William Gay - Provinces of Night

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 brakes.

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.