Provinces of Night: A Novel Read online

  Look, he said, this was not my deal, I was just helping Brady set it up, and I was ordered to keep my mouth shut. If you say anything to Brady he’ll wind up putting some kind of curse on me.

  I’ll keep you out of it. I aim to have the straight of it, though, I may put a few curses of my own, I ain’t above it.

  Well. I reckon I better get on. I guess I’ve done about all the damage I can do here for one day.

  She looked at him fondly. You won’t never make much of a liar, she said. I can see right through you like lookin down into still water. I expect law and politics is goin to be out of your reach.

  She was silent a time, and he had already turned to go when she said, What’s E.F. like these days?

  I don’t know what he was like any other days. I don’t know what to tell you. He’s just an old man, has to go with a stick. Kind of easygoing, talks about music all the time.

  He must’ve calmed down with age some. Easygoin is not a word anybody would put to E.F. back when I knowed him. You tell him I said come by here some day. I done some talkin once a long time ago when I should’ve been keepin my mouth shut.

  He turned to go. She would have told him more but he didn’t want to hear it. All these old troubles were burdensome and hard to carry, folks would load you down if you’d let them. He had plenty of troubles of his own, old and new, and he did not want to be further encumbered.

  FLEMING WITH a sharp putty knife was scraping calcified bits of gasket off the heads while Albright cleaned the block. Albright had been drunk the night before and had given himself a tan with a bottle of suntan lotion called Mantan that was supposed to darken the skin chemically but had succeeded only in giving him a curiously piebald appearance. He’d tanned the palms of his hands, between his fingers, most of his face save round areas about the eyes which remained albino white and gave him the startled look of a raccoon.

  You put me in mind of a spotted horse I had one time, the old man said. Come out of north Mississippi, I named him Cisco. His pattern of spots was laid out a whole lot similar to yours. Course I doubt he could have rebuilt a automobile engine.

  I doubt if he could drive one just into the ground, either, Albright said. Just down to the ground and then into it. You’d think a man would know when to pull a car over to the side of the road and just cut the switch off.

  Well, Fleming said, you said it needed overhauling anyway, and I’m helping you do it. Plus I bought that rebuild kit with the last of my typewriter money.

  You couldn’t drive a typewriter to Clifton anyhow. Haul Miss Halfacre around on it.

  That was my thinking exactly, Fleming said.

  What I don’t understand is how you broke the inside light out of it. Plastic cover and bulb and everything. What happened to it?

  It was the beat of anything I ever saw, Fleming said. We were going up that long hill before you get to Clifton. The motor was knocking louder and louder. When it knocked that last time, the loudest lick of all, that light blew up and scattered little pieces of white plastic all over the car. I didn’t understand it, not being a mechanic. I expect a mechanic could figure it right out. Probably something to do with the wiring.

  Albright stopped scraping for a long moment and looked at him. I guess that explains why it don’t say Taxi on the sides no more, he said.

  SHE SET the tone arm carefully onto the spinning record, waited. It was as the old man had told, the record was unused, there was scarcely a hiss as the needle tracked the grooves. The banjo commenced so abruptly it must have been going full tilt when the recorder was switched on thirtyodd years before. The old man’s voice, smoky and sardonic, almost mocking, but you couldn’t tell if he was mocking you or mocking the song or perhaps mocking himself.

  She glanced at Fleming sharply, as if the voice had startled her. She opened her mouth to speak, then remained silent. The voice cast out words and drew them back misshapen, twisted to the nihilistic thrust of the song; phrases foreshortened then elongated, drawn out in entreaty. The last time I saw my woman, good people, she had a wineglass in her hand. She was drinking down her troubles with a nogood sorry man. The banjo seemed at an odd counterpoint to the voice, the blues rushed and almost discordant, playing out of the melody and then back into it. The banjo at times sounded as if it were playing a different song entirely, a song you could barely hear seeping through the walls of time itself, the banjo and the voice each telling a separate story, the music an almost satiric comment on the words and on the singer who was singing them, reducing the disembodied singer to a specter you could see through, and all you saw when you looked was a swirling empty darkness.

  God, she said. He sounds a hundred years old and terribly pissed off. What’s he mad about? I don’t get this at all.

  But when the voice and the banjo ceased, halted abruptly as if the old man’s pain or rage had spent itself, she set the needle back at the beginning and let it play through again. When it had played through a second time she turned the record over and played that, a driving raucous banjo, the voice so disaffected and distanced from everyday life it wanted completely gone, wished itself a mole in the ground. Well, the railroad man, he’ll kill you if he can, and drink up your blood like wine …

  Well, she said when the song ended, that’s about as far from Bing Crosby as you can get. He’s strange. Strange but good. It leaves you feeling like you heard something important but you can’t quite figure out what it was. What’s your grandfather like?

  I don’t know. What anybody’s like. I think he’s just an old man who’s about decided he misspent a good part of his life.

  When was this made? Do you have others?

  Back sometime in the twenties. I’ve got three more of them.

  She closed the lid of the phonograph so that it looked like a small suitcase. It was checked in a red and white plaid, with white musical notes emblazoned on it, and its appearance formed an odd juxtaposition to the songs that it had just played.

  He sounds black.

  So what? You look like Pocahontas.

  I’ve seen photographs of Pocahontas, and I’m much prettier. Seriously, when can I meet this old man?

  Never, the boy said. He’d just take you away from me without even trying and head out to Arkansas or somewhere. Not, he added hurriedly, that you’re mine to take.

  I’m yours if I’m anybody’s, nobody else wants me. Do you think he’d marry me? I always wanted to marry a real blues man. You’re not one, are you?

  I could learn.

  She shook her head. You don’t learn that, she said. It’s just there. It sounds like he spent his whole life trying to unlearn it. Trying to forget it.

  I don’t see how you get all that just from listening to two songs.

  Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I think too much. I sit in this room, I listen to dead people singing and I read books dead people wrote. I read strange things into it. Or maybe I just need to get out more.

  He had crossed to the window and held aside the curtain to peer into the back yard. A bleak day which held winter like an implicit threat. A wind scuttled leaves along; even as he watched leaves fell and drifted away. On a strung length of clothesline perched a temporary bird. A lean black cat paced beneath it, as if charged with guarding it from other less civilized cats. Its hypnotic eyes never left the bird. The bird flew and the cat sprang impotently, its paws batting empty air. Down a concrete driveway a little girl was learning to ride a bicycle, her mother following, the mother’s mouth calling anxious warnings Fleming couldn’t hear.

  He dropped the curtain and turned. I think I’m getting a little too fond of you, he said carefully.

  She looked up at him from the iron cot she slept on. I don’t think you can do that, she said. I think people need to be as fond of each other as they can.

  Be serious for once.

  Why? You’re always serious enough for both of us. Besides, maybe I am serious.

  I’m getting too dependent on you. Using you to get through the day. You need to
tell me to just get away and leave you the hell alone.

  Just get away and leave me the hell alone, she said.

  He turned back to the window. The cat was playing with a leaf, rolling it over, slapping it intently. Fleming thought it might be practicing for the next bird.

  She rose from the cot and came to stand beside him. She laced an arm about his waist and leaned her head against his shoulder. They stood staring at nothing. A cloud passed the sun and the light grew dense and somber.

  This is no way to bring me to my senses, he said.

  I don’t want you at your senses, she said. You’d be even duller at your senses. Will you take me to meet that old man?

  Sure. If you’ll stand by me like this a day or two.

  Make up your mind. I thought you wanted let alone.

  He turned her to him and raised her face and leaned and kissed the hollow of her throat. She seemed all there was to life. He hoped obscurely that she could save him, but he did not even know from what.

  LET ME TELL you this story, Neal said. Do you know Jimmy de Nicholais, that works in the post office?

  I’ve seen him around the poolhall, Fleming said. I don’t really know him.

  He was staring through the car glass across a flat sweep of field, a bleak and wintry landscape. Trees were baring and already the sky had a look of immeasurable distances, the winds that morning had borne a trace of ice; cold was coming, cold hard on man and child, cold hard on old men in unheated rattletrap trailers.

  Hey, he said. You want to come out tomorrow and help me rig up the old man some kind of heater? He bought one of these little sheet-iron jobs and I figured we might take that window out of the back and put in a piece of tin. We could elbow the pipe right through there.

  I guess, Neal said. All right. Listen to this story though. Me and Albright was in the poolhall about halfdrunk thinkin about finding another drink of whiskey somewhere and we didn’t have any money. Right off we thought of de Nicholais. He’s always got a little drink hid away. We went over there, Jimmy was off that day, it was some kind of government holiday, Veterans Day or something, some such day. He wasn’t home, though, but the door was standing about half open and we decided to just go in and wait. Jimmy lives by himself and he wouldn’t mind, we’d done it before, or anyway I had. Anyway he didn’t come and he didn’t come and we got to looking for his bottle. We turned up the mattress, that’s where he usually keeps it, but there wasn’t no bottle there. Well, we turned that place upside down looking for whiskey and do you know what we found on the top shelf of his bedroom closet? Just guess.

  What?

  Well, are you going to guess or not?

  Fleming was grinning. Just tell me, he said. Although I’m not sure I even want to know.

  A sex doll, Neal said.

  A what? A what doll?

  One of them blowup sex dolls. It was the damnedest thing you ever saw. I’d always heard about them, but I sort of figured it was something folks made up, but there she was, and nothing would do Albright but he had to blow her up. We couldn’t find no pump and Albright he huffed and puffed around on her. I wasn’t about to blow that bitch up, no telling what you’d catch. Plastic clap or something. Pretty soon there she was. Big round titties, had these pink nipples on them. Had all these orfices, orifices, little round holes everywhere. Little round mouth. Had this like mop of steelwool-lookin hair. Albright like to fell in love.

  Anyway at first we couldn’t decide what to do with her. Finally we carried her out by the mailbox in front of the house and stood her up. I found some bricks and piled them on her little feet so she wouldn’t blow away. Taped her hand to the door of the mailbox and she looked for all the world like she’d just run out to see what the mailman had left her.

  Probably something in a plain brown wrapper, Fleming grinned.

  Probably. Anyway we parked down the street to wait on Jimmy. It was a while before he come. This woman come by walkin a little dog and neither one of them knew what to make of her. Finally Jimmy come and it looked like he seen her from a long way off cause he started loping. He was looking all around, like he was trying to see was anybody looking out the windows of the other houses. Then he just run by her and grabbed her under his arm like a football and run right up the steps and through the door without ever slowing down. You ought to have seen it. Hey, hand me that pack of Luckies out of the glove compartment.

  Fleming popped open the glovebox and tossed the unopened package of cigarettes to Neal. Then he withdrew a pair of women’s underwear and held them upraised by their elastic waistband. Pale blue watered silk, Tuesday embroidered in black thread. He regarded them with amusement.

  I guess we’ve all got our secret side, he said.

  That damned Raven Lee Halfacre, Neal said. For somebody that fought so hard to keep them she don’t seem to put much value on them. They say Tuesday, but I believe it was along about Friday before I got her out of them.

  The road was running parallel with a wire fence, beyond it dying grass, weeds the wind had tilted. When he looked up nameless birds were moving patternlessly against a gunmetal sky, like random markings on a slate. He studied them intently, as if they were leaving some message there for him to decipher. Suddenly he wanted to be anywhere else but here, desperately wanted to be somewhere Neal was not.

  I believe I’ll just walk, he said.

  What?

  Let me out.

  Neal slammed the brakes and simultaneously slid the car toward the shoulder of the road. What the fuck’s the matter with you?

  There’s nothing the matter with me, Fleming said.

  He opened the door and climbed out. He stood for a moment leaning his left arm on the car and holding the door with his right.

  Well there’s sure as hell something the matter with you. It’s three miles to the old man’s place and coldern a bitch out there.

  I’ll see you, Neal.

  You’re about as crazy a person as I ever saw in my whole Goddamned life.

  I may be. You’re not very subtle, are you?

  What? Neal took a last drag off the cigarette and spun it past Fleming onto the roadbed. Fleming turned and toed it out in the dry weeds. I guess not, Neal said. I guess subtlety is not my strong suit, as they say. Or it could be I just wanted to tell you something.

  Could be I didn’t want to know it, Fleming said.

  You need to know it.

  I’d just as soon be the judge of what I need to know.

  He was still holding the car door. It seemed to him for an absurd moment that closing the door would in some manner alter the rest of his life. Mark forever a line between what had been and what was yet to be. He slammed the door and started through the brittle weeds up the roadside.

  Hey.

  He turned and gave Neal the finger. He heard the door open. You crazy son of a bitch, Neal said. He heard Neal’s feet in the gravel. Then the footsteps stopped and a car door slammed and the engine cranked. He could hear Neal laboriously turning the car in the roadbed. Pulling up, backing, pulling up again.

  He looked down and saw that he was carrying the panties balled up in his fist. His expression was caught somewhere between a smile and a grimace. He tossed them away and the wind pressed them furtively into the clashing weeds like a dirty scrap of paper, old newsprint. He hunched his shoulders into the wind and went on up the roadbed.

  THERE WERE three carloads of them, two county cars and a state car full of Tennessee Highway Patrolmen. They had search warrants and official looking papers but as they had been expected most of the day they hardly disrupted the old man taking the pale sun on Itchy Mama’s front porch. Itchy Mama’s sources were wellnigh infallible and the whiskey had been removed hours before to a safer and more distant location and the old men watched all the legal proceedings with a bemused interest.

  Deputies fanned out into the woods with sharp metal rods to prod the ground for jugs of contraband. Others searched the house with thoroughness and a mounting frustration but th
e place might have been a Pentecostal church so free of alcohol it was.

  Bellwether seemed bored and he did not even participate in the search. He leaned against a porch support and smoked a cigarette, glancing occasionally at an old man in a gray fedora who sat beside a boy with dark hair and sleepylooking eyes like the old man’s. Bellwether knew the deputies wouldn’t find anything. He knew that Itchy Mama had a connection in the judge’s office, though he did not know who it was. Perhaps the judge himself, who knew. The moment a warrant was sworn out Itchy Mama would get a telephone call and everyone went into action. When the law had left and had time to get its collective mind on matters more pressing everyone would go into action again and move the whiskey back.

  Finally the deputies strung emptyhanded out of the woods and made ready to go. Be a temperance meetin here at eight o’clock tonight, Garrison, one of the old men called to a deputy. Be testifyin and hymn singin. Everybody’s invited.

  Bellwether rose to go as well. Crossing the porch he laid a hand in passing on Bloodworth’s shoulder.

  Mr. Rutgers, I believe it is, he said.

  THE DRIVEWAY was exposed aggregate concrete, long and winding, snaking sinuously up through enormous evergreens Albright had no name for but which he admired nonetheless. Finally the house came into view. Woodall had apparently done well for himself, for the house was huge, a long low ranchstyle dwelling shaped like the letter L. Before the house was parked a gray Lincoln Towncar and a white pickup truck; the truck immediately gave Albright a strong and unpleasant sense of déjá vu, and wrenched his insides with guilt. He remembered the truck idling in front of his house, he remembered Woodall taking off his cowboy hat and laying it carefully on the truck seat.