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

He knew he should have been out of the Harrikin by now and across the county line into what passed in these provinces for civilization but he was not. Somehow the snow had turned him around, and he was someplace he’d never been. His hands ached but he was more worried about his feet for he couldn’t feel them anymore and he was afraid they might be frozen. He thought of hot breathless July nights, dryflies crying from a velvet wall of sweet mimosa. The bottled matches in his coat pocket, steel walls impervious to the winds. He rose and kicking through the snow began to gather dead branches and break them and stuff them into the pockets of the overcoat. When he had all he could carry he went over to the ladder and stood looking at it for a time. He took off his belt. He put it back on over the coat and shoved the rifle under it and worked the rifle around to his back and tightened the belt a notch. It was snowing harder. He took a deep breath and began to climb the ladder.

BEASLEY DREAMED brokenly but when he woke the dream was lost to him no matter how hard he tried to call it back. All he could remember was that Doneita was in it.

He guessed the cold had wakened him but then he heard someone yelling. Beasley, Beasley, the voice called.

Company out here in the middle of the goddamned woods, he thought. Where do you have to go to get a little privacy around here?

When he stepped onto the platform and looked down and saw Harris staring up at him down the barrel of a rifle. Beasley wasn’t even surprised. He just felt strange, as if everything had been imbued with inevitability — everything had been taken from his hands, events had become steel balls rolling unfrictioned down grooved boards and there was no stopping anything.

See you don’t fall, Harris called. It’s so goddamned cold you’d break like a china cup. But the first thing you need to do is throw that rifle over the side.

Beasley guessed the clanging door had drawn Harris up out of the woods and he wished he’d tied it back somehow. He turned and leaned the Winchester against the wall of the tower.

I don’t want this busted, he called down. My son-in-law give it to me.

I been lost all night, Harris said. How the hell do you get out of here?

You don’t, Beasley said.

What’s that supposed to mean?

This is the end of the road.

You crazy son of a bitch.

What? Step up close, I can’t hear you.

Harris approached the steel legs of the tower. He had his mouth open to say something when Beasley abruptly pulled his coat aside and unzipped his trousers and hauled himself out to urinate over the edge of the platform. Harris backpedaled frantically away from the arc of urine and fell with his feet crumpled beneath him. He immediately slapped the stock of his rifle into his shoulder and Beasley felt in the pit of his stomach the muzzle lock onto him.

You know what that was, Harris? he called. That was contempt of court.

I’m going to blow your sorry ass off there.

Your balls are too small, Beasley said. I expect you’ll have to come up and get me.

We’ll just see if I can’t manage to knock you down here.

Beasley stared down the gun barrel for what seemed an interminable time. It looked like a hole into nothingness, or a tunnel that might wind its way out of these woods.

After a time Harris lowered the gun. He approached the ladder and stared at it as if it were something he couldn’t make up his mind about. Beasley judged he was envisioning himself halfway up and Beasley suddenly blowing him off the ladder with the Winchester. After a time he began to climb anyway. He was ascending the ladder left-handedly, the rifle clutched in his right.

Beasley looked out across the world. Everything was snow and trees, an unmapped landscape black and white. Everything looked reduced to its essence, all that was left at the end of time. He thought inexplicably of Doneita, endearments that she had said, sweet nights that were as lost as anything that ever was. Above the treeline a hawk hung motionless against the frozen void.

When Harris was almost three-quarters of the way up the ladder, Beasley stepped off the platform. The landscape reeled away and upward. Snowflakes drifted heavenward. It seem to take forever for him to tilt and slam against the ice-locked earth.

I N BENDER’S DREAM the Stag came full tilt out of a thin stand of scrub blackjack and leapt the chain-link fence. Its hooves barely cleared the top strand of wire. There was yet a thin skift of snow on the ground melted and refrozen and when the stag’s hooves struck they slid and it went momentarily to its knees. It was up instantly but the wolf was already there, morphing yellow-eyed and immediate out of the tall broom sedge and moving close and swift along the ground like winter smoke. Muscles bunched to bolt the stag quartered but the wolf was there before it. The stag’s eyes were huge and its breath steamed bluely in the cold moonlight.

The moon cleared the raft of clouds it had shuttled before it and everything in Bender’s vision went varying shades of black and silver. The stag lowered its head as the wolf bore in as if it would disembowel it with its antlers but the wolf feinted sidewise and leapt and opened a gash in the stag’s side and coiled back on itself to leap again and when the stag quartered this time its hooves splayed out on the ice and out of balance it took the full weight of the leaping wolf with its chest. When the wolf’s snout burrowed into the stag’s throat the spray of blood was black in the moonlight and was as stark on the snow as bas-relief shadows.

Feeding the wolf looked up at the moon. Its face and ruff were dark with blood and the moon was no moon Bender was familiar with, so close he could have tiptoed and touched it, as if whatever laws governing the distance it kept no longer applied so that it was settling slowly toward the surface of the earth.

BENDER HAD BEGUN to think he lived in a countryside so beleaguered and desolate even the dead were fleeing it. The last truck went out at dusk and he was there by the fence to see it go, hands in his hip pockets and no expression at all on his face. The flatbed truck pulled a lowboy carrying a backhoe secured by chains and the backhoe shifted in its moorings when the truck started down the grade toward the main road, the dead or whatever dust remained of them hidden decorously under tarpaulins lashed to the truck through eyelets in the canvas, and under the taut canvas oblong shapes like archetypes out of some primal memory.

There were men holding shovels and picks squatted about the lowboy and some studied Bender as they went out but one or two raised their hands in greeting or dismissal and one young man with shoulder-length blond hair beneath a yellow hardhat grinned and gave him a thumbs-up signal. Bender raised an arm in an oddly formal gesture and watched them go.

He stood by the fence the length of time it took him to smoke a cigarette and by the time he was finished with it he could hear the truck far off on the highway, gearing down for the hills ringing the town.

It was scarcely a foot from Bender’s garden fence to the government’s chain-link fence and contrasted with it Bender’s looked like a child’s mock-up of a fence, something Jesse might have built. Chain-link wire was stretched taut on steel posts and the sign affixed to it had an authoritative look and seemed to have been positioned for Bender’s eyes alone, KEEP OUT, the sign said. PROPERTY OF THE US GOVERNMENT. TRESPASSING IS PROHIBITED AND VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

Bender climbed the woven-wire fence and stepped onto a locust post and grasped the top of the government s fence and swung one leg over it. The other. He balanced momentarily then dropped onto the other side.