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

The Lightpainter

JENNY’S MOTHER once shot her husband in the thigh with a small-caliber pistol. She had been aiming higher but she was angry and the target was in desperate motion so she missed. She told it about the town with a kind of grim humor. If it had been anything like normal size I would have brought it down with one shot, she said. Who could hit a teensy old thing like that?

Tidewater heard this story or its myriad variations in disparate places. In the barbershop, in the county courthouse waiting in line to renew his license plates, in a Mexican restaurant on South Maple. He even heard a truncated version from Jenny herself. Mama tried to shoot Daddy in his thing but she got him in the leg, she said, laying the phrase out for their inspection as emotionlessly as a dealer turning up a card and awaiting betting or folding. Tidewater did not know which to believe but there was an irrevocability about the remark that seemed to call for one or the other.

Tidewater had studied her face. Jenny was a child then and her face had not yet assumed the impassivity of still waters that masked it in adolescence but still he could not read it. What response did she expect from the remark? Humor, honor, compassion? Tidewater was touched in varying degrees by all these things but he wanted to know her intent. Beneath the dark fringe of lashes her violet eyes told him nothing. Her pale heart-shaped face held only the promise of beauty and its customary vulnerability. It said what it always said: Well, here it is. Help me or hurt me, it’s all the same to me.

Jenny in those early years lived an ambivalent existence. She was part of the time with Tidewater and his wife Claire and his daughter Lisa and part of the time with her mother and whatever live-in boyfriend she was involved with at the time. Jenny’s father had wisely moved on in search of an environment where his drunken abuse would be dealt with more tolerantly. She seemed to move effortlessly from chaos to the order that Tidewater insisted upon, that in fact he had created by an act of sheer will.

Once there was a showdown of sorts in Tidewater’s front yard. Tidewater and his wife and daughter aligned on the porch with Jenny, the mother and her boyfriend standing on the brick sidewalk before the porch.

Are you Jenny’s father? Tidewater asked.

Hell no, the man said. He wore Ray-Ban sunglasses and Tidewater couldn’t see his eyes.

What is it to you?

The woman stood before the doorstep looking up at them. Like some show she was watching from the first row.

If you think you can come between me and my daughter, the woman began, listing slightly to the northeast as if she stood in the force of a strong southwesterly wind that nobody else felt, if you think you can just step in and take my child away from me then you’re living in a goddamned dream world.

Nobody’s trying to take anybody, Tidewater said. She’s Lisa’s friend and she likes staying over here. Nobody tries to persuade her one way or the other, but I’m not about to refuse to let her stay. She does what she wants to.

Well right now she’s doing what I want her to, the woman said. She’s going home. Come on, Jenny.

Jenny glanced at Tidewater then started toward the steps.

Tidewater said: Wait a minute.

The man in the yard laughed and spun his cigarette away. He wore a white shirt with the cuffs folded two careful turns over his forearms. His forearms were thick and the right bore a tattoo of the Marine Corps insignia. The tattoo was blurred as if the ink had run in the rain or as if the man was drawing sustenance from it, using it up, assimilating it into his bloodstream.

She’s not getting in that car with you, Tidewater said.

Charles, Tidewater’s wife said. She had never particularly cared for Jenny, as if she sensed something about her that Tidewater did not. I think you may be getting in over your head here.

I’ll drive her home myself, Tidewater said. You two go ahead. I’ll follow you.

I’d like to know why she’s not going to get in my car, the mother said.

Because you’re drunk, Tidewater told her.

On the way to the Harrikin the car Tidewater followed drifted across the centerline, whipped back, slipped onto the shoulder with gravel singing off the fenders. Tidewater gave them plenty of room. The car sometimes drifted into the path of oncoming traffic as if it were driverless, controlled by some deathwish volition of its own.

I don’t know if they’re going to make it or not, Tidewater said.

Jenny sat small and shrunken against the passenger-side door of the van. Her face was turned toward the sliding autumn scenery and he could see only the dark straight fall of her hair.

If they don’t I guess we could always go back to your house, she said.

TIDEWATER SAT in a hard-backed wooden chair across a littered desk from a soft-looking woman with hair the color of flax.

It’s an unpleasant situation, the woman said.

It’s a dangerous situation. She could be killed in a drunken car wreck. She could be abused sexually by a boyfriend. They could burn the house down over their heads while they sleep.

The woman shuffled the papers. Applications for help, field reports, evaluations. As if after false starts and side roads and dead ends lives had come down to this, all the identity there was contained in these neatly typed government reports.

I’m not sure precisely what you expect us to do.

I’m just reporting it. I don’t expect you to do anything. I’ve never done this before, interfered in people’s lives. I have a daughter of my own.

What he wanted done was something to eliminate the inequity in people’s lives. A balancing out of things. Jenny’s life did not seem fair. It seemed to bear little relation to Lisa’s life or the lives of other young girls who came and went in Tidewater’s house. Their lives seemed controlled, assured, as if they possessed some sort of celestial insurance policy. Jenny’s life seemed random, open-ended, unstable as quicksilver.

The flaxen-haired woman had no control over the inequity of lives. Tidewater was sorry that he had come, that he had even interfered. People’s lives went the way they went. They conformed to some law no physicist had yet devised a formula to explain.

The woman took up a form and a pen. Do you know of a specific incident of abuse? she asked.

Her life is an incident of abuse, Tidewater said.

THE LIFE THAT JENNY aspired to had been created solely by Tidewater. It was order pressed on chaos. Tidewater had fallen out of love with the world. The world no longer wanted to do his bidding. The world was going to hell in a handbasket and Tidewater wanted no part of it.

He was sick of violence. He was sick of wars, and politicians’ rationalizations for wars, of politicians themselves. Beyond Tidewater’s fences the world was falling apart. Chaos swirled like the smoke off a battlefield. Bloody insurrection stirred in the rubble of great industrial cities. In the mountains of Montana grim-faced men caressed their hoarded weapons and waited for Armageddon the way a teenager awaits a phone call. Strangers crossed in the night and gave each other AIDS as casually as handshakes. Mothers basted their children in ovens and burned them with cigarettes because there was nothing good to watch on television, drove them into deep cold waters with their safety belts thoughtfully secured.

In his youth Tidewater had courted violence like a lover but these years he wanted it out of his life, scalpeled cleanly out of his body and the clean living flesh cauterized by fire. He owned sixtyfive acres and a lot of fences and a century-old farmhouse. He renovated the farmhouse and converted a screened-in porch to a studio where he painted and these years he hardly left it. His hair grew long, the ends turned up loosely on his shoulders. The soft blond beard that covered his cheeks made him look ascetic and intense as a devout young monk, photographs taken of him during this period in Tidewater’s life looked like photographs of Jesus, if Jesus had ever taken the time to have his picture made.

Yet if the farm was an island of calm, disorder flourished beyond its borders, chaos lapped constantly at its shores.

He had once been far back in the woods, carrying a sketchpad and pencil, headed for a grove of beeches he wanted to paint. Halfway across a barbed-wire fence a voice out of the trees hailed him.

Hey.

Hey, Tidewater said. He climbed down the fence.

A man came out of the bracken with an unbreeched shotgun in the crook of his arm and a brace of squirrels strung on his belt.

Did you not see that sign? the man asked.

What sign?

That sign that said, trespassers will be shot, survivors will be prosecuted. Did you not see that?

No. No such sign existed but Tidewater did not say so. He waited.

What are you? Some kind of goddamned hippie, livin off the government?

I don’t live off anybody. I work.

You work? You look like a wild man to me, like you run wild in the woods for a livin.

I’m a painter, Tidewater said.

The man was half a head shorter than Tidewater and fully twenty-five pounds lighter but there was an outsized belligerence about him, as if he perpetually needed more space than he had been allotted, as if he’d suck a room dry of oxygen just by entering it. He hit Tidewater on the muscle of the arm, not lightly, a solid blow. He struck again, in measured insistence, like someone knocking at a door that just won’t open.

Suddenly he dropped the shotgun and shoved Tidewater hard and hit him while he was off balance. Tidewater slung the sketchpad and went backpedaling away and fell on his back in the dry leaves with the man astride him. He was trying to cover his face and the man kept slapping him, not hard, just contemptuously flicking his face.

Say I’m sorry I trespassed on posted land, the man said out of clenched teeth.

Tidewater had a crazy urge to laugh. What?

Say it goddamn you, or I’ll pound your head into the ground.

All right, Tidewater said, not lying, I’m sorry I trespassed on posted land.

The man seemed dissatisfied, perhaps with Tidewater s inflection. His grip tightened. Say I’m sorry I trespassed on posted land and I promise never to do it again, he said.

Oh for Christ’s sake, Tidewater said. You don’t know when to quit, do you?

He began to strain against the man’s weight, the arms pinning him seemed banded by iron but little by little he began to rise, the man pushing as hard as he could and his arms trembling and cords standing out in his throat but being lifted inexorably upright, his face congested and his eyes going crossed and peculiar.

Tidewater threw him aside and grasped up a windfall tree branch and began to whip the man with it. The man cursed and flailed both-handed at the branch then tried to crawl out of its reach, Tidewater following beating him until the man was crazed with sweat and leaves and squirrel blood.

Tidewater threw the branch across him. The man was cringing away in something akin to horror. Who the hell are you? he cried.

Tidewater was sick at heart at what he’d done. He’d firebombed his good intentions back to ground zero and so had to begin again. He took up the fallen shotgun by the barrel and slammed it against a tree trunk. The stock shattered.

I’m The Lightpainter, you son of a bitch; he wanted to scream, needing some trademark with which to mark the folks he beat up like the Z of Zorro’s rapier. Perhaps he’d have cards printed up and leave them stapled to the foreheads of the victims of his wrath.

IN TRUTH HE WAS the light painter. In the years when Lisa and Jenny had been children he had painted while Claire worked. She was an accountant and the money she earned balancing folks’ books and preparing their income tax returns made their living while Tidewater painted. He painted one picture after another that no one wanted. He’d paint and frame all year then in the fall load up the van to its ceiling with paintings and make a circuit of the craft shows and art fairs throughout rural Tennessee.

Then one year he’d painted a picture so perfect he felt he could not have done it. Perhaps he’d dozed and elves had completed it while he slept. It was a picture of a hay cart loaded with straw in the hall of a barn. A pitchfork, rude farm implements, leaned against it. But what was perfect was the light. He had caught the quality of indirect light perfectly, soft diffuse dust-moted light that fell through a high gable window, the harsher sunlight falling on the earth past the hall of the barn, each blade of straw on the cart imbued with soft gold light.

He was drunk on the power to re-create light on canvas. He painted one picture after another in an orgy of creativity. Bucolic pictures that existed nowhere save in the geography of his imagination. He painted firelight flickering warmly on the walls of a room, soft yellow lamplight falling through a window, lantern-light from a sleigh on reefs of drifted snow, moonlight on snowy mountains, the light from bonfires on the faces of homecoming game revelers. They were pictures of a time that was irrevocably gone and perhaps had never truly been.

After he had put up a small show in Huntsville a newspaper called him the light painter and the appellation had stuck. Soon the light painter was in great demand. The more sophisticates sneered at his paintings’ sentimentality the more folks embraced them. The paint would scarcely be dry on a canvas before someone was pressing money upon him. Then a lithograph company signed him to a contract. They made prints of his paintings and advertised them in magazines and sold them for more money than the light painter himself had been able to get for the original canvases.

Tidewater began to think of The Lightpainter as a sort of alter ego and he sometimes referred to himself in the third person in a self-deprecating way as The Lightpainter. He thought this was mildly funny, though no one else did.

I’m The Lightpainter, he had told Lisa and Jenny when they were small. He had taken them to the creek, they were in scarcely to their knees and afraid to wade deeper.

I’m watching you, Tidewater told them, I’m always watching you. If anything goes wrong I’ll zip into a phone booth and leap out of my clothes and Fm in my Lightpainter superhero uniform, cape and all.

We’d drown before you found a phone booth on this old creek, Lisa giggled.

Let’s see, Jenny shrieked. Take off your clothes and let’s see your uniform.

Well, Tidewater said, out of his depth here and in truth not very good at games. My costume is in disguise too. It has a secret identity and the truth is it looks a lot like ordinary clothing.

♦ ♦ ♦

ALONG ABOUT THEIR fifteenth year Lisa began to acquire a new circle of friends. They came and went in the light painter’s house, bright as summer flowers, gliding effortlessly on peals of laughter. They seemed more sophisticated than Jenny, they discussed books she had not read, the colleges they were going to, boys Jenny seemed to know by name only. Jenny grew a little bright, a little desperate. She talked too much and said awkward things.

More and more she sought out the light painter. She’d sit hour-long and watch him work. He seemed to be her last refuge, as though he could make her fit, make her part of the gaudy crowd coming and going in shiny cars.

Finally Tidewater mentioned it to Claire.

I can’t see how you think it’s Lisa’s problem, she said. She has her own life to live. It was always you Jenny wanted anyway. And when she’s away from here she has her own set of friends, who I don’t want Lisa involved with.

When he brought the subject up with Lisa she snapped at him. You need to open your eyes, she told him. You never know what’s going on right under your nose. She’s changed. She’s gross, she lets these awful boys do things to her. She does things to boys.

In Tidewater’s view of the ways of the world he suspected that most girls let boys do things to them and perhaps some of them even did things back. He guessed what was at issue here was a question of decorum.

Yet he didn’t say this or anything else in his own defense because he was appalled at himself: in a moment of clairvoyance he suddenly saw that he knew Jenny better than he would ever know this smooth, confident young woman, as if Jenny had vouchsafed him a glimpse into the disordered interior of her very soul, a lowering of barriers that all the rest of the world had denied him. Blood or no blood he had to admit that he was not a very big part of Lisa’s life anymore, perhaps no more a part than Jenny herself. It was nothing he could rationalize away, nothing he could make right. It just was.

JENNY WAS IN her sixteenth year when the decision to blackball her was made. Like most of the decisions that mattered in Tidewater’s life this one had been made by a committee of Claire and Lisa and passed down to him.

He couldn’t argue that things hadn’t changed. Jenny’s life had the appearance of unraveling. They saw her less now, sometimes it seemed to Tidewater that she came only when she had nowhere else to go. She stayed away longer and longer, like something you have tried to tame reverting to wildness. Lisa brought home rumor after rumor about her. She was suspended from school, she was pregnant, she was on drugs. Lisa watched Tidewater as she told these stories at the dinner table, like a cat laying dead mice at the feet of its master.

Tidewater and Claire were lying in darkness save for the fluorescent face of the clock.

I don’t think you can just throw people over the side, Tidewater said to the ceiling. She grew up with us, this is home to her.

That’s just the point, Claire said. She is grown up. And she’s thrown us over the side as much as we have her. She has other interests, and they’re interests I don’t want Lisa taking up.

If you mean sex then maybe you ought to talk to her.

Talk to her? Maybe she ought to be talking to me. I expect I could learn from her.

I wonder if her mother talked to her.

For God’s sake. Don’t put me in this position, Charles. Make me a total bitch while you stand aside and let what happens happen. The way you do. And anyway sex is not what I meant. It’s part of it but by no means all. I mean drugs and alcohol and the whole nine yards. What if she and Lisa are out together with a bunch of drunks and drive head-on into another car? What if it came down to her or Lisa? If you were forced into a choice what would you say?

God, Tidewater said, lying still in the darkness, wishing every question had one answer and one answer only, and that he knew them all. Wishing everything was black and white instead of incremental variations of gray.

Besides, she’s not even Lisa’s friend anymore, no matter how hard you try to pretend they’re still ten years old. For the last several years she’s been your friend, not Lisa’s. You’re the only one she cares about.

That’s crazy.

And you’ve always had a soft spot in your heart for her, Claire said, then added: Or a hard one someplace else, which is what I always wondered about.

He lay in silence a long time before he answered. Finally he said, That was a sorry thing to say, Claire.

You’re right. It was a sorry thing to say. I guess I meant it to be funny. Hard, soft. It was just something to say.

It wasn’t funny, Tidewater said.

No. It wasn’t.

Tidewater’s position was made more ambiguous by his secret, and he lay there in the dark thinking about it. His mind worrying it the way a tongue worries a sensitive tooth.

A while ago he had fallen asleep watching a football game and sometime in the night Jenny shook him awake.

You fell asleep on the couch.

I guess I did.

They’re asleep, everybody’s asleep.

What time is it?

Two o’clock in the morning.

I guess I ought to go to bed then.

Charles?

What, Jenny?

I like it here, Charles. I don’t want to have to leave.

Hey, kid, nobody’s going anywhere.

Okay. Can I kiss you goodnight?

Sure, he said thinking — surely thinking, this was import — she meant a peck on the cheek. When he offered his cheek she laid a palm alongside his jaw and turned his face and covered his mouth with hers. Her robe fell open and he could still see her body all white light and ebony shadows. Her naked breast touched him like a jolt of electricity and her sharp little tongue was alive in his mouth.

When he shoved her away she almost lost her balance and they struggled for an insane moment, him expecting any second Claire or Lisa to materialize in the doorway the way it would happen in a movie and he knew it looked exactly as if he were trying to wrestle a sixteen-year-old girl onto the couch.

She released him and took one graceful step back and calmly adjusted her robe. Goodnight, Charles, she said, her one-cornered smile opaque and enigmatic as always, the smile that said: You think you know what this means, but you’re badly mistaken.

If you feel this strongly about it we can wait a few days and see what happens, Claire said. Maybe she’ll move in with somebody or something.

I suppose we’ll have to do something sooner or later, he said. Do whatever you think best.

♦ ♦ ♦

EVERYTHING WAS ON A PATH that seemed imbued with inevitability, events ran forward like ball bearings on a grooved incline.

A boy let her out in Tidewater’s yard. They were arguing. The boy got out and slammed the door. They struggled for possession of her purse. Tidewater watched from the porch. The boy slapped her. The straight fall of her hair swung with the force of the blow. He seemed not to know that Tidewater was The Lightpainter, not to care that he was creating a disturbance in The Lightpainter’s yard.

Keep your hands to yourself, Tidewater said, coming down the doorstep.

How about trying that with your mouth, the boy said. He looked far older than Jenny, not even a boy, perhaps a man in his twenties. Tidewater saw that he was drunk. That The Lightpainter might have bitten off more than Tidewater could comfortably chew.

I don’t want trouble with you, Tidewater said. But I want you away from my house.

Or what?

Tidewater hadn’t thought that far ahead. Or I’ll call the law.

Call the son of a bitches then. But that little thief of a slut’s got my property and she’s going with me.

When Tidewater grabbed him the man’s feet slid apart in the gravel. His dishwater blond hair fell lankly across his face. Tidewater was trying to turn him. There was a rank feral smell about the man, a smell of sweat and whiskey and slow ruin. Tidewater wrestled him about into a hammerlock and walked him backward to the open car door and half threw him onto the seat. An audience had aligned itself on the porch. The man came up off the seat with a longneck beer bottle out of the floorboard and slammed Tidewater in the face with it. Tidewater went backward with his hands over his face. The motor cranked, tires slewed sidewise in the pea gravel.

He went up the steps wiping blood out of his eyes. I don’t need any of this, he said.

Jenny was hanging on to his arm, trying to touch his face.

Why do I feel I should have been charged admission to see this? Claire asked.

Running water onto a towel The Lightpainter glanced upward at his broken reflection. Blood was seeping out of his hair and into his beard. He looked like a lost and dissolute Jesus, a wild-eyed Jesus illy used and set upon by thugs with longneck beer bottles.

WHEN HE CAME OUT of a place called the Painter s Corner with two sable brushes and a tube of alizarin crimson Jenny was sitting in the passenger side of the van, staring off toward a Dumpster on the parking lot where winter birds foraged for crumbs. He got in and stowed the brushes and paint in the glove box.

I’m glad to see you, he said, and was, feeling obscurely that something had been missing, that his family was complete.

I’m glad to see you too. How is everybody?

Well, we’ll ride out and see. Is that what you had in mind, a ride out to the house?

I don’t think so, she said. My life is complicated enough with how Claire feels and all. What I need is a favor, and you’re the only one I know to ask.

I’ll do anything I can, Tidewater said, taking care that the wariness he felt did not creep into his voice: he guessed a favor for Jenny might entail anything from a ride somewhere to bailing a boyfriend out of jail though he expected it was money.

Where are you staying?

She seemed not to be taking care of herself. She had on a sleeveless T-shirt though the day was chill. There was an air of ruin about her, sweet corruption. There were dark smudges under her eyes and her long brown hair was lank and none too clean. There was a suck mark on her throat like a crescent-shaped birthmark, when she raised a tendril of hair out of her eyes he saw the dark stubble of her armpit and he could smell her, feral and dissolute.

I need forty dollars. I borrowed it off this woman and I’ve got to pay it back.

It has to be paid back right now?

Well, it’s a check I wrote. Postdated. If I don’t pick it up she’ll turn it in to the cops and they’ll get me for a bad check.

Tidewater took out his wallet and gave her two twenties. There was a folded fifty in a side compartment he always thought of as his emergency fund and he withdrew it and laid it on top of the twenties in her palm.

Get a coat. Warm shirts or something. It’s turning wintertime. You never did tell me where you were living.

I’m living with this friend of mine in the housing project. I hardly ever stay at home anymore, I can’t take the fighting. Her boyfriends hitting on me.

Tidewater didn’t know what to say. He felt like counting out more money, as if it was all he had, a down payment on a life someone was going to repossess anyway.

I’m thinking about leaving. Just heading out down the Trace and going all the way to the gulf. Natchez. Is it warm down there?

I don’t know: I was never there in the winter. I’d guess warmer than here.

That’s where the pirates used to be, Natchez Under-the-Hill. I’d fit right in.

Now the pirates run fancy restaurants and gift boutiques and get their booty off the tourists, Tidewater said.

I’d still fit right in. Bye, Charles, I got to go. Thanks for the money.

She opened the door and got out, clasped her arms and shivered. Gooseflesh crept up the flesh of her upper arms. A Wind blew papers across the parking lot like dirty snow.

Get a coat, he said.

I will.

Jenny, he said without knowing he was going to.

What?

Let me help you, he said. You come on back and live with us and we’ll work everything out. It’ll be hard, but we can do it. If we have to we’ll see a counselor. Somebody.

She looked intently into his eyes. Her eyes were pale violet with darker flecks and there were tiny lines in the grainy skin at the corners of them.

I don’t need anything like that, Charles. Don’t believe everything Claire and Lisa tell you.

Take care, he said. She walked away then turned and raised a hand and waved with just the fingers. Tidewater watched her go wondering where she was off to, half glad he didn’t know. He had striven for the simplicity in his life, the linearity. Jenny’s life was not linear. It was made up of switchbacks and side roads and mazelike dead ends and to him it seemed chaotic, each day some new crisis, each night some new pleasure. He watched her walk out of his life with a sense of loss and shame for the faint relief he felt.

ALL DAY A CURIOUS band of light lay in the southwest. Weather crawls across the television screen told of winter storm warnings, an early ice storm already rampant to the south in Alabama. Tidewater stood in the backyard watching the heavens. Small nameless birds fluttered in the branches. Dry leaves drifted and tilted on a rising wind that already had winter’s edge on it. Above the light the sky took on the color of wet slate. The light swirled toward him like a silver mist rising off some country already locked in the seize of ice.

He drove into town and bought bread and milk and candles. At the hardware a butane camp stove. The supermarkets were full of people pushing overflowing baskets toward the checkout lines as if the countryside lay under siege.

By dusk a cold gray drizzle was falling. Sometime in the night he awoke and went outside. It had turned very cold. The rain was freezing on everything it touched and the brick walk gleamed dully and the trees glittered like they were fashioned from glass.

He woke again when the power went off and the house ground down to silence. All the myriad mechanical sounds of the nighttime house vanished and all he could hear was Claire’s measured breathing and the soft hiss of ice against the window.

When they arose in the morning the world had been transformed. Tidewater’s breath caught in his throat as a child’s might. Every leaf, every twig, every blade of grass was caught in its own caul of ice like a purer finer symbol of itself.

The day drew on cold and strange and silent. Everybody seemed to be waiting for something. There was no television, no stereo, no lights. Tidewater had a show coming up in Memphis in less than a week and he sorted through paintings and wrapped them carefully in furniture pads and stacked them in the van. But after a while the cold deepened and the house grew more chill yet and he brought wood from the garage and built an enormous fire in the fireplace and sat before it reading a book.

Everyone had assumed the phone was out of order as well and when it rang in midmorning Tidewater jumped as if it had broken some physical law.

What? Lisa said, and something in her voice made Tidewater pause in midstep and turn, the coffee cup halfway to his mouth and forgotten.

He could not quite fathom the look on Lisa’s face. It said: I know something you don’t know, and I can’t wait to tell you.

Jenny’s dead, Lisa said.

Dead? Claire said. She can’t be dead. Dead how?

Lisa’s face twisted, grotesquely torn between laughing and crying. She lowered the phone. The hand holding it jerked spasmodically. The phone began to shake uncontrollably and Tidewater crossed the room and took it gently from Lisa’s hand. When he held it to his ear there was only a dial tone and he recradled it. She froze to death, Lisa said.

It’s another crazy rumor, Claire said. She probably started it herself. No one freezes to death anymore.

Her orderly accountant’s mind seemed to have considered these figures and rejected them and Jenny was still somewhere in time, smiling her one-cornered smile and pushing a dark strand of hair out of her eyes the way Tidewater had seen her do a thousand times.

There were other phone calls each with its attendant piece of the puzzle and finally the story told itself.

Her boyfriend, or anyway a man, had let her out at three o’clock in the morning at the foot of the grade that ascended toward her house. Apparently he had taken her to the housing project but for some reason she had been locked out. Ice was already frozen on the hill and continually freezing faster and the man had turned at the foot of the hill and driven back to town. She’d drunk a little vodka and she was taking pills, some kind of medicine the man guessed. She could walk all right though.

♦ ♦ ♦

IN THE MORNING Jenny’s mother had gone out to put a letter in the mailbox in case the mailman made it up the hill, and found Jenny frozen to death in a small stream of water that wound through a washed-out gully below Jenny’s house.

And seen, Tidewater guessed, Jenny in her shroud of ice, black fringe of lashes frozen to her cheeks and pale face composed like some marvelous archaeological find, some pretty girl flash frozen eons ago and ten thousand years gone in the blinking of an eye.

He felt at some odd remove from things. He sat before the fire not feeling its heat with a book open and unseen upon his lap. He was trying to enter and relive the past, Jenny’s past, his own. To replay every word and act of her life and so locate the exact moment when the canker appeared on the rose, when the fairy-tale wood darkened and the trees bore thorns, when a cautionary word could have turned aside fate.

It was impossible. No action was separate to itself but led to its echoes like ripples on water, words were not only words but symbols for things left unsaid.

Just at nightfall he drove Lisa and Claire to the funeral home, hunched over the wheel and sweating out every mile, icy beads of perspiration tracking down his rib cage. The van shifted and veered, the chains skirling on the ice, as if they negotiated some new-medium not just unfamiliar but alien.

The funeral home was dimly lit, he supposed by an emergency generator. He thought he was going in the door but abruptly he stepped aside for Claire and Lisa, the room overpowering him, images of crepe and velvet and old polished wood, images that were not in the room but in his mind.

What in the world are you doing? Claire asked.

I’ll be back in a little while.

But where are you going?

I don’t know. Uptown. I need to see somebody from the power company, if there’s anyone around tonight. I’d like to find out when the power s coming back on.

Well, it probably won’t be on tonight. If there’s any place open you may as well get something for supper that doesn’t have to be cooked. Get a pizza or something.

Beyond her he could see the dim sepia room with its air of waiting, a cozy paneled vestibule just one door removed from eternity. Why don’t I just have one delivered and you can eat it here, he said.

She gave him a cold cat’s look and opened her mouth to speak but he pulled the door gently to and went back up the sidewalk to the van.

The town looked surreal, like some town forsaken and abandoned. After some cataclysmic fall, after the failure of dreams and human will itself. Some of the businesses seemed to have generators but candles flickered room to room in private dwellings and he drove on toward the part of town where he could see that streetlights still burned.

There was a bar called Wild Bill’s open but scarcely populated save by its habitual ancient drunkards who sat crouched about the room like troglodytes. The place was poorly lit by gas lanterns and in the hollow yellow light appeared cavernous, the sidewalk curving inward, the dark wall beyond the pool table and hushed jukebox like the entrance to a tunnel moving on into the dark.

Tidewater ordered a bottle of beer and paid for it and sat beside an alcoholic old sign painter named Lee. He had never known Lee’s last name.

You painting many signs these days, Lee?

The old man’s eyes were rheumy and his toothless mouth loose and wet. He always looked obscurely angry, the world itself seemed to have done him some grievous wrong.

I’ve quit, the old man said. Nobody wants a regular sign anymore. Last one I done was this little old Swiss maid or somethin. Little Swiss maid totin a milk bucket. Had on this little cloth cap, blue with while dots. I thought, if I ever get this bitch painted, that’s it for me. Somebody else can paint the next one.

Life gets more complicated, Tidewater said. Somebody’s always raising the ante on you.

Did you notice all that ice?

Well, trees are laying on power lines everywhere and the electricity’s off It’s kind of hard to miss it.

I believe this is it. This is the beginning of the end.

The end of what?

Every goddamned thing there is, Lee said. I believe it’s comin the end of time. Did you hear about that girl in the Harrikin froze herself to death?

I heard about it. I don’t think that means it’s the end of time though. I just think it means it’s cold.

Maybe anyway it’ll do something about these damned mites.

These which?

These mites. They’re suckin the blood right out of me, eatin the meat right off the bone. A month from now the wind’ll blow me down the street like a paper sack.

As if he’d humor him Tidewater leant to peer closely in the poor light. I don’t see anything at all.

You can’t see mites with the naked eye and anyhow they’re not here now. The old man raised his watch to the glow of the lantern. They take off ever mornin about seven o’clock like a bunch of, blackbirds. Come ten o’clock at night they’re back again. I don’t know where they go but there’s gettin more of them all the time. I believe they’re bringin their buddies.

I’ve got to get on, Tidewater said. I need to find somebody from the power company. Anyway all this talk about the end of time depresses me.

You’d think depressed if you had these mites to contend with, Lee told his back as he went out the door.

It was still raining and the windshield was frozen over with a thin membrane of ice. He waited until the defroster melted it then drove on toward the lights. Full dark had fallen and above the haloed streetlamps the wet sky glowed a deep mauve.

The Pizza Hut was open though almost deserted and while they prepared his pizza he sat in a booth by the window and drank a cup of coffee and watched the freezing rain track on the glass and the sparse traffic accomplish itself on the highway. Little by little a nameless dread had seized him and cold grief lay in him heavy and gray as a stone.

When the pizza was ready he paid and went out. He laid it in the seat across from him. He opened the box and looked at it. As was The Lightpainter’s wont he had ordered the top of the line, a supreme deluxe jumbo with everything there was on it, a pizza so garish and begarbed as to serve as a satiric comment on the very nature of pizza.

He cranked the van and drove laboriously out of the parking lot. He could smell the hot pizza and he opened the box as he drove into the empty street and bit the end off a slice and began to chew. The cheese was tasteless and had a quality of elasticity that made it grow enormous in his mouth the more he chewed it. He couldn’t swallow it and at last he rolled down the glass and spat and then he took up the pizza and hurled it into the street. The white box went skittering across the ice like a Frisbee. He drove on.

He was not surprised to see that he was driving toward the Harrikin, though the road was perilous and even with the chains on the van spun on the hills and once slid dizzily sideways, so that for a moment the headlights swept the frozen woods in an eerie frieze, the trees tracking palely off the glass in elongated procession.

He drove on into frozen night. Once he had to halt and plot a course around a fallen tree. Once he passed a downed power line where an ice-loaded tree had broken it, the high-voltage wire writhing and dancing and snapping bursts of blue fire.

The house when he arrived at it was lightless the way he had known it would be and it seemed deserted. It set pale and haunted-looking against the dark hills. In the driveway the tractor for an eighteen-wheeler was frozen to the ground, its chrome appurtenances sheathed in ice. He withdrew a flashlight from the glove box and got out with it. He approached the ditch.

It was very cold and the silence was enormous. It was broken only by the sound of trees splitting and branches breaking far off in the woods, like sporadic gunfire from some chaos that had not reached him as yet. Palms on knees he stood on the lip of the gully and peered into it. His breath smoked in the air and froze whitely in his mustache and beard. He wondered what she had thought. If she had thought, if her mind had been put on hold by ninety dollars’ worth of medicine. If memories and plans and dreams had already seen the writing on the wall and were fleeing her like rats scuttling over the decks of a burning ship.

He played the light about the rim of the ditch. He found a pink comb layered beneath the ice like an artifact suspended in amber. He studied it at some length. Perhaps it was a clue.

He heard an engine laboring up the hill and he turned. He could hear snow chains spinning on ice, the headlights washed the trees and a pickup truck turned into the driveway, the sealed beams framing him like a searchlight where he stood.

Doors slammed and a man and a woman got out of the truck. The woman incongruous in a knee-length black dress and high-heel pumps. She came teetering across the precarious ice like some grotesque beetle. Jenny’s mother. The man stood silhouetted before the headlights. Tidewater wondered was he Jenny’s father, brought back under truce by this mutual grief. The man unpocketed a flat half-pint bottle and drank from it then canted it against the inscrutable heavens as if he’d gauge its contents.

You morbid freak. What the hell are you doing here?

For a moment Tidewater stood in silence, trying to think what to say. He made some sort of obscure arms-spread gesture, a mutated shrug. Before he could speak the man pocketed the bottle and approached. You need to move it along somewheres else, he said. There’s people in mournin here if you don’t but know it.

I know, Tidewater said. I’m Charles Tidewater. I—

I know who you are. Move it along, you’re blocking the driveway.

No, you don’t understand, Tidewater said, the words tumbling out in a drunken rush, She was like a daughter to me. I loved her. It all seems impossible, that she’s … I had to come out here. I drove without knowing where I was going. I thought there might be a reason, a clue.

A clue? There was a trace of amusement in the man’s voice. I’ve got a clue for you. Get back in that van and haul your ass somewheres else before I call the law and have you arrested for trespassin.

I don’t want any trouble, Tidewater said.

Trouble wants you, the man told him.

You stole my daughter, the woman said suddenly. Her voice was thin and vicious, hardly more than a hiss. You carried her over there and turned her against her own family. And then when your precious daughter was tired of her you ruined her. You and your hippie ways. Got her on dope and everything else. No telling what else you did to her. Just no telling.

He had raised his hands to protest but she launched herself at him like a harridan. Blood-red fingernails raked his cheek, clawed wildly for his eyes. The Lightpainter stepped backward and his feet slid and kicked the woman over and he fell with her to the earth then rolled into the ditch. Ice cracked the back of his head and he lay on his back staring upward into the freezing rain. He could see the woman’s head and shoulders above the lip of the ditch, her glasses gleaming dully like enormous pupilless eyes. Then the man helped her arise and they turned away, out of his line of sight.

Just call the law and let them come get him, the man said. That’s what they get paid for.

He knew that he was lying where she had lain. He knew without seeing them that long straight strands of brown hair, like horsehairs, were seized in the ice where they’d snapped when they pried her free. As they’d snapped in the bloody permafrost of the heart.

After a while Tidewater got up. He could feel his clothing peeling away from the ice. He went down the ditch run to where it shallowed and clambered out. He got into the van and cranked it and sat with it idling and his hands cupped over the heater ventilator until he could feel warm air. He knew he had to drive away but he did not know yet to where. He knew that his life had changed, finally and irrevocably, but he did not yet know to what. The light painter felt like one of the rustic agrarians in his own paintings who had thrown aside brush hook and pitchfork and attained an almost undetectable motion, easing from the pastoral landscape that had sheltered him toward the white void of chaos at the picture’s edge.