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

Let’s go home, she said.

Charles is on that week-long fishing trip. He won’t be back tonight.

No, all the fun’s gone out of this, I’m leaving.

I’ll get the blanket.

No, leave it, I don’t care about the blanket, let’s just go.

The ride back was mostly silent. Usually, they talked all the way, and there was never enough time to get everything said, but tonight she drove and Robert smoked and watched the night roll by, lights of distant hillside towns rolling up and subsiding like St. Elmo’s fire in the wake of a ship.

This was a bad idea, she finally said.

No, it was a good idea. I loved it. You know me, I’d go with you anywhere. A rattlesnake hunt. A Baptist foot washing.

That’s not what I meant, and you know it. I meant it’s crazy, this whole thing’s crazy.

A public stoning. A hanging. Well, maybe not a hanging.

Crazy, she said, smiling in spite of herself.

When she stopped the station wagon in front of Robert’s lodge, he opened the door to get out, then paused and turned toward her. You want to come in awhile?

No, she said, but her hand was on the door latch, then the door was open and she was standing beside the car. Robert got out. He opened the rear door and unbelted a sleeping Stephen and took him up in his arms. He started up the flagstone walk. Vangie followed. Her feet seemed to be taking steps on their own; they needed no instruction from her. The lodge, all rough-hewn timbers and glass, was built on a bluff, and below it you could see the river rolling dark as tarnished brass through the cedars.

They went from the deck through French doors into the living room, and Robert made a bed for Stephen on the couch and tucked a blanket around him.

You want a drink?

No, she said. Her voice sounded strange to her, as if she had never heard it before, or heard just that precise tone in it.

Then she didn’t say anything. She didn’t move. When he looked in her eyes, he stepped toward her and laid a hand on her shoulder. She moved against him. They embraced. She felt as if their flesh had flowed together, merged in some manner, as if they’d fallen from some enormous height and struck the earth clasped in this fashion. He felt so thin, but his arms almost crushed her. God, he said against her face. God. For a moment he just held her. As if after so long a time the embrace itself was enough. Then he lowered his mouth to hers, and she drew him tighter and opened her mouth under his.

In the bathroom she washed her face, but she didn’t look in the mirror. She felt that Charles might be staring back. She felt that after all a cardboard box is simply a matter of geography.

THE ROOM WAS DARK, and a woman was singing out of it in a smoky listless languor: Balled out, wasted, and I feel I’m goin’ down …

I love this record, Robert said.

It doesn’t seem very apt, Vangie said. I’m not going to get wasted on half a glass of wine, and I seem not to be balled out. I can’t keep my hands off you.

Just indulge yourself, Robert said.

Hard to find a place I won’t get cut on, you’re all angles and bones. Don’t you ever eat?

Goodbye, darl’n’, I’ve been good ’til now. …

Well, it seems apt to me, Robert said. You’ve probably been as pure as milk, or at least good ’til now, and I’m for damn sure going down.

She glanced sharply at him as if she’d read the context of his words, but he made no move toward her, and he wasn’t even looking at her. He was just lying there staring at the ceiling.

What are we going to do? he finally asked.

I don’t know. I don’t know. She was sipping from a glass of wine he’d brought her. She was half reclining on pillows stacked against the headboard of the bed. Robert still wasn’t drinking. He was smoking, and in the dark she could see the orange pulse of his cigarette when he drew on it.

What we ought to do is just flee, Robert said. Just get the hell out of Dodge. I was reading this book by Robert Penn Warren, and this guy Jack Burden found out the woman he’d loved all his life was sleeping with his boss. His boss was supposed to be Huey Long. Burden drove all the way to California and checked into a motel. He drank a pint of whiskey, and in the morning he just started driving back. He said Flee is what you do when the telegram says all is discovered . It’s what you do when you look down and see the bloody knife in your hand.

She didn’t say anything. The wine was strawberry, and she could smell summer in it, hot green leaves, berries warm in the sun. She was thinking how little time it took to alter things forever. To arrive at a place you can’t get back from. She realized the mental picture of herself she’d carried all these years didn’t favor her much anymore.

We ought to just go and not look back. Like that Dylan song. Go all the way, ’til the wheels run off and burn, the upholstery cracks and the paint fades and the moccasins die. Something like that.

She wondered how much of him was real. How much was Robert Vandaveer and how much was cobbled up out of lines from songs, words from books, wisdom that fell ponderous as stones from the dust-dry tongues of dead philosophers.

I’ve got to go, she said.

She got up naked and set the wineglass on the nightstand. She began to search for her clothes. They seemed to be everywhere. She started putting them on.

What are we going to do?

I don’t know, she said. Well just sort it out. We can’t do this.

If you go, you’ll just come back. I told you a year ago it was fated, and I wasn’t lying. I knew it the moment I saw you. Before I saw you, when a man showed me a picture of his wife. We’re like the two halves of something — what, I don’t know — but together we’re a whole. Apart we’re just cripples, half a set of twins.

She was buttoning her blouse. You can’t do this to me, she said. You can’t put a lien on my life, some sort of attachment. On me, on my child. With your lines about fate and talking to Charles because he had a picture of me in his wallet. I admit I fell in love with you, but that talk’s all bullshit. I can’t lose my son, that’s what’s real to me.

By now he was up and putting on his clothes. I’ll get Stephen for you, he said.

Don’t start drinking. Don’t you start drinking.

She didn’t think he ever used drugs anymore, but she thought he might have a stash laid by for hard times. These were hard times. She knew he kept an unopened fifth of Wild Turkey sitting on the table where he could see it. She’d asked him about drugs once and never forgotten what he’d said. Everybody’s on drugs, he said. The world’s on drugs. Heroin, sex, booze, money. Television. Comfort. What I get from you, that’s a drug. Calmness. Any kind of crutch you can hobble through the goddamned day on is a drug. Darkness. They say when you get old enough, you look forward to dying. That’s the drug you reach for when the other crap doesn’t work anymore.

It was hard to leave. Harder than anything she’d ever done. She kept going back, leaving in stages, on the steps of the lodge, in the yard, leaning across Stephen’s sleeping body to kiss Robert. She clung to him when he snapped Stephen in and closed the door. She was half crying. Go in the house and shut the door, she said. I can’t leave like this, I can’t drive off looking at you standing in the yard.

He went.

She felt like a thief who’d stolen something it was impossible to return, she felt like Jagger the Midnight Rambler, Joan Osborne with her panties stuffed in the bottom of her purse, the girl in the song, balled out, wasted, feeling she was going down. There in the moonlight with her shoes in her hand and dew on her feet, with Stephen in the backseat looking not like her child but some waif she’d snatched at random from a Wal-Mart parking lot and shuttled far from his home, there wiping condensation from the windshield with Charles’s wadded shirt and the moon a yellow blur through the glass, even then she knew — she knew she was going down.