Twilight (27 page)

Sometime in the night he met a horseman. He’d been walking on half asleep, stumbling with a wooden gait, and the horseman was almost upon him before he recognized the sound of steel shoes on the packed earth roadbed. There was a bend in the road ahead and the rider just beyond and without even thinking he veered off down an embankmentand crouched in a thicket of winter huckleberry bushes till the rider should pass. When he passed he passed above him with the sound of steel on stone and the creak of the saddle and Tyler could see the smoking breath of the black horse and the rider pale and indistinct like some underimagined protagonist in a fever dream. Horse and rider diminished into the foggy rain and the mist muffled the slow clop of hoofbeats. There was a sharp pain in his chest and he realized he’d been holding his breath. He exhaled in a pale plume of steam and hunkered there in the winter huckleberries. He was shivering from more than the cold. He fought an almost overpowering urge to flee crazed and directionless into the fog that drifted between the dark boles of the trees. He didn’t know if it was Sutter or not and he didn’t know if it was real or he had dreamed it but he knew that something dread had passed over him in the night and gone on.

He could hear a rush of water toward the hollow that kept increasing in intensity, and he went downhill tree to tree over
the slick, soggy leaves. Runoff was massing where the hollow was deepest and he could hear more than see the churning below him, a vague, dark, turbulent motion and thick, creamlike gouts of foam clocking rapidly downstream.

Loath to return to the road just yet lest the horseman double back he clambered on around the hillside, going steadily downhill. The carpet of wet leaves thinned to ultimate stony shale and he could hear his boots on the rocks. His feet felt wooden and strange and he wondered idly if they were frozen. He didn’t know how cold it was but it didn’t seem to matter. It was just cold. The earth flattened and widened here and he was moving through halfgrown cedars that loomed suddenly out of the mist like shrouded ghosts, and the waterwas boiling into a larger body of water and he stopped to get his bearings. He looked up as if to chart from the stars, but the heavens were leaden yet and out of them the ceaseless rain still fell. Some nameless creek on his right but he didn’t know what creek or even which direction it should be flowing. He went on. On his right hand rose an embankment that came out of the fog and continued on too symmetrical to have just happened, and he clambered up its rickrack sides to the summit, where railroad tracks laid on crossties gleamed palely with a wet phosphorescence through the dead weeds grown through them. One way led to town but in the dark he wasn’t sure which. Down the bank on the other side another shadow loomed anomalous out of the more familiar shadows of trees and stone.

He approached cautiously. If it was a house it might be inhabited and folks hereabouts sometimes answered a nighttime summons with a shotgun in hand. It was a house, or at least a building of some kind. A wall with darker rectangles for
stonedout windows and a doorless cavity behind a canted stoop. He went in slowly, feeling for missing floorboards with his feet and for the snuffbox of matches with stiff fingers, and whatever tenanted the house this night crossed the floor in nighsoundless scuttling and over the windowsill and into the night. Somewhere in all this dark a startled nightbird rose with a clamor of wings and subsided against a wall with a soft thud. Rose fluttering again.

He dried his hands as best he could on the lining of the coat and lit a match. A low ceiling over his head, loose paper hanging in shreds. On the wall across the ruin of a fireplace. A litter of old newspapers, broken boards. The match went out, and he could hear the rain drumming on the tin roof. Within a half hour he had a cheery fire going in the fireplace and he was crouched before it feeding it broken pieces of boxing he had ripped off a partition wall. The room was lit with a hellish orange light and he had the firebox fairly stuffed to the damper with splintered chestnut before he ceased and he just sat on the hearth for a time basking in the heat. He’d never felt anything better and he hadn’t known such cold as he’d been existed. He’d kept the bag sheltered from the rain as best he could, and now he ate the lunch she’d packed. Thick slabs of yeast bread smeared with butter and jelly. Loose ground coffee in a folded paper tied with floursack ravels. He could smell the coffee through the paper and he had a taste for a cup but he could find no sort of pan about.

When he had eaten he stripped off his clothes and put the steaming coat back on and buttoned it around him. He leant boards against the brick mantle and hung his trousers and shirt to dry. He went on gathering wood for a while until he had a
great pile mounded before the hearth. The chestnut burned fiercely hot but it was dry as tinder and there wasn’t much last to it.

He gathered a stack of old newspapers to read and sat as close to the hearth as the heat would permit. An eye to the boards cocked against the mantle, he had to be forever turning his clothes lest they scorch. He chewed a handful of the coffee raw, swallowing the bitter essence, and tried to read, but he was utterly weary, and the stories the papers told were strange and surreal and whole sentences tilted and slid off the page into the fire.

When the clothes were dry he put them on and restoked the fire one last time, and with a stack of newspapers for a pillow and the coat for a blanket he went to sleep. His dream was strange and fevered.

He was on a blasted heath where the trees were sparse and dead. Birds he couldn’t put a name to clustered their bare branches and called mournfully ahead of him and fell silent at his approach, then resumed when he’d passed as if they’d announce his entry into this sepia world of shades. He moved on a thin skift of snow that a sourceless wind kept setting in motion and settling back and all there was was the white snow and the black skeletal trees.

The weary road he traveled wound gently downhill toward a vague depression in the earth and he kept trudging on and after a time he could see another traveler approaching, a black figure seeping across the snowy landscape like a line of ink dripping down the snowy page, and he came to think that across a vast distance he was approaching a mirror image of himself.

When they met they ceased walking without speaking for a
time and hunkered in the frozen roadbed to rest. The man took out a sack of Country Gentleman and rolled himself a cigarette with deft economy of motion and offered the tobacco then when it was refused pocketed it.

Then Tyler knew him.

Why, you’re Clifford Suggs, he said. Wait till Claudelle and Drew hear about me running up on you. Drew thinks you were lost down a mineshaft, and they’ve been hunting you for years.

The man exhaled acrid blue smoke from his nostrils. Beneath the felt hatbrim his shadowed face studying Tyler with a kind of distant amusement.

I don’t know who you are or how the story come to you, but you got it turned around backwards. I’m the one been huntin them. They’re the ones that’s gone.

Tyler was studying his shoes where the snow was compressed into a thin sole of transparent ice and between his feet were little curling strands of grass all seized in tubes of ice and when he looked back up the man’s face with the curious illogic of dreams was gone. In its place was a yellowed skull with a few strands of lank dead hair. Within the skull there was furtive movement. He leant to see. A rat’s sharp gray face peered through an eyesocket and all about the eyeholes the bone was chamfered with teethmarks, but the rat would not fit. It withdrew, turning, trying the other eyehole then growing claustrophobic and agitated and turning endless upon itself within the bony confines of the skull but there was no way out.

At some unclocked hour the rain ceased and Sutter was on the move almost immediately, wending his way through the brush which dripped continually in small echoes of rain. He was trying to remember where the house was, and he kept making false starts and recovering and going on, and after a while a wornlooking disc of moon eased out of the broken clouds and hung there like a flare to guide his path.

When he came upon the barn lot it was all shadow and white light and where water stood it gleamed in the moonlight like pooled quicksilver. He stopped here to study the house. It seemed cloaked in sleep. He leant against a stall door to rest and he could hear a horse snuffling in the stable and he could hear the quick disquieted movement of its hooves. It seemed to be turning restlessly about in the stable.

Outside in the barnlot he looked up and the pale moon was directly over him and allencompassing. It appeared to be lowering itself onto the earth and he could make out mountains and ranges of hills and hollows and dark shadowed areas of mystery he judged to be timber and he wondered what manner of beast thrived there and what their lives were like and the need to be there twisted in his heart like an old pain that will not dissipate. As he watched, enormous birds stark and dimensionless as the shadows of birds passed the remote face of the moon, wings beating slow and stately and silent and they were like birds that had once existed but did no more and he could not put a name to them. They were at once familiar and foreign, archetypes from some old childhood dream that was lost to him.

There in the shadows he seemed a darker shadow than those he moved among, some beast composed wholly of the
ectoplasm of the night and with some arcane magnetism drawing to itself old angers and discontents and secret and forbidden yearnings freefloating in the humming and electric dark. The sleeping house seemed to be waiting for him, and he went on toward it.

He went on up a muddy grade past an old pickup truck hopelessly mired in the sucking clay, and he didn’t even notice it. He was thinking: You better be here. They better hope you are because whatever happens if you ain’t will be on your head. He crossed onto the porch and began to hammer on the door.

For a time he could hear nothing. He hammered again as if he’d rouse the dead, and there was an abrupt scuttling of claws across the floor and a fierce yip yip yip of a small dog on the other side of the door. The dog was growling and sounded as if it were tearing the door from its hinges and its barking was wellnigh hysterical.

Shut up, you little son of a bitch, he told it. A woman’s muffled voice said, What on earth? Then: Claude. You wake up, Claude. Then silence, but he could imagine the man swinging his legs off the creaking bed and sitting so for a moment and running a hand through sleeptousled hair, then going to the door.

Shut up, a voice told the dog. You the Lost Sheep back? it asked the door.

Yes, Sutter said, as lost a sheep as ever was.

The door opened onto a musky sleepy dark. Somewhere in the room a match flared. He could smell kerosene, stale whiskey breath, taste the residue of old unspent angers. A lamp was lit and adjusted to a dim yellow glow. Shadows flitted about the walls and ceased.

What the hell? Claude said. He added inanely, It’s three o’clock in the mornin, as if perhaps Sutter had merely stopped to inquire the time.

Sutter hadn’t waited to be asked in. He was standing in the center of the front room. His clothes were soaked and reeking and he was dripping water onto the rug. A woman had come in, children, the room seemed to be filling up. A ravenhaired girl restrained the dog then took it up in her arms and clutched it protectively to her breast.

How long’s he been gone?

Who?

That Tyler boy. You tell me what I want to know and I’ll be on my way without anybody gettin hurt.

Just who the goddamn hell do you think you are, mister? You seem to forgot you’re on my property. As a matter of fact, you’re in my house without bein asked at three o’clock in the mornin.

I’m the fellow that’s huntin Tyler, Sutter said. And if youdon’t tell me damn quick where he’s at I’m goin to unbreech you like a shotgun. Now I better hear somethin.

Sutter’s hand had found the knife. Its blade lay against his thigh. A forefinger felt its edge. It winked dully in the light. No one save the woman seemed to notice.

She said, Tell him, Claude.

Shut up. I ain’t tellin him jackshit. And you ain’t neither. I don’t care for the ways this feller’s got. I don’t take orders from ever son of a bitch wanders up out of the woods.

He’s went to Ackerman’s Field, the woman cried.

Claude’s blow was thrown wild but it caught Sutter hard enough to jar him and make blue lights flash behind his
eyes. Claude seemed halfdrunk. He was windmilling his arms crazily but a glancing blow jarred Sutter’s jaw and Sutter could taste blood in his mouth. Now Claude was listing to the side like a drunken dancing bear and Sutter just stepped inside the flailing arms and hooked the knife deep and jerked upward in an explosion of blood and putrid gasses so hard Claude’s feet momentarily cleared the floor. When he withdrew the knife Claude stood disemboweled and looking down at himself with stunned incredulity and trying to put himself back together with both bloody hands.

Some sob or strangled cry jerked Sutter’s head around and he stared in momentary confusion. He seemed to have forgotten all these folk. Who they were and where he was and what was his purpose here. They were aligned against the wall like spectators at some perverse bloodsport that had gotten out of hand and when he advanced toward them with the dripping knife he moved upon a wall of stricken eyes.