Twilight by William Gay Page A

sliding toward the edge of the world. The truck was riding eerily sideways on the embankment with brush whipping the rocker panels and headlights lost in the halfgrown pines they were riding over. He was afraid to break the truck’s momentum by slowing and he had some halfcrazed idea he might get back on the road where the curve ended if he could just keep the truck from flipping. The right side of the truck was topmost and it kept defying gravity andbouncing playfully upward then returning to the ground again. Her weight had slid against him and the door kept banging. If he’d continued downward he might have made it but where his course intersected the road he cut right and when he did the right side of the truck lifted and would not settle back. It stood eerily balanced for a moment like a carnival trickrider then rolled upward and over in a cacophony of rending metal and breaking glass and the grating shriek of steel sliding across stone. She’d slid away from him when the truck rolled and when it slid again she was gone.
    The truck righted pointed downhill with headlights cocked into the onrushing trees that were just a whirlpool of light he was driving into. He was in the floorboard when the truck slammed into a tree and ceased in a final outrage of breaking glass and he was out immediately to find her. His next thought was for the cover of the trees, he wanted it desperately.
    He could not feel anything broken but something had peeled the skin from his shin and he was bleeding into his boot. All the while he was feeling for broken bones he was looking wildly about for her and he could hear brush popping somewhere and he knew that Sutter was already coming at a run.
    A white body strewn on the homemade road they’d constructed. He leapt deadfalls of broken pine skinned bonewhite in the moonlight to where she was sprawled and caught her up under the armpits and dragged her toward the truck. She seemed slack and unwilled as a sack of grain and he kept talking to her but she didn’t answer.
    At the truck he dragged the rifle from behind the seat. He untaped the Prince Albert can from beneath the dash. His hands were shaking and it seemed to take him forever. Something keptdripping out of the truck and onto the leaves, drip, drip, some vital fluid, his truck was bleeding to death. He shoved the can in his hip pocket and caught her up again and started for the woods. All the breath he had was just a ragged sob in his throat. He won’t shoot, he was thinking; he don’t know for sure where the pictures are. To show what he’d learned of Sutter the moon rode from behind a skiff of ragged clouds and a bullet thocked solidly to earth, sending chunks of dirt skittering away across the girl, and another sang off somewhere in the treebranches.
    He’d stopped stockstill, mindless of the bullets, just staring at her. She lay with her head pillowed facedown on her breast. Arms outflung defenselessly. As if the world was coming at her at a blinding rate of speed and she’d thrown up her hands to thwart it. All he could see was the dishwaterblonde of the back of her head and when he gently righted it it moved without resistance like something moving underwater. Her eyes were open with the exposed whites rolled upward and he could see the dark freckles against her colorless face and her pale breasts bared without shame and her hair all caught with leaves and sticks like some luckless soul drowned and beached here by a receding tide.
    He’d begun to cry. Keening some inarticulate grief over her broken body. All the cruel things said and done, the kind ones saved for later. Could I but do it over.
    He lowered her head gently and closed her eyes and took up the gun. He’d thought when he made the woods he might lie up in the brush and kill Sutter but the light was chancy at best and what he wanted most right now was to hear her voice, for things to be the way they had been scant minutes before with her weight against his shoulder