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

You went up that thing?

I damn sure did. With a five-gallon vinegar jug of money.

The hell you did.

The hell I didn’t. It’s not as steep as it looks.

It better not be. If it is, Spiderman couldn’t get up it with suction cups on his hands and feet. Are you sure it’s the right one?

I’m almost positive, Mayfield said. He had opened a tackle box and sat with an air of concentration, inspecting its contents. At length he selected a fly and began to tie it to the nylon line on the fishing rod he was holding.

It was ten o’clock on a balmy Saturday morning. They had already been inside several inlets where the river backwatered and had inspected the bluffs for caves. They had seen two openings that could have been caves, but the openings had not looked right to the old man. Mayfield had brought a cooler of beer and CocaColas, a picnic basket filled with sandwiches, his tackle box, a creel, and two fly rods. Raymer had brought only a heavy-duty flashlight and a two-hundred-foot coil of nylon rope, and he was disgusted. If we had one of those striped umbrellas, we could lollygag on the beach, he said. If we had a beach.

He began a winding course up the bluff. It was cut with ledges that narrowed as the bluff ascended, and sometimes he was forced to progress from ledge to ledge by wedging his boots in vertical crevices and pushing himself laboriously upward. From time to time he came upon stunted cedars growing out of the fissured rock, but he didn’t trust them to hold his weight.

Halfway up, the ledges ceased to be anything more than sloping footholds on the rock face, and he could go no farther. He stood on a narrow ledge not much wider than his shoe soles, hugging the bluff and glancing up. The rest of the bluff looked as sheer and smooth as an enormous section of window glass. The hell with this, he said. He worked himself down to a wider outcropping and hunkered there with his back against the limestone and his eyes closed. He could feel the hot sun on his eyelids. When he opened them, the world was spread out in a panorama of such magnitude that his head reeled, and for a moment he did not think of Corrie at all.

Everything below him was diminished — a tiny boat with a tiny man casting a line, the inlet joining the rolling river where it gleamed like metal in the sun. Far upstream, toward the ferry, a barge drifted with a load of new cars, their glass and chrome flashing in the sun like a heliograph. Mayfield glanced up to check his progress and waved an encouraging hand. Raymer was seized with an intense loathing, a maniacal urge to throttle the old man and wedge his body under a rock somewhere.

When he reached the base of the cliff, he was wringing wet with sweat. He waded out into the shallow water and got the coil of rope. Mayfield was unhooking a small channel cat and dropping it into his creel.

What’s the trouble? he said.

Raymer shook his head and did not reply. He lined up the mouth of the cave with a lightning-struck cypress on the white dome of the bluff and went up the riverbank looking for easier climbing. He entered a hollow, topped out on a ridge, and then angled back toward the river looking for the cypress. Finding it seemed to take forever. When he did find it, he tied the end of the rope around its base and dropped the coil over the bluff. Then he hauled thirty or forty feet of rope back up and began to fashion a rough safety line. The idea of swinging back and forth, pendulumlike, across the face of the bluff, dependent on an old man with a fishing pole to rescue him, did not appeal to him, but he tied the rope off anyway. He felt like a fool to the tenth power, and in his heart of hearts he knew he wouldn’t find any money.

His feet reached the opening first, and for a dizzy moment they were climbing on nothingness, pedaling desperately for purchase until the bottom of the opening connected with his shoes. When he was sure he was safe on solid rock, he undipped the flashlight from his belt and shone it into the opening. This could not be it. Here was no huge room like the one the old man had described, no dead soldiers or guns, no money. It was not even a proper cave — just cannular limestone walls thick with bat guano, sloping inward toward the dead end of a rock wall. He rested for a time and then clicked off the light and went hand over hand back up the face of the bluff.

When Raymer waded out to the boat and tossed in the rope and the light, Mayfield did not seem concerned. Likely it’s another bluff, he said. All these sloughs get to lookin’ the same, and it’s been upwards of twenty years since I was here. I used to fish all these backwaters when I first come up from Alabama. Now I think on it, it seems the mouth of that cave was just about hid by a cedar. That’s why I picked it to begin with, I never would have found it if I hadn’t been watchin’ a hawk through some field glasses.

Then you just deposited your twenty thousand and sat back waiting for the interest to add up.

I told you, I didn’t need it. I’d tip a waitress a dollar for a fifty-cent hamburger. I never cared for money.

I guess you were just in the bootlegging trade for the service you could render humanity.

Right.

I wish I had sense like other folks, Raymer said. Why does everybody think I just fell off the hay truck?

You’ve got that red neck and that slack-jawed country look, Mayfield said placidly. And a fool is such a hard thing to resist.

♦ ♦ ♦

HE HAD SENT HER three dozen American Beauty roses, and the apartment was saturated with their smell. Raymer sat on the couch with his legs crossed and a cup of coffee balanced on his knee and had the closest thing to a conversation he had had with Corrie since the day she left.

This is so unlike you, she said. All these flowers. How much did they cost?

They were day-old roses, half off. I told you it didn’t matter.

And climbing around in caves looking for hidden treasure. It’s so unpredictable. Who would have thought it of you? Are you having some sort of a crisis?

Raymer kept glancing around the apartment. He had neither seen Robbie nor heard mention of his name, but the place made him nervous anyway. It was fancier and more expensive-looking than he remembered, and he wondered how she could afford it. Everything looked like a sleek and dynamic symbol for a life he could not aspire to. The furniture was low and curvilinear, as if aerodynamically designed for life in the fast lane.

He’s almost certainly senile, she said. What makes you think he’s telling you the truth?

I know he’s telling the truth. He’s religious, and he laid his hand on the Bible, and … wait a minute — quit that. It may be funny to you, but he took it seriously.

Religious and bootlegger just sort of seem contradictory terms to me.

I’m not going to argue semantics. The point is, he’s telling the truth. I even drove down below the state line and talked to some folks who used to know him. He was a bootlegger, and he was successful enough at it to have socked away twenty thousand dollars without missing it. That’s ten thousand for me. Us, if I can talk you into it. We could just spend it, just piss it away. Buy things. Go on a cruise. I’m making money for us to live on, and I’ve got more work to do.

She gave him a sharp took of curiosity. What’s in it for you?

You. If you’ll give me a chance, I’ll win you back. By the time we spend ten thousand dollars, I can persuade you to give it another shot.

We gave it a four-year shot. It wasn’t working.

I’ll try harder.

Oh, Buddy. If you tried any harder, you’d break something. Rupture all your little springs or something. It wasn’t you. It was just a bad idea — although you did make it worse. You’re such an innocent about things. You get a picture of things in your head and your picture is all you see. You don’t know me. You don’t even know yourself. All you know is your little picture of how things ought to be, and that’s the way you think they are.