Twilight

by William Gay

  He was standing peering into the showroom of the MVA motor company at a new Ford he couldn’t have told you the color of when a voice spoke behind him.

  You shoppin for one of these new Fords, Mr. Phelan?

  What? Oh, no, no, I don’t need one, Harris.

  Fine looking car.

  I was just thinking about something and I’m afraid I forgot what I was doing. I’d been up to the funeral parlor asking about that young Tyler woman. I couldn’t get any satisfaction at all. Fenton Breece was acting very peculiar.

  Peculiar? What would have been peculiar was if he’d been actin some other way.

  Let’s walk up to the Bellystretcher and talk about this, Phelan said. I don’t know why he’d do it but I believe he was lying to me. No, he was lying to me. I’ve taught school too many years not to know when I’m being lied to.

  Well there’s one sure way to tell if Fenton Breece was lyin, Harris said. Did you happen to notice if his mouth was movin?

  Light altered and the world was a world seen through smoked glass. The somber light diminished and a small bitter rain began to fall out of a pewter sky. A wind arose and drove before it a cloud of small dark sparrows, bedraggled andhomeless as refugees, fleeing nowhere with thin, lost cries. Sutter was passing through a stand of enormous cedars and when the rain fell harder he took shelter beneath one, hunkered on the coppercolored needles, his weight on the balls of his feet and the upright rifle in its zippered canvas case, just peering out beneath the lowering branches and watching the world go shimmery and ephemeral in the blowing rain.

  When water began to course down on him through the matted branches and the windbrought rain to soak him, he rose with resignation and went on down the cedared sedgefield, his gait wooden and stoic and implacable.

  In the lee of the hills lay the vestiges of a road and a concrete tiling where a wetweather stream went beneath it. He went down the weedgrown embankment to the rocky gully and into the tiling. He had to stoop slightly to enter it. It was dry inside, and he figured if it rained all night this was as good a place as any to spend it. The floor of the tiling was thickly grown with virid moss, and the place had a damp but not unpleasant smell. He sat with his back to one wall with his feet straddling the center, though no water had yet entered the mouth of the tiling, and ate a candy bar, then sat smoking, watching his spherical vision of rain and trees and stone like a world seen through the dirty lens of a spyglass.

  After a while he slept or thought he slept. He dreamed or dreamed he did. Anymore the line between dreams and reality was ambiguous at best. For years he’d felt madness sniffing his tracks like an unwanted dog he couldn’t stay shut of. He’d kick it away and it would whimper and cower down spinelessly and he’d go on, but when he looked back over his shoulder it would be shambling toward him, watching him with wary apprehension but coming on anyway. An old woman stood before the mouth of the tiling peering in. A rawboned, floridfaced woman with graybrennel hair sheared straight across as if by the angry blow of an axe. Fierce little eyes like stokeholes to a red rage flaring behind them. A downturned slit of a mouth as if the workings of the world did not quite go to suit her.

  She wore a shapeless old gray dress and a ruffled floursack apron: he remembered when she’d made it. He could see the lethal shape of the butcher knife through the thin, worn cloth of the apron.

  She stood watching him intently, her hands clasped behind her back.

  You come on home now, the rasp of her voice said. It’s time to come with me.

  No, he told her. No, I believe I’ll just hang around here awhile.

  Her face didn’t change. I don’t know what ever made you think you had a choice, she said.

  He sat in silence listening to the rain in the trees. Raincrows called from some distant fallow cornfield. All those sounds he remembered out of the years of his life he wanted desperately to hold onto, to prove he was, rags of memory like cut flowers pressed in a Bible.

  She stepped into the mouth of the tiling, a moving darkness silhouetted against falling dark. Water was running out of her hair and down her face, the thin gray cotton held the bony shapes of her shoulders. A thin trickle of dirty yellow water pooled in the tiling. She squatted in it without seeming to notice. Raw red ankles in a pair of broken-out men’s slippers. A worn and bewenned hand made absentminded pleats in the hem of her dress. Come on, she said. You’ll like it here where I am. You don’t have to do anything except what you want to do. Nobody expects anything from you. There ain’t no rules, and there ain’t no limits to what you can do. Nobody to tell you folks don’t do them things. Nothin binds you except the limits of what your mind can think up. Nobody signs papers, swears out warrants. There’s things done here nobody would write up anyway the ink would run like flamin gas, the paper would catch and burn. I been keepin a eye on you, and it’s time to go right now.

  No, he said. I don’t want to.

  She stood up. When she spoke, a steely threat had entered her voice. You come on. You go right now of your own free will and I won’t send em after you.

  She stepped out of the tiling into the rain, and the dark rain enveloped her, abrupt and revenantial and absolute.

  He leapt up to follow her. His head struck the concrete hard and fireworks flared behind his eyelids. He stood clasping his head in both hands. He staggered out into the rain.

  Ma? he called into the night. Nightbirds took up the cry mockingly. He called again and there was a thread of fear woven into his voice and the cankeredpenny taste of it in the back of his mouth.

  When he opened his mouth to call again she stepped close behind him and clasped a fist in his hair and jerked his head upward and the butcher knife honed to a razor’s sharpness opened a gaping slit in his throat and bright life’s blood darker than claret erupted down his shirtfront.

  Lying there sleeping on the mossy concrete, his face jerking with the troubled passage of his dreams, he is provisionally still brother to all humankind. He has strayed far from the ways of men but there has always been a kind of twisted logic to his violence. The things he desired and struggled for made a kind of sense. Revenge, avarice, a thirst for power. The things only dreamed by normal men. Their own secret thoughts made carnate and ambulatory. Silver threads, thin and frayed though they be, hold him yet to the ways of the world. Here in the night they part and the ties give one by one and he falls away like some winged predator into another country, dark and unmapped and turbulent, so that he is finally free from all restraint, lost.

  Coming down a long spine of ridge through a forest of dead chestnut Tyler chanced upon a pack of wild dogs or they upon him. They paced him silently from a distance, turning to watch him and check his course, and when he dropped off toward the hollow they adjusted their course simultaneously with his all dogs at once as if they communicated with each other in some manner above or below the comprehension of men. He began to regard them with disquiet and stopped once to check whether the rifle was loaded.

  They’d gone wild in the Harrikin. Or their forebears had. These had been born wild as wolves or jackals, and any kind word or touch from man was nothing save a genetic memory if that. They were scruffy, halfstarved and rabidlooking and anymore they were only vaguely dogs.

  When he made his rough camp by a stream that night, they were with him still. He’d killed a rabbit and he roasted it over firecoals banked in a circle of stones. He ate and tossedthe bones beyond the circle of firelight where they were contested with snarls and he could see their green eyes moving about like paired fireflies. When the meat was gone and he’d lain down to sleep with his rifle for bunkmate he could see a circle of their eyes drawn about the fire and in his mind he could see them stretched out, chins on paws, warily studying the fire and this strange god they’d adopted. As if they’d wearied of this wild life of freedom and hoped he could give them back what they’d lost of civilization.

  He had none to spare and at best a tenuous grip on what remained. Sometime in the night he could hear the
m howling down the night howl on howl distant then more distant like descending souls crying from the lower keep of Hades and when he broke camp in the morning they were not to be seen.

  What amazed him was that Sutter seemed to know where he’d be before the notion even struck him to go there. He had gone up the bluff because it was the highest hill he could see and he thought from there he might be able to see the railroad tracks.

  On the near side the hill steepened gradually. Rocky clumps of wild ivy. He had come out of a long fallow field and commenced a leisurely zigzagging ascent, he was seeing country he hadn’t seen before, and he felt like an explorer charting unmapped wilderness. He looked up. Great white outcroppings of limestone like sleeping beasts jutting out of the ivy. At the summit an enormous dome of stone.

  He stopped once on a ledge and ate a candy bar. There was a fugitive sun, faint frail warmth. A thin and spectral lightupon this aerie. He sat chewing the chocolate and looking back the way he’d come. A bleak and wintry vista of timbered ridges told in dull and somber tones and a series of staggered horizons fading into nightransparency and no sign at all that he’d ever set foot there. Or that anyone else ever had. In all that he surveyed nothing moved save the mindless ballet of branches in the wind.

  A few feet higher up the bluff a cave opened up. Small cave, close ceiling, he must go there on hands and knees. He crawled several feet inside, but it narrowed further into a dark hole he’d have to wriggle through, and he had a thought for whatever might lie beyond, he had no idea what. He peered about. The calcified bones of small luckless animals, a bed of moss and windbrought leaves. Some predator’s lair. On a narrow shelf of rock lay an arrowhead. He took it down in wonder and crawled back into better light to study it. It was perfect and chipped carefully from some pink stone. It held a delicate tracery of pale blue like bloodveins running beneath its surface. The arrowhead was sharp and wickedlooking and he was struck by the singleness of its purpose. It was created to kill and beyond that had no reason for its existence. He wondered at the dark hand that had chipped it so long ago. What had transpired during the clocking of the seasons since the dark hand had laid it on the ledge till his paler hand had retrieved it?

  He laid it aside and took off his belt and with his pocketknife sliced a thin thong of cowhide and looped a slipknot about the ears of the arrowhead and tied the amulet about his neck.

  As he turned, an angry wasp sang past his head and splatted against the rock. He whirled in surprise at where itstruck the rock and splintered and there were shards of bright metal like bits of molten slag and he could smell the corditelike odor of shattered flint. He was scrambling for cover even before the shot came rolling across the field, going pellmell on elbows and stomach through the ivy, the rifle cradled under his chin, toward a sheltering ledge. A closer shot clipped shreds of ivy and careened off into space.

  He couldn’t see anything for a time. Then the light altered with the passage of the clouds and there was just a ghost of movement in the brush across the field, and light winked off glass like a heliograph.

  A scope, he breathed. The son of a bitch has got a scope. My ass is gone.

  He aimed the rifle and waited. He knew there was no point at all in shooting, he hadn’t the range or the velocity. Sutter knew it, too. He came out of the woods and glanced toward the bluff and angled in an unhurried lope toward a thin finger of timber bisecting the field. At its edge he paused and waved and did a curious maniacal dance. Tyler fired and Sutter waved an arm and stepped into the timber, and a fierce and almost uncontrollable panic arose in Tyler: the timber ran all the way to the base of the bluff, and even now Sutter was probably running tree to tree toward the bottom of the hill.

  He scrambled up and went further up the slope, leant in a crouch, his feet sliding in the loose shale, trying to keep as much of the bluff as possible between himself and wherever Sutter was now. Rickrack stone made a makeshift stairway to the summit, an enormous table of windy rock. He’d a mind to go down the other side but what he saw made him lightheaded and almost took his breath away. All the world seemed spread out here in a smoky pastoral dreaminessVast umber fields rolling gracefully away and tangled bluegray forests and far below the treetops the yellowgreen river snaking through the pines. He studied his position critically. There was a ledge jutting out forty or fifty feet below him, and he thought with care he could make that. Beyond it he just didn’t know.

  He looked back down the front slope. He couldn’t see Sutter, and somehow that was worse: he could be anywhere, plastered chameleonlike against the stone creeping toward him. He might lie up here and kill Sutter and he might not. He didn’t even know for sure if he could kill him. Sutter might even get close enough to do some killing himself before he even saw him. He kept thinking of the pictures. Whatever happened to him, Sutter would never know where the pictures were.

  He crept backward crablike to the edge of the table and turned and peered into the abyss again. A few dwarf cedars grown twisted and tortured by the perpetual wind. The hell with it, he thought. If I got to do it, then I got to do it. With the rifle clutched onehanded he began a hunkered halfslide in a hail of small rocks scuttling away before him toward a halfgrown cedar. When he reached it he paused a moment, clutching it to him and trying not to look at the dizzying landscape below. It was a long way down and he was already seeing the folly of what he’d done but it was too late now to go back. He slid on before he could delay further and the next sapling he grasped came out of the earth roots and all and he was clutching bothhanded at the limestone for purchase with the rifle clattering away somewhere below him. A wristsize pine he managed to grasp held, and he clung to it a moment in giddy relief. He could feel icy sweat creeping down hisribcage and his heart wouldn’t quit pounding. He slid onto the ledge. The rifle had ended cocked stock upward against a boulder and if it was damaged he couldn’t tell by looking.

  He couldn’t have known from above but the bluff fell away under the ledge convex for fifteen or twenty feet then dropped vertically to the riverbank and below him were still the tops of trees. He looked down the front side into windy space and the yellow river was clocking along far enough below him that he didn’t want to think about it. He couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid: he’d taken the chance of falling to his death to get to a place completely bare of cover that he couldn’t get away from.

  All he had to do was wait until Sutter appeared on the rim and shoot him. He sat hunkered with the gun in his lap while the day waned. Light gathered in the west above the timbered hills and the sky went red and gold as the rest of the world darkened incrementally as if all the light there was were gathering there and draining off the rim of the world.

  He was watching the rim when Sutter appeared: first his hat, then his head and arm and the rifle barrel so quick he wasn’t prepared for it, and a bullet rang on stone so near that splintered rock showered his cheek and he could feel blood. He backpedaled wildly away when Sutter fired again and threw up the rifle toward Sutter and when he tried to squeeze the trigger he could not. The trigger was locked in some manner and he stood staring at it as if it had turned in his hands like a serpent. He looked about in horror: there was nowhere at all to hide. He backed against the bluff for a running start and ran to the ledge and kept running, leaping as far as he could into space, brandishing the impotent rifle aloft, and above him he could hear Sutter’s wild cry elongated anddistorted like a garbled electronic shriek. He turned in midair and there was a graybrown frieze of stone and trees rushing dizzily upward and stark black cedars going shapeless with speed. He hit the water feet first and shot all the way under, turning in the swift current and immediately fighting for the surface. He felt the branches of a submerged tree rake across him and for a moment snare him, then the yellow current sucked him downstream. He was aware of the hot aching in his lungs. He surfaced in an explosion of spray, gasping for air. He was on his back bearing downstream and when he’d wiped the water from his eyes the first thing he saw was the
bluff. It was diminishing rapidly but Sutter was silhouetted against the pale sky, fist aloft and dark and motionless as crude sculpture from obsidian. Or yet some baleful god remonstrating with a world he’d created that would not do his bidding.

  He drifted downstream as far as he could stand the cold water and where the river shoaled and grew shallow enough he waded out. Like a beast driven to earth by the dogs of hunters he sought deeper woods. From old leached stumps he kicked out of the earth he built an enormous fire and hunkered before it shivering. The fire roared and great showers of sparks went cascading upward but he just piled on more wood. There was a cold measure of comfort in knowing where Sutter was tonight, and unless he was taking the express as Tyler had there was no way he was getting here. Wherever here was. He didn’t even suspect where he was. He was deep in the heart of the Harrikin and he was hopelessly and desperately lost and the walls of the night were drawing in about him.

  It is true this world holds mysteries you do not want to know. Visions that would steal the very light from your eyes and leave them sightless. The drawer opened on its oiled rollers without a sound. She lay quite composed with her arms at her side. Legs together, eyes open. Breece’d combed and curled her hair in a becoming way she hadn’t worn it in life and at her left temple he’d placed a white gardenia. There was another woven into the darker triangle of her maidenhair, and he studied it critically with the eye of an artist and made some small adjustment. Her mouth was slightly open, and he could see the white line of her teeth. Her pale breasts pooled like flowers of melting wax in the cool blue fluorescence. Sweet gutter angel, just far enough past redemption to make it worth his while.