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

Closure and Roadkill on the Life’s Highway

RAYMER HAD BEEN working at the housing project for more than a month, and during this time the little old man had consistently moved with the sun. Raymer had begun work during the chill days of a blackberry winter, and the man had shuttled his chair as each day progressed, claiming the thin, watery light as if he drew sustenance from it. Now it was well into June, and at some point the man had shifted into reverse, moving counterclockwise for the shade but always positioning his lawn chair where he could watch Raymer work.

Raymer hardly noticed him, for he was in more pain than he had thought possible. He could scarcely get through the day. He was amazed that hearts could actually ache, actually break. Secretly he suspected that his had been defective, already faulted, a secondhand or rebuilt heart, for it had certainly not held up as well as he had expected it to. Corrie, who had been his childhood sweetheart before she became his wife, had inserted the point of a chisel into the fault line and tapped it once lightly with a hammer, and that was the end of that.

By trade he was a painter, and some days he was conscious only of the aluminum extension ladder through his tennis shoes and the brush at the end of his extended arm, which leaned out, and out, as if gravity were just a bothersome rumor, as if he were leaning to paint the very void that yawned to engulf him. When Raymer came down to move the ladder, the old man was waiting for him at the foot of it holding a glass of iced tea in his hand. He was a wizened little man who did not even come to Raymer’s shoulder. He had washed-out eyes of the palest blue, and the tip of his nose looked as if, sometime long ago, it had been sliced off neatly with a pocketknife. He was wearing a canvas porkpie hat that had half a dozen trout flies hooked through the band, and he was dressed in flip-flops, faded blue jeans, and an old Twisted Sister T-shirt.

My name’s Mayfield. Drink this tea before you get too hot.

Raymer took the glass of tea as you’d take a pill a doctor ordered you to, and stood holding it as if he did not know what to do with it.

Drink it up before that ice melts. You don’t talk much, do you?

What?

You don’t have much to say.

Well, I work by myself. Folks might think me peculiar if I was having long conversations.

I mean you ain’t very friendly. You don’t exactly invite conversation.

I just have all this work to do.

Who do you work for?

Raymer sipped the tea. It was sweet and strong, and the glass was full of shaved ice. A sprig of mint floated on top, and he crushed it between his teeth. I work for myself, he said.

I been watchin you ever since you come out here. You’re right agile on that ladder. Move around like you was on solid ground. How old a feller are you?

I’m twenty-four, Raymer said, chewing the mint, its taste as evocative as a hallucinogenic drug, reminding him of something but he could not have said what. Where’d you get that T-shirt?

It was in some stuff that my daughter left when she married, Mayfield said. You ever do any bluff-climbin?

Any what?

Bluff-climbin: Climbin around over these limestone bluffs down by the Tennessee River.

No.

I bet you could, though. I used to do it when I was a hell of a lot older than twenty-four. I can’t do it now, though — my joints has got stiff, and my bones are as brittle as glass.

I’m sorry, Raymer said, feeling an obscure need to apologize for infirmities of age he hadn’t caused. He was thinking of Corrie the last time he’d seen her, thinking of her hands pushing against his chest.

It ain’t your fault. Listen, I got somethin I need a coat of paint on. You stop by when you knock off work this evenin, and I’ll show it to you.

Well, I don’t know. I push myself pretty hard. I’m usually about worn out by the end of the day.

It ain’t much, and I ain’t lookin’ to get it done for nothin. I’ll pay you.

If I’m not too tired.

The main thing is I want to talk to you. I’ve got a business proposition for you.

Raymer drained the glass and handed it to the old man. He began repositioning the ladder. I’ll see at quitting time, he said.

He made it through the day, and when he was behind the apartment building, washing his brushes, he thought he might make it to his truck and escape without painting whatever it was the old man wanted painted. He wanted to go home to the empty house and sit in the dark and think about Corrie. But Mayfield was a wily old man and had anticipated him. He was leaning against the front of Raymer’s truck when Raymer came around the building with his brushes in his hand. He had one flip-flop cocked on the bumper and was leaning against the grille with an elbow propped on the hood. He wasn’t much taller than the hood of the truck. I’ll show you that thing now, he said. It’s over on the porch of my apartment.

Raymer didn’t even know what it was. It appeared to be a sort of flattened-out concrete lion. Its paws were outstretched, and its eyes looked crossed or rolled back in its head. It looked like an animal on which something had fallen from an enormous height, flattening its back and leaving a rectangular cavity.

What the hell is it?

It’s a homemade planter, of course. It was my wife’s. It’s all I’ve got left after fifty years of marriage, all I have to remember her by.

Raymer gazed at the sorry-looking thing. It seemed precious little to have salvaged from fifty years of marriage, but he guessed it was more than he had.

What color you want it? Paint won’t stay on that concrete anyway, not out here in the weather.

I ain’t worried about the weather — that thing’ll be on this porch longer than I will. Paint it red, brighten things up around here.

While Raymer painted it red, the old man told him a tale.

I was watchin the way you get around on that ladder, he began. You ain’t got no fear of heights. That ladder must run out forty foot, and you never make a misstep. Course it wouldn’t take but one, and that’d be all of you. I was thinkin about them bluffs down on the Tennessee River. Down there below Clifton. I bet a young man like you wouldn’t have no trouble climbin up to some caves I know of on them bluffs.

Raymer was barely listening. While he was painting the lion, he was replaying a loop of tape in his head of Corrie telling him about the emptiness in her life. What’s the matter? he had asked, but whatever was the matter was so evasive and intangible that it couldn’t be pinned down with a word. No word was precise or subtle enough to explain it. We never have enough money, but it’s not really aBout money, she had said. He had dropped out of college so that Corrie could finish nursing school. She had dropped out of his life, and the bottom had dropped out of everything. My life is empty, she said, before she packed her bags and rented an apartment in Maury County. He didn’t know what kind of emptiness, or what had been removed to cause it, but the space must have been sizable, because she had found a six-foot-four guitarist in a country band to fill it. The guitarist’s name was Robbie, and he had a wild mane of curly red hair and a predatory, foxlike face.

Hell, he’s not even good-looking, Raymer had told her. He looks like a goddamned fox.

Like a what?

Like a fox. A red fox. That sharp nose, all that red fur. Hair. Hell, I’m better-looking than he is.

You’re very good-looking, Buddy. You’re a lot better-looking than he is — but life’s not always about looks, is it?

You a married man? Mayfield asked.

She quit me, Raymer said, putting the finishing touches on the lion.

I bet ten thousand dollars would put things in a whole other light, Mayfield said.

It wasn’t really about money.

It’s never about money, but still, a few thousand dollars would fix a lot of things right up. Smooth things over, round off a lot of sharp corners. She got another man?

Raymer was growing uncomfortable talking about it. Thinking about it. Not until after she left, he said carefully.

I bet she had him picked out beforehand, though.

Raymer laid the brush aside. You do? What the hell do you know about it? What is it to you anyway?

I know I’m seventy-five years old, and I ain’t went through life blindfolded. I know you’re pretty down in the mouth, and I know there’s nearly twenty thousand dollars in that cave I was tellin you about. I put it there myself, a long time ago. You can’t even get to it from the top, from the bluff side. You got to get up to it from the river. A little over nineteen thousand dollars, to be exact.

A little over nineteen thousand is not exact, Raymer said.

Nineteen thousand seven hundred something, then, Mayfield said. At that time Alabama was dry for beer. Dry as a chip. I lived right across the state line then. I had two coolers on my back porch and didn’t sell nothin but tallboy Bud. Sunday afternoons in the summertime you could stand in my front yard and look up the highway and the line of cars windin around my house looked like it went on forever. You’d wonder where all them cars come from. Where they went. I had a beer truck comin from Tennessee twice a week. I was payin off everybody from county judges to dogcatchers, and still I was hooked up to a money machine. I didn’t drink, like most bootleggers. I didn’t gamble. What was I goin to do with all that money? Put it in the bank? Mail it to the IRS? I was makin money faster than I could spend it, and I was never a slacker when it come to spendin money. We had a daughter in a finishin school in Atlanta, Georgia, and we was drivin matchin Lincoln Continentals. I was accumulatin it in fruit jars, paper sacks. The money kept growin all the time.

Why didn’t you just bury it? Raymer asked, as if he believed any of this.

I did, but folks was always slippin around and tryin to dig it up. They took to watchin me in shifts. They knew I had money. I had to get it somewheres nobody prowled around. I was thinkin in terms of a sort of retirement fund. Then I come in this part of the country and found that cave. You can barely see it from the river, much less get into it. Nobody had been in there in a hell of a time. Some skeletons were in there, and old guns. Swords. I’ve got one of them I’ll show you. It was a old Civil War cave.

Let’s see it, Raymer said, interested in spite of himself.

The sword was wrapped in what looked like an old tablecloth. The old man unfolded the oilcloth and held up the sword for Raymer to see. Raymer was expecting something polished and lethal, but the steel had a dull patina of time, and it seemed to draw light into itself instead of reflecting it.

It’s one of them old CSA officer’s swords, ain’t it? the man said.

I really wouldn’t know one from a meat cleaver, but I guess it is if you say it is. It’s certainly some kind of sword. What else was in there?

Belt buckles. Rusty guns. Bones, like I said. Further back there was different kinds of bones, arrowheads, and clay pots. That place was old. I ain’t no zoologist or nothin, but them was Indian bones.

Hellfire, Raymer said. I thought you needed someplace nobody knew about. It sounds like folks were just tripping over each other to get into your cave. It must have been the Grand Central Station of caves.

The old man took the sword back and folded its shroud around it. Nobody’s interested in that kind of stuff anymore, he said. Everybody’s forgot about it. When I was in there, I guess I was the first in seventy-five years. Nobody’s been there since — I’d bet on it.

If you left nineteen thousand dollars in there, you bet pretty high, Raymer observed. I thought you said you didn’t gamble.

Mayfield had not yet turned on the lights in his living room, and behind him the door loomed dark and silent. Raymer thought of his own still house, where he must go.

I’ve got to get on, he said. What happened to your nose?

I had plastic surgery. I wanted it this way. I picked this nose out of a book.

Were you in an accident?

No, he did it on purpose. I was in a beer joint over on the Wayne County line. Goblin’s Knob. This big farmer off of Beech Creek set on me and held me down and cut the end off of it with a pocketknife.

Jesus Christ.

No, he was a Pulley. He disappeared right after that. Nobody ever knew what became of him. I believe he’s in a dry cistern with his throat cut and rocks piled down on him. What do you think?

I think I can feel you pulling on my leg again.

Maybe. Maybe not.

SIX WEEKS AFTER she left, he had seen her in a mall, coming out of a JCPenney. She had had her hair shorn away and what was left dyed a glossy black. She was slim and graceful, and she looked like the willowy child he had grown up with. He walked along beside her. Standing by a wishing pool where coins gleamed from the depths, and with a brick wall hard against her back, he kissed her mouth until she twisted her face away. Let me alone, she said. What are you trying to do?

He was still holding her. He could feel the delicate framework of bones beneath her flesh. Like a rabbit, a fawn, like something small. I’m trying to save our marriage, he said.

She shook her head. This marriage is shot, she said quietly. A team of paramedics couldn’t save it. This marriage wound up roadkill on the life’s highway.

On the life’s highway, Raymer repeated in wonder. You’ve been helping Robbie with his country lyrics, haven’t you?

She was pushing harder against him, but he was still holding her. His arms wouldn’t release. When they finally did, they hung limply at his sides, like appendages he hadn’t learned the use of. She was looking into his eyes. Was she about to cry? Maybe. Maybe not. She turned away, and he didn’t follow.

Corrie lived in an apartment complex near the college where she was learning to be a nurse. He had been there a time or two before she took up with the country musician. Tonight her light was out. Early to bed, early to rise. Robbie owned an old green Camaro, and Raymer drove around the parking lot until he found it. Then he got back on the interstate and drove toward home.

IT’S IN A FIVE-GALLON VINEGAR JAR, Mayfield said.

What in the world would a person ever do with five gallons of vinegar? Raymer said.

They’d make a lot of pickles. Anyway, that’s where it’s at. I started out with fruit jars, but they were too hard to keep up with. I figured, keep all my eggs in one basket. If the weather clears up, we might do it this weekend. I believe it’d do you good to get your mind off that girl that quit you. We might fish a little. You get down on that river, you’ll be all right.

I never said I believed any of this tale. And I damn sure never said I’d do it.

You never said you wouldn’t. We’ll split right down the middle, half and half. I’d even give you the even ten.

Raymer was sitting on Mayfield’s porch, a porch stanchion against his back, drinking from a warming bottle of beer and watching rain string off the roof. A sudden squall had blown in from the southwest, and Mayfield had been standing there in the rain waiting for him before he had his ladders and tools stored away. Now Mayfield was rocking in the porch swing, and for some time he studied Raymer in silence.

What you’re doin is draggin this out way too far, he said. You’re a likely young feller. Not too bad-lookin. You need to get over it. Get on to the next thing. You need some kind of closure.

Closure? Raymer was grinning. Where did you hear that? Was relationship therapy part of the bootlegging trade when you followed it?

I heard it on TV. I got no way of gettin out anywhere. I watch a lot of TV. Them talk shows — them shrinks and social workers are always talkin about closure. Closure this, closure that. I figure you need some. You need somethin for sure. You got a look about you like you don’t care whether you live or die, and maybe you’d a little rather die. I’ve seen that look on folks before, and I don’t care for it. It ain’t healthy.

Raymer was thinking that maybe the old man was right. He did need something, and closure was as good a word for it as anything else. Everything had just been so damned polite. She had not even raised her voice. Just I’m going, goodbye, don’t leave the light on for me. If only she had done something irrevocable, something he couldn’t forget, something so bad she couldn’t take it back. Something that would cauterize the wound like a red-hot iron.

Did it have a metal lid, this famous jug?

What?

If it did, after twenty years in a wet cave the lid’s rusted away and the money’s just a mildewed mess of rotten goop. A biological stew of all the germs that came off all the people who ever handled it. Fermenting all these years.

I never heard such rubbish. Anyway, I’m way ahead of you. The money’s wrapped in plastic, and I melted paraffin in a cooker and sealed it with a couple of inches of that. Like women used to seal jelly.

This silenced Raymer, and he took a sip of beer and sat watching Mayfield bemusedly. After a while he set his bottle aside. He seemed to have made up his mind about something.

Do you believe in God? he asked.

Do what? Of course I do. Don’t you?

Do you own a Bible?

I believe there’s one in there somewhere.

Go get it.

Mayfield was in the house for some time. Raymer watched staccato lightning flicker in the west out of tumorous storm clouds. Thunder rumbled like something heavy and ungainly rolling down an endless corridor, faint and fainter. When Mayfield came out, he had a worn Bible covered in black leather. He held it out to Raymer.

Did you want to read a psalm or two? he asked.

Raymer didn’t take the Bible. Do you swear you’re telling me the truth about that money? he asked.

The old man looked amused, as if he’d won some obscure point of honor. He laid the Bible in the seat of the lawn chair and placed his palm on it. I swear I hid a vinegar jar with nineteen thousand seven hundred dollars in it in a cave down on the Tennessee River.

Raymer figured he might as well cover all the contingencies. And as far as I know, it’s still there, he said.

And as far as I know, it’s still there, Mayfield repeated.

IT WAS NEVER ABOUT MONEY, Corrie had said, but Raymer thought perhaps it had been about money after all. Corrie had been happiest when they had money to spend, and she fell into long silences when it grew tight. The happiest he had seen her was when they bought an old farmhouse to remodel. But everything ate up money: mortgage payments, building materials. Anyway, what Corrie seemed to enjoy was the act of spending, not what she bought.

He had given her a $300 leather jacket for her twenty-second birthday, and she had left it in a Taco Bell and not even checked on it for a week. Naturally, it was gone. They probably made a lot of others just like it, she said. Somewhere someone Raymer didn’t know was wearing his $300.

HE CUT THE MOTOR and let the boat drift the last few feet toward shore, rocking slightly on the choppy water. He took a line up from the stern and tossed it over a sweet-gum branch. He drew it around and tied it off and just stood for a moment, staring up the face of the bluff. The cliff rose in a sheer vertical that he judged to be almost two hundred feet. The opening he was looking at was perhaps thirty feet from the top.

You went up that thing?

I damn sure did. With a five-gallon vinegar jug of money.

The hell you did.

The hell I didn’t. It’s not as steep as it looks.

It better not be. If it is, Spiderman couldn’t get up it with suction cups on his hands and feet. Are you sure it’s the right one?

I’m almost positive, Mayfield said. He had opened a tackle box and sat with an air of concentration, inspecting its contents. At length he selected a fly and began to tie it to the nylon line on the fishing rod he was holding.

It was ten o’clock on a balmy Saturday morning. They had already been inside several inlets where the river backwatered and had inspected the bluffs for caves. They had seen two openings that could have been caves, but the openings had not looked right to the old man. Mayfield had brought a cooler of beer and CocaColas, a picnic basket filled with sandwiches, his tackle box, a creel, and two fly rods. Raymer had brought only a heavy-duty flashlight and a two-hundred-foot coil of nylon rope, and he was disgusted. If we had one of those striped umbrellas, we could lollygag on the beach, he said. If we had a beach.

He began a winding course up the bluff. It was cut with ledges that narrowed as the bluff ascended, and sometimes he was forced to progress from ledge to ledge by wedging his boots in vertical crevices and pushing himself laboriously upward. From time to time he came upon stunted cedars growing out of the fissured rock, but he didn’t trust them to hold his weight.

Halfway up, the ledges ceased to be anything more than sloping footholds on the rock face, and he could go no farther. He stood on a narrow ledge not much wider than his shoe soles, hugging the bluff and glancing up. The rest of the bluff looked as sheer and smooth as an enormous section of window glass. The hell with this, he said. He worked himself down to a wider outcropping and hunkered there with his back against the limestone and his eyes closed. He could feel the hot sun on his eyelids. When he opened them, the world was spread out in a panorama of such magnitude that his head reeled, and for a moment he did not think of Corrie at all.

Everything below him was diminished — a tiny boat with a tiny man casting a line, the inlet joining the rolling river where it gleamed like metal in the sun. Far upstream, toward the ferry, a barge drifted with a load of new cars, their glass and chrome flashing in the sun like a heliograph. Mayfield glanced up to check his progress and waved an encouraging hand. Raymer was seized with an intense loathing, a maniacal urge to throttle the old man and wedge his body under a rock somewhere.

When he reached the base of the cliff, he was wringing wet with sweat. He waded out into the shallow water and got the coil of rope. Mayfield was unhooking a small channel cat and dropping it into his creel.

What’s the trouble? he said.

Raymer shook his head and did not reply. He lined up the mouth of the cave with a lightning-struck cypress on the white dome of the bluff and went up the riverbank looking for easier climbing. He entered a hollow, topped out on a ridge, and then angled back toward the river looking for the cypress. Finding it seemed to take forever. When he did find it, he tied the end of the rope around its base and dropped the coil over the bluff. Then he hauled thirty or forty feet of rope back up and began to fashion a rough safety line. The idea of swinging back and forth, pendulumlike, across the face of the bluff, dependent on an old man with a fishing pole to rescue him, did not appeal to him, but he tied the rope off anyway. He felt like a fool to the tenth power, and in his heart of hearts he knew he wouldn’t find any money.

His feet reached the opening first, and for a dizzy moment they were climbing on nothingness, pedaling desperately for purchase until the bottom of the opening connected with his shoes. When he was sure he was safe on solid rock, he undipped the flashlight from his belt and shone it into the opening. This could not be it. Here was no huge room like the one the old man had described, no dead soldiers or guns, no money. It was not even a proper cave — just cannular limestone walls thick with bat guano, sloping inward toward the dead end of a rock wall. He rested for a time and then clicked off the light and went hand over hand back up the face of the bluff.

When Raymer waded out to the boat and tossed in the rope and the light, Mayfield did not seem concerned. Likely it’s another bluff, he said. All these sloughs get to lookin’ the same, and it’s been upwards of twenty years since I was here. I used to fish all these backwaters when I first come up from Alabama. Now I think on it, it seems the mouth of that cave was just about hid by a cedar. That’s why I picked it to begin with, I never would have found it if I hadn’t been watchin’ a hawk through some field glasses.

Then you just deposited your twenty thousand and sat back waiting for the interest to add up.

I told you, I didn’t need it. I’d tip a waitress a dollar for a fifty-cent hamburger. I never cared for money.

I guess you were just in the bootlegging trade for the service you could render humanity.

Right.

I wish I had sense like other folks, Raymer said. Why does everybody think I just fell off the hay truck?

You’ve got that red neck and that slack-jawed country look, Mayfield said placidly. And a fool is such a hard thing to resist.

♦ ♦ ♦

HE HAD SENT HER three dozen American Beauty roses, and the apartment was saturated with their smell. Raymer sat on the couch with his legs crossed and a cup of coffee balanced on his knee and had the closest thing to a conversation he had had with Corrie since the day she left.

This is so unlike you, she said. All these flowers. How much did they cost?

They were day-old roses, half off. I told you it didn’t matter.

And climbing around in caves looking for hidden treasure. It’s so unpredictable. Who would have thought it of you? Are you having some sort of a crisis?

Raymer kept glancing around the apartment. He had neither seen Robbie nor heard mention of his name, but the place made him nervous anyway. It was fancier and more expensive-looking than he remembered, and he wondered how she could afford it. Everything looked like a sleek and dynamic symbol for a life he could not aspire to. The furniture was low and curvilinear, as if aerodynamically designed for life in the fast lane.

He’s almost certainly senile, she said. What makes you think he’s telling you the truth?

I know he’s telling the truth. He’s religious, and he laid his hand on the Bible, and … wait a minute — quit that. It may be funny to you, but he took it seriously.

Religious and bootlegger just sort of seem contradictory terms to me.

I’m not going to argue semantics. The point is, he’s telling the truth. I even drove down below the state line and talked to some folks who used to know him. He was a bootlegger, and he was successful enough at it to have socked away twenty thousand dollars without missing it. That’s ten thousand for me. Us, if I can talk you into it. We could just spend it, just piss it away. Buy things. Go on a cruise. I’m making money for us to live on, and I’ve got more work to do.

She gave him a sharp took of curiosity. What’s in it for you?

You. If you’ll give me a chance, I’ll win you back. By the time we spend ten thousand dollars, I can persuade you to give it another shot.

We gave it a four-year shot. It wasn’t working.

I’ll try harder.

Oh, Buddy. If you tried any harder, you’d break something. Rupture all your little springs or something. It wasn’t you. It was just a bad idea — although you did make it worse. You’re such an innocent about things. You get a picture of things in your head and your picture is all you see. You don’t know me. You don’t even know yourself. All you know is your little picture of how things ought to be, and that’s the way you think they are.

Well, whatever. Ten thousand dollars is still a lot of money.

She didn’t argue with that. Wouldn’t it be fun to go down to the Bahamas? I’m on summer break. We could lie on the beach. All that white sand. We could just lie in the sun and drink those tall drinks they have with tropical fruit in them.

Then you’ll do it?

I’ll think about it. Like you said, it’s a lot of money. She paused, and was silent for a time. There’s just one thing, she said.

Where’s the fox at?

Robbie? He’s playing a string of club dates in Nashville, trying to get a record deal. By the way, you shouldn’t call him that — it just shows how petty you are. I told him about it, and he wasn’t amused.

Piss on him. I never set out to be a comedian.

Back to what I was saying. The way you tell it, you’re doing all the work. Swinging around on those bluffs — that’s dangerous. You could get killed. I’m only twenty-three, and I could be a widow. I think you deserve the entire twenty thousand.

Hellfire, Corrie, it’s Mayfield s money, not mine.

You said yourself he doesn’t care about it. Besides, it would take twice as long to spend it. If you’re really trying to, as you put it, win me back, this would give you twice as long to do it.

Raymer was put off balance by what she’d suggested, and he felt a little dizzy. He thought the smell of the roses might be getting to him. The room was filled with a sickening sweet reek that seemed to have soaked into the draperies and the carpet. It smelled like a wedding, a funeral. You may be right, he said.

Of course I’m right. You could take six months off from work. We could spend it remodeling the house. Maybe you’re learning, Buddy. You did right to tell me this.

I could tell you about it all night long, Raymer said. He’d heard that money was an aphrodisiac, but he suspected this was more likely to be true of actual as opposed to conjectural money, and Corrie’s reply bore this out.

I’ve got to think all this through, she said. I’ve got to decide what I’m going to tell Robbie.

At the door she kissed him hard and opened her mouth under his and rounded her sharp breasts against his chest, but her mouth did not taste the same as it had that day by the wishing pool, and the odor of the roses had even saturated her hair. An enormous sadness settled over him.

Going back, he was five miles across the county line when a small red fox darted up out of the weedy ditch and streaked into his headlights. He cut the wheel hard to miss it, but a rear wheel passed over the fox, and he felt a lurch in the pit of his stomach. Goddamn it, he said. He put the truck in reverse and backed up until he could see the fox. It wasn’t moving. He got out. The fox’s eyes were open, but they were blind and dull; its sharp little teeth were bared, and blood was running out of its mouth. Its eyes had been as bright as emeralds in the headlights, and they had gleamed as if they emitted light instead of reflecting it. I don’t believe this, Raymer said. This is just too goddamned much.

He rose and took a drop cloth from the bed of the truck and wrapped the fox in it. He stowed it in the back of the pickup and drove on toward home.

RAYMER WAS SHAKING HIS HEAD. Why don’t you just admit it? he asked. You wanted to go fishing. You wanted to get away from the project and picnic on the river. So you fed me all this bullshit, and here you are, with your little basket and your little fishing pole.

Mayfield regarded him placidly. It don’t matter what you think, he said. The money’s not there because you think it is. It’s there because I put it in a jar and poured paraffin over it and packed it up the side of that bluff. If you think it’s not there, that don’t change nothin. It’d be there even if you didn’t exist.

Because you packed it up the side of that bluff.

Right.

Raymer sat in the stern of the boat looking at his hands. He had slipped twenty scary feet down the face of a bluff before he could stop himself, and the nylon line had left a deep rope burn across each palm, as if he’d grabbed a red-hot welding rod with both hands.

Truth to tell, though, exploring the caves was interesting. He had not found any dead Confederates, but he had been in a cave in whose winding depths Indians had left flint chippings, pottery shards, all that remained of themselves.

As always, Mayfield seemed to know what he was thinking. Why won’t you admit it yourself? You know you’re gettin a kick out of it. I bet you ain’t thought of your wife all mornin.

Raymer shook his head again. He grinned. You’re just too many for me, he said.

THURSDAY HE WAS RAINED OUT in midafternoon, and he drove to the bank and checked the balance in his account. It was a lot higher than he had expected. He was amazed at how little he had spent. Like the old man, he seemed to be accumulating it in paper sacks, fruit jars. It was growing all the time.

He asked to withdraw $500 in ones and fives. The teller gave him a peculiar look as she began to count out the money.

It’s for a ransom note, Raymer said, and for a moment she stopped counting. She was careful to keep any look at all from her face. Then she resumed, laying one bill atop another.

He drank the rest of the day away in a bar near the bypass. The place was named Octoberfest and had a mock-Germanic decor, and the waitresses were tricked out in what looked like milkmaids’ costumes. He drank dark lager and kept waiting for the ghost of Hitler to sidle in and take the stool across from him. A dull malaise had seized him. A sense of doom. A suspicion that someone close to him had died. He had not yet received the telegram, but the Reaper was walking up and down the block looking for his house number.

You’ve sure got a good tan, the barmaid told him. It looks great with that blond hair. What are you, a lifeguard or something?

Something, Raymer said. I’m a necrozoologist.

A what? Necrowhat?

A necrozoologist. I analyze roadkill on the highways. On the life’s highway. I look for patterns, migratory habits. Compile statistics. So many foxes, so many skunks. Possums. Try to determine where the animal was bound for when it was struck.

There’s no such thing as that.

Sure there is. We’re funded by the government. We get grants.

She laid a palm on his forearm. I think you’re drunk, she said. But you’re cute anyway. Stop by and see me one day when you’re sober.

When he went to use the pay phone, he was surprised to see that dark had fallen. He could see the interstate from there, and the headlights of cars streaking past looked straight and intent, like falling stars rifling down the night.

The phone rang for a long time before she answered.

Where were you?

I was asleep on the couch. Where are you? Why are you calling? I’ve got it, he said.

Jesus. Buddy. You found it? All of it?

All of it.

You sound funny. Why do you sound like that? Are you drunk?

I might have had a few celibatory — celebratory — beers.

If you were going to celebrate, you could have waited for me.

I’m waiting for you now, he said, and hung up the phone.

A CHEST FREEZER STOOD on the back porch of the farmhouse they had bought to renovate. Raymer raised the lid and took out the frozen fox, still wrapped in its canvas shroud. He folded away the canvas, but part of it was seized in the bloody ice, and he refolded it. He slid the bundle into a clean five-gallon paint bucket. A vinegar jar would have been nice, but he guessed they didn’t make them that big anymore. The money was in a sack, and he dumped it into the bucket, shaking the bag out, the ones and fives drifting like dry leaves in a listless wind. He glanced at his watch and then picked up the loose bills from the floor and packed them around the fox. He stretched a piece of plastic taut across the top of the bucket and sealed it with duct tape. He replaced the plastic lid and hammered it home with a fist. Then he went into the kitchen and filled up the coffeemaker.

When headlights washed the walls of the house, he was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee. By the time he had crossed to the front room and turned on the porch light, Corrie was standing at the front door with an overnight bag in her hand.

She came in looking around the room, the high, unfinished ceiling. Looks like you quit on it, she said.

I guess I sort of drifted into the doldrums after you left, he said. Is that bag all you brought?

I figured we could buy some new stuff in the morning. Where is it? I want to see it.

He’d expected that. He pried off the lid and showed her. He’d been working on the wiring in the living room, and the light was poor here. She was looking intently, but all it looked like was a bucket full of money.

Can we dump it out and count it? I thought it was in some kind of glass jar.

The jar was broken. I think a rock slid on it. If he hadn’t had the whole mess airtight in plastic, it would probably have been worthless. I’ve already counted it, and we’re not going to roll around in it or do anything crazy. I still don’t feel right about this, and we’re leaving for Key West early in the morning, before I change my mind. I can see that old man’s face every time I close my eyes.

Whatever you say, Buddy. Five gallons of money sure has made you decisive and take-charge. It looks good on you.

Later he lay on his back in bed and watched her disrobe. You don’t have to do this, he said. We on’t have to rush things.

I want to rush things, she said, reaching behind to unclasp her brassiere.

Raymer’s mind was in turmoil. There was just too much to understand. He wondered if he would ever drive confidently down what Corrie had called the life’s highway, piloting a sleek car five miles over the limit instead of standing by the road with his collar turned up and his thumb in the air. There were too many variables — the rates of chance and exchange were out of balance. The removal of Corrie’s clothing was to her a casual act, all out of proportion to the torrent of feelings it caused in him. Her apartment was less than forty miles away, but it was no-man’s-land, offlimits. She had laid stones in the pathway that had driven him to a despair that not even the sweet length of her body laid against his would counterbalance.

An hour or so after he should have been asleep, he heard her call him. Buddy? When he didn’t answer, she rose, slowly so that the bed would not creak. She crossed the floor to the bathroom. He could hear the furtive sounds of her dressing, the whisper of fabric on fabric. Then nothing, and though his eyes were still closed, he knew that she was standing in the bathroom door watching him. He lay breathing in, breathing out. He heard her take up the bucket and turn with it. The bucket banged the doorjamb. Goddamn, she breathed. Then he heard the soft sounds of bare feet and nothing further, not even the opening and closing of the front door, before her car cranked.

It was hot and stale in the room. It smelled like attar of roses, like climate-controlled money from the depths of a cave, like a rotting fox in the high white noon.

He got up and raised a window. Night rushed in like balm to his sweating skin. She hadn’t even closed the front door. The yard lay empty, and still and so awash with moonlight that it appeared almost theatrical, like the setting arranged for a dream that was over, or one on which the curtain had not yet risen.

When he crawled back into bed, he lay in the damp spot where they had made love, but he felt nothing. No pleasure, no pain. It was just a wet spot on a bed, and he moved over and thought about getting up and changing the sheets. But he didn’t. He was weary and, despite all the coffee, still a little drunk. He tried to think of Corrie’s lips against his throat, but all his mind would hold on to was the hiss in her voice when the bucket banged the door. Then even that slid away, and on the edge of sleep a boat was rocking on sun-dappled water, an old man was changing the fly on his line, and Raymer was feeling the sun hot on his back and wondering, Would you really lay your hand on the Bible and swear a lie? The old man’s face was inscrutable, as always, but somehow Raymer didn’t think he would, and when he slipped into sleep, it was dreamless and untroubled.