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

They were in the front seat. Harris had not considered it necessary to confine Beasley to the rear seat where there were no door handles and there was a steel mesh barrier between front and rear. Beasley was not a common criminal. Harris’s baton lay on the seat between them. Beasley had noticed that the end of it was pegged and he figured Harris had drilled it out and poured melted lead into it.

Harris had once been sheriff. He had been sheriff until he had beaten a teenager to death with perhaps this very baton and now he was only a deputy. There had been some controversy about the beating and it had ultimately been decided that the teenager had had to be confined in a straitjacket and had choked to death on his own vomit. But Beasley knew that the county had quietly come up with twenty thousand dollars for the boy’s family and that all it had cost Harris was the next sheriff’s election.

Time to go in, Harris said. He got out and shoved the baton in his belt. I’ll come around, he said.

Harris opened the door and Beasley got out. They had turned to go when Harris said, turning, Oh shit. I forgot the cuffs.

What? You forgot what?

Morris wanted you brought in in handcuffs. He wants to make an example of you.

Hellfire, Beasley said. What kind of example?

To tell the truth I was a little foggy on that myself, Harris said. But he’s the judge. To other dog shooters maybe, I don’t know.

He had turned back to the cruiser and opened the door and was leaned fumbling in the console. When he started to straighten and turn with the cuffs in his hand Beasley slipped the baton from Harris’s garrison belt and with a continuation of that single swift motion slammed him with all his might just above the right ear and Harris dropped as if he’d been depending from suddenly cut strings.

Beasley was dragging him back onto the grass when a station wagon pulled into a parking space and a woman got out. The wind was getting up and the woman got out into it holding her hat on with both hands and gaping at Beasley.

He’s had some kind of attack, Beasley said. I believe it’s his heart. Would you run across to the General and call the ambulance while I get him over here?

Of course, the woman said, and hurried off. Beasley watched her. She’d forgotten her hat and the wind blew it off but she went on anyway.

Beasley got behind the wheel of the cruiser. When the woman went into the General Care he cranked the engine and sat a moment just listening to the rock-steady lick the cam was hitting. Then he put the cruiser in gear and drove away.

The first place he went was home. Clarence had sent him from the Navy PX a Winchester.32 Special he wouldn’t have traded for an emerging nation and looking about the small front room he saw little else he could not do without. Then he went into the bedroom and came out with a heavier coat and a blanket. When he left he didn’t even pull the door closed behind him or turn the lights out and glancing once over his shoulder the house looked as temporary and impersonal as a motel room.

He drove toward Riverside. He knew already that he was going into the Harrikin, a wild stretch of land that had once been mined for iron ore. It was all company land, dangerous mine shafts, abandoned machinery. No one lived there, and there were miles of unbroken timber you couldn’t work your way through with a road map in one hand and a compass in the other. He felt he knew the country well enough to struggle through into Wayne County and strike out for Alabama. He didn’t envision posses. How many bounty hunters could be on your ass for contempt of court? And coldcocking an overweight deputy sheriff.

He stopped at a country store and bought pork and beans and tinned Vienna sausages and crackers. He bought a quart of milk and a pound of coffee. The storekeep was totting up these purchases on a ticket book with a stub of pencil and he kept glancing out at the cruiser idling before a rusting gas pump that did not work and that advertised a brand of gasoline that no longer existed.

Finis, I can’t help but notice that you’ve swapped vehicles, he finally said.

No, the county hired me to try her out, Beasley said. It’s one of these new thirty-two-valve jobs and the county itself don’t know how fast she’ll go. None of them deputies got the balls to wind her out. They hired me to take her out to Riverside and straighten out a few of them curves.

The storekeep was regarding him with a benign skepticism. Long as you pay before you wind her out I don’t care how many lies you tell me.

Beasley was counting out ones, laying coins atop. That was my intention, he said.

Beasley left and drove to where the terrain began its steep descent toward the river. He stopped on a sharp switchback curve and parked on the shoulder of the road and got out. The day was blue-looking and windy and the horizon looked as hard as iron and it was very cold. The cruiser sat idling puffing little bursts of exhaust. He looked around. A high-tension power line crossed the road here and following it with his eyes he could see where the towers faded into the blurred multiple horizons of the Harrikin.

He cocked the front wheels of the cruiser toward the hollow and with the stock of the Winchester tapped the gearshift into drive and stepped away. The cruiser bumped off the shoulder of macadam and eased over waist-high scrub blackjack and gaining momentum sped down the hillside toward the hollow. The car started around the side of the steep incline like a daredevil motorcycle in a wheel of death but it wasn’t going fast enough and grew top-heavy and rolled over again and again and fetched up at the bottom of the hollow upside down against an enormous beech. It ran for a while and then it quit.

He had started down the opposite side of the embankment where the power line wound toward the Harrikin but then he turned and came back across the road and stood looking down at the cruiser. It was almost hidden by brush. He stood with the rifle across his shoulders and both arms hung from the barrel and stock. He just stood for a time thinking. He was thinking about the weighted baton. He could see Harris making it. Harris had it clamped in a vise, he was drilling a hole in the end, pouring melted lead into it.

After a while he went down the embankment, the hillside so steep in places he was sliding tree to tree. When he’d reached the door-sprung cruiser he leaned the Winchester against the trunk of a tree and began to gather up windfall branches and lengths of dead wood and a stump weathered thin and silver and almost weightless and to fill the cruiser with them. He piled on leaves and set them afire and then he went back the way he’d come with the fire popping and snapping like something alive coming up the hillside after him.

He was a mile and better along the power line before he looked back. The black smoke was rolling against the sky and he felt he’d drawn a line forever between the world that yawned before him and everything that had gone before. When he looked forward the way he was headed the long endless line of marching towers looked like angular giants skeletoned up out of steel.

Goddamn you, Sugarbaby, Beasley said.

♦ ♦ ♦

HE CAME UP THROUGH a long blue dusk that lay like smoke between the cedars, wending his way through a sage field to where the house sat almost hidden by trees. The wind had shifted around to the north and grown more chill yet and he could hear it soughing through the cedars and rattling a loose section of tin and banging a shutter against the wall in random percussion.

The house was abandoned. A cedar had grown up through the rotted porch and was slowly dismantling the roof. The stone chimney had tilted away from the house or the house away from it. At his step over the threshold something unseen scrambled up and went with near-liquid grace through an unglazed window sash and gone.