Provinces of Night: A Novel

by William Gay

  You can hush about some red drawers, the second man said. The thought of Tut Albright pullin on a pair of women’s underwear is more than I want to deal with this early in the day.

  JUNIOR ALBRIGHT WAS on the schoolhouse construction site long before seven o’clock, his battered Dodge pulled into the graveled parking lot and the door cocked open for what coolness remained. The sun had come up red and smoking and malign over the spiky treeline, instantly sucking the dew from the leaves and driving it into the parched earth and he judged it was going to be another hot one. He sat with a leg extended over the open car door, sipping the last of his coffee. He glanced occasionally at his wrist as if he’d check the time though he wore no watch there. There was just a band of paler flesh, like the ghost of a watch. His watch resided in a cigar box beneath the bar at the poolroom with similar timepieces where he’d pawned it for two sixpacks of Falstaff beer, and he resolved that the first thing he was going to do when he got a paycheck was redeem the watch.

  After a while he got out of the car with his lunch box and seated himself on a pile of treetrunks a dozer had pushed into windrows. The bladescarred trees were lush with honeysuckle vines and the air was heady with the scent of their blossoms. He opened the lunch box and selected a sandwich and unwrapped it and took a bite. Occasionally he’d glance up the cherted road and cock his head attentively and listen but all he could hear was doves calling mournful as lost souls from some smoky hollow still locked in sleep.

  He turned at a sudden whicker in the air and watched a hummingbird suck the drop of nectar from the throat of a honeysuckle. Curious creature, no bigger than his thumb. Its blurred wings, tiny sesame eyes. He stopped chewing and watched it. He studied it with a bemused intensity as if he’d learn its secrets. As if this might be a talent he ought to acquire. When he heard the first pickup truck he rewrapped the uneaten portion of his sandwich and restored it to the lunch box and fastened the clasps and stood up.

  The truck pulled nearer the unfinished structure and stopped and two men got out. Doors slammed. They stood studying the schoolhouse as if to see did it meet their specifications.

  Bout time you all got here, Albright sang out. I’d about give you out.

  They didn’t even look at him. They’d seen this fool before. This was the third day he’d been perched on the windrowed trees, drawing no salary, waiting like a vulture for somebody to burn out, not show up, die.

  You reckon they’ll be hirin today?

  You’d have to ask Woodall about that, one of the men said.

  The other man lit a cigarette. He glanced at Albright through the smoke. It gets any hotter than it was yesterday you can have my job.

  I’d take it, Albright said.

  The man looked at him. You wouldn’t know what the fuck to do with it, he said.

  Supposed to be a hundred in the shade and shade hard to come by, Albright said.

  Other workers arrived in beatup trucks and rattletrap cars and even one man walking, angling across a field of kneehigh sedgegrass, his lunch bucket swinging along in his hand. The men fell to getting out tools and stringing power cords. Someone cranked a concrete mixer and began to hose water into it. Another to remove plastic sheeting from pallets of bagged mortar mix.

  When the white truck with WOODALL CONSTRUCTION painted on the side arrived Albright was already sauntering toward the office. The office was a tiny metal trailer with the wheels removed shored up on concrete blocks. A set of steps of raw lumber led to the door. The truck halted before the trailer and a man got out. Heavyset man wearing khakis and a broadbrimmed gray cowboy hat. He removed the hat and laid it carefully in the seat of the truck and put on a white hardhat and adjusted it over one sleepylooking gray eye. He seemed not to have noticed Albright.

  Albright cleared his throat. I was wonderin about a job, he said.

  I don’t reckon I need nobody today, Woodall said. He was studying the working men, looking all about as if to see was everyone accounted for.

  Albright played his hole card. They locked up Clyde Edmonds last night.

  They did?

  Cleve Garrison arrested him last night in Baxter’s on a drunk and disorderly. He was drunk as a fiddler’s bitch. He’d of needed a seein eye dog to find his way across the street.

  He was running the crimper, Woodall said bemusedly.

  He won’t be runnin it today unless it’s got a hell of a cord on it. That’s why I thought you might need somebody.

  I don’t need just anybody. I need somebody that can operate a crimper.

  Hellfire. I can pick it up. I was drivin a tractor when I was ten year old. Runnin a haybaler. A crimper’s a plaything next to a haybaler.

  Woodall was thinking. His left eye had a cast to it as if he’d see a wider range of things than other men and Albright was never quite certain which eye was watching him.

  There’s not much to it for a fact, he finally said. I don’t have anybody I can spare to put on it, so I’m going to have to give you a shot at it.

  I won’t let you down.

  We’ll get you a hardhat out of the trailer here. We’ll have to fill out some papers anyway. This here is a government job and everything has to be wrote down five or six times.

  He had ascended the steps and was unlocking the office door. Albright was glancing about to see was anybody watching him get hired. They went in. The air in the trailer was hot and stifling and Albright felt sweat break out instantly all over his body. Woodall set him to filling out forms and began rummaging through a wooden box of hardhats and rubber boots. He laid a blue hardhat upon the desk.

  You have to wear this hardhat all the time you’re on the work site.

  Have you not got another white one like you got? Albright was licking the point of his pencil, studying Woodall’s hat.

  These blue hardhats are laborer’s hats. This one I got is a superintendent’s hat. It might be a little early in the day for one of them. I been here twenty years and I own the company.

  Oh. Well. Blue’s all right. One of them blue ones’d suit me just fine, I reckon.

  Listen to me about this hat. You got to wear it all the time. This is a government job and the sons of bitches keep sending inspectors around trying to catch me fucking up. They catch a man working without a hat it’d be a hellatious fine on me and no telling what else. You got it?

  Albright signed his name with a flourish. I got it, he said.

  Let’s get going then.

  Woodall was already going down the steps, striding off toward the tall brick building. Hey, Albright called after him. Where’s this crimper at?

  Woodall turned. It’s on the roof, where did you reckon it was at? Do you not know what we’re talking about here?

  Course I know. I just didn’t know if it was already up there or if we’d have to carry it.

  They stood before a ladder leading to the roof. Albright looked up. The sheer brick wall, the ladder telescoping into the nothingness of a hot brassy sky. He judged it forty or fifty feet.

  That ladder sure is one long son of a bitch, he said.

  It don’t go but from the bottom to the top, Woodall pointed out. Let’s be for going up it. Time’s wasting and there’s a world of metal waiting up there to be crimped.

  Albright took a deep breath and squared his shoulders and laid a hand to each side of the ladder. He started up. The ladder swayed gently and disquietingly with his progress. He could hear it grating against the brick parapet high above him. He could feel Woodall coming up behind him. Halfway up he stopped. His hands gripping the rung of the ladder were bloodless and white. His knees began to jerk spasmodically nor could he make them stop. The ladder began to shake.

  Hey, Woodall called.

  Albright didn’t say anything. He was staring through a window opening into a room where men were hanging drywall. He was imagining what the solidlooking floor felt like beneath their feet.

  This ladder’s tied off up there. It’s not going anywhere.

  I was thinking m
ore in the line of me going somewhere without it, Albright said. Is there not any other way up?

  No there’s not. We’ve not put the elevator in yet and the helicopter’s out on some other job. Why didn’t you tell me you were afraid of heights?

  I didn’t know. I ain’t ever been on em before.

  Just go up one step at a time and don’t be looking down. Look at the wall.

  Albright rested his face on his clenched knuckles. He closed his eyes. After a time he began to ascend again.

  When he reached the top he stepped over the parapet onto an enormous expanse of metal roofing. The roof was enclosed front and sides by the brick wall capped with stone but open on the rear and Albright’s feet sensed a slight pitch toward the open area. The roof felt solid and substantial beneath his feet when he stamped it tentatively remnants of his normal cockiness began to accrue about him now that he was safe.

  The crimper was a squat metal device built close to the floor with four short appendages each ending in a roller. There was a handle on its back not unlike a harness and to Albright it looked for all the world like a fullgrown dachshund. To complete this illusion it was powered by an electrical cord wound about the handle like a leash.

  This metal is all laid out and screwed to the lathing, Woodall said. It’s not going anywhere. But where the joints are there are two L-shaped edges and this crimper just rides down the joint and crimps the longer edge over the short one. You see? That makes it watertight. Here, I’ll show you.

  Woodall hoisted the crimper and set it astride one of the seams. Albright watched. Woodall flipped a toggle switch and the crimper sprang to life and began a loud clacketyclack and commenced pulling itself along the crimped edge, its little rollered feet gliding smoothly on the metal. Woodall paid out cord from the roll across his arm and when he’d crimped six or eight feet leaned and grasped the handle on the machine’s back and lifting it and reversing its direction set it on the next seam facing and began crimping it. He cut the toggle switch.

  You see? I just turned it to show you how. You let it crimp clear to the end of a seam then just pick it up and flip it onto the next one and go back the other way. You don’t need to shut her off unless you quit crimping. Just keep your power cord feeding and let her roll. Watch her on that back side where there’s not any parapet. Turn her two feet or so back from the edge. That’s been handcrimped already to keep a man from having to lean out over the edge and turn the crimper. You got any questions?

  Whose airplane is that? Albright asked.

  What?

  Albright was gazing over the brick parapet into a level green expanse of field. In the distance a one-engine plane was tethered and the sun glinted off guywires securing the wings. Cows like tiny ceramic cows from a knickknack shelf grazed placidly in the weight of the sun.

  Whose airplane is that?

  It’s mine, Woodall said. Were you listening to what I said about that crimper?

  Sure. I got it.

  I had to fly all the way to North Carolina to get it. If there’s one in the state of Tennessee I couldn’t find it. Try it a seam or two.

  Albright flipped the switch and walked alongside the crimper feeding it cord. When the crimped edge ended he flipped the crimper around and followed it back. Woodall nodded grudgingly. He laid a hand atop his head. Keep that hardhat on, he yelled above the din of clacketyclack. He turned and went back down the ladder.

  I’m walkin the dog, Albright sang, paying out leash. Easy money, he was thinking, making up a shopping list as he sang, adding up prices.

  By ten o’clock the heat on the roof was horrific. It danced off the metal in miasmic emanation like steam rising from a swamp and the sun off the mirrorlike tin was blinding. Albright was wringing wet with sweat. Son of a bitch, he said. It was like the basement to hell, like the furnace room to hell. He was constantly wiping sweat out of his eyes with a shirtsleeve and when he glanced over the wall toward the horizon the landscape warped and ran like a landscape viewed through melting glass. He felt lightheaded and so weightless he might go drifting aloft into the hot blue firmament and he divined that the only thing keeping him earth-bound was the length of leash he kept paying out, reeling in, paying out.

  He cut off the crimper. Goddamn it’s hot, he said. I’d give a five-dollar bill for a good cold drink of water.

  But there was no water here cold or otherwise and the thought of negotiating the ladder again seemed not to appeal to him. He looked about for shade. There wasn’t any. He took off his shirt and folded it and laid it on the roof and laid the hardhat atop it. Fucker draws heat like iron draws lightning, he said. He shook the water out of his spungold curls and wiped his eyes again and took a pack of Camels out of his pocket but he’d sweated them through and he tossed them over the edge. He stood for a moment catching his breath. The air was so hot it seemed to sear his lungs. He turned the crimper back on.

  He was crimping away when he heard someone yelling at him. He seemed to have been hearing it subliminally for some time and when he finally turned Woodall was standing on the roof screaming at him. Woodall pounded the top of his hardhat and pointed a finger at Albright’s bare head until finally comprehending but momentarily confused Albright dropped the cord and went to get his hardhat.

  The crimper crimped on toward the sloping edge of the roof. Albright positioned the blue hat on his head and whirled to chase the crimper. Woodall was shrieking at him soundlessly. The crimper was at the edge of the roof when Albright grasped the cord. There was too much slack and the crimper tilted over the edge like a diver and just went on crimping sheer air and vanished from sight. Come back, Albright cried. The cord grew taut in his hands then went slack. The clacketyclack fell silent and something slammed against the concrete far below and Albright could hear the startled cries of the workers.

  He raised a hand to calm Woodall, a placating hand of casual assurance, don’t worry, just a minute, I’ll go get it.

  He made for the ladder. He went down it hand over hand without a thought for heights and dropped the last six or eight feet and was up immediately and headed for the Dodge. He went past crimper parts and oddments of metal strewn over an unlikely area of concrete and past where men were circled about the remains of the crimper standing hands on knees peering down at it like soldiers gathered about a comrade fallen in battle. By the time he reached the Dodge he was going at a dead run with his left arm already extended to open the car door he wasn’t even at yet and his right hand was fumbling out the ignition keys.

  Inside he cranked the car and shifted and popped the clutch in one smooth liquid motion and slewed spinning out of the gravel into the road. He went down it with the speedometer in a slow steady climb and a slipstream of pale dust rising behind him.

  ON A PINE WARM MORNING in May Fleming Bloodworth carrying a string of sunperch rounded a bend in the creek and came upon a blondhaired girl about to heave a rock at a huge gray hornets’ nest suspended from the branch of a sycamore.

  Hey, he yelled.

  The girl looked at him in wildeyed surprise but heaved the rock anyway and tore out a fistsize chunk of the nest. Instantly the air was full of hornets and they seemed in little doubt about where the rock had come from. Bloodworth dropped the fish and began to run. Batting away hornets onehanded he grasped the girl about the waist and dragged her upstream in a silver sluice of water. He was stung on the neck and he could feel them in his shirt and buzzing madly in his hair and the girl was fighting him with one hand and trying to slap away hornets with the other. The hornets were coming at his face like divebombers and the girl had clawed his left cheek and she kept trying to slap him away.

  She was halfcrying. Get the hell away from me, she said.

  Where the creekbed fell away to a thighdeep pool Fleming went under and when he came up pulled the girl under with him. He opened his eyes underwater and she had a wildeyed look of panic on her face as if she were drowning. She was frantically trying to unbutton her blouse. She surfaced sputtering and cho
king. She gagged and spat a mouthful of water. She was still trying to undo the blouse but her hands were shaking. When Fleming grasped both sides of the collar and jerked the buttons spun away and she shrugged out of it and reached behind her back to unhook her brassiere. There was a coppery glint of stubble in her armpits, red welts already swelling on her sides.

  She went over to the bank of the creek and sat down. She began to cry. The hornets seemed to have departed but he could see them downstream circling their ruined home and the air was vibratory with an angry hum.

  She stopped crying and glared at him. You could at least turn your head, she said.

  He looked away and when he looked back she had the bra off and was raking crushed hornets out of it. Her breasts were starkly white against the tanned flesh of her stomach and shoulders save the rosecolored nipples and the dark aureole surrounding them. His mouth felt dry and there was a faroff ringing in his ears.

  I told you to look the other way.

  How many times did they get you?

  I don’t know. A lot. I can’t stand this, they stung me all over. She was dipping water in her cupped hands and rubbing it over her breasts.

  You’re not allergic, are you?

  How the hell would I know? I don’t even know what kind of bugs those were.

  They’re not bugs, they’re hornets. Why on earth would you slam a rock into a hornets’ nest?

  I told you I didn’t know what they were. It was just a big gray paper thing and I wondered what would happen if I hit it with a rock.

  That’s what happens.

  Well. I’m from Michigan. They don’t have the things hanging from lampposts in Detroit.

  The girl had covered herself as best she could with the blouse and beneath it she sat hunched and miserable. Fleming’s stings hurt as well but the sheer fact of seeing the girl and talking with her seemed to diminish the pain. She had blond hair with auburn lights in it and eyes of clear guileless blue and light played on the angles of her face in an interesting way. There was a faint prettiness about her but also something vaguely familiar, and he kept wondering if he’d seen her before or just someone that looked like her.