“Try,” Elgin said and cleared his throat.
“I just can’t. I got to …do something. I got to go…” His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. “I can’t sleep.”
The doorknob turned and Elgin raised the rifle, stared down the barrel.
“Sure, you can, Blue.” He curled his finger around the trigger as the door opened. “Sure you can,” he repeated and took a breath, held it in.
* * * The skeleton of Eden Falls still sits on twenty-two acres of land just east of Brimmer’s Point, covered in rust thick as flesh. Some say it was the levels of iodine an environmental inspector found in the groundwater that scared off the original investors. Others said it was the downswing of the state economy or the governor’s failed reelection bid. Some say Eden Falls was just plain a dumb name, too biblical. And then, of course, there were plenty who claimed it was Jewel Lut’s ghost scared off all the workers.
They found her body hanging from the scaffolding they’d erected by the shell of the roller coaster. She was naked and hung upside down from a rope tied around her ankles. Her throat had been cut so deep the coroner said it was a miracle her head was still attached when they found her. The coroner’s assistant, man by the name of Chris Gleason, would claim when he was in his cups that the head had fallen off in the hearse as they drove down Main toward the morgue. Said he heard it cry out.
This was the same day Elgin Bern called the sheriff’s office, told them he’d shot his buddy Blue, fired two rounds into him at close range, the little guy dead before he hit his kitchen floor. Elgin told the deputy he was still sitting in the kitchen, right where he’d done it a few hours before. Said to send the hearse.
Due to the fact that Perkin Lut had no real alibi for his whereabouts when Jewel passed on and owing even more to the fact there’d been some very recent and very public discord in their marriage, Perkin was arrested and brought before a grand jury, but that jury decided not to indict. Perkin and Jewel had been patching things up, after all; he’d bought her a car (at cost, but still…).
Besides, we all knew it was Blue had killed Jewel. Hell, the Simmons boy, a retard ate paint and tree bark, could have told you that. Once all that stuff came out about what Blue and Big Bobby’d been doing with the dogs around here, well, that just sealed it. And everyone remembered how that week she’d been separated from Perkin, you could see the dream come alive in Blue’s eyes, see him allow hope into his heart for the first time in his sorry life.
And when hope comes late to a man, it’s quite a dangerous thing. Hope is for the young, the children. Hope in a full-grown man —particularly one with as little acquaintanceship with it or prospect for it as Blue — well, that kind of hope burns as it dies, boils blood white, and leaves something mean behind when it’s done-
Blue killed Jewel Lut.
And Elgin Bern killed Blue. And ended up doing time. Not much, due to his war record and the circumstances of who Blue was, but time just the same. Everyone knew Blue probably had it coming, was probably on his way back into town to do to Perkin or some other poor soul what he’d done to Jewel. Once a man gets that look in his eyes — that boiled look, like a dog searching out a bone who’s not going to stop until he finds it —well, sometimes he has to be put down like a dog. Don’t he?
And it was sad how Elgin came out of prison to find Shelley Briggs gone, moved up North with Perkin Lut of all people, who’d lost his heart for the car business after Jewel died, took to selling home electronics imported from Japan and Germany, made himself a fortune. Not long after he got out of prison, Elgin left too, no one knows where, just gone, drifting.
See, the thing is — no one wanted to convict Elgin. We all understood. We did. Blue had to go. But he’d had no weapon in his hand when Elgin, standing just nine feet away, pulled that trigger. Twice. Once we might been able to overlook, but twice, that’s something else again. Elgin offered no defense, even refused a fancy lawyer’s attempt to get him to claim he’d suffered something called posttraumatic stress disorder, which we’re hearing a lot more about these days.
“I don’t have that” Elgin said. “I shot a defenseless man. That’s the long and the short of it, and that’s a sin”
And he was right:
In the world, case you haven’t noticed, you usually pay for your sins.
And in the South, always.
2000
WILLIAM GAY
THE PAPERHANGER
William Gay (1941-) was born in the rural town of Hohenwald, Tennessee, and after joining the Navy and serving in the Vietnam War, he lived in New York and Chicago before returning permanently to his hometown in 1978. He did not receive a formal college education, but read voraciously and began writing at the age of fifteen. He earned a living in the construction trade as a drywall hanger, painter, carpenter — “whatever worked,” as he once stated it. For an author of such singular talent, it is astonishing to note that Gay did not sell any of his literary output until 1998, when literary magazines bought two of his stories.
The following year, his novel The Long Home was published to outstanding reviews and won the James A. Michener Memorial Prize. Like his other work, it is clearly in the Southern Gothic tradition of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Cormac McCarthy. He also was influenced by the works of such great American crime writers as Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, though his stories are not set in California, as theirs are, but are placed in the rural South, their dark, weird, violent landscapes populated by seemingly ordinary working-class people. He also published Provinces of Night (2000), a short story collection, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down (2002), and Twilight (2006).
“The Paperhanger” grew out of a story Gay had heard years before he wrote it, told to him by a plumber. It was first published in the February 2000 issue of Harper’s Magazine. It was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2001, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2001, and The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century.
The vanishing of the doctor’s wife’s child in broad daylight was an event so cataclysmic that it forever divided time into the then and the now, the before and the after. In later years, fortified with a pitcher of silica-dry vodka martinis, she had ‘cause to replay the events preceding the disappearance. They were tawdry and banal but in retrospect freighted with menace, a foreshadowing of what was to come, like a footman or a fool preceding a king into a room.
She had been quarreling with the paperhanger. Her four-year-old daughter, Zeineb, was standing directly behind the paperhanger where he knelt smoothing air bubbles out with a wide plastic trowel. Zeineb had her fingers in the paperhanger’s hair. The paperhanger’s hair was shoulder length and the color of flax and the child was delighted with it. The paperhanger was accustomed to her doing this and he did not even turn around. He just went on with his work. His arms were smooth and brown and corded with muscle and in the light that fell upon the paper-hanger through stained-glass panels the doctor’s wife could see that they were lightly downed with fine golden hair. She studied these arms bemusedly while she formulated her thoughts.
You tell me so much a roll, she said. The doctor’s wife was from Pakistan and her speech was still heavily accented. I do not know single-bolt rolls and double-bolt rolls. You tell me double-bolt price but you are installing single-bolt rolls. My friend has told me. It is cost me perhaps twice as much.
