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

He went up the steps wiping blood out of his eyes. I don’t need any of this, he said.

Jenny was hanging on to his arm, trying to touch his face.

Why do I feel I should have been charged admission to see this? Claire asked.

Running water onto a towel The Lightpainter glanced upward at his broken reflection. Blood was seeping out of his hair and into his beard. He looked like a lost and dissolute Jesus, a wild-eyed Jesus illy used and set upon by thugs with longneck beer bottles.

WHEN HE CAME OUT of a place called the Painter s Corner with two sable brushes and a tube of alizarin crimson Jenny was sitting in the passenger side of the van, staring off toward a Dumpster on the parking lot where winter birds foraged for crumbs. He got in and stowed the brushes and paint in the glove box.

I’m glad to see you, he said, and was, feeling obscurely that something had been missing, that his family was complete.

I’m glad to see you too. How is everybody?

Well, we’ll ride out and see. Is that what you had in mind, a ride out to the house?

I don’t think so, she said. My life is complicated enough with how Claire feels and all. What I need is a favor, and you’re the only one I know to ask.

I’ll do anything I can, Tidewater said, taking care that the wariness he felt did not creep into his voice: he guessed a favor for Jenny might entail anything from a ride somewhere to bailing a boyfriend out of jail though he expected it was money.

Where are you staying?

She seemed not to be taking care of herself. She had on a sleeveless T-shirt though the day was chill. There was an air of ruin about her, sweet corruption. There were dark smudges under her eyes and her long brown hair was lank and none too clean. There was a suck mark on her throat like a crescent-shaped birthmark, when she raised a tendril of hair out of her eyes he saw the dark stubble of her armpit and he could smell her, feral and dissolute.

I need forty dollars. I borrowed it off this woman and I’ve got to pay it back.

It has to be paid back right now?

Well, it’s a check I wrote. Postdated. If I don’t pick it up she’ll turn it in to the cops and they’ll get me for a bad check.

Tidewater took out his wallet and gave her two twenties. There was a folded fifty in a side compartment he always thought of as his emergency fund and he withdrew it and laid it on top of the twenties in her palm.

Get a coat. Warm shirts or something. It’s turning wintertime. You never did tell me where you were living.

I’m living with this friend of mine in the housing project. I hardly ever stay at home anymore, I can’t take the fighting. Her boyfriends hitting on me.

Tidewater didn’t know what to say. He felt like counting out more money, as if it was all he had, a down payment on a life someone was going to repossess anyway.

I’m thinking about leaving. Just heading out down the Trace and going all the way to the gulf. Natchez. Is it warm down there?

I don’t know: I was never there in the winter. I’d guess warmer than here.

That’s where the pirates used to be, Natchez Under-the-Hill. I’d fit right in.

Now the pirates run fancy restaurants and gift boutiques and get their booty off the tourists, Tidewater said.

I’d still fit right in. Bye, Charles, I got to go. Thanks for the money.

She opened the door and got out, clasped her arms and shivered. Gooseflesh crept up the flesh of her upper arms. A Wind blew papers across the parking lot like dirty snow.

Get a coat, he said.

I will.

Jenny, he said without knowing he was going to.

What?

Let me help you, he said. You come on back and live with us and we’ll work everything out. It’ll be hard, but we can do it. If we have to we’ll see a counselor. Somebody.

She looked intently into his eyes. Her eyes were pale violet with darker flecks and there were tiny lines in the grainy skin at the corners of them.

I don’t need anything like that, Charles. Don’t believe everything Claire and Lisa tell you.

Take care, he said. She walked away then turned and raised a hand and waved with just the fingers. Tidewater watched her go wondering where she was off to, half glad he didn’t know. He had striven for the simplicity in his life, the linearity. Jenny’s life was not linear. It was made up of switchbacks and side roads and mazelike dead ends and to him it seemed chaotic, each day some new crisis, each night some new pleasure. He watched her walk out of his life with a sense of loss and shame for the faint relief he felt.

ALL DAY A CURIOUS band of light lay in the southwest. Weather crawls across the television screen told of winter storm warnings, an early ice storm already rampant to the south in Alabama. Tidewater stood in the backyard watching the heavens. Small nameless birds fluttered in the branches. Dry leaves drifted and tilted on a rising wind that already had winter’s edge on it. Above the light the sky took on the color of wet slate. The light swirled toward him like a silver mist rising off some country already locked in the seize of ice.

He drove into town and bought bread and milk and candles. At the hardware a butane camp stove. The supermarkets were full of people pushing overflowing baskets toward the checkout lines as if the countryside lay under siege.

By dusk a cold gray drizzle was falling. Sometime in the night he awoke and went outside. It had turned very cold. The rain was freezing on everything it touched and the brick walk gleamed dully and the trees glittered like they were fashioned from glass.

He woke again when the power went off and the house ground down to silence. All the myriad mechanical sounds of the nighttime house vanished and all he could hear was Claire’s measured breathing and the soft hiss of ice against the window.

When they arose in the morning the world had been transformed. Tidewater’s breath caught in his throat as a child’s might. Every leaf, every twig, every blade of grass was caught in its own caul of ice like a purer finer symbol of itself.

The day drew on cold and strange and silent. Everybody seemed to be waiting for something. There was no television, no stereo, no lights. Tidewater had a show coming up in Memphis in less than a week and he sorted through paintings and wrapped them carefully in furniture pads and stacked them in the van. But after a while the cold deepened and the house grew more chill yet and he brought wood from the garage and built an enormous fire in the fireplace and sat before it reading a book.

Everyone had assumed the phone was out of order as well and when it rang in midmorning Tidewater jumped as if it had broken some physical law.

What? Lisa said, and something in her voice made Tidewater pause in midstep and turn, the coffee cup halfway to his mouth and forgotten.

He could not quite fathom the look on Lisa’s face. It said: I know something you don’t know, and I can’t wait to tell you.

Jenny’s dead, Lisa said.

Dead? Claire said. She can’t be dead. Dead how?

Lisa’s face twisted, grotesquely torn between laughing and crying. She lowered the phone. The hand holding it jerked spasmodically. The phone began to shake uncontrollably and Tidewater crossed the room and took it gently from Lisa’s hand. When he held it to his ear there was only a dial tone and he recradled it. She froze to death, Lisa said.

It’s another crazy rumor, Claire said. She probably started it herself. No one freezes to death anymore.

Her orderly accountant’s mind seemed to have considered these figures and rejected them and Jenny was still somewhere in time, smiling her one-cornered smile and pushing a dark strand of hair out of her eyes the way Tidewater had seen her do a thousand times.

There were other phone calls each with its attendant piece of the puzzle and finally the story told itself.