William Gay: Provinces of Night

He was going out the screen door when he heard the noise of someone retching in the back part of the house. He turned and went down the hall. At the end of it a stairway led away to another floor and to the left there was a bathroom where Neal knelt on the white tile floor. He was on his knees with his arms wrapped about the toilet as if it was something he’d arise with and carry off and his face was pillowed on the cold porcelain.

What’s the matter with you?

Neal raised his head and turned. There was bloody froth at the corners of his mouth. His eyes were blurred and unfocused. Sick, he said.

What’s made you sick?

Bad whiskey, Neal said. Why don’t you just get the fuck wherever you were going and leave me alone.

I’ll get a doctor.

Don’t get a doctor, don’t get any fucking body. Whoever you got would just call the law. I don’t believe I need no law here this morning. What are you even doing here? What time is it?

I don’t know, early, seven maybe. I came to ask if you know where the old man is. To get you to help me hunt him. He’s gone out of that trailer and I’ve hunted the place over and I can’t find him. Albright pulled the car out last night from where I had it stuck and I went to see about him but the doors were locked and I never could get him to the door. This morning I tried again and finally prized the back door open with a tire spud. He wasn’t there and there wasn’t any fire. We need to find him before he freezes to death.

Hell, you don’t even know he’s out in the cold. Besides, I ain’t studying that old man. He can take care of himself, sink or swim. I’m sick as I ever been. Sicker than I ever been.

I think something’s happened to him.

Something’s going to happen to you if you don’t get the fuck away and leave me alone.

There was a calendar on the wall that marked a date five years gone. Fleming stood staring abstractedly as its flyspecked print of September Morn.

I think that girl’s dead, he said.

What?

There’s a dead girl in that front room.

Oh, Jesus, no, Neal said. He tried to rise, settled back bonelessly against the toilet. Oh shit. How can this happen to me?

The boy was silent a time. I think it mainly happened to her, he said.

Well, you’ll just have to help me. If I can get up. When I can get up.

Help you what? I told you there needs to be a doctor here. Somebody. Where’d you get bad whiskey?

That fucking Early. He laid for me. I slipped in there this evening, yesterday evening, and stole another jug. The son of a bitch. He poisoned one and hid it out and I got it. I’ll kill him. I aim to kill him, just as soon as we hide that girl.

I’m not hiding any girl. You can forget that crazy shit.

Neal’s face was very white. His cheekbones and nose looked like those of an effigy cast from wax. His eyes were glazed and his forehead slick with greasylooking perspiration.

Well, we don’t have to hide her. Just take her out on a road somewhere and dump her. Just get her away from me.

He fell silent, in a deep concentration. Who all did we see last night, Neal asked himself.

I’m not hiding any girl, Fleming said again.

You worthless little shitass. Think you’re better than anybody else. Think you know every Goddamn thing because you read a book one time. Here I am with my back to the wall and you fold on me. Blood’s got to hang together.

What about your blood?

What?

You don’t mind letting your blood slide. You turned your back on it and just walked away.

You little fucker. That’s what you’re pissed about. You just can’t stand it because I screwed your little Raven Lee Halfacre. Well, I did, and I enjoyed every Goddamned minute of it. I never heard her complaining, either. I’m going to sit here a minute and rest and then I’m going to get up and stomp your ass. And then I’ll go and screw her again, just for spite.

The boy was silent. Neal turned and spat into the stained toilet bowl. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. You’ve got to help me, he said.

I’ll see you around, Neal, Fleming said. He turned and went up the hall. Neal rose and staggered across the room and fell against the door-jamb and slid down it.

Fleming went into the room where the pale dead girl was lying in state. There was a folded bedspread on a chifforobe and he shook it out and spread it over her. Then he went out of the room and out of the house.

THE TRAILER’S BACKYARD was windswept ice trackless as a wasteland but after he’d crossed its expanse snow was drifted in the woods and he found the old man’s tracks. It had snowed more since he’d made them but still they were there to read, the right footprint firm and clean, the left dragging, not even clearing the surface of the snow. Pockmarks in the ice where the walking stick had gone. He went on around the slope through a childhood fairyland of ice. Each fork filled with snow, each leaf encased in ice. He moved through utter silence save the carillon tinkling of the icy leaves. Small black birds flitted about the ice with a curious decorum, their tiny bright eyes unreal as bits of obsidian from a taxidermist’s hand.

He went on through the woods, and the going grew heavier. The old man seemed to have just forged a straight path into the woods, taking what came, places where the wind had driven the snow into kneedeep drifts, windfall branches he’d had to work his way across. Of course the first thing he’d noticed was that there was no return set of footprints. He knew they had to stop somewhere and he was beset with a rising dread about what he’d find when they did.

When he began to come upon dog tracks he paused and studied them with some interest. They crossed and recrossed, huge tracks like the spoor of wolves. The tracks bore left and they bore right but followed the same general course the old man was taking.

He paused to rest, breathing hard, the icy air like fire in his lungs. He couldn’t fathom how the old man had done it. Here the earth sloped so steeply the old man must have dragged himself from the trunk of one poplar to the next. A hare erupted by him in an explosion of snow and when it topped the slope Fleming turning to watch its flight suddenly saw the old man’s hat. It was lying on the ridge crested with an inch or so of snow on the crown and tipped slightly sidewise with the brim frozen in the ice. He clambered up the slope, falling, his feet sliding on the ice beneath the snow, rose and struggled on.

The old man’s black coat was what Fleming saw first, stark against the snow. He was lying on his left side, his face in the snow, his knees drawn up toward his chest.

Fleming whirled to run. Brady, he was thinking. Brady was closest and there was a telephone. Before he had even started his descent there was a sound, a groan, then a low keening moan that went on and on without cessation or variation. He saw that Bloodworth was trying to turn himself in the snow, clawing at the ice with his right hand in an attempt to wheel himself around facing Fleming. He’d start to turn then cease with his head lolled back and Fleming saw with horror that the long black strands of his hair had been frozen into the ice.

He ran to him. He didn’t know what to do. He tried freeing the old man’s hair, flailing at the ice with a fist. At last he took out his pocket knife and began to saw the hair off above the ice. The old man was trying to talk. His mouth frothed with spittle. He walled a terror-stricken eye up at Fleming, a wild black eye with the yellowlooking cornea shot with clotted red. Once when he was a child Fleming had with Boyd come upon a wreck in which a trailerload of horses had been capsized. The horses were screaming in voices nigh human and one horse trapped on the bottom had rolled upon Fleming a wild outraged eye that demanded that he do something, anything, and that eye had looked like this.