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

The Man Who Knew Dylan

HE WOKE IN a yellow room. Yellow walls, a print of van Gogh’s saffron sunflowers, pale winter light through the window. For a moment he didn’t know where he was, but Crosswaithe had woken in far stranger places than this one, and soon everything clicked into focus: the hissing and sighing that was keeping the woman in the bed across the room alive or what passed for it, the sallow husk of the woman herself, a foam cup half full of cold coffee on the table beside his chair.

He drank the coffee and sat watching the still form beneath the folded coverlet. He set the cup aside and wiped a hand across the sandpaper stubble on his face and stood up. He approached the bed and stood looking down at the woman. What had been a woman. The skin was pulled tightly over the delicate framework of bones. The eyes were closed and the lids were bluely translucent like those of hatchling birds. He tried to feel pain, pity. If he felt anything at all it was a sort of detached interest in the way she seemed to be receding from sight. Everything was sliding from her, and nothing was coming back. Nothing mattered. No one expected her to do anything at all and whatever was going to happen was going to happen no matter what she did or if she did nothing whatever. The machine breathed on, breathed on.

He went out of the room and softly closed the door behind him. He went down a waxed tile hallway past the nurses’ station and out into the early December day. He lit a cigarette and walked two blocks down Main Street then turned right and went four down Maple to a long low building with a huge Plexiglas sign that said PETTIGREW MAGNAVOX. He unlocked the door and went in clicking on lights and walked on past long lines of sofas and easy chairs and silent flickering television sets.

In the office he put on a pot of coffee and stood before it with a cup in his hand waiting for the trickle to start and when it did he moved the pot aside and placed his cup beneath the stream. When it filled he replaced the pot and went with the cup to a desk and sat drinking the coffee and idly reading yesterday’s newspaper. After a while he looked at his watch and went into the bathroom and took from beneath the lavatory a shaving kit. He lathered his face and shaved, the face looking back at him hollow-eyed and angular and somehow sinister, like a nighttime predator’s face peering at him through a backlit window.

At five minutes before eight Crosswaithe’s erstwhile brotherin-law arrived. J. C. Pettigrew was a heavyset jowly man wearing a tan tweed topcoat and a golfing cap. He hung up coat and cap then took a folded document from the topcoat pocket. He unfolded it and slapped it hard onto the desk before Crosswaithe.

You’ve got a little run this morning, he said. He waited for Crosswaithe to look at the paper.

Crosswaithe went on drinking coffee and he didn’t look. What is it? he finally asked.

The bank sent this note back. You’ve got to go to the Harrikin and pick up that projection TV you sold that old son of a bitch with the hole in his throat. I told you that son of a bitch was no good.

He seemed all right.

You felt sorry for him because he had that hole in his throat and that damned microphone he held to it when he talked. Buzz, buzz, buzz. You sold a two-thousand-dollar television set to a man just because he had a hole in his throat.

You told me to use my own judgment.

I also told you he was a bootlegger and a dopegrower and he was no good. You assured me you’d work the note. It’s four months behind and not worked and the bank’s kicked it back. I don’t know whether it was the old man or that daughter of his that kept sidling around and showing you her black drawers. But whichever it was I want my TV.

Crosswaithe drained his cup and stood up. I’ll get your TV, he said. He folded the note and shoved it into his hip pocket.

You look like hell, Pettigrew said. What’d you do, stay out all night? Was you by the hospital? How’s Claire?

Crosswaithe shrugged. How she always is, he said. He was putting on his coat. Pettigrew was watching him. Pettigrew had tiny piglike eyes that were not liking what they were seeing. I don’t doubt you give her some disease that you picked up somewhere, he said. You only married her for what little money Daddy had. It’s a crying shame she didn’t divorce you before you run through it.

One of these days the time is going to come when I have to stomp your ass, Crosswaithe said. It’s just inevitable. I won’t be able to help myself. It may not be today and it may not be tomorrow but it’s going to come. You’re going to get sideways with me some morning before I’ve had all my coffee and I’m going to kick hell out of you. What do you think about that?

Pettigrew had taken a step or two back. You’re only here because of Claire, he said. Now get on the move. Get there and get back, the weatherman’s talking about snow.

CROSSWAITHE DROVE the company pickup truck into the far southern part of the county. A waste of a country ravaged and scarred by open-pit mines and virtually abandoned, leftover remnants of landscape, the tailings of a world no one would have. At a beer joint called Big Mama’s he stopped and asked directions and set out again. He drove on and on over rutted switchback roads. Jesus Christ, he said. He was driving into a world where the owls roosted with the chickens, where folks kept whippoorwills for pets and didn’t get the Saturday Night Opry till Monday morning.

The house when he found it was set at the mouth of a hollow. A tin-roofed log house canted on its stone foundation and leant as if under the pressure of enormous perpetual winds. Blown-out autos set about the yard as if positioned with an eye for their aesthetic value. A black cat elongated like running ink down the side of a crumpled Buick and vanished silently in the woods.

He knocked on the door. After a while he knocked again. A curtain was pulled aside and the girl’s face appeared. She stood regarding him through the glass. He had been thinking about her on the drive out here, remembering not individual features but the sum expression, a sort of sullen eroticism.

The door opened. Hey, she said. I remember you. Come on in.

Hey, Crosswaithe said. He had the note in his hand. I came about the television set.

What about it?

Crosswaithe was by now standing in the front room looking about. A clean simple room, cheap vinyl trailer-park furniture. The television set looked like something that been teleported there from more opulent surroundings.

Well, he said, you didn’t pay for it. I had to come pick it up. He was studying it with an eye toward handling it and loading it into the bed of the truck. It had a distinctly heavy look.

How much do I owe?

He looked at the note. A little over a thousand dollars, he said. Is your father not at home?

There’s nobody here but me, the girl said. She had long dark hair and eyes that in the room’s poor light seemed to vary from gray to a deep sea-green. Every move the girl made had undercurrents: the hip-slung way she stood too close to him, even the way she said, There’s nobody here but me. Long attuned to nuance and shadings he could turn to his own advantage, Crosswaithe picked all this up immediately but there were subtle connotations here he wasn’t prepared to deal with just yet.

Where’s he at?

Not here, she said. Come on in and let’s sit down and talk about it. I’ve got some money.

Crosswaithe at the mention of money crossed and sat with his elbows on his knees on the edge of the sofa. He was thinking that maybe he wouldn’t have to wrestle with a projection TV after all. Even with the two-wheeler it would be difficult for one man to handle it without dropping it.

She went through a curtained doorway into another room. He could hear her rummaging around, opening and closing drawers. Perhaps she was looking for money. The room was cold; he shivered involuntarily and sat hugging his knees. He wondered what they used for heat around here, they didn’t seem to be using anything today.

When the curtain parted she came back into the room carrying a whiskey bottle by the neck and in her other hand a brown envelope. She sat on the sofa beside him and laid the whiskey bottle in his lap. Get you a drink, she said. I’ve got to see how much money I’ve got here.

Crosswaithe sat clasping the bottle loosely. I’ve about quit doing this, he said.

Daddy made it, it’s supposed to be good.

Crosswaithe shook the bottle and watched the glassine bead rise in it. The girl had withdrawn from the envelope a thin sheaf of checks. They looked to Crosswaithe like government checks. He unscrewed the cap of the bottle. It’s cold in here, he said. Maybe I will have just a sip.

He drank and swallowed. He swallowed rapidly a time or two to keep it down. Hot bile rose in his throat. Great God, he said. What’s in this stuff?

I don’t know. Whatever you make whiskey out of. Daddy made it, it’s supposed to be good.

Crosswaithe’s eyes were watering, he could feel it in his sinus passages. I can taste old car radiators and maybe an animal or two that fell in the mash but there’s something I can’t quite put my finger on.

She was laughing. She hid her mouth with a hand when she laughed and he wondered if her teeth were crooked. She stopped laughing and wiped her eyes. A curving strand of black hair lay across her forehead like a comma.

You’re a good-looking thing, she said. I noticed it right off the day we bought the TV. Did you sell it to us because of the way I was flirting with you?

My brother-in-law said I sold it because your father had a hole in his throat.

What do you say?

It could have been a little of both. What’s with all these checks?

She fanned them out like a poker hand. There were six of them. They’re social security checks, she said. Daddy drawed them one a month after he got that cancer. I just saved these up. You’ll have to give me a ride into town to cash them, though. None of these cars around here works and I never was much of a mechanic.

Crosswaithe was taking cautious little sips of the whiskey against the cold. His feet felt numb and he kept stamping them to keep the circulation going. The whiskey was giving him a vague ringing of the ears. Why is it so cold in here? he asked. They’ve got this stuff out now they call fire, and it’s the very thing. Have you not heard of it?

Me and my boyfriend broke up, she said.

Crosswaithe searched for some connection however tenuous but he couldn’t find one.

I’m out of wood, she said. He used to bring me a load of wood now and then but he quit when we broke up. I’m going to Florida on part of this money anyway. Somewhere it’s warm.

There must be three or four thousand dollars there.

Four thousand and eighty dollars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s Goblin’s Knob? Crosswaithe asked.

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

And then again we might not, Crosswaithe said.

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

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

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

Crosswaithe waited.

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

Daddy’s dead, she said.

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

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

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

You thought what over?

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

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

Of course it did.

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

That too.

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

Just what month are we talking about here?

The thirtieth of June, Carmie said.

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

Billy, she said.

What?

It’s not what you think.

Probably not, Crosswaithe said.

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

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

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

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

Have you ever drank a strawberry daiquiri? she asked him.

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

What’s in them?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey Carmie.

Hey Chessor.

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

It’s mine, Crosswaithe said.

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

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

Was there just the one?

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

There was just the one, he said.

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

It might not even work, Crosswaithe said.

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

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

I better hang on to it, he said.

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

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

I was waiting on you, she said.

Like fate.

What?

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

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

How would you look at it?

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

Well where have you got him?

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

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

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

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

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

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

No.

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

No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get away from me, Crosswaithe said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside it was hot and loud and smoky. One enormous room with booths set about the walls and a bare wood dance floor where bodies jerked spasmodically to a bluesy shuffle amplified from a raised bandstand.

They found a corner booth and Crosswaithe wended his way to the bar and bought two bottles of beer and wended his way back through a crowd that seemed a cross section of Harrikin society. There were fat men in baseball caps turned backwards and overalls stained with deer blood or blood from more dubious sources and rawboned Marlboro men in cowboy hats and girls in beehive hairdos and formal gowns and girls in jeans and boots. Some of the men were carrying pistols, for Crosswaithe could see more than one imprinted against fabric pockets and once he bumped against one in a jumper pocket that swayed heavily and the man carrying it pulled away and eyed Crosswaithe with a long speculative look.

Let’s get the bottle and go find a motel room, Carmie said. Head out for Florida in the morning.

Just a minute, Crosswaithe said. Did you see that guitar? He must have went down and met the devil at the crossroads for one like that.

The lead guitar player of the band was playing a National steel guitar that Crosswaithe drunk as he was had to feel in his own hands. He drained his bottle and set it aside and rose and picked his way around the crowd’s perimeter to the bandstand. He stood with his hands in his coat pockets letting the wave of rehashed Lynyrd Skynyrd wash over him until the band took a break between numbers and the man leant the guitar against an amplifier.

Mind if I fool with your guitar?

The guitar player had pale shoulder-length hair and he smoothed it back both-handed and looked at Crosswaithe. It was my daddy’s and I don’t want it busted over somebody’s head. Can you play one?

I tried a lot of years.

Hell, sit in with us then. We need all the help we can get around here.

Crosswaithe began tentatively with the band feeling its way behind him, bass and drums and second guitar looking for a way into the song then falling silent one by one. There was no way in. The song was a scratchy old 78 from the bottom of someone’s trunk, his fingers feeling around and into a past that was realer and more imminent than the present, his fingers exploring the cracked linoleum and raw pine boards and faded rose wallpaper of Robert Johnson’s fabled kitchen. They read Son House’s “Death Letter Blues” and halfway through a song by Reverend Gary Davis the old magic seized him, a tide of power that rolled over him and made him omnipotent, invulnerable to kryptonite and bulletproof, someone who could make or destroy worlds at his whim or simply bend them to his liking the way his fingers bent the snaking strings.

When he handed the guitar back the man just looked at him. Goddamn, he said.

At least they didn’t throw bottles.

Where’d you learn to play like that?

All over the place, Crosswaithe said. Is there a pay phone here?

There’s one here but it’s outside. For some damn reason they put it on the porch.

At the bar he exchanged a five-dollar bill for quarters and went out the door into the cold. In the phone booth he stood for a moment with the receiver in his hand waiting for the number to rise up from his subconscious the way he knew it would do. When it did he put in money and dialed, and in San Francisco, in a room he’d never been to, a room his mind had imbued with myth, a phone began to ring. It rang and rang. At length he hung up and tried for another number. This one came harder but it did come. The phone was picked up on the third ring.

Hello?

Richie?

Who is this?

Billy Crosswaithe.

Crosswaithe? Goddamn. Where are you, are you here in town?

I’m in Tennessee.

What are you doing in Tennessee?

Freezing my butt off and thinking about warmer climates, Crosswaithe said. What’s going on?

You mean in the six or seven years it’s been since you called? I don’t know if there’s time enough to tell you all that.

Just in the few minutes before you answered the phone, Crosswaithe said.

I was working. Are you in Nashville, is that what you’re doing in Tennessee? Are you famous yet?

Not yet.

I keep waiting to see you on the cover of Rolling Stone or to read a record review somewhere.

Any day now.

There was a quickening of interest in Richie’s voice so that Crosswaithe wondered for a cynical moment what he had ever done to make Richie think that something entertaining was going to happen just because he had called. Things happen around you, Richie had said once long ago. You never know what’s going to happen next. As if Crosswaithe’s life was a story Richie read a chapter of every few years.

What’s going on in your life, Richie?

Crosswaithe listened awhile. Richie had a computer company, he had started on a shoestring but things were beginning to boom. Crosswaithe glanced at his watch. He stared out the glass into the world of night. All the world there was a black vacuum sucking whirling snow up into it.

When Richie fell silent Crosswaithe said, I called Robin a few minutes ago but nobody answered. Has she moved?

For the first time Crosswaithe’s radar detected caution, hesitation. Robin’s in Tupelo, Richie said.

In Tupelo, Mississippi? What’s she doing there?

Well, Father’s there. He’s old. He’s a lot older than he was the last time you called. He’s not able to care for himself and Robin moved in with him. She is a nurse, you know.

I know. Do you have the number there?

There was silence for a time. Finally Richie said, Of course I have it, but I don’t think I’m going to give it to you.

Why not?

Why not? I don’t think you’re good for her. I know damn well you’re not good for her. She has problems and you make them worse. You turn up every few years and knock her off balance. We’ve been through a lot and I love you like a brother but frankly I think you ruined her life a long time ago. I think she expects things from you that you’re not capable of doing. She was just a kid, for Christ’s sake, what, sixteen years old?

I just wanted to talk to her.

Come on out and talk to me. We’ll go out on the town like we used to. Set em up and knock em down. It’s warm out here.

Hey, Crosswaithe said. I’ve been meaning to call and tell you this. You remember that time we went up to Woodstock looking for that place Dylan lived after the motorcycle accident?

Yeah. Then we made a pilgrimage to Big Pink.

I saw him.

You saw Dylan? What, in concert? So did I, several times.

No, not in concert. In New Orleans. He was coming out of a bar on Bourbon Street. I was drunk and he was drunk or on something and I bumped into him.

You actually bumped into him? What did he say?

He said, Hey, man, watch where you’re going, or something like that.

Hey, man, watch where you’re going, Richie said, laughing. That’s real profound. How would you interpret that, what do you suppose it means? Did you ask him anything?

No. He had his, whatever, entourage. He was with that Byrd, Roger or Jim McGuinn. His eyes looked stoned, out there.

I’d have asked him something.

He wouldn’t have known.

The hell he wouldn’t.

You know how we always thought he had a handle on things? How he knew where the answers were in the back of the book? He doesn’t. He’s just wandering around this sideshow like everybody else. Trying to make it through to daylight the best way he can.

The hell he is. He knows.

He doesn’t know, Crosswaithe said. And you can take that to the bank.

Listen, about Robin, she’s been through some rough times. The messy divorce, and then a messier custody trial for her son because of her drinking problem. She’s got everything under control now, but I don’t know if you ought to talk to her.

Divorce, Crosswaithe thought. Child, custody fight. Drinking problem. How time flies.

I don’t see how talking to me could make it any worse.

Just don’t promise a bunch of shit you can’t deliver, all right? Do you have a pen?

I can remember it.

He hung up and dialed the number. He wondered what time it was in Mississippi. Early, late, ten years ago, twenty years ago. He suddenly noticed that his knuckles clutching the phone were bloodless and white and he loosened his grip. When the voice came on he felt it like a physical shock, a palpable and three-dimensional remnant from his past.

She recognized his voice immediately. I don’t think I want to talk to you, she said. Anyway I don’t have time. I was up with Father, he’s frail and sick.

Crosswaithe thought of Father, frail and sick, remembering the violent weight of him, the strong carpenter’s arms closed on him in a headlock, remembering the smell of him, Old Spice and Red Man chewing tobacco and the smell of violence, like the smell of an enraged animal.

I just woke up this morning wanting to see you, Crosswaithe said, hearing his voice but not the words, Crosswaithe on automatic pilot, hearing the buzz of his voice but seeing a Mexican hotel room with panic spreading, blood spreading in the center of a white sheet like a malignant flower blooming, her abortion turning into a car crash. Today just seemed different, Crosswaithe went on. I knew I’d have to call you before the day was over. Why do you suppose that is?

I don’t know, unless it’s because you’ve used up all the people wherever you are and need to move on. Maybe it’s because you’re a cold-blooded bastard who uses people then flushes them like toilet paper. Could that be it?

Maybe, but I don’t think so. I think I just want to see you.

There was silence for a time. What’s the matter with you? she finally asked, and this time there was a different tone to her voice, perhaps imperceptible to one less attuned than Crosswaithe: here was malleable clay to sculpt, a slate upon which to write.

I don’t know exactly, he said, and a part of him seemed to split off from the whole and watch cynically, a tiny Crosswaithe standing with head cocked sidewise and a look of sardonic amusement on his face, a look that said, there he goes again, where does he get this stuff? can you believe this guy?

It’s no one thing, Crosswaithe said. I just can’t seem to get my life together. Things were running along pretty good and then it all just blew apart. My wife divorced me but I could handle that, the worst thing was my son. I’ve got this six-year-old the sun rises and sets on and I just lost a bloody custody battle. I’m not even certain about any kind of visitation rights. I guess I just don’t know where to turn.

Crosswaithe recounting this tale felt his vision blur, felt real pain for the fictional son he had lost, for a dizzy moment lost control over which emotions were real and which manufactured, what events were true and what dreamed.

Don’t bullshit me, you can’t manipulate me, he imagined her screaming. But she said quite calmly, This doesn’t sound at all like you, Billy. Are you leveling with me?

Listen, I was thinking about driving down to Natchez, he said. If I stopped in Tupelo do you think I could see you?

No. I don’t have the time or inclination for this.

Just for a little while.

If I said yes I’d be a fool, she said. If I said no I’d be a liar. I prefer to be neither.

That’s good enough for me, Crosswaithe said, and broke the connection. His face felt hot and flushed and he leaned it against the cold glass. I heard the news, there’s good rockin tonight, he said aloud.

At the bar he drank a cup of coffee. There was a subtle difference in the atmosphere of the room. An undercurrent of unease, he could smell violence like the scent of ozone in an electrical storm. In the far corner a fight erupted in a cascade of overturned tables and flying bottles and spread toward him like ripples on water. Hey good buddy, a voice said. He turned. It was Chessor with the checked cap with doglike earflaps. He put a proprietary arm about Crosswaithe’s shoulders. Let’s get drunk and kill somebody, he said.

Crosswaithe twisted away. He drained his coffee cup and set it on the bar and started toward the corner Carmie was in. Halfway there someone hit him in the side of the head and he went down and went the rest of the way to the door on his hands and knees, through a forest of denim-clad legs, buffeted by thrashing bodies, the brawl following him like a plague.

He was already in the truck with the engine running when she came out. She got in and offered him a half-pint bottle. Get you a drink, she said. You’ve got blood on your mouth.

He took a drink and rinsed it around in his mouth and rolled down the window and spat bloody vodka onto the snow.

Did we eat today, she said. I’m beginning to feel awfully peculiar.

I think we had a steak somewhere this morning.

We never did make it to bed though, and that was sort of the point of this whole thing. Why don’t we find a warm motel and a warm meal and a warm bed and start out for Key West in the morning?

Why don’t we, Crosswaithe said.

HE BACKED THE TRUCK carefully up the incline to the loading dock at PETTIGREW MAGNAVOX. It was drifted with snow and the rear wheels began to spin sideways, whining wildly on the ice. The hell with it, he said. He got out and slammed the truck door and lowered the tailgate. He got the two-wheeler lifted and the television set onto the tailgate but he couldn’t get it turned properly and he couldn’t decide what to do with it. His hands were freezing and finally he lowered the two-wheeler back onto the bed of the pickup. You heavy son of a bitch, he told it. Carmie stood in the snow watching him.

At last he leaned his back against the truck railing and braced his feet against the television and shoved. It went freewheeling off the icy tailgate and slammed onto the asphalt, striking on one corner and settling heavily onto its back with the screen collapsing inward and snow drifting into it.

Jesus, the girl said.

Crosswaithe was shaking with silent laughter.

What the hells the matter with you? Carmie asked.

Oprah Winfrey came out of that thing when it hit like a bat out of hell, he said. Did you not see her?

You’re crazy as shit, the girl told him.

At least that crazy, Crosswaithe agreed.

WHEN HE PULLED INTO the hospital parking lot the girl was asleep but she awoke and looked wildly about. Where are we? This is not a motel.

I have to see somebody a minute.

Who?

My ex-wife.

Weeks seemed to have passed since he had left her at six o’clock in the morning but here the clock hands seemed not to have moved at all. His coffee cup was still in the wastebasket, the machines that lived for her had not missed a beat, van Gogh’s sun-flowers tilted toward a sun that had not moved in the sky. He studied her face remembering for a moment things she had said and the nights when she had clung to him with sweet urgency, like drowning, like dying. What’s it like over there? he asked her silently, but her face had no secrets to tell him and if she knew what it was like over there she was keeping it to herself.

Outside he stood on the concrete steps breathing deeply, sucking his lungs full of the cold air until he could feel the oxygen run in his veins like ice. Snowflakes melted in his lashes, on his face, he could feel them in his lungs.

The girl was asleep with the bottle of orange vodka clasped loosely in her hands and her head resting against the window glass where she’d jury-rigged a pillow with a folded sweater but halfway to Waynesboro she awoke and looked about as if she’d see where she had got to. Crosswaithe was thinking about where the old man leant again: the beech with the rifle propped against him and the world going to ice when as if she’d read his mind or simply judged what he’d be thinking she said,

I guess Daddy’s about snowed under by now.

All day long Crosswaithe had wondered how the girl could switch back and forth from beer to vodka with no apparent sign of it but now it seemed to have caught up with her. Her voice coming out of the darkness was slurred and after a while she began to chuckle softly to herself.

Crosswaithe lit a cigarette from the dash lighter. The snow blew into the headlights and went looping weightlessly away and the road melted out by the lights looked like a tunnel into a perpetual ice storm.

The last few weeks with Daddy were just hell, Carmie said. Pure hell. He stayed on to me all the time. Like I had give him that cancer or could take it away if I wanted to and just wouldn’t. He used to call me names with his talker, bitches and whores, worse names than that. If I was a whore he made me one, didn’t he?

Crosswaithe could feel her eyes on him demanding an answer but he didn’t say anything. He cranked the window down for the cold air to clear his head.

Can you keep a secret? she asked.

I’ve already got more than I need, Crosswaithe said. I’ve got secrets people have given me I haven’t even taken out of the box yet.

Finally I took his talker away from him and threw it in the stove. One day he was mouthing names at me while I was changing his sheets and I just picked up a pillow and laid it across his face. Just to keep his mouth from working. But then I caught both sides of the pillow and leaned on him as hard as I could. He fought awhile but he was real weak and after a little bit he just quit.

I’ll bet he did, Crosswaithe said.

They were coming into Waynesboro, strings of neon night lights, no other traffic about. On the square there was a bus station with a running greyhound outlined in blue neon and he pulled the truck up to the curb.

Why are we stopping here? What’s this place?

Go get us a couple of cups of coffee. I’m running down or something. Driving through this shit’s hard on the nerves.

Can’t we get some at the motel?

We’ve got to find one first. Crosswaithe was fumbling out money. He handed her a five and she got out bunching her shoulders against the cold. Keep the heater going, she said.

She was halfway to the bus station when he leaned across the seat and called her back. He slid two one-hundred-dollar bills from the rubber-banded money and pocketed them. He reached the money to the girl. Put this in your purse before I lose it, he said. We need to hang on to it.

HE THOUGHT FOR A MOMENT she was going to refuse it but then she shrugged and walked away stowing it in her purse. He watched her. She went in. The windows of the bus station were steamed from condensation and she looked gray and spectral walking away, as if she were fading out, not real at all.

He eased the truck in gear and drove away. He turned onto the Natchez Trace Parkway five miles out of Waynesboro and the first thing he saw was a sign that said TUPELO MISS 121 MILES. He was a believer in signs and portents and took this as an omen. He rolled on. He drove with the windows cranked down for the cold astringent air and when he crossed the Mississippi line it was hardly snowing at all and a band of rose light lay in the east like a gift he hadn’t expected and probably didn’t deserve.