William Gay - Provinces of Night

Where’s the worst place you ever slept?

In a jail in Meridian Mississippi, Warren said. Second worst was a jail in Sicorro New Mexico. You may see a pattern beginnin to emerge here. A young man like yourself just startin out in life would do well to stay out of jails as much as possible. Cops love you when you’re up and they love to kick a man when he’s down. They had me in jail as a vag one time in Arizona. Had me and a bunch of us, mostly Mexicans, cut-tin lettuce on a big lettuce farm. When my time was up they let me out and damned if they didn’t pick me up again before I made the city limits. I reckon I’d made too good a hand. Had me right back in there cuttin lettuce. I can’t eat lettuce till this day. Now if I wanted to I could buy me a motor home and cruise around out there lookin at the country. But I don’t guess I will. Things like that sort of sours you on a place.

The boy drove in silence, early predawn fog white by the roadside, rising out of the wet brush like a community of ghosts turned out to watch his passage. He was headed south now on U.S. 43 and the eastern sky lay on his left hand, the sky above the horizon already mottled with red. He thought of Warren storming a German bunker or whatever he had done, flailing through waistdeep water toward the Normandy beaches. He had never asked Warren what he had done to earn his medals, but he knew they did not hand them out just for showing up. He thought of Warren with his medal swung about his neck, leaning to slice heads of lettuce in Arizona.

Ma said Boyd headed out north. You ever heard from him?

No.

Damned if I ain’t beginnin to believe he’s geared the way Pa is.

What do you mean?

I always wondered what made Pa do some of the things he did. He’d head out, turn up again. But it was the damnedest thing, you couldn’t stay mad at him. He was always glad to see you and it was like he never left. It was like somethin he had to do. There was just somethin about a road, he never could let a road alone. Then he left that time and never turned up. Playin that music. I finally just figured out he was geared in a higher gear than other folks. Had to have more goin on, things movin faster. After I figured that out I never worried about it again.

He was supposed to write. Pa was. But I’ve about given up on him. I’m sick of blaming everything on the U.S. Mail.

Warren lit a cigarette off the butt of its predecessor, cranked down the glass and threw the stub out in a slipstream of sparks. Boyd’ll turn up when he’s old and broke down and needs you to help him across the street, he said. Piss on him. Get on some kind of schedule. What do you plan to do?

The boy grinned. Right now my plans are just contingencies, he said. They all seem to hinge on other folk’s plans. It’s like everything’s in motion and I’m just waiting for it to settle down. Waiting for the glass to clear so I can see what I’m doing.

No move is the wrong move.

What?

Sometimes any move at all is better than nothin. If you’re right you’re one up. If you’re wrong you start over. This sittin and waiting for somebody else to make up their mind is for the Goddamned birds. You have to take control of your own life.

Day was coming in broad shields of light that spread over the eastern world, breaking over the smoking fields, and a crescent of bloodred sun burned through the trees. He had crossed the Alabama line into a world foreign to him, the hills and hollows were behind now and he was driving into a flat featureless land planted with cotton fields that paced the highway for improbable distances, driving past happenstantial tenant shacks side by side with great brick mansions with iron gates and alabaster columns, plantations so grand their squires might not have heard that the Old South had fallen long ago, had moved from slaves to sharecroppers with hardly a wasted motion.

I never could figure Pa out, Warren said. You never could figure why he’d do somethin. He never would tell you anything. Either he figured you could read his mind or he figured it was none of your business. I remember one time these two old boys come up to the house lookin for me and I wasn’t there. They had planned to beat hell out of me. I was just a boy and they were grown men, thirty years old or better. It was something about their sister, I don’t remember what. Pa asked them what they wanted with me. There’s just a feller down the road wants to meet Warren, they said. Wait and let me get my hat, Pa said. I just might want to meet this feller myself. He had this old gray felt hat he wore all the time. He always had to get his hat. He got his hat and they walked off down the road and he kicked the holy bejesus out of the whole bunch. I never could figure whether he done it for me or he just wanted to kick somebody’s ass. Probably a little of both, most everything is.

Who’s Elise?

Who?

Elise. I saw your name cut in a table in the Snowwhite Cafe. Elise loves Warren Bloodworth. It looked old, like it had been cut in there a long time ago.

I’ll be damned. I went to school with a girl named Elise Warf Never went with her though, we was just schoolmates. She was pretty, too. Never let on she liked me. Why didn’t she say so? Shit. You reckon the offer’s still good?

Coming into a town just big enough to have a post office and a cafe Fleming parked before the restaurant. Traffic had increased with the day’s advent and there were a few cars and trucks on the road and two or three beatup pickups parked before the diner.

You want a sandwich?

I don’t believe I could go it. Get you one. You’ve got that money. Get me a glass of tomato juice if they’ve got it. Bout half a bottle of hot sauce in it.

At the counter he ordered a bacon and egg sandwich and a cup of coffee to go and the tomato juice for Warren. Standing by the cash register awaiting his order he noticed he had forgotten in his haste to wear socks but such folk as were in the diner looked sleepnumbed and in dread of whatever the day held for them and no one seemed to notice this deficiency. He kept glancing at the gleaming car through the plate-glass. Warren was slumped with a hand shading his eyes from the sun. Fleming wondered if these folk had seen him climb casually out of the white Buick Roadmaster. If they thought it was his. If they wondered where he was bound bareankled and with a pocketful of money this fine summer morning.

He paid and went out with the bag the waitress handed him and in the driver’s seat unwrapped the greasylooking sandwich and took a bite. Warren looked away, rolled down the glass and sat staring out the window, sipping his tomato juice.

Can you drive and eat at the same time?

Sure.

Let’s roll, then.

No move is the wrong move.

Damn right.

Driving into a country so monotonous and flat an enormous spirit level laid across it would have shown no deviation, something metallic formed shapeless and elongated far down the sunwarped highway and shot toward him, coalesced into a green sedan moving so fast the speedometer must have been pegged, a blur of a face he recognized instantly as his cousin Neal. Watching in the mirror he saw brakelights come on and the sedan fishtail crazily down the road in a haze of smoking rubber. Instead of backing around in the highway as anyone else would have done Neal simply drove out into a cottonfield and came back paralleling the road in a rising cloud of red dust.

Fleming had pulled the Buick onto the shoulder of the road and cut the switch. Warren had been dozing and he came awake instantly. He opened one bleary eye. What is it?

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.