William Gay - I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down - Collected Stories

He went out and sat down on the stone steps. The day seemed to grow still and he sat and smoked and grew still along with it. Suddenly, he realized it was almost night. He’d sat down in broad daylight and now it was the darkest shade of twilight and the cries of whippoorwills were washing over him from out of the trees.

At length he rose and went around the house and through the backyard. He stood at the fence and watched. The horizon had almost merged with the darkness. It was dissolving rapidly, like a horizon cut from paper and dropped into acid. The spiky tops of the cypresses marked the spot where the body had lain. Where the bodies had lain. In an uneasy moment of revelation, he divined that the woods were not yet finished with him, that he had barely tapped the reservoir of their knowledge. It seemed to him that this dark quarter acre of death and assignation would go on and on whispering to him secrets he did not want to hear as long as he had the strength to listen.

BONEDADDY BOWERS had not had a driver’s license since 1989 but that did not deter him on his appointed rounds. Cops he met raised a casual hand, Hey, Bonedaddy. He was a laidback good old boy of twenty-seven who was not going to hurt anybody or cause any real harm unless you were a sixteen-year-old virgin or a factory worker on the nightshift with a restless wife home listening for the sound of the gutted mufflers of Bonedaddy’s truck.

Bonedaddy liked George Jones, the Buffalo Bills, professional wrestling, cold longneck bottles of Bud with water beading on the side. He liked pliable young girls he could mold to his liking, soft summer nights beside the Tennessee River, consoling the distraught wives of inattentive young husbands. That Bonedaddy, folks said, shaking their heads. Women sensed something in Bonedaddy that men did not that went beyond his dark good looks, an unpredictable thread of danger that ran through his character like a faultline, a bright streak of precious metal in a fissured strata of rock. Had Bonedaddy not met his comeuppance he might have continued running sixteen-year-old virgins until he had to hobble after them with a walking stick, waylay them on the way to the mailbox after his social security check.

His comeuppance, though he had no way of knowing her as such, was sitting at the Sonic drive-in drinking a cherry Coke the first time he noticed her. She was a girl named Quincy Nell Qualls, five months past her sixteenth birthday, and she was a virgin. She had blondwhite hair and Nordic blue eyes and she was sitting behind the wheel of a little red Gremlin hatchback and when Bonedaddy looked down at her from the window of his pickup truck something passed between them tangible as an electric shock.

Good God, Bonedaddy said. He had scooted across the truck seat and rolled the glass down on the passenger side.

She didn’t reply. She looked up at him with her guileless blue eyes as clear as springwater. Bonedaddy had no way of knowing that he had been under observation, that she had kept up with his comings and goings as studiously as an ornithologist might ponder the migratory habits of birds. It was the first warm day of May and she could feel the weight of the sun on her face and she knew she looked good in it.

You’re Candace Qualls’ little sister, right?

I’m Candace’s sister.

God. You grew up. I never noticed you before. I guess I never paid any mind to you after me and Candace broke up.

Bonedaddy could do that and had done it, work his way through a whole family of sisters. In his ten years on the road he’d gone through as many as three or four stairstep sisters. Folks grinned and said that Bonedaddy was a caution, the moment a girl was out of pigtails Bonedaddy would be standing at the front door, his hand raised to knock.

Where’s she at now? Up at UT Martin taking premed.

Me and her were pretty hot stuff there for a while.

All the time Bonedaddy and Candace were pretty hot stuff Quincy Nell had been watching from the sidelines. She had already determined that she was going to marry Bonedaddy. She loved him, and Candace didn’t. Candace was marking time and waiting to go away for college. Quincy Nell loved everything about him. She loved the straight fall of his long hair that was as black and shiny as a ravens wing. She loved the thin scar curving down his left cheek that never tanned and that he told everyone he got knife fighting although in actuality it had been caused by a bumper jack kicking out when he was fifteen years old. Everybody in Clifton knew that he had not been in a knife fight so he mostly used that story picking up women in the string of honkytonks across the Perryville bridge. She loved him with a childlike devotion, and she would have died for him, though she didn’t figure she’d have to go nearly that far.

Last time I paid you any mind you was a kid. You still get hot playin Softball and pull your T-shirt off?

No, she said. I don’t do that anymore.

Say me and you ought to get together tonight. You want to ride over cross the river where they have that dance?

No, she said. I can’t. I’ve got a date tonight.

Bonedaddy studied her in bemused silence. She knew she had him. Bonedaddy could never stand the sound of the word no, it aroused in him enormous efforts of acquisition, and she knew that before the weekend was gone Bonedaddy would have his bone-white Toyota truck parked in her front yard and he himself would be parked on the shady end of the porch talking up her father.

SHE HAD A DATE THAT NIGHT with Robert Earl Crouch. They drove to Columbia and went to the bowling alley but there was no one there they knew. There was no movie she wanted to see at the multiplex either so they drove back to Clifton and parked on a long point of land grown up with wild mimosa that overlooked the river. Under the starlight the rimpled surface of the river looked hammered and it glittered with a thousand points of light. Sometimes a tug went upriver pushing a barge, the sound of the tug’s motor and distant foreign voices drifted to them on the soft warm wind.

Robert Earl kissed her and she kissed him back. He had always smelled like Dentyne chewing gum but lately she had noticed that he smelled like Stetson aftershave. He cupped her right breast and she moved his hand.

Quit it, she said.

Do what? he asked in disbelief. His voice carried a tinge of quiet outrage, he’d been disenfranchised of a privilege that had been a given for some months.

What’s the matter with you, Quincy Nell?

There’s nothing the matter with me. You don’t care what I want. You never want to do what I want to do. All you care about is yourself.

He was silent a time. Finally he said: Just what is it you want to do?

You never know what I’m thinking about. I’m just a body to you. I think we might as well break up.

Why Jesus Christ, Robert Earl said.

♦ ♦ ♦

HER FATHER SAT on the front porch and passed the time of day with Bonedaddy. Bonedaddy had a graceful easy charm, it didn’t matter to whom he was talking. Old ladies confided in him and children trusted him with their secrets and dogs had been known to follow him home. Quincy Nell’s father was not even a suitable challenge and Bonedaddy was humming along on half power.

Quincy Nell’s father was an English teacher at the high school and though they lived in a veritable warren of Republicans he was of a liberal bent of mind and he liked to think that guidance rather than discipline was what he should be dispensing. He liked to say, Well, I’m of a liberal bent of mind myself and I can’t say that the position you’re taking is very compassionate. He was fond of saying that blood would tell, that he’d let Candace decide things for herself and things had turned out fine.