William Gay - Provinces of Night

Slip you some of it off. Everybody else has, and you’ve earned it.

I don’t need it.

Warren shoved the money into a shirt pocket as if it were a thing of no importance and closed his eyes. Neal had pulled the Ford back onto the road behind the Buick like a highway patrolman apprehending a miscreant and he got slowly out of the car. Fleming cranked down the window and the warm day rolled in, the smell of the fields, the distant woods. The fields were arsenical green and they seemed to roll on forever with no change perceptible to the naked eye.

Neal laid his hands on the roof and leaned to look inside the car. He was wearing sunglasses and Fleming couldn’t see his eyes but he seemed to be studying Warren where he lay huddled against the glass with his eyes closed.

Hello, cousin. You and the old man been on a drunk?

Something like that.

Where’d you run up with him?

He just sort of turned up in the middle of the night.

Neal took a pack of Luckies out of his shirt pocket and tipped one out and lit it. Fleming could smell him, the scent of aftershave and mouthwash and the pomade he used on his hair. Neal’s sandy hair was brushcut flat on top but the sides were worn long and waved smoothly back over his ears in a ducktail.

Mama’s just climbing the Goddamned walls. He was supposed to be back two days ago. First she thought he was in jail and then she decided he was dead in a carwreck. The more she thought the madder she got and she’s about worked herself up to a killing spree. Did he have a woman with him?

Fleming uncapped the cardboard cup of coffee he’d forgotten about and drank from it. All I saw was Warren, he said.

Neal was five years older than Fleming and a good halffoot taller. He was said to be wild and it was told that he had been kicked out of every college foolhardy enough to enroll him in the first place. He had turned and walked around the car, inspecting it critically as he went. When he came up on the passenger side Fleming looked away across the field to the sky. The sky was absolutely cloudless and so blue it looked transparent and against it a wave of blackbirds shifted shapeless as smoke.

Goddamnit, Neal said, and kicked the door so hard the car rocked on its springs till the shocks froze it. He came around the front of the car inspecting the grill and headlights.

I guess that was him instead of you?

Warren had roused himself. I run into a fence. Somebody had built a barbed wire fence right across a public road. People in Tennessee, I don’t know, strange folks.

Hellfire, why didn’t you take your car? Mine won’t clean out ditch-runs any better than yours will. This was a brand new car.

Well. I paid for both of them. I guess I can pay for fixin it.

I guess you can. Come on, Dad, Jesus, what’s the matter with you? Why do you do this shit? Mama’s wound tightern a two-dollar clock and set to go off the minute we drive up. I believe I’ll just let you out at the mailbox and ease on down the line.

We’ll take Fleming, Warren said hopefully. She’s always liked him. Maybe a little company will placate her.

I don’t believe we need to put Fleming through that, Neal said. There may be things bouncing off the walls and I expect he’d rather be somewhere else.

He turned to Fleming. You drive my car back to Tennessee. Leave it at Brady’s and I’ll pick it up there. Try to keep my car out of as many fencerows as you possibly can.

All right.

You don’t have a beer in that other car do you? Warren asked.

No I don’t.

Warren was climbing out of the Buick. Oh well, he said. At least Elise loves me.

Whoever Elise is you better be grateful for her, Neal said. Elise may be the only person this mornin that gives a damn whether you live or die.

They got into the green Ford. Warren, rueful and resigned behind the glass, smiled and raised a hand at Fleming. They drove away. Fleming sat for a time just soaking up the warm sun then he backed the car around in the highway and drove back the way he’d come. He turned on the radio. Coming in sight of Wheeler Dam he met a car from the Alabama Highway Patrol, but the cop just threw up a hand, good morning, and kept on freewheeling south.

WITHIN THE OLD MAN’S DREAM Brady dreamed as well, talking in his sleep to phantom mules, his hands moving against the quilt snapping plowlines that he did not hold. In his dream the old man leaned to him and shook him awake so that Brady roused startled and disoriented, looking wildly about the bedroom, the old man saying hush, laying a calming hand on his naked shoulder, you hush, boy, you’re not plowing, you’re here in your bed, I just worked you too hard in that bottom today. Go back to sleep now. You’ve plumb wore yourself out.

Bloodworth awoke thinking for a dislocated moment that Brady had woke as well to the eerie green light of the truck’s instrument panel. All he could make out was Coble’s dark bulk humped against an invisible sleepfast countryside, his cigarette pulsing as he drew on it. He glanced about and there was no one in the truck save Coble and himself, but the dream would not release him. It was of such strength and clarity that it had dislocated him in time, moved him into the past so that a Brady who was just a boy worn out from plowing was more concrete than the seat his head rested against, truer than the yellowlit road the headlights were sucking up. He had felt Brady’s heart hammering under his hand, seen his chest rise and fall with his breathing.

You wakin up oldtimer?

These hours before first light were merciless. You could not go back to sleep and it was too early to get up and the things you had done or not done lay in your mind immovable as misshapen things you’d erected from stone. There was no give to these hours. They took no prisoners, made no compromises, and the things you had done could not be rationalized into anything save things you had done. The past was bitter and dry and ashes in his mouth, its bone arms clasped him like some old desiccated lover he could not be shut of.

Say, oldtimer, this place we’re goin to, this Ackerman’s Field. How come it’s named that?

I don’t know. Seems like the first courthouse or the first jail was built in a field that belonged to a man named Ackerman.

He was wishing the past was a place you could backtrack to, take a sideroad you’d walked hurriedly past, wake somebody from a bad dream he was having.

How big a place is it?

It wasn’t much when I left, he said, coming wide awake instantly and thinking, Goddamn, Bloodworth, what’s the matter with you.

Hellfire, oldtimer, how long you been gone?

The old man chuckled smoothly. Folks are runnin off in wholesale lots to go to Detroit and make cars, he said. You never know who’ll be gone from one day to the next.

Don’t I know it. It’s the same where I live. What in the world do you reckon they’re doin with all them hillbillies and niggers up there?

The old man remained silent and tried to regather the threads of the dream but the intensity of it was lost to him now. He guessed seeing all those championship mules had made him remember Brady plowing the mules so long ago. He sat and watched the dark glass, houses rearing up out of the night and subsiding like houses constructed on floodwaters, lonely houses set like sentinels against the black hills, once a town constructed on a mountain with lights strewn earthward as if something enormous and full of light had broken there and spilled down the mountainside.

NEAL TURNED UP with a tale about being kidnapped off a Greyhound bus. He showed up about seven o’clock in the morning while Fleming was sitting on the doorstep in the sun drinking a cup of morning coffee. He went in and filled another cup and brought it out and Neal stood in the yard drinking it.