William Gay - Provinces of Night

I live right across from Dee. Up on that hill on the other side of the road.

I didn’t know there was a house up there, you can’t see it from the road. What’s your name?

He told her. They had begun wading up the shallow water toward the roadbed. He knew now why she had seemed familiar. What’s your name? he asked her.

Merle. Daddy named me after this movie star named Merle Oberon. You think I look like her?

For a minute I thought that was her drawing back that rock.

She poked him lightly in the ribs. What are you going to do with those fish?

I planned on having them for supper. You could come over tonight and help me eat them.

What, you mean with you and your folks?

I live by myself. My folks are in Detroit Michigan.

They are? Where in Detroit?

I don’t know. They’re looking for work.

You mean you live all by yourself?

All by myself.

God. I wish my family would go off somewhere looking for something and leave me alone.

Suddenly Fleming did not want them to go their separate ways. He did not want to go back to the still house and wait for Boyd or for any of the other things he seemed to spend his time waiting for. Come on over tonight, he said. We’ll eat the fish and listen to the radio awhile.

I’m not much on radios. In Detroit we’ve got this big twenty-one-inch Crosley TV It’s like having a movie theater right in your house. Anyway, I don’t like fish, I’m always afraid of choking on a bone.

I’ll pick the bones out for you.

Are you a smooth talker or what, she said. I’ve had boys promise me a lot of things but you’re the first one that ever offered to pick out fish bones.

The creek widened in a shoal before they came upon the bridge until it was no more than ankle deep near the bank and at the edge where a riot of cattails grew it was almost lukewarm. With his pocket knife he cut a handful of the reeds and gave them to her. These roses were just growing wild, he said.

First you tear my clothes off and then you bring me flowers. What a man.

Will you come?

I don’t know. I might. There’s sure nobody else to talk to around this Godforsaken place. We’ll see.

I can do this, he was thinking. All I have to do is just be as normal as everyone else. All I have to do is just not blow apart like a two-dollar clock. Just pick words and put one of them after the other like a baby learning to walk, like a drunk carefully crossing the street.

He reached out suddenly and touched her arm. She jerked it away as if the touch had burned her then gave him a curious smile and linked an arm through his.

Why did you touch me like that?

I thought for a second you weren’t real, he said.

HE HAD PRIED the fish and ate a plate of them leaned against the front wall of the house watching dusk descend and sipping a Coca-Cola chilled in the springbox. In the wintertime he could have seen the lights from Dee Hixson’s house but the trees were riotous with summer growth and for all the lights he could see this might have been the only house in the world.

She might come and she might not but the later it grew the more he doubted she would. Would she come in the dark? Perhaps she was scared of the dark, they probably don’t have dark in Detroit. They have twenty-one-inch Crosley TVs but they don’t have hornets’ nests hanging from the lampposts.

He thought how ludicrous he would be wandering the streets of Detroit. He smiled, thinking for a moment of the four of them, Boyd looking for his wife and him looking for Boyd and Merle, all of them moving through a maze of brick buildings and dark circuitous alleyways and everyone just half a beat out of sync with everyone else, wandering each alone in the electric dark and any destination reached one just quit by another.

He set the plate aside and leaned his head back against the wall. He felt a curious solitary contentment. The world he’d heard rumored seemed enormous, roads led everywhere free for the taking, any one you chose had a destination at its end.

In the west a star winked on like a pinprick through the faulted dusk to a greater light beyond. Another. Bats came veering out of the murky purple twilight and one hollow over a whippoorwill called to him, brother calling to brother.

IN THE TWO DAYS following Junior Albright’s destruction of the crimper the white company truck stopped in front of the small frame house he lived in three times. Each time Junior froze, hardly daring to breathe. Each time the horn honked three loud blasts, waited. A truck door slammed and Albright was mousequiet and mousestill, hearing in his constricted heart the heavy tread onto the doorstep, the measured hammering that shook the door on its hinges, rattled the glass in its unglazed sash.

The third time Albright was crouched in the kitchen and heard Woodall trying to turn the doorknob that Albright had had the foresight to thumbbolt, heard him yell in frustration, You’re just making it harder on yourself, Goddamn you, ain’t you man enough to even open the door? I’ll catch you out sometime.

Which he did. Albright was sprawled in a chair in the poolroom watching Clyde Sharp clean out Big Shaw at straight pool. He was drinking a can of Falstaff with salt sprinkled on the can’s top. He had just taken a swallow of beer and licked the salt when he felt a heavy arm settle about his shoulders.

You a hard man to find, Woodall said.

I didn’t know I was lost.

Well you was. I’ve been out to your place three times but I can’t ever seem to catch you at home.

I was out back there once when I seen your truck leave. I hollered at you but you just drove on off.

Well. No matter. We’re both here now.

I figured you just brought my check out, you know for that day I worked. I just decided to let it slide on account of that crimper actin up the way it done.

No, Woodall said. It wasn’t quite that. As a matter of fact I have a receipt in my pocket where I paid the rental company for the very crimper you’re speaking of. Eight hundred and sixty dollars. That’s the amount you owe me. So you see it’s not something I can let slide, the way you can.

Big Shaw stooped and sighted drunkenly down the length of his pool cue, looking directly into Albright’s face, one eye closed as if in a conspiratorial wink, and Albright leaned to the side in case the ball went wild. On the break Shaw had once laid out a man named Jess Cotham colder than a wedge so that he had to be lain on the concrete floor and water poured on his face. This time the cue ball just kissed gently off the seven and scratched in a corner pocket, but when Big Shaw stepped back Albright suddenly saw a folded twenty-dollar bill that had been hidden by Shaw’s polished dress shoe. The little engraved two and zero were clearly visible at the corners and powerful as some occult or Masonic symbol, and Junior looked about to see if anyone else had noticed. He sat trying to devise some plan to recover this windfall without Clyde Sharp falling upon him with a pool cue.

Are you listening to me?

Mmmm?

I’ve got a note fixed up at my office trailer. I never thought that you would have eight hundred and sixty dollars. I never thought that you would ever have eight hundred and sixty dollars at one time so the note says that you will pay me thirty dollars a month for twenty-eight months then twenty dollars for the last month.

They Godamighty damn. That’s nearly three years.

Well, if you wanted to pay sixty a month we could shave that time nearly in half.

Some months I don’t have thirty dollars. Besides, there was somethin wrong with that damn crimper to make it behave that way. Runnin off the way it done. I believe the throttle hung on it or somethin. Anyway I don’t believe it’s my place to pay for it.