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

When headlights washed the walls of the house, he was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee. By the time he had crossed to the front room and turned on the porch light, Corrie was standing at the front door with an overnight bag in her hand.

She came in looking around the room, the high, unfinished ceiling. Looks like you quit on it, she said.

I guess I sort of drifted into the doldrums after you left, he said. Is that bag all you brought?

I figured we could buy some new stuff in the morning. Where is it? I want to see it.

He’d expected that. He pried off the lid and showed her. He’d been working on the wiring in the living room, and the light was poor here. She was looking intently, but all it looked like was a bucket full of money.

Can we dump it out and count it? I thought it was in some kind of glass jar.

The jar was broken. I think a rock slid on it. If he hadn’t had the whole mess airtight in plastic, it would probably have been worthless. I’ve already counted it, and we’re not going to roll around in it or do anything crazy. I still don’t feel right about this, and we’re leaving for Key West early in the morning, before I change my mind. I can see that old man’s face every time I close my eyes.

Whatever you say, Buddy. Five gallons of money sure has made you decisive and take-charge. It looks good on you.

Later he lay on his back in bed and watched her disrobe. You don’t have to do this, he said. We on’t have to rush things.

I want to rush things, she said, reaching behind to unclasp her brassiere.

Raymer’s mind was in turmoil. There was just too much to understand. He wondered if he would ever drive confidently down what Corrie had called the life’s highway, piloting a sleek car five miles over the limit instead of standing by the road with his collar turned up and his thumb in the air. There were too many variables — the rates of chance and exchange were out of balance. The removal of Corrie’s clothing was to her a casual act, all out of proportion to the torrent of feelings it caused in him. Her apartment was less than forty miles away, but it was no-man’s-land, offlimits. She had laid stones in the pathway that had driven him to a despair that not even the sweet length of her body laid against his would counterbalance.

An hour or so after he should have been asleep, he heard her call him. Buddy? When he didn’t answer, she rose, slowly so that the bed would not creak. She crossed the floor to the bathroom. He could hear the furtive sounds of her dressing, the whisper of fabric on fabric. Then nothing, and though his eyes were still closed, he knew that she was standing in the bathroom door watching him. He lay breathing in, breathing out. He heard her take up the bucket and turn with it. The bucket banged the doorjamb. Goddamn, she breathed. Then he heard the soft sounds of bare feet and nothing further, not even the opening and closing of the front door, before her car cranked.

It was hot and stale in the room. It smelled like attar of roses, like climate-controlled money from the depths of a cave, like a rotting fox in the high white noon.

He got up and raised a window. Night rushed in like balm to his sweating skin. She hadn’t even closed the front door. The yard lay empty, and still and so awash with moonlight that it appeared almost theatrical, like the setting arranged for a dream that was over, or one on which the curtain had not yet risen.

When he crawled back into bed, he lay in the damp spot where they had made love, but he felt nothing. No pleasure, no pain. It was just a wet spot on a bed, and he moved over and thought about getting up and changing the sheets. But he didn’t. He was weary and, despite all the coffee, still a little drunk. He tried to think of Corrie’s lips against his throat, but all his mind would hold on to was the hiss in her voice when the bucket banged the door. Then even that slid away, and on the edge of sleep a boat was rocking on sun-dappled water, an old man was changing the fly on his line, and Raymer was feeling the sun hot on his back and wondering, Would you really lay your hand on the Bible and swear a lie? The old man’s face was inscrutable, as always, but somehow Raymer didn’t think he would, and when he slipped into sleep, it was dreamless and untroubled.

W HEN FOLKS TALKED about divorce statistics or the disintegration of the American family they would hold Finis and Doneita Beasley up as the example of the perfect marriage. They had been married thirty years. They worked their place side by side. Raised their kids and now they’ve got each other. You couldn’t blow them apart with a stick of dynamite.

In the months before their thirty-first anniversary Doneita bought a dog. Their two daughters were grown and married with concerns of their own. Finis was much to himself, and he was not easily given to conversation. He was a hard worker yet and had always made them a good living but in all truth he was not very good company. Finis knew a dog would be company for Doneita. A dog would be almost like another child. A dog could not talk to her but she could talk to it. Doneita had told him that bonds form between dogs and their owners and she looked forward to the formation of these bonds.

It was a small dog of some indeterminate breed and Finis just called it a lapdog. A kind of terrier perhaps. It was an ugly dog with black, bulbous eyes and an improbable number of sharp little teeth. There was an atavistic look about it as if millennia had passed and left it unchanged, as if evolution had deemed it not worth bothering with.

Finis did not like the dog. It didn’t seem to like him either. It growled at him when he came into the room. He’d turn to look at it and it would be watching him with something akin to speculation in its protuberant little eyes. Once it bit the back of his ankle where the tendons are, leaving his sock bloody and the prints of its little teeth like claw marks.

Doneita had Finis build it a small plywood house. Black shingles on the roof. She bought jars of paint and lacquered the house a glossy blue and wrote the dog’s name above the door: Sugarbaby. She painted delicate roses ascending the front corners of the house, the briars hunter green, the blossoms dusky rose.

Sugarbaby did not take to living in the small house. Every night about ten o’clock just as Finis would be drifting off to sleep, it would turn up on the porch scratching at the screen. Yip yip yip, it would say. Its claws dragging down the screen were like fingernails scraping across a blackboard that went on and on forever.

That goddamned yip yip yip is driving me crazy, Beasley said. Get up and make it shut up.

Just ignore it and go to sleep, Doneita said. It doesn’t bother me anyway. It doesn’t keep me awake.

This went on for over a week and one night something seemed to break inside him and he got up and blew the dog off the porch with a.44 magnum. The concussion in the small parlor was enormous. Pictures fell from the walls, window glass rattled in its sashes. There was a ringing in his ears. An appalled silence rolled on him wave on wave like the waters of an ocean.

He couldn’t hear her footsteps for the ringing but abruptly Doneita was standing in the doorway of the bedroom. She was looking at him in a way that he had never seen before.

What on earth are you doing? Was somebody breaking in on us? I shot at that dog, he said.

You did what?

I can’t stand that racket anymore. I shot at Sugarbaby.

Good God. You didn’t hit him did you?

I don’t think so, Finis said. I was trying to scare him into shutting up. Go back to bed.

There is something the matter with you, she said.