Twilight by William Gay

you’ve got a lot to learn. You take a man wants something real bad and don’t get it, he’s likely to say some things he don’tmean. Sort of in the heat of the moment, you might say. When he cools down a bit, it’ll all be forgot. Likely he’s done forgot it, and you worrying yourself to death about it.
    And that’s it? You’re not going to do anything? Talk to him, or anything?
    The law’s a funny thing, Tyler. It requires that a crime be committed before a man’s arrested for it. If we arrested everybody that thought about doing something illegal, there wouldn’t be jails to hold em. And if everybody Granville Sutter threatened to kill wound up dead, Fenton Breece would have to hire him a couple of helpers and put on another shift. If Sutter roughed her up like you say and she swears out a warrant for assault, that’s another matter. But she’ll have to do it. You can’t do it for her.
    But then if she did, you’d have to serve the warrant and arrest him? He’d be in jail?
    Till he made bond. Which knowin Granville would be somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen minutes. And then he would be madder than hell. Which you wouldn’t want. My advice to you would be to let bygones be bygones.
    Whiskey, the deputy said suddenly.
    What? the sheriff asked.
    This has got to do with whiskey or I miss my guess. This boy here’s got into it with Granville over whiskey the same as his daddy did. Probably set up back there in one of them hollers in the edge of the Harrikin and Sutter’s got wind of it. Man go prowlin around back in there, no tellin what he’s liable to find.
    Tyler had risen. Unnoticed, his chair toppled sidewise against the wainscoting and fell. His face was white with anger.
    I ought not to have come here, he said. He was staringdown into the sheriff’s face. The face was bland and almost politely inquisitive. I knew better all along and by God I came here anyway.
    You watch your mouth, boy. Anybody cusses in my office I kind of take it they’re cussing me, and nobody cusses me.
    Tyler went out without speaking and left the door ajar. The deputy’s voice said, Wouldn’t mind takin little sister a round myself.
    He went on in a kind of cold detached rage up the stairs and into the failing winter light. Dusk was falling and a purple mist seemed to be seeping up out of the earth itself andobscuring the town. Buildings looked blueblack and dimensionless. He stood for a moment looking back down the stairs, then he shoved his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders and went on.

    Two stone lions stood sentinel at the gate of the house, but they were chipped and weathered and their ancient eyes were blind. They might have guarded some city long sacked and forgotten: the house they actually watched was subtly going to seed, and the gate itself canted on one twisted hinge.
    Tyler went up the cracked concrete sidewalk. A plaster mother duck and six plaster ducklings wended their way singlefile through the sere winter weeds, but like the lions they were weathered and blind and seemed to have lost their way.
    He went up the steps to the gloom of the porch. Somewhere behind the curtain windows a light glowed and hecould hear soft jazz playing within the house. He rapped on the storm door then opened it and knocked on the peeling white door. He waited awhile and knocked again. After a time he could hear soft footfalls and a porchlight came on over his head. The door opened.
    Kenneth?
    Hello, Mr. Phelan.
    A pair of limpid eyes behind the thick lenses of reading glasses. A thin scholarlylooking man in a white shirt and a blue necktie. Phelan’s cheeks were slick and freshly shaven, and he smelled of Lilac Vegetal. His hand clutched a thin leatherbound volume a forefinger marked his place in.
    I thought you were in Knoxville, Kenneth. Well. No. Not yet.
    If you wanted to talk to me about it, this is not really a good time for me. Could you come back tomorrow, perhaps in the afternoon?
    I did want to