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

If you left nineteen thousand dollars in there, you bet pretty high, Raymer observed. I thought you said you didn’t gamble.

Mayfield had not yet turned on the lights in his living room, and behind him the door loomed dark and silent. Raymer thought of his own still house, where he must go.

I’ve got to get on, he said. What happened to your nose?

I had plastic surgery. I wanted it this way. I picked this nose out of a book.

Were you in an accident?

No, he did it on purpose. I was in a beer joint over on the Wayne County line. Goblin’s Knob. This big farmer off of Beech Creek set on me and held me down and cut the end off of it with a pocketknife.

Jesus Christ.

No, he was a Pulley. He disappeared right after that. Nobody ever knew what became of him. I believe he’s in a dry cistern with his throat cut and rocks piled down on him. What do you think?

I think I can feel you pulling on my leg again.

Maybe. Maybe not.

SIX WEEKS AFTER she left, he had seen her in a mall, coming out of a JCPenney. She had had her hair shorn away and what was left dyed a glossy black. She was slim and graceful, and she looked like the willowy child he had grown up with. He walked along beside her. Standing by a wishing pool where coins gleamed from the depths, and with a brick wall hard against her back, he kissed her mouth until she twisted her face away. Let me alone, she said. What are you trying to do?

He was still holding her. He could feel the delicate framework of bones beneath her flesh. Like a rabbit, a fawn, like something small. I’m trying to save our marriage, he said.

She shook her head. This marriage is shot, she said quietly. A team of paramedics couldn’t save it. This marriage wound up roadkill on the life’s highway.

On the life’s highway, Raymer repeated in wonder. You’ve been helping Robbie with his country lyrics, haven’t you?

She was pushing harder against him, but he was still holding her. His arms wouldn’t release. When they finally did, they hung limply at his sides, like appendages he hadn’t learned the use of. She was looking into his eyes. Was she about to cry? Maybe. Maybe not. She turned away, and he didn’t follow.

Corrie lived in an apartment complex near the college where she was learning to be a nurse. He had been there a time or two before she took up with the country musician. Tonight her light was out. Early to bed, early to rise. Robbie owned an old green Camaro, and Raymer drove around the parking lot until he found it. Then he got back on the interstate and drove toward home.

IT’S IN A FIVE-GALLON VINEGAR JAR, Mayfield said.

What in the world would a person ever do with five gallons of vinegar? Raymer said.

They’d make a lot of pickles. Anyway, that’s where it’s at. I started out with fruit jars, but they were too hard to keep up with. I figured, keep all my eggs in one basket. If the weather clears up, we might do it this weekend. I believe it’d do you good to get your mind off that girl that quit you. We might fish a little. You get down on that river, you’ll be all right.

I never said I believed any of this tale. And I damn sure never said I’d do it.

You never said you wouldn’t. We’ll split right down the middle, half and half. I’d even give you the even ten.

Raymer was sitting on Mayfield’s porch, a porch stanchion against his back, drinking from a warming bottle of beer and watching rain string off the roof. A sudden squall had blown in from the southwest, and Mayfield had been standing there in the rain waiting for him before he had his ladders and tools stored away. Now Mayfield was rocking in the porch swing, and for some time he studied Raymer in silence.

What you’re doin is draggin this out way too far, he said. You’re a likely young feller. Not too bad-lookin. You need to get over it. Get on to the next thing. You need some kind of closure.

Closure? Raymer was grinning. Where did you hear that? Was relationship therapy part of the bootlegging trade when you followed it?

I heard it on TV. I got no way of gettin out anywhere. I watch a lot of TV. Them talk shows — them shrinks and social workers are always talkin about closure. Closure this, closure that. I figure you need some. You need somethin for sure. You got a look about you like you don’t care whether you live or die, and maybe you’d a little rather die. I’ve seen that look on folks before, and I don’t care for it. It ain’t healthy.

Raymer was thinking that maybe the old man was right. He did need something, and closure was as good a word for it as anything else. Everything had just been so damned polite. She had not even raised her voice. Just I’m going, goodbye, don’t leave the light on for me. If only she had done something irrevocable, something he couldn’t forget, something so bad she couldn’t take it back. Something that would cauterize the wound like a red-hot iron.

Did it have a metal lid, this famous jug?

What?

If it did, after twenty years in a wet cave the lid’s rusted away and the money’s just a mildewed mess of rotten goop. A biological stew of all the germs that came off all the people who ever handled it. Fermenting all these years.

I never heard such rubbish. Anyway, I’m way ahead of you. The money’s wrapped in plastic, and I melted paraffin in a cooker and sealed it with a couple of inches of that. Like women used to seal jelly.

This silenced Raymer, and he took a sip of beer and sat watching Mayfield bemusedly. After a while he set his bottle aside. He seemed to have made up his mind about something.

Do you believe in God? he asked.

Do what? Of course I do. Don’t you?

Do you own a Bible?

I believe there’s one in there somewhere.

Go get it.

Mayfield was in the house for some time. Raymer watched staccato lightning flicker in the west out of tumorous storm clouds. Thunder rumbled like something heavy and ungainly rolling down an endless corridor, faint and fainter. When Mayfield came out, he had a worn Bible covered in black leather. He held it out to Raymer.

Did you want to read a psalm or two? he asked.

Raymer didn’t take the Bible. Do you swear you’re telling me the truth about that money? he asked.

The old man looked amused, as if he’d won some obscure point of honor. He laid the Bible in the seat of the lawn chair and placed his palm on it. I swear I hid a vinegar jar with nineteen thousand seven hundred dollars in it in a cave down on the Tennessee River.

Raymer figured he might as well cover all the contingencies. And as far as I know, it’s still there, he said.

And as far as I know, it’s still there, Mayfield repeated.

IT WAS NEVER ABOUT MONEY, Corrie had said, but Raymer thought perhaps it had been about money after all. Corrie had been happiest when they had money to spend, and she fell into long silences when it grew tight. The happiest he had seen her was when they bought an old farmhouse to remodel. But everything ate up money: mortgage payments, building materials. Anyway, what Corrie seemed to enjoy was the act of spending, not what she bought.

He had given her a $300 leather jacket for her twenty-second birthday, and she had left it in a Taco Bell and not even checked on it for a week. Naturally, it was gone. They probably made a lot of others just like it, she said. Somewhere someone Raymer didn’t know was wearing his $300.

HE CUT THE MOTOR and let the boat drift the last few feet toward shore, rocking slightly on the choppy water. He took a line up from the stern and tossed it over a sweet-gum branch. He drew it around and tied it off and just stood for a moment, staring up the face of the bluff. The cliff rose in a sheer vertical that he judged to be almost two hundred feet. The opening he was looking at was perhaps thirty feet from the top.