William Gay - Twilight

It was some time before it occurred to Sutter that they were looking for him.

That boy was all right. He was kind of curious turned, but to tell you the truth I sort of liked him. He’d speak to you. Not like some of these young fellers thinks the world didn’t start till the doctor slapped em on the ass.

There is about these old men who have arranged themselves about the coal stove in Patton’s store a curious air of waiting, of time in suspension, as if they had already achieved some remove from the world, the eldest among them awaiting death as calmly as someone waiting on a bus. Beyond them through the plateglass window it is snowing hard and when cars pass to and fro the sound is muted and cloistral and the lights look blurred and unreal, a dream of carlights.

I notice you keep sayin was, another man said. I reckon you done wrote him off, then.

When he run crossways of Sutter I reckon he wrote hisself off. I always thought of that myself as one of the more unpleasant ways you commit suicide.

The old man shook his head. You can say what you want to about him, but if I was able I’d be out there with Bellwether and them scouring the woods.

Leastways some good will come of this. Sutter’s done it this time. The son of a bitch is finally gone way over the line.

A man named Junior Raymer was whittling something unrecognizable but vaguely obscene from soft red cedar. He sat on his upended Coke crate a time studying his creationthen he rose and opened the stove door and tossed it inside. He stirred the fire with the poker and showers of sparks cascaded outward. He spat into them then slammed the door.

Don’t you bet on it, he said. He’s rolled through the cracks before, and he’s fixin to do it again. You mark my words. He’ll be gone like a lost ball in the high weeds.

Talkin about that Tyler boy, the old man said, they must be more to him than meets the eye. Some said that schoolteacher of his worked around and got him a scholarship in a college. Up to Knoxville, they said.

He’ll work, Junior agreed. That’s more than anybody could ever have said about old Moose. Less you count totin sacks of sugar up them hollers back in there. He’d do that. That boy come up hard, him and his sister, too. I used to drink some back when they was little, and I used to lay drunk out there.

Raymer took out a pipe and began to tamp it with roughcut applesmelling tobacco. Someone got up to peer out the window at the snow blanketing the road. The day had waned and the glass had gone a surreal and unearthly gray against whose cold slick surface flakes list and slide with the faintest of ghostsounds and beyond them there is a faint and sourceless fluorescence.

Raymer struck a match on the side of the potbellied heater and lit his pipe. You know, they used to have cockfights in the Harrikin back then. Moose, he fooled with it some. Raised some of them game roosters. Anything there was money in and the work took out of you’d find Moose in it somehow, and don’t nothing draw loafers and lowlifes like a cockfight will. Moose had him one he was real proud of. It was silvercolored and had these little coldlookin eyes like a damn cottonmouthmoccasin. It didn’t look like no chicken I ever seen. It looked like some kind of a weapon.

Anyhow, this boy y’all speakin of was about seven years old. He had this lit old dominecker rooster he raised from a chick. It used to foller him around the way a dog would. That Sunday Moose was about drunk and the boy’s rooster done somethin to piss him off. Messed the porch, I reckon. Young Tyler seen the way things was headin and grabbed that rooster up and hugged it to him. He made to run off, and Moose grabbed him and jerked that rooster away from him. He looked around and spied that silver chicken and set the dominecker down in front of it. He grabbed em and rubbed their heads together, and that game jumped straight up and hung the dominecker through the head and that quick it was deadern hell. It was the beat of anything I ever seen. His own boy’s pet. That boy was takin on and talkin to that dead chicken, and I learnt somethin right then and there. I was learnin it late, but I reckon that’s better than never. There’s folks you just don’t need. You’re better off without em. Your life is just a little better because they ain’t in it. Moose was the first I cut loose, but I cut him clean and I never went out there no more.

When the phone rang Fenton Breece answered it in tones of sepulchral dignity, but there did not seem to be anyone there or, more properly, anyone with anything to say, for all he could hear was a labored catarrhal breathing. This went on for a few seconds and then there was a mechanical click when the phone was hung up, and he thought, They know I’m here. He was sitting at his desk. He was wearing a burgundy silk lounging robe and matching houseshoes and silverrimmed reading glasses on a cord about his neck. He put aside the funeral director’s journal he’d been reading when the phone interrupted and opened the drawer of the desk and took out a German Luger he’d taken to carrying of late. He laid the weapon on the ink blotter before him and sat studying it: there was something sinister about its symmetry, something lethal in its craftsmanship. Something efficient, but he’d read somewhere the Germans were like that: when the death factories were running fulltilt three shifts a day, they’d had cost efficiency reports on the systematic extinction of the Jewish people figured to the last mark. His father had told him once he’d taken the pistol from an officer in the Luftwaffe, but Breece had always figured he’d just bought it like he did everything else.

Past the window the street was a blur of blowing snow, and a vague anger touched him. He ought to be feeling cozy and Badgerlike with the exquisite feeling of being snowed in and the world snowed out, but he was not. He ought to be sitting before the fire with the Tyler girl against his shoulder and a demitasse of Cognac in his hand and soft music adding ambience to the room, but he was not that either. He was drifting in the icechoked backwaters of paranoia, and he could feel them, cold and black, rising about his upper thighs. He’d been navigating these perilous seas for some time, and every knock was a man in khakis with a warrant in his hand, every phone call the IRS auditing him for the last twenty-five years, every letter in the mailbox a note saying flee, all is discovered. I’ve just got to put it out of my mind, he thought. Either that or I’ve got to do something. He adjusted the reading glasses back on his nose, and he had read two paragraphs when someone began to pound on the front door. He rose. He hesitated and then remembered the slick streets: it’s been a bad wreck, two or three dead, he told himself comfortingly. But he took up the Luger anyway and shoved it into the pocket of his dressing gown before he went to answer the door.

The oak door was latched with a security chain that he left in place, opening the door a scant three inches.

A motley crew indeed. Twelve or fifteen felthatted and overalled men bundled against the cold assembled with the stoop full and more aligned tense and silent about them. Young or old, they all had in common the set anger in their faces and the utter implacability of their manner. Jaws knotted with lumps of chewing tobacco, and they all seemed to be armed, some clutching rifles and others just sticks, and he thought he saw a ballbat or two. The foremost, who seemed the leader, opened his mouth to speak, and for an insane moment Breece thought he might break into song, for save the fierce outrage of their eyes, they looked not unlike perverse and rustic carolers come to herald the yuletide.

He didn’t know from where the strength to speak came, but it did. I’ll be right with you, he said brightly. He smiled, gestured toward the robe. I’m not dressed to receive company.