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

He set the bottle on the corner of the bureau and took out his wallet. The movement of his reflection in the mirror was furtive, that of a prowler, a midnight rambler. Like a burglar returning something he has stolen. He withdrew three bills from the wallet and tilted them toward the moonlit window to ascertain their denomination. He folded them once and slid them under the edge of the bottle. The room seemed close and more claustrophobic than ever, decadent and diseased, perhaps there really was blood on the walls and baseboards, shreds of rotting brain tissue in the nap of the carpet. Voices from darkened corners of the room muttered secrets he wanted no part of. Holding his breath he crossed through the doorway into the living room, went out the front door for the last time. He pulled the door to behind him then as an afterthought opened it and reached in and turned the lock and pulled it closed until it clicked. He went down the steps from the deck.

It was almost as bright as day. The moon was well up now and the world as pristine as if no one had yet torn the cellophane off it, left a footprint on it. The slabs of limestone reared out of the dark white as snowbanks. He went to the car and climbed in.

He had his hand on the ignition when something his eyes had seen but his brain had not immediately registered struck him and he opened the door and got out.

Well I’m a son of a bitch, he said.

Oil had pooled beneath the engine and trickled down the rock in streams that in the moonlight looked like blood, dark heart’s blood coagulating on white leather seat covers. There was an enormous quantity of it, and he guessed the crankcase was empty, the engine bled white.

Well, it’s only an oil pan, he told himself. An oil pan could be fixed. He opened the door of his wife’s Taurus. He did not expect the keys to be in the ignition and they were not. He could go in for the keys, but it might be better to send a wrecker for the Buick. She would lend him the car, but in order to get the keys he would have to knock on the door and he did not want to knock on that door again. He had a superstitious fear that something dread might answer his knock, who knew what.

Like a crossroads, the night itself had confounded him, possibilities he’d never considered swirled like smoke — he might borrow the keys and be on his way, he might seek value received for his three hundred dollars, like Borum he might sweet-talk her into giving him one more chance, he might strangle her where she lay.

Of course a man might walk away. The yellow moon lay low in the southern sky and that would be enough light to walk by. Just walk off toward it, give up cigarettes and Ron Rico and thoughts of suicide and bloody violence. Take up Zen, needlepoint, the salvation of heathen souls. Find a southern star and use it as a sextant as mariners were told to do and set a course for the Mississippi Delta so absolutely undeviating he would clamber over things instead of walking off course around them, crossing interstates and freeways and clotheslines and barbed-wire fences until he was deep in the Delta, sitting in some smoky club drinking Wild Turkey and listening to the blues. Then farther still until there was no longer any question of going back, you couldn’t go back. Until the turnpikes and the Burger Kings and the Taco Bells and acres of smashed cars that looked like the broken and discarded cartons death had come in vanished and time itself distorted like light through warped glass and he was in some yellow-lit shack that smelled of coal oil and bootleg whiskey and where the ghost of Robert Johnson scowled at him and turned his body away so that Karas could not see the chords his fingers were making on the guitar.

Then finally into the warm night until the Delta itself, smooth as velvet and sweet as honeysuckle, took him as absolutely as if he had walked into dark and bottomless waters that had closed over his head remorseless as time, implacable as fate, seamless as the heavens.

R AYMER HAD BEEN working at the housing project for more than a month, and during this time the little old man had consistently moved with the sun. Raymer had begun work during the chill days of a blackberry winter, and the man had shuttled his chair as each day progressed, claiming the thin, watery light as if he drew sustenance from it. Now it was well into June, and at some point the man had shifted into reverse, moving counterclockwise for the shade but always positioning his lawn chair where he could watch Raymer work.

Raymer hardly noticed him, for he was in more pain than he had thought possible. He could scarcely get through the day. He was amazed that hearts could actually ache, actually break. Secretly he suspected that his had been defective, already faulted, a secondhand or rebuilt heart, for it had certainly not held up as well as he had expected it to. Corrie, who had been his childhood sweetheart before she became his wife, had inserted the point of a chisel into the fault line and tapped it once lightly with a hammer, and that was the end of that.

By trade he was a painter, and some days he was conscious only of the aluminum extension ladder through his tennis shoes and the brush at the end of his extended arm, which leaned out, and out, as if gravity were just a bothersome rumor, as if he were leaning to paint the very void that yawned to engulf him. When Raymer came down to move the ladder, the old man was waiting for him at the foot of it holding a glass of iced tea in his hand. He was a wizened little man who did not even come to Raymer’s shoulder. He had washed-out eyes of the palest blue, and the tip of his nose looked as if, sometime long ago, it had been sliced off neatly with a pocketknife. He was wearing a canvas porkpie hat that had half a dozen trout flies hooked through the band, and he was dressed in flip-flops, faded blue jeans, and an old Twisted Sister T-shirt.

My name’s Mayfield. Drink this tea before you get too hot.

Raymer took the glass of tea as you’d take a pill a doctor ordered you to, and stood holding it as if he did not know what to do with it.

Drink it up before that ice melts. You don’t talk much, do you?

What?

You don’t have much to say.

Well, I work by myself. Folks might think me peculiar if I was having long conversations.

I mean you ain’t very friendly. You don’t exactly invite conversation.

I just have all this work to do.

Who do you work for?

Raymer sipped the tea. It was sweet and strong, and the glass was full of shaved ice. A sprig of mint floated on top, and he crushed it between his teeth. I work for myself, he said.

I been watchin you ever since you come out here. You’re right agile on that ladder. Move around like you was on solid ground. How old a feller are you?

I’m twenty-four, Raymer said, chewing the mint, its taste as evocative as a hallucinogenic drug, reminding him of something but he could not have said what. Where’d you get that T-shirt?

It was in some stuff that my daughter left when she married, Mayfield said. You ever do any bluff-climbin?

Any what?

Bluff-climbin: Climbin around over these limestone bluffs down by the Tennessee River.

No.

I bet you could, though. I used to do it when I was a hell of a lot older than twenty-four. I can’t do it now, though — my joints has got stiff, and my bones are as brittle as glass.

I’m sorry, Raymer said, feeling an obscure need to apologize for infirmities of age he hadn’t caused. He was thinking of Corrie the last time he’d seen her, thinking of her hands pushing against his chest.

It ain’t your fault. Listen, I got somethin I need a coat of paint on. You stop by when you knock off work this evenin, and I’ll show it to you.