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

A Death in the Woods

CARLENE WAS STANDING naked before the window when Pettijohn awoke. She was holding the curtains aside with an upraised arm and she was peering into the night, the flesh of her left breast lacquered by a pulsing light that cycled red to blue, red to blue, and back again.

What the hell is that? Pettijohn asked.

I don’t know, she said. Lights.

When she turned from the window, her eyes were just dark slots in the shadows of her face and lit so by the strobic light she might have been some erotic neon succubus he’d conjured from a fever dream.

What woke you up?

I don’t know. I was just looking toward those woods and there were lights everywhere.

There was no way there could have been any lights. Beyond the glass lay only fallow fields, deep woods. He got out of bed and crossed the carpet to stand beside her. Her hair brushed his shoulder. Silver beads of rain strung off the eaves. Past the dark stain of the fields that were more sensed than seen, moving lights turned and swayed and darted through the slanting rain in a curious ballet that seemed senseless, profoundly alien.

What the hell is it? he asked again.

She just shook her head.

He was pulling on pants and a shirt, looking about for his shoes. She was watching him.

What in the world are you doing?

He looked up sharply, as if she’d taken leave of her senses. He’d found both shoes and how he was tying them. I’m going to see what that is.

In this rain? Why don’t you just let it alone? It’s nothing to us.

The way I see it, it’s something to us. Those are our woods. Nobody’s got any business even being there.

He went out of the house and around the side in the rain and to the edge of the backyard. Here he climbed a woven-wire fence and descended in the grown-up field. All the time, he was staring toward the dark blur where the woods began and his face was half perplexed and half angry.

Lights twisted and turned, smaller white lights like flashlights strung out of the woods. Soon vehicles began to shape themselves out of the blue murk — police cars, ambulances. A pickup truck. An emptiness swung in the pit of his stomach. He couldn’t fathom what might have happened. A wind was blowing the rain in slant gusts. He buttoned his shirt and wished he’d worn a jacket.

An ambulance was backed to the edge of the woods, lights revolving, rear door sprung. Attendants were carrying a stretcher out of the trees. They loaded it and its plastic-wrapped freight into the rear: All this in a silent tableau, then in a rush the sound came up. The first sound he heard through the muting rain was the slam of the ambulance door. As he approached, he became aware of the detached and mechanical crackling of voices from the police radio, the rush of windy rain in the dripping woods.

The high sheriff that year was a man named Holly Roller. Folks when they kidded him called him Holy Roller, but none were kidding him tonight. When he finished with the radio, Pettijohn asked, What’s going on back here, Sheriff?

Roller hung the microphone back in its rack on the dash. Couple of coon hunters found a body back in here last night.

A what?

A body, a dead man.

Pettijohn stared toward the woods. The coon hunters stood in the shelter of an enormous cedar. Denim jumpered, felt hatted, wet. Rifles kept dry under their coats. Coonhounds were curled at their feet like curious black-and-tan familiars. The two men looked as if they wished they were anywhere but here. Like unwilling passersby called up to witness or attest something.

One of the attendants knelt against the bole of a tree. He was very young. A green surgical mask hung from his neck. He’d vomited into it, and as Pettijohn watched, he vomited on his shoes. His hands were encased in translucent plastic gloves and he kept trying to strip them off.

A dead man, Pettijohn said.

I hope I never see one deader. He’s deader than I ever want to get.

Who was he?

His driver’s license said he was a Waters. You couldn’t prove it any other way, or I couldn’t. He must have been there two or three weeks and everything from dogs on down had been eating on him. Where’d you come from, anyway?

I live right across that field.

Where that light is?

Yes.

These woods belong to you?

Yes, Pettijohn said again.

That’s pretty damn close. What, a couple of hundred yards? You ain’t seen or heard anything out of the way?

Out of the way? Like what?

I don’t know. Like folks wandering around back in here. Shots. You ain’t even seen buzzards after him?

No, Pettijohn said.

Who else lives over there?

Just my wife. He wondered was she still standing against the window, watching him, or watching where he was.

She say anything about seeing anything unusual?

No. What killed him?

Best I can tell a twelve-gauge shotgun. There was one laying by a log, back in that thick brush. Come on, I’ll show you.

Pettijohn wasn’t sure he wanted to see, but he went anyway. It seemed to be required; new rules seemed to apply here. All these official comings and goings had padded out a trail through the sodden leaves. He went through a tangle of winter huckleberry bushes. They entered a shadowed glade. The light flitted about, fixed on a dead beech tree the winds had taken, and abruptly the woods altered, became somber, like an abandoned graveyard, like a church where the religion has no name.

What I think he done was set on that beech yonder and study about it a long time. We found a Marlboro pack and seventeen cigarette butts, all Marlboros. He was doing some serious studying. That black spot’s where he was, where the torso was. The head was over yonder where that smaller round spot is. I reckon dogs or something drug it there.

The light moved. Pettijohn’s eyes followed it.

He had one boot on and one boot off. That TBI man said that’s how he pulled the trigger.

A dull anger ached in Pettijohn. He’d loved these woods. He could walk in summer dusk, watch silent winter snowfalls. Now they had a quality of unease. Perhaps they were not even his woods anymore. Possession seemed to have shifted subtly to the dead man. They felt defiled.

I need to get back to the house, Pettijohn said.

Well, if anything comes up, I guess I know where you live.

I won’t know any more then than I do now.

Halfway across the field, he noticed day was coming. Shapes accruing bleakly out of the gray, rainy dawn. After a while, he could see the green roof of his house. The black truck he drove to work and the blue Ford he’d bought Carlene last year. They seemed commonplace, no part of the woods he’d been in, and there was something vaguely reassuring about them.

SHE OFFERED BREAKFAST, but he wanted no part of it. All he could handle was coffee. The woods were too much with him.

He’s ruined the damned woods, he said. There’s something different about them. Something … I don’t know, I can’t put my finger on it. Just different.

She ate unperturbed. She dipped a triangle of toast delicately into egg yolk. You’re just too sensitive, she told him. She put the toast in her mouth and began to chew. He couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not.

Well, he said, I was back there, you weren’t. What I can’t figure is why he picked our woods to blow himself away. Those woods run all the way to Deerlick Creek. Why couldn’t he do it there?

You see everything from your own selfish perspective, she said. I’m sure that while he was thinking about shooting himself he didn’t stop to consider whether it was an inconvenience to you.

Inconvenience? That’s not what I mean and you know it.

I never know what you mean anymore. Sometimes I wonder if I ever did.

What I want to know is why he did it and why he did it there.

You never know when to leave a thing alone. Maybe he was hunting there when the impulse or whatever hit him. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe he was on drugs. Besides, it’s none of our business. Let it go, Bobby.

It was Sunday and he didn’t have to go to work. After noon the rain ceased and the sun broke through and burnt away the clouds. The sky was marvelously blue and it held an autumnal look of distances. A warm wind looping up from the south brought them distant voices and children’s laughter. They went out to see. Across the field, the edge of the woods thronged with people. A family strung out across the field like miswandered carnival folk. Young girls in Sunday dresses bright as cut flowers.

Why, goddamn, he said. I wish you’d look at those morbid freaks. All I need is a roll of tickets.

She didn’t answer.

HE DROVE THROUGH THE GATE in the chain-link fence at the hose factory where he worked and parked in the lot and cut the switch and pocketed the keys. He dreaded going in. He always did. He told himself if he could make it another year he would have enough money saved to buy a few horses and he was going to say to hell with industrial hose and try to make it raising horses and farming. Live simple. Just him and Carlene and the farm. The world seemed to have gone volatile and unpredictable, but there was something timeless and reassuring about horses. He sat with his hands on the steering wheel and thought about horses for a while and then got out of the truck and walked toward the brick factory. It looked like a prison. A dull hammering emanated from it. Ceaseless, rhythmic. Here the machinery ground metal on metal twenty-four hours a day. He showed his pass at the guardhouse and went through gray steel doors into the din and clocked in and went to the break room.

Reuben and Stayrook were already sitting at a red Formica table, drinking coffee from paper cups. The three of them formed the crew that operated the number three press. Reuben was an enormous, gentle man shaped like a round-shouldered mountain, and winter and summer he wore overalls and long-sleeve khaki shirts that were perpetually sweated through.

There he is, Stayrook sang out. There’s the infamous shotgunner of meter readers. And we didn’t even know they had a bounty on them.

Pettijohn put coins in a Coke machine, then sat down at the table across from Reuben and Stayrook. What the hell are you talking about?

That Waters feller they found in the woods behind your house worked for the power company. Went round readin folks’ meters, how much electricity they used. Did you not know him? Pettijohn was making interlocking circles with the wet bottom of the Coke can. No, he said. Anyway, it wasn’t all that close.

Not that close? What I heard, you could of stood on your back doorstep and pissed on him.

Reuben glanced at the clock and took out a package of Bugler smoking tobacco and a packet of papers and began to build himself a cigarette. I guess you know them woods is haunted now.

What?

They’re ruined. Something happening like that ruins a place. He’ll be tied to wherever he done it and you won’t never be able to look at them woods without thinking of Waters.

Oh, for Christ’s sake. Give me a break, Reuben.

Say, Pettijohn, Stayrook said. When’re we going out to Goblin’s Knob and drink a few cold ones? Get out amongst em and run some wild women?

Pettijohn studied him. His last friend out of the wild lost years. Beneath the flesh of tHe man Stayrook had become, Pettijohn could see the face of the child he’d been and in some curious way the old man he’d be if he was lucky enough to live that long.

I quit all that.

Yeah. I had a wife looked like Carlene I might stay home with her, too. Keep a eye on her. I ever marry I aim to marry some old gal so ugly nobody else’d ever try to take her away from me. That way I could rest easy and she’d be grateful for any passin kindness I might offer.

Reuben glanced at the clock. About time to get it, he said.

We had some wild times though, didn’t we? Stayrook asked.

Pettijohn nodded, but he didn’t think about all that much anymore. The high times were blurred in mist, sharp edges already rounded off by time. Wild times had come and gone like telephone poles veering up drunkenly in speeding headlights, but they seemed to have little to do with this new and improved Pettijohn.

As they rose from the table, Stayrook punched him in the ribs and grinned. Tell Reuben about that time in Chicago when we saw that drunk Indian throw that piano down the stairs.

Pettijohn, try though he might, could call no such incident to mind, and there was something mildly disquieting about it. You ought to remember a thing like that. Maybe he’d seen one too many drunk Indians throw one too many pianos down one too many stairways and it was time to get on to something else.

He just smiled his noncommittal smile, taking no position at all, and Stayrook shook his head. You ain’t been no fun since you got married, he said.

THAT NIGHT HE GOT HURT for the first time in the three years he’d worked there. It happened as they were changing the die in the press. He was thinking about the black oval of earth in the woods and holding the wrench positioned on the die for Reuben to hit with the sledgehammer. Something he’d done a thousand times before. The wrench weighed fifty or sixty pounds and had always reminded Pettijohn of something lost from the toolbox of a giant.

He must have been standing off-balance, for when the clang of steel on steel came and the wrench slipped, he fell headfirst into the press, the wrench ringing again when it struck the concrete floor. He felt no pain when his head struck the press, just a dull, sick concussion and a wave of red behind his eyelids and the sensation that his knees had turned to water. A hand stabbed at the floor to break his fall, index finger splayed out beneath his boneless weight. He felt that. A rush of nausea washed over him and he could taste sour bile at the back of his mouth.

When he came to himself, he had arisen to his knees and Reuben was stooped peering down at him. Reuben leaned forward with his enormous hands cupping his knees and his face was very close to Pettijohn’s. Behind the thick twin layers of safety glass, his eyes were rabbitlike and benign. His entire face was rabbitlike, Pettijohn suddenly saw — the soft twitching nose, the magnified eyes pinked-rimmed and myopic. Behind Reuben other workers had gathered, but Pettijohn saw no face he could put a name to and they might have been strangers staring down at some mishap in the street.

Goddamn, Bobby. Are you all right?

I think I hurt my finger, he said.

Finger, hell. You may be hurt bad. You knocked the shit out of your head and you’re bleedin like a stuck hog. Stayrook, help me get him to the nurse’s station.

I believe he’s busted that press, Stayrook said.

In the infirmary a middle-aged woman with a beehive of purple hair and an air of professional detachment cleaned and bandaged his cut. You’re going to need a few stitches in the corner of that eye, she said. I’m afraid you’re going to have a scar there, too. I’m sending you out to the hospital.

No. I’m not going to any hospital.

You don’t have a choice. It’s company policy. You have to go.

I don’t have to do anything. It’s my head. He felt dull and angry. He should not have fallen. He’d never done anything this foolish before.

Very well, then. Suit yourself. But your medical insurance won’t pay any expenses you might incur later. And you’ll have to sign a release.

Get it.

Coming out of the infirmary, he saw Reuben still awaiting him, cap in hand, out of place in this antiseptic world of steel and spotless tile.

They sendin you out to the hospital? he asked solicitously.

No. I’m taking the rest of the day off. Maybe a day or two.

Oh, Reuben said, crestfallen. Pettijohn knew that Reuben had been counting on driving him out to the hospital and waiting on him, thirty minutes or more of idle time that he’d be paid for and that he could easily stretch to an hour.

Ain’t you in no pain?

She gave me a bunch of pain pills. Anyway, my head’s all right. It’s my damn finger that’s giving me a fit.

You ought to have it X-rayed, Reuben said, trying one last time.

No. They’re liable to just sew me up and slap me into the hospital overnight. I’m going home.

That’s the ticket. Go home and soak it inside her; that’s the best thing for it.

In cider?

Yeah, inside her, Reuben said. That’ll draw the soreness out of it. A leering eye closed in a lewd wink.

Halfway to the parking lot and for no good reason, the remark angered him. Reuben hadn’t meant anything by it; that was just the way people talked. Still, it made an assumption he wasn’t comfortable with. It assumed an intimacy that he wasn’t sure existed anymore.

HIS HEAD HURT TOO MUCH for sleep and he sat beside the bed where she lay, his feet propped on the hearth of the dead fireplace.

Can you not sleep, Bobby?

Not right now.

Do you want me to get you a pain pill?

No, I’m all right. The one pill he’d taken had eased the pain but had made him lightheaded and drunk. He felt curiously off balance, out of sync, as if something somewhere needed to be adjusted half a turn. Everything looked and felt skewed; the level and plumb of the world seemed subtly off He wasn’t sure though how much of it was caused by the accident. He’d been feeling eerie and disassociated ever since he’d stood peering down at the dark oval in the woods.

They said Waters was a meter reader. Do you remember ever seeing him up here?

Who?

Waters. The man they found in the woods. Did you ever see him?

I don’t know. I may have. They all wear those yellow hardhats and they all look alike to me. Why?

Well, everybody has been talking about him.

They certainly have around here, she said. Why don’t we just let it be.

He fell silent. He studied her where she lay. He’d never thought about her leaving, the rest of his life without her. Her still somewhere in the world getting up in the morning and going to bed at night, living her life and yet no part of his. He’d always felt that she had saved him from something. Who knew what, perhaps she’d saved him from himself. Yet she’d always been a person of silences, of dark places you couldn’t see into. He would have liked to see the world through the eyes she saw it with, but her vision of it seemed posted off-limits, no trespassing. It seemed as best he could judge a serene world of chrome and ice and you went through it unscathed. Nothing touched you, nothing hurt you, nothing branded you with its mark to show you’d even been there.

I wonder what he was thinking while he was smoking nearly a pack of cigarettes, he said aloud. She didn’t answer. He knew she was awake. He could tell by the pitch of her breathing. She was lying naked in the warm dark. Her breathing changed when she slept. He used to lie awake and listen to it, a sort of reassurance that she was there.

He hadn’t been talking to her anyway. He had just thought of Waters, sitting on the dead beech, perhaps the gun in his lap. Was it dark? Was the sun in his eyes? Staring at nothing, then at the drifted leaves between his boots that had shifted to reveal a chasm of unreckonable depth.

Suddenly, she turned to face him and reached her arms to enfold him. She raised on one elbow and kissed his throat. Bobby, she said, just let it alone. It’s nothing to us. We didn’t even know him. It’s nobody’s fault. Can’t you see that none of it even matters? We’ve got our own lives to go on with. She took his hand and placed it on her naked breast. Marvelously, his hand passed through it into nothing, past the brown nipple and the soft flesh and the almost imperceptible resistance of the rib cage and into a vast gulf of space where winds blew in perpetuity and the heart at its center was seized in bloody ice. Rolling against him and sliding her hand up his thigh, she was a ghost, less than that, like nothing at all.

THE HIGH SHERIFF’S CAR sat idling noiselessly in Pettijohn’s front yard. With his cup of morning coffee, Pettijohn crossed the lawn toward it. A flicker of annoyance crossed his face, then there was no look there at all.

Mornin, son. I get you up?

I’ve been up.

What happened to your face?

I got hurt at work.

What do you work at, sortin wildcats?

Pettijohn didn’t reply.

I thought you might want to know how it all came out.

How did it all come out?

They decided there’s no question he shot himself. The angle of the shot and all.

Roller was sitting with his hands clasping the steering wheel and he was peering through the windshield toward the distant woods as intently as if they touched him with the same vague sense of unease Pettijohn had been feeling.

Well? Pettijohn said.

Well what?

I appreciate all this news coverage or whatever it is. But I can’t help wondering what makes me important enough for the high sheriff to drive out and report the result of an inquest.

The truth is, I wanted to talk to you some more. It occurred to me you might have remembered something. Seeing him pass your house, hearing a shot, anything.

No. I told you. I’m not here all the time. I have to make a living. Some folks can’t drive around the county asking questions and get paid for it. My wife’s here all the time. You could ask her.

Actually, I figured she told you I was out here Monday morning. And if there’s a soul on this round earth that knows less about Randy Waters than you do, you’re married to her.

Pettijohn was silent.

Oh well, it’s a small thing anyway, Roller said. It just sticks in my craw, where he was. How he got there.

He came in on those log roads. The way you got him out.

The problem for me is no vehicle. Did somebody let him out to hunt, and if they did, why don’t they speak up? He lived in Ackerman’s Field. Did he tote that shotgun all the way from town just looking for enough privacy to shoot himself? Now, what gets me about them woods is what he was doing there in the first place.

Hunting. Scouting a place to put up a deer stand. You hear gunfire back in there every weekend, when deer season opens.

I don’t know. Maybe. Like I said, it’s a small thing. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation don’t care. He shot himself. His wife has no idea why. I just have a fondness for stories, and that’s not a story. It might be a beginning, or an end, but it’s damn sure not a story.

Maybe he didn’t even kill himself. Maybe somebody blew him away and hauled him back in there and dumped him out and went about their business.

Roller eased the car into reverse, stopped it with a foot on the brake. The pitch of the engine changed.

Oh, I’m satisfied he did it. Our boy Waters had problems. He’d tried it all and none of it worked. Drugs, booze, women. Did I say he tried it a few years back? His folks or whoever got him up and carried him to old Doc Epley. There had been a bad car wreck over by Mormon Springs and Epley had blood all the way to his elbows and he was busy as a one-legged man in a ass-kickin contest. “Put him over on that cot and I’ll get to him when I can,” Epley told them. “I got folks here tryin to live.” There’d been a kid in that wreck and Epley done everything he could and then it died anyway. After he got Waters patched up, he got a tube of lipstick off his nurse’s desk and drew a big X right over Waters’ heart. “There, by God,” he told him. “You ever try it again, there’s you a map to go by.”

God Almighty.

It might have been harsh, but it did the trick. He didn’t have no trouble findin it this time.

WOODS HERE SOMBER and ancient. Pettijohn passed under great live oaks and cypresses and beeches with distended groping arms like gothic trees in a fairy-tale wood. The glade was sepulchral. Light came falling through the latticework of branches and it had the quality of light filtered through stained glass. It stood in greengold columns, shimmered with the movement of the trees.

Dark oval of earth, so stained with the body’s seepings. So unhallowed a resting place. In the nights, the beasts would quarrel and contest territorial rights, how’d a body sleep? By day the sun would sear the flesh and scald the blind eyes, vultures tilt on the updrafts and glitter in the sun like some hybrid of flesh and chrome.

He sat on the windfall beech and smoked cigarettes and thought about things. As if by placing himself where Waters had been and echoing his motions he’d gain some insight into the workings of his mind. There were clues could he but find them. A story could he but read it. It sticks in my craw, too, Roller, he thought. And I like a story as well as the next one.

He arose and toed the cigarette out in the dirt and looked about. Directly, he wound through the winter huckleberries following a path so faint it might have been a ghost path, a dream of a footpath. He moved along with confidence for he now knew where he was going: They were his woods. The ground began to climb gently in an earth bulwark and leveled out, and he came through a spinney of sassafras onto the rim of the abandoned pond.

There seemed clues in abundance here. What to make of all this? Two old lawn chairs tilted by the wind. Nestled in the roots of an elm half a liter of a red wine called Tokay rosé and in the brush a folded blanket, still sodden and mildewed from the fall rains. An empty plastic bottle that had contained suntan lotion. A glint of the sun off metal drew him farther, to where a tiny gold crucifix lay half buried in the packed clay. He dipped it in the water and wiped it clean on the tail of his shirt. An earring. He dropped it into a shirt pocket and stood up. He remembered what Reuben had said about haunted woods and he grinned a rueful grin and figured him right. He reckoned these woods haunted, but he could not have said by what.

♦ ♦ ♦

SHE WAS SITTING on the sofa with a book open on her lap, and she had her legs stretched out across the coffee table. He leaned and laid the crucifix between her smooth tan calves. You must have lost an earring, he said.

She leaned forward and picked it up. Thanks, she said. You gave me those. Where was it?

He had no way of knowing what look he had on his face, but when she looked up at him hers went opaque and guarded, as if a curtain had fallen behind her eyes.

He went into the kitchen and made a glass of iced coffee. He held the cold glass against his forehead. He had a headache he seemed to have been born with, and the ice seemed to help it.

She went with her book through the doorway to the bedroom. When he’d drunk half the coffee, he followed her into the room. Her book lay on the night table, a torn strip of paper to mark her place, and she had a suitcase open on the bed and she was stacking clothes in it. He could see his reflection in the mirror across. His image was dark and warped looking in the faulted glass.

Don’t start, she said.

I’m not going to start. I just want to know one thing.

She turned. She looked at him as if she’d never seen him before. No, she said. You never want to know just one thing. You have to know it all. That’s what’s the matter with you, and it’s been the ruin of you.

The ruin of me? What about you? You knew all the goddamn time he was out there. There in the brush with the dogs fighting over him, pulling him apart. What made him do it? Did he get in over his head and you brushed him off? Did he break it off and you were about to tell his wife? Or did you shoot him yourself?

She went on serenely packing clothes. By my count, that’s way more than one thing, she said. She glanced up at him and smiled. Besides, I sort of got the impression that that sheriff thought you knew a lot more than you were saying. Perhaps you did it yourself.

All right. Forget all that. It doesn’t matter who killed him. The only thing I want to know is what you thought about.

What I thought about?

After all he’d been to you. Lying on that blanket with you. Nights when you were in bed with me and he was lying out there with things crawling over his face, what did you think about?

She gave him a slight frown of incomprehension. I never did think of that at all, she said.

He had crossed the room before he knew what he was doing. Perhaps he’d meant to strike her, but the motion that started as a blow ended with a hand laid gently on her shoulder. His thumb could feel the small knob of bone beneath the flesh. The hand subsided, dropped uselessly to his side. He couldn’t think of anything to say. He went back and leaned against the wall and watched her.

After a time, she went out with the suitcase. As she went through the doorway, she picked up the book from the night table. The screen door slapped to on its keeper spring. The Ford cranked. He heard it turning in the driveway, retreating down the hill. Everything grew very quiet. The house seemed to be listening intently. It seemed to be waiting for him to make the next move.

He went out and sat down on the stone steps. The day seemed to grow still and he sat and smoked and grew still along with it. Suddenly, he realized it was almost night. He’d sat down in broad daylight and now it was the darkest shade of twilight and the cries of whippoorwills were washing over him from out of the trees.

At length he rose and went around the house and through the backyard. He stood at the fence and watched. The horizon had almost merged with the darkness. It was dissolving rapidly, like a horizon cut from paper and dropped into acid. The spiky tops of the cypresses marked the spot where the body had lain. Where the bodies had lain. In an uneasy moment of revelation, he divined that the woods were not yet finished with him, that he had barely tapped the reservoir of their knowledge. It seemed to him that this dark quarter acre of death and assignation would go on and on whispering to him secrets he did not want to hear as long as he had the strength to listen.