Sundown, Yellow Moon

by Larry Watson

  After shooting the senator, Raymond walked away calmly—his calm was a pleasant surprise—away from the scene, away from the man twitching and jerking and clutching at his throat as if his death couldn’t come fast enough and he wanted to choke off his last breath, away from the blood-smeared stone floor, away from the panicked onlookers who weren’t sure of the direction in which to run. At an even pace, Raymond exited the building through the south door, and not until he was negotiating the icy steps leading down from the building was he even aware that he was still holding the gun, and even then his awareness wasn’t of a weapon, an instrument with which he had just committed murder, but of weight, and that awareness led to another: He was a fugitive, fleeing a crime, and fugitives needed neither the extra weight nor evidence connecting them to the crime. No matter that Raymond Stoddard had no expectation of escape from capture or incrimination, as he walked away from the capitol, he instinctively lightened his load by flinging the gun away, and when it landed in a snowdrift, it had not only its weight to help it sink through the snow but also the heat it still held from Raymond’s hand and from being so recently fired.

  Raymond Stoddard’s Ford was not the only car leaving the capitol’s parking lot. As he waited at the stop sign for his turn to pull out onto Fourth Street, he counted five cars ahead of him, all employees who had probably heard—or heard about—the shooting and were driving away from the grounds as quickly as possible. Surprises kept multiplying. He was shocked and somewhat indignant that he could make his escape—although he hesitated to think of it in that way; after all, he had no hope, no desire, of a permanent getaway—with so little difficulty. Shouldn’t the entire capitol building and grounds be sealed as quickly as possible to prevent the assassin’s flight?

  He drove the few blocks to his home, and once he arrived there, he pulled into the driveway and automatically got out to open the garage door in order to park the car inside. Then he stopped himself, remembering that he needed the garage’s empty space for what lay ahead. He entered his house through the front door, walked unhesitatingly through the living room and kitchen, and exited into the garage.

  The tires were piled in a corner, waiting to be put on the Ford once winter’s snow and ice melted from the roads. Raymond reached inside the dark well of the heaped tires to bring out the coiled clothesline rope. He tested again the knot that he had tied days before. It held tight, as he knew it would. The knot was a variation of one he tied in fishing line when he was a boy. Seven twists and then circle through—it looked more like a noose than the actual noose would. He threaded the other end of the rope through the loop but left an open circle. When he reached up to gauge whether it was large enough to fit over his head, he knocked off his hat, which under the circumstances struck him as hilarious, the setup to a joke without a punch line: Did you hear the one about the man about to hang himself? He forgot to take off his hat. . . .

  Continuing to move quickly yet deliberately, Raymond unfolded the stepladder and climbed high enough to toss the rope over a crossbeam, a process he repeated a few times. He wanted to make certain the rope wouldn’t slide from side to side. The other end of the rope he anchored by tying it to one of the legs of a built-in workbench. With the stepladder still in place he brought the tires over and stacked them under the knotted rope, the height of which had to be adjusted one more time. The ladder would enable him to climb up to the top of the pile of tires. He’d loop the rope around his neck—making sure to take off his hat first!—and then he could push the ladder and send it crashing to the floor. He’d have to balance only long enough to kick the tires out from under him, and only two would have to fall away to guarantee that his decision would be irrevocable.

  Once all these preparations were in order, Raymond went back inside the house. He didn’t have a lot of time, but he could have one more cigarette and warm up a bit. Working in the garage had been almost as cold as it would have been to work outside. He sat down at the kitchen table. He took the typed confession from his pocket and put it under the ashtray. No need to remove his hat or overcoat. He wouldn’t be here long.

  One small matter was still plaguing him. Those failed attempts to write a suicide letter—had he thrown them all away? Raymond was sure he had. But had he only crumpled them up before tossing them into the wastebasket, or had he torn them to pieces? Had he emptied that basket into the garbage can in the garage? He thought he remembered taking those precautions, but if he hadn’t, someone could retrieve those sheets—some of them containing no more than a few words, others filled with clumsy crossed-out sentences that were supposed to explain his life and why he chose to end it as he did—smooth out the paper, decipher his scrawled handwriting, and believe they had the answer to Raymond Stoddard.

  Well. Let them try. If the papers were there, they were there. Raymond didn’t have the energy to walk down the stairs and climb back up again. Not when he still had those ladder steps to negotiate. And now he heard the sirens that he had been listening for, though he couldn’t determine if they were moving toward him or if they were still speeding toward the capitol building. But if they weren’t coming his way yet, they would be soon.

  He wondered from how far away they could be heard. Or, put another way, how far his fame had already traveled. If Raymond could hear the sirens from his kitchen, certainly they could be heard in the homes of his neighbors on Keogh Street. People in the older houses and apartments in the center of the city could probably hear them. And farther away? Could they hear the sirens in those expensive homes on the western hills? In the run-down houses south of the tracks? In the offices of his brother-in-law’s construction company out on Airport Road—could they hear them there? In the Frontier bar on Main Avenue? His wife and son—could they hear them? And was everyone within earshot asking, as people so often do at the sound of a siren, what’s happening? What’s wrong? Raymond hoped they were heard everywhere and that to every ear they would inspire the same questions, not just today but every day hereafter. What happened? What went wrong?

  He had just lit his second Old Gold when Raymond heard the front door open. He had an impulse—an absurd, ridiculous, impossible impulse—to rush to the garage to complete his mission before Alma or Gene—no one else, not even the police, would enter without knocking, ringing the bell, or shouting their presence—discovered him, but then Raymond relaxed. He still didn’t have to hurry. Not yet. The garage was his domain; he could walk out there at anytime and neither his wife nor his son would have any curiosity about what he might be doing out there on a winter’s day.

  It was his son, his son and his friend who lived up the street, their faces red and their noses running from their walk home from school. Before Gene could ask his father why he was sitting at the kitchen table rather than at his desk in the capitol, Raymond put a question to his son. “Where’s your mother?”

  “I’m pretty sure she works at the church library on Wednesdays.”

  Raymond nodded. “Wednesday. That’s right. It’s Wednesday.” In his mind he added to the day a calendar notation, calculating the date that would for years after bear his mark and name more than his birthday ever had. “What time will she—”

  But Gene was already turned to the refrigerator, reaching inside for the milk he would swig from the bottle. The neighbor kid, however, kept watching Raymond, and with the gaze of someone who doesn’t recognize what his gaze fixes upon.

  And perhaps Raymond did look different. He was, after all, someone he hadn’t been the last time these two young men had seen him. Why wouldn’t his appearance be altered—what identity had more strength and power than “murderer”? For that matter, Raymond hadn’t, he realized, looked at himself since he’d left the capitol. Perhaps before he went into the garage he would seek out a mirror for a quick self-inspection, just to see if he could see what this kid saw. Then again, why bother? He had never known who he was better than at this moment.

  He tilted his hat back and took a last drag on his cigarette. Look a
ll you like, kid; Raymond Stoddard will never be anything but a mystery to you.

  Since my mother’s death, and instead of those regular visits to her and my hometown, I’ve been making a very different journey. As a result of my friendship with a French editor, I’m able to live for a few weeks in Paris. His apartment is in the Latin Quarter, my Montana home is near a number of first-class trout streams, and because he is a fanatic fly fisherman, he is more than happy to swap residences every summer.

  His apartment, in a building dating to the seventeenth century, has much to recommend it. Rue Xavier Privas is a quiet street, but only steps from the Seine, the Saint-Michel Metro stop, Notre Dame, and from wonderful bridge views. Boulevard St.-Germain is close enough that I hear those distinctive French police sirens regularly. Shakespeare & Company is nearby, and I browse its shelves frequently. Two or three evenings a week I eat dinner at Chez Pento, a wonderful tiny restaurant that has been feeding diners for over a hundred years. But those are the attractions that Jerome might list in a brochure if he were interested in subletting to any American. Only to me might he mention the slanted ceilings with their exposed beams . . . which remind me of the attic where Marie and I first made love. I can stand at the window, and though I am looking down at a cobbled courtyard where children play and my neighbors greet one another, those sights are not as poignantly real as the remembered image behind me. After lovemaking, Marie lies unashamedly naked on our makeshift mattress, and the late afternoon sun slants through the window, lighting her just so and revealing the sheen of perspiration that covers her from head to foot. She glistens. She shimmers. She shines. She glistens. She shimmers. She shone, shone, shone. . . .

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For their advice and support I am deeply grateful to my agent, Ralph Vicinanza, and my editor, Bruce Tracy. I am fortunate indeed to work with these consummate professionals and to count them as friends. For the information and insights they provided about the past, heartfelt thanks to Bruce and Barb Evanson and to Mark Miller. Special thanks to Eben Weiss and Bara MacNeill. Thanks also to Jennifer Hershey, Laura Ford, Beth Pearson, Ryan Doherty, and everyone else at Random House for their expertise and enthusiasm. Finally, for her love and inspiration I owe a debt that can’t be repaid to my wife, Susan, who is present on every page of this novel.

  Sundown,

  Yellow

  Moon

  LARRY WATSON

  A Reader’s Guide

  A CONVERSATION WITH LARRY WATSON

  Random House Reader’s Circle: You tell the story through a timid and unnamed narrator. Was he modeled after anyone? At times he is likeable, yet ultimately he betrays his best friend. What relationship did you have with the narrator while writing? How do you think the reader should react to his actions?

  Larry Watson: I’m strongly tempted to duck this question, because the narrator—timid and traitorous, as the question suggests—is based on me. We grew up in similar neighborhoods in Bismarck, North Dakota. We both lived within view of the state capitol building, and in childhood came to know that distinctive structure well. We both graduated from Bismarck High School. (He’s from the class of 1963; I’m from 1965.) We both attended the University of North Dakota, and we both became fiction writers. Each of us in adolescence fell in love with a girl who had been dating our best friend. In fact, the narrator is one of two characters in the novel with a real-life counterpart. Anyone who knew my wife, Susan, when she was younger (or, for that matter, who knows her now) will almost certainly identify her as the model for Marie Ryan. I seldom base my characters so closely on people from life, but these two characters in Sundown, Yellow Moon are exceptions.

  I suppose I could console myself because the question also applies the word “likeable” to the narrator, but I’ve already read reviews, met with book clubs, and heard from readers who have said they find the narrator unlikeable. I can live with those opinions, and I understand why readers respond to the narrator in that way. He lives too much in his head and too much in the past. He is calculating and self-absorbed. But he is also punished for his failings. The man who looks back on his life and tells this story—these stories—is haunted and anguished. I, of course, escaped his unhappy condition. I never broke up with my Marie Ryan; my wife and I have been happily married for more than forty years. There are other essential differences. I never had a neighbor who was an assassin and committed suicide, or had a friend who was a murderer’s son, and no matter the extent to which fictional characters might be based on real people, they can’t be the same people when their experiences are different.

  This is a long way of saying that the narrator is and isn’t me. Even when a writer works from the actual, the very act of writing produces an aesthetic and an emotional distance that guarantees the written version will differ from its real-life analogue. The narrator and I also share a reverence for the writer William Maxwell who wrote in So Long, See You Tomorrow that “in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.” That strikes me as a little strong, since “lie” to me suggests an intent to deceive. It would be more accurate, in my view, to say that our memory always lies to us. But then fiction is a lie to get at the truth.

  RHRC: The entire town of Bismarck, North Dakota, becomes obsessed with Raymond’s murder and suicide and, of course, his motives. You grew up in Bismarck. Was it how you portrayed it in the book? Was there an instance in your youth that inspired this story? What is it about this landscape that you wanted to bring to the reader?

  LW: The correlation between the Bismarck of the novel and the “real” Bismarck is similar to the correlation between the narrator and me. I wrote about a place that resembled a real place but whose true existence was in my imagination. For the purposes of the novel I altered a few facts about the city, and I’m sure my memory altered others. Nevertheless, the real Bismarck of the early 1960s was, I believe, comparable to the Bismarck of the novel in that they were both fairly conservative, largely middle class, and somewhat repressed homogeneous communities, removed in many respects from the rest of the nation by climate and geography. One of the ironies of the novel is that Bismarck is brought out of its isolation and anonymity by an act of violence. There have been, unfortunately, too many real-life instances of communities made famous, however briefly, by the violence that has occurred within their borders. In that regard, it should be noted that Sundown, Yellow Moon takes place not only in a small city on the northern plains but also in America. From the political assassinations of the 1960s to last year’s insane slaughter on the Virginia Tech campus, Americans have had event after gruesome, grievous event that have forced us to ask again and again who we are as a people and why we live in such a culture of violence.

  RHRC: First loves, first lovers, childhood friendships, and people’s past relationships are big themes in this book. How do you think each relationship affects the next? Which relationship in the story was primary for you? Which one did you feel contained the crux of the story?

  LW: I do believe in the power and durability of first love, but whether that early relationship lasts, as my wife’s and mine has, or doesn’t, it’s still capable of forming a template that many people apply to subsequent relationships. These people spend a good part of their lives seeking to find a partner with whom they can recapture the passion, purity, and intensity of a youthful love affair. This is the predicament of the narrator of Sundown, Yellow Moon. Because of that, I regard his relationship with Marie Ryan as the crux of the story. To the end of his days the narrator will long for something he once had but can never have again. And he knows it.

  RHRC: Raymond Stoddard’s motives for the murder of Monty Burnham and his suicide are never revealed. Do you believe there is a single motive? Did you write it with a clear answer in mind? The protagonist seems to believe it was jealousy. Do you agree? Do crimes always need motives?

  LW: I didn’t write Sundown, Yellow Moon with an answer in mind as to Raymond Stoddard’s motive. I never doubted that he would have one, o
r more than one, but the desire to know what is ultimately unknowable—what was going on Raymond Stoddard’s heart and mind—obsesses not just the narrator but other characters in the novel.

  Jealousy is plausible as a motive, but of course, the narrator is drawn to that as an explanation because he himself is prone to jealousy. I had hoped that one of the ways readers would participate in the novel would be through examining their own personalities and by speculating on how that examination would lead them toward certain explanations. But it would be a brave, introspective reader willing to do that.

  Yes, I believe that crimes always have motives, no matter how irrational, crazed, twisted, or inadequate they may be.

  RHRC: Sundown, Yellow Moon contains many short stories written by the protagonist, who is a writer himself. How did you come up with the idea?

  LW: Almost immediately after the murder and suicide, the narrator struggles to comprehend what has happened. Such acts are beyond puzzling; they’re inexplicable. But that doesn’t stop people from trying to understand and explain them. Reason won’t provide answers, so the narrator tries to imagine his way into lives that are otherwise closed to him. At first this activity takes place only in his mind, but that signals the beginning of his life as a writer. It made sense to me that he would continue to do that throughout his life, though, as for any artist, at some point the aesthetic demands of making a good art object—a short story, in this case—takes precedence over the personal stimulus that initially moved him toward making that object in the first place. Artists are, in my opinion, people finally more interested in making than knowing. The narrator of Sundown, Yellow Moon has a dramatic past that provides him with all the raw material he needs for a lifetime of stories. I thought that, by including his stories in the text, readers would be able to see how his imaginative mind works. Do we know him any better through reading those stories? I believe we do.