William Gay: Twilight

In the courthouse basement, less they moved it without tellin me. That’s where it’s always been.

He got the rifle and went out. He looked up and down the street cautiously, like a man sweating in the last card in a poker hand. Ordinary folk going about their business. Their very ordinariness reassured him. The dull day-to-day routine of life seemed suddenly very dear to him, for it was something he had lost. All these rustic folk with their complacent faces seemed to dwell in the happy-ever-after end of a fable. He took a deep breath and held it a moment. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest. All he had to do was make it a block and a half to the courthouse. A cripple could do that, a blind man tapping with a cane.

Old men like fragile statuary were already set about the courtyard benches for such faint sun as there was. They looked up expectantly as Tyler approached, as if he might do something interesting to break the monotony that yawned before them, but when he didn’t and just strode purposefully on, their eyes dismissed him and they went back to the nothing they’d been doing before.

The courthouse was a square twostory brick building. Theboy looked up. Windows on the upper floor were barred, and Tyler wished he might see Sutter’s face peering down at him. The words covrt hovse were chiseled into a great concrete lintel set above the double door. He turned the corner and there was an iron railing round a set of concrete stairs descending to the basement.

An old grandmotherlike woman sat on a bench like a sentinel guarding a palace door. She wore an anklelength dress and men’s brogans broken out at the side and a ratty plaid shawl wound about her ample shoulders. She watched him out of the folds of the pokebonnet she wore tied beneath her long chin and from behind dimestore shades with tortoiseshell frames.

He had a hand on the cold metal railing.

She rose at his arrival as if she’d been awaiting him. Sonny boy, she said. Her voice was an ingratiating whine, and it grated on his nerves like a fingernail dragged across a chalkboard.

He turned. Yes, ma’am?

I need a little help, she said. I sure wish you could do me a little favor.

I’d like to but I’m in an awful hurry. Maybe I could when I get done with the sheriff.

He was on the first step. The steel-reinforced glass door lay in shadowed sanctuary.

It ain’t much, she whined. Won’t take you but a minute. I’ll give you a dollar.

Once more he turned. I really can’t. He started down the stairs.

My old man took and died, she said, and I ain’t got nobody to do for me but strangers. It’s awful to be at the mercy ofstrangers.

He stopped.

And me about blind on top of it.

She was just not going to let up. All right, he said. What is it you need done?

Not much for a big strong young man like you, she said. Just load a sack of cowfeed in the trunk of my car for me.

She had turned and was hobbling away. Tall old grandmother with broad humped shoulders. Confident of him now, she didn’t even look back. He followed.

Where is your car?

Down by the tie yard.

They passed under casual eyes that remarked them without interest. The railroad then and a sulfurous pall of coal smoke and tackier houses with black faces pressed against the glass to mark their progress. Old blownout automobiles enshrined on tieblocks while poisonoak crept their rocker panels. Surly watchdogs watched from chains with cartire anchors, and one chained to a clothesline followed them to the end of its tether with the chain skirling on wire then sat on its haunches and watched them go.

I don’t really understand this, the boy said. Would they not load the feed for you where you bought it?

The boy at the store had a bad back, Grandmother said.

Then how the hell did it get to the tieyard? he wondered to himself. He didn’t pursue it, for he had come to suspect the workings of the old woman’s mind. Perhaps his own as well.

The silence between them deepened as the road they trod narrowed to a footpath bowered by winterbare sumac. He and Grandmother walking in a fairytale wood, but a wrong turn has been taken somewhere, for nothing seems rightabout any of this. The very light had altered, darkened as if for an early December dusk. Behind them a car took the railroad crossing fast and its mufflers opened up fullthroated then the siren came on, laying wail on fading wail on the belabored countryside. He wondered if it was Bellwether and he’d missed him. There was a leaden weight on his heart.

The silence seemed interminable. To break it he asked her back, What did your man die of?

She didn’t hesitate. The syph, she said.

The what? He had skipped a step, he’d misunderstood, his ears were failing him.

The syph, she whined. He come down with it and it drug on and turned into the drizzlin shits and he just wasted away.

He figured somewhere in these territories there was an enormous madhouse whose keeper had thrown up his hands in disgusted defeat and flung wide the portals so these twisted folk could descend like locusts on the countryside.

Why, you’re crazy as hell, he told her.

I got to stop and pee, the old woman in the nightmare snickered. You wouldn’t sneak a peek at a old lady peein, would you?

I’ve got all the craziness I need, Tyler said. Carry yours on somewheres else, and you can load your own damn cowfeed.

They had come to a cleared area where stacks of crossties were drying. Beside a tiestack a black Buick Roadmaster sat cocked outward bound, gleaming in the frail sun, luxurious, profoundly out of place.

Tee hee hee, Grandmother said. Grandmother’s back had begun to shake with uncontainable mirth and she was making sniggering, chortling sounds, and she was trying to stop but she couldn’t. When she turned her face was congested withlaughter. She grasped her sides and burst out laughing, pounding her thighs with her palms. Then instantly the look of revelation on his face seemed to sober her for a hand snaked out and an iron grip clamped his throat and a broganned foot kicked the rifle away. It clattered somewhere behind him. They locked and swayed for a moment in a broken ballet, then she tripped him and fell across him in parodic lechery. Brass knucks slammed his temple hard and the world darkened and tilted on its axis. When it righted itself the face was very close to his own. The tortoiseshell shades hung by one earpiece and the pokebonnet was comically askew.

I got you now, you little son of a bitch, Sutter said.

Tyler tried to twist his face away but Sutter hit him hard in the mouth and Tyler didn’t know anything for a while.

He awoke to a dull throb in his temple and to music. Singing and some rhythmic accompaniment. A jouncing over rutted roads and the roar of an automobile engine.

…and I wound up her little ball of yarn, the voice sang.

A radio then. The Grand Ole Opry perhaps.

It was just two weeks from this I went out to take a piss,

And I found myself a burden of great pain,

For it had been to my mishaps I had caught a dose of claps,

And I’ll never wind that little ball again.

Not The Grand Ole Opry then. The voice went on singing. The song seemed to have an infinite number of verses in an ascending order of obscenity and the voice seemed to know all of them. Not the Grand Ole Opry. Then it all came back to him. He remembered Sutter, and it was Sutter himself singingat the top of his voice with brush slapping the rockerpanels rhythmically. This son of a bitch is driving in the woods, he thought in wonder. His face lay against the cold glass of the window, and he didn’t know how close Sutter was watching him, but he chanced opening one eye and all there was was the dark boles of trees streaking by on both sides of a logroad snaking into deeper timber.