Provinces of Night: A Novel

by William Gay

  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.

  I was huntin a hog, not a river, Albright said. That shoat’s worth thirty dollars, what she told me. I need to court this lady I know over in Clifton and I always take her a present.

  What sort of present? the boy asked.

  Well. Generally I take her twenty dollars.

  Old Mrs. Halfacre, Neal said.

  Who? the boy asked.

  She ain’t old, Albright said.

  Hellfire, she’s older than you and me put together. She must be getting on toward fifty years old. That’s old from where I’m sitting.

  She keeps herself up, though, Albright said.

  Well. If stumbling around drunk on blackberry wine is keeping in shape, I guess she does.

  Albright looked as though he was about to defend Mrs. Halfacre’s various attributes so the boy said hastily, We’re just driving around looking for some place that’ll let us in long enough to sit down. Neal here’s about got us barred from everywhere. We may have to
go clean out of the county.

  Barred from where?

  Hellfire. Everywhere. The Snip, the poolhall. About two weeks ago they barred us from the Knob. They barred me for being underage and Neal for being Neal.

  I never heard of anybody bein barred from the Knob, Albright said in disbelief. They’d let the devil hisself set there as long as he had the price of one more beer.

  Not Neal. He started a fight in there that day and they just about tore the place down to the foundation. Broke all the chairs. Somebody tore a piece of boxing off the wall to use for a club and a rat the size of a fice dog run out of the wall. Neal was about halfdrunk and he was trying to go with this woman that was with somebody else. Finally the guy told Neal to get lost and Neal told him the girl was playing with his dick the night before. The guy knocked Neal across the room and it just spread from there.

  It was the gospel truth, what I said, Neal said.

  He emptied a pistol at us, Fleming said. Neal tried to run him down. Did run over the doorstep.

  They Lord, Albright said, as if this was something he deeply regretted missing. You all can go with me, he said. We’ll catch that hog and sell it and head out for Clifton. Mrs. Halfacre’ll let you in, she don’t bar nobody.

  I pass again, Neal said.

  That daughter of hers, that Raven Lee, she’s about the prettiest girl in a three-county area, Albright said. You ought to come with us.

  Fleming thought this an odd way to describe the girl’s beauty, wondered how the three-county area had been canvassed. What the criteria were.

  I won’t argue with that, Neal said. He raised a wrist and tilted the dial of his watch to the sun. I know Miss Halfacre well. But I’ve got a date with a redhead from Beaver Dam tonight and I believe I’ve seen all I ever need to see of Raven Lee Halfacre.

  Albright glanced at him curiously but didn’t reply. He turned to Fleming. What about you, young Bloodworth? Want to ride over to the Tennessee River? Makes this one look like a spring branch.

  Well, I don’t have a date with a redhead. I expect I need to get home, though.

  I expect you do, Neal said contemptuously. You’ve got to feed all them stock. Cook supper. Change all them doilies on the coffee table. Why do you remind me of some eighty year old woman?

  I wouldn’t mind ridin down there, Fleming told Albright.

  All right then. We’ll need my car though. You could ride down and drive it back up here. I doubt Neal’d let me in his car, muddy as I am.

  Hell, crawl in here, Neal said. Daddy’s about ruined it. Raised chickens out of it and everything else. Another few trips to the woods up above Early Dial’s and I may just buy me a new one.

  They got out at the railroad trestle. You want some of this beer? Neal asked.

  Albright was already loading up his pockets. I might take three or four, he said.

  I might could take one, Fleming said.

  You’ve got the makings of a hell of a Bloodworth, Neal told him. Might could take one. You don’t watch your step you’re going to get drummed out of the whole damned family. Sip on two beers all day long.

  They returned to the top of the hill in Albright’s Dodge. Albright got out studying the undergrowth as if the hog might be lurking there awaiting his return. Now let’s round up that shoat, he said. We can’t sell him we’ll stick a apple in his mouth and roast him on a spit.

  Fleming gave it a halfhearted attempt but could not get fully caught up in the search for the missing hog. The undergrowth was hot and stifling and absolutely breezeless. Sweat immediately popped out over his entire body and clots of gnats plagued his eyes as if seeking ingress to the skull itself. Mosquitoes buzzed about his ears and he kept slapping at them bothhanded. He stood for a time before the river. It was slow-moving and turgid, viscous as a river of mud easing along. A cotton-mouth dropped from a branch and undulated sluggishly away.

  Something was crawling up his leg. He hauled up his breeches legs and he’d been beset by an army of seedticks. Barely visible. His legs were already itching. He shucked off his shoes and socks and waded into the river and began to scrub them off with handfuls of sand.

  Hey, he yelled.

  After a while Albright came shoatless out of the undergrowth.

  I’ve got a little money, Fleming said. How about if I just loan you the twenty?

  Where’d you get twenty dollars?

  I came into some money. How about it? Does that suit you?

  It suits me right down to the ground, Albright said. We’ll go back to town where I can get me a bath and some clean clothes and we’ll head out.

  They had been following the Tennessee River for miles, losing it behind enormous stone tablets black as ebony in the darkness, regaining it in the breaks and switchbacks, the car paced by a pale moon that hung over the river, its luminous abstract reflection shattered in the hammered water. The river was wider than Fleming had expected, more of a presence than the road they drove on, it kept drawing your eyes back to it, it refused to be ignored.

  The road to Clifton had been long and varied, had consisted of side-trips and dead ends. Albright had been hot and tired and he hadn’t eaten that day and the beer seemed to hit him hard and immediate. He fell to concocting other entertainments as a prelude to the visit to Mrs. Halfacre. Fleming made no protest, he had made a conscious decision to roll with the current, go where the night might take him.

  It took him first to Waynesboro, where Albright had heard of a dance. The women were wild there, he said, especially if you came from another county and were therefore foreign to them. He described various acts of intimacy at which these women had no peer. Degrees of abandon to which the women of Ackerman’s Field could only aspire. Fleming doubted all this but he listened anyway and thought with a kind of sardonic amusement that before the night was over life itself might grasp him by the scruff of the neck and jerk him out of the doldrums he seemed grounded in and into its swifter currents. One of these wild women might spring upon him and perform an act so abandoned his life would be altered forever.

  Their way was barred at the door of the dancehall by a muscular arm stretched in front of Albright’s chest, a fist clamped on the doorjamb. The man jerked his head toward a handlettered sign nailed to the wall, NO STAGS ALLOWED, the sign said, COUPLES ONLY.

  Albright took offense at this. I’ll give you to understand I’m not no Goddamned Staggs, he said. I been a Albright all my life and I got a driver’s license to prove it.

  He bought a pint of bootleg whiskey at Goblin’s Knob, sipped it driving while he grew morose and regretful, remembering old wrongs and new done to him as if fate had a dark sense of humor and amused itself at Albright’s expense with every toss of the dice. Fleming rode silently, awash in the raw reek of whiskey that seemed to be rising out of the floorboards, out of the very upholstery itself. While the headlights rolled up scenes he’d never viewed, new configurations of trees and houses and bluffs as if the shifting of their arrangement in the tableau made them new things altogether. A world forever restructuring itself. Strange country rearing up out of the night and subsiding off the dark glass like one of those books whose rapidly flipped pages give the illusion of motion.

  It wasn’t so far back I’d go check on that hog, Albright said. Roust that old woman out of bed. I’m thinkin she probably sleeps with that shoat, I’d get em both together.

  Fleming leaned his head against the glass and closed his eyes. He’d about decided they’d just drive in circles until daylight then go home. There were no wild women, no Mrs. Halfacre in whom he had invested twenty dollars. Certainly there was no Raven Lee Halfacre, prettiest girl in a three-county area. Likely there was no Clifton, all he’d seen so far was the Tennessee River.

  I ought to hex her, Albright said. But I done got one workin, and I don’t know how many they allow to a customer.

  Slow down a minute, Fleming said. Are you tellin me that you actually hired Brady to put a hex on Woodall?

  I damn sure did. She’s simme
rin on the back burner now, waitin to come to a boil.

  You paid him.

  Yeah. It must of been the top of the line hex, too. It cost fifty dollars.

  Where on earth did you come up with fifty dollars?

  I borrowed it at the bank.

  You what?

  I borrowed it at the First National Bank.

  You mean you just waltzed in there and told them you needed fifty dollars to put a curse on a man and they counted it out?

  Hell no, what do you think I am, crazy? I told them it was for house repairs. He took a mortgage on my car. It don’t matter anyway, unless this thing pays off pretty quick Woodall’s goin to be drivin it anyway. What do you think about that?

  I think you’ve just about cornered the market on craziness, Fleming said.

  The broken cliffs had fallen away now and they were descending toward the lights of a little town strewn between the hills. On his right hand the river lay shimmering as far as the eye could see. Fleming watching could see the lights of a ferry working its way across, a searchlight arcing through the fog like an acetylene torch. They drove down the main drag of town, a few stores and cafes. Albright turned down a steep incline to a sidestreet and they were following the river again. Fleming saw a marina where boats rocked at their lines, a lighted barge so long it seemed to pass forever, a huge monolith nighshapeless in the starblown dark, like a city slipped its moorings and was drifting toward parts unknown.

  Albright parked the car before a small steep-roofed pink house. The windows were ablaze with light and when Albright cut off the engine Fleming could hear the low gutbucket thump of guitar music.

  Let me have just a sip of that bottle, Fleming said. When Albright reached it to him Fleming unscrewed the cap.

  Don’t smell of it, Albright cautioned. Just get you a good horn of it and when you swallow kind of clamp down on it. Get you a good hold.

  Fleming did but he had to swallow a time or two to ensure that it would stay where he put it. He shook his head. His eyes were watering. Hellfire, he said.