by William Gay
Since the affair had begun Worrel had become an addict of shading and nuance, decoding her speech as if there were always hidden meanings. What she’d asked could have meant, Haveyou found a place for me and the kids? or it could have meant, Have you found a place we can be without your ex-wife coming and screaming at us? But it did not mean either of those things. All it meant was, Have you found a place? and he discarded it.
I may move in with you and Hollis, he said.
She glanced from the road to him, half a smile, half a grimace. It’s not funny, she said. When are you going to stop treating everything as if it were a joke?
Maybe when everything stops being a goddamned joke, he said.
The last of the traffic lights had fallen away now and she didn’t need her right hand for shifting, so she reached and grasped his left, pulling it over to the console between them. Her hand uppermost, her fingers laced with his. She squeezed it hard, then just drove clasping it loosely, her fingers calm and cool against his own. There was something oddly comforting about it, and Angie seemed to feel it as well, for climbing into the hills where perhaps she should have downshifted, she just drove on, the transmission laboring and vibrating until they’d made the grade.
If you need your hand to drive just take it back, he said.
She smiled at him, her face an enigma behind the dark glasses. My hand is just fine where it is, she said.
He turned away and looked at the countryside, aware of the scarcely perceptible weight of her hand, and watched Tennessee roll up—bleak trees, buttercups on the shoulder of the road, the leached funeral silks of winter, the cusp of promised spring the world hung on to.
They had been friends before they had been anything else and they could talk or they could ride in comfortable silence. Mostly they rode in silence, Worrel’s mind turning up images of her as you’d turn up pages in an album of photographs and, in the one he looked at most, her eyes looked as they did in the moment before he kissed her the first time. He’d known he was going to and was glad he’d waited until her eyes looked the way they had. As if they’d been simultaneously asking and answering a question. They’d stepped together and Worrel felt as if she’d slammed against his chest, as if they’d stepped onto some narrow ledge of unreckonable height. Looking down made you dizzy and you might plummet later in the next second, though not now; now seemed not only enough but all there was. Later there were other kisses: in hallways, in the moment before a closed door opened, in the moment between the wash of headlights on a wall and the slam of a car door, in the moment when footfalls announced someone was coming but he wasn’t here yet. In these tawdry moments are worlds, universes.
The night before they went to the motel for the first time she twisted his mouth down to hers and said against his teeth, I think you’re trying to corrupt me. He didn’t deny it.
♦ ♦ ♦
IT WAS SEVENTY MILES to Nashville and today it seemed too short a distance. After a while they joined the insectlike moil of traffic and she needed her hand back. She was a good driver, effortless, unpressured, and she didn’t even have to look for street signs to find the medical center. She’d been there before.
In the thin watery light, the Athens of the South perched atop its hills like something from a dream. The red Blazer went through the narrow canyons between the buildings with ten thousand other red Blazers negotiating the narrow canyons and everything began to look unreal.
The pale transparent light off the facades of the buildings imbued them with meaning so that they looked to Worrel like monuments erected and fled by some prior race finer than the present folk who milled about like maggots working in flesh.
She parked in front of the medical center and they got out. She looked at her watch. We don’t have time for lunch before my appointment, she said. Do you mind waiting until we get through here?
Of course not, he said. I’m not even hungry.
Well, she said, uncertain, looking at the building.
They walked toward it. The marble veneer glittered in the sun. It looked like an enormous mausoleum. The statuary on the lawn looked like relics replevied from a tomb so long hidden from the daylight that the thought of time and its unspooling made Worrel dizzy.
HE SAT IN THE WAITING AREA with a roomful of other people. Nothing looked right. Maybe he was coming down with something. The pictures on the wall were wrong. A Dali print, a Bosch. Watches melted, marvelously detailed folk were flared. The pictures seemed part of some surreal scheme to acclimate him to the horror to come.
The people did not seem right either. Everything about them rang false, even their clothing seemed strange, either years out of style or years ahead of its time. When they spoke some of the voices were pitched too high, others dragged endlessly like audio-tape moving slower and slower. Their emotions were out of sync, their anxiety too hyper, their stoicism simply cold indifference.
She’d left her purse for him to mind and dangling it by the strap he went outside and smoked a cigarette. He seldom left the country and his eyes were drawn almost against his will to the jumbled skyscrapers and high-rise apartments. Everything seemed leaned toward some common center, the hazy pastel buildings collapsing on themselves. In the sepia light the city looked as strange as some fabled ruin on the continent of Lemuria.
He put the cigarette out in an urn half filled with sand and went back inside the waiting room and took up a copy of Newsweek. He tried to read an article on a new survey of sexual habits but the sheer amount of work that had gone into producing the magazine he held in his hands made him tired. Lumberjacks had felled trees that had been shredded and pulped to make paper. Ink had to come from somewhere. Other folks ran presses, stacked the glossy magazines, delivered them; the U.S. Mail shuttled them across the country. Not to mention the people with cameras and word processors, people with curiosity and the knowledge to ask the questions to satisfy it. The magazine grew inordinately heavy, all these labors had freighted it with excess weight. He could hardly hold it. All the information was encoded in bits that swarmed like electronic insects and the words flew off the page like birds. He sat staring at an advertisement for a red Blazer that he was convinced was the very truck that had brought him to Nashville.
When she came through the doorway back into the waiting room, days seemed to have passed. He’d laid the magazine aside and sat clutching her purse. Reaching it to her he pretended not to study her but he did all the same. Having learned nuance and shading he’d become adept as well at interpreting her body language. Her smile was a little bright, her movements a little mannered: she’d put on the restraints and maybe screwed them down a notch too tight.
Ready? she asked.
More than, he said, scanning the room one last time as if he’d mark it as a place to avoid, remember all these miscast faces should he ever encounter them in old movies on late-night TV.
They went out. The cars in the parking lot glared under the sun. He felt hollow and enormous inside.
She was reaching for the door handle of the Blazer when he stopped her with a hand on her arm.
Wait, he said.
Wait? For what?
He was silent a time. Tell me something, he finally said.
I guess there’s not much to tell.
Was it bad?
She had her lower lip caught between her teeth. About as bad as it gets, she said.
He thought for a moment her eyes looked frightened then he saw that more than fear they showed confusion. She looked stunned, as if life had blindsided her so hard it left her knees weak and the taste of blood in her mouth. He wanted to cure her, save her, jerk her back from the edge as she’d tried to do for him.
But all he could say was, Do you want me to drive?
I’m fine, she said. I can always drive. I like to drive.
Behind the wheel she searched her purse for the keys. I’m starved, she said. Are you hungry?
Yes, he lied.
Where do you want to eat?
She h
ad the keys, the Blazer caught on the first crank, then sat idling. She studied him intently.
I don’t care, he said.
You must care.
I don’t care, it’s nothing, it’s just food. Hell, it’s just food. He knew she thought that was a barbaric notion but that was just the way he felt.
Where was that little Italian place we went to? You had the veal, they had these great salads there. Terrific salads. What was the name of that place ?
I don’t know.
You must know. The salads had the little cherry tomatoes?
Goddamn it, he said, suddenly angry. They all have the little cherry tomatoes.
She knew him, she wasn’t fooled, she didn’t take offense. She smiled. I can find it, she said. We’ll just drive around, I’ll know it when I see it.
I still don’t see what it matters.
It matters to me, she said. It was the first time we ever went out to eat. You know, in a nice place. You bought me a bottle of wine you couldn’t afford.
As she drove back into the street, she kept looking at the buildings, cutting down narrow crooked alleys, taking side streets that seemed to go nowhere you’d want to be—as if the place where they had the cherry tomatoes would materialize before her, between the tacky country music souvenir stores with their ceramie Roy Acuffs and price-tagged Minnie Pearl hats and the interminable pawnshops in whose dust-moted windows guitars hung by their necks like arcane beasts taken as trophies.
The day was waning, the light stingy and oblique. The sun flared behind the buildings and lent them a stark undimensioned quality. After a while they were hopelessly lost. The city looked strange even to her. They didn’t speak. It began to seem to Worrel that they had sought and found their own level.
They trickled down sunless corridors and burst capillaries until they were in the city’s dark heart. A city within the city where the blood slowed and thickened and clotted in viscous smears of alizarin crimson dried to burnt sienna around the edges. The tires of automobiles bore it away in fading hieroglyphic slashes. Neon flared, the air had grown heavy with the drone of flies, BAR BAR BAR, the neon repeated. 20 NAKED GIRLS 20. Brands of beer seemed to have the significance of the names of prophets on graven tablets.
Finally she pulled the Blazer to the curb and cut the switch and stared uncertainly about her. They had parked next to a vacant lot. Dead weeds tilted askew by the winds, the sun caught in broken wine bottles. The husk of an Eldorado sat so stripped and demolished it seemed to suffer obsolescence on an epidemic scale. A brown dog came out of the weeds and stood staring at them as if it had news of their coming. It was starved to the point of emaciation, just something that stood for a dog, a concentration that might possibly reconstitute a dog, a dog decocted in smoking electric chambers by a mad doctor who’d seen a dog once long ago and conjured one up with only the vagaries of memory as a recipe.
Adjacent to the vacant lot was a row of buildings constructed of umber-colored brick. Between two of them a narrow two-story house was wedged so tightly it seemed to have no sides of its own, simply its wooden frame front and tin-roofed porch hung parasitically between the brick walls, the rococo gingerbread trim of the porch paintlorn and rotting. A swing dangled motionless from rusted chains. The front window had been stoned out and covered with a metal sign that read CLABBER GIRL BAKING POWDER. A cracked sidewalk led to the street through packed earth encysted with bottle caps. Venus flytraps grew in car-tire planters serrated as if pinked by enormous shears.
The streets were full of drifters who seemed to be looking for something that they had lost. The homeless by choice and by circumstance held in common their disconnectedness and the self-same look of threat in their faces, danger loosely contained like lightning in a voltaic jar. They looked listless and numb as sleepwalkers, they moved as if the air itself offered hindrance to their passage. A man with shoulder-length blond hair stood on the high concrete steps of the parasite house and had occasional commerce with these streetfolk. He wore a quilted vest from whose cargo pockets he dealt glass vials of some iridescent liquid, smoky and volatile as nitroglycerin. The drifters paid him with bills that he folded onto a thick sheaf of like bills and he treated the money casually as if it were of no moment in itself but simply some happenstantial by-product of the transference of the vials. Occasionally he’d speak into a cellular telephone while watching Worrel with narrowed blue eyes.
Worrel looked away. He felt the uneasy knowledge that at any moment everything could alter. The air felt heavy and volatile, the way it does before a summer storm.
He turned to look at her. Her head was lain back against the upholstery. Her eyes were closed. Perhaps she slept.
He had no doubt that at some point he’d be confronted; it was a given, a law of nature. If she did not drive away, if he did not get under the wheel and take charge himself. Apparently he was not going to. Apparently he was going to sit here and look blankly back into the eyes that locked momentarily with his then slid away, until someone motioned for him to roll down the glass and he did and someone said, in a spray of spit, a reek of splo whiskey, in white-hot crackhead clarity, What is it with you, motherfucker? And who the fuck do you think you’re looking at?
Until the day waned and the light pooled and drained westward and the streetlamps came on and until the pace of the streets altered and moved in a loose disjointed rhythm and fierce chromatic colors that seared the eye and until the day’s possibilities became probabilities and then dead certainties and they were hauled from the Blazer and humiliated, made to plead for their lives, urinating on themselves and soiling their clothing while the last vestiges of human dignity fled. Credit cards gone, money gone, pristine Blazer stripped and burned. Surely they’d slit his throat and rape her fair white body, slit her throat and rape his own fair white body, shoot them full of drugs that would send them at warp speed past any conception of reality the mind was prepared to deal with, snuff them in a bending flash of light that was the very essence of ecstasy. Their bodies would be found in garbage-strewn alleys, septic hypodermic needles dangling from their veins like fey ornaments, or their bodies would drift pale and bloated in the currents of the Cumberland River until they turned up stranded on silt bars like worn-out whores their pimps had no further use for.
Bring it on, Worrel told their sullen faces. Let me have it, you sons of bitches. You goddamned amateurs. There’s nothing you can do to me half as bad as this.
He thought of the people waiting for Angie, beginning to wonder where she was. The kids at the grandmother’s, the husband probably wondering why there was no supper on the table. He suddenly felt weary and omnipotent, like a troubled god: he knew something they did not yet know, something that was waiting for them like a messenger with a finger on the doorbell and a telegram in his hand. They did not know, any of them, that they were living in the end times of bliss. The last belle epoque. Not the kids at Granny’s, whining where is Mama, not the husband bitching about the fallow table.
They did not know that they were going to have their world blown away, walls flung outward and doors ripped from shrieking hinges, trees uprooted and riding the sudden hot wind like autumn leaves, the air full of debris like grainy old 8-millimeter footage of Hiroshima. A cataclysm that would leave the floor of their world charred and smoking, inhospitable for some time to come.
Just for a moment, though, he was touched by a feeling he could not control, that he had not sought and instantly tried to shuttle to some dark cobwebbed corner of his mind. He wanted to forget it, at the very least deal with it later.
He had felt for an instant a bitter and unconsoling satisfaction that terrified him. When she sat eyes closed with her fair head against the seat she seemed to be fading in and out of sight like someone with only a tenuous and uncertain reality, going at times so transparent he could see the leather upholstery through her body, her face in its temporary repose no more than a reflected image, a flicker of light off water.
At these moments, all th
at was real was the grip of her hand, the intent focused bones he could trace with the ball of his thumb. Nothing was holding her back save the fingers knotted into his own. She was sliding away, fare-thee-well-I’m-gone, vanishing through a fault in the weave of the world itself, but until this moment ended and whatever was supposed to happen next happened, he was holding on to her. Everybody was hanging on to her, all those gasping hands, but for the first time no other hold was stronger than his own.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to acknowledge the debt he owes to two friends named Amy—his agent, Amy Williams, and editor, Amy Scheibe—and to thank them for their trust and support.
He would also like to express his gratitude to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
About the Author
WILLIAM GAY is the author of the novels Provinces of Night and The Long Home. His short stories have appeared in Harper’s, The Georgia Review, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Oxford American, and New Stories from the South 1999-2001. The winner of the 1999 William Peden Award and the 1999 James A. Michener Memorial Prize and the recipient of a 2002 Guggenheim fellowship, he lives in Hohenwald, Tennessee.
FREE PRESS READING GROUP GUIDE
I HATE TO SEE THAT EVENING SUN GO DOWN
In the collection’s tide story, Meecham returns home after a stint in a nursing home. Discuss what appears to be a class rivalry between Meecham and Lonzo Choat. Do you believe Meecham’s really a threat or merely a harmless old man? Is Meechams son, Paul, justified in sending his father to a home?
In the story “A Death in the Woods,” the body that is discovered on Pettijohn’s property disturbs him immensely, while his wife, Carlene, appears quite indifferent. Does her dismissive attitude seem suspicious to you? Do you think Pettijohn suspected something from the start? What do you make of Pettijohn and Carlenes relationship?
The narrator in “Bonedaddy, Quincy Nell, and the Fifteen Thousand BTU Electric Chair” says that Bonedaddy “met his comeuppance” when he met Quincy Nell. Did Bonedaddy get what he deserved? Was Quincy Nell justified? Why do you suppose Bonedaddy was allowed to get away with so much?