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

Sugarbaby

WHEN FOLKS TALKED about divorce statistics or the disintegration of the American family they would hold Finis and Doneita Beasley up as the example of the perfect marriage. They had been married thirty years. They worked their place side by side. Raised their kids and now they’ve got each other. You couldn’t blow them apart with a stick of dynamite.

In the months before their thirty-first anniversary Doneita bought a dog. Their two daughters were grown and married with concerns of their own. Finis was much to himself, and he was not easily given to conversation. He was a hard worker yet and had always made them a good living but in all truth he was not very good company. Finis knew a dog would be company for Doneita. A dog would be almost like another child. A dog could not talk to her but she could talk to it. Doneita had told him that bonds form between dogs and their owners and she looked forward to the formation of these bonds.

It was a small dog of some indeterminate breed and Finis just called it a lapdog. A kind of terrier perhaps. It was an ugly dog with black, bulbous eyes and an improbable number of sharp little teeth. There was an atavistic look about it as if millennia had passed and left it unchanged, as if evolution had deemed it not worth bothering with.

Finis did not like the dog. It didn’t seem to like him either. It growled at him when he came into the room. He’d turn to look at it and it would be watching him with something akin to speculation in its protuberant little eyes. Once it bit the back of his ankle where the tendons are, leaving his sock bloody and the prints of its little teeth like claw marks.

Doneita had Finis build it a small plywood house. Black shingles on the roof. She bought jars of paint and lacquered the house a glossy blue and wrote the dog’s name above the door: Sugarbaby. She painted delicate roses ascending the front corners of the house, the briars hunter green, the blossoms dusky rose.

Sugarbaby did not take to living in the small house. Every night about ten o’clock just as Finis would be drifting off to sleep, it would turn up on the porch scratching at the screen. Yip yip yip, it would say. Its claws dragging down the screen were like fingernails scraping across a blackboard that went on and on forever.

That goddamned yip yip yip is driving me crazy, Beasley said. Get up and make it shut up.

Just ignore it and go to sleep, Doneita said. It doesn’t bother me anyway. It doesn’t keep me awake.

This went on for over a week and one night something seemed to break inside him and he got up and blew the dog off the porch with a.44 magnum. The concussion in the small parlor was enormous. Pictures fell from the walls, window glass rattled in its sashes. There was a ringing in his ears. An appalled silence rolled on him wave on wave like the waters of an ocean.

He couldn’t hear her footsteps for the ringing but abruptly Doneita was standing in the doorway of the bedroom. She was looking at him in a way that he had never seen before.

What on earth are you doing? Was somebody breaking in on us? I shot at that dog, he said.

You did what?

I can’t stand that racket anymore. I shot at Sugarbaby.

Good God. You didn’t hit him did you?

I don’t think so, Finis said. I was trying to scare him into shutting up. Go back to bed.

There is something the matter with you, she said.

IN THE MORNING he was about early. He gathered up the remnants of the dog and buried them below the barn lot. He had been very impressed with what a.44 magnum was capable of. It had virtually disintegrated Sugarbaby and torn out a deep groove in the floorboards then knocked loose a four-by-four porch column so that it dangled out of plumb from the porch beam.

When he came up from burying the dog Doneita was leaving. She had a small station wagon and she was loading possessions into it. Clothing, knickknacks, pictures. I’ll send Clarence after the rest, she told him.

He nodded. Take whatever you want, he said.

In days to come his life went on as usual. He farmed, he fed the horses. His life seemed largely unchanged. He knew how to run a washing machine, he knew how to cook. In truth he preferred his own cooking. He had always believed that Doneita used too much grease, too little salt, though he had been too polite to say so.

WHEN BEASLEY CUT the chainsaw off and turned around his daughter Berneice was standing there watching him.

Hellfire, he said. Why didn’t you speak up? I could have cut a tree on you.

I did but you can’t hear anything for that saw. I don’t believe you can half hear anyway.

I hear fine, Beasley said.

Berneice had had to leave her car and climb the fence and cross the pasture to the edge of the timber where Beasley was sawing firewood. She didn’t look happy. Beasley thought she looked torn between raking him over the coals and crying on his shoulder. He hoped it wouldn’t be crying, but there was a tremulous look to her mouth and a slick wet gleam to her eyes.

What’s all this about Mama? she asked.

Beasley set the saw down and knelt beside it and unscrewed the gas cap. He poured fuel into it from a milk jug he was using as a gas container.

What you see, I guess, he said. Me living out here and her living wherever she’s living.

She’s living out there in one of those housing authority apartments, Berneice said. Out on Walnut where the old people live. Most of them widows, old women waiting to die. One of them had to die before she could even get in there. She stayed with me and Clarence for a few days.

I guess you got an earful, he said.

Well. How come you shot Sugarbaby?

Beasley thought about it a time. He had unpocketed a file and begun to sharpen the saw. I don’t know, he finally said. I expect it was that yip yip yip every night.

Mama said you told her you meant to just shoot at it. Did you mean to hit it?

I don’t know. I just shot, and there it was.

She don’t need to be out there with nothing but old folks. Mama’s not anywhere near ready to give up and die.

Does she like it out there?

She claims she does but she don’t. She’s trying to fit in. She plays bridge with those old ladies. She’s planted a bed of petunias. They sit around talking about quilts and their dead husbands.

If she says she likes it then she probably does. Doneita was never one to hold her tongue when something needed saying.

What makes you the way you are, Daddy? Everything’s gone, it’s just such a waste. Thirty years of memories. You’ve just thrown it away.

You can’t throw away a memory, Beasley said. Anyway she can always come back. Nobody ever said she couldn’t come back.

She’s too stubborn. Both of you. All our Christmases gone, all the birthdays. Now she was crying silently, tears tracking down her cheeks. Beasley was growing more uncomfortable by the second.

Go out there and talk it over with her, Berneice said. Try and work it out.

Beasley was silent. He didn’t know why people were always trying to change things, to get back to where they were. People were who they were, and the things they did were just the things they did. He could not call back the bullet, silence the enormous concussion of the pistol.

And you might take her a little dog of some kind.

Beasley watched her cross back through the pasture. In due course Beasley received a certified letter from a lawyer’s office in Ackerman’s Field. He read it through three times. He studied it in a sort of bemused wonder. He was being sued for divorce. He had been mentally cruel, there were irreconcilable differences. Doneita wanted support, a division of their mutual properties. A date was shown for a hearing where these particulars might be discussed.

Beasley saw no need for that. If she wanted a divorce she was entitled to one. He personally did not believe in divorce. He decided to have no part of whatever happened. He would do nothing to prevent it but he would not abet it.

As the year drew on more letters came. They grew more insistent, the legalese the message was couched in more strident: His presence was requested in court. His lack of cooperation was making things more difficult for everyone. The letters began to anger Beasley. Who are the sons of bitches? he wondered. Why are they aggravating the hell out of me? Why is everybody nosing around in my business?

WHAT YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE at the beginning was go talk to her and get her to come back home, Clarence said.

I guess, Beasley told his son-in-law.

And since you didn’t do that, what you should have done was go talk to her when the court served you with those papers. Work something out. That’s what she wanted. But you didn’t do that either. You just let it roll.

I just let it roll, Beasley agreed.

It was the first cold day of winter and he had the rocking chair dragged before the fireplace and his feet propped on the brick hearth. He had been cutting and hauling firewood all day and he was tired and cold. He liked Clarence but he did not want to discuss this with him. At the very bottom of things he did not consider it any of Clarence s business. It was not even any of his business. It was the business of Doneita and the lawyer she had hired.

Clarence was a schoolteacher and the word he always used to describe Beasley was stoic. He’s tougher than a cut of sweet gum, he told Berneice once when Beasley was still within earshot. You can’t break him or split him, the grain runs every which way. He’s a vanishing breed. An anachronism.

This stoic anachronism sat regarding Clarence from the rocking chair. I appreciate your advice, Clarence, he said. But I decided a while back to just not have anything to do with all this mess. To just let it roll over me and get on out of sight.

It’ll roll over you, all right, Clarence said. You need a lawyer. It’s not any of my business, but this place has been in your family for generations. Now a bunch of lawyers are going to be fighting over it like dogs over a garbage can. They won’t leave you a pot to piss in. Nor a place to set it down if you had a pot.

I’ve always minded my own business, Beasley said. Kept my own counsel. I’ve always believed if a man minded his own business everybody would leave him alone.

You don’t understand, Clarence said.

Maybe not. But I haven’t bothered anybody. I pay my debts, I don’t owe a dime in this world. If they think they can do anything to me let them bring it on.

Well they’ll damn sure bring it. They’ll bring it in wholesale lots. She’s pissed about that dog. That Sugarbaby, and from what I hear the judge she went before is pissed too. They’re going to take you out.

Clarence, Beasley said, wanting to explain but unable to articulate what he meant. It was just that it wasn’t his kind of deal. He was not going to explain his business to a bunch of people in neckties and suits.

What was the use of having principles if you abandoned them when the going got rough? If you said, Well, maybe I’ll do this but I won’t do that. If you said, Well, I’ll move the lines back to here, but no farther? Beasley wasn’t moving any lines. The lines stayed where they were.

This has all gotten out of hand, Clarence said in frustration, rising to go, resting his hand a moment in passing on Beasley’s shoulder. You were together thirty years. What’s this all about?

I just couldn’t stand that goddamned yip yip yip, Beasley finally said.

BEASLEY HAD ON clean overalls. He had on a clean chambray shirt so faded by repeated launderings that its collar had gone soft and shapeless. He was freshly shaven and there was a streak of talcum on his throat.

Well, the elusive Mr. Beasley, the lawyer said. Take a seat there, Mr. Beasley.

Beasley seated himself in a wooden chair with rollers on it. It creaked when he adjusted his weight. He sat studying the lawyer. The lawyer’s name was Townsley. He was a thin young man given to the wearing of loud sport coats. Today he wore a coat of some woolly fabric in blue and green checks whose clash was almost audible. The coat had plastic buttons as big as golf balls. He had smooth oily hair, smooth oily skin, a smooth oily voice.

I’m only here because my son-in-law said I ought to be, Beasley said. I thought there might be some misunderstanding and I aim to clear it up. It’s never been my intention to beat her out of anything. I want that understood. The farm’s half hers and always has been. I thought she knew that. If you want it in writing then that’s what I’m here for.

I’m afraid it’s not that simple, the lawyer said. The time for arbitration has come and gone. What we’re asking for is an accounting of assets. Then an equal division of them.

Half the farm? That’s fine with me. Half of two hundred acres is one hundred acres. That’s fine with me.

It’s not that simple, Townsley said again. We’re asking half the value of your total assets in cash. Your wife no longer has an interest in the farm. There’ll be an appraisal of your properties to determine their value. Which you will pay for, by the way, it’ll be itemized on the bill for expenses. The court has already sent you a demand for an accounting of assets by certified mail. Ignore it at your peril. Ignore it and you’ll be in contempt of court.

I don’t have that kind of money, Beasley said after a time.

The lawyer shrugged. We’re not asking for more than you’ve got, he said. Simply half of it.

BEASLEY ALREADY HAD his glasses on when the deputy brought the warrant and so did not have to get up to go get them. He had been sitting before the fire reading a seed catalog that had come that day and he laid it in a magazine rack and took the warrant and unfolded it and read it. Then he handed it back to the deputy.

The deputy looked outsize and strange in Beasley’s small parlor. His pressed khakis, the black garrison belt. The bolstered pistol and all that it conveyed.

I have to arrest you, the deputy said. But it don’t amount to that much. We’ll go to city hall and post bond. They’ll let you sign for yourself, hell, everybody knows you. Or Clarence could sign for you.

I don’t want anybody signing for me, Beasley said.

What?

I don’t want to tie Clarence up. He might be out some money.

How’s that?

I might just head out. All this is getting too heavy to carry around. Hellfire, a man’s not rooted to the ground the way a goddamned tree is.

All they want you to do is comply with the court, the deputy said. I heard the judge say so himself. Talking to Townsley. He said you were an arrogant son of a bitch and he was going to teach you a lesson.

Then let’s be for learning it, Beasley said.

BEASLEY WAS TURNED into the bullpen with other nightshade denizens who’d run afoul of the law. It was a weekend and business had been brisk and here were miscreants of every stripe. Dread-locked black men and pony tailed white drug dealers, luckless drunks and wifebeaters and child molesters of every taste and inclination. Beasley judged he could keep himself entertained for a day or two just reading the tattoos.

A huge black man stood regarding this clean-cut and well-barbered man of advancing years with some interest.

What’d they get you for? he asked.

Contempt of court, Beasley said.

Shit. And I thought I was a judge of character. I had you figured for a murderer at the very least.

Later they locked him into a cell with a heavyset man named Brenner. Brenner was a soft sluglike man who was awaiting trial for murdering his mother. He had lived in a house trailer with her for years out on Metal Ford Road, supported by her government money. Then one day she met a widower from Jack’s Branch and began to have a social life. One night Brenner watched through the window as she and the widower made love. When the man left Brenner went inside to confront her. He’d had in mind a heart-to-heart talk, tears of repentance. But things had gotten out of hand and he was caught iὴ the act of burning her body.

Brenner wanted Beasley to understand why he had killed her. My mother was a great lady, he said. A saint. I revered my mother. I wouldn’t have harmed a hair on her old gray head. She changed. Something happened to her morals. I believe it’s these times we live in.

Beasley just looked at him and didn’t say anything.

What are you doing in here? Brenner asked him.

When Beasley told him contempt of court Brenner just shook his head in disbelief. That’s a bullshit charge, he said. That’s just paperwork. You must be crazy.

At least I never burned my mama in a goddamned brush pile, Beasley told him.

NO ONE EVEN KNEW he was in jail for a week and then Clarence came to get him. Berneice is just jumping up and down, he said. She said get you out and no mistake about it. Why didn’t you call somebody?

I didn’t see much sense in it, Beasley said.

They were standing in a concrete courtyard. It was enclosed by a chain-link fence. The day was coldlooking and bleak. A few flakes of snow fell. You could see the street from here and Beasley stood watching the cars pass as if he had some interest in where they were going, some investment in what they were up to.

Clarence lit a cigarette. His hands shook. He was wearing a heavy overcoat and he put the burned match into a side pocket. I don’t understand you, he said through the smoke. This has gone way too far. Way too far. It’s gotten out of hand and we need to get our act together here.

Telephone poles ran along the street and small sparrows had aligned themselves on the wire. Beasley watched them. They all flew away, as if they’d simultaneously received the same urgent message.

Will you not come, or what?

I may as well lay it out and get it over with.

Goddamn, Clarence said. I don’t know about you, Finis. I think I’m beginning to not know about you.

Beasley had his hands in his pockets and he was hunched against the weight of the cold. He smiled. I’m beginning to not know about myself, he said.

Later he lay on his cot with his fingers laced behind his skull and thought about things. Things had gotten out of hand, Clarence had said, and Clarence was undoubtedly right. He couldn’t fathom what had happened to him. Some core of stubbornness he hadn’t even known about had set up inside him like concrete. There had been some curious juxtaposition of lives. He’d been switched around somehow and he was living out the balance of someone else’s chaotic life. Somebody somewhere had burnt out and they’d handed it to him to finish up. Somewhere somebody was placidly living out the balance of his.

JUDGE MORRIS made her tell that part about you shooting her terrier dog twice, a deputy named Harris told him. He couldn’t believe it. He’s going to give you a minimum of thirty days, or I’ll kiss your ass right here in front of the courthouse.

They were sitting facing the courthouse in a police cruiser. Harris kept glancing at his watch. It was not quite time to enter the courtroom and Harris sat in the cruiser smoking cigarettes.

They were in the front seat. Harris had not considered it necessary to confine Beasley to the rear seat where there were no door handles and there was a steel mesh barrier between front and rear. Beasley was not a common criminal. Harris’s baton lay on the seat between them. Beasley had noticed that the end of it was pegged and he figured Harris had drilled it out and poured melted lead into it.

Harris had once been sheriff. He had been sheriff until he had beaten a teenager to death with perhaps this very baton and now he was only a deputy. There had been some controversy about the beating and it had ultimately been decided that the teenager had had to be confined in a straitjacket and had choked to death on his own vomit. But Beasley knew that the county had quietly come up with twenty thousand dollars for the boy’s family and that all it had cost Harris was the next sheriff’s election.

Time to go in, Harris said. He got out and shoved the baton in his belt. I’ll come around, he said.

Harris opened the door and Beasley got out. They had turned to go when Harris said, turning, Oh shit. I forgot the cuffs.

What? You forgot what?

Morris wanted you brought in in handcuffs. He wants to make an example of you.

Hellfire, Beasley said. What kind of example?

To tell the truth I was a little foggy on that myself, Harris said. But he’s the judge. To other dog shooters maybe, I don’t know.

He had turned back to the cruiser and opened the door and was leaned fumbling in the console. When he started to straighten and turn with the cuffs in his hand Beasley slipped the baton from Harris’s garrison belt and with a continuation of that single swift motion slammed him with all his might just above the right ear and Harris dropped as if he’d been depending from suddenly cut strings.

Beasley was dragging him back onto the grass when a station wagon pulled into a parking space and a woman got out. The wind was getting up and the woman got out into it holding her hat on with both hands and gaping at Beasley.

He’s had some kind of attack, Beasley said. I believe it’s his heart. Would you run across to the General and call the ambulance while I get him over here?

Of course, the woman said, and hurried off. Beasley watched her. She’d forgotten her hat and the wind blew it off but she went on anyway.

Beasley got behind the wheel of the cruiser. When the woman went into the General Care he cranked the engine and sat a moment just listening to the rock-steady lick the cam was hitting. Then he put the cruiser in gear and drove away.

The first place he went was home. Clarence had sent him from the Navy PX a Winchester.32 Special he wouldn’t have traded for an emerging nation and looking about the small front room he saw little else he could not do without. Then he went into the bedroom and came out with a heavier coat and a blanket. When he left he didn’t even pull the door closed behind him or turn the lights out and glancing once over his shoulder the house looked as temporary and impersonal as a motel room.

He drove toward Riverside. He knew already that he was going into the Harrikin, a wild stretch of land that had once been mined for iron ore. It was all company land, dangerous mine shafts, abandoned machinery. No one lived there, and there were miles of unbroken timber you couldn’t work your way through with a road map in one hand and a compass in the other. He felt he knew the country well enough to struggle through into Wayne County and strike out for Alabama. He didn’t envision posses. How many bounty hunters could be on your ass for contempt of court? And coldcocking an overweight deputy sheriff.

He stopped at a country store and bought pork and beans and tinned Vienna sausages and crackers. He bought a quart of milk and a pound of coffee. The storekeep was totting up these purchases on a ticket book with a stub of pencil and he kept glancing out at the cruiser idling before a rusting gas pump that did not work and that advertised a brand of gasoline that no longer existed.

Finis, I can’t help but notice that you’ve swapped vehicles, he finally said.

No, the county hired me to try her out, Beasley said. It’s one of these new thirty-two-valve jobs and the county itself don’t know how fast she’ll go. None of them deputies got the balls to wind her out. They hired me to take her out to Riverside and straighten out a few of them curves.

The storekeep was regarding him with a benign skepticism. Long as you pay before you wind her out I don’t care how many lies you tell me.

Beasley was counting out ones, laying coins atop. That was my intention, he said.

Beasley left and drove to where the terrain began its steep descent toward the river. He stopped on a sharp switchback curve and parked on the shoulder of the road and got out. The day was blue-looking and windy and the horizon looked as hard as iron and it was very cold. The cruiser sat idling puffing little bursts of exhaust. He looked around. A high-tension power line crossed the road here and following it with his eyes he could see where the towers faded into the blurred multiple horizons of the Harrikin.

He cocked the front wheels of the cruiser toward the hollow and with the stock of the Winchester tapped the gearshift into drive and stepped away. The cruiser bumped off the shoulder of macadam and eased over waist-high scrub blackjack and gaining momentum sped down the hillside toward the hollow. The car started around the side of the steep incline like a daredevil motorcycle in a wheel of death but it wasn’t going fast enough and grew top-heavy and rolled over again and again and fetched up at the bottom of the hollow upside down against an enormous beech. It ran for a while and then it quit.

He had started down the opposite side of the embankment where the power line wound toward the Harrikin but then he turned and came back across the road and stood looking down at the cruiser. It was almost hidden by brush. He stood with the rifle across his shoulders and both arms hung from the barrel and stock. He just stood for a time thinking. He was thinking about the weighted baton. He could see Harris making it. Harris had it clamped in a vise, he was drilling a hole in the end, pouring melted lead into it.

After a while he went down the embankment, the hillside so steep in places he was sliding tree to tree. When he’d reached the door-sprung cruiser he leaned the Winchester against the trunk of a tree and began to gather up windfall branches and lengths of dead wood and a stump weathered thin and silver and almost weightless and to fill the cruiser with them. He piled on leaves and set them afire and then he went back the way he’d come with the fire popping and snapping like something alive coming up the hillside after him.

He was a mile and better along the power line before he looked back. The black smoke was rolling against the sky and he felt he’d drawn a line forever between the world that yawned before him and everything that had gone before. When he looked forward the way he was headed the long endless line of marching towers looked like angular giants skeletoned up out of steel.

Goddamn you, Sugarbaby, Beasley said.

♦ ♦ ♦

HE CAME UP THROUGH a long blue dusk that lay like smoke between the cedars, wending his way through a sage field to where the house sat almost hidden by trees. The wind had shifted around to the north and grown more chill yet and he could hear it soughing through the cedars and rattling a loose section of tin and banging a shutter against the wall in random percussion.

The house was abandoned. A cedar had grown up through the rotted porch and was slowly dismantling the roof. The stone chimney had tilted away from the house or the house away from it. At his step over the threshold something unseen scrambled up and went with near-liquid grace through an unglazed window sash and gone.

He leaned the rifle carefully against a wall, set the paper bag of food by the fireplace hearth, and looked about for something to burn. He broke up rotting floorboards from the porch and stacked the fireplace with them and with the bag for tinder set them alight. He could hear a heavy swift beating of wings up the flue and a rain of soot fell. After a while the area immediately before the hearth warmed but the wind came looping across the windowsill and he wrapped the blanket about his shoulders and sat crouched before the fire with his hands extended like a supplicant.

When he was warm he opened a can of the beans and a tin of the sausages and set them near the coals to heat. He ate crackers while they warmed and when they did he ate with his pocketknife, chewing slowly and staring abstractedly into the fire.

He was warm and dry and almost content. He figured at least he wasn’t in jail. Nobody was telling him about burning their mother’s body or crying out in their sleep and if the notion struck him to just walk out the door into the night there were no bars. All around him was the Harrikin, miles of uninhabited woods smothered in rain and darkness and he drew a small bitter comfort from it.

After a while he dozed crouched before the fire but awoke cold and disoriented and for a moment he couldn’t fathom where he’d got to. The dead wood had burned away to the faintest glow in the depths of a feathery caul of ash. It was still raining and the wind was still blowing in a cold mist through the broken windows so that the blanket felt damp across his shoulders. He got up and went through the house striking matches looking for something to burn. Beneath a collapsed shelf he found a motley of books and he stacked an armload and carried them back to the fireplace. He ripped out pages and piled them on the quaking ash until they flared up and then he laid on the volumes. Finally they caught and he sat before them watching little blue flames flicker over the leather bindings.

He noticed with some amusement that they comprised a set of State of Tennessee law books and it occurred to him how all-encompassing the law was: he and Doneita had both appealed to it each in their own way and both had drawn a modicum of comfort from it each according to their natures.

WITH THE BLANKET mantled about him and the rifle slung under it he watched from beneath the wet ruin of his hat four police cruisers creep up the road far below him. From his aerie the red chert road wound like a capillary of road on a map. The road widened where fifty years before the post office and commissary had stood and here the cruisers pulled over side by side and stopped. Across the folds of rain-blurred horizons the cars looked tiny and insignificant. Men got out of the cars into the rain and stood in a loose group. He wished he’d had the foresight to bring binoculars. He’d have liked to know was Harris along.

In truth he was a little surprised. He’d have thought they’d have waited for better weather but he guessed burning a squad car raised the ante considerably and he was truly a wanted man.

He was not alarmed. The men moved into the sodden woods with a reluctance that was almost visible to the naked eye. The deputies he had seen around the jail looked soft and out of shape. They looked as if they drank too much beer, smoked too many cigarettes, ate too many doughnuts. Beasley did not drink and had not smoked a cigarette for twenty-five years and he could take a doughnut or leave it alone and scrambling up the bluff toward deeper timber he was not even breathing hard.

As the day progressed the weather did not warm as he’d expected nor did the rain abate and if there was sun at all behind the leaden weeping sky he saw no sign of it. By noon he was far back in the Harrikin, following the spine of a ridge that kept breaking off into deep blue hollows. He could hear the rain in the trees and by midafternoon it had begun to be mixed with sleet and it was freezing on the leaves and branches and the leaves he brushed had the tinny half-musical, sound of a carillon.

He passed by an ancient graveyard, the tilting slabs leached thin and fragile, transient as whatever souls they’d marked. Sheltered beneath a cedar he ate the last of the Viennas and crackers and listened to the sleet rattle in the leaves. Graveyard cleanin, dinner on the ground, he thought sardonically.

The day wore on gray and cold and darkened so incrementally you couldn’t have told the exact moment night fell but after a while he was walking in darkness.

He knew he had to stop. Only a fool would continue on here. He knew this country as well as anyone but there were core-sample holes deep as wells, their bottoms drifted with leaves covering the bones of luckless animals or perhaps worse that stumbled into them. And if he became lost he would in all probability wander for miles in the wrong direction.

By the time he had a fire going he was half frozen. He finally found tinder beneath a rotten husk of log and when he had it going he piled on whatever he could find, branches and fallen saplings and finally the log itself was burning and he had an enormous bonfire going he figured you could see for miles. Snow had begun falling with the sleet and huge flakes drifted into the toiling smoky glare and vanished. The wet earth began to steam and standing before the fire with the blanket cowled about him Beasley looked like some cautionary symbol set up to warn of such depths of misery as the human race can sink to.

Beasley thought of his other life but already it was lost to him. It had been a mere prelude to this. He seemed to have been born the moment he shot Sugarbaby through the screen. He stood back to the fire with the rifle at port arms scanning the darkness. There was nothing beyond the limits of the fire, where the light tended away the world simply ceased to exist. Come on you sons of bitches, Beasley called. If you’re out there come up and warm.

For the first time in his life he realized that sometimes in life you go through doors that only open one way. You can stand before them and think about whether you want to go through them or not. But when you do and the door closes behind you there is no way to go back. The door is featureless and unknobbed and smooth as a sheet of glass. You can pound on it and claw till your fingers are bleeding, scream until your throat is raw, but no one will open the door, no one will even hear you.

HE WAS LOST and he had been lost for some time, the drifting snow obscuring landmarks and giving the landscape a curious sameness, the snow already ankle-deep and falling so fast and hard he could scarcely see where he was going.

He was following a sound, a hollow clang of metal on metal that he seemed to have heard subliminally for hours, maybe longer, maybe since the moment something had wound too tight inside him and finally broken and he’d blown Sugarbaby off the porch. The sound seemed all there was left in the world, all there was of reality beyond the curtain of shifting white. It was a random and infrequent noise, and sometimes he’d have to stand still in the hushed woods waiting for it to come again so that he could get a fix on it, waiting and hearing nothing but the sound of his breathing and the soft hiss of the woods filling up with snow. Then finally the clang would come again and he would go on.

At length he stood beneath the source of the sound. Four legs of structural steel rose high into the air. A tiny house set atop them, what he judged was sixty or seventy feet up. He didn’t know what it was. An abandoned fire lookout station perhaps, or maybe something that had been built by the mining company so long ago its very purpose was lost.

He hunkered for a moment against the trunk of a tree and stared upward at the house. A steel ladder began a few feet off the ground and ascended to heights that made his head swim. The metal sign that said CLIMB AT YOUR OWN RISK was rusted and pocked by ancient rifle fire. As he watched a steel door slammed against the wall, the wind whipped the sound away. The higher he’d climbed the thinner the timber had gotten and here the wind came whipping down out of the north and howled through the steel tower like a banshee’s warning.

He knew he should have been out of the Harrikin by now and across the county line into what passed in these provinces for civilization but he was not. Somehow the snow had turned him around, and he was someplace he’d never been. His hands ached but he was more worried about his feet for he couldn’t feel them anymore and he was afraid they might be frozen. He thought of hot breathless July nights, dryflies crying from a velvet wall of sweet mimosa. The bottled matches in his coat pocket, steel walls impervious to the winds. He rose and kicking through the snow began to gather dead branches and break them and stuff them into the pockets of the overcoat. When he had all he could carry he went over to the ladder and stood looking at it for a time. He took off his belt. He put it back on over the coat and shoved the rifle under it and worked the rifle around to his back and tightened the belt a notch. It was snowing harder. He took a deep breath and began to climb the ladder.

BEASLEY DREAMED brokenly but when he woke the dream was lost to him no matter how hard he tried to call it back. All he could remember was that Doneita was in it.

He guessed the cold had wakened him but then he heard someone yelling. Beasley, Beasley, the voice called.

Company out here in the middle of the goddamned woods, he thought. Where do you have to go to get a little privacy around here?

When he stepped onto the platform and looked down and saw Harris staring up at him down the barrel of a rifle. Beasley wasn’t even surprised. He just felt strange, as if everything had been imbued with inevitability — everything had been taken from his hands, events had become steel balls rolling unfrictioned down grooved boards and there was no stopping anything.

See you don’t fall, Harris called. It’s so goddamned cold you’d break like a china cup. But the first thing you need to do is throw that rifle over the side.

Beasley guessed the clanging door had drawn Harris up out of the woods and he wished he’d tied it back somehow. He turned and leaned the Winchester against the wall of the tower.

I don’t want this busted, he called down. My son-in-law give it to me.

I been lost all night, Harris said. How the hell do you get out of here?

You don’t, Beasley said.

What’s that supposed to mean?

This is the end of the road.

You crazy son of a bitch.

What? Step up close, I can’t hear you.

Harris approached the steel legs of the tower. He had his mouth open to say something when Beasley abruptly pulled his coat aside and unzipped his trousers and hauled himself out to urinate over the edge of the platform. Harris backpedaled frantically away from the arc of urine and fell with his feet crumpled beneath him. He immediately slapped the stock of his rifle into his shoulder and Beasley felt in the pit of his stomach the muzzle lock onto him.

You know what that was, Harris? he called. That was contempt of court.

I’m going to blow your sorry ass off there.

Your balls are too small, Beasley said. I expect you’ll have to come up and get me.

We’ll just see if I can’t manage to knock you down here.

Beasley stared down the gun barrel for what seemed an interminable time. It looked like a hole into nothingness, or a tunnel that might wind its way out of these woods.

After a time Harris lowered the gun. He approached the ladder and stared at it as if it were something he couldn’t make up his mind about. Beasley judged he was envisioning himself halfway up and Beasley suddenly blowing him off the ladder with the Winchester. After a time he began to climb anyway. He was ascending the ladder left-handedly, the rifle clutched in his right.

Beasley looked out across the world. Everything was snow and trees, an unmapped landscape black and white. Everything looked reduced to its essence, all that was left at the end of time. He thought inexplicably of Doneita, endearments that she had said, sweet nights that were as lost as anything that ever was. Above the treeline a hawk hung motionless against the frozen void.

When Harris was almost three-quarters of the way up the ladder, Beasley stepped off the platform. The landscape reeled away and upward. Snowflakes drifted heavenward. It seem to take forever for him to tilt and slam against the ice-locked earth.