Sundown, Yellow Moon

by Larry Watson

  It was raining on the night of the ten-year reunion dance too. The preceding week had been exceptionally warm and the summer of 1951 exceedingly dry, so when the rain began, it was treated as another cause for celebration on a night when most people’s spirits were already high and their moods festive. The dance was held in the high school gymnasium, and not only the gym’s doors but the school’s outer doors were thrown open to take advantage of the rain-cooled air. In fact, couples almost immediately began dancing their way out of the gym and into the cooler, darker school corridor, often swaying in time to the music right next to the double doors propped open to the night.

  In Raymond’s view the weather was to blame for what occurred that night, though he was willing to concede that things might have ended as they did even without the rain.

  Throughout the evening, in dance after dance, partner-switching had been customary. Not only men but women too felt free to cut in on other couples, and the intent behind this activity was often to restore couples who had dated in high school. The husbands and wives who were not from Wembley, and the unmarried men and women, good-naturedly went along with the constant realignment of couples.

  For most of their high school years, Alma had dated Monty Burnham, the most popular boy in school. Their relationship was so long and durable that their classmates assumed that Monty and Alma would someday marry. But the romance foundered, for the rumored reason that Monty “got too serious.” And though they each went on to marry other people—Raymond and a girl from Grand Forks—there still seemed something fated about them—the class president and the prettiest girl—being together.

  That would certainly explain why, when Monty cut in on Raymond, laughter, cheers, and applause spontaneously erupted from their classmates.

  Playing to the approving crowd, Monty danced off with Alma, whirling, spinning, exaggeratedly swinging their arms, moving them off together with speeded-up, elongated steps, as if they were waltzing around a nineteenth-century ballroom, though Monty paid no attention to the rhythm of the actual music. The song in fact was, as Raymond remembered well, “Begin the Beguine,” one of the few instances when the band accurately matched the music to their high school years, though not to the year of their graduation. Alma’s expression—her unrestrained smile, her astonished laughter—made it plain that she enjoyed being part of the show.

  Once they exited the gym, they kept right on going, into the night, into the steady rain. Other couples followed their example, and soon half the reunion crowd was dancing exuberantly on the high school’s soggy lawn. Out there they certainly couldn’t hear the music anymore, but it didn’t matter. Their laughter would have drowned out the band anyway.

  Raymond stood in the doorway, dry and watching it all. Or trying to. The rain was a heavy veil that made it difficult to tell one dancing couple from another. He thought he was able to keep track of Monty and Alma, but he couldn’t be sure—somany of the men wore dark suits and white shirts, and Alma was one of three women who came to the reunion in a light blue dress, and that blue turned dark when it became wet.

  Finally, Raymond turned away. He didn’t want to do what he felt like doing—running out into the rain, grabbing Alma by the arm, and hauling her away from Monty Burnham and the entire reunion. Behavior like that would only reveal him to be more or less what he was—a humorless, jealous fool.

  Instead, putting on an expression that he hoped would be read as sophisticated nonchalance, he strolled back to the gym, shaking his head in amusement over his classmates’ antics.

  He walked to the refreshments table. There, two identical punch bowls were set up. One container of pink liquid, however, had been spiked with Everclear, and Raymond assumed this was the nearly empty bowl. He hadn’t had anything to drink all evening, but now he scooped out a full cup, lit a cigarette, and waited under the backboard of one of the gym’s two baskets for his wife to reappear. The net had been removed from the rim, and Raymond wondered if that had been done just for this occasion or if it had been taken down for the summer. The crêpe-paper decorations that had been hung the length of the court had gone limp from humidity.

  At the other end of the gym stood a cluster of men talking, Raymond was sure, about the war and their roles in it. Raymond was entitled to join the group, but he had tired of war stories and their distortions before the war was even over. On more than one occasion he had listened to accounts of battles on the very day they’d been fought, battles that Raymond himself had been in, and he invariably found those reports, like the songs played at the reunion, false. Yet those storytellers weren’t necessarily lying; they were simply trying to make sense of the senselessness they’d lived through, and in the process warped the truth for the sake of their tales.

  His cigarette burned down to the filter. Raymond had been willing to flick his ashes onto the gymnasium’s floor, but he didn’t want to crush out the butt on the varnished hardwood. He considered returning to the outside door. There he could throw his cigarette out into the rain and hope that it might seem his only reason for going there. Instead he walked over to the water fountain outside the locker room door and deposited his cigarette there. There must have been twenty butts already sticking wetly to the porcelain.

  Monty and Alma were by now the only couple who had not yet returned from their dance in the rain. Raymond surveyed the gym for Mrs. Burnham, wondering if she was as troubled and curious over her spouse’s absence as Raymond was. She, however, was involved in a raucous conversation with four other women, one of them so pregnant she looked as though she might give birth at any moment. In what must have been a joking reference to her condition, the woman opened her eyes wide and puffed out her cheeks. The other women laughed uproariously.

  The band began to play its rickety rendition of “Moonlight Serenade,” another of the few examples of songs that really were popular when they were in school, though Monty and Alma would have been more likely to dance to it than Raymond and Alma.

  And just at that moment Alma entered the gym. Her dress was soaked, and while its skirt was wrinkled and shapeless below her waist, the fabric above clung shamelessly to her torso. Her hair hung down in wet tendrils. Alma wore a bewildered expression, and perhaps she’d been crying, but then again the rain might have created that effect. In each hand she carried a shoe. Raymond made no move to approach her or signal his presence.

  Eventually of course Alma saw him standing under the basket, and she began to hurry toward his end of the gym. Alma had not been a cheerleader in high school, but she ran across the gym floor just as she might have after leading a cheer for the home team. And Mrs. Burnham and the other women in her group regarded Alma as coolly as high school girls might have watched a cheerleader for a rival team.

  Before Alma reached him, Raymond decided that she had allowed Monty Burnham to fuck her somewhere out there in the rain. When she came close to him and stood on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek, Raymond looked over her shoulder, examining the back of her dress for mud or grass stains, evidence that she had been lying on her back on the wet ground. The fabric was only wet, but Raymond told himself that didn’t mean anything. She and Monty might have done the deed in the backseat of a car or leaning up against the school’s bricks. Not that it mattered. . . . In his mind Raymond had moved into the realm where neither logic nor fact was necessary for belief to be sustained.

  Because she might admit it, he didn’t ask Alma if she had just had sex with Monty Burnham. And he didn’t ask her because she might deny it. From that moment forward, Raymond Stoddard would live as a man of faith.

  A few minutes later, Monty entered the gym. He stood at center court, gazed expectantly up at the ceiling, and turned up both palms. It seemed to Raymond that men especially found Monty’s act humorous.

  For ten years Raymond did nothing in thought or action that might alter his conviction about what had happened between his wife and Monty Burnham. Indeed, he learned how he could make practical use of it, particularly in his sexual r
elations with Alma. If he felt no desire for her he could justify his rejection of her by reminding himself that she had been unfaithful to him. And when that same thought—Alma being fucked by another man—oddly stirred Raymond, he could make love to his wife with a passion that was equal parts passion and anger. Have sex with him, will you—take that, and that, and thatthatthat. . . .

  So of course Alma wanted to attend the twentieth reunion What other opportunity would she have, since they had left Wembley and moved to Bismarck, to renew her relationship with her former lover? And of course Raymond was determined that they not go. He could not face the possibility that another man would once again dance off with his wife. Yet without speaking to Alma of his belief, what could he possibly say or do that would explain his unwillingness to reunite with his classmates?

  For months he worried the problem. Then, one night while he was watching an episode of Peter Gunn, a solution came to him. He had been drinking beer since he’d come home from work, and alcohol in any form often allowed his thoughts to travel into orbits they could never reach when he was sober. It was so simple, really. He could get a gun, Raymond reasoned, and kill Monty Burnham. The notion had barely formed itself when he laughed out loud at its ridiculousness. Alma heard him and came in to ask him what was so funny. Raymond gestured vaguely in the direction of the television.

  Barely a week later that coldly murderous thought revisited Raymond. He was sober this time, and though he laughed once again, after a few seconds his laughter halted as abruptly as if a hand had clutched his throat. The next time, he didn’t laugh at all.

  This story could be read as another chapter in the lives of the Monty Burnham and Raymond and Alma Stoddard that have been revealed through the other fictions in these pages. Indeed, those fictional characters perhaps have more substance than the real people. The stories allow access to their inner lives, something that life generally won’t offer. But notice that “Reunion” (published in the magazine Windsong) says nothing about Killeen, Texas, and what occurred in the fictional bathroom of a fictional hotel between a fictional Monty Burnham and a fictional Alma Stoddard. It contains no reference to a wartime confession or a confrontation between two soldiers, and of course I have no evidence that either event occurred. In fact, the narrative has no basis in any reality I’m aware of except that Raymond, Monty, and Alma graduated from the same high school in the same year. But I suspect that the story had its origin in the emotions I experienced that October when Marie vanished so suddenly from my life.

  After Marie ran from my apartment, I looked everywhere but couldn’t find her. Not in the library, not in the student union. Not in the registrar’s office, where she had a work-study job. Not on the banks of the English Coulee, where she sometimes sat and watched the water’s slow swirl and flow. I phoned Blackmore Hall, Marie’s dorm, but was told she wasn’t in her room. I called Jackie Rickinger, Marie’s friend from Bismarck who lived in another dormitory. She hadn’t seen Marie since their Educational Psychology class that morning. I went to Neville Hall, the home of the education department, and walked up and down the corridor where the faculty had its offices, believing that she might be conferring with a professor. After I made all those rounds, I went back and visited or called each site again. And then again.

  In spite of my search’s futility I was confident that I’d find Marie and sure that she would accept my apology. Because he had once meant something to both of us and because of his hard-luck history, I had always been careful to temper any remarks I made about Gene Stoddard. But no more. As part of my contrition I would gladly portray him as a lout and a liar. Further, I was certain that I could convince her, because this was now my belief, that I regarded the news of her pregnancy as cause for celebration. If I found her soon enough, I’d propose that we commemorate the occasion with a steak dinner at the Bronze Boot.

  But when the curfew for women arrived at ten o’clock (men had no restriction on their hours), I was pacing the sidewalk in front of Marie’s dormitory, and I still hadn’t seen her or heard from her.

  The receptionist at Blackmore Hall was in my Shakespeare class. Phyllis. Stout, stringy-haired, earnest Phyllis Orr . . . After flattering her with questions about King Lear and the upcoming exam, I finally persuaded her to reveal that Marie had checked out of the dorm hours earlier. On the form where she signed out, she listed her parents’ address and phone number as her location until Sunday afternoon at five o’clock.

  Marie had no car. No train ran between Grand Forks and Bismarck, and the bus left much earlier in the day. It seemed unlikely that anyone with whom Marie could ride would leave for Bismarck on a Thursday afternoon or evening. Those factors helped me decide: I wouldn’t drive to Bismarck that night—no matter how hard I pushed the Studebaker, I wouldn’t arrive before three A.M.—but if I didn’t hear from Marie before morning, I would leave then.

  I slept little that night, so when dawn came, I didn’t waste any time. I tossed a hastily packed suitcase into the trunk and hit the highway. Less than five hours later, I was in Bismarck, and before I went to my own home, I drove to Marie’s.

  As soon as Mrs. Ryan answered the door, I immediately knew my being there was a mistake. I had not only Marie’s accounts but the evidence of my own eyes to know how Mrs. Ryan had struggled with alcohol over the years. A nervous, high-strung woman, she used her worries, real or imagined, as her justification for drinking, so when I asked if Marie was there and Mrs. Ryan’s eyes widened with her answer—“Isn’t she in Grand Forks? With you?”—I realized that I simultaneously had caused her to be apprehensive about her daughter and had given her a reason for pouring herself a stiff drink. Stammering, I tried to say something that would allay her concerns. “I-I’m sure that’s where she is. But when I told her I was coming to Bismarck for the weekend, she said maybe she’d follow me here. I was sure she was joking, but I thought I’d check just to be sure. I’m sorry I bothered you.” Mrs. Ryan habitually chewed her fingernails to the quick, and before I backed away from the door, she had the tip of her little finger between her teeth.

  My mother too was skeptical of my reason for coming home. “I needed a little break,” I told her. “You know, sleep in my own bed. Eat a home-cooked meal.”

  By that time my parents were living apart, and my mother had perhaps developed the ability to read the signs of a troubled heart in the faces of her family’s men. “Are you and Marie having difficulties?” she asked.

  I couldn’t manage a response any more convincing than, “Nothing serious. We’ll work it out.”

  Throughout the day I drove by Marie’s house, hoping I’d see her in the yard, in a window. When I wasn’t driving, I was back at my mother’s house or in the phone booth next to the Mobil station, calling Grand Forks—Marie’s dorm, Jackie Rickinger’s room, my apartment. I gave my roommate my mother’s telephone number and ordered him to phone there immediately if Marie, if any female, should call. Finally, late in the afternoon, self-conscious of my many circuits of the Ryans’ block, I parked a short distance away and continued my watch from the car.

  I’m not sure how long I sat there but it was with no sign of Marie. In the gutter in front of his house a neighbor of the Ryans’ burned a pile of prematurely fallen leaves. The air was still, and since the block was canopied with trees, the leaf smoke didn’t rise very high. It hovered over the street until evening dusk arrived, and then, mingling, the smoke and the dusk completed the task of bringing autumn darkness to the block. I drove away in defeat.

  Since it seemed as though it had lately become my habit to distress mothers and mothers-to-be, I decided to risk disturbing one more. After parking my car in front of my mother’s home, I walked down to the house that would always be the Stoddards’ to me.

  Alma Stoddard—I could never get used to her as Mrs. Mauer—answered the door, and I had barely uttered a word of greeting, much less offered a reason for my visit, before she embraced me and ushered me inside.

  The living room was lit
tle changed from the room I had spent so many hours in as a child. The console television was now a color set—The Wild Wild West was on—and on top of the TV, Gene’s graduation portrait joined his sister’s. In place of the wing-backed chair where Mr. Stoddard used to sit there was now a Naugahyde recliner. This was where Gene’s mother insisted I sit. She pulled up a footstool and sat at my feet.

  She was even thinner than when I had last seen her, and the vestiges of her beauty had vanished with those pounds. Her dark hair was shot through with gray, and her eyes were sunken and dim, like a votive candle’s flame guttering in its own liquid before it goes out. Creases ran down from the corners of her mouth. The smile she struggled to shine on me, however, seemed genuine, and genuine too seemed her interest in my college career.

  After I told her about the courses I was taking and my possible plans for graduate school or law school (no longer a serious ambition but one I still occasionally expressed, especially on Keogh Street), she said, “I hope Gene changes his mind and applies for college one day.”

  “He still has time. There’s a woman in my Modern Drama class in her sixties.”

  “I remember when the two of you used to sit at the kitchen table and work on your arithmetic together. . . . He’s certainly smart enough to attend college. . . .”

  “Sure, he is.”

  “But he doesn’t have the discipline. And you need discipline, don’t you? Brains and discipline?” She bent toward me, eager for confirmation of her theories on educational success.

  “I suppose. . . .”

  “A chemist. I always thought Gene would make a good chemist.”