Just After Sunset

Grunwald shook his head.

“No? I didn’t think so. I think you’ve had your last good sunset, neighbor. In fact, I think you’ve had your last good day, and that’s why I’m letting you live. And do you want to know the irony? If you’d let me alone, you would have gotten exactly what you wanted. Because I was locked in the shithouse already and didn’t even know it. Isn’t that funny?”

Grunwald said nothing, only looked at him with his terrified eyes. His sick and terrified eyes. Curtis could almost have felt sorry for him, if the memory of the Port-O-San was not still so vivid. The lid of the toilet flopping open like a mouth. The turd landing in his lap like a dead fish.

“Answer, or you get another baptismal dunk.”

“It’s funny,” Grunwald rasped. And then began to cough.

Curtis waited until he stopped. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Yes, it is,” he said. “It is funny. The whole thing’s funny, if you see it from the right perspective. And I believe I do.”

He boosted himself out of the hot tub, aware that he was moving with a litheness The Motherfucker would never again be able to match. There was a cabinet under the porch overhang. There were towels inside. Curtis took one and began to dry off.

“Here’s the thing. You can call the police and tell them I tried to drown you in your hot tub, but if you do that, everything else comes out. You’ll spend the rest of your life fighting a criminal case as well as dealing with your other woes. But if you let it go, it’s a reset. Odometer back to zero. Only-here’s the thing-I get to watch you rot. There will come a day when you smell just like the shithouse you locked me in. When other people smell you that way, and you smell that way to yourself.”

“I’ll kill myself first,” Grunwald rasped.

Curtis was pulling the overalls on again. He had decided he sort of liked them. They might be the perfect garment to wear while watching the stock quotes on one’s computer in one’s cozy little study. He might go out to Target and buy half a dozen pairs. The new, non-compulsive Curtis Johnson: an overall kind of guy.

He paused in the act of buckling the second shoulder strap. “You could do that. You have that gun, the-what did you call it?-the Hardballer.” He finished with the buckle, then leaned toward Grunwald, who was still marinating in the hot tub and looking at him fearfully. “That would be acceptable, too. You might even have the guts, although, when it comes right down to it…you might not. In any case, I’ll listen with great interest for the bang.”

He left Grunwald then, but not the way he had come. He went around to the road. A left turn would have taken him back to his house, but he turned right, toward the beach. For the first time since Betsy died, he felt like watching the sunset.

Two days later, while sitting at his computer (he was watching General Electric with especial interest), Curtis heard a loud bang from next door. He didn’t have his music on, and the sound rolled through the humid, almost-July air with perfect clarity. He sat where he was, head cocked, still listening. Although there would be no second bang.

Us witches just know shit like that, he thought.

Mrs. Wilson came rushing in, holding a dishtowel in one hand. “That sounded like a gunshot!”

“Probably just a backfire,” he said, smiling. He had been smiling a lot since his adventure at Durkin Grove Village. He thought it wasn’t the same sort of smile as the one he had worn during the Betsy Era, but any smile was better than none. Surely that was true?

Mrs. Wilson was looking at him doubtfully. “Well…I guess.” She turned to go.

“Mrs. Wilson?”

She turned back.

“Would you quit me if I got another dog? A puppy?”

“Me, quit over a puppy? It’d take more than a pup to drive me out.”

“They tend to chew, you know. And they don’t always-” He broke off for a moment, seeing the dark and nasty landscape of the holding tank. The underworld.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Wilson was looking at him curiously.

“They don’t always use the bathroom,” he finished.

“Once you teach them, they usually go where they’re supposed to,” she said. “Especially in a warm climate like this one. And you need some companionship, Mr. Johnson. I’ve been…to tell the truth, I’ve been a little worried about you.”

He nodded. “Yes, I’ve kind of been in the shit.” He laughed, saw her looking at him strangely, and made himself stop. “Excuse me.”

She flapped her dishtowel at him to show he was excused.

“Not a purebred, this time. I was thinking maybe the Venice Animal Shelter. Someone’s little castoff. What they call a rescue dog.”

“That would be very nice,” she said. “I look forward to the patter of little feet.”

“Good.”

“Do you really think that was a backfire?”

Curtis sat back in his chair and pretended to consider. “Probably…but you know, Mr. Grunwald next door has been pretty sick.” He lowered his voice to a sympathetic whisper. “Cancer.”

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Wilson said.

Curtis nodded.

“You don’t think he’d…?”

The marching numbers on his computer screen melted into the screen saver: aerial photos and beach scenes, all featuring Turtle Island. Curtis stood up, walked to Mrs. Wilson, and took the dishtowel from her hand. “No, not really, but we could go next door and check. After all, what are neighbors for?”

Sunset Notes

According to one school of thought, notes such as these are unnecessary at best, and suspect at worst. The argument against is that stories which need explanation are probably not very good stories. I have some sympathy with the idea, which is one reason to put this little addendum at the back of the book (putting it here also avoids those tiresome cries of “spoiler,” which are most commonly uttered by spoiled people). The reason to include them is simply that many readers like them. They want to know what caused a story to be written, or what the author was thinking when he wrote it. This author doesn’t necessarily know either of those things, but he can offer some random thoughts that may or may not be of interest.

“Willa” This probably isn’t the best story in the book, but I love it very much, because it ushered in a new period of creativity for me-as regards the short story, at least. Most of the stories in Just After Sunset were written subsequent to “Willa,” and in fairly quick succession (over a period of not quite two years). As to the story itself…one of the great things about fantasy is that it gives writers a chance to explore what might (or might not) happen after we shuffle off this mortal coil. There are two tales of that sort in Just After Sunset (the other is “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates”). I was raised as a perfectly conventional Methodist, and although I rejected organized religion and most of its hard and fast assertions long ago, I hold to the main idea, which is that we survive death in some fashion or other. It’s hard for me to believe that such complicated and occasionally wonderful beings are in the end simply wasted, tossed away like litter on the roadside. (Probably I just don’t want to believe it.) What that survival might be like, though… I’ll just have to wait and find out. My best guess is that we might be confused, and not very willing to accept our new state. My best hope is that love survives even death (I’m a romantic, so fucking sue me). If so, it might be a bewildered love…and a little bit sad. When love and sadness occur to my mind at the same time, I put on the country music: people like George Strait, BR549, Marty Stuart…and the Derailers. It’s the latter who are playing in this story, of course, and I think they’re going to have a very long engagement.

“The Gingerbread Girl” My wife and I live in Florida for part of the year now, near the barrier islands just off the Gulf of Mexico. There are a lot of very large estates there-some old and gracious, some of the bloated nouveau sort. I was walking with a friend on one of these islands a couple of years ago. He gestured at a line of these McMansions as we walked and said, “Most of these places stand empty six or even eight months of the year, can you imagine that?” I could…and I thought it would make a wonderful story. It grew out of a very simple premise: a bad guy chasing a girl along an empty beach. But, I thought, she’d have to be running away from something else to start with. A gingerbread girl, in other words. Only sooner or later even the fastest runners have to stand and fight. Also, I like suspense stories that turn on crucial little details. This one had a lot of them.

“Harvey’s Dream” I can only tell you one thing about this story, because it’s the only thing I know (and probably the only thing that matters): it came to me in a dream. I wrote it in a single sitting, doing little more than transcribing the tale my subconscious had already told. There’s another dream-story in this book, but I know a little more about that one.

“Rest Stop” One night about six years ago, I did a reading at a college in St. Petersburg. I stayed late, and ended up driving home on the Florida Turnpike, after midnight. I stopped at a rest area to tap a kidney on the way back. You’ll know what it looked like if you’ve read this story: a cellblock in a medium-security prison. Anyway, I paused outside the men’s room, because a man and a woman were in the ladies’, having a bitter argument. They both sounded tight and on the verge of getting physical. I wondered what in the world I’d do if that happened, and thought: I’ll have to summon my inner Richard Bachman, because he’s tougher than me. They emerged without coming to blows-although the lady in the case was crying-and I drove home without further incident. Later that week I wrote this story.

“Stationary Bike” If you’ve ever ridden on one of those things, you know how bitterly boring they can be. And if you’ve ever tried to get yourself back into a daily exercise regimen, you know how difficult that can be (my motto: “Eating Is Easier”-but yes, I do work out). This story came out of my hate/hate relationship not just with stationary bikes but with every treadmill I ever trudged and every Stairmaster I ever climbed.

“The Things They Left Behind” Like almost everyone else in America, I was deeply and fundamentally affected by 9/11. Like a great many writers of fiction both literary and popular, I felt a reluctance to say anything about an event that has become as much an American touchstone as Pearl Harbor or the assassination of John Kennedy. But writing stories is what I do, and this story came to me about a month after the fall of the Twin Towers. I might still not have written it if I had not recalled a conversation I had with a Jewish editor over twenty-five years before. He was unhappy with me about a story called “Apt Pupil.” It was wrong for me to write about the concentration camps, he said, because I was not a Jew. I replied that made writing the story all the more important-because writing is an act of willed understanding. Like every other American who watched the New York skyline burning that morning, I wanted to understand both the event and the scars such an event must inevitably leave behind. This story was my effort to do so.