Little Sister Death by William Gay Page B

of it and didn’t.
    The air conditioning man had come that day, an efficient, swarthy little fellow not given to conversation. Though Corrie had certainly tried, Binder thought, half smiling in the dark, remembering her bringing him iced tea and offering sandwiches, apparently delighted at seeing any strange face and reacting to the sight of the red and white truck winding toward them through the cedar rows as if it were the arrival of some long and eagerly awaited visitor. The old man shifted his cud of Beech-Nut and watched her with wary little berrylike eyes, as if she were bearing suspect intentions along with mintsmelling tea.
    You won’t never cool it, the man told Binder. Your best bet is to shut off some of them upstairs rooms. You won’t cool it this summer nor heat it this winter, not unless you’re a millionaire. Cost you four, maybe five hundred a month, and them fireplaces’d keep you humpin with a chainsaw.
    We’ll be back in Chicago this winter, Corrie had said. This place is depressing enough in the summer. Can you imagine what it’d be like in the wintertime?
    Lying there in the dark, under the cool, mechanical whine of the air conditioner, Binder thought he could. Already remote, the place shrouded with snow would be inaccessible, locked in silent peace. No telephone, no traffic, no gossip, just the quiet walls and the unlined yellow paper and time settling slowly over him like motes of dust spinning in the air.
    He couldn’t sleep. His head ached, the pain coming in waves so regular he could have charted them, ebbing and flowing like the black tides of the sea. And that was the way he came to see them, the waves beginning far out and uneven beyond a reef of slick black rocks starting in, whitecapping, breaking on the rocks with fingers of salty spray. Fading thin, but never completely going away. There was always a dull aching behind his eyes. He opened them, stared into the darkness. He could feel her naked back against him. His arm encircled her as if he could draw furtive comfort from her sleeping warmth. He cupped a breast gently, slid his hand down to the smooth mound of her belly, her waist already thickening in pregnancy. He thought simultaneously of the tiny form growing inside her (cells dividing even as she slept, no rest for the weary, a woman’s work is never done) and the book growing on lined sheets of yellow paper and in his head. We shall each be creative, each in our own way.
    He arose, went to check on Stephie, studied her sleeping face for a time. He went into the kitchen. In a cabinet he found a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol, took three with a glass of icewater from the refrigerator, stood for a moment with the cold glass against his temple.
    He sat on the sofa smoking, watching the television with the sound off. Late-night news, talking heads like prophets gifted with hindsight mouthing dark forebodings intercut with neon images of random violence.
    On the porch it was cooler, a degree of comfort between the sterile manufactured cold of the bedroom and the hot heavy air in the den. He sat on the damp stone steps, watching across the dark bottomland to where the horizon met the sky in a collusion of black he suspected more than saw. Distant lightning flickered there, vague and threatless, and he caught himself waiting for thunder that wouldn’t come. Orange electricity bloomed and faded, burnishing the silver clouds, tracing their outlines with bright neon fire, the afterimage burning on his retinas. Beyond the toolshed the sky was black and wetlooking, velvet drowning slowly in India ink.
    He talked to folks.
    He took a seat on a worn bench on the courthouse square, next to an old felthatted man whetting a knife. Occasionally the man would cease his work and inspect it critically, try the edge experimentally on the sparse gray hairs on his forearm, return to his patient whetting. Perhaps he had a need for a blade so painstakingly sharpened, Binder thought. Perhaps he was a