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

Standing by Peaceful Waters

IN BENDER’S DREAM the Stag came full tilt out of a thin stand of scrub blackjack and leapt the chain-link fence. Its hooves barely cleared the top strand of wire. There was yet a thin skift of snow on the ground melted and refrozen and when the stag’s hooves struck they slid and it went momentarily to its knees. It was up instantly but the wolf was already there, morphing yellow-eyed and immediate out of the tall broom sedge and moving close and swift along the ground like winter smoke. Muscles bunched to bolt the stag quartered but the wolf was there before it. The stag’s eyes were huge and its breath steamed bluely in the cold moonlight.

The moon cleared the raft of clouds it had shuttled before it and everything in Bender’s vision went varying shades of black and silver. The stag lowered its head as the wolf bore in as if it would disembowel it with its antlers but the wolf feinted sidewise and leapt and opened a gash in the stag’s side and coiled back on itself to leap again and when the stag quartered this time its hooves splayed out on the ice and out of balance it took the full weight of the leaping wolf with its chest. When the wolf’s snout burrowed into the stag’s throat the spray of blood was black in the moonlight and was as stark on the snow as bas-relief shadows.

Feeding the wolf looked up at the moon. Its face and ruff were dark with blood and the moon was no moon Bender was familiar with, so close he could have tiptoed and touched it, as if whatever laws governing the distance it kept no longer applied so that it was settling slowly toward the surface of the earth.

BENDER HAD BEGUN to think he lived in a countryside so beleaguered and desolate even the dead were fleeing it. The last truck went out at dusk and he was there by the fence to see it go, hands in his hip pockets and no expression at all on his face. The flatbed truck pulled a lowboy carrying a backhoe secured by chains and the backhoe shifted in its moorings when the truck started down the grade toward the main road, the dead or whatever dust remained of them hidden decorously under tarpaulins lashed to the truck through eyelets in the canvas, and under the taut canvas oblong shapes like archetypes out of some primal memory.

There were men holding shovels and picks squatted about the lowboy and some studied Bender as they went out but one or two raised their hands in greeting or dismissal and one young man with shoulder-length blond hair beneath a yellow hardhat grinned and gave him a thumbs-up signal. Bender raised an arm in an oddly formal gesture and watched them go.

He stood by the fence the length of time it took him to smoke a cigarette and by the time he was finished with it he could hear the truck far off on the highway, gearing down for the hills ringing the town.

It was scarcely a foot from Bender’s garden fence to the government’s chain-link fence and contrasted with it Bender’s looked like a child’s mock-up of a fence, something Jesse might have built. Chain-link wire was stretched taut on steel posts and the sign affixed to it had an authoritative look and seemed to have been positioned for Bender’s eyes alone, KEEP OUT, the sign said. PROPERTY OF THE US GOVERNMENT. TRESPASSING IS PROHIBITED AND VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

Bender climbed the woven-wire fence and stepped onto a locust post and grasped the top of the government s fence and swung one leg over it. The other. He balanced momentarily then dropped onto the other side.

He felt the sensation he always felt when he crossed the property line, as if he had swung from one dimension to another. Here the earth lay in ruins. Scraped raw and bloody by the blades of bulldozers, trees dozed into long curving windrows and burned. They burned for days, for weeks, and smoke still rose in columns like council fires and hot ash drifted in the unwinded twilight.

He followed the roadway back the way the truck had come. The road steadily descended and as far as he could see the world was laid to waste. To his left hand lay the Indian mounds the archaeologists from Knoxville had disinterred and on his right he could see the concrete pylons of the dam rising out of the earth and he judged it near completion. Time was getting away from him and he suspected that the government’s patience was wellnigh exhausted.

All day the trucks hauled stone for the riprap and all day the earthmovers took on earth here and disgorged it there and packers wore the earth hard as stone. Enormous armies of machinery toiled over the earth like insects and somewhere out there in the mauve dusk the river, not yet tamed, its course not yet altered, rolled on toward the sea the way it had always done.

Here Bender stood. His grandfather had long ago deeded this land to the church but it did not belong to the church now. The cemetery lay on a rise not yet leveled and his feet remembered the path and he walked a path not even here anymore, that had been hauled away for backfill. He wandered this vacant cemetery like a visitor come to call and there’s no one home.

Crude oblong holes dug deeply into the earth. Rectangles of dark leaking upward from some ultimate dark. Bits of wormscored wood, shards of bones, nameless dross. The stones still stood amidst the savaged sassafras trunks, leaning weather-thinned tablets and carved marble angels with folded wings and graven names and dates. Some of the names said Bender.

He sat there for a time smoking while the dusk deepened and nightbirds began to call to him out of the purple dusk. When he rose he looked instinctively to where the church had stood as if to see if it had been miraculously restored but of course there was no church nor anything at all that he recognized anymore.

I EXPECT WE NEED TO TALK, Lynn told him.

I expect we do, Bender said. He’d been watching her and he always knew when she thought they needed to talk.

Did you know old man Liverett took their offer?

No.

I guess you’re the last one left now.

I’ve always been the last one left, Bender said.

They ate supper in silence and Bender gathered up the dishes and washed them while Lynn played with Jesse. He washed the dishes as if this simple act might placate her, might be so far-reaching as to placate the very government that was stirring itself to move against him.

They sat on the porch in the swing awhile. The weathered wood seemed somehow to draw out what coolness the dusk held. Everything about the house was wood from the sills to the shingles, cypress and chestnut Bender’s grandfather had cut and hauled to the sawmill in a mule-drawn wagon. He had built the house himself and time had settled it and silvered the wood until the house seemed something organic that had just grown out of the earth, something that had always been there and that man had had nothing to do with. Honeysuckle grew all around the house and its vines climbed nigh to the roof itself. Full dark was falling and was intensifying the scent of the blossoms until the air felt drugged, some sweet narcotic that had sung in Bender’s blood all his days.

His three-year-old son Jesse was dozing on his lap with his blond curls against Bender’s chest and Bender’s arms loosely clasped about his waist. The boy was a wonder to Bender. Even the small things about him, the way his face looked subtly different when the light falling on it altered, as if here was an entirely different Jesse. Bender loved him so it scared him sometimes, and not because Jesse was some scaled-down and newly minted edition of Bender but a new and separate individual, innocent and unmarked as yet by the world.

He must have tightened his grip more than he thought for the child awoke and slid down Bender’s legs to the porch floor. Go shoot some wolves, he said sleepily.

Well all right, Bender said. Let’s waste some of them suckers. He figured the game would last awhile, perhaps even until Lynn was asleep, postponing the need to talk.

He did not even suspect where Jesse had come up with the game but it might have been from something he had seen on television or something he had heard someone say. They had been playing it two or three months and lately it had become every night’s ritual.

All the game required was two black plastic popguns and Bender and his son crouched peering through the sliding glass door into the backyard. Past the flagstone patio and where the porch light tended away into darkness the woods began and this was where the wolves came from. Jesse would point one out and Bender would pretend to see it and shoot it and then Jesse would kill one. There, he’d say, raising the rifle and sighting down its barrel: bang. Sometimes they would kill wolves for upwards of half an hour before Jesse wearied of the game, sometimes only one or two each would suffice. One of the rules seemed to be that they both had to kill the same number of wolves.

Tonight he was sleepy and grew bored with the game early. When he was asleep in his room and Lynn was undressing for bed she said:

What are we going to do?

Wait it out a few more days.

We can’t wait it out. We’ve gone as far as we can go. Something has got to be done.

Bender was standing by the window with an outspread palm on the frame and he was just looking out into the darkness. The EPA is going to shut the goddamned thing down and you know it.

I don’t know any such thing. Nothing is going to shut it down. Nothing. All this is going to be underwater and I don’t know why you can’t see that.

Bender watched the dark and thought about that awhile. He thought about the slow seep of water rising, first his shoe soles dampening and the summer dust going to mud and the water cascading over the lips of the barren graves and rising more until the mimosa fronds trailed in the deep like seaweed. The dam looked to be at least eighty feet in the air and Bender guessed the water would rise for days, for weeks, who knew.

That goddamned fish, Bender said.

What?

I was thinking about that goddamned fish.

Just come on to bed, David.

Bender got into bed with all his clothes on and then noticed his shoes and got back up and pulled off his shoes and socks and lay back down with his hands clasped behind his head. She touched his face, let her arm rest across his chest. David, she said, baby, I know what all this means to you, but—

Bender lay there not listening. Nobody knew what all this meant. He felt an enormous sorrow for the inadequacy of everything. For everything that was said, for everything that was done. There in the dark Lynn kissed his throat and tried to draw him to her. She was trying to comfort him in the only way she knew but dread lay in him heavy as a stone and Bender would not be comforted.

SOMETIME IN THE NIGHT Bender awoke and lay staring at the ceiling above him and thought about the fish. There for a while he had had high hopes for the fish.

He had first heard of it months ago. He had been keeping his eyes open and he had known something was up when he had seen a news crew from a Nashville television station interviewing folks wearing hardhats over by the main gate. Then a night or two later he had seen the fish itself on the evening news being discussed by an earnest-looking young man in a pith helmet. The fish was about as ugly a thing as Bender had ever seen, angular and goggle-eyed and atavistic as something which had simply decided not to evolve. It was called a snail darter and the interesting thing about it was that it seemed to thrive nowhere in the known universe save in the riverbed not three miles from Bender’s farm.

Bender was exultant. Salvation was at hand. It did not even strike him as ironic that all his efforts had been impotent but that a fish as ugly and apparently useless as the snail darter had a branch of the federal government working night and day to save its home. He was more than willing to just go along for the ride. The man in the pith helmet said that the snail darter was an endangered species. Endangered himself Bender felt more than a passing empathy with it.

AT MIDMORNING a sheriff’s department car from the town of Ackerman’s Field pulled up Bender’s driveway towing a wake of dust fine as talcum. Bender went out to see. He’d come to dread cop cars, mailmen, ringing telephones.

It was the sheriff himself. Bellwether stood smoothing the wrinkles out of his khaki trousers and adjusting the pistol on his hip.

We’re all peaceable here, Bender said. You won’t need that.

I was just driving out to see what was going on out here, Bellwether said. I ain’t been out in this neighborhood in no telling when.

You can hear what’s going on, Bender said. He realized that he’d lived with noise so long he’d become accustomed to it. It was like the low hum of a swarm of distant bees.

Bellwether stood in an attitude of listening. The dull drone of who knew how many kinds of heavy machinery; to the south they could see the dust they stirred hanging in a shifting cloud.

They do make a hell of a racket, don’t they? Busy as little beavers.

All day long.

I figured you to be gone. Thought I’d see.

Well. I’m not.

I see you ain’t. You hear about old man Liverett coming to terms with them?

Everybody keeps telling me about it.

The sheriff squatted in the earth yard. He tipped out a Camel and put it in his mouth and lit it and took a drag off it. He exhaled and took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it in mild surprise. He crushed the fire out under a polished shoe and tossed the butt away. I’m trying to quit, he said, but I keep doing that out of habit.

Bender waited. He watched. The high sheriff took up a twig and began to draw meaningless hieroglyphs in the dust. Bender let me talk to you a minute, he said.

All right.

I’ve known your people all my life. You’ve known me all yours. Your mama and daddy was fine people, both of them. Paid their debts and minded their own business. The way you are your ownself. And I know this piece of land goes way back but don’t you think you’ve done about all you can do?

You’re telling it.

You’ve hired lawyers and fired, lawyers and hired more lawyers. You’ve tried to get injunctions and court orders and exemptions and about every kind of legal paper they make. I don’t know how much money you’ve spent and I don’t give a damn. It’s nothing to me. But I know you ain’t a rich man, and for what value you’ve got you might as well have stuck that money up a wild pig’s ass and hollered sooey. They’re going to build that dam. It’s for flood control and the government holds that the common good is more important than what one individual, you for example, has to say about it.

They’re going to shut the goddamned thing down, Bender exploded. That fish. That snail darter. It’s on the endangered species list and the EPA is not going to let it be destroyed.

Bellwether was shaking his head. There is just no way in hell, he said. Not in this lifetime. They’re going to finish it and cut the channel for the river and all this is going to be under a hundred feet of water. Are you by any chance building a boat in your backyard?

Bender didn’t say anything,

Now listen. You’ve got a wife and a kid and a good job teaching English out at the high school. Them boys of mine had you, they thought the world of you. You’ve got it made. Why do you want to piss it all away? Your wife and kid still here?

Yes.

You know they’ve offered you market value for this farm. Take it. There’s plenty of land. Buy some more.

Bender felt awkward and inarticulate the way he did every time this happened. He was continually called upon to explain himself and day by day it had grown harder so that by now there didn’t seem to be any words, the right phrases hadn’t been coined yet. It was easy to say buy more land but hard to explain this was all the land there was. This was all the land he had been born on and that had absorbed the lives of his ancestors. His dead parents’ voices rose and fell in measured cadence just out of hearing and their shades stood almost invisible in dark corners.

Bellwether stood up. Now his face looked curiously remote, and Bender divined that he was distancing himself from him. Bender’s folks were good folks and all that but the law was the law and the federal government was where the buck stopped.

I’d like to talk sense to you, Bellwether said. Sometimes a man in my position is called on to do things he might not want to do, but he’s got to do them anyway.

He climbed back into the cruiser and pulled the door to. I’ll see you, Bender, he said. But I hope for both our sakes it’s someplace else.

BENDER IN HIS OLD FORD truck drove through a countryside almost surreal in the degree of its devastation. As if some great war had been won or lost here. No soul seemed to have survived. He drove past shotgun shack and mansion alike, all empty, houses canted on their foundations by dozers, shells of houses gutted by fire, old tall chimneys standing solitary and regal like sentries left to guard something that wasn’t even there anymore.

The old man was sitting amidst the motley of plunder on his front porch like some gaunt-eyed dust bowl survivor. Ninety-five years old and he lived alone and did his own cooking and mowed the yard himself and until recently he had driven an old pickup truck homemade from a ’47 Studebaker. Liverett had outlived the ’47 Studebaker and all his children and a number of wives and all this outliving had begun to turn him bitter against things in general.

Come up, Bender, the old man said.

Bender sat on the doorstep. He hadn’t seen the old man for a while and age seemed finally to be catching up with him. His face seemed caved as if it were decaying internally and the skin stretched over the cheekbones looked nearly transparent. He went inside to fetch Bender a cup of coffee and now he seemed to move as carefully as if he conveyed something of incalculable value and marvelous fragility.

When Bender had taken a sip of his coffee he figured to work the conversation around to the government. Those home health people still bothering you? he asked. The old man was fiercely independent and for years he had waged a running battle with various agencies determined to take care of him.

I reckon they about give up on me, Liverett said. They send em out once and I run em off and next time it’ll be somebody else. They sent this little snip of a girl out here a week or two ago. Said she was new on the job. Purty little thing, big blue eyes, fine little titties. Said she was supposed to check my blood pressure and give me a bath. A bath? I said. Why I never heard of such a thing. A little snip of a girl givin a grown man a bath and him a stranger at that. Well Missy, I told her, I’ll tell you what. You let me give you one first and we might work up some kind of a deal.

Bender grinned weakly. In his later years the old man’s mind seemed to have turned to sex and in some manner locked there. Bender judged that were he stronger and more agile he might have turned into some kind of sex maniac.

I hear you let them beat you, Bender said. You finally knuckled under.

Is that what you hear? You heard wrong. What I heard was that I asked em a certain price and they finally met it.

You already sold?

Damn right. Wait here a minute. He got up and opened the screen door and went inside. Bender could hear him rummaging around inside the house. When the old man came back out he was carrying a paper bag, a grocery sack with the top folded down. He unfolded it and held it for Bender to peer into. Looky here, he said. Bender looked. Great God, he said. The sack was full of money. Neat stacks of bills as square and crisp as if some kind of machine had bundled them. They paid you in cash?

No. They wouldn’t. I had to carry the check to the bank and cash it. They raised Cain but I didn’t give em no selection. I wanted it with me. All of it. The notion might strike me to roll around in it.

What are you aiming to do with it?

I been studyin some on that. I’m goin out to Las Vegas, Nevada. I’m goin into one of them gamblin places they got and pick out the purtiest girl in the place. I’m goin to pay her just whatever it takes to dance naked on the table I’m sittin at.

Bender looked at the money again. I expect that would do it, he said.

I may get two of em dancin.

I meant really. What are you really going to do, Mr. Liverett?

The old man looked sharply at Bender and for a moment his eyes looked confused and disoriented. I’m damned if I know, he said, and Bender wished he’d left him his casinos and dancing girls.

What do you plan on doin, Bender?

Hang on as long as I can. I believe that fish is going to shut it down.

Not anymore it ain’t. Don’t you never watch the news? They found a bunch of them little son of a bitches down around Muscle Shoals, Alabama. In the Tennessee River. Then they found some more somers else. Seems they ain’t near as scarce as they thought they was. I look for em to find em in mudholes and everywhere else before they’re through. They may have to cut the river channel just to thin em out some.

Bender drained his coffee cup and set it carefully on the porch railing. He stood up and dusted off the seat of his pants. I got to get on, he said. You be careful with that money, Mr. Liverett.

I aim to. The old man arose as well. He stuck out a hand in a curiously formal gesture. I expect I won’t ever see you again, Bender.

I guess not. Bender took the hand. It was dry and papery and the bones felt light and hollow as bird’s bones.

I don’t know what you’re going to do out there in Nevada. You won’t know a soul

I don’t know a soul anymore anyway, the old man said. That’s all folks are good for. To die off on you.

GAUNT-EYED AND INTENSE Bender stepped out of the thick woods to see why the government truck had stopped in his driveway. The motor of the pickup was idling and the door was open and a young man in a white hardhat already had the sign in his left hand and a claw hammer in his right hand. He was holding tacks in his mouth.

I believe you’ve wandered onto private property here, Bender said.

The young man said something around the tacks Bender didn’t get.

Spit them out, Bender said. You won’t be using them on my property anyway.

The man palmed the tacks and stood holding them. I don’t believe I’m on private property. I was told this was government land, part of the dam project.

You were told wrong then.

They sent me up here to post all this property. I just do what I’m told.

If you do what you’re told then I’m telling you to get the hell off my land.

Interfering with the United States government can put a world of hurt on you. Have they not served you with eviction papers?

No.

Well they’re fixing to.

The man had the sign affixed against a utility pole and was positioning a tack when Bender closed on him. They struggled for a moment in the roadside ditch like drunken dancers. The government man’s hardhat fell off. Bender had him in a headlock and when he released him he crumpled. Bender wrenched the claw hammer out of his right hand and threw it as far as he could into the woods. The man’s left hand had made a fist over the tacks and he was pulling them out of the flesh of his palm.

Hellfire, the man said. His lip was bleeding and he was looking around for his hardhat. When he had found it and had it on he got into the truck and slammed the door. He rolled down the glass. I heard them talking about you, he said. You don’t watch it mighty close you’ll be in a place where the rooms got rubber walls.

Get off my property, Bender said.

THE WOLF HAD SLEPT out the day in a hazelnut thicket near the river and it was full dark before it came out and when it did it crept unbidden into Bender’s dreams. It came delicately down the tiers of limestone shelving to the riverbank and drank and angled across a cleared area toward the dam. This area was laid out with wooden stakes tied with garlands of red plastic but the wolf went on. Far across the manmade basin low thunder rumbled and on the western horizon lightning flickering a fierce staccato rose. By its photoelectric glare the scraped treeless world was as barren and alien as a moonscape.

The wolf paused and raised its head toward where the moon would be were it not overcast and when the horizon quaked and trembled again it increased its pace and by the time the first drops of rain came it was moving at a slow lope. It went down the limestone riprap with surefooted steps and crossed the concrete floor weaving between the rebar without diminishing its speed. It had a brief yellow-eyed glance for all these works of man but seemed to have no interest for it.

The wolf’s shaggy coat was wet now and the stag’s blood coagulated and matted began to melt in his ruff and his front was stained with spreading pink as if he were some jaunty tie-dyed wolf a child might create.

He went past the desecrated Indian mound where long ago men had laid their dead with solemnity and later other men had with like solemnity disinterred them and when it reached the chain-link fence it did not falter but turned at a right angle and ran along the fence until it came to a bulldozed pile of charred trees and scorched topsoil. It ran up the jumble of logs until it was almost at a level with the top of the fence and then it jumped. It landed in thick honeysuckle it had in past times wallowed into a lair and slowed its pace cautiously and followed its path through the sweet smell of honeysuckle into the wild nightshade that had taken Bender’s fallow garden.

From where it stood chest-deep in the tangle of nightshade it could see through the falling rain the yellow squares of light from the house and after a while it took shelter beneath the riot of honeysuckle and lay with its chin on its paws and watched the house.

♦ ♦ ♦

LYNN WAS TALKING but Bender had his eyes closed and he was not listening. His mind was occupied with thinking about the days before the dam project was even rumored and he realized that he and Lynn and Jesse had been living an idyllic life without even knowing it and that this life was as remote to him now as his childhood.

… taking him to my sister’s for a few days, were the first words he heard clearly.

He raised onto his elbows. What? he asked. He noticed with mild surprise that she had been crying.

Just until this is all settled one way or another. We can’t go on like this, this is like living in a motel. We can’t live in a motel the rest of our lives.

I don’t know as Hike the sound of any of this, Bender said.

I don’t know as we have a choice, she said. You won’t even talk about leaving. About taking the money and finding another place. It’s like we’re just sitting here waiting until the police pick us up and carry us across the property line. I don’t know what you plan to do. If you plan to do anything at all. You won’t talk anymore.

We’re a family, Bender said. Me and you and Jesse. Together we can do whatever we have to do. Split up and scattered we’re nothing, just three separate people.

A family talks about things and makes decisions for the good of the family. Not like this … this craziness. Your whole life depends on what they decide to do about some stupid fish.

Bender decided not to tell her what Liverett had said about the snail darter. If you want to go a few days I can’t stop you. But you’re not taking Jesse. He’s as much my son as he is yours. What makes you think you can pick him up like a suitcase and just go away with him?

Bender was sitting on the side of the bed with his hands cupping his knees. He watched her get out of bed and pace away from him — her white nightgown drifting behind her.

In fact, I don’t think you should go at all. Well figure something out.

She paced back to him. I’ve already called Ruthie and told her we were coming. I’ve got to get away from here a few days. If you come over tomorrow we can talk about it.

He grasped her arm but perhaps harder than he meant to for she cried out and twisted away and her eyes were panicky and wild-looking. She was backpedaling away from him. When he was almost upon her with arms outspread to grasp her she jerked the lamp off the end table and swung it at him. Goddamn, Bender said. Only the shade caught him a glancing painless blow but he was so shocked at her striking him that he shoved outward bothhanded as hard as he could. The lamp swung away and slammed the wall and the bulb broke. He heard her fall somewhere off in the dark. She didn’t even cry out. He picked up the lamp and righted it and plugged it in. The room stayed dark. He crossed the room, almost running, and clicked on the ceiling light.

Oh Jesus, Bender said. Oh Jesus.

She was lying with her head on the edge of the raised brick hearth and her neck cocked sideways at a crazy-looking angle. Blood like shadows was already seeping onto the brick from the back of her head and with her eyes open and lying there on her back with arms and legs outflung she looked as if she had fallen from some unreckonable height and slammed onto Bender’s carpet.

With his face close to hers he tried to ascertain was she breathing or not. He couldn’t tell for sure but he didn’t think she was. Her pulse was either faint or absent at her throat and his own heart beat too loud and too fast to be sure.

He ran out of the room and down the hall to the open door of Jesse’s room. Jesse lay with his face toward Bender and the sheet rising and falling in measured respiration.

He went back to the bedroom and squatted in the middle of the floor and watched Lynn. After a while he put his face in his hands and sat there swaying soundlessly and trying to think. What to do. It had grown very quiet. He could hear the rain soft and suspirant on the roof and far off beyond the dam the rumble of thunder like something heavy and out of control rolling downhill toward him. He didn’t care if it was. He couldn’t fathom how or why this had happened. Someone he loved lay still and bloody pillowed on the hearth and no hands but his had touched her. He felt strange in his skin, it was light and uncomfortable, like some illfitting costume he had struggled into, and he did not know how to get out of it. He divined that he was somewhere he’d had no intention of going, that he was someone he did not want to be.

He got up and stripped the sheet off the bed and laid it spread out on the carpet and lifting Lynn by the arms he dragged her to the center of it. He lowered her gently onto it. Her head kept lolling back loosely as if it would fold beneath her and he had to adjust her head with a foot while he positioned her. He folded the sheet about her like a shroud and straightened and just stood for a moment staring down at her. He stooped and picked her up and cradled her in his arms and turned her so that she was draped over his left shoulder. He went cautiously past Jesse’s door and out of the house and into the rain.

He’d decided that somehow he had to get her across the garden fence and across the chain-link fence and back to the graveyard. Then he could place her in one of the empty graves and maybe cave the sides in on her. Only one body to a grave, who’d look in an empty grave? He’d tell Ruthie they had had an argument and Lynn had driven off and left him. Nobody was going to buy that story long but maybe it would give him enough time to think of something.

He was halfway across the garden staggering in the mud and vines when he stopped dead-still. He stood in an attitude of listening. Well I’m a son of a bitch, he said. He could hear a car engine toiling up the hill. He turned with her. He stared in disbelief. A slow wash of headlights coming up the hill like the very embodiment of ill luck. His face had an angry, put-upon look as if the world would not leave him alone long enough for him to get on with the things he had to do. Then all at once he came to himself and half ran, half fell, into the nightshade and honeysuckle with her. He pulled vines over her as best he could and struggled up and ran into the shadows keeping the house between himself and the headlights. When he came around the corner of the house the car was sitting parked in his driveway with the door sprung open and a dark silhouette getting out. Rain was falling slant in the headlights and he could hear the disjointed crackling of a police scanner.

What is it? Bender asked. His voice sounded like a harsh rasp and he felt he could not bear just one more thing. Not one more thing. He felt some enormous dark weight settling over him and smothering him. He wondered that he could place left foot in front of right, string one word in a coherent sequence after another.

Of course it was Bellwether. He saw Bender as he closed the door of the cruiser. Bender?

What is it?

Do you not know enough to get in out of the rain?

Bender raked his wet hair out of his eyes. Water coursed down his face. He grinned weakly.

What the hell are you doing out in this mess?

Bender took a deep breath. He forced himself to think. I thought lightning struck something. It came a hell of a clap of thunder and the power went off a second then came back on. I thought it might have hit my pump but I reckon not. A tree over there I guess.

Listen, Bender, I’m sorry as hell to come out here this late, but they want those papers served. I’ve got them right here. You want to go in the house where it’s light and I’ll read them to you?

I think not, Bender said. Leave them and I’ll read the goddamned things myself.

I told you all this before. Sometimes I have to do things I don’t want to do, and this is one of the times. You know I got to read them to you. Now get in the car.

Bender did as he was told. He pulled the door closed and sat clasping the door handle loosely with his right hand. Bellwether turned on the dome light and read the papers. They might have been Sanskrit, Latin, so little did Bender comprehend. He sat staring at Lynn’s face so pale in the wet black honeysuckle and not one coherent word did he hear.

That’s about it. This is where it stops. You are ordered off this property by ten o’clock tomorrow morning or suffer whatever consequences failure to comply entails.

Like getting my ass carried off it?

Like getting your ass carried off if need be. When you roughed that feller up or whatever you done you pissed them off.

Bender opened the door and started to get out. All right, he said.

All right what?

Just all right. Ill be gone.

They’ll give you sufficient time to get your property and personal effects moved. Listen, Bender, you fought and you lost. Let it go. For what it’s worth I’m sorry.

Bender was standing by the car. Sorry is not worth a damn to me, he said. He shoved the door but Bellwether leaned across the seat fast and caught it and pushed it open hard. The edge of the door caught Bender on the hip and he staggered back.

Let me tell you this straight out, Bellwether said. I’ll be here myself to see about your wife and kid. You do what you want. A man wants carried out can damn sure find somebody to carry him. But I’m escortin your family away from any trouble myself. Are we right clear on that?

Bender stood rubbing his hip. He didn’t say anything.

Are we right clear on that?

Yes.

All right then. Bellwether eased the car in gear and pulled the door closed. He had scarcely begun to turn in the drive before Bender was moving rapidly toward the corner of the house. Out of the lights he stood leaning for a minute against the side of the house with the rain from the eaves falling on him until he heard the car going down the hill and then he struck out for the garden.

When he reached both-handed into the honeysuckle and felt nothing he gave a sort of grunt of dismay or disbelief and felt all about the dark vines. He was looking around wildly when lightning bloomed and she was standing by the fence in the rain specterlike in her funeral windings and her hair plastered to her skull and her eyes closed just swaying slightly then gone in abrupt dark and Bender raised his face to the heavens and gave a cry scarcely human, a hoarse unarticulated scream of outrage and horror and such utter despair as should have stitched a caesura in the wheeling of the earth on its axis.

He whirled and ran back toward the house and fell once and got up and went on. When he came to himself he was sitting on the couch in the living room with water dripping out of the cuffs of his jeans and pooling on the floor.

He got up and methodically began to search the kitchen. Cabinet drawer to cabinet drawer leaving each standing open in its turn as he went on to the next and finally the cabinets themselves. In the cabinet over the oven he found a pint of peach brandy three-quarters full and went with it back to the couch and sat down. He drank the brandy while the night drew on and rain blew against the windows and lightning wrought the mimosa in stark relief until finally the storm passed over and the thunder dimmed, away. All this time by an act of sheer will he had not thought of Lynn at all.

He was weary and after a while the brandy bottle slipped from his fingers and tilted and spilled on the floor and he laid his head on the arm of the couch and fell asleep.

At some point he began to dream. In his dream all this tumult and disorder had fallen away and his life stood in marvelous symmetry. He and Lynn and Jesse had survived. The world had done its best to unhinge them but they had come through unscathed. The world had tried them with fire and water but the water had cleansed and soothed them and the fire had tempered them so that they were the stronger for it, and they were together, hand in hand, standing by peaceful waters.

When he awoke there was a sour taste in his mouth and a weight in his chest and his face was wet with tears. He got up and shambled into the kitchen to the sink and halted abruptly when he saw Jesse standing by the sliding glass door looking out at the patio.

Jesse saw Bender s reflection in the glass and he turned. There was a curious look on his face, almost a sly complicity as he looked at Bender in silence and pointed at the glass.

They crouched before the plate glass like conspirators. The rain-wet flagstones, the dripping trees. Then in silent wonder he saw the wolf. It came at a lope out of the trailing honeysuckle, ragged and ill kept like some wolf cobbled up out of the leftover parts of other wolves and resurrected and set upon him by some dark alchemy. It bounded onto the flagstones and sprang at the glass. It slammed against it and for a microsecond the glass bulged inward with a marvelous elasticity and glass and wolf alike were frozen in midair as if time had skidded to a halt. Then the glass exploded inward and all Bender’s senses were so assailed by stimuli he could scarcely comprehend everything: the smell of the rainy night blown in and the sweet nostalgic reek of flowers and the feral charnel smell of the wolf. The air was full of pebbled glass. It rattled off the walls like hail and sang along the Formica countertop like grapeshot. He could hear the wolf’s claws snicking along the tile floor and clawing for purchase and he had only time to enfold the child and turn Jesse’s face into the hollow of his throat before the wolf was upon them.