Time Done Been Won't Be No More

by William Gay

  TIME DONE BEEN WONT BE NO MORE

  ALSO BY WILLIAM GAY

  The Long Home

  Provinces of Night

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

  Wittgenstein’s Lolita / The Iceman: Short Stories

  Twilight

  Time Done Been Won’t Be No More

  William Gay

  Dzanc Books

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 2010 William Gay

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Cover painting by William Gay

  Compiled and edited by J. M. White

  Jacket design by John Cipollina

  Author photo by Greg Hobson

  Published 2013 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-938103-74-2

  Book was originally printed by Wild Dog Press

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Contents

  SHORT STORIES

  Come Home, Come Home, Its Supper Time

  Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?

  Charting the Territories of the Red

  Excerpt from Lost Country

  MEMOIRS

  The Man in the Attic

  Calves Howling at the Moon

  Queen of the Haunted Dell

  MUSIC CRITICISM

  Time Done Been Won’t Be No More

  I Believe I’ll Buy Me a Graveyard of My Own

  The Banjo Man

  Hand Me My Traveling Shoes

  Sitting on Top of the World

  INTERVIEW (2008-09)

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  SHORT STORIES

  COME HOME, COME HOME, IT’S SUPPERTIME

  HIS DREAMS WERE SERENE PASTORAL images, white picket fences, old log barns silver in the moonlight. An ornamental tin sun set high in the eaves of a farmhouse, tinstamped rays fanning upward. When the light subtly altered he saw that the pickets were stakes sharpened for impaling, something stirred in the strawstrewn hall of the barn, and there was a persistent ringing beyond the serrated treeline the illogic of dreams imbued with dread. Then he became aware of Beth’s leg flung across him in sleep, the smell of her hair, the ringing of the telephone, and he realized where he was, and that he wasn’t a child after all.

  He wondered how many times it had rung. Here in these clockless hours past midnight.

  Hello.

  It must have rung several for the voice was harsh and preemptory. I’ve got to have some help over here, she said.

  What is it? He could hear the ragged hasp of her breathing.

  I’m having some kind of attack. A heart attack.

  All right. I’m on my way.

  He was fumbling for his shoes. He found one sock, the other seemed to have vanished. Beth arose and he heard her stumbling toward the bathroom. Water running. He gave up on the sock and was hauling on his pants.

  Your grandmother?

  Yes.

  Another heart attack.

  He looked up. She was standing naked on the threshold of the bathroom, her face enigmatic in the dark bedroom, backlit by the bathroom light. Framed so against the yellow rectangle the light was a nimbus in her fair hair, and she seemed to be in flames.

  Do you need me?

  Stark and depthless against the light she looked like erotic statuary. Something in her hipslung posture lent her words an ambiguity he couldn’t deal with just now, everything about her lately seemed subject to various interpretations.

  I’ll be back when I get back, he said. He slid his wallet and cigarettes into his pocket and went out.

  He pushed the door back open. Lock the door, he told her, but she didn’t say if she would or she wouldn’t.

  He drove out toward the farm, off the blacktop onto a cherted road so bowered by trees the moonlight couldn’t defray the darkness, the road descended like a tunnel of black velvet, like a cleft in the earth itself he was driving off into. A whippoorwill swept up in the headlights, dark wings enormous, eyes wild and red as blood. Mailboxes, sleeping watch dogs, darkened houses shuttered against the night. Then the row of cedars, the lit farmhouse beyond them.

  She was in the bentwood rocker. She sat twisted in agony. Her head in her hands, her breathing a thin panting.

  Do you need an ambulance?

  I’ve called it already. It should have been here.

  Well, he said. He couldn’t think of anything to say. It’d all been said before. Somewhere a clock ticked, a series of clocks deafening in the silence that stretched, stretched to a thin sharp wire. A tall grandfather clock whirred into life, gave three solemn and measured bongs.

  I can’t breathe. I’ve got to have some oxygen. Why won’t they hurry up?

  I think I hear them, he lied.

  She was clutching her chest like a parody of agony. I’m on fire in here, she said. Behind the thick glasses her near colorless eyes were stricken, afraid. He felt a detached and impotent pity.

  Is there anything I can do?

  Get me a glass of orange juice. Maybe my sugar’s gone down, I’m having some kind of attack.

  He took a carton from the refrigerator and poured a glass of juice. He carried it to her. When she had drunk from the glass, he asked, Are you feeling any better?

  Maybe a little.

  Are you sure you want to go to the hospital? It never accomplished anything before. I can hire a nurse. I can stay myself.

  I’ve already called it, she said. Something has got to be done. I’m not putting up with this.

  He went out onto the porch. Where the porchlight tended away the yard lay silver in the moonlight, it glittered as if viewed through a veil of ice. Beyond it lay darkness, a veritable wall of insect sounds. From the ebony trees nightbirds called, cries so lost and forlorn he wondered what the configurations of such birds might be. Far up the road he could hear the whoop of the ambulance. Closer now homing down the walls of night. Its lights pulsed against the bowering trees like heat lightning. He lit a cigarette and waited.

  The ambulance backed to the edge of the porch. An attendant leapt out and threw open the rear door and hauled out a gurney. Everything seemed rehearsed, every movement preordained, they’d been here before. Déjà vu all over again, he thought.

  She needs oxygen, he said.

  The driver came around and helped with the gurney. The paramedic took out a chromium oxygen bottle, a mask appended by a thin transparent tube. They seemed to have divined something unsaid from his face for their movements had become less hurried, more studied. He held the door open and they went into the living room with the gurney.

  She seemed reassured by such an authoritative presence. The paramedic was kneeling at her feet adjusting gauges. The other had immediately commenced monitoring blood pressure, heartbeat. She was reaching for the mask. He could hear a thin hissing. Here you go, Mrs. Wildman, the attendant said. You just relax now. She grasped the mask greedily the way a baby grasps its bottle, a drowning man a straw. As if the very essence of life itself had been distilled and concentrated in this chromium bottle, the ultimate spraycan.

  They were already gently helping her onto the gurney, adjusting straps. Hand me my bag, she told Wildman. When he laid it beside her she clutched it possessively with a thin ravaged arm. They were rolling her through the doorway. I’l
l see you early in the morning, he said. The door creaked to on its keeperspring. Gurney wheels skirling across the oak porch. After a moment the rear door of the ambulance closed. The ambulance pulled away, siren shrieking, parti-colored lights pulsing through the window, the wall across flickering in crimson neon. The wails grew faint and fainter and then he could hear whippoorwills calling one to the other.

  Wildman sat in the room where he’d been a child. Where he’d crawled about the floors amongst his playthings. Images of himself at various ages adorned the walls, the table. He leant to study one. From across time the face seemed to be studying him back. Dark calm child with disaffected eyes. In the end time waylays you, he thought. It can outwait you, what does it care, it’s got you outnumbered. There is just so damn much of it.

  The room was begarbed with knickknacks, geegaws and ceramic cats and statuary he couldn’t fathom the source of. They’d just accumulated with the years, so many years, had settled like dust motes out of time. Across the room a bookcase where she kept the highschool annuals. She’d been a teacher and she’d saved them all the way a traveler might save maps of places he’d been. Suddenly the room was claustrophobic, the walls were sliding inward on oiled tracks, he couldn’t breathe. He put his cigarette out in a coffee cup and arose and went out into the night. Where the moon was a washedout ghost of itself and the sky was already faint with rosecolored light, the day lying somewhere east of him.

  She’s a hypochondriac, Beth said.

  I guess, he said. He drank coffee.

  What are you going to do about it?

  Do about it?

  You can’t go on like this. All these emergencies in the middle of the night. You’re not sleeping, it’s too hard on you working construction the way you are this summer.

  I’m used to it, he said. I can take it.

  She ought to be thinking of you.

  She’s thinking about death, he said. It’s staring her right in the face and she can’t deal with it. I don’t know if I could. Could you?

  I can when I get that old, she said.

  He watched her across the rim of his coffee cup. Dying seemed way down the line. She was fifteen years younger than he was. She was twenty five years old and her skin was poreless as marble and her mouth red and bruisedlooking. Her green eyes were the green of still deep waters and there was something arrogantly sexual about them, they said that she knew what she had and that she had an unlimited supply of it and it was going to last forever. He knew it wasn’t and he wished he didn’t.

  She’s old, he said. She can’t teach anymore. She’s sick and she’s going to be sicker and then she’s going to die. And she knows all that.

  She’ll outlive us all and dance on your grave, Beth said.

  He set the cup down. Let’s just give it a rest awhile, he said.

  Are you going to work today?

  It’s Sunday.

  I mean are you going to write.

  I may. I don’t know.

  Why don’t you write us another of those thousanddollar stories like you did that time, she said.

  Thousanddollar stories don’t grow on trees, he told her.

  She smiled. It was gibberish to me anyway, she said.

  I know. I saw your review in the paper.

  Everybody’s a critic, huh?

  Everybody’s a critic.

  For a moment Beth and the old woman shared a curious duality, she had been a critic too.

  I saw that piece in The Atlantic, his grandmother had said. I thought it offensive.

  They liked it, he had told her. It was an Atlantic First Story.

  It ought to have been an Atlantic last story. It was gibberish and obscene gibberish at that.

  The world is obscene gibberish, Wildman said. I find it offensive.

  She studied him. I liked you better as a child. You were such a lovable child.

  The phone rang at four o’clock in the morning and there was a nurse on the line. Wildman lay listening to the nurse and to Beth’s regular breathing beside him. She’s had a rough night, the nurse said tentatively. She didn’t sleep and she’s had a lot of difficulty breathing. She insisted I call, she wants you to come.

  He tried to think. He was still half asleep and tatters of his strange dreams swirled about him like eddies of brackish waters. I was just down there tonight, he said.

  Well. I don’t know anything about that. I just said I’d call.

  He felt like a fool. A callous fool at that. I’m on my way, he said.

  Highballing through the night at eighty five toward the little backwater town of Clifton where she carried all her medical business. Stringing past the barren ridges and the hollows where mist pooled white and opaque as snow. All these recent midnight runs had him feeling a denizen of the night himself, one of the whippoorwills of his childhood or the whores and drunks of his youth but he alone was still on the road. Civilization had pushed the whippoorwills deeper into the timber from where their cries came to him faint and ever fainter and the hands of the clock had pushed the whores and the drunks into each other’s arms and into their dark and dreamless slumber. He strung past empty allnight markets alight with cool white fluorescence and past gas stations and abandoned lumber yards and the only soul he saw was the one glancing back from the rearview mirror.

  The hospital itself seemed geared down for the night, humming along on half power. He hated hospitals and went stealthily down the gleaming tilefloored hall. Past doors opened and doors closed. Beyond these doors folks with their various ailments sleeping in their antiseptic cubicles if they could sleep and if not lying in a drug-induced stupor that passed for sleep in the regions. Like the larval stage of something dread waiting to be born and loosed upon an unsuspecting world.

  She herself was still wide awake. They’d moved her to the pulmonary intensive care unit and she sat by the window waiting for day to come until she heard the door open then turning her head to see. Ravaged and wildlooking in her hospital gown she fixed him with eyes so fierce he had a thought for what halfcrazy stranger was inhabiting her body. A look of utter viciousness as if she held him and him alone responsible for the predicament in which she found herself. For the wearing out of irreplaceable organs, for the slow inevitable recession of the tide of blood, for life seeping away like night sewage, drop by septic drop.

  Then the face changed and he laid an arm about her thin shoulders and she grasped his other arm with a hand more claws than fingers. She hung on fiercely, you’d not expect such a grip from one so frail. Instinctively he tried to pull away, the dying would take you with them if they could, it’s dark down there and cold, a little company might lighten the tone of things.

  Around midmorning he talked with her doctor. This doctor was young, Wildman considered him no more than a child. Styled blond hair, this wisp of a mustache. A preoccupied air. Wildman wondered was he competent. Perhaps he was a leech, a parasite, there was a pale vampirish look about him, a sucker of old folks’ thin unhealthy blood.

  She has anxiety attacks, the doctor said. I’ve tried to explain it to her. The emphysema makes it difficult for her to breathe and it scares her. The fear compounds the breathing problems and her heart trouble. Everything just compounds itself.

  Is she going to die?

  He shrugged. Well, she thinks she is. In the past weeks she’s insisted on being tested for everything terminal. There’s no reason she shouldn’t live another five or ten years. She seems to be willing herself to die. How close are you to your grandmother?

  Wildman shrugged. She raised me from a baby when my parents were killed in an accident. I guess that’s pretty close.

  Perhaps you could talk to her then. And there’s no reason she has to be confined to a hospital. I’m releasing her later today.

  I’ll talk to her again, Wildman said. He smiled slightly. She taught school for fifty years. She’s used to doing all the talking.

  We’re all going to die, the doctor said, as if this was some hot flash that hadn’t caugh
t up with Wildman yet and that he might want to make note of.

  I’ll tell her, he said politely. Sometimes there were windy gulfs of distance between what he thought and what he said and there was something mildly disturbing about it. He went out into the hall. It smelled of floor wax, antiseptic. He followed it to where he could see morning sunlight through a glass door and he went through the door into it. His senses were immediately assaulted by sensations: warmth, colors, the smell of the hot light falling through the green trees. Everything looked bright and gold and new and dying seemed very far away.

  He hired a practical nurse and she stayed two nights which contained no phone calls and no midnight drives toward flashing ambulances then his grandmother fired her.

  The nurse came and told him about it. He paid her off and drove out to the farm to see the old woman.

  Why did you fire her, he wanted to know. You couldn’t fire her anyway. I hired her.

  She was a thief, the old woman said. She was stealing from me.

  Stealing what?

  My things, she said evasively. She waved an arm airily about the room. A motley of photographs, ceramic cats, plaster pickaninnies with fishing poles. I caught her stuffing them into her purse, she said.

  Well, he said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  I can stay by myself. I don’t need her. I don’t need you.

  He lifted his shoulders in a shrug of defeat. You’re three times seven. I guess you can do what you want to do.

  I’m many more times seven than that, she said caustically. And I can’t do anything I want to do. I can’t even breathe God’s own air like you and everyone else takes for granted. I’d give all that I own just to take a good deep breath.

  She was kneeling astride him, moving above him in the halfdark. Head thrown back, yellow hair all undone. She was deeply tanned but her pale breasts bobbed like flowers. Her breath came ragged, like something feeding. Yet she was somehow unreal, like a fiercely evocative dream of lust.