William Gay - Provinces of Night

Then let it be on your head. Have you got fifty dollars?

Albright had it in his front pocket, five folded tens, and he laid it atop the table. Brady did not pick it up, as if now that its existence was confirmed it was of no moment, as if it was the willing exchange rather than possession that mattered.

I’ll need somethin of his. Somethin he touched.

Albright rose and went through the front room. The old woman was peering at an unfolded newspaper through a pair of spectacles and she did not look up. Outside the yard was dappled with shadow and light, the moon was out now and curdled clouds ran before it as if in the keep of some enormous lunar wind.

He took the blue hardhat out of the back floorboard and for a moment just stood holding it, wondering how Brady could use it, trying to feel something of Woodall in its sleek metal surface. He put the hat on his head and stood remembering the hot metal through his shoes, the clicketyclack of the crimper. He tried to think as Woodall might think. Then in a moment of insight he saw himself as a fraction of the fool he was. He felt a tremendous compulsion to just get in the Dodge and drive away without looking back. Then he took off the hardhat and went slinging it along in his hand toward the house.

THERE WAS a hollow booming sound that he dreamed he went from room to room looking for, but it was always in the wall he’d just left or the one he was bound for. Then it fell silent. His eyes opened. He looked at the phosphorescent hands of the clock.

You want to open the Goddamned door?

Fleming raised up and felt around for his shoes.

The pounding commenced again. I know you’re in there, a voice said.

All right, all right, I’m coming, he called.

When he opened the door his uncle Warren Bloodworth was regarding him with a kind of bland patience that belied the intensity of the pounding. He was standing in the moonlight with his handsome dissipated face showing only a benign placidity, blinking occasionally as if waiting for the boy to do something he had already been instructed to do.

You’re a sound sleeper, ain’t you?

Well. It’s two o’clock in the morning. I’m usually abed by then. Are you drunk?

I probably am. That’s not my problem though, I’ve managed somehow to run off the road down there and I can’t seem to get back on it. You reckon you could give me a hand?

Sure, I guess so. What do you want me to do?

Anything would be an improvement over what I’ve managed. You don’t have a mule or anything like that in there do you?

I don’t have a mule or anything like a mule.

I guess Boyd gave up on farming.

I guess.

Well come on anyway. Maybe we can figure something out.

They cut through the woods with Warren falling twice before they reached the embankment that shouldered the road. Fleming could see the car tilted off the road in a stand of sumac that followed a three-strand barbed wire fence.

Can you drive? Warren had halfslid and halffallen down the embankment and now he was struggling up onto the roadbed.

Brady lets me drive his tractor. Junior Albright let me drive his car once, but I wasn’t very good at it.

Hellfire, it sounds to me like you’re qualified for a chauffeur’s license. Get in and see if you can do anything with it.

He tried rocking the car, shifting from low to reverse and popping the clutch and back again but the right rear wheel seemed to have no purchase and spun impotently until he could smell thick acrid smoke from the burning rubber. He cut the switch off and then the lights and got out.

He found a stack of fencepost inside Dee’s field and threw three of them over the fence and climbed through the strands of wire. He jammed a post as far as it would go under the rear wheel and wedged the others beneath it and got back into the car. The car smelled like new leather and whiskey and perfume and some other odor, musky and somehow unpleasant.

He cranked the car and when he popped the clutch he felt the rear end shift and come off the post but when it did it caught solid chert and sent the car spinning onto the roadbed with the barbed wire breaking and whanging away into the darkness and him whipping the steering wheel impotently this way and that and the red chert bank looming enormous in the headlights. He slammed the brakes as hard as he could and slid lockwheeled to the side of the ditch with something slamming hard against the seat and knocking him into the steering wheel and thumping solidly into the rear floorboard. When he looked back over the seat a woman in bra and panties was struggling up out of the floorboard ranking lank strands of hair out of her eyes like someone struggling up through deep foliage.

You little bastard, she said. I’ll claw your eyes out. What have you done with Warn?

Fleming rolled down the glass. Warren, he called.

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?