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

Her boyfriend, or anyway a man, had let her out at three o’clock in the morning at the foot of the grade that ascended toward her house. Apparently he had taken her to the housing project but for some reason she had been locked out. Ice was already frozen on the hill and continually freezing faster and the man had turned at the foot of the hill and driven back to town. She’d drunk a little vodka and she was taking pills, some kind of medicine the man guessed. She could walk all right though.

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IN THE MORNING Jenny’s mother had gone out to put a letter in the mailbox in case the mailman made it up the hill, and found Jenny frozen to death in a small stream of water that wound through a washed-out gully below Jenny’s house.

And seen, Tidewater guessed, Jenny in her shroud of ice, black fringe of lashes frozen to her cheeks and pale face composed like some marvelous archaeological find, some pretty girl flash frozen eons ago and ten thousand years gone in the blinking of an eye.

He felt at some odd remove from things. He sat before the fire not feeling its heat with a book open and unseen upon his lap. He was trying to enter and relive the past, Jenny’s past, his own. To replay every word and act of her life and so locate the exact moment when the canker appeared on the rose, when the fairy-tale wood darkened and the trees bore thorns, when a cautionary word could have turned aside fate.

It was impossible. No action was separate to itself but led to its echoes like ripples on water, words were not only words but symbols for things left unsaid.

Just at nightfall he drove Lisa and Claire to the funeral home, hunched over the wheel and sweating out every mile, icy beads of perspiration tracking down his rib cage. The van shifted and veered, the chains skirling on the ice, as if they negotiated some new-medium not just unfamiliar but alien.

The funeral home was dimly lit, he supposed by an emergency generator. He thought he was going in the door but abruptly he stepped aside for Claire and Lisa, the room overpowering him, images of crepe and velvet and old polished wood, images that were not in the room but in his mind.

What in the world are you doing? Claire asked.

I’ll be back in a little while.

But where are you going?

I don’t know. Uptown. I need to see somebody from the power company, if there’s anyone around tonight. I’d like to find out when the power s coming back on.

Well, it probably won’t be on tonight. If there’s any place open you may as well get something for supper that doesn’t have to be cooked. Get a pizza or something.

Beyond her he could see the dim sepia room with its air of waiting, a cozy paneled vestibule just one door removed from eternity. Why don’t I just have one delivered and you can eat it here, he said.

She gave him a cold cat’s look and opened her mouth to speak but he pulled the door gently to and went back up the sidewalk to the van.

The town looked surreal, like some town forsaken and abandoned. After some cataclysmic fall, after the failure of dreams and human will itself. Some of the businesses seemed to have generators but candles flickered room to room in private dwellings and he drove on toward the part of town where he could see that streetlights still burned.

There was a bar called Wild Bill’s open but scarcely populated save by its habitual ancient drunkards who sat crouched about the room like troglodytes. The place was poorly lit by gas lanterns and in the hollow yellow light appeared cavernous, the sidewalk curving inward, the dark wall beyond the pool table and hushed jukebox like the entrance to a tunnel moving on into the dark.

Tidewater ordered a bottle of beer and paid for it and sat beside an alcoholic old sign painter named Lee. He had never known Lee’s last name.

You painting many signs these days, Lee?

The old man’s eyes were rheumy and his toothless mouth loose and wet. He always looked obscurely angry, the world itself seemed to have done him some grievous wrong.

I’ve quit, the old man said. Nobody wants a regular sign anymore. Last one I done was this little old Swiss maid or somethin. Little Swiss maid totin a milk bucket. Had on this little cloth cap, blue with while dots. I thought, if I ever get this bitch painted, that’s it for me. Somebody else can paint the next one.

Life gets more complicated, Tidewater said. Somebody’s always raising the ante on you.

Did you notice all that ice?

Well, trees are laying on power lines everywhere and the electricity’s off It’s kind of hard to miss it.

I believe this is it. This is the beginning of the end.

The end of what?

Every goddamned thing there is, Lee said. I believe it’s comin the end of time. Did you hear about that girl in the Harrikin froze herself to death?

I heard about it. I don’t think that means it’s the end of time though. I just think it means it’s cold.

Maybe anyway it’ll do something about these damned mites.

These which?

These mites. They’re suckin the blood right out of me, eatin the meat right off the bone. A month from now the wind’ll blow me down the street like a paper sack.

As if he’d humor him Tidewater leant to peer closely in the poor light. I don’t see anything at all.

You can’t see mites with the naked eye and anyhow they’re not here now. The old man raised his watch to the glow of the lantern. They take off ever mornin about seven o’clock like a bunch of, blackbirds. Come ten o’clock at night they’re back again. I don’t know where they go but there’s gettin more of them all the time. I believe they’re bringin their buddies.

I’ve got to get on, Tidewater said. I need to find somebody from the power company. Anyway all this talk about the end of time depresses me.

You’d think depressed if you had these mites to contend with, Lee told his back as he went out the door.

It was still raining and the windshield was frozen over with a thin membrane of ice. He waited until the defroster melted it then drove on toward the lights. Full dark had fallen and above the haloed streetlamps the wet sky glowed a deep mauve.

The Pizza Hut was open though almost deserted and while they prepared his pizza he sat in a booth by the window and drank a cup of coffee and watched the freezing rain track on the glass and the sparse traffic accomplish itself on the highway. Little by little a nameless dread had seized him and cold grief lay in him heavy and gray as a stone.

When the pizza was ready he paid and went out. He laid it in the seat across from him. He opened the box and looked at it. As was The Lightpainter’s wont he had ordered the top of the line, a supreme deluxe jumbo with everything there was on it, a pizza so garish and begarbed as to serve as a satiric comment on the very nature of pizza.

He cranked the van and drove laboriously out of the parking lot. He could smell the hot pizza and he opened the box as he drove into the empty street and bit the end off a slice and began to chew. The cheese was tasteless and had a quality of elasticity that made it grow enormous in his mouth the more he chewed it. He couldn’t swallow it and at last he rolled down the glass and spat and then he took up the pizza and hurled it into the street. The white box went skittering across the ice like a Frisbee. He drove on.

He was not surprised to see that he was driving toward the Harrikin, though the road was perilous and even with the chains on the van spun on the hills and once slid dizzily sideways, so that for a moment the headlights swept the frozen woods in an eerie frieze, the trees tracking palely off the glass in elongated procession.

He drove on into frozen night. Once he had to halt and plot a course around a fallen tree. Once he passed a downed power line where an ice-loaded tree had broken it, the high-voltage wire writhing and dancing and snapping bursts of blue fire.