Provinces of Night: A Novel

by William Gay

  It’s Neal, the boy said.

  Oh hell. Is Juanita with him?

  It looked like just Neal. Fleming was fumbling out the roll of rub-berbanded money. Here, you’d better take this.

  Slip you some of it off. Everybody else has, and you’ve earned it.

  I don’t need it.

  Warren shoved the money into a shirt pocket as if it were a thing of no importance and closed his eyes. Neal had pulled the Ford back onto the road behind the Buick like a highway patrolman apprehending a miscreant and he got slowly out of the car. Fleming cranked down the window and the warm day rolled in, the smell of the fields, the distant woods. The fields were arsenical green and they seemed to roll on forever with no change perceptible to the naked eye.

  Neal laid his hands on the roof and leaned to look inside the car. He was wearing sunglasses and Fleming couldn’t see his eyes but he seemed to be studying Warren where he lay huddled against the glass with his eyes closed.

  Hello, cousin. You and the old man been on a drunk?

  Something like that.

  Where’d you run up with him?

  He just sort of turned up in the middle of the night.

  Neal took a pack of Luckies out of his shirt pocket and tipped one out and lit it. Fleming could smell him, the scent of aftershave and mouthwash and the pomade he used on his hair. Neal’s sandy hair was brushcut flat on top but the sides were worn long and waved smoothly back over his ears in a ducktail.

  Mama’s just climbing the Goddamned walls. He was supposed to be back two days ago. First she thought he was in jail and then she decided he was dead in a carwreck. The more she thought the madder she got and she’s about worked herself up to a killing spree. Did he have a woman with him?

  Fleming uncapped the cardboard cup of coffee he’d forgotten about and drank from it. All I saw was Warren, he said.

  Neal was five years older than Fleming and a good halffoot taller. He was said to be wild and it was told that he had been kicked out of every college foolhardy enough to enroll him in the first place. He had turned and walked around the car, inspecting it critically as he went. When he came up on the passenger side Fleming looked away across the field to the sky. The sky was absolutely cloudless and so blue it looked transparent and against it a wave of blackbirds shifted shapeless as smoke.

  Goddamnit, Neal said, and kicked the door so hard the car rocked on its springs till the shocks froze it. He came around the front of the car inspecting the grill and headlights.

  I guess that was him instead of you?

  Warren had roused himself. I run into a fence. Somebody had built a barbed wire fence right across a public road. People in Tennessee, I don’t know, strange folks.

  Hellfire, why didn’t you take your car? Mine won’t clean out ditch-runs any better than yours will. This was a brand new car.

  Well. I paid for both of them. I guess I can pay for fixin it.

  I guess you can. Come on, Dad, Jesus, what’s the matter with you? Why do you do this shit? Mama’s wound tightern a two-dollar clock and set to go off the minute we drive up. I believe I’ll just let you out at the mailbox and ease on down the line.

  We’ll take Fleming, Warren said hopefully. She’s always liked him. Maybe a little company will placate her.

  I don’t believe we need to put Fleming through that, Neal said. There may be things bouncing off the walls and I expect he’d rather be somewhere else.

  He turned to Fleming. You drive my car back to Tennessee. Leave it at Brady’s and I’ll pick it up there. Try to keep my car out of as many fencerows as you possibly can.

  All right.

  You don’t have a beer in that other car do you? Warren asked.

  No I don’t.

  Warren was climbing out of the Buick. Oh well, he said. At least Elise loves me.

  Whoever Elise is you better be grateful for her, Neal said. Elise may be the only person this mornin that gives a damn whether you live or die.

  They got into the green Ford. Warren, rueful and resigned behind the glass, smiled and raised a hand at Fleming. They drove away. Fleming sat for a time just soaking up the warm sun then he backed the car around in the highway and drove back the way he’d come. He turned on the radio. Coming in sight of Wheeler Dam he met a car from the Alabama Highway Patrol, but the cop just threw up a hand, good morning, and kept on freewheeling south.

  WITHIN THE OLD MAN’S DREAM Brady dreamed as well, talking in his sleep to phantom mules, his hands moving against the quilt snapping plowlines that he did not hold. In his dream the old man leaned to him and shook him awake so that Brady roused startled and disoriented, looking wildly about the bedroom, the old man saying hush, laying a calming hand on his naked shoulder, you hush, boy, you’re not plowing, you’re here in your bed, I just worked you too hard in that bottom today. Go back to sleep now. You’ve plumb wore yourself out.

  Bloodworth awoke thinking for a dislocated moment that Brady had woke as well to the eerie green light of the truck’s instrument panel. All he could make out was Coble’s dark bulk humped against an invisible sleepfast countryside, his cigarette pulsing as he drew on it. He glanced about and there was no one in the truck save Coble and himself, but the dream would not release him. It was of such strength and clarity that it had dislocated him in time, moved him into the past so that a Brady who was just a boy worn out from plowing was more concrete than the seat his head rested against, truer than the yellowlit road the headlights were sucking up. He had felt Brady’s heart hammering under his hand, seen his chest rise and fall with his breathing.

  You wakin up oldtimer?

  These hours before first light were merciless. You could not go back to sleep and it was too early to get up and the things you had done or not done lay in your mind immovable as misshapen things you’d erected from stone. There was no give to these hours. They took no prisoners, made no compromises, and the things you had done could not be rationalized into anything save things you had done. The past was bitter and dry and ashes in his mouth, its bone arms clasped him like some old desiccated lover he could not be shut of.

  Say, oldtimer, this place we’re goin to, this Ackerman’s Field. How come it’s named that?

  I don’t know. Seems like the first courthouse or the first jail was built in a field that belonged to a man named Ackerman.

  He was wishing the past was a place you could backtrack to, take a sideroad you’d walked hurriedly past, wake somebody from a bad dream he was having.

  How big a place is it?

  It wasn’t much when I left, he said, coming wide awake instantly and thinking, Goddamn, Bloodworth, what’s the matter with you.

  Hellfire, oldtimer, how long you been gone?

  The old man chuckled smoothly. Folks are runnin off in wholesale lots to go to Detroit and make cars, he said. You never know who’ll be gone from one day to the next.

  Don’t I know it. It’s the same where I live. What in the world do you reckon they’re doin with all them hillbillies and niggers up there?

  The old man remained silent and tried to regather the threads of the dream but the intensity of it was lost to him now. He guessed seeing all those championship mules had made him remember Brady plowing the mules so long ago. He sat and watched the dark glass, houses rearing up out of the night and subsiding like houses constructed on floodwaters, lonely houses set like sentinels against the black hills, once a town constructed on a mountain with lights strewn earthward as if something enormous and full of light had broken there and spilled down the mountainside.

  NEAL TURNED UP with a tale about being kidnapped off a Greyhound bus. He showed up about seven o’clock in the morning while Fleming was sitting on the doorstep in the sun drinking a cup of morning coffee. He went in and filled another cup and brought it out and Neal stood in the yard drinking it.

  Neal was wearing a black T-shirt with his deck of Luckies rolled up in the sleeve and he was wearing mirrored shades that turned the world back from him and in whose lens
es Fleming could see his own grinning reflection as Neal told the story of the kidnapping.

  I met these four girls on the bus, Neal said. Nice girls they acted like, friendly. Coming home from a Baptist youth camp, they told me. They were getting off in Iron City and talked me into getting off too; said we was going on a Sunday school picnic. Well, you know me, I was all for that. One of them had a car there in Iron City, and we all piled in and rode out to this big place where a limestone quarry was. A big hole in the side of a hill, a cave, like. I wondered that there wasn’t no picnic basket. One of them had a sixpack. Well, to make a long story short they raped me. They held a switchblade knife on me and one by one they had their way with me. I felt defiled. Humiliated. It wouldn’t surprise me if I developed some kind of a trauma.

  The boy just shook his head and grinned and turned away.

  You still writing up those stories and sending them out?

  I’ve about quit until I get a typewriter.

  I was thinking we might team up and make a few dollars that way. I could do the thinking, get all the ideas for us. It ain’t nothing for me to have two or three ideas in a day. You could write them up for us.

  I don’t think it’s that easy, the boy grinned.

  We could write up the story of my rape by them Baptists. It would be painful but I’m willing to sacrifice my dignity. I need the money now that I’m out in the cruel world on my own. Some magazine would buy it. Sports Afield, it’d be right down their alley.

  Hellfire, Neal, are you not ever serious?

  Not unless I have to be.

  How come you’re out in the world on your own?

  It got too damn squally around the house. All that damn fighting and carrying on, you couldn’t sleep, I figured fuck it, I’d come up here and help with your education. I don’t know what’ll happen to Mom and Dad, I guess they’re quits. They’re both crazy, I can’t see after them anymore.

  Help with my education?

  Initiate you into the world. Get you out of this Nat King Cole Nature Boy shit and take you out into the world and get you laid.

  I can do just fine on my own.

  Neal set his empty coffee cup on the edge of the porch. He climbed the steps onto the porch. He stood looking around. Turned and peered into the interior of the house.

  You call this doing just fine? What have you done, took some kind of vows of poverty? A sharecropper would curl his lip at this place.

  I don’t believe in putting up much of a front, the boy said.

  Well, come on, let’s go. Get your town clothes on and let’s get out amongst em.

  I don’t think so.

  Come on, keep me company. I’ll let you in on this plan I’ve got to make a few bucks. Didn’t you say you needed a typewriter? Let me tell you about this.

  Oh, all right. Wait up a minute.

  Out amongst em, Neal said again.

  They had hidden Neal’s car in a sideroad two hollows down from Early Dial’s house and gone up the hollow to its head and followed the spine of the ridge and came down through the wooded hillside almost to Early’s house. It was a morning that suited their purpose very well. It was raining, a slow dawn drizzle from an invisible sky, fog rolling up out of the hollow so blue and dense the dripping cedars looked spectral and insubstantial, the oaks and hickories penitent and without detail, just dark slashes of trunks rearing up out of the mist.

  They came down the hillside like conspirators, Neal with a finger to his lips, easing down the slope as close to the house as they dared come, each carryin a length of stick to prod the earth for faults. Under the sodden leaves the sticks prodded for stumpholes, for holes spaded and refilled with leaves. Neal found a jug almost immediately, the stick sliding into the leaves and glancing off the slick glass surface. He fell to his knees, hauling away wet black leaves bothhanded and lifting from the hole a gallon jug of clear whiskey. Soon he had two in each hand, carrying them by the fingerholds in their necks, dancing gleefully about the hillside. It’s like an Easter egg hunt, he whispered. We’re sittin on a fuckin gold mine here. Let’s carry them up to the ridge and put them all together.

  They had six gallons cached at the top of the slope and were searching for more when Fleming froze in an attitude of listening. Someone was coming up from the house: a screen door slapped, there was a whisper of footsteps through the sodden leaves. Almost immediately a man appeared out of the fog like a ghost. Fleming and Neal sank to the earth, faded back past a huge pine the winds had taken and crouched in the hole the roots had excavated. Fleming peered cautiously through the roots.

  A long skinny man swinging a shotgun along in his hand came up through the scrub brush. He wore checked pants too big for him and a black derby hat canted over one eye and he was talking to himself.

  If he sees us rush him, Neal said. We’ll coldcock the motherfucker and head up the hillside.

  The boy nodded. The man passed very near to him, Fleming could see the weave of his trousers, the veins in his bony ankles. He was wearing bedroom slippers. He seemed to be telling himself some story, recounting some kind of confrontation. I told that bitch, I said, bitch, he was mumbling as he passed, then the monologue grew vague and incoherent.

  The man paused and prodded the ground with the barrel of the shotgun, knelt and raked the leaves away from a fallow hole. He grunted. He rose and kicked the leaves back in and looked about. He went eight or ten feet up the slope, poking the earth at random until he found a jug and went back toward the house cradling it up in his arms like some strange baby he’d found.

  Neal flung imaginary beads of sweat from his forehead. I’m glad that’s over, he said softly. I’d hate to kill a man this early in the day. Let’s get four or five more and get the hell out of here.

  Ultimately they had twelve gallon jugs and they carried them back across the ridge to the Buick. It took them two trips. They sat down to rest and Neal unscrewed one of the metal caps and drank a mouthful. He spat it out in a fine volatile mist that looked explosive. He shook the jug and watched the bead, greasy grapeshots of nitroglycerin shifting in its smoky depths.

  This stuff is very nearly undrinkable, he said. It tastes like doublestrength rubbing alcohol would if you chased it with carbolic acid.

  He rose and from the trunk of his car brought forth a quart of black viscous liquid.

  What’s that?

  Caramel coloring. I got it off this old bootlegger in Hickman County. It won’t do much for the taste but it’ll pretty it up some. Give it sort of an official look.

  Neal had unscrewed the lids from the gallon jugs and with a judicious eye gauging quantity was pouring coloring into each jug. He set the jar aside and took up a jug and shook it, watching the tarry coloring swirl into the alcohol, a cloudy spectra like ink in water. He was satisfied when the whiskey was a warm amber. Look at that, he said. All I need is some federal stamps to slap on and you’d swear this stuff was bonded.

  What do you plan on doing with it? Fleming asked again.

  I aim to resell it to Early.

  Don’t that seem a little risky? We could sell it out of the poolhall a halfpint at the time. Sell it to Itchy Mama.

  I got nothing against Itchy Mama, she never done anything to me. Early run me off from down here the other night. Said he was calling the law on me. Can you imagine that? A Goddamned bootlegger with a lifestyle a hop skip and a jump from the federal penitentiary and he’s calling the law on me. I was outraged. I don’t even know why I went. Well, actually, he had a gun throwed on me at the time and he was looking so crazy out of his eyes I thought he’d use it.

  Why did he run you off?

  You know that crazy whore he married? That little Mathis girl? I was down here drinking homebrew and playing poker. Everything was copacetic till she started giving me the eye. Standing behind me rubbing on me and looking at my cards. Before you know it we were in the back room with her drawers off and Early throwed down on me. Run me off. Hell, it ain’t been six months since I give her ten dolla
rs there in the alley behind Baxter’s. I told Early that. That’s my wife you’re talking about, he said. Well does that mean the price’s gone up, or down? I asked him.

  Neal raised the trunklid with a flourish, gestured in a manner curiously theatrical, a carnival barker presenting his show perhaps, a salesman his apothecary of exotic drugs.

  Where’d you get it? Early peered into the trunk, leaning precariously on the wooden leg he’d never gotten used to. They stood grouped about the trunk in the drizzling rain, the boy wiping water out of his eyes with the tail of his shirt. The aforementioned whore stood in the dry on the porch and watched Neal sullenly, slateyed and enigmatic as a cat.

  The yard where they’d parked the Buick was full of all manner of fowl, ducks and gamecocks and guinea fowl, all alike sodden and disconsolate in the rain. An arrogant guinea hen kept fluttering to the roof of the Buick as if to roost there and Neal kept slapping it off.

  This whiskey came out of keg county itself, Neal said. Hickman County. I’m running some for a fellow over there, Herman Tiptoe, and last night he was a little short and paid me in whiskey. I got no use for this much whiskey, but I can always use money.

  Early rubbed the gray stubble on his jaw. I expect you’re going to tell me it was chartered in oak kegs.

  I am not. I don’t know where it’s been, but I doubt seriously if it’s ever seen an oak keg. I do know it’s a lot better than that popskull shit you peddle. Try a little knock of it.

  Fleming watched Early tilt a jug back and drink. Early’s neck was skinny and stringy as a turkey gobbler’s, his fistsize adam’s apple pumping the whiskey down. His eyes looked wide and wild as some startled animal’s. Fleming turned away and looked at the girl. Her face had the stunned vacuous look you’d see in a mental hospital, as if life had dealt up a card so high and wild she could not handle it, that had caused her mind to reel away in shock.

  Early lowered the jug. His eyes looked slightly out of sync. It’s not so bad, he said grudgingly. Neal rolled his eyes up at Fleming and turned away laughing. What was you askin for it, Early asked.