Read Online Twilight by William Gay - Free Book Online Page B

there was nothing for it.
    They walked past the drygoods store down toward the railroad track. Poolroom loungers watched them pass with curiosity. Mentor and protégé, perhaps, warlock and aspiring wizard. People they met seemed to defer to Sutter, to give him more room than was necessary for his passage. Grimes’s carlot. Grimes’s cars sat forlorn and lustreless under the leaden sky, and the pennants strung on wires snapped and fluttered in the stiff wind.
    Sutter didn’t talk for a time. He built himself a careful cig Sutter dropped his cigarette. Ground it out with a conscientious foot.
    Or who knows, he shrugged. Maybe you do look like your daddy. Names and blood don’t always go arm in arm.
    Tyler was momentarily off balance. He stood studying Sutter as if measuring his size against his own. Finally he said, You might ought to watch your mouth. Anyway, I don’t reckon you been hanging around here waiting to talk to me about my daddy.
    As a matter of fact I ain’t. Let’s take a walk, Tyler.
    He started off toward the railroad tracks and after a moment’s hesitation Tyler fell in beside him. He was torn between curiosity about Sutter’s purpose and the desire to just walk away. More’s the fool he didn’t, Tyler thought, but the moment when he could have just walked off down the road and made this never be had passed and it would not come again. Somehow this all felt preordained and out of control, as if someone was behind the curtains mimicking voices and controlling the strings. As if for all the years of his life he and Sutter had been passing and repassing in the dark and now here they were face to face in God’s own daylight and there was nothing for it.
    They walked past the drygoods store down toward the railroad track. Poolroom loungers watched them pass with curiosity. Mentor and protégé, perhaps, warlock and aspiring wizard. People they met seemed to defer to Sutter, to give him more room than was necessary for his passage. Grimes’s carlot. Grimes’s cars sat forlorn and lustreless under the leaden sky, and the pennants strung on wires snapped and fluttered in the stiff wind.
    Sutter didn’t talk for a time. He built himself a careful cigalmost dizzy with shock. He wished himself fleeing along the railroad tracks. All this over and forgotten or never been.
    Course a man can get the bigeye thinkin about all that money. I can understand that. That’s why we can get this messstraightened out right here at the start and make it easy on everbody. All he wants is the pictures back. He’s willin to forget the rest of it, the blackmailin charge, the theft, just to get his property back. There might even be a small piece of money, call it a finder’s fee, say five hundred dollars, when you lay them in my hand.
    Apprentice blackmailer though he was, even Tyler knew something about this did not quite ring right. He knew it was more than the pictures. Breece and Sutter knew it as well, for the pictures were only symbols for the dark perversions of the waiting graves: the graves lay ticking like timebombs, untold numbers of them, dividing insanely like the malignant cells of an embryonic cancer. The pictures didn’t mean anything.
    I’d like to help you out, Tyler said. Lord knows I could use five hundred dollars. I just don’t know what you’re talking about. Pictures of what?
    Sutter was quiet for a time. He seemed to be studying the cordwood haulers. They had the truck unloaded now and had jumped down from the bed. Tyler could smell the hot winy odor of curing wood. The sun had descended further and what he could see of the world lay half in shadow, half in thin light splayed out across the houses clustered on the hillside across from town.
    He chose to ignore Tyler’s last words, as if they were so ludicrous they didn’t deserve comment or perhaps his acknowledgment might lend them a credibility they didn’t deserve. Course I took into consideration maybe it wasn’t all your doin. Maybe you