William Gay - Provinces of Night

Just make yourself at home, the woman told Fleming. You can go talk to Raven Lee out on the porch or just sit here and listen to the radio. Fleming noticed that she was holding the twenty-dollar bill he had lent Albright. Abruptly she crossed the room and laid an arm about his shoulders. She leaned and kissed him noisily on the jaw. She showed him a corner of the folded bill. He watched it disappear into the depths of her bosom with some regret. Don’t you wish you had something that would make you twenty dollars this easy? she asked.

Some reply seemed called for but none came immediately to mind. While he was mulling it over she linked an arm through Albright’s and they went into a hall and toward the back of the house. On the radio Uncle Dave Macon was frailing a banjo. Keep your skillet good and greasy all the time, time, time, he sang. After a while he could hear the woman’s throaty laughter through the gaudy walls. He arose and with the glass of wine went out onto the porch in the cool night air and sat on the doorstep. He could smell the river, a rank weedy smell of ripening summer, honeysuckle so overpowering it almost made him dizzy. Somewhere behind him off in the dark the horn of a barge came in sporadic bursts.

He was staring out toward Albright’s car and past it to where the shapeless buildings of town reared against the night sky when the presence in the swing rose and crossed the porch and sat beside him on the floorboards. Though there were several inches of space between them he could smell her and the fragrance cleared up all questions of gender but he could not have said exactly why this was. It was not perfume. Perhaps it was the smell of her hair.

You favor Neal Bloodworth. Are you kin to him?

He’s my first cousin. How come you know Neal?

Everybody knows Neal. I went with him a few times. Why are you not drunk? I’d hardly expect Neal to have a sober relative at all, let alone a first cousin.

Fleming judged it a flippant question but he tried to frame a serious answer for it. I tried it a few times, he said. But I don’t much care for what it does to me. It does something to your attention, the way you see and hear things. You miss things. I don’t know, that’s not what I mean. I can’t say exactly what I mean.

You mean it dulls your senses?

Yes. It dulls my senses. That’s exactly what I mean.

Why didn’t you just say that then?

I don’t know, he said. He turned to face her for the first time and something about her, her face or perhaps her total presence, hit him like a blow to the abdomen. She was the prettiest girl in a three-county area, Albright had said, but Fleming would have moved the boundaries outward to encompass considerably more geography than that. She was small and dark, hair the color of her namesake, eyes black as sloe. Her features were as delicate as if she were a scaled-down and infinitely complex model of some coarser and larger being, as if she were the very essence of herself. There was something subtly foreign about her but he could not define or even isolate it. Indian, Hispanic, Oriental. And something was coming off her, exuded from the pores perhaps, that made him feel heavy and tongue-tied and simpleminded.

I don’t know, he said. I believe you’ve addled me.

Addled you? You’ll know for sure when I addle you. I never did anything to you.

Maybe you’ve accidentally addled me, he said.

You mean I’ve vamped you, like those old silent movie stars with the long black eyelashes? Hypnotized you? What do you think I am, one of those highpriced callgirls?

No. Lord no.

You think I’m a cheap callgirl then?

Hellfire, Fleming said. I don’t think anything at all. I’m going to quit thinking. Kick it like a bad habit.

She seemed obscurely satisfied. Maybe I have addled you, she said. Maybe I’m turned up too high. Or your resistance is just too low. I’ll turn myself down a notch or two.

I wish you would, he said, thinking, Raven Lee Halfacre, I’ve got to watch myself here, this may be getting out of hand. And I believe I’m helping it along.

What’s your name?

Fleming. I know yours, Junior Albright was raving about how pretty Raven Lee Halfacre was.

The girl was studying him. I said you looked like Neal but now I’m not so sure. You favor him but not that much. You know how Neal’s got that sort of smartass look.

Yes I do.

You don’t have that. You look nice.

Fleming was silent. He’d been given the kiss of death. He did not want to be nice. He wanted to be wild and reckless, a rake and a rambling man, the highwayman who came riding, riding up to the old inn door.

You’re not as good a talker as Neal is, either. Neal would have had a girl’s blouse talked off by now. You haven’t even tried.

He didn’t reply. He’d only been sitting by her for a bare ten minutes but already the idea of Neal talking her blouse off held little appeal for him. He wondered if Neal talked it off. He remembered Neal saying he’d seen about all he wanted to of Raven Lee Halfacre. Perhaps he’d tried and failed.

You want to walk up town and get a Coke or something? she asked.

I guess. Is anything open?

The cafe. Maybe the drugstore, we can look at the magazines.

We could just ride up there in Albright’s car.

I’d rather walk, it’s nice out. That yellow he painted it is a little wild for me.

Clifton seemed to have been constructed on hillsides. They walked up, they walked down. Folk here seemed to suffer some aversion to level ground. He could hear the lapping of water, you were always aware of the river.

She walked easily along beside him, swinging her arms, once she hooked an arm in his and something coursed through him like electricity, like the immediate onset of some rare and powerful drug.

At the drugstore they drank vanilla Cokes and she sorted through the movie magazines and selected a copy of Modern Screen with Montgomery Clift on the cover. They drank their Cokes at a table by the window while she thumbed through the magazine. He watched her. Her profile new and bright as a newlystruck coin. She twisted a curl around a finger as she read.

Fleming noticed the countergirl watching them with open irritation. After a while she came around the corner and approached their table.

This ain’t no library, she said. You can look through them and pick one out but you can’t just set and read one then put it back.

Raven Lee laid the magazine on the table. Take it then, she said.

Fleming picked up the magazine. Twenty-five cents, the price was stated. He laid a halfdollar on the counter and slid the magazine back toward Raven Lee. The countergirl picked up the money and walked away. After a time she came back and laid a quarter down on the red Formica tabletop.

A big spender, Raven Lee said. What’s that going to cost me?

What?

Boys always expect something back when they do something for you, she said. What do you expect?

Hellfire. If I did I wouldn’t expect much of it for a quarter. I doubt you’d even miss a quarter’s worth. Besides, I don’t want anything from you.

That’s what he heard himself saying but it did not even come close to being the truth. What he wanted, he had realized in the last few minutes, was everything. He wanted the rest of her life, and failing that, he wanted permission to walk along beside her while she lived it. As dying men are told to have their past unreel before them Fleming had been gainsaid a kaleidoscopic view of his future. In the space of seconds whole sequences unspooled before him. They stood before a Bible-holding preacher. Hand in hand they stood before a crib where lay their firstborn. They stood shoulder to shoulder against a world that did its utmost to drive them to their knees and they prevailed. She knelt before his grave, tousled gray curls swinging, and imbedded into the clay a single white rose. There was a mist of tears in her eyes. He saw all this instantly, not as a future cast in stone but as a swirling maelstrom of events that could be mastered and controlled. It was a future to aspire to. Fleming considered himself a fairly stubborn and persistent person, and he planned to aspire as hard as he could.