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

  There must be three or four thousand dollars there.

  Four thousand and eighty dollars.

  Since you had this money you could have just paid the note and saved everybody a lot of trouble.

  The girl had the checks spread out and was holding them beneath her chin in the manner of an oriental fan. It’s no trouble to me, she said, giving him a sly smile above the fan. Besides, I knew if I waited you’d be coming to get it. He didn’t want to sell it anyway, and I knew he’d send you instead of coming himself.

  Well let’s decide something one way or another. No offense, but I’m freezing my butt off in here, and there’s a heater in my truck.

  If I’m going to Florida I don’t even need it. Over a thousand dollars is a lot of money for a TV I don’t even need.

  Suit yourself, Crosswaithe said. It’s all the same to me. I suspect this might be my last day in the TV hauling business anyway.

  I thought you looked like a man with a bridge on fire, she said.

  BY TWO O’CLOCK they had the checks cashed and were sitting in a booth in Big Mama’s drinking long-necked bottles of Coors. The check cashing had taken place without their being set upon by federal agents as he’d secretly expected, Crosswaithe sitting in the truck keeping the motor running like the driver of a getaway car, watching the frozen streets and wondering how he knew there was something peculiarly amiss about the money. Something in her manner, some kind of bad news that just radiated off her. Or maybe Crosswaithe just had his radar turned up too high: for days he had divined machinations behind the curtains, tugs on the strings that controlled him, and he had to be on the road. Somewhere his name was being affixed to papers that needed only the serving to alter his life forever, and even the low-grade heat from the four thousand eighty dollars in his left front pocket did nothing to comfort him.

  Beyond the rain-streaked window in the bar the day had gone gray and desolate. The sky had smoothed to uniform metallic gray and a small cold rain fell, a few grains of sleet rattled off the glass like shot. A flake of snow, listing in the wind and expiring to a pale transparency on the warm glass. There was an enormous coal heater in the middle of the room and from time to time one of the orange-clad deer hunters that peopled Big Mama’s would stoke it from a scuttle and with an iron poker roil sparks from its depths that snapped in the air like static electricity.

  The girl’s name was Carmie and everyone seemed to know her. She seemed a great favorite here. Everyone bought her a beer and asked her if her old man had ever showed up and wanted to know if she was going to the dance at Goblin’s Knob.

  What’s Goblin’s Knob? Crosswaithe asked.

  A beer joint over on the Wayne County line. It’s a real mean place, they’re always having knockdown dragouts over there. Knifings. A fellow was shot and killed over there a week or two ago. I was thinking we might go over there tonight.

  And then again we might not, Crosswaithe said.

  It always amazed him and scared him a little how easily he fell into the way of things. For seven years he had walked what he considered the straight and narrow, a sober member of the business community, an apprentice mover and shaker. Yet it felt perfectly normal to be drinking Coors in a place called Big Mama’s with four thousand dollars in his pocket and a young girl sitting so close he could feel the heat of her thigh and whose nipples printed indelibly not only against the fabric of her pullover but on some level of Crosswaithe’s consciousness as well.

  She kept talking about Florida as if their heading out there was a foregone conclusion and Crosswaithe did nothing to deter her. Part of it was the attraction of a world drenched in Technicolor, green palm trees and white sand and blue water: he felt stalemated by this monochromatic world of bleak winter trees, as if he’d been here too long, absorbed all the life and color out of the landscape.

  There’s something that has to be done before we can go to Florida or anywhere else, she said.

  Crosswaithe waited.

  She had been making on the red Formica tabletop a series of interlocking rings with the wet bottom of her beer bottle and now sat studying the pattern she’d made as if something of great significance was encoded there.

  Daddy’s dead, she said.

  Well, I’m sorry your father died but I don’t see what it has to do with leaving. Seems to me that would be just one less thing keeping you here.

  She was silent a time. I just can’t have anybody finding him, she finally said. She was peering intently, almost hypnotically into Crosswaithe’s eyes, and he divined that truth from her would vary moment to moment, and there was something so familiar in her manner that for a dizzy moment it was like looking into a mirror and seeing his reflection cast back at him smooth and young and marvelously regendered.

  I went to see about him one morning and he was just stiff and dead. Just I guess died in his sleep and never made a sound. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have any money. Daddy kept all the money and he ran through it as fast as he got it. I took out running toward the highway to find help. Then I stopped. I sat down by the side of the road and thought it over.

  You thought what over?

  It was the thirtieth of the month. If I waited three more days there’d be a check in the mailbox for six hundred and eighty dollars. IfI told anybody there’d be death certificates and funerals and all that and the government would just keep the check. I thought about it from every angle and it just didn’t seem like I had a choice.

  If you considered all those angles it must have occurred to you that sooner or later they might lock your ass up.

  Of course it did.

  And it also might have occurred to you that at some point six hundred and eighty dollars would become thirteen hundred and sixty.

  That too.

  Crosswaithe lit a cigarette he didn’t want. There was already a blue shifting haze to the room like battlefield smoke and the air had become hot and close.

  Just what month are we talking about here?

  The thirtieth of June, Carmie said.

  Crosswaithe was silent a time. He sat staring out the window past the gravel parking lot. Bare winter trees, bleak fading horizons folding away to blue transparency. It had begun to snow, a few flakes then more, drifting toward the window almost horizontally in the heavy wind. He rose and dropped the cigarette into an empty beer bottle and started pulling on his coat.

  Billy, she said.

  What?

  It’s not what you think.

  Probably not, Crosswaithe said.

  He went out the front door and stood with his hands in his pockets. The day had turned very cold. Snow snaked across the parking lot in shifting windrows. He felt a little drunk. He’d had a few beers and more of the old holethroated alchemist’s potion than he wanted to think about and he wasn’t used to it.

  He was standing on the doorstep staring at a dead deer in the bed of someone’s pickup truck when she came out the door behind him. The deer had blood matted in its hair and its eyes were open. The eyes had gone dull and snowflakes lay on them without melting and when they reminded him of Claire’s eyes behind their blue bird’s lids he was seized with a sourceless dread, an almost palpable malaise that cut to the core of his being. The Grim Reaper had leaned to him face to face and laid a hand to each of his shoulders and kissed him hard on the mouth, he could smell the carrion breath and taste graveyard dirt on his tongue. He suddenly saw that all his youthful optimism was long gone, that his time had come and gone to waste. That things were not all right and would probably not be all right again.

  I’ve had days when I could have raised that deer from the dead like Lazarus, he told the girl.

  She linked an arm through his and stood hunched in her thin coat. The wind spun snow into her dark hair. She looked very young. Crosswaithe abruptly realized that she might be the very last one, the last young girl who would stand arm in arm with him with her head leaned against his shoulder. He could smell her hair.

  Have you ever drank a strawber
ry daiquiri? she asked him.

  I don’t think so. His breath smoked in the cold air.

  What’s in them?

  Probably strawberries and some ofthat stuff your daddy made out of old car radiators.

  We could be in Key West lying on the hot sand drinking them, she said.

  We could be up at Brushy Mountain cranking out Tennessee license plates on a punch press, Crosswaithe said. I know where this conversation is going and you can just forget it.

  When I was fourteen or fifteen Daddy used to make me go sit with these old men he was playing poker with. Fat old men in overalls with their tobacco money folded up in the bib pockets and their gut full of beer and Daddy’s whiskey. They stank, I can still smell them. They smelled like snuff and sweat and they all had black greasy dirt under their fingernails. I’d sit and play up to them while Daddy dealt himself aces off the bottom of the deck. When I was sixteen he sold me to a cattle farmer from Flatwoods. I was supposed to be a cherry but Daddy had the last laugh there. What do you think about that?

  I don’t think about it at all, Crosswaithe said. I’m not a social worker. And I’m for goddamned sure not an undertaker.

  But you do begin to see why I’m not all tore up about his dying, don’t you? They owed me that money for taking care of him. Somebody did. For changing all those dirty bedclothes and putting up with him till he died. I was owed. Do you see?

  I might if I believed any of it, he said.

  A pickup truck pulled into the parking lot and a short pudgy man in a denim jumper got out of it. He stood for a time behind Crosswaithe’s truck staring at the lashed-down television set. Finally he turned and came on toward the steps.

  Hey Carmie.

  Hey Chessor.

  Whose big TV is that? The man had on a checked cap with huge earflaps and the flaps stood out to the side like a dog’s ears. He seemed a little drunk.

  It’s mine, Crosswaithe said.

  I need me one like that. Where’d you get it?

  I found it where it lost off a truck, Crosswaithe said.

  Was there just the one?

  Crosswaithe stood and listened to the buzz of alcohol in his head. To the remorseless ticking of a clock that had commenced somewhere inside him, and to a voice that whispered Let’s go, let’s go, what are we wasting time here for? He’d already decided to call Robin but the time wasn’t yet right.

  There was just the one, he said.

  I need me one. You wouldn’t want to sell it, would you?

  It might not even work, Crosswaithe said.

  Chessor turned to study it. Hell, I’d make a stock feeder out of it if it didn’t. Use it for something. My dope crop come in pretty well and I need to buy something.

  To Crosswaithe the conversation seemed to have turned surreal. He stood looking at his truck. It would probably start, he could just drive away, drive all the way across the country to San Francisco where Robin was.

  I better hang on to it, he said.

  When Chessor shrugged and went into Big Mama’s Carmie shoved a hand into his pocket and laced her fingers into his. Nobody would ever know, she said. Nobody would even think anything about it. Daddy was always just walking off and staying gone for weeks at a time. Everybody knew he had the cancer, he could just have died somewhere. All we’d have to do is get him up that hollow behind the house and bury him.

  Why the hell haven’t you already done it, then? If you needed help any one of these good old boys would have been glad to furnish it.

  I was waiting on you, she said.

  Like fate.

  What?

  You were just lying in wait for me like fate. All the time I was going to work and going home and living my dull little life all this was up around a bend. You were just killing time and waiting for me to come along and tote a dead man up a hollow and bury him.

  I guess. That’s a funny way to look at it.

  How would you look at it?

  I never really thought about it. It sort of happened a little at a time.

  Well where have you got him?

  She leaned her mouth closer to Crosswaithe’s ear though there was no one else around. Her breath was warm. He’s in the freezer, she said.

  Of course he is, Crosswaithe said. Í don’t know why I even bothered to ask.

  THE PICK WHEN IT STRUCK the frozen earth rang hollowly like steel on stone and sent a shock up Crosswaithe’s arms like high-voltage electricity. Hellfire, he said. He slung the pick off into the scrub brush the hollow was grown up with and took up the shovel. Beneath the black leaves the earth was just whorls of frozen stone and the shovel skittered across it. He leaned on the shovel a moment just feeling the cold and listening to the silence then hurled it into the woods after the pick and turned and walked back down the hollow.

  You can forget this digging business. The ground’s frozen hard as a rock.

  The girl seemed to be sorting through clothing, packing her choices and discarding the rest, occasionally drinking from a pint of orange vodka. Is there not any way you can get a hole dug? she asked. He’s not very big.

  Not unless you’ve got a stick or two of dynamite. Do you?

  No.

  You had this all planned out so well I thought you might have laid a few sticks by.

  No.

  I guess we could just burn the goddamned house, Crosswaithe said. At least we’d get warm.

  He fell silent a time, thinking. Finally he said, Did he have a gun, did he ever go hunting?

  He had a rifle he used to squirrel hunt with. Stillhunt. He’d sit right still under a tree until a squirrel came out.

  He’ll be still all right, Crosswaithe said. Go get the gun.

  He smashed a rickety ladderback chair and in a half-dark bedroom found an old wool Navy peacoat. He crammed the peacoat into the wood heater and laid the oak dowels and slats atop it and lit the coat with his cigarette lighter. He hunkered before it cupping his hands over a thin blue wavering flame. The hell with all this, Crosswaithe said.

  He crossed a windy dogtrot to a spare room used to store oddments of junk. His head struck a lowhanging lightbulb shrouded with a tin reflector and the fixture swung like a pendulum, streaking the walls with moving light. He opened the freezer. Jesus Christ, he said. The old man lay on his side half covered with plastic bags of green beans and blackberries. He was wrapped in some sort of stained swaddling and only the top of his head was visible. He had a blue-looking bald spot the size of a baseball iced over with silver frost. Crosswaithe shuddered. He took a deep breath. He grasped the old man where he judged his shoulder might be and jerked as hard as he could.

  Nothing happened. The old man wouldn’t budge. There was an inch or so of ice in the bottom of the freezer as if the whole mess had thawed and refrozen. He stood studying it. Finally he grasped the front edge of the freezer with both hands and tilted everything over onto the floor. There was a horrific din and bags of frozen food went skittering like bowling balls, Crosswaithe falling and scrambling up. When the freezer struck the floor there was an explosion of ice and the old man shot out like a tobogganist blown crazed and flashfrozen out of a snowbank. He went sailing across the room and fetched up hard against the opposite wall and careened off it with a hollow thud and lay spinning lazily on the linoleum.

  Crosswaithe went outside to the dogtrot and sat with the logs hard against his back. He lit a cigarette and sat smoking it. He tried to get his mind under some kind of control. To force order onto chaos. He tried to think of the girl, the curving line of a hip, a rosebud nipple on a field of white.

  The girl herself came out of the living room. What’s the matter? she asked.

  Get away from me, Crosswaithe said.

  It’s about dark, she said. We’re going to have to do something.

  Get away from me, he said again. She went back into the room and pulled the door to. Crosswaithe rose and spun the cigarette at the snowy dark and went back into the room. He grasped the old man by the edge of the twisted sheet and w
ent dragging him out of the room like some demented pulltoy.

  We’ve got to get this mess off him and clothes on him, Crosswaithe said. I’m going to take him back in the woods and lean him against a tree like he was out hunting and just died. It’d look kind of peculiar next spring if some hunter walked up on him and he was still wearing this bedsheet. And find him some shoes.

  He dragged a recliner next to the heater and propped the old man in it. The sides of the sheet-iron heater were cherry red. He went looking for something else to feed it. The old man crouched steaming and smoking in his chair and they sat before the fire watching him like necromancers trying to raise something from the dead.

  HE WENT WITH THE GUN hauling the old man along into deepening dark. Trees like runs of ink on a white page, a shifting curtain of billowing snow. His feet creaked on the snowy earth and everything gleamed with a faint phosphorescence. When he got to the head of the hollow he could drag the old man no farther. He was forced to wrap gun and body in the blanket and shoulder the whole loathsome package and climb pulling himself from sapling to sapling up the slope. Halfway up he paused to rest, leaned with the old man balanced on him like something dread that had sprung upon him out of the dark and just would not let go. He crouched listening to his ragged breathing, to the soft furtive sound of the woods filling up with snow.

  AT GOBLIN’S KNOB the parking lot blazed with light and there was the dull thump of a bass guitar feeding out of the white frame building like something you felt rather than heard. The graveled parking lot was filled with pickup trucks, with racked deer rifles in the back windows, and most of them festooned with tags with messages on them. Crosswaithe read a few of them on the way to the porch. This vehicle protected by Smith and Wesson. Ill give up my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers. Kill them all and let God sort them out.

  Let’s get the hell out of here, Crosswaithe said.

  Well just stay a minute. I need to get some more vodka for the road and I might see somebody I need to say goodbye to.

  I need to say goodbye to every son of a bitch I’ve met in this sorry godforsaken place, Crosswaithe said.