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

He drank the coffee and sat watching the still form beneath the folded coverlet. He set the cup aside and wiped a hand across the sandpaper stubble on his face and stood up. He approached the bed and stood looking down at the woman. What had been a woman. The skin was pulled tightly over the delicate framework of bones. The eyes were closed and the lids were bluely translucent like those of hatchling birds. He tried to feel pain, pity. If he felt anything at all it was a sort of detached interest in the way she seemed to be receding from sight. Everything was sliding from her, and nothing was coming back. Nothing mattered. No one expected her to do anything at all and whatever was going to happen was going to happen no matter what she did or if she did nothing whatever. The machine breathed on, breathed on.

He went out of the room and softly closed the door behind him. He went down a waxed tile hallway past the nurses’ station and out into the early December day. He lit a cigarette and walked two blocks down Main Street then turned right and went four down Maple to a long low building with a huge Plexiglas sign that said PETTIGREW MAGNAVOX. He unlocked the door and went in clicking on lights and walked on past long lines of sofas and easy chairs and silent flickering television sets.

In the office he put on a pot of coffee and stood before it with a cup in his hand waiting for the trickle to start and when it did he moved the pot aside and placed his cup beneath the stream. When it filled he replaced the pot and went with the cup to a desk and sat drinking the coffee and idly reading yesterday’s newspaper. After a while he looked at his watch and went into the bathroom and took from beneath the lavatory a shaving kit. He lathered his face and shaved, the face looking back at him hollow-eyed and angular and somehow sinister, like a nighttime predator’s face peering at him through a backlit window.

At five minutes before eight Crosswaithe’s erstwhile brotherin-law arrived. J. C. Pettigrew was a heavyset jowly man wearing a tan tweed topcoat and a golfing cap. He hung up coat and cap then took a folded document from the topcoat pocket. He unfolded it and slapped it hard onto the desk before Crosswaithe.

You’ve got a little run this morning, he said. He waited for Crosswaithe to look at the paper.

Crosswaithe went on drinking coffee and he didn’t look. What is it? he finally asked.

The bank sent this note back. You’ve got to go to the Harrikin and pick up that projection TV you sold that old son of a bitch with the hole in his throat. I told you that son of a bitch was no good.

He seemed all right.

You felt sorry for him because he had that hole in his throat and that damned microphone he held to it when he talked. Buzz, buzz, buzz. You sold a two-thousand-dollar television set to a man just because he had a hole in his throat.

You told me to use my own judgment.

I also told you he was a bootlegger and a dopegrower and he was no good. You assured me you’d work the note. It’s four months behind and not worked and the bank’s kicked it back. I don’t know whether it was the old man or that daughter of his that kept sidling around and showing you her black drawers. But whichever it was I want my TV.

Crosswaithe drained his cup and stood up. I’ll get your TV, he said. He folded the note and shoved it into his hip pocket.

You look like hell, Pettigrew said. What’d you do, stay out all night? Was you by the hospital? How’s Claire?

Crosswaithe shrugged. How she always is, he said. He was putting on his coat. Pettigrew was watching him. Pettigrew had tiny piglike eyes that were not liking what they were seeing. I don’t doubt you give her some disease that you picked up somewhere, he said. You only married her for what little money Daddy had. It’s a crying shame she didn’t divorce you before you run through it.

One of these days the time is going to come when I have to stomp your ass, Crosswaithe said. It’s just inevitable. I won’t be able to help myself. It may not be today and it may not be tomorrow but it’s going to come. You’re going to get sideways with me some morning before I’ve had all my coffee and I’m going to kick hell out of you. What do you think about that?

Pettigrew had taken a step or two back. You’re only here because of Claire, he said. Now get on the move. Get there and get back, the weatherman’s talking about snow.

CROSSWAITHE DROVE the company pickup truck into the far southern part of the county. A waste of a country ravaged and scarred by open-pit mines and virtually abandoned, leftover remnants of landscape, the tailings of a world no one would have. At a beer joint called Big Mama’s he stopped and asked directions and set out again. He drove on and on over rutted switchback roads. Jesus Christ, he said. He was driving into a world where the owls roosted with the chickens, where folks kept whippoorwills for pets and didn’t get the Saturday Night Opry till Monday morning.

The house when he found it was set at the mouth of a hollow. A tin-roofed log house canted on its stone foundation and leant as if under the pressure of enormous perpetual winds. Blown-out autos set about the yard as if positioned with an eye for their aesthetic value. A black cat elongated like running ink down the side of a crumpled Buick and vanished silently in the woods.

He knocked on the door. After a while he knocked again. A curtain was pulled aside and the girl’s face appeared. She stood regarding him through the glass. He had been thinking about her on the drive out here, remembering not individual features but the sum expression, a sort of sullen eroticism.

The door opened. Hey, she said. I remember you. Come on in.

Hey, Crosswaithe said. He had the note in his hand. I came about the television set.

What about it?

Crosswaithe was by now standing in the front room looking about. A clean simple room, cheap vinyl trailer-park furniture. The television set looked like something that been teleported there from more opulent surroundings.

Well, he said, you didn’t pay for it. I had to come pick it up. He was studying it with an eye toward handling it and loading it into the bed of the truck. It had a distinctly heavy look.

How much do I owe?

He looked at the note. A little over a thousand dollars, he said. Is your father not at home?

There’s nobody here but me, the girl said. She had long dark hair and eyes that in the room’s poor light seemed to vary from gray to a deep sea-green. Every move the girl made had undercurrents: the hip-slung way she stood too close to him, even the way she said, There’s nobody here but me. Long attuned to nuance and shadings he could turn to his own advantage, Crosswaithe picked all this up immediately but there were subtle connotations here he wasn’t prepared to deal with just yet.

Where’s he at?

Not here, she said. Come on in and let’s sit down and talk about it. I’ve got some money.

Crosswaithe at the mention of money crossed and sat with his elbows on his knees on the edge of the sofa. He was thinking that maybe he wouldn’t have to wrestle with a projection TV after all. Even with the two-wheeler it would be difficult for one man to handle it without dropping it.

She went through a curtained doorway into another room. He could hear her rummaging around, opening and closing drawers. Perhaps she was looking for money. The room was cold; he shivered involuntarily and sat hugging his knees. He wondered what they used for heat around here, they didn’t seem to be using anything today.

When the curtain parted she came back into the room carrying a whiskey bottle by the neck and in her other hand a brown envelope. She sat on the sofa beside him and laid the whiskey bottle in his lap. Get you a drink, she said. I’ve got to see how much money I’ve got here.