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

How you, Mr. Scribner?

He slid the bill across to Skully. I thank you for the beer, he said. Let me buy them highbinders down the bar a couple.

There was a flurry of goodwill from the drunks downbar toward this big spender from the outlands and the old man accepted their thanks with grace and drank down the second can of beer.

We heard you was sick and confined to your son’s house, Skully said. You look pretty healthy to me. What supposed to be the matter with you?

I reckon my mind’s goin out on me, Scribner said. It fades in and out like a weak TV station. I expect to wake up some morning with no mind at all. There ain’t nothin wrong with me, though. He hit himself in the chest with a meaty fist. I could still sweep this place out on a Saturday night. You remember when I used to do that.

Yes I do.

I just can’t remember names. What went with folks. All last week I was thinkin about this old boy I used to see around. Name of Willard Pulley. I couldn’t remember what become of him. Folks called him Bonedaddy.

Let me see, now, Skully said.

He’s dead, one of the men down the bar said.

Scribner turned so abruptly the stool spun with him and he almost fell. What? he asked.

He’s dead. He got drunk and burnt hisself up down on the Tennessee River. Must be over twenty years ago.

Wasn’t much gone, another said. He ain’t no kin to you is he?

No, no, I just wondered what become of him. And say he’s dead sure enough?

All they found was ashes and bones. That’s as dead as I ever want to be.

I got to get on, the old man said. He rose and put on his hat and shoveled his change into a pocket and took up his stick.

When the door closed behind him with its soft chime, one of the drunks said, There goes what’s left of a hell of a man. I’ve worked settin trusses with him where the foreman would have three men on one end and just him on the other. He never faded nothin.

He wasn’t lying about cleaning this place out, either, Skully said. He’d sweep it out on a Saturday night like a long-handled broom but he never started nothin. He’d set and mind his own business. Play them old songs on the jukebox. It didn’t pay to fuck with him though.

THE OLD MAN SAT in the barber chair, a towel wound about his shoulders and he couldn’t remember what he wanted. I need a, he said, and the word just wasn’t there. He thought of words, inserting them into the phrase and trying them silently in his mind to see if they worked. I need a picket fence, a bicycle, a heating stove. The hot blood of anger and humiliation suffused his throat and face.

What kind of haircut you want, Mr. Scribner?

A haircut, the old man said in relief. Why hell yes. That’s what I want, a haircut. Take it all off. Let me have my money’s worth.

All of it?

Just shear it off.

When Scribner left, his buzz-cut bullet head was hairless as a cue ball and the fedora cocked at a jaunty angle. He drank two more beers at Skully’s, then thought he’d amble down to the courthouse lawn and see who was sitting on the benches there. When he stood on the sidewalk, the street suddenly yawned before him as if he were looking down the sides of a chasm onto a stream of dark water pebbled with moonlight. He’d already commenced his step and when he tried to retract it he overbalanced and pitched into the street. He tried to catch himself with his palms, but his head still rapped the asphalt solidly, and lights flickered on and off behind his eyes. He dragged himself up and was sitting groggily on the sidewalk when Skully came out the door.

Skully helped him up and seated him against the wall. I done called the ambulance, he said. He retrieved Scribner’s hat and set it carefully in the old man’s lap. Scribner sat and watched the blood running off his hands. Somewhere on the outskirts of town a siren began, the approaching whoop whoop whoop like some alarm the old man had inadvertently triggered that was homing in on him.

ALL THIS SILENCE was something the old man was apprehensive about. Rabon hadn’t even had much to say when, still in his schoolteaching suit, he had picked Scribner up at the emergency room. Once he had ascertained that the old man wasn’t seriously hurt he had studied his new haircut and his bandaged hands and said, I believe this is about it for me.

He hadn’t even gone in to teach the next day. He had stayed in his bedroom with the door locked, talking on the telephone. Scribner could hear the rise and fall of the mumbling voice but even with an ear to the door he could distinguish no word. It was his opinion that Rabon was calling one old folks’ home after another trying to find one desperate enough to take him, and he had no doubt that sooner or later he would succeed.

The day drew on strange and surreal. His life was a series of instants, each one of which bore no relation to the one preceding, the one following. He was reborn moment to moment. He had long taken refuge in the past, but time had proven laden with deadfalls he himself had laid long ago with land mines that were better not stepped on. So he went further back, to the land of his childhood, where everything lay under a troubled truce. Old voices long silenced by the grave spoke again, their ancient timbres and cadences unchanged by time, by death itself. He was bothered by the image of the little man in the green checked suit and the derby hat, rapping the spotted dog with a malacca cane and saying: I just hate a dog at a funeral, don’t you? Who the hell was that? Scribner wondered, the dust of old lost roads coating his bare feet, the sun of another constellation warming his back.

He looked out the window and dark had come without his knowing it. A heavyset man in wire-rimmed glasses brought a tray of food. Scribner did not even wonder who this might be. The man was balding, and when he stooped to arrange the tray, Scribner could see the clean pink expanse of scalp through the combed-over hair. The man went out of the room. Scribner, looking up from his food, saw him cross through the hall with a bundle of letters and magazines. He went into Rabon’s room and closed the door.

Scribner finished the plate of food without tasting it.

He might have slept. He came to himself lying on the bed, the need to urinate so intense it was almost painful. He got up. He could hear a television in the living room, see the spill of yellow light from Rabon’s bedroom, the bathroom.

His bandaged hands made undoing his clothing even more complicated and finally he just pulled down his pajama bottoms, the stream of urine already starting, suddenly angry at Rabon, why the hell has he got all his plunder in the bathroom, these shoes, suits, these damned golf clubs?

Goddamn, a voice cried. The old man whirled. Rabon was standing in the hall with the TV Guide in his hand. His eyes were wide with an almost comical look of disbelief. My golf shoes, he said, flinging the TV Guide at Scribner’s bullet head and rushing toward him. Turning his head, the old man realized that he was standing before Rabon’s closet, urinating on a rack of shoes.

When Rabon’s weight struck him he went sidewise and fell heavily against the wall, his penis streaking the carpet with urine. He slid down the wall and struggled to a kneeling position, trying to get his pajama bottoms up, a fierce tide of anger rising behind his eyes.

Rabon was mad too, in fact angrier than the old man had ever seen him. He had jerked up the telephone and punched in a series of numbers, stood with the phone clasped to his ear and a furious impatient look on his face, an expression that did not change until the old man struck him in the side of the head with an enormous fist. The phone flew away and when Rabon hit the floor with the old man atop him, Scribner could hear it gibbering mechanically at him from the carpet.