Twilight

by William Gay

  You done me a good job, he said.

  Well. It’s painted, anyway.

  De Vries had taken out his wallet and was carefully thumbing through bills. He took out a sheaf of them and counted money into Tyler’s hand. He held a five poised in midair as if in momentary indecision then laid it atop the others and put away his wallet.

  That’s five more than we agreed.

  You did me a good job. No accidents. You stayed with it and got done in good time. You’re a careful worker. Last time I had it done Clarence Treadway done it drunk, and he dropped a paintbrush loaded with bright red paint right on the hood of Clyde Tookie Bell’s car, and Clyde was drivin a white Buick that year.

  You hear of anybody else wants anything done, try to get word to me. I’ll try most anything once.

  I sure will. I’ll get you some work.

  I better get on home then.

  He started toward the truck parked in the mouth of the alley but something in de Vries’s manner or in his face made him hesitate.

  De Vries cleared his throat. Hold on a minute, he called.

  Tyler waited.

  It’s a feller been hangin around out front waitin for you to get done. He figured you was up on top and said tell you he wanted to see you. He knowed you was down, I guess he’d done be back here.

  Who is it?

  Do you know Granville Sutter? I just know of him.

  If you know of him, then you know he’s got a bad name.

  What does he want with me? Did he say?

  No, he didn’t, and I didn’t ask. Didn’t figure it was any of my business, and Granville would of let me know that right quick anyhow. Reason I told you back here, I figured if you wanted to give him the slip, you wouldn’t have to go around front. You could just head up the alley there.

  Well, I don’t mind talking to him. I never stepped on his toes that I know of. He may need some work done.

  De Vries’s look said that this was not a strong likelihood. Any work Sutter needs doin you’d be well advised to pass on, he said. If he didn’t do nothing else, he’d figure a way to beat you out of your money. But you suit yourself on that.

  I’ll talk to him.

  There was an empty bench against the front of the store but Sutter was hunkered against the brick wall waiting with the calm patience of the country folk you used to see sitting about the town square. This bench was usually filled with loiterers or old men settling world affairs but Sutter’s mere presence seemed to have cleared it. Tyler approached him and for no reason he could name there was a tight empty feeling in the pit of his stomach. Something in Sutter’s remote eyes told him that this was the knock on the door at midnight, the telegram slid under the door in the dead of night.

  You looking for me? I’m Tyler.

  I know who you are. You old Moose’s boy. You don’t look much like him. Old Moose was heavy and built right close to the ground. You kinda rangy. Must of took after your mama’s side of the family.

  Tyler didn’t say anything. Sutter dropped his cigarette. Ground it out with a conscientious foot.

  Or who knows, he shrugged. Maybe you do look like your daddy. Names and blood don’t always go arm in arm.

  Tyler was momentarily off balance. He stood studying Sutter as if measuring his size against his own. Finally he said, You might ought to watch your mouth. Anyway, I don’t reckon you been hanging around here waiting to talk to me about my daddy.

  As a matter of fact I ain’t. Let’s take a walk, Tyler.

  He started off toward the railroad tracks and after a moment’s hesitation Tyler fell in beside him. He was torn between curiosity about Sutter’s purpose and the desire to just walk away. More’s the fool he didn’t, Tyler thought, but the moment when he could have just walked off down the road and made this never be had passed and it would not come again. Somehow this all felt preordained and out of control, as if someone was behind the curtains mimicking voices and controlling the strings. As if for all the years of his life he and Sutter had been passing and repassing in the dark and now here they were face to face in God’s own daylight and there was nothing for it.

  They walked past the drygoods store down toward the railroad track. Poolroom loungers watched them pass with curiosity. Mentor and protégé, perhaps, warlock and aspiring wizard. People they met seemed to defer to Sutter, to give him more room than was necessary for his passage. Grimes’s carlot. Grimes’s cars sat forlorn and lustreless under the leaden sky, and the pennants strung on wires snapped and fluttered in the stiff wind.

  Sutter didn’t talk for a time. He built himself a careful cig Sutter dropped his cigarette. Ground it out with a conscientious foot.

  Or who knows, he shrugged. Maybe you do look like your daddy. Names and blood don’t always go arm in arm.

  Tyler was momentarily off balance. He stood studying Sutter as if measuring his size against his own. Finally he said, You might ought to watch your mouth. Anyway, I don’t reckon you been hanging around here waiting to talk to me about my daddy.

  As a matter of fact I ain’t. Let’s take a walk, Tyler.

  He started off toward the railroad tracks and after a moment’s hesitation Tyler fell in beside him. He was torn between curiosity about Sutter’s purpose and the desire to just walk away. More’s the fool he didn’t, Tyler thought, but the moment when he could have just walked off down the road and made this never be had passed and it would not come again. Somehow this all felt preordained and out of control, as if someone was behind the curtains mimicking voices and controlling the strings. As if for all the years of his life he and Sutter had been passing and repassing in the dark and now here they were face to face in God’s own daylight and there was nothing for it.

  They walked past the drygoods store down toward the railroad track. Poolroom loungers watched them pass with curiosity. Mentor and protégé, perhaps, warlock and aspiring wizard. People they met seemed to defer to Sutter, to give him more room than was necessary for his passage. Grimes’s carlot. Grimes’s cars sat forlorn and lustreless under the leaden sky, and the pennants strung on wires snapped and fluttered in the stiff wind.

  Sutter didn’t talk for a time. He built himself a careful cigalmost dizzy with shock. He wished himself fleeing along the railroad tracks. All this over and forgotten or never been.

  Course a man can get the bigeye thinkin about all that money. I can understand that. That’s why we can get this mess straightened out right here at the start and make it easy on everbody. All he wants is the pictures back. He’s willin to forget the rest of it, the blackmailin charge, the theft, just to get his property back. There might even be a small piece of money, call it a finder’s fee, say five hundred dollars, when you lay them in my hand.

  Apprentice blackmailer though he was, even Tyler knew something about this did not quite ring right. He knew it was more than the pictures. Breece and Sutter knew it as well, for the pictures were only symbols for the dark perversions of the waiting graves: the graves lay ticking like timebombs, untold numbers of them, dividing insanely like the malignant cells of an embryonic cancer. The pictures didn’t mean anything.

  I’d like to help you out, Tyler said. Lord knows I could use five hundred dollars. I just don’t know what you’re talking about. Pictures of what?

  Sutter was quiet for a time. He seemed to be studying the cordwood haulers. They had the truck unloaded now and had jumped down from the bed. Tyler could smell the hot winy odor of curing wood. The sun had descended further and what he could see of the world lay half in shadow, half in thin light splayed out across the houses clustered on the hillside across from town.

  He chose to ignore Tyler’s last words, as if they were so ludicrous they didn’t deserve comment or perhaps his acknowledgment might lend them a credibility they didn’t deserve. Course I took into consideration maybe it wasn’t all your doin. Maybe you just easy led, and I ought to went to her to begin with. But I believe a man’s accountable for the actions of his womenfolks, don’t you?


  No, Tyler said. I don’t believe one person can be responsible for another person’s life. We’re on our own.

  Sutter shrugged. Still, I figured man to man between me and you would be better. We ought to be able to come to terms. What it is, you don’t quite see the whole picture. You’re lookin at it, but you’re not seein all the details. You’ve got some idea about Fenton Breece and you’re judgin me by him. Fat and soft and very likely some specie of queer. Let’s get it straight right now that me and him ain’t nothin alike. Right? If we was, he wouldn’t have me agentin for him to begin with. He’d of just took care of it hisself.

  What’s he paying you?

  I won’t lie to you. He’s payin me plenty. Because he’s got a lot to lose and because he thinks I can stop up the holes where it’s spillin out. And make no mistake about it, Tyler, I can. I’m the fix-it man, and you’re the problem I been hired to fix.

  I don’t have them, Tyler said.

  Maybe not. But you know where they live. Whatever you have to do, you better get your mind right to do it. Because I’m not foolin around, and I don’t want no mistake about it. If you have to talk to her, you better let her know I’m dead serious.

  Tyler didn’t say anything. The cordwood truck had gone, and a cool blue dusk lay over the railroad yard. Across the tracks where happenstantial shanties spilled yellow light, three young blacks strolled toward town, and a woman’svoice, faintly ridiculing, called something after them.

  I got to get on, Tyler said. He’d thought he was able to handle whatever befell him but this was something new. Something far outside the borders, and he could feel a panicky fear like cold waters rising about him. He didn’t know how deep they were and he didn’t know if he could swim in them. Anywhere seemed preferable to here but when he made to go Sutter’s hand on his arm stayed him.

  Not just yet, Sutter said.

  The hand tightened on Tyler’s biceps, then moved away.

  None of this means anything, Tyler said. It’s all just a waste of time. If I went to the law, it would all be out the window anyway.

  If, Sutter said contemptuously. If a frog had a glass ass, he’d only jump one time and bust like a dropped teacup. We both know you’re not goin to the law. If you did, there’d go your big money. Which is gone anyway, you’ve kissed it goodbye and never knowed it. And on top of that, graverobbin and foolin with corpses ain’t never been too highly thought of in this part of the country.

  We never robbed any graves.

  Sutter shrugged. You got your story, Breece has got his. He’s prepared to swear in a court of law that he caught you and your sister diggin up graves and doin stuff to the bodies. Desecratin em, he called it. I guess the first tale told is the one that gets listened to.

  I got to get on. I have to think what to do.

  Then while you’re at it, think about this: I’ll do what I have to do. It’s a hell of a lot of money, and it would move me pretty far down the line, and it looks like I need to be there. All these son of a bitches. Push and push and keep on and I’ve hadabout all I want of it. I’m goin to lay some folks out to cool if I have to, and I don’t particularly care who. But what I want you to think about is the worst thing that can happen. You know when somethin bad happens, how folks kind of console one another? They say, well, it could of been worse. This or that could of happened. Well, not this time. Believe it. I am absolutely the worst thing that can happen to you.

  I just don’t know.

  You better know. If you don’t, ask around about me. I don’t carry no references, but folks’ll tell you. And you better let me know somethin one way or another by tomorrow night. If you don’t, it’ll be on your head.

  What will?

  Whatever happens. Whatever it takes. It’s enough that you know that Fenton Breece ain’t the only man can bury the dead, and the grave ain’t the only place to put em.

  Tyler rose to leave, and this time Sutter made no move to stop him. He just sat unmoving, letting night take him and sinking into darkness as if he kept some obscure watch against whatever of dread might be approaching the town.

  Tyler went woodenly back up the street. His mind wouldn’t work. Everything seemed jammed, overloaded. He went past closed and shuttered stores, a lit café where shards of brittle music fell about him and diminished with his passage. A voice called Tyler after him, but he didn’t heed it. Where a neon sign blinked billiards he went through a paintscaled door and down a halflit stair to where smoke drifted in the glow of fluorescent lights strung over pool tables and where there was a loud clanging of pinball machines and a hubbub of human voices. He bought a Coke at the counter and went to a long bench anchored alongside the wall and sat drinking andwatching a pill game in progress.

  Hey, Tyler, a man called Woodenhead yelled at him. Want to play some pill?

  I got to get home here in a minute.

  Draw me a couple of pills then. I need a change of luck, and you the luckiest fucker about pill I ever seen.

  Tyler shook the canister and spilled out two red wooden pills onto his palm. He looked at the numbers on them. Not tonight. The four and the twelve. He passed them to Woodenhead. Sorry, he said.

  Woodenhead looked at them. Grimaced. Goddamn, Tyler. I meant from bad to better. I could of went to worse myself.

  Damn, there’s old T-Texas Tyler, another sang out. He fell to studying Tyler’s carminesmeared clothes. Hell, he’s been in a terrible wreck. Was anybody killed in it besides you, Tyler?

  Oh, he’s just got ahold of one with the rag on, Woodenhead said. Hell, Tyler, if you couldn’t of waited a day or two, the least you could of done was take your britches off.

  Tyler just grinned weakly and didn’t say anything. There was something reassuring about this ribald camaraderie, but he knew he must be off. He drained the Coke and set the bottle aside, and so into the night.

  When the last streetlight stood vigil against the night and the highway dropped and curved sharply, he was thinking about Sutter as he rounded the curve and was suddenly hurled into absolute and inexplicable darkness. Reflexively he locked the truck down in a caterwauling wail of protesting rubber and ceased in the middle of the road with his hands clamped whiteknuckled to the steering wheel. Faroff and faint headlights were wending toward him, and he felt for the lightswitch. He hadn’t even remembered to turn on the headlights.

  I’m going to the law, he said.

  No, you’re not. That would be the end of it. The money and everything. This is our last chance to get away from here.

  It’s not mine.

  He’s bluffing. Trying to scare us. Looks like he did you, too.

  You didn’t hear him, Tyler said. But she was implacable as stone. His words rolled hollowly out, and her hardened face just turned them back to him and they began to sound craven even to his own ears.

  Think what it would be like, Kenneth. Us somewhere else, some city, Nashville or Memphis maybe. With all that money, thousands and thousands of dollars. Dressing fine, driving a fine new car. Doing what we please. And the law won’t help. Daddy always said the law was like two people fighting over a blanket on a cold night. The one that’s the biggest and the strongest winds up with most of the cover. And the last time I looked that wasn’t you.

  Give me the pictures.

  What are you going to do with them?

  Hide them. Just in case.

  She went out of the room. When she came back in, she laid them on the table. He took from his pocket a square he’d cut from a canvas tarp, and he wrapped the pictures carefully and taped them and slid them into a Prince Albert tobacco tin.

  She watched him wordlessly. He finished and rose and just as wordlessly went out into the night.

  He was sitting at the bottom of the basement stairs in the courthouse drinking a dope when a deputy came through a side door with a sheaf of warrants in his hand. He went past Tyler without speaking and stood for a moment before a door marked sheriff’s office fumbling out keys. He unlocked the door and went in. He was
in there for a few minutes. When he came back out, he didn’t have the warrants and Tyler was still there. He’d finished the dope and sat holding the empty bottle as if he didn’t quite know what to do with it.

  You want something?

  I wanted to see the sheriff.

  He ain’t in.

  I figured that by the door being locked, Tyler said. The deputy stood waiting as if there might be more forthcoming, but there was not.

  What did you want with the sheriff? The deputy was a small stoopshouldered man with fiery red hair and a long, aquiline nose, and his eyes veered warily as if he didn’t know whether to suck up to you or push you around.

  I wanted to talk to him, Tyler said.

  I’m a duly sworn deputy sheriff, the deputy sheriff said. If it’s got anything to do with breakin the law or enforcin the law, then you can take it up with me.

  When do you reckon he’ll be back?

  He’ll come when he comes, the deputy said. He ain’t responsible to me. You through with that bottle, it needs to go back upstairs by the dopebox where it belongs.

  It was a good half hour before the high sheriff came, and when he did the deputy was with him. They stood before thedoor unlocking it, and Tyler wondered vaguely what there was to steal. The world was all locked doors. Watchdogs, keep off signs. As he turned the key, the deputy nodded toward Tyler. Him, he said.

  Uh-huh, the sheriff said.

  They went in and Tyler sat a few minutes longer debating whether to stay or leave. He’d about decided to leave when the door opened halfway and the deputy’s head poked out.