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

The house when he arrived at it was lightless the way he had known it would be and it seemed deserted. It set pale and haunted-looking against the dark hills. In the driveway the tractor for an eighteen-wheeler was frozen to the ground, its chrome appurtenances sheathed in ice. He withdrew a flashlight from the glove box and got out with it. He approached the ditch.

It was very cold and the silence was enormous. It was broken only by the sound of trees splitting and branches breaking far off in the woods, like sporadic gunfire from some chaos that had not reached him as yet. Palms on knees he stood on the lip of the gully and peered into it. His breath smoked in the air and froze whitely in his mustache and beard. He wondered what she had thought. If she had thought, if her mind had been put on hold by ninety dollars’ worth of medicine. If memories and plans and dreams had already seen the writing on the wall and were fleeing her like rats scuttling over the decks of a burning ship.

He played the light about the rim of the ditch. He found a pink comb layered beneath the ice like an artifact suspended in amber. He studied it at some length. Perhaps it was a clue.

He heard an engine laboring up the hill and he turned. He could hear snow chains spinning on ice, the headlights washed the trees and a pickup truck turned into the driveway, the sealed beams framing him like a searchlight where he stood.

Doors slammed and a man and a woman got out of the truck. The woman incongruous in a knee-length black dress and high-heel pumps. She came teetering across the precarious ice like some grotesque beetle. Jenny’s mother. The man stood silhouetted before the headlights. Tidewater wondered was he Jenny’s father, brought back under truce by this mutual grief. The man unpocketed a flat half-pint bottle and drank from it then canted it against the inscrutable heavens as if he’d gauge its contents.

You morbid freak. What the hell are you doing here?

For a moment Tidewater stood in silence, trying to think what to say. He made some sort of obscure arms-spread gesture, a mutated shrug. Before he could speak the man pocketed the bottle and approached. You need to move it along somewheres else, he said. There’s people in mournin here if you don’t but know it.

I know, Tidewater said. I’m Charles Tidewater. I—

I know who you are. Move it along, you’re blocking the driveway.

No, you don’t understand, Tidewater said, the words tumbling out in a drunken rush, She was like a daughter to me. I loved her. It all seems impossible, that she’s … I had to come out here. I drove without knowing where I was going. I thought there might be a reason, a clue.

A clue? There was a trace of amusement in the man’s voice. I’ve got a clue for you. Get back in that van and haul your ass somewheres else before I call the law and have you arrested for trespassin.

I don’t want any trouble, Tidewater said.

Trouble wants you, the man told him.

You stole my daughter, the woman said suddenly. Her voice was thin and vicious, hardly more than a hiss. You carried her over there and turned her against her own family. And then when your precious daughter was tired of her you ruined her. You and your hippie ways. Got her on dope and everything else. No telling what else you did to her. Just no telling.

He had raised his hands to protest but she launched herself at him like a harridan. Blood-red fingernails raked his cheek, clawed wildly for his eyes. The Lightpainter stepped backward and his feet slid and kicked the woman over and he fell with her to the earth then rolled into the ditch. Ice cracked the back of his head and he lay on his back staring upward into the freezing rain. He could see the woman’s head and shoulders above the lip of the ditch, her glasses gleaming dully like enormous pupilless eyes. Then the man helped her arise and they turned away, out of his line of sight.

Just call the law and let them come get him, the man said. That’s what they get paid for.

He knew that he was lying where she had lain. He knew without seeing them that long straight strands of brown hair, like horsehairs, were seized in the ice where they’d snapped when they pried her free. As they’d snapped in the bloody permafrost of the heart.

After a while Tidewater got up. He could feel his clothing peeling away from the ice. He went down the ditch run to where it shallowed and clambered out. He got into the van and cranked it and sat with it idling and his hands cupped over the heater ventilator until he could feel warm air. He knew he had to drive away but he did not know yet to where. He knew that his life had changed, finally and irrevocably, but he did not yet know to what. The light painter felt like one of the rustic agrarians in his own paintings who had thrown aside brush hook and pitchfork and attained an almost undetectable motion, easing from the pastoral landscape that had sheltered him toward the white void of chaos at the picture’s edge.

W ORREL WAS SITTING on the stone steps drinking his third cup of morning coffee when he saw the Blazer turn off into his driveway. The softwood trees were beginning to green out in a pale transparent haze but the hardwoods were bare yet and he could see the red Blazer flickering in and out of sight between their trunks, the bright metal of its roof flashing back the sun like a heliograph. He’d seen it come a hundred times before, but its appearance was still as magical as something he’d conjured by sheer will, and he hoped the magic held through even such a day as this one threatened to be.

He rose from the steps when he heard Angie downshift for the hill and drank the last of the coffee and tossed out the dregs. He set the cup on the edge of the porch. When she parked the Blazer in the yard he was standing with his hands in his pockets. It was March and the wind still had a bite to it around the edges and he leaned slightly into it with his shoulders hunched.

She cut the switch and got out and stood by the car. She wore dark glasses and pushed them up with a forefinger as if she’d have a better view of him. She looked at him with a sort of rueful fondness.

I didn’t know if you’d be ready to go or not, she said.

Yes you did.

Well I don’t know why. I can’t see why you want to come with me.

I don’t want to even talk about it, he said. Are you ready?

She smiled. Ready as I’ll ever be, she said.

She slid back under the steering wheel and he came around to the passenger door and got in. She had the motor going but was waiting for him to kiss her and he took her into his arms and kissed her mouth hard. When he moved his face back from hers, her green eyes were open. She always looked at him as if he were the only one who had the answer to some question she had been thinking of asking.

Well, she said. I won’t even ask if you’re glad to see me.

She felt thin in his arms. He could feel the delicate bonework of her shoulder through her flesh, through the silk of the blouse she wore. She’d been thin ever since he’d known her and he always tempered the strength with which he held her but now she seemed thinner. If he held her as tightly as he wanted, he felt he’d crush her. Yet the flesh of the face turned toward him looked new and unused, scarcely touched by the abrasions of the world or its ministrations.

Where’s Hollis?

He had to work. They didn’t want to let him take off.

The son of a bitch, Worrel said.

Don’t say that. He offered to take off anyway and go with me.

The son of a bitch, Worrel said again.

He doesn’t know the whole story anyway, Angie said. He just thinks it’s tests. I couldn’t say the word malignant. You’re the only one who knows everything.