Provinces of Night: A Novel

by William Gay

  Every bit of it, Albright agreed. Now listen, Fleming. Just talk up to them and you’ll be all right. Don’t start talkin about books or quotin poems at them. These is good folks but they ain’t real crazy about readin books. Just do what I do and you’ll be all right.

  Fleming was irritated. I do what you do and I’ll wind up in the penitentiary or the crazyhouse one, he said. Don’t worry about it. I’ll try not to slobber or wet myself.

  Albright slapped his shoulder. That’s all that a man can expect, Youngblood. Now let’s check em out.

  Out amongst em, Fleming said.

  The outside light was turned off but coming onto the porch Fleming saw a swing that seemed to be drowning in ivy or honeysuckle suspended from the ceiling on the shadowed end of the porch. A slim dark presence was lying in it but that was the sum of what he could see. Albright turned to face the swing and tipped an imaginary hat. Miss Raven, he said. Is your mama in the house?

  The girl if girl was what she was did not reply and Albright rapped the screen door smartly against the sash. Apparently he was recognized from within for a woman’s voice cried out, Junior, Sweetie, and Albright entered with Fleming practically stepping on his heels.

  Fleming stood for a moment blinking in the harsh light. He was in a small front room, low-ceiled, the room papered with wallpaper so loud the walls seemed to be shimmering with a constant vibratory motion. A vinyl couch shoved against one wall, a tall console radio tuned to the Grand Ole Opry. A ratty green armchair set facing out of the corner in which sat a shirtless man clutching a guitar. His eyes were focused with a fierce dark intensity on these newcomers as if he’d immediately know their business here but the woman had embraced Albright with her left arm and was running her right hand through his wild stand of curls and she wasn’t paying the man in the chair any mind.

  A woman would kill for a head of hair like that, she said, stepping back to look. Albright was standing directly beneath the hot white glare of the ceiling bulb and with his hair uplifted from the ministrations of the woman’s fingers he looked as if his head was afire.

  Wouldn’t they? she turned and demanded of the man in the corner chair. The man was drinking from a snuff glass a dark liquid so opaque it might have been India ink. He appeared to be thinking this over. Wouldn’t they? she demanded again but the man would not go on record as to whether they would or wouldn’t. There was a five-gallon jug of clear scalloped glass set before the chair halffull of the same dark liquid he was drinking and he had his feet propped atop it possessively as if it was something he was charged with guarding with his life.

  Fleming figured the woman had been pretty in her youth but by the impartial glare of the light there was scarcely any of it left. He judged her not yet forty-five but the flesh of her upper arms sagged and her face looked curiously as if it was formed of melting wax and gravity itself was undoing her a little at a time. She seemed a little drunk. She hung onto Albright and swayed as if they were dancing though no feet were moving.

  Abruptly the man in the chair got up and leant the guitar against the wall. He went out the screen door. It fell to behind him. Something’s goin to tote you off settin here by yourself, Fleming heard him say. Nobody answered him and his footsteps receded down the doorstep and faded out in the yard.

  For lack of anything better to do Fleming crossed the room and sat on the couch beside the radio. Now folks I’ve got a little lady here I really want you to put your hands together for, Ernest Tubb said. The woman had turned to study Fleming. He’s a finelookin thing, she said to Albright. Are there any more like him at home except bigger and closer to my age?

  If there was you wouldn’t hear it from me, Albright said. That’s Fleming. We out amongst em tonight.

  Get you a glass of that wine, the woman told Fleming. It’s blackberry, it’s good. What’s went with Albert?

  If that was him in the chair he left, Fleming said. He crossed to the jug and unscrewed the lid. The wine had the fruity smell of summer to it, a curious hot undercurrent of alcohol. There seemed to be nothing to drink it from.

  Guitar music’s nice but money’s something a person has an actual use for, she said obscurely. There’s glasses in the kitchen yonder.

  They were upended on a clean towel on the counter beside the sink. Fleming couldn’t seem to get rid of the smell of the drink of bootleg whiskey he’d taken. It seemed to have soaked into his clothing, his hair. Between his teeth. He filled a glass from the tap and stood drinking it, facing his reflection in the window behind the sink. He could hear affectionate noises from the front room. He’d scarcely walked through the doorway and already they were groping each other. Squeals, giggles, throaty little growls ensued. All this just from Albright. He couldn’t fathom why he’d gotten talked into this. I’d sooner be in hell with my back broke, he told his disgusted reflection in the windowglass. He emptied the remaining water into the sink and went through the doorway with the glass and halffilled it from the enormous jug. He sipped from it. It was sweet, almost treacly, with a sour burning aftertaste.

  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, Orienta
l. 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.

  As long as you understand that I’m not some watered-down version of my mama. We’re two different people, so don’t go getting us confused. She don’t tell me how to live my life and I don’t tell her how to live hers. I’ve already changed my name from Evelyn and I expect before long I’ll be changing the Halfacre too.

  You planning on getting married?

  You don’t have to get married to change your name. Besides, I’m sixteen years old, way too young to be married. Not too young to get married, just to be married. Mama thinks I’m pretty enough to get into some line of show business. Maybe not a movie star, or anything like that, but something. Really Mama sees me as her best shot to get out of Clifton. Out of Tennessee. She hates Tennessee, says it’s full of hillbillies.

  Where’s she from?

  Tennessee, the girl said, grinning, then leant to suck the last of her Coke through the straw.

  We closing up in here, a woman at the counter called, proving it by crossing the room to a panel box on the wall and flipping a switch that killed the exterior lights.

  They rose from the table, Raven Lee rolling up her magazine. That woman just hates me, she said. And I’ve never done a thing to her.

  Fleming suspected that before time eventually did whatever it was going to do to Raven Lee Halfacre a lot of women were going to just hate her, but he didn’t say so. He followed her out the pneumatic door onto the sidewalk where enormous moths and candleflies fluttered about in confusion as if they’d ascertain where the light had gone. One entrapped itself in the girl’s hair and after slapping at it unsuccessfully she allowed Fleming to extricate it. He released it and it flew away.

  I hate those things, Raven Lee said. Let’s walk up by the cafe and see if it’s still open.

  They had gone scarcely a block and a half past dark stores shuttered and barred when they came upon Fleming Bloodworth’s worst nightmare.

  He was lounging against the front of the Eat and Run Cafe. The cafe was closed and dark. This nightmare was wearing engineer boots with straps and buckles, one of them on the sidewalk and the other propped back against the brick facade of the cafe. He was wearing jeans turned up one turn at the cuffs and a white T-shirt with a pack of unfiltered cigarettes rolled into a turned up sleeve. A pair of aviator sunglasses hung by an earpiece from the neck of the shirt. His hair was as flat on top as if it had been barbered with the aid of a spirit level and the sides were worn long and brilliantined back into a gleaming ducktail. A cigarette drooped from the corner of his mouth in a studied manner, as if he’d practiced it before a mirror.

  Hellfire, Fleming was thinking.

  Raven Lee Halfacre, the boy-man said.

  Just walk on by and don’t answer, the girl hissed.

  They did. Fleming didn’t look back but the boots had toe and heel taps on them and he could hear them clicking along behind them. Clicking faster.

  When you goin to g
ive me a shot at that stuff, Raven Lee, the man called. I believe it’s about my time.

  Fleming stopped. She jerked his arm. Are you crazy? she demanded.

  I may well be, he was thinking. He felt called upon to say something. Do something. Defend her honor in some manner. At length he allowed himself to be propelled along but by this time the man had approached, passed, and halted in front of them.

  When you goin out with me?

  When hell freezes over, she said.

  Looks like you down to scrapin the bottom of the barrel, he observed. What’d you do, decide to get you a young one and bring him up right?

  We’re not bothering you, the girl said. Why don’t you just let us alone and go about your business?

  Right now you are my business, the man said. I heard you had some excellent stuff.

  I heard you didn’t, the girl said. I heard you got that no account Sheila Brewer in the bedroom with none of her folks at home and couldn’t even get it up.

  You lyin little slut, he said. He slapped her openhanded hard and then whirled on Fleming. The girl clasped her face bothhanded and stood for a moment with her head down and her hair fallen over her hands. The man spun his cigarette into the street in a spiral of sparks. His face was flat and angry. What do you have to say about this? he asked Fleming.

  I heard—Fleming tried to swallow but there was insufficient spit in his mouth. He could feel cold clammy sweat in his armpits, tracking down his rib cage—you couldn’t get it up till her brother came in the room.

  He knew he was going to be hit and he threw up both hands in a kind of clumsy guard, with the result that he was hit not only with the man’s fist but by his own as well. His own hands slammed nose and mouth and a larger fist connected with his lower jaw and his knees just seemed to liquefy. He struck out as hard as he could aiming at the man’s face but felt glass break under his right hand. His left connected to something with more flesh to it but then a blow caught him in the solar plexus and the air exploded out of his lungs like a bellows someone had closed. He sat down hard with his hands splayed out behind him to break his fall and the man kicked him in the thigh with an engineer boot then whirled and ran.