Free Twilight by William Gay Page A

Whatever it takes. It’s enough that you know that Fenton Breece ain’t the only man can bury the dead, and the grave ain’t the only place to put em.
    Tyler rose to leave, and this time Sutter made no move to stop him. He just sat unmoving, letting night take him and sinking into darkness as if he kept some obscure watch against whatever of dread might be approaching the town.
    Tyler went woodenly back up the street. His mind wouldn’t work. Everything seemed jammed, overloaded. He went past closed and shuttered stores, a lit café where shards of brittle music fell about him and diminished with his passage. A voice called Tyler after him, but he didn’t heed it. Where a neon sign blinked billiards he went through a paintscaled door and down a halflit stair to where smoke drifted in the glow of fluorescent lights strung over pool tables and where there was a loud clanging of pinball machines and a hubbub of human voices. He bought a Coke at the counter and went to a long bench anchored alongside the wall and sat drinking andwatching a pill game in progress.
    Hey, Tyler, a man called Woodenhead yelled at him. Want to play some pill?
    I got to get home here in a minute.
    Draw me a couple of pills then. I need a change of luck, and you the luckiest fucker about pill I ever seen.
    Tyler shook the canister and spilled out two red wooden pills onto his palm. He looked at the numbers on them. Not tonight. The four and the twelve. He passed them to Woodenhead. Sorry, he said.
    Woodenhead looked at them. Grimaced. Goddamn, Tyler. I meant from bad to better. I could of went to worsemyself.
    Damn, there’s old T-Texas Tyler, another sang out. He fell to studying Tyler’s carminesmeared clothes. Hell, he’s been in a terrible wreck. Was anybody killed in it besides you, Tyler?
    Oh, he’s just got ahold of one with the rag on, Woodenhead said. Hell, Tyler, if you couldn’t of waited a day or two, the least you could of done was take your britches off.
    Tyler just grinned weakly and didn’t say anything. There was something reassuring about this ribald camaraderie, but he knew he must be off. He drained the Coke and set the bottle aside, and so into the night.
    When the last streetlight stood vigil against the night and the highway dropped and curved sharply, he was thinking about Sutter as he rounded the curve and was suddenly hurled into absolute and inexplicable darkness. Reflexively he locked the truck down in a caterwauling wail of protesting rubber and ceased in the middle of the road with his hands clamped whiteknuckled to the steering wheel. Faroff and faint headlights were wending toward him, and he felt for the lightswitch. He hadn’t even remembered to turn on the headlights.

    I’m going to the law, he said.
    No, you’re not. That would be the end of it. The money and everything. This is our last chance to get away from here.
    It’s not mine.
    He’s bluffing. Trying to scare us. Looks like he did you, too.
    You didn’t hear him, Tyler said. But she was implacable as stone. His words rolled hollowly out, and her hardened face just turned them back to him and they began to sound craven evento his own ears.
    Think what it would be like, Kenneth. Us somewhere else, some city, Nashville or Memphis maybe. With all that money, thousands and thousands of dollars. Dressing fine, driving a fine new car. Doing what we please. And the law won’t help. Daddy always said the law was like two people fighting over a blanket on a cold night. The one that’s the biggest and the strongest winds up with most of the cover. And the last time I looked that wasn’t you.
    Give me the pictures.
    What are you going to do with them?
    Hide them. Just in case.
    She went out of the room. When she came back in, she laid them on the table. He took from his pocket a square he’d cut from a canvas tarp, and he wrapped the pictures carefully and taped them and slid them into a Prince Albert tobacco tin.
    She watched him wordlessly. He