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

I expect it’s a woman, he said. I’ve seen it a lot of times. Had it happen to me myself. A woman’ll warp your mind worse than whiskey ever thought of doing.

Karas’s wife, when she was eighteen, used to wake in the mornings with her black curls so tousled and windswept that he imagined the landscape of her dreams to be beset with perpetual storms. Now years had come and gone and in her dreams ice held dominion. He took up the bottle and drank from it and let it ease him further into despair.

Course you’re talking foolishness, Borum said. Doin away with yourself. Let me tell you a story. You notice them stone steps we dumb up? Laid in that bank? I toted that limestone out of this hollow myself. Mixed the mortar in the hood of a forty-seven Studebaker. Laid that rock more years ago than I want to think about. This used to be my place, me and the wife lived here when we was first married. I raised corn and a little cotton, she planted all them flowers. Then later on we had some trouble over one thing and another and she quit me. Went back to her family. Them was hard times. Bitter times. I thought of killin myself, setting the house on fire and just laying down in our bed and letting the ceilin cave in on me. Instead of that I got up my nerve and went and talked to her one last time. Pled my case, so to speak. No politician running for office ever spieled out words the way I did. No lawyer try in to snatch his client out of the electric chair. Like I had a tongue of gold. Words were sweet as honey in my mouth. So she come back to me.

Karas smiled. So you all lived happily ever after, he said. All your grandkids and great-grandkids turned out for your fiftieth wedding anniversary.

Well, not exactly. Not in my case. I come in early from huntin one day two years later and caught her in bed with my brother. I looked down and I was holdin that shotgun, what else was I goin to do? I shot her where she lay and my brother was up and out the window. I shot a goose down pillow he was lyin on a second before. The air was full of feathers like it was snowin. It was summer and hot like this and they had all the windows up. I sighted down the barrel laid across the windowsill and he was runnin up this spring holler. About where we are. I shot his legs out from under him and went out the window after him.

Jesus Christ, Karas said. I don’t want to hear any more of this. These are all things I don’t need to know.

You need to know what a man’s capable of. You need to know what things cost.

Why would I want to know any of that? Karas asked. What in God’s name are you talking about?

Night had almost completely fallen. Darkness was rolling out of the hollow like smoke. Borum was barely visible. He seemed to be fading away.

Because everything has its price, he said out of the dark. And because the two years between talkin her back and shootin my brother’s legs out from under him was the two best years of my life. Them was good times. Sweet times. Yet all the same when the bill come it had to be paid.

AT SOME HOUR past all clocking Karas was on the road back to the Storm Princess. It was a road not appreciably better than most of the other roads he had been on this day. Stones sang off the rocker panels and went flying off into the weeds like shot and something, probably the jutting tip of a boulder, slammed the undercarriage and oil pan hard. The engine had taken on a guttural sound as if he’d lost or broken the muffler. He glanced down and saw he was driving too fast. He was going downhill like a stone skittering down the sides of a well and he began to ride the brakes. He parked the car on the shelf of rock where he’d already parked one time too many and got out. He kicked the door closed, one more dent couldn’t hurt, the Grand National’s sides were streaked with zigzag scars like hesitation marks on the wrists of a would-be suicide.

He leaned against the door and fumbled with his clothing and urinated beside the car, his penis in one hand and the rum bottle in the other, the rum burning his throat. A huge orange harvest moon was just clearing the horizon above the dark field and it looked for all the world like some light enormous and supernatural that was rising out of the black velvet surface of the field itself. He canted the bottle against the starblown heavens as if he’d gauge its contents then turned toward the trailer.

Though by now, he had to admit, it was no longer a trailer. It was the lonely tower where the Storm Princess had fled to escape the attentions of an evil wizard. It was a tall conical tower of white stone, and roses climbed its side, their thorns giving purchase on the almost poreless rock, their blossoms dark as drops of splattered blood on the alabaster stone. Slits of window climbed the tower in an ascending spiral, he knew that inside a staircase wound toward a bower at the top where the Storm Princess had sequestered herself to make her stand, all the furniture in the room hastily skidded across the floor to barricade the door against the weight of his shoulder.

The evil wizard fell twice on plates of slick shale rock, once rapping the bottle smartly but not breaking it. He rose and went on, the bottle held aloft like a beacon that was lighting his way or yet like a child held one-handed out of harm’s way by someone fording deep swift waters.

The trailer was dark, not even a porch light. Long and low and tacky, it no longer bore any resemblance to a white stone tower, no more resemblance than the woman who finally answered his knock bore to the Storm Princess of so long ago. Her face was scrubbed clean of makeup and by the bare-bulb glare of the porch light she clicked on he could see the fine wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, a few gray strands of hair swept back from her temples.

Are you alone? he asked, knowing that tonight she was still alone. Yet he was weary with the knowledge that flesh can be no more than flesh and he knew of time’s implacable attrition on all good resolve. He knew that a time would come when his fist would pound the flimsy door and a man in his wife’s bed would stir and sit up. This faceless man would grasp the Storm Princess by the shoulder and shake her gently awake, asking, Who in the world can that be at two o’clock in the morning?

Of course I’m alone, who did you expect to be here? What do you want? She wore a blue bathrobe unbuttoned but clasped loosely at the throat with one hand and at the waist by the other. She did not seem particularly surprised to see him, nor pleased that he could still number himself among the living.

You of all people should know what I want.

Well, she said, it’s — she turned and glanced over her shoulder to a wall clock, a round white clock that was garlanded with fake roses that reminded him of the roses climbing the tower — two o’clock in the morning. You’re going to have to be more specific than that. I have to work tomorrow.

I’m drunk but not so drunk I don’t know what day it is, Karas said. Tomorrow is Sunday. Is it all right if I come in?

I suppose so, she said. You seem determined to run through all the definitions there are for a fool. What’s the matter with you?

Not exactly knowing, he did not reply. When she stepped aside to allow him passage he entered the small claustrophobic living room, stood for a moment in its center breathing in the caustic smell of imitation wood paneling, old violence, his own violent despair. He crossed the room, a bare few paces, and seated himself on a vinyl sofa. He held the bottle across his lap the way a commuter awaiting a train clutches his briefcase.

This place feels wrong, he said. Distinctly bad vibrations. You can feel it in the air, double murder, love gone wrong. This place has been cleaned up but I’ll bet if I look I can find blood on the walls, bits of tissue in the nap of the carpet.