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

by William Gay

  HE THOUGHT FOR A MOMENT she was going to refuse it but then she shrugged and walked away stowing it in her purse. He watched her. She went in. The windows of the bus station were steamed from condensation and she looked gray and spectral walking away, as if she were fading out, not real at all.

  He eased the truck in gear and drove away. He turned onto the Natchez Trace Parkway five miles out of Waynesboro and the first thing he saw was a sign that said TUPELO MISS 121 MILES. He was a believer in signs and portents and took this as an omen. He rolled on. He drove with the windows cranked down for the cold astringent air and when he crossed the Mississippi line it was hardly snowing at all and a band of rose light lay in the east like a gift he hadn’t expected and probably didn’t deserve.

  Those Deep Elm Brown’s Ferry Blues

  I HEARD A WHIPPOORWILL last night, the old man said.

  Say you did? Rabon asked without interest. Rabon was just in from his schoolteaching job. He seated himself in the armchair across from the bed and hitched up his trouser legs and glanced covertly at his watch. The old man figured Rabon would put in his obligatory five minutes then go in his room and turn the stereo on.

  It sounded just like them I used to hear in Alabama when I was a boy, Scribner said. Sometimes he would talk about whippoorwills or the phases of the moon simply because he got some perverse pleasure out of annoying Rabon. Rabon wanted his father’s mind sharp and the old man on top of things, and it irritated him when the old man’s mind grew preoccupied with whippoorwills or drifted back across the Tennessee state line into Alabama. Scribner was developing a sense of just how far he could push Rabon into annoyance, and he fell silent, remembering how irritated Rabon had been that time in Nashville when Scribner had recognized the doctor.

  The doctor was telling Rabon what kind of shape Scribner was in, talking over the old man’s head as if he wasn’t even there. All this time Scribner was studying the doctor with a speculative look on his face, trying to remember where he had seen him. He could almost but not quite get a handle on it.

  Physically he’s among the most impressive men of his age I’ve examined, the doctor was saying. There’s nothing at all to be concerned about there, and his heart is as strong as a man half his age. But Alzheimer’s is irreversible, and we have to do what we can to control it.

  Scribner had remembered. He was grinning at the doctor. I’ve seen you before, ain’t I?

  Excuse me?

  I remember you now, the old man said. I seen you in Alabama.

  I’m afraid not, the doctor said. I’m from Maine and this is the farthest south I’ve ever been.

  Scribner couldn’t figure why the doctor would lie about it. Sure you was. We was at a funeral. You was wearing a green checked suit and a little derby hat and carrying a black shiny walkin stick. There was a little spotted dog there lookin down in the grave and whinin and you rapped it right smart with that cane. I hate a dog at a funeral, you said.

  The doctor was looking sympathetic, and Scribner was going to try to lie out of it. Rabon was just looking annoyed. Who were you burying? he asked. This confused Scribner. He tried to think. Hell, I don’t know, he said. Some dead man.

  I’m afraid you’ve got me mixed up with someone else, the doctor said.

  Scribner was becoming more confused yet, the sand he was standing on was shifting, water rising about his shoes, his ankles.

  I reckon I have, he finally said. That would have been sixtyodd years ago and you’d have to be a hell of a lot older than what you appear to be.

  In the car Rabon said, If all you can do is humiliate me with these Alabama funeral stories I wish you would just let me do the talking when we have to come to Nashville.

  You could handle that, all right, the old man said.

  Now Scribner was back to thinking about whippoorwills. How Rabon was a science teacher who only cared about dead things and books. If you placed a whippoorwill between the pages of an enormous book and pressed it like a flower until it was a paper-thin collage of blood and feathers and fluted bone then Rabon might take an interest in that.

  You remember that time a dog like to took your leg off and I laid it out with a hickory club?

  No I don’t, and I don’t know where you dredge all this stuff up.

  Dredge up hell, the old man said. I was four days laying up in jail because of it.

  If it happened at all it happened to Alton. I can’t recall you ever beating a dog or going to jail for me. Or acknowledging my existence in any other way, for that matter.

  The old man was grinning slyly at Rabon. Pull up your britches leg, he said.

  What?

  Pull up your britches leg and let’s have a look at it.

  Rabon’s slacks were brown-and-tan houndstooth checked. He gingerly pulled the cuff of one leg up to the calf.

  I’m almost sure it was the other one, Scribner said.

  Rabon pulled the other leg up. He was wearing wine-colored calf-length socks. Above the sock was a vicious-looking scar where the flesh had been shredded, the puckered scar red and poreless and shiny as celluloid against the soft white flesh.

  Ahh, the old man breathed.

  Rabon dropped his cuff. I got this going through a barbedwire fence when I was nine years old, he said.

  Sure you did, the old man said. I bet a German shepherd had you by the leg when you went through it, too.

  LATER HE SLEPT FITFULLY with the lights on. When he awoke, he didn’t know what time it was. Where he was. Beyond the window it was dark, and the lighted window turned the room back at him. He didn’t know for a moment what room he was in, what world the window opened onto. The room in the window seemed cut loose and disassociated, adrift in the space of night.

  He got up. The house was quiet. He wandered into the bathroom and urinated. He could hear soft jazzy piano music coming from somewhere. He went out of the bathroom and down a hall adjusting his trousers and into a room where a pudgy man wearing wire-rimmed glasses was seated at a desk with a pencil in his hand, a sheaf of papers spread before him. The man looked up, and the room rocked and righted itself, and it was Rabon.

  The old man went over and seated himself on the side of the bed.

  You remember how come I named you Rabon and your brother Alton?

  Yes, the man said, making a mark on a paper with a red-leaded pencil.

  Scribner might not have heard. It was in Limestone County, Alabama, he said. I growed up with Alton and Rabon Delmore, and they played music. Wrote songs. I drove them to Huntsville to make their first record. Did I ever tell you about that?

  No more than fifty or sixty times, Rabon said. But I could always listen to it again.

  They was damn good. Had some good songs, “Deep Elm Blues.” “Brown’s Ferry Blues.” “When you go down to Deep Elm keep your money in your shoes,” the first line went. They wound up on the Grand Ole Opry. Wound up famous. They never forgot where they come from, though. They was just old country boys. I’d like to hear them songs again.

  I bought you a cassette player and all those old-time country and bluegrass tapes.

  I know it. I appreciate it. Just seems like I can’t ever get it to work right. It ain’t the same anyway.

  I’ll take Brubeck myself.

  If that’s who that is then you can have any part of him.

  It’s late, Papa. Don’t you think you ought to be asleep?

  I was asleep. Seems like I just catnap. Sleep when I’m sleepy. Wake up when I’m not. Not no night and day anymore. Reckon why that is?

  I’ve got all this work to do.

  Go ahead and work then. I won’t bother you.

  The old man sat silent a time watching Rabon grade papers. Old-man heavy in the chest and shoulders, looking up at the school-teacher out of faded eyes. Sheaf of iron-gray hair. His pale eyes flickered as if he’d thought of something, but he remained silent. He waited until Rabon finished grading the paper he was working on and in the space between his laying it aside and taking up another on
e the old man said, Say whatever happened to Alton, anyway?

  Rabon laid the paper aside ungraded. He studied the old man. Alton is dead, he said.

  Dead? Say he is? What’d he die of?

  He was killed in a car wreck.

  The old man sat in silence digesting this as if he didn’t quite know what to make of it. Finally he said, Where’s he buried at?

  Papa, Rabon said, for a moment the dense flesh of his face was transparent so that Scribner could see a flicker of real pain, then the flesh coalesced into its customary opaque mask and Rabon said again, I’ve got to do all this work.

  I don’t see how you can work with your own brother dead in a car wreck, Scribner said.

  SOMETIME THAT NIGHT, or another night he went out the screen door onto the back porch, dressed only in his pajama bottoms, the night air cool on his skin. Whippoorwills were tolling out of the dark and a milky blind cat’s eye of a moon hung above the jagged treeline. Out there in the dark patches of velvet, patches of silver where moonlight was scattered through the leaves like coins. The world looked strange yet in some way familiar. Not a world he was seeing, but one he was remembering. He looked down expecting to see a child’s bare feet on the floorboards and saw that he had heard the screen door slap to as a child but had inexplicably become an old man, gnarled feet on thin blue shanks of legs, and the jury-rigged architecture of time itself came undone, warped and ran like melting glass.

  NAKED TO THE WAIST Scribner sat on the bed while the nurse wrapped his biceps to take his blood pressure. His body still gleamed from the sponge bath and the room smelled of rubbing alcohol. Curious-looking old man. Heavy chest and shoulders and arms like a weightlifter. The body of a man twenty-five years his junior. The image of the upper torso held until it met the wattled red flesh of his throat, the old man’s head with its caved cheeks and wild gray hair, the head with its young man’s body like a doctored photograph.

  Mr. Scribner, this thing will barely go around your arm, she said. I bet you were a pistol when you were a younger man.

  I’m still a pistol yet, and cocked to go off anytime, the old man said. You ought to go a round with me.

  My boyfriend wouldn’t care for that kind of talk, the nurse said, pumping up the thingamajig until it tightened almost painfully around his arm.

  I wasn’t talking to your boyfriend, Scribner said. He takin care of you?

  I guess he does the best he can, she said. But I still bet you were something twenty-five years ago.

  What was you like twenty-five years ago?

  Two years old, she said.

  You ought to give up on these younger men, he said, studying the heavy muscles of his forearms, his still-taut belly. Brighten up a old man’s declinin years.

  Hush that kind of talk, she said. Taking forty kinds of pills and randy as a billy goat.

  Hellfire, you give me a bath. You couldn’t help but notice how I was hung.

  She turned quickly, away but not so quickly the old man couldn’t see the grin.

  Nasty talk like that is going to get a soapy washrag crammed in your mouth, she said.

  WITH HIS WALKING CANE for a snakestick the old man went through a thin stand of half-grown pines down into the hollow and past a herd of plywood cattle to where the hollow flattened out then climbed gently toward the roadbed. The cattle were life-size silhouettes jigsawed from sheets of plywood and affixed to two-by-fours driven in the earth. They were painted gaudily with bovine smiles and curving horns. The old man passed through the herd without even glancing at them, as if in his world all cattle were a half-inch thick and garbed up with bright lacquer. Rabon had once been married to a woman whose hobby this was, but now she was gone, and there was only this hollow full of wooden cattle.

  He could have simply taken the driveway to the roadbed but he liked the hot astringent smell of the pines and the deep shade of the hollow. All his life the woods had calmed him, soothed the violence that smoldered just beneath the surface.

  When he came onto the cherted roadbed he stopped for a moment, leaning on his stick to catch his breath. He was wearing bedroom slippers and no socks and his ankles were crisscrossed with bleeding scratches from the dewberry briars he’d walked through. He went on up the road as purposefully as a man with a conscious destination though in truth he had no idea where the road led.

  It led to a house set back amid ancient oak trees, latticed by shade and light and somehow imbued with mystery to the old man’s eyes, like a cottage forsaken children might come upon in a fairy-tale wood. He stood by the roadside staring at it. It had a vague familiarity, like an image he had dreamed then come upon unexpectedly in the waking world. The house was a one-story brick with fading cornices painted a peeling white. It was obviously unoccupied. The yard was grown with knee-high grass gone to seed and uncurtained windows were opaque with refracted light. Untrimmed tree branches encroached onto the roof and everything was steeped in a deep silence.

  A hand raised to shade the sun-drenched glass, the old man peered in the window. No one about, oddments of furniture, a woodstove set against a wall. He climbed onto the porch and sat in a cedar swing for a time, rocking idly, listening to the creak of the chains, the hot sleepy drone of dirt daubers on the August air. There were boxes of junk stacked against the wall, and after a time he began to sort through one of them. There were china cats and dogs, a cookie jar with the shapes of cookies molded and painted onto the ceramic. A picture in a gilt frame that he studied until the edges of things shimmered eerily then came into focus, and he thought: This is my house.

  He knew he used to live here with a wife named Ellen and two sons named Alton and Rabon and a daughter named Karen. Alton is dead in a car wreck, he remembered, and he studied Karen’s face intently as if it were a gift that had been handed to him unexpectedly, and images of her and words she had said assailed him in a surrealistic collage so that he could feel her hand in his, a little girl’s hand, see white patent-leather shoes climbing concrete steps into a church, one foot, the other, the sun caught like something alive in her auburn hair.

  Then another image surfaced in his mind: his own arm, silver in the moonlight, water pocked with light like hammered metal, something gleaming he threw sinking beneath the surface, then just the empty hand drawing back and the muscular freckled forearm with a chambray work shirt rolled to the biceps. Somewhere upriver a barge, lights arcing over the river like searchlights trying to find him. That was all. Try as he might he could call nothing else to mind. It troubled him because the memory carried some dark undercurrent of menace.

  With a worn Case pocketknife he sliced himself a thin sliver of Apple chewing tobacco Rabon didn’t know he’d hoarded, held it in his jaw savoring the taste. He walked about the yard thinking movement might further jar his memory into working. He paused at a silver maple that summer lightning had struck, the raw wound winding in a downward spiral to the earth where the bolt had gone to ground. He stood studying the splintered tree with an old man’s bemusement, as if pondering whether this was something he might fix.

  SAY, WHATEVER HAPPENED to that Karen, anyway? he asked Rabon that night. Rabon had dragged an end table next to the old man’s bed and set a plate and a glass of milk on it. Try not to get this all over everything, he said.

  Scribner was wearing a ludicrous-looking red-and-white-checked bib Rabon had tied around his neck, and with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other he was eyeing the plate as if it were something he was going to attack.

  Your sister, Karen, the old man persisted.

  I don’t hear from Karen anymore, Rabon said. I expect she’s still up there around Nashville working for the government.

  Workin for the government? What’s she doin?

  They hired her to have one baby after another, Rabon said. She draws that government money they pay for them. That AFDC, money for unwed mothers, whatever.

  Say she don’t ever call or come around?

  I don’t have time for any of that in my life, Rab
on said. She liked the bright lights and the big city. Wild times. Drinking all night and laying up with some loafer on food stamps. I doubt it’d do her much good to come around here.

  I was thinkin about her today when she was a little girl.

  She hasn’t been a little girl for a long time, Rabon said, shutting it off, closing another door to something he didn’t want to talk about.

  PAST MIDNIGHT Scribner was lying on top of the covers, misshapen squares of moonlight thrown across him by the windowpanes. He had been thinking about Karen when he remembered shouting, crying, blood. When he pulled her hands away from her face they came away bloody and her mouth was smashed with an incisor cocked at a crazy angle and blood dripping off her chin. One side of her jaw was already swelling.

  Where is he?

  I don’t know, she said. He’s left me. He drove away. No telling where he’s gone.

  Wherever it is I doubt it’s far enough, he said, already leaving, his mind already suggesting and discarding places where Pulley might be.

  Don’t hurt him.

  He gave her a long, level glance but he didn’t say if he would or he wouldn’t. Crossing the yard toward his truck he stepped on an aluminum baseball bat that belonged to Alton. He stooped and picked it up and went on to the truck, swinging it along in his hands, and threw it onto the floorboard.

  He wasn’t in any of his usual haunts. Not the Snowwhite Café, the pool hall. In Skully’s City Café the old man drank a beer and bought one for a crippled drunk in a wheelchair.

  Where’s your runnih mate, Hudgins?

  Bonedaddy? He was in here a while ago. He bought a case of beer and I reckon he’s gone down to that cabin he’s got on the Tennessee River.

  Why ain’t you with him? The old man did not even seem angry. A terrible calm had settled over him. You couldn’t rattle him with a jackhammer.

  He’s pissed about somethin, said he didn’t have time to fool with me. I know he’s gone to the river though, he had that little snake pistol he takes.

  The night was far progressed before he found the right cabin. It set back against a bluff and there was a wavering campfire on the riverbank and Bonedaddy sat before it drinking beer. When Scribner approached the fire, Bonedaddy glanced at the bat and took the nickel-plated pistol out of his pocket and laid it between his feet.