Twilight

by William Gay

  He’ll hire a team of sharp Nashville lawyers, she said. There’ll be some publicity about it. He might even lose his license or whatever you have to have to operate. They’ll send him to talk to some psychiatrist for a while; then they’ll say he’s cured, and he’ll be back at the same old stand. We’ve got to get him ourselves. We’ve got to get more evidence.

  He thought she’d taken leave of her senses. More? What more do we need? There’s enough now for a lynch mob and enough left over to tar and feather him. Anyway, what’s all this we mess? It’s not our job. Let the law or somebody dig up a few more graves. There’s your more.

  The law. Seems like we never had much luck with the law. Daddy never did.

  Bootleggers hardly ever do. It’s an occupational hazard.

  Well. You know so much about it. I doubt a bootlegger’s son would, either. Anyway, don’t start on Daddy. He’s dead and gone and you hated him anyway. I never hated him.

  You hated him because he beat you. You hated me because he never hit me.

  No. That’s the one thing I was grateful for. If he had ever beat you, I’d have had to fight back. Or kill him. The way it was, I could take it and go on. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Like you say, he’s dead and gone.

  I never understood how you did that. How you just took it and went on, as you say.

  Because it all balanced out. Because I knew something that he didn’t know.

  What?

  I knew he was going to die and I’d still be alive.

  She was silent for a time studying him. She shook her head. You’ve got a hell of a way of looking at things, she finally said. But let’s get back to Fenton Breece. I’ve been thinking about this, and I know how to make him pay where it’ll hurt him the worst. In the pocketbook.

  How long have you been thinking about this?

  I guess from the minute you saw him hauling that vault back to the funeral home that was supposed to be in Daddy’s grave. From the time I seen the way he done Daddy when he was past doing anything to help himself.

  Tyler was wishing he’d kept his mouth shut. This is crazy and you know it, and whatever you’ve got in mind, you can include me out.

  This time it’s not that easy for you You can’t be included out of a family. It’s not that easy. Once you’re in one, you’re in it for life. You can’t turn away from blood. Will you help me?

  No. Not only no but hell no. This mess is too crazy for me

  The first time Fenton Breece saw Corrie Tyler had been in the spring of that year. She was walking past the café as he had his nine o’clock coffee. She was wearing a tight black skirt, and he was watching the side-to-side movement of her hips when the man next to him said, I wouldn’t kick that out of bed.

  Breece turned on the off-chance the man might be speaking to him, but he wasn’t. He was talking to the man on the other stool. Unless there was more room on the floor, he added.

  Who is that, anyway? the man two stools down asked.

  Old Moose Tyler’s daughter. Don’t know who she got her looks from, but she damn sure never got em from Moose.

  Breece watched her out of sight. He felt the weight of eyes and when he turned the man was watching him with sardonic amusement, as if he had looked not at Breece but into him and read his thoughts. Breece flushed and looked away.

  A bootlegger’s daughter, he had thought. White trash who had probably done it with every man in town save him. He remembered a phrase his mother had used long ago in some old cautionary fable. He had forgotten the fable and disregarded the caution but the phrase was with him still: anybody’s dog who wants to go hunting. It seemed applicable here.

  But back at his desk he closed his eyes and let her body drift in his mind like the remnant of a dream that will not fade. He had already decided to learn what there was to know about her.

  He found she worked in the garment factory, and he used to cruise by sometimes in the afternoons and watch for her coming out of the plant. She drove an old primerspottedpickup truck that seemed held together with baling wire and blind luck. She never came out in the groups of girls that strung across the parking lot laughing and talking. She didn’t seem to have any friends. He was encouraged by this. Half a dozen times he had intended to pick her up. He had his lines meticulously rehearsed but when he saw her the spit would dry up in his mouth and the carefully chosen words roil like leaves in the wind.

  The day he finally did speak to her he was in the white Lincoln. It was the first warm day in May and he had the top down. The Lincoln had a beautiful red interior it still held that newcar smell of money and he thought that would get her if all else failed. His cheeks were shiny and freshly shaved and he was redolent of some special pheronomic aftershave he’d mailordered from California that was supposed to be made from the glands of male hogs and possess aphrodisiac properties. He was wearing one of the new seethrough nylon shirts that were just beginning to catch on and he didn’t see how he could fail.

  Apparently the truck wouldn’t start for she had the hood aloft and was standing hipslung before it staring into the engine.

  He stopped the Lincoln.

  Car trouble? he called. Can I help?

  She turned and glanced briefly at him. Her face was harried and irritated. I was just about to send for you, she said. I believe this thing is deader than hell.

  I’m not mechanically inclined, but I can give you a ride somewhere, he said. He was listening to his own calm voice say these things, and he was thinking: Mechanically inclined. That wasn’t half bad.

  If it’s not too much trouble, she said. She turned toward him again.

  The voice he could manage, but he couldn’t make his eyes behave. They kept darting about as if they had independent wills of their own. One wanted to go up, the other down. They’d lock onto her sharp breasts, then drop to her crotch, then back up to the breasts, and he thought if he could just grasp his eyes with his hands and point them into her face he’d be all right, but he could not.

  It’s a little ways out there, she said. Where I have to go. My brother’s the only one who can keep this thing running.

  That’s fine, that’s fine, he told her crotch, and she fell silent watching him. She shook her head and looked away toward town. She didn’t make any move to get into the car.

  He reached across and opened the door on the passenger side. Just jump right in here, he told her. It took an enormous effort to raise his eyes to the level where her navel would be could he have seen it.

  I guess I’ll just walk, she said. She turned and struck out for the street.

  He was cranking the car. Wait a minute, he called in confusion. He didn’t know if he was coming on too hard or too easy. He’d had it and thrown it all away. He slipped the car into gear and followed a little way behind her, riding the brake.

  Come on and get in, he called. I’ll take you wherever you want to go.

  She just waved him away onehanded and didn’t look back.

  We could drive over to Columbia for dinner, he called, and sure enough his eyes dropped to the tight denim between her legs and he could have clawed his eyes from their bloody sockets.

  Fuck off, she said.

  He just stared. What? What?

  You heard me.

  No, I didn’t. Say it again.

  You sick bastard.

  This time she kept on walking and he didn’t follow. He just sat in the white Lincoln watching her form diminish down the street. He kept thinking about how she’d looked. The way her eyes had snapped and the way her fall of straight blonde hair had tossed when she said Fuck off.

  Sooner or later, he promised himself. One way or another.

  It is told by Squire Robnett at the Bellystretcher Café:

  I never cared for undertakers in general and Fenton Breece in particular. There was just always something about him. I done some work for him out there when he was buildin that mansion he built, but times was hard and I’d of worked for Hitler if he’d of been hirin.

  Wha
tever it was, he was born with it because I knowed him when he was a boy, and he was just as peculiar then as he is now. Fenton was a rich kid, and that’s when I first begun to suspect rich ain’t all it’s made out to be.

  Fenton’s daddy was a undertaker, too, but they had plenty of money besides. That’s one reason why I never understood him takin up undertakin. Why not medicine, or the law? Now I don’t know if you choose your trade or the trade chooses you, but at the very least you’ve got to have an inclination for it. I’ve always believed that Fenton just liked foolin aroundwith dead folks.

  He just didn’t fit in. Didn’t or couldn’t. He used to get dead animals off the side of the road and play like he was embalmin em. Cut em up and see what they was made out of. If he couldn’t find none and the mood was on him he took to killin em hisself. Strangle em. There for a while he was hell on the neighborhood cat population.

  He’s got that smarmy act down pat, but a act is all it is. You know that hangdog sorrowful look that he can turn on and off. But the truth is he just don’t give a shit. He ain’t got no respect for the dead. I was workin out there at his place buildin a rock wall around what he called his duck pond when one of these fellers works for him drove up in a flatbed truck with a casket strapped to the back. It was some feller that had died off from here, and they hauled him back to be buried with his folks. You would have thought he would take it on into town to the funeral home, but he didn’t. It set right out there in the boilin sun all day. Like a piece of machinery or a load of lumber or somethin while he was prissin around settin out peonies and box elders.

  What I’m sayin is that it ain’t that he’s a undertaker. Undertakin’s just a job, like anything else. It’s him. There’s just somethin about him that makes your skin kindly crawl, like turnin over a rotten plank and seein one of them slick brown centipedes. I never wanted him pawin over any kin of mine, and that’s why when my sister passed away we took her to Ackerman’s Field. And that’s why when I kick off, the arrangements is done made for a feller in Memphis to cremate my ass and spread the ashes in them hills back of Allens Creek, back in the Harrikin where I was raised. I sleep a little better ever night knowin he won’t ever lay them soft white hands on me.

  Here was wealth beyond measure. Beyond even Tyler’s powers of comprehension. Set on the gently rolling slopes of grass, the house might have been the counting house of some wicked ruler living in exile. Or yet an evil magician with spells cast on the rightful heirs, legions of familiars to do his bidding.

  Scarcely five years old, already the house is part of the folklore of the region. There is conjecture as to just how many miles of electrical wire, how many miles of copper tubing. So far does the hot water travel there must be an auxiliary water heater to maintain Breece’s chosen temperature. The glittering bricks came wrapped five to the bundle and woe to the mason who marred one in the laying. The tile came from Italy, the light fixtures from France. The bay windows are roofed with braised copper, and the workmen who installed it spoke no language the local workers could understand. Some kind of Chinese gobbledygook, they said.

  There was even an interior decorator imported from Memphis who talked with a slight lisp and whose airy hand gestures were of great interest to local craftsmen. Just to listen to that son of a bitch talk, you’d think the only thing on God’s green earth that mattered was winder curtains, one of them said. He could talk about drapers till you never wanted to hear about drapers again. This decorator’s vision of the house clashed with Breece’s and he left in a snit, pressing upon Breece in parting a slip of paper whereon was written the name of the builder of a Beale Street whorehouse. The house had started out vaguely Georgian but ended up with a decided bent for the grotesquely opulent. Gables and peaked roofs and turrets had been added seemingly by Breece’s whim or a coin toss so that the house came to resemble the temple of some old king overthrown solely because of his sorry taste.

  Tyler had been watching the house all day, and so far nothing at all had happened save the movement of light and shadow and he was about ready to give it up when Breece came out of the house and got into a silvergray Cadillac hearse and drove away toward town. Tyler sat for a time waiting to see if there was to be further movement but he didn’t expect any and he was proven right. He came out of the spinney of sassafras he’d been concealed in and wended his way down the slope to the house.

  For a time he just wandered around the outside of the house staring upward. He felt a deeprooted contempt for Breece but at the same time he couldn’t help being impressed by the sheer size of the house. Breece had simply outdone himself here, and Tyler wondered at the number of unoccupied rooms and the number of caskets sold and crying kids and widow women it had taken to accomplish this.

  He didn’t know what he was looking for. Or where to look. Something he could hold in his hand, something incriminating. The gun still warm and smoking, the dagger with a drop the color of claret forming at its tip.

  In a land where folks seldom even locked their doors Breece was an anomaly: there was no way in save stoning out a window, and his desire for evidence fell short of that. He tried every door, but they were all locked, and there was no key hidden about that he could find. He looked under matsthat lied welcome, in flower urns, and ultimately decided that the only keys existing rode in Breece’s pocket.

  He came on around the house, wandering through curious oriental-looking hedges he didn’t have a name for and strange dwarf twisted trees and to a covered carport laid in flagstone where sat a Lincoln convertible with the top up. The car gleamed and the flagstones were still damp and he guessed Breece had been washing it, he hadn’t been able to see this side of the house from the slope.

  The hearse made so little noise it was almost too late when he saw it. He couldn’t believe it was already back. Breece must have only gone to the mailbox. Sunlight off its lustrous surface caught his eye and it was already wending its way up the curving drive past marble fountains and the stone eyes of arcane statuary and he looked about wildly for somewhere to flee to: the woods were too far away and the way to them open territory.

  At the end of the stone floor opposite the house was a garage or shop but he had no doubt it was locked and no time to try for it anyway and he had barely made the cover of the far side of it when he heard the Cadillac’s tires hissing smoothly on the concrete drive. He sat crouched against the glittering brick wall fearing he’d left some spoor, triggered some crafty snare that would show evidence of trespass.

  He heard the no-nonsense click of the hearse’s door closing, footsteps crossing the flagstones. He grew bolder and chanced a look.

  Breece was standing behind the Lincoln, a tan leather briefcase by his side. He had a set of keys in his hand, unlocking the trunk lid. He raised it and set the briefcase carefully inside and slammed the lid. He stood for a moment as if abstractedby some new notion, then strode purposefully to the back door of the house and withdrew yet another set of keys and unlocked the door of the house and went inside and pulled the door to after him.

  Tyler didn’t plan his next move or even think about it. There was just something in the careful way Breece had stowed away the briefcase. If Tyler had thought about it, he wouldn’t have done it, but the keys were still in the trunk of the Lincoln and in an instant he had darted across the carport and wrenched up the trunk lid and seized the briefcase. He was already fleeing with it when the door of the house opened and the undertaker came down the steps.

  Tyler was running full tilt up the grassy slope toward the line of trees with the briefcase swinging choppily along and his shirt blown out cartoonlike behind him like some halfcrazed and ill-dressed commuter chasing a fleeing train. He was holding his breath and expecting the crack of a gun and buckshot snarling about him like angry hornets but all that came was a hoarse cry like the cry of some wounded animal hopelessly snared, a strangled ululating shriek of outrage or despair.

  Once he reached the cover of trees he kept on going, crashing through brush
with saplings whipping past him and his breath coming ragged, and when he thought how ludicrous the picture of portly Fenton Breece leaping brush and fallen trees was he stopped and sat on a stump to catch his breath.

  He listened intently but all was silence save the hammering of his heart against his ribcage. He sat for a time staring at the briefcase. He had to see what manner of beast he had here. There was a businesslike lock on the strap buthe didn’t even try forcing it. He just took out his pocketknife and cut the strap and looked inside.

  Papers. He leafed hurriedly through them, glancing occasionally at the woods. Invoices, bills of lading, receipts. Copies of orders placed with various firms for chemicals, caskets, clothing. Curious the trades men follow. Beneath the sheaf of papers lay a flat zippered pouch of the sort businesses use to carry deposits to the bank. His heart sank. A sack of goddamn money, he thought. I take a chance on getting shot and get chased through the woods by a fat undertaker and all I’ve done is prove I’m a thief.

  He unzipped it with trepidation.

  The first thing he saw was a pair of lavender silk panties. They were discolored up one side and hip with a faded rustbrown stain that had long soaked into the very texture of the fabric and appeared very old. He didn’t even want to know what it was or how it came to be there. He laid them aside and stared at them in a kind of appalled wonder.

  Here was more. A rubberbanded stack of glossy black-and-white photographs. He slipped off the rubber band to rifle hastily through them.

  He dropped them suddenly as if they’d seared his hand. Or he’d been handling one of those clever medieval boxes with their springloaded needles cunningly hidden and tipped with curare. He felt infected, poison freezing his nerve and brain.

  The photographs had scattered, some face up. He stared at them in fascinated revulsion. They were all of nude women. Some young, some old. Some pretty, some not. They were arranged in grotesque configurations they’d probably not aspired to in life and they were all unmistakably dead. Legsspread flagrantly, some grouped in mimicry of various acts of sexual congress. Their faces painted in carmine smiles. Their weary eyes, their sagging flesh. He’d used some sort of timer with the camera for here was Breece himself, nude and gross and grinning, capering gleefully among the painted dead.