but I reckon not. A tree over there I guess.

  Listen, Bender, I’m sorry as hell to come out here this late, but they want those papers served. I’ve got them right here. You want to go in the house where it’s light and I’ll read them to you?

  I think not, Bender said. Leave them and I’ll read the goddamned things myself.

  I told you all this before. Sometimes I have to do things I don’t want to do, and this is one of the times. You know I got to read them to you. Now get in the car.

  Bender did as he was told. He pulled the door closed and sat clasping the door handle loosely with his right hand. Bellwether turned on the dome light and read the papers. They might have been Sanskrit, Latin, so little did Bender comprehend. He sat staring at Lynn’s face so pale in the wet black honeysuckle and not one coherent word did he hear.

  That’s about it. This is where it stops. You are ordered off this property by ten o’clock tomorrow morning or suffer whatever consequences failure to comply entails.

  Like getting my ass carried off it?

  Like getting your ass carried off if need be. When you roughed that feller up or whatever you done you pissed them off.

  Bender opened the door and started to get out. All right, he said.

  All right what?

  Just all right. Ill be gone.

  They’ll give you sufficient time to get your property and personal effects moved. Listen, Bender, you fought and you lost. Let it go. For what it’s worth I’m sorry.

  Bender was standing by the car. Sorry is not worth a damn to me, he said. He shoved the door but Bellwether leaned across the seat fast and caught it and pushed it open hard. The edge of the door caught Bender on the hip and he staggered back.

  Let me tell you this straight out, Bellwether said. I’ll be here myself to see about your wife and kid. You do what you want. A man wants carried out can damn sure find somebody to carry him. But I’m escortin your family away from any trouble myself. Are we right clear on that?

  Bender stood rubbing his hip. He didn’t say anything.

  Are we right clear on that?

  Yes.

  All right then. Bellwether eased the car in gear and pulled the door closed. He had scarcely begun to turn in the drive before Bender was moving rapidly toward the corner of the house. Out of the lights he stood leaning for a minute against the side of the house with the rain from the eaves falling on him until he heard the car going down the hill and then he struck out for the garden.

  When he reached both-handed into the honeysuckle and felt nothing he gave a sort of grunt of dismay or disbelief and felt all about the dark vines. He was looking around wildly when lightning bloomed and she was standing by the fence in the rain specterlike in her funeral windings and her hair plastered to her skull and her eyes closed just swaying slightly then gone in abrupt dark and Bender raised his face to the heavens and gave a cry scarcely human, a hoarse unarticulated scream of outrage and horror and such utter despair as should have stitched a caesura in the wheeling of the earth on its axis.

  He whirled and ran back toward the house and fell once and got up and went on. When he came to himself he was sitting on the couch in the living room with water dripping out of the cuffs of his jeans and pooling on the floor.

  He got up and methodically began to search the kitchen. Cabinet drawer to cabinet drawer leaving each standing open in its turn as he went on to the next and finally the cabinets themselves. In the cabinet over the oven he found a pint of peach brandy three-quarters full and went with it back to the couch and sat down. He drank the brandy while the night drew on and rain blew against the windows and lightning wrought the mimosa in stark relief until finally the storm passed over and the thunder dimmed, away. All this time by an act of sheer will he had not thought of Lynn at all.

  He was weary and after a while the brandy bottle slipped from his fingers and tilted and spilled on the floor and he laid his head on the arm of the couch and fell asleep.

  At some point he began to dream. In his dream all this tumult and disorder had fallen away and his life stood in marvelous symmetry. He and Lynn and Jesse had survived. The world had done its best to unhinge them but they had come through unscathed. The world had tried them with fire and water but the water had cleansed and soothed them and the fire had tempered them so that they were the stronger for it, and they were together, hand in hand, standing by peaceful waters.

  When he awoke there was a sour taste in his mouth and a weight in his chest and his face was wet with tears. He got up and shambled into the kitchen to the sink and halted abruptly when he saw Jesse standing by the sliding glass door looking out at the patio.

  Jesse saw Bender s reflection in the glass and he turned. There was a curious look on his face, almost a sly complicity as he looked at Bender in silence and pointed at the glass.

  They crouched before the plate glass like conspirators. The rain-wet flagstones, the dripping trees. Then in silent wonder he saw the wolf. It came at a lope out of the trailing honeysuckle, ragged and ill kept like some wolf cobbled up out of the leftover parts of other wolves and resurrected and set upon him by some dark alchemy. It bounded onto the flagstones and sprang at the glass. It slammed against it and for a microsecond the glass bulged inward with a marvelous elasticity and glass and wolf alike were frozen in midair as if time had skidded to a halt. Then the glass exploded inward and all Bender’s senses were so assailed by stimuli he could scarcely comprehend everything: the smell of the rainy night blown in and the sweet nostalgic reek of flowers and the feral charnel smell of the wolf. The air was full of pebbled glass. It rattled off the walls like hail and sang along the Formica countertop like grapeshot. He could hear the wolf’s claws snicking along the tile floor and clawing for purchase and he had only time to enfold the child and turn Jesse’s face into the hollow of his throat before the wolf was upon them.

  Good ’Til Now

  VANGIE THOUGHT this day would never end, and what got her through it was thinking about the time her husband had been fired for having sex with a woman in a cardboard carton. Vangie had always been more interested in the carton than in the woman. The woman was just a faceless coworker who had crawled—how else would you get in there?—into a cardboard box and had sex with Charles. But the box was something else. How big was it? Was it lying horizontally? Who crawled in first? Was there protocol involved here, etiquette? What did you say to someone in a cardboard box? They had been caught not by one person, who might just conceivably have kept his mouth shut, but by four or five workers who’d come into the storeroom to sneak cigarettes and been treated to an impromptu floor show.

  It was about the size of a goddamned refrigerator box, Charles had said sullenly. Charles had been contrite and humiliated for about fifteen minutes, and then the Hemingway implications of the whole thing had struck him. It seemed in some manner tied to the level of his testosterone. It proved beyond all conjecture the appeal he had to women. It was an ego thing, and since Charles was a hunter who mounted the heads of his victims on wooden plaques, Vangie thought it was a shame he hadn’t managed to get some sort of trophy out of the whole affair.

  This
had been five years ago, and it had crossed her mind a few times that she and Charles might not be as made for each other as they had once thought; but by then their son, Stephen, was a year old, and Stephen was such an enormity in her life that he dwarfed even so tacky a thing as adultery committed inside a cardboard box.

  All day she had been thinking that she and Stephen and Robert might just pile everything into the car and flee. Flee had been Robert’s word. Just flee west ’til the wheels run off and burn, the upholstery cracks and the paint fades and the moccasins die. She was wondering if adultery had an expiration date like something you’d pick up from a supermarket shelf. A statute of limitations. If she left and Charles tried to win custody of Stephen, maybe she could hit him with that. Perhaps hit him first. He had even beaten her once, in a halfhearted way, but he had been drinking a lot then, and he had cried and promised that it would never happen again, and it had not.

  Even this Robert Vandaveer business could be laid at Charles’s door, if you wanted to carry things back far enough.

  Charles had been deer hunting with a band of his friends down on the river, and he came back talking about Vandaveer. We met this weird fellow down on Buffalo, Charles said. Some kind of writer, songwriter or something. Weird, but all right. He gave us permission to camp on his place. Hair down to his ass, but he’s all right. He even drank a beer with us.

  For a while all Charles could talk about was Robert Vandaveer. Vangie figured he’d taken Vandaveer for some proponent of the cult of machismo, some writer of the Hemingway-Jim Harrison school. Robert had done this, Robert had done that. Robert had constructed his lodge with his bare hands. Robert had even cut the timber with which he bare-handedly constructed his lodge. Then Charles had abruptly stopped talking about Robert Vandaveer.

  What happened to Robert Vandaveer? she asked him.

  We’re not hunting down there anymore, Charles said.

  Yet that night a year ago the name had stirred some lost memory, and before bedtime she went through her record collection. She’d always loved music, had written songs herself, and she owned an enormous number of tapes, CDs, records. She found what she was looking for with absurd ease. As if they had been stored, all stacked in sequence and lying in wait for her. The subtle machinations of fate, Robert would have said in an ironic tone, if she had ever told him. Emmylou Harris had covered two of Robert Vandaveer’s songs. Johnny Cash had recorded a Dylanesque song that Vandaveer had written. There was even a recording by Vandaveer himself, one of his own songs, on a Rhino collection called Folk Troubadours of the Seventies.

  Later she wondered why she had searched for the songs. Why she hadn’t just let it lie. Maybe we are all the authors of our own doom, she thought. Maybe we lay by the cobwebbed artifacts we’ll need for our future undoing. At some unknown point we’ll rummage through them for the cord that fits the throat just so, the knife with the perfect edge.

  VANGIE WAS A TEACHERS’S AIDE and a counselor. Stephen was in the second grade, and she had taken the job when he started kindergarten. The days had been long then, too. They had been long, but they hadn’t cut the way this one did.

  At noon she went to the teachers’ lounge and used the phone to dial Robert’s number. The phone rang and rang. She held it so tightly against her ear that it hurt, but she just let it ring. She could see the room the phone was in. The scarred pine table it sat on. She wondered if he was drinking. She wondered if he was passed out on the couch with an empty Wild Turkey bottle cradled against his chest as you’d cradle a child. She didn’t think so. She figured he was laying rock on the chimney he was building. He’d completed the fireplace, but the lodge was an A-frame and high roofed, and the chimney would have to be enormously tall to clear it. He kept building scaffolding higher and higher. She kidded him about the thin air, about nesting eagles. He wrestled the stones from one level of the scaffold to the next. Five-gallon buckets of mortar. He was stronger than he appeared.

  He had called her Sunday to see if she would come out. She was still off balance, disoriented; she could not. His voice didn’t sound quite right, but she couldn’t put her finger on why. There was a feeling of distance in it, distance you couldn’t measure in miles. You’re not drinking are you? she asked him. There’d been a pause, as if he’d looked to see was he drinking or not. No, no, he said. I’m not drinking. I thought I might mix up some mortar, lay a few rocks.

  A teacher came in and stood watching her. Waiting perhaps for the phone. She hung it up. She wondered how long she had let it ring, but she really didn’t want to know. She didn’t look at her watch. She wondered what she was going to do.

  YOUR BUDDY Robert Vandaveer’s going to be at the school, she told Charles. This had been almost exactly a year ago.

  Say he is? What in the world for?

  He’s supposed to address one of the English classes on creativity. On poetry, the process of converting experience into a poem.

  My question remains unanswered, Charles said.

  Well, he is a songwriter. A poet. A long time ago he was almost famous, in a fifteen-minute kind of way. The superintendent heard there was a poet living in the wilds of Buffalo River and figured the English class might benefit from hearing him talk and asking him questions.

  I have a question of my own, Charles said. How much money is the county pissing away on this?

  They’re not paying him, she said.

  She had a free period that day, and she thought she might just see this semifamous Vandaveer. When the lecture was over and the students had filed out of the classroom, she was standing in the hallway. She’d stood aside to let them pass, and when Vandaveer went by he nodded to her. She nodded in return, and that should have been that, except she heard herself say: My husband, Charles, told me about meeting you.

  He paused and turned to study her. I knew you the moment I saw you, he said.

  You what? How could you do that?

  Your husband showed me your photograph.

  She wondered why Charles was going around showing strange men her picture. She wondered if he’d had a leer on his face to show them what hot ,stuff she was.

  How did he come to show you my photograph?

  It was my fault, Vandaveer said. I led him into it. I just had a feeling he had a photograph I wanted to see. I thought it might be you, and as it turned out I was right.

  Then why did you nod and just walk on past me without speaking? She figured to let him know she could play word games as well as he could.

  He smiled. Because I was sure you’d speak to me.

  Vangie was trying to relate the aging hippie before her to the young man whose photograph was on the back of the album sleeve. A young man with anarchic hair, firebrand eyes, an impatient look of arrogance on his face. Vandaveer looked about fifty, like a man salvaged weatherworn but intact from the ’60s. He had a gray-brown ponytail, and he was wearing an old black sport coat over a white shirt. His jeans were faded, and his shoes were spotted with what looked like dried brick mortar. There seemed little of the revolutionary left in Vandaveer’s face, and his eyes were the most changed feature of all: There was an enormous stillness to them. There were depths, blank spaces, burnt landscapes. They seemed to say that they had seen all the world had to show them and there was nothing they could do about it.

  I have a recording you made, she said. Some of your own songs. She knew he was going to ask her which songs, and she had the titles ready, even the lines that she had liked best. He didn’t, though.

  Do you like music? he asked.

  I like it very much.

  There’s a thing, a folk music part of the arts and crafts fair. Some pretty good guitar players and songwriters are going to be there. Would you like to go?

  She was confused. You mean with you?

  That’s what I mean.

  Well, you know my husband. Charles. If I have a husband, it follows I’m married.

  It was just to listen to music, he said. Bring the boy. He was in the picture, too. Bring
Charles, it’s just a family thing. Folks show up from all over, campers full of families.

  Charles doesn’t even like music, she said. He hates crowds, too.

  Then I wouldn’t bring him. This pretty much consists of crowds listening to music.

  I’d have to tell him.

  I would imagine so.

  It really might be fun. There’s a lot of questions I’d like to ask you about music, anyway.

  He had unpocketed a cigarette. He lit it with a thin gold lighter. There was engraving on the side, but she couldn’t read what it said.

  You can’t smoke in here.

  He didn’t seem to hear. Oh hell, he said. I forgot. I’m sorry I even brought it up. The transmission’s out of my truck, and it might not be ready.

  That was another place when that should have been that, but she said: Stephen and I will pick you up if you’ll give me directions.

  He told her where the road turned off and which fork to follow to the river. Just drive ’til you run out of road, he said.

  When he’d turned to go, she said: I really am happily married.

  He looked surprised she’d bring it up. That’s cool, he said. I’ve been there a few times myself.

  IF THEY HAD NOT LOST Stephen that night, she would not have gone to bed with him. That was what she told herself later, but she did not believe it. If they had not lost Stephen, they would have lost something else. It was fated, Robert had said, and she believed him. Fated was a word Robert was fond of. Fated and flee. We are fated to flee.

  Though before that happened, a year had passed and they had fallen into the habit of going places together. First to the music festival, then to a music store Robert knew about in Nashville that sold hard-to-find records on obscure labels. To art galleries, musty-smelling bookstores. To other places beyond reproach. Once, he took her and Stephen to a Mexican restaurant in Franklin. Stephen was always along, nothing was going to happen with Stephen along. Stephen seemed to have fallen in love with Vandaveer. Robert talked to him the way he might talk with another adult. When he took Stephen fishing, Vangie sipped a Corona and watched but would only let Stephen fish from the riverbank. She would not allow Robert to take him out in the boat.