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

Except when he threw it the fire leapt toward him like something he’d summoned by dark invocation and even as he hurled the can from him he was thinking how like Choat it was to keep lawn mower gas in a can clearly labeled kerosene. His lashes and eyebrows were singed away and he could feel his hair burning and when the can blew the room filled up with liquid fire. The walls were flaming and on the foot of the burning bed Nipper watched him calmly out of the smoke with his glass eyes orange with refracted fire.

Meecham covered his face with his hands and fell to the floor. Far off he could hear somebody screaming Help me, help me, and then he realized it was he himself.

WHEN HE CAME TO he was lying on his back staring upward into the stars. His body seemed to be absorbing the heat from the wheeling constellations, he rocked on a sea of molten lava. He could hear a voice and an ambulance wailing and after a while he figured out the voice was Lonzo Choat’s.

He’s damn lucky these houses is so close or I never would of heard him. Beats the hell out of me what he thought he was doin. He’s been actin funny, I believe his mainspring may have busted. I reckon he thought it was winter and he was just buildin a fire.

That’s a hell of a brave thing you did, Choat, another voice said. Let’s go with him, Ray.

Then the stars were gone and he was rocking down the sleek wall of the night. He could feel the ambulance beneath him wild and fierce as a beast, the heavy shocks taking stockgap and curve, then there was a sharp pain in his wrist and a voice was saying, Lay back, old-timer, this’ll cool you off.

He was in a cold glacial world of wind-formed ice, ice the exact blue of frozen Aqua Velva, a world so arctic and alien life was not even rumored and he struggled up to see.

Help me hold him, Ray, he’s trying to get up.

But the frieze of night was familiar. Why I believe we’ve crossed over into Alabama, he said to himself in wonder, and in truth they were descending into a landscape sculpted by memory. The ambulance rocked on past pastoral farmhouses whose residents’ dust these sixty years still dreamed their simple dreams behind darkened windows, past curving lazy creeks he had fished and waded as a boy, past surreal cotton fields white as snow in the moonlight.

He pressed his face to the glass as a child might and watched the irrevocable slide of scenery, tree and field and sleeping farmhouse, studying each object as it hove into view and went slipstreaming off the dark glass as if it might have something to tell him, might give him some intimation as to his destination.

C ARLENE WAS STANDING naked before the window when Pettijohn awoke. She was holding the curtains aside with an upraised arm and she was peering into the night, the flesh of her left breast lacquered by a pulsing light that cycled red to blue, red to blue, and back again.

What the hell is that? Pettijohn asked.

I don’t know, she said. Lights.

When she turned from the window, her eyes were just dark slots in the shadows of her face and lit so by the strobic light she might have been some erotic neon succubus he’d conjured from a fever dream.

What woke you up?

I don’t know. I was just looking toward those woods and there were lights everywhere.

There was no way there could have been any lights. Beyond the glass lay only fallow fields, deep woods. He got out of bed and crossed the carpet to stand beside her. Her hair brushed his shoulder. Silver beads of rain strung off the eaves. Past the dark stain of the fields that were more sensed than seen, moving lights turned and swayed and darted through the slanting rain in a curious ballet that seemed senseless, profoundly alien.

What the hell is it? he asked again.

She just shook her head.

He was pulling on pants and a shirt, looking about for his shoes. She was watching him.

What in the world are you doing?

He looked up sharply, as if she’d taken leave of her senses. He’d found both shoes and how he was tying them. I’m going to see what that is.

In this rain? Why don’t you just let it alone? It’s nothing to us.

The way I see it, it’s something to us. Those are our woods. Nobody’s got any business even being there.

He went out of the house and around the side in the rain and to the edge of the backyard. Here he climbed a woven-wire fence and descended in the grown-up field. All the time, he was staring toward the dark blur where the woods began and his face was half perplexed and half angry.

Lights twisted and turned, smaller white lights like flashlights strung out of the woods. Soon vehicles began to shape themselves out of the blue murk — police cars, ambulances. A pickup truck. An emptiness swung in the pit of his stomach. He couldn’t fathom what might have happened. A wind was blowing the rain in slant gusts. He buttoned his shirt and wished he’d worn a jacket.

An ambulance was backed to the edge of the woods, lights revolving, rear door sprung. Attendants were carrying a stretcher out of the trees. They loaded it and its plastic-wrapped freight into the rear: All this in a silent tableau, then in a rush the sound came up. The first sound he heard through the muting rain was the slam of the ambulance door. As he approached, he became aware of the detached and mechanical crackling of voices from the police radio, the rush of windy rain in the dripping woods.

The high sheriff that year was a man named Holly Roller. Folks when they kidded him called him Holy Roller, but none were kidding him tonight. When he finished with the radio, Pettijohn asked, What’s going on back here, Sheriff?

Roller hung the microphone back in its rack on the dash. Couple of coon hunters found a body back in here last night.

A what?

A body, a dead man.

Pettijohn stared toward the woods. The coon hunters stood in the shelter of an enormous cedar. Denim jumpered, felt hatted, wet. Rifles kept dry under their coats. Coonhounds were curled at their feet like curious black-and-tan familiars. The two men looked as if they wished they were anywhere but here. Like unwilling passersby called up to witness or attest something.

One of the attendants knelt against the bole of a tree. He was very young. A green surgical mask hung from his neck. He’d vomited into it, and as Pettijohn watched, he vomited on his shoes. His hands were encased in translucent plastic gloves and he kept trying to strip them off.

A dead man, Pettijohn said.

I hope I never see one deader. He’s deader than I ever want to get.

Who was he?

His driver’s license said he was a Waters. You couldn’t prove it any other way, or I couldn’t. He must have been there two or three weeks and everything from dogs on down had been eating on him. Where’d you come from, anyway?

I live right across that field.

Where that light is?

Yes.

These woods belong to you?

Yes, Pettijohn said again.

That’s pretty damn close. What, a couple of hundred yards? You ain’t seen or heard anything out of the way?

Out of the way? Like what?

I don’t know. Like folks wandering around back in here. Shots. You ain’t even seen buzzards after him?

No, Pettijohn said.

Who else lives over there?

Just my wife. He wondered was she still standing against the window, watching him, or watching where he was.

She say anything about seeing anything unusual?

No. What killed him?

Best I can tell a twelve-gauge shotgun. There was one laying by a log, back in that thick brush. Come on, I’ll show you.

Pettijohn wasn’t sure he wanted to see, but he went anyway. It seemed to be required; new rules seemed to apply here. All these official comings and goings had padded out a trail through the sodden leaves. He went through a tangle of winter huckleberry bushes. They entered a shadowed glade. The light flitted about, fixed on a dead beech tree the winds had taken, and abruptly the woods altered, became somber, like an abandoned graveyard, like a church where the religion has no name.