Provinces of Night: A Novel

by William Gay

  Warren came up beside the car. This thing’s got a tendency to take to the air, he said. You need to lighten your foot a little.

  Who is that?

  I don’t know, Warren said. Crack the door so we can see.

  When he opened the door the dome light came on and the woman had subsided back onto the seat and perhaps she slept. Her mouth was open and she had one arm folded beneath her head for a pillow.

  Oh. That’s just my accountant, Hazel. You want some of that?

  What?

  You want some of it?

  Fleming looked. He could smell the rank fishy odor of her and a line of spittle had escaped the corner of her slack mouth and was tracking down her throat. He noticed that there was a handful of wadded money stuffed into her panties, the corner of a twenty-dollar bill showing above the elastic.

  Not right now.

  No matter. I expect you’re used to adding up your figures all by yourself anyway.

  Accountant?

  I came up here to, let’s see, I came up here to sell two lots in town and pay the taxes on something somebody was fixing to foreclose on. I picked Hazel up in the poolroom to help me keep up with everything.

  Abruptly he stood very still and then he sat down in the moonlit roadbed and began to empty his pockets one by one and to hold slips of paper close to his face. I wonder if I paid those damn taxes? he asked.

  I think you ought to come up to the house and sleep it off and wait till morning to drive anywhere. You can bring your accountant. It’s getting cold down here and besides, somebody’s bound to come by sooner or later and call the law.

  Fuck that. I’ve got to be in Alabama immediately. I was supposed to have been there this morning. Yesterday would have been better. You’ll have to drive. They’ve probably got a search party out by now and I’ve got to get Neal’s car back.

  He struggled up out of the roadbed. Let’s see if we’ve done any damage to it.

  They walked around the car and Warren took out a packet of matches and kept trying to strike them until finally reaching them to Fleming. See if you can make these son of a bitches work, he said.

  Fleming lit a match but he hadn’t needed it. Moonlight had shown three scratches deep as if three steel claws had hooked at the headlight and raked viciously down the length of the car. Something, a fencepost perhaps, had struck the passenger side door hard enough to knock a fist-size dent in it.

  Little soap and water and a good coat of wax and he won’t even notice it, Warren said. He removed a huge roll of greenbacks with a rubberband containing them from a pocket and handed it to Fleming. Stick this in your pocket and keep up with it, he said.

  Good God, I don’t want to carry that. I might lose it or something.

  You can’t lose it at the rate I can. Everywhere I’ve been tonight folks’ve been glad to see me coming and sorry to see me go. I’ve bought and paid for enough friends tonight to hold a Baptist footwashin and I doubt I’ll ever see any of them again. You reckon you can get me to Alabama?

  I don’t have a driver’s license.

  I’m drivin on a revolted, a revoked driver’s license myself and if they catch me it’s my ass. I’ll pay your fine if you get caught. You’re not drunk are you?

  No.

  That’s a start then. You furnish the sobriety and I’ll furnish the car and the money and we might just get organized here.

  What about the accountant?

  Well, yeah, I’m furnishin her too.

  No. I mean what are we supposed to do with her?

  I don’t know but we’ve by God got to do something. She almost got me killed over at the Knob tonight. Started something with some big logger off Beech Creek. I’d have to be drove with a shotgun to ever set foot in that part of the county again.

  When they were underway Warren leaned back across the seat and shook the woman awake. Where do you need to go, he asked.

  I need a cheeseburger. Go by the DariDip.

  There won’t be no more cheeseburgers in here this night, Warren said. You’ve done puked all over the whole Goddamned car.

  Take me down to Early’s then, she said. We can get a halfpint and he’ll let me stay there.

  Take the Dial Holler Road, Warren said, and leaned his face against the glass and closed his eyes.

  With the night coming at him in tatters of groundfog that streaked across the hood and broke on the windshield and his confidence in being able to handle the big car growing Fleming began to realize the enormity of his situation and to appreciate the curious curves and switchbacks that lay along the road of life. An hour ago he had been asleep in his bed. He couldn’t even drive. Now he was barreling through the night in an eight cylinder Buick, a roll of money in his pocket and a carload of drunk folks. On top of that he was headed to Alabama, a place he’d never been.

  Warren had opened his eyes and was watching the yellowlit night roll at him. You know where Early lives?

  Yeah.

  Let her out there.

  Early lived in a little clapboard house on the bank of the road at the head of Dial Hollow. He parked before the house. The woman got out unsteadily and stood swaying in the yard pulling a dress over her head. When her head cleared the neck she looked the very caricature of a mad harridan and she fixed Fleming with a fierce look of parodie outrage. When you get your eyes full open your mouth and load it up too, she told him. Fleming had always thought that Warren’s wife, Juanita, was fairly attractive and he wondered why he’d wound up with Hazel the accountant.

  Give me some money, she told Warren.

  Make change out of your drawers, Warren said. Don’t come at me with that poormouth shit.

  She staggered up the sloped yard and climbed the steps to the porch. Warren leaned his head back against the seat. Damned if it ain’t a long road to Alabama, he said.

  The boy studied him. He looked like an aging film star out of the forties, the cropped mustache, the smooth brown hair. His clean Roman profile was beginning to slacken from liquor and accountants and too many nights driving highpowered cars through barbed wire fences. Fleming guessed that if the war had gone on forever or until Warren died in it he would have been all right but it had not. When he came home with his medals and shrapnel scars he had found a different world than the one he had sailed away from.

  The accountant had gone in the front door but almost immediately she was ejected back onto the porch and the door slammed in her face. She stood on the porch cursing the door and shaking her fist at it. She kicked the door then gestured viciously toward it with an upraised middle finger.

  Ahh, Lord, Warren said. I’ve always held there was nothing in this world as sacred as southern womanhood.

  When she was back in the car she said, Early won’t let me stay. Take me to my ex-husband’s out on Drake’s Lane.

  Look, Warren said. I’m willin to take you wherever you need to go but I can’t be takin the scenic route all over the midsouth. I’ve got to be in Alabama. We’ve got to get on some kind of a schedule here.

  Take me to Drake’s Lane.

  Where in hell is Drake’s Lane? the boy asked.

  They were halfway back to the highway when the boy fell to thinking about Warren’s drive-in theater. He had suddenly remembered that Warren owned a movie theater in Alabama and he was thinking he might be invited to remain a few days and watch the movies and he was trying to think of any recent movies that might be playing when he came into a lethal hairpin curve and straightened it by leaving the road through a spinney of alders. The alders were whipping the car like triphammers and the boy was fighting the wheel desperately and wondering where the blacktop had gone. Great God, Warren said. The accountant had been asleep with her face against the glass and when she awoke she awoke clawing bothhanded at the shrubbery flailing the glass and she began to scream. The alders had thinned and he was going sixty miles an hour through a waving sedgefield. The woman was beating him about the head and shoulders with her fists and Warren was shouting, The brakes, the br
akes.

  The car lurched back onto the roadbed where the curve straightened and the boy remembered the brakes and applied them. The car came to a halt crossways in the road with the headlights outlining trees stark against the sky. The boy was shaking and he could feel icy sweat tracking down his ribcage. The motor idled smoothly and a disc jockey on the radio said, Now friends, I’d like to send this out to all the sick and the shut-ins, and a gospel quartet began to sing.

  Now you’re catchin on, Warren said. This flat black thing, I think that’s what we’re supposed to be drivin on. These woods and shit, I believe I’d just try to stay out of them as much as I could.

  We turned over in the woods three or four times and I’m alive, the woman said in an awed voice.

  Fleming slid his hands under his thighs to halt their shaking. We never turned over, he said.

  The hell we didn’t, she said. You blackhearted little liar. You tried to kill us. We turned over three or four times in the bushes and I seen every bit of it through the glass. I’ve wet all over myself and I ain’t ridin with you crazy son of a bitches one more foot.

  Warren got out and yanked the back door open. The woman sat there a moment then she climbed out into the roadbed. Warren climbed into the back seat and kicked out a hail of clothing and purses and empty whiskey bottles that rattled hollowly on the macadam. He got out and climbed back into the front seat. Let’s roll, he said.

  Fleming backed the car onto the shoulder of the road and straightened the wheels and drove cautiously away. He looked once in the rearview mirror but all was darkness where the taillights faded out and he couldn’t see Hazel. He resolved to attend to his driving and when the speedometer hovered at forty-five he eased up on the gas. Warren settled himself against the seat and closed his eyes but he did not sleep. He seemed to be sobering up.

  Fleming turned the radio off. You want to drive?

  No, you’re doin fine. I’m just dreadin goin home. Juanitas goin to pitch a bitch of a fit and I’m just too tired to handle it. I don’t know what’s the matter with women anyway. Now you take Juanita. I took her out of a situation where she was living with cracks in the floors where you could keep an eye on the chickens and flour gravy to eat three times a day, and put carpet under her feet and electric heat to sit by and T-bone steaks, and do you think she’s grateful? Why hell no. I’ll probably sleep in the concession stand tonight, if I sleep at all.

  He fumbled out a cigarette and lit it. He offered the pack to Fleming but it was waved away.

  I don’t know. A couch ain’t the worse place I ever slept. I’ve slept in graveyards and cottonfields and hayricks. Graveyards are the best. Folks’ll leave you alone in a graveyard. When I was bummin around them first few years after the war I’d always try to find me a graveyard if night caught me on the road.

  Where’s the worst place you ever slept?

  In a jail in Meridian Mississippi, Warren said. Second worst was a jail in Sicorro New Mexico. You may see a pattern beginnin to emerge here. A young man like yourself just startin out in life would do well to stay out of jails as much as possible. Cops love you when you’re up and they love to kick a man when he’s down. They had me in jail as a vag one time in Arizona. Had me and a bunch of us, mostly Mexicans, cut-tin lettuce on a big lettuce farm. When my time was up they let me out and damned if they didn’t pick me up again before I made the city limits. I reckon I’d made too good a hand. Had me right back in there cuttin lettuce. I can’t eat lettuce till this day. Now if I wanted to I could buy me a motor home and cruise around out there lookin at the country. But I don’t guess I will. Things like that sort of sours you on a place.

  The boy drove in silence, early predawn fog white by the roadside, rising out of the wet brush like a community of ghosts turned out to watch his passage. He was headed south now on U.S. 43 and the eastern sky lay on his left hand, the sky above the horizon already mottled with red. He thought of Warren storming a German bunker or whatever he had done, flailing through waistdeep water toward the Normandy beaches. He had never asked Warren what he had done to earn his medals, but he knew they did not hand them out just for showing up. He thought of Warren with his medal swung about his neck, leaning to slice heads of lettuce in Arizona.

  Ma said Boyd headed out north. You ever heard from him?

  No.

  Damned if I ain’t beginnin to believe he’s geared the way Pa is.

  What do you mean?

  I always wondered what made Pa do some of the things he did. He’d head out, turn up again. But it was the damnedest thing, you couldn’t stay mad at him. He was always glad to see you and it was like he never left. It was like somethin he had to do. There was just somethin about a road, he never could let a road alone. Then he left that time and never turned up. Playin that music. I finally just figured out he was geared in a higher gear than other folks. Had to have more goin on, things movin faster. After I figured that out I never worried about it again.

  He was supposed to write. Pa was. But I’ve about given up on him. I’m sick of blaming everything on the U.S. Mail.

  Warren lit a cigarette off the butt of its predecessor, cranked down the glass and threw the stub out in a slipstream of sparks. Boyd’ll turn up when he’s old and broke down and needs you to help him across the street, he said. Piss on him. Get on some kind of schedule. What do you plan to do?

  The boy grinned. Right now my plans are just contingencies, he said. They all seem to hinge on other folk’s plans. It’s like everything’s in motion and I’m just waiting for it to settle down. Waiting for the glass to clear so I can see what I’m doing.

  No move is the wrong move.

  What?

  Sometimes any move at all is better than nothin. If you’re right you’re one up. If you’re wrong you start over. This sittin and waiting for somebody else to make up their mind is for the Goddamned birds. You have to take control of your own life.

  Day was coming in broad shields of light that spread over the eastern world, breaking over the smoking fields, and a crescent of bloodred sun burned through the trees. He had crossed the Alabama line into a world foreign to him, the hills and hollows were behind now and he was driving into a flat featureless land planted with cotton fields that paced the highway for improbable distances, driving past happenstantial tenant shacks side by side with great brick mansions with iron gates and alabaster columns, plantations so grand their squires might not have heard that the Old South had fallen long ago, had moved from slaves to sharecroppers with hardly a wasted motion.

  I never could figure Pa out, Warren said. You never could figure why he’d do somethin. He never would tell you anything. Either he figured you could read his mind or he figured it was none of your business. I remember one time these two old boys come up to the house lookin for me and I wasn’t there. They had planned to beat hell out of me. I was just a boy and they were grown men, thirty years old or better. It was something about their sister, I don’t remember what. Pa asked them what they wanted with me. There’s just a feller down the road wants to meet Warren, they said. Wait and let me get my hat, Pa said. I just might want to meet this feller myself. He had this old gray felt hat he wore all the time. He always had to get his hat. He got his hat and they walked off down the road and he kicked the holy bejesus out of the whole bunch. I never could figure whether he done it for me or he just wanted to kick somebody’s ass. Probably a little of both, most everything is.

  Who’s Elise?

  Who?

  Elise. I saw your name cut in a table in the Snowwhite Cafe. Elise loves Warren Bloodworth. It looked old, like it had been cut in there a long time ago.

  I’ll be damned. I went to school with a girl named Elise Warf Never went with her though, we was just schoolmates. She was pretty, too. Never let on she liked me. Why didn’t she say so? Shit. You reckon the offer’s still good?

  Coming into a town just big enough to have a post office and a cafe Fleming parked before the restaurant. Traffic had increased with t
he day’s advent and there were a few cars and trucks on the road and two or three beatup pickups parked before the diner.

  You want a sandwich?

  I don’t believe I could go it. Get you one. You’ve got that money. Get me a glass of tomato juice if they’ve got it. Bout half a bottle of hot sauce in it.

  At the counter he ordered a bacon and egg sandwich and a cup of coffee to go and the tomato juice for Warren. Standing by the cash register awaiting his order he noticed he had forgotten in his haste to wear socks but such folk as were in the diner looked sleepnumbed and in dread of whatever the day held for them and no one seemed to notice this deficiency. He kept glancing at the gleaming car through the plate-glass. Warren was slumped with a hand shading his eyes from the sun. Fleming wondered if these folk had seen him climb casually out of the white Buick Roadmaster. If they thought it was his. If they wondered where he was bound bareankled and with a pocketful of money this fine summer morning.

  He paid and went out with the bag the waitress handed him and in the driver’s seat unwrapped the greasylooking sandwich and took a bite. Warren looked away, rolled down the glass and sat staring out the window, sipping his tomato juice.

  Can you drive and eat at the same time?

  Sure.

  Let’s roll, then.

  No move is the wrong move.

  Damn right.

  Driving into a country so monotonous and flat an enormous spirit level laid across it would have shown no deviation, something metallic formed shapeless and elongated far down the sunwarped highway and shot toward him, coalesced into a green sedan moving so fast the speedometer must have been pegged, a blur of a face he recognized instantly as his cousin Neal. Watching in the mirror he saw brakelights come on and the sedan fishtail crazily down the road in a haze of smoking rubber. Instead of backing around in the highway as anyone else would have done Neal simply drove out into a cottonfield and came back paralleling the road in a rising cloud of red dust.

  Fleming had pulled the Buick onto the shoulder of the road and cut the switch. Warren had been dozing and he came awake instantly. He opened one bleary eye. What is it?