William Gay: Provinces of Night

The concrete was too low to stand erect in and when his legs grew cramped he stood stooped with his hands clasped on his knees, staring into the black water that coursed between his feet. Lightning showed him cigarette butts, scraps of paper, an unrolled condom trailing like some weird sealife.

I reckon by God it’s set in for the night, he told himself.

It hadn’t though. The intervals between the blind white stabs stretched farther and farther, he thought the low rumbling was growing more distant, rolling on eastward the way he planned to go himself. When the rain tempered itself to a slow drizzle he came out of the viaduct and rubbed the stiffness out of his legs and clambered up the sloping shoulder of riprap onto the blacktop and walked off toward the lights of town.

Such town as there was and what there was of it asleep. He trudged through a high-class section of town, into a neighborhood where watchdogs from the dark porches they watched refused even to acknowledge his passage, as if he’d achieved some measure of invisibility. Or was utterly alien to their frame of reference, emissary from some race set apart. He put his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders in the wet coat and coming into what appeared to be the business section of town looked for something that might be open. A cab stand, a bus station, an allnight diner. The wet black sidewalks gleamed where the streetlamps pooled and particolored neon pulsed in the streets like a gaudy heartbeat.

Tires sloughed softly on wet macadam. An engine slowed, almost pacing him, the engine idled down so that he could hear the lick the full-race cam was hitting, and he thought cop without even turning to look. A soft breeze had risen in these western flatlands and in the street-lamp’s globe of yellow, rain swung slantwise in a silver spray.

Hey.

Boyd turned. A blue and white cruiser was creeping along, driver’s side window down, slab of beefy red face peering out. Jowly as a bulldog. Hard cop’s eyes, like shards of agate splintered off by the blow of a hammer.

Can I help you?

Not in any way I can think of, Boyd said.

Where are you going? Boyd had increased his pace but the cruiser compensated to match him, the cop’s face intent as if he’d commit him to memory should he be called upon to identify this visage from a witness stand or as if he’d compare it to some handbill seen long ago on a post office wall.

Somewheres it’s dry, Boyd said. Am I breaking one of your laws or something?

None that I know of. It’s just that it’s three o’clock in the morning and most folks is in bed asleep. I seen you walking and thought you might have troubles of some kind. Be looking for a doctor or something.

I don’t reckon I need one, Boyd said. He took a deep breath, held it, forced himself to contain his anger. I was visitin some folks out by the levee, he said. Got caught out in the storm and sheltered under a bridge back yonder. I live east of here, in Lewis County, and I figured there might be a Greyhound station here.

There ain’t no bus station as such. They sell tickets out of the Bob-White Cafe and the bus stops there for pickups. But not till seven thirty in the morning.

And there ain’t nothing else open?

There may be somebody hangin around the cab stand. Get in, I’ll drop you off.

Boyd knew the difference between an order and an invitation. He got in. He sat clasping the door handle. Thinks I’ll steal his fuckin town, Boyd thought with sour amusement. As if they had anything he wanted. The cruiser eased through the sleeping streets, Boyd’s eyes cataloging a five-and-dime, a jewelry store, the aforementioned Bob-White Cafe. Closed, closed, closed, please call again. The entire town of Tiptonville, Tennessee, posted off-limits this April morning in 1952. If he pulls up in front of city hall he’s goin to be one surprised son of a bitch, Boyd thought. He won’t know what hit him.

The cop didn’t speak again. He stopped in front of a small rundown storefront where a sign said TAXI and Boyd knew he was meant to get out. He did. He closed the door and the cruiser eased away. The plate-glass front of the cab stand was cracked in myriad fissures mended with duct tape and the entire window bulged slightly outward as if barely containing some internal force. There was a padlock through the hasp on the peeling green door but a cab parked at the curb before it and Boyd could see a pair of shoe soles propped against the driver’s side window.

When Boyd rapped with a knuckle on the glass the shoes moved and a man raised up in the front seat and rolled a bleary eye up at him. The man wiped a hand across his face as if he’d erase sleep and cranked down the glass.

You needin a ride?

You know where a man might buy a drink of whiskey this time of night?

I might. Get on in here, no, get up here in the front with me. It’s fell a flood ain’t it? Looks like it fell a good bit of it on you.

I got caught out in it, Boyd said, getting in and pulling the door closed. How far is it to this bootlegger’s?

It ain’t never far to a bootlegger, the driver said, cranking the engine and pulling out into the street. Won’t be no more than a fifty-cent run.

They drove out past the railroad tracks. A string of boxcars and flat-cars stacked with crossties was pulled onto a siding and Boyd turned and watched them out of sight. They rode on past poultry houses with rows of lighted windows that looked long as freight trains and past cotton-fields wet and blacklooking in the headlights and across a rickety bridge that popped and snapped ominously under the cab’s passage and to a bricksiding house in a treeless earth yard.

He don’t sell nothin but halfpint bottles, the cabby said. I think it’s a dollar and a half for a halfpint.

Boyd walked toward the porch beneath a bare lightbulb suspended from a wire that seemed to descend out of the dark heavens themselves. When he knocked a tiny door within the door opened immediately as if they’d had word here of his coming and a moleshaped man stood regarding him benignly from among his stacked cases of bottles.

Let me have two halfpints of whiskey.

I ain’t got nothing but peach brandy left, the man said. I sold a sight in the world of whiskey tonight. Everybody in this part of the country must of decided to get drunk.

Just let me have whatever you got then.

When he’d paid for the brandy and paid the cabdriver Boyd had one lone dollar left and this he folded and slid carefully into the watch pocket of his jeans. In the cab he cracked one of the bottles and drank and offered it to the cabdriver but the cabby waved it away.

Lord no. I ever started drinking when I was behind the wheel I’d likely drive clean off to Asia or somewhere. I can’t be trusted drinkin and drivin an automobile.

Shit ain’t worth drinkin anyhow. Kind of sickly sweet. I bet enough of this stuff’d give a man a hell of a hangover.

I’ll tell you what it’ll give you in Lake County, the cabdriver said. A few days in the crossbar hotel. Where do you want to go? They’ll vag you in this town, you ain’t got a pocketful of money.

About two hundred and fifty miles from here, Boyd said. I guess that’s more than a fifty-cent run, ain’t it. How often they run that train out?

Ever day. Them flatcars of ties leaves some time in the mornin headed towards Jackson. You goin to have to get somewheres until then.

Let me out at the railroad tracks then.

HIS MOTHER had gone in the night with no word of her intent though the signs were there if you cared to read them. In his mind Fleming could see her covert departure. Perhaps carrying her shoes, tiptoeing toward the door past the moonlit windows, light to dark, light to dark until she vanished. Until the night negated her, made her transparent as the shade in some old grandmother’s ghost story, sucked her down where the light goes when you lean and blow out a candle.