William Gay - Provinces of Night

He closed on it. They fell together in the road like the very essence of degeneracy and struggled up with Albright cursing and the shoat grunting in short explosive bursts and upholstery gummed hydrophobically around its mouth. Albright had a long slanting cut on his bicep and man and hog alike were crazed with dust and blood.

That trestle ain’t but one lane wide, a voice said. You was to move your car I’d get on out of your way and let you go about your business.

Albright whirled. An old farmer in faded overalls and a baseball cap was looking down at him. Perhaps slight amusement in his craggy face.

What the hell do you mean by that? Albright asked. The hog seemed to sense this moment of indecision and jerked hard on the leash and streaked desperately toward the line of woods bordering the road.

If that’s your hog, and I got no reason to suspect it ain’t, then you can do whatever you want to, he said. But you’re holdin up traffic here.

My hog is gettin away, Albright said. If we wasn’t standin here arguin you could be helpin me run that hog. It got out of my car back there.

I’m a little too old and brittle to be runnin hogs through the woods, the old man said. I never knowed anybody to hogfarm out of a taxicab anyway.

He hunted the hog for what must have been hours, letting time get away from him, pausing at last to study the sun through the trees and get some sort of fix on the time. The sun stood past its zenith, perhaps halfway down the western quadrant. He didn’t know how far he’d come or for sure in what direction but he knew where the river was and he felt that ought to be enough.

The hog seemed to be playing with him, drawing him ever deeper into the lush riverbottom undergrowth. Just when the realization of how crazy this all was began to sink in the hog would show itself or slow tantalizingly and permit him to almost but not quite catch it. Once in a stand of wild cane it had completely stopped, not even breathing hard, and waited for Albright to get his own breath back, Albright resting hands on knees watching beads of sweat drip off his nose and listening to the harsh rasp of his breathing. When he’d judged the hog off guard he sprang forward and got two hands on the hog’s haunches but the hog just squealed and leapt away into the cane.

He had come to hate the hog. He had come to loathe it and the old woman who foisted it upon him. He began to think of the hog as the old woman’s bastard offspring, the result of a misbegotten crossroads alliance between her and some porcine representative pushing the devil’s wares.

He wandered about the cane looking for the left shoe he had lost in the sucking mud and envisioned posting a reward, a thousand dollars for the shoat or its head, dead or alive, pictured armed bounty hunters stamping through the vines and greenery, the hog’s face leering at him fullface and profile from a flyer on the postoffice wall.

Right shoe on and left shoe gone he consulted the mental compass he used for a guide and struggled through the briars and creepers toward where he judged the roadbed to be. He imagined the hog following him through the brush, and considered driving back to the old woman’s farm and strangling her, laboriously scraping off all the paint he’d so carefully applied.

When he staggered onto the roadbed he was strung with briars and spiderwebs and slathered with blood and mud and he was lightheaded and halfcrazy. He looked about and had reason to question his sanity, to suspect dimensional displacement. There was nothing familiar in the landscape, he was somewhere he had never been. Far across the roadbed the country tended away in a soft green tapestry, just before the limit of his vision faded out was a farmhouse, tilled fields, a column of smoke from burning brush. A bucolic scene from a feedstore calendar. Nothing looked familiar. Gradually he realized that the hog had drawn him so far into the riverbottom that he had come out on another road, and from all appearances one that he had never been on before. He looked up the road and down the road and was undecided which way to go. Everything looked like just more of the same. He tried to remember which way west lay from the river but he was in country unfamiliar to him and a cointoss would have made as much sense as anything else.

He was sitting on the shoulder of the road smoking his last cigarette when a white Buick Roadmaster came up the hill and slowed, came to a stop parallel with him. It was on his tongue to inquire as to directions when he saw a grinning Fleming Bloodworth peering out the passenger window at him. He pinched out the cigarette and tossed the butt away and scrambled up brushing dried mud off his jeans. Lord God, he said. Homefolks.

Fleming had been taking in Albright’s bedraggled appearance. His muddy clothing, the missing shoe. Wild unstrung albino hair. Were you in a carwreck? he asked.

No.

Are you lost?

Hell no, I know where I’m at, I’m sittin right here on this bank. It’s my car and the bridge and the rest of the fuckin world that’s wandered off.

Neal leant across to ask, What went with your shoe?

Albright started to speak, paused. He took a deep breath, let it out. I lost it runnin a hog, he finally said.

Neal looked at Fleming. He pushed his sunglasses up with a forefinger and nodded. It makes sense to me, he said. That’s the way I always run my hog, one on and one off. That way you’ve got speed on one foot and traction on the other. Just whichever one is called for you’ve got it right there.

It sounds to me like something that would have a story connected with it somewhere, Fleming said.

Neal reached into the back seat. There was a foottub of ice and the water it was melting into in the floorboard and he fumbled around in it and withdrew a can of Falstaff beer and tossed it out the window at Albright. Here, he said. Albright caught the can onehanded and sat looking at the icy water tracking down its side. Almighty God, he said in wonder. He worked an opener out of his front pocket and punctured the can on opposing sides of the top and raised it to his mouth.

Damned if he don’t go prepared, Neal said. His own opener and everything.

When the can was empty Albright folded it in half and tossed it over his left shoulder into the honeysuckle. That thing don’t have a brother livin in there anywhere, does it?

This one he sipped slowly then set it on a level spot he’d scooped out with the heel of his lone shoe. I really need some help catchin that hog, he said. I need to sell it. You all wouldn’t help me run it, would you? I believe the three of us could hem it up without any trouble.

I believe I’ll pass, Neal said. We’ve run hogs since before good daylight and I believe it’s about quitting time.

Where’d you get a hog? Fleming asked.

It’s kind of a long story. I needed some money to get to Clifton so I worked for this old woman over by the Harrikin. She seen me comin a mile off. She worked me like a dog and come settlin up time turned out she didn’t have no fuckin money. It was either take that shoat or take nothin. Now by God I guess it’s nothin after all. She had that little son of a bitch trained or somethin. No tellin how many times she’s traded it for work. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the damned thing’s swum the river and is back scratchin at her screen door right now. It’s my intention to strangle her and burn her house, after I’ve drunk this beer and rested a while.

Fleming opened the car door for the breeze. What there was of it came looping up from the riverbottom, hot and steamy with the smell of the river, the heady essence of honeysuckle.

Your car’s setting down by the trestle where you left it, he said. Looks like you could have noticed which way the water was flowing.