Provinces of Night: A Novel

by William Gay

  Climbing the snowy slope he had a thought for the spotted horse clambering up the hay bales long ago and smiled a small sardonic smile to himself, thinking of flesh calling to flesh not across distance but across vast gulfs of time. He wondered what he would say, what he would do. He had no idea what the circumstances would call for but he had no doubt that he would be able to handle whatever was required, throw his fate on such mercy as they possessed and make amends, kill them all.

  SOMETIME AFTER midnight Julia’s eyelids trembled as if jerked from the turbulence of some unsettling dream. Then the lids opened, though at first there was nothing to see save darkness, and she lay trying to get a fix on where she was, on when she was.

  Time seemed wormholed and faulted, honeycombed in mazes that crossed and recrossed. She knew there was someone in the room with her. A hand had lain on her forearm. Gentle but cold as ice, and a voice had said: Julia.

  She raised on her left elbow, felt on the nightstand for her glasses. Even before she found them objects were beginning to surface from the purplegray murk the room was drowning in: a chifforobe, a cedar wardrobe, the worn dull pewter of a mirror. The objects tilted and swirled, rocked once and righted themselves.

  She fumbled for the lamp, but in her haste to put an end to all this darkness her hand knocked it off the table and the glass base shattered and she struggled up, swung her feet off the side of the bed, her glasses on now and her eyes already searching the wall for the lightswitch.

  There was just a ghost of light through the window, just enough to lighten the walls, to make the black rectangle of the open door even darker, to suggest an exit into who knew what, a world so unfeatured and undimensioned that it was beyond her power even to conjecture upon it. She turned toward the window: beyond it everything was pearl-white and glowing, the diametric opposite of the world of darkness the doorway had become.

  When she found the lightswitch and clicked it on objects in room sprang at her with an otherworldly clarity, gaudy and vibratory and larger than themselves, but the dark monolith had become the doorway to the living room. She passed through it and went through the house turning lights on then she came back to the front door and opened it and stepped onto the porch.

  For a moment the cold took her breath away, a wind with teeth sang off the eaves and rattled beads of sleet onto the floorboards then swept them away and sucked from her such meager warmth as the shift provided and mourned like something grieving in the pine branches. Across the field the snow was already sticking and blurred by white motion it shifted with the wind. In the garden dead weeds clashed softly against the barbed wire and she thought of the pale figure stooped to cross it so long ago. When the wind stilled momentarily the snow sifted down through the pine branches, falling thickly, falling faintly in its eternal almost nosound through the trees.

  A rush of warmth struck her when she went back in and closed the living room door. She thumbbolted it against the cold and turning saw that the floor was smeared with blood, bright and wet against the white linoleum.

  E.F. has been here, she whispered to herself.

  She had no word for what she felt but she knew the world or her perception of it had altered and that it had altered forever.

  When the lights finally woke Brady he rose to see why they were on and the first thing he saw was a bloody footprint on the living room floor and he rushed into the bedroom. His eyes took in the broken lamp, the floor strewn with glass, Julia standing before the mirror. Her feet were bloody and she was clutching before her a black dress, an old crepe with three-quarter sleeves, and she was studying her reflection with a look of speculation on her face, as if trying to decide did the dress fit her anymore.

  THE WHITE BUICK had been parked with the left front wheel driven up onto the sidewalk, the driver’s side door swung wide. Fleming stood for a moment studying the house Neal had rented in Ackerman’s Field in bemused speculation, then turned and started up the cracked concrete sidewalk. Halfway to the porch he saw a dropped purse, its contents strewn on the frozen grass. He stooped and picked up a compact, a lipstick, a handful of coins. He looked for an uncertain moment as if he might take them on to the house but then he dropped them back on the earth where he’d found them and went on.

  The house was a two-story clapboard with the paint peeling away in great yellow slashes. He went up the stoop and crossed the porch and hammered with a fist on the edge of the screen door. The door rattled loosely on its hinges. The front door was open behind the screen but the house seemed steeped in silence and he could make out nothing through the dirty screen wire.

  Neal, he called. It was very cold and he stood hugging himself and stamping his feet to keep the blood flowing through them. He grasped the door by its handle and slapped it loosely against the frame repeatedly and when that drew no response he opened the door and went in.

  He was in a hall that apparently ran the depth of the house. A door on the left hand, a door on the right, both standing ajar. Dark paneled doors razed with dull opaque varnish. There was no one in the room on the right, only stacked cartons of what looked like fruit jars and old newspapers.

  In the room across the hall a naked girl lay atop the tousled covers of a bed fashioned from gleaming tubular brass. He turned away in awkward haste and made to close the door but something about the girl drew his eyes back to her. She was very still. She lay profoundly still and seemed not to feel the cold though there was no heat in the room and his breath plumed in the air like smoke.

  He approached the bed. The room smelled like vomit, on some level he’d been aware of it since coming through the front door. The girl had vomited on the bed and on herself and there was vomit in her curly red hair. Her eyes were open. They were blue. A vase had been overturned on an old sewing machine cabinet set beside the bed for a night table and five roses lay on the bed and a single longstem rose lay across the rounded marble of her abdomen. Its stem was woven into the snarled red tuft of pubic hair. It was very cold in the room and nothing seemed to exist anymore save this room. He could hear himself breathing. He leaned to study the girl more closely, as if to see was she sleeping. She lay staring at the ceiling and as motionless as if she were holding her breath. Thorns on the rose stem had indented but not pierced the alabaster flesh of her stomach and when he clasped her ankle it was as cold as the curving tubes of brass.

  He was going out the screen door when he heard the noise of someone retching in the back part of the house. He turned and went down the hall. At the end of it a stairway led away to another floor and to the left there was a bathroom where Neal knelt on the white tile floor. He was on his knees with his arms wrapped about the toilet as if it was something he’d arise with and carry off and his face was pillowed on the cold porcelain.

  What’s the matter with you?

  Neal raised his head and turned. There was bloody froth at the corners of his mouth. His eyes were blurred and unfocused. Sick, he said.

  What’s made you sick?

  Bad whiskey, Neal said. Why don’t you just get the fuck wherever you were going and leave me alone.

  I’ll get a doctor.

  Don’t get a doctor, don’t get any fucking body. Whoever you got would just call the law. I don’t believe I need no law here this morning. What are you even doing here? What time is it?

  I don’t know, early, seven maybe. I came to ask if you know where the old man is. To get you to help me hunt him. He’s gone out of that trailer and I’ve hunted the place over and I can’t find him. Albright pulled the car out last night from where I had it stuck and I went to see about him but the doors were locked and I never could get him to the door. This morning I tried again and finally prized the back door open with a tire spud. He wasn’t there and there wasn’t any fire. We need to find him before he freezes to death.

  Hell, you don’t even know he’s out in the cold. Besides, I ain’t studying that old man. He can take care of himself, sink or swim. I’m sick as I ever been. Sicker than I ever been.

/>   I think something’s happened to him.

  Something’s going to happen to you if you don’t get the fuck away and leave me alone.

  There was a calendar on the wall that marked a date five years gone. Fleming stood staring abstractedly as its flyspecked print of September Morn.

  I think that girl’s dead, he said.

  What?

  There’s a dead girl in that front room.

  Oh, Jesus, no, Neal said. He tried to rise, settled back bonelessly against the toilet. Oh shit. How can this happen to me?

  The boy was silent a time. I think it mainly happened to her, he said.

  Well, you’ll just have to help me. If I can get up. When I can get up.

  Help you what? I told you there needs to be a doctor here. Somebody. Where’d you get bad whiskey?

  That fucking Early. He laid for me. I slipped in there this evening, yesterday evening, and stole another jug. The son of a bitch. He poisoned one and hid it out and I got it. I’ll kill him. I aim to kill him, just as soon as we hide that girl.

  I’m not hiding any girl. You can forget that crazy shit.

  Neal’s face was very white. His cheekbones and nose looked like those of an effigy cast from wax. His eyes were glazed and his forehead slick with greasylooking perspiration.

  Well, we don’t have to hide her. Just take her out on a road somewhere and dump her. Just get her away from me.

  He fell silent, in a deep concentration. Who all did we see last night, Neal asked himself.

  I’m not hiding any girl, Fleming said again.

  You worthless little shitass. Think you’re better than anybody else. Think you know every Goddamn thing because you read a book one time. Here I am with my back to the wall and you fold on me. Blood’s got to hang together.

  What about your blood?

  What?

  You don’t mind letting your blood slide. You turned your back on it and just walked away.

  You little fucker. That’s what you’re pissed about. You just can’t stand it because I screwed your little Raven Lee Halfacre. Well, I did, and I enjoyed every Goddamned minute of it. I never heard her complaining, either. I’m going to sit here a minute and rest and then I’m going to get up and stomp your ass. And then I’ll go and screw her again, just for spite.

  The boy was silent. Neal turned and spat into the stained toilet bowl. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. You’ve got to help me, he said.

  I’ll see you around, Neal, Fleming said. He turned and went up the hall. Neal rose and staggered across the room and fell against the door-jamb and slid down it.

  Fleming went into the room where the pale dead girl was lying in state. There was a folded bedspread on a chifforobe and he shook it out and spread it over her. Then he went out of the room and out of the house.

  THE TRAILER’S BACKYARD was windswept ice trackless as a wasteland but after he’d crossed its expanse snow was drifted in the woods and he found the old man’s tracks. It had snowed more since he’d made them but still they were there to read, the right footprint firm and clean, the left dragging, not even clearing the surface of the snow. Pockmarks in the ice where the walking stick had gone. He went on around the slope through a childhood fairyland of ice. Each fork filled with snow, each leaf encased in ice. He moved through utter silence save the carillon tinkling of the icy leaves. Small black birds flitted about the ice with a curious decorum, their tiny bright eyes unreal as bits of obsidian from a taxidermist’s hand.

  He went on through the woods, and the going grew heavier. The old man seemed to have just forged a straight path into the woods, taking what came, places where the wind had driven the snow into kneedeep drifts, windfall branches he’d had to work his way across. Of course the first thing he’d noticed was that there was no return set of footprints. He knew they had to stop somewhere and he was beset with a rising dread about what he’d find when they did.

  When he began to come upon dog tracks he paused and studied them with some interest. They crossed and recrossed, huge tracks like the spoor of wolves. The tracks bore left and they bore right but followed the same general course the old man was taking.

  He paused to rest, breathing hard, the icy air like fire in his lungs. He couldn’t fathom how the old man had done it. Here the earth sloped so steeply the old man must have dragged himself from the trunk of one poplar to the next. A hare erupted by him in an explosion of snow and when it topped the slope Fleming turning to watch its flight suddenly saw the old man’s hat. It was lying on the ridge crested with an inch or so of snow on the crown and tipped slightly sidewise with the brim frozen in the ice. He clambered up the slope, falling, his feet sliding on the ice beneath the snow, rose and struggled on.

  The old man’s black coat was what Fleming saw first, stark against the snow. He was lying on his left side, his face in the snow, his knees drawn up toward his chest.

  Fleming whirled to run. Brady, he was thinking. Brady was closest and there was a telephone. Before he had even started his descent there was a sound, a groan, then a low keening moan that went on and on without cessation or variation. He saw that Bloodworth was trying to turn himself in the snow, clawing at the ice with his right hand in an attempt to wheel himself around facing Fleming. He’d start to turn then cease with his head lolled back and Fleming saw with horror that the long black strands of his hair had been frozen into the ice.

  He ran to him. He didn’t know what to do. He tried freeing the old man’s hair, flailing at the ice with a fist. At last he took out his pocket knife and began to saw the hair off above the ice. The old man was trying to talk. His mouth frothed with spittle. He walled a terror-stricken eye up at Fleming, a wild black eye with the yellowlooking cornea shot with clotted red. Once when he was a child Fleming had with Boyd come upon a wreck in which a trailerload of horses had been capsized. The horses were screaming in voices nigh human and one horse trapped on the bottom had rolled upon Fleming a wild outraged eye that demanded that he do something, anything, and that eye had looked like this.

  Bloodworth kept trying to talk. He sounded as if he were cursing, praying, calling upon someone for something. Then help me, help me, Fleming understood. He kept trying to move around, to get up. Fleming noticed for the first time that the old man’s pistol was lying in the snow. Bloodworth kept trying to pick it up and lift it toward his face but he couldn’t work his fingers. They were frozen or he’d lost the use of them or both and he’d bring the arm up and the pistol would tilt away and once he managed to bring the barrel against his temple but the finger through the triggerguard lay lax and useless. Help me, he was trying to say.

  Listen, the boy said, laying a hand on Bloodworths shoulder. I’m going after help, we’ll get a doctor, it’ll be all right.

  Bloodworth struggled to look at him. His entire face had slackened, all the muscles dead, no more animate than cold wax. With his wild eyes and lolling mouth and long hair hacked off by the pocket knife he looked like something that would come at you out of a nightmare.

  No, he said quite clearly. Help me.

  I can’t, the boy said. Goddamn it, I can’t.

  Bloodworth looked away, toward the treeline. The trees were brittlelooking and cold and they looked like surreal and patternless ironwork some crazed sculptor had wrought against the heavens.

  He saw that the old man was crying silently, tears welling up and coursing onto the ice. Fleming lowered his face to the rough wool of the old man’s shoulder. He could not bear this. He could not bear this. Through the thick coat he could feel the old man shaking with the cold. Then he raised his face and wiped an arm across his eyes and without forethought or hesitation picked up the pistol and wrapped Bloodworth’s hand around it and rested the barrel against Bloodworth’s temple.

  He was looking away through the trees when the explosion came and when it did a soft avalanche of snow fell like an afterthought and blackbirds scattered with wild startled cries from all the frozen trees.

  IN ORDER
to get the dead girl into the trunk he had to back the Buick up to the edge of the porch. The Buick came wheeling crazily across the ice, straddling the sidewalk, the spinning wheels peppering the front of the house with bits of black ice. Neal hadn’t been able to lift her. He had her wrapped in the bedspread and he managed to drag it by one corner down the hall, standing on the porch then and looking up the street and down, seeing nothing but the frozen street and trees then hauling her with a thump across the threshold and onto the porch. He sat for a time resting, sick at heart, staring at the still shapeless mass beneath the blanket. Finally he rose and struggled with her, getting her head and torso into the trunk then lifting her legs in but when he tried to close the lid he was left with two bare feet resting on the edge of the trunk opening. Try as he might he could not adjust her so that the lid would latch. At last he sat with his forehead against the icy bumper trying to think what to do.

  He rose and went into the house and came back out with a coathanger. He arranged the blanket over the naked feet and drew the lid as near to closed as it would come and wired it from the inside with wire from the hanger. By now he was in a state of disassociation and the threat of someone walking upon a man loading a dead girl into the trunk of a car did not even occur to him. He was so tired that he thought she was bought and paid for. His state of exhaustion seemed to justify any small wrongdoing he might be guilty of.