Provinces of Night (16 page)

 

T
HERE WAS
a hollow booming sound that he dreamed he went from room to room looking for, but it was always in the wall he’d just left or the one he was bound for. Then it fell silent. His eyes opened. He looked at the phosphorescent hands of the clock.

You want to open the Goddamned door?

Fleming raised up and felt around for his shoes.

The pounding commenced again. I know you’re in there, a voice said.

All right, all right, I’m coming, he called.

When he opened the door his uncle Warren Bloodworth was regarding him with a kind of bland patience that belied the intensity of the pounding. He was standing in the moonlight with his handsome dissipated face showing only a benign placidity, blinking occasionally as if waiting for the boy to do something he had already been instructed to do.

You’re a sound sleeper, ain’t you?

Well. It’s two o’clock in the morning. I’m usually abed by then. Are you drunk?

I probably am. That’s not my problem though, I’ve managed somehow to run off the road down there and I can’t seem to get back on it. You reckon you could give me a hand?

Sure, I guess so. What do you want me to do?

Anything would be an improvement over what I’ve managed. You don’t have a mule or anything like that in there do you?

I don’t have a mule or anything like a mule.

I guess Boyd gave up on farming.

I guess.

Well come on anyway. Maybe we can figure something out.

They cut through the woods with Warren falling twice before they reached the embankment that shouldered the road. Fleming could see the car tilted off the road in a stand of sumac that followed a three-strand barbed wire fence.

Can you drive? Warren had halfslid and halffallen down the embankment and now he was struggling up onto the roadbed.

Brady lets me drive his tractor. Junior Albright let me drive his car once, but I wasn’t very good at it.

Hellfire, it sounds to me like you’re qualified for a chauffeur’s license. Get in and see if you can do anything with it.

He tried rocking the car, shifting from low to reverse and popping the clutch and back again but the right rear wheel seemed to have no purchase and spun impotently until he could smell thick acrid smoke from the burning rubber. He cut the switch off and then the lights and got out.

He found a stack of fencepost inside Dee’s field and threw three of
them over the fence and climbed through the strands of wire. He jammed a post as far as it would go under the rear wheel and wedged the others beneath it and got back into the car. The car smelled like new leather and whiskey and perfume and some other odor, musky and somehow unpleasant.

He cranked the car and when he popped the clutch he felt the rear end shift and come off the post but when it did it caught solid chert and sent the car spinning onto the roadbed with the barbed wire breaking and whanging away into the darkness and him whipping the steering wheel impotently this way and that and the red chert bank looming enormous in the headlights. He slammed the brakes as hard as he could and slid lockwheeled to the side of the ditch with something slamming hard against the seat and knocking him into the steering wheel and thumping solidly into the rear floorboard. When he looked back over the seat a woman in bra and panties was struggling up out of the floorboard ranking lank strands of hair out of her eyes like someone struggling up through deep foliage.

You little bastard, she said. I’ll claw your eyes out. What have you done with Warn?

Fleming rolled down the glass. Warren, he called.

Warren came up beside the car. This thing’s got a tendency to take to the air, he said. You need to lighten your foot a little.

Who is that?

I don’t know, Warren said. Crack the door so we can see.

When he opened the door the dome light came on and the woman had subsided back onto the seat and perhaps she slept. Her mouth was open and she had one arm folded beneath her head for a pillow.

Oh. That’s just my accountant, Hazel. You want some of that?

What?

You want some of it?

Fleming looked. He could smell the rank fishy odor of her and a line of spittle had escaped the corner of her slack mouth and was tracking down her throat. He noticed that there was a handful of wadded money stuffed into her panties, the corner of a twenty-dollar bill showing above the elastic.

Not right now.

No matter. I expect you’re used to adding up your figures all by yourself anyway.

Accountant?

I came up here to, let’s see, I came up here to sell two lots in town and pay the taxes on something somebody was fixing to foreclose on. I picked Hazel up in the poolroom to help me keep up with everything.

Abruptly he stood very still and then he sat down in the moonlit roadbed and began to empty his pockets one by one and to hold slips of paper close to his face. I wonder if I paid those damn taxes? he asked.

I think you ought to come up to the house and sleep it off and wait till morning to drive anywhere. You can bring your accountant. It’s getting cold down here and besides, somebody’s bound to come by sooner or later and call the law.

Fuck that. I’ve got to be in Alabama immediately. I was supposed to have been there this morning. Yesterday would have been better. You’ll have to drive. They’ve probably got a search party out by now and I’ve got to get Neal’s car back.

He struggled up out of the roadbed. Let’s see if we’ve done any damage to it.

They walked around the car and Warren took out a packet of matches and kept trying to strike them until finally reaching them to Fleming. See if you can make these son of a bitches work, he said.

Fleming lit a match but he hadn’t needed it. Moonlight had shown three scratches deep as if three steel claws had hooked at the headlight and raked viciously down the length of the car. Something, a fencepost perhaps, had struck the passenger side door hard enough to knock a fist-size dent in it.

Little soap and water and a good coat of wax and he won’t even notice it, Warren said. He removed a huge roll of greenbacks with a rubberband containing them from a pocket and handed it to Fleming. Stick this in your pocket and keep up with it, he said.

Good God, I don’t want to carry that. I might lose it or something.

You can’t lose it at the rate I can. Everywhere I’ve been tonight folks’ve been glad to see me coming and sorry to see me go. I’ve bought and paid for enough friends tonight to hold a Baptist footwashin and I doubt I’ll ever see any of them again. You reckon you can get me to Alabama?

I don’t have a driver’s license.

I’m drivin on a revolted, a revoked driver’s license myself and if they catch me it’s my ass. I’ll pay your fine if you get caught. You’re not drunk are you?

No.

That’s a start then. You furnish the sobriety and I’ll furnish the car and the money and we might just get organized here.

What about the accountant?

Well, yeah, I’m furnishin her too.

No. I mean what are we supposed to do with her?

I don’t know but we’ve by God got to do something. She almost got me killed over at the Knob tonight. Started something with some big logger off Beech Creek. I’d have to be drove with a shotgun to ever set foot in that part of the county again.

When they were underway Warren leaned back across the seat and shook the woman awake. Where do you need to go, he asked.

I need a cheeseburger. Go by the DariDip.

There won’t be no more cheeseburgers in here this night, Warren said. You’ve done puked all over the whole Goddamned car.

Take me down to Early’s then, she said. We can get a halfpint and he’ll let me stay there.

Take the Dial Holler Road, Warren said, and leaned his face against the glass and closed his eyes.

With the night coming at him in tatters of groundfog that streaked across the hood and broke on the windshield and his confidence in being able to handle the big car growing Fleming began to realize the enormity of his situation and to appreciate the curious curves and switchbacks that lay along the road of life. An hour ago he had been asleep in his bed. He couldn’t even drive. Now he was barreling through the night in an eight cylinder Buick, a roll of money in his pocket and a carload of drunk folks. On top of that he was headed to Alabama, a place he’d never been.

Warren had opened his eyes and was watching the yellowlit night roll at him. You know where Early lives?

Yeah.

Let her out there.

Early lived in a little clapboard house on the bank of the road at the head of Dial Hollow. He parked before the house. The woman got out unsteadily and stood swaying in the yard pulling a dress over her head. When her head cleared the neck she looked the very caricature of a mad harridan and she fixed Fleming with a fierce look of parodie outrage. When you get your eyes full open your mouth and load it up too, she told him. Fleming had always thought that Warren’s wife, Juanita, was fairly attractive and he wondered why he’d wound up with Hazel the accountant.

Give me some money, she told Warren.

Make change out of your drawers, Warren said. Don’t come at me with that poormouth shit.

She staggered up the sloped yard and climbed the steps to the porch. Warren leaned his head back against the seat. Damned if it ain’t a long road to Alabama, he said.

The boy studied him. He looked like an aging film star out of the forties, the cropped mustache, the smooth brown hair. His clean Roman profile was beginning to slacken from liquor and accountants and too many nights driving highpowered cars through barbed wire fences. Fleming guessed that if the war had gone on forever or until Warren died in it he would have been all right but it had not. When he came home with his medals and shrapnel scars he had found a different world than the one he had sailed away from.

The accountant had gone in the front door but almost immediately she was ejected back onto the porch and the door slammed in her face. She stood on the porch cursing the door and shaking her fist at it. She kicked the door then gestured viciously toward it with an upraised middle finger.

Ahh, Lord, Warren said. I’ve always held there was nothing in this world as sacred as southern womanhood.

When she was back in the car she said, Early won’t let me stay. Take me to my ex-husband’s out on Drake’s Lane.

Look, Warren said. I’m willin to take you wherever you need to go but I can’t be takin the scenic route all over the midsouth. I’ve got to be in Alabama. We’ve got to get on some kind of a schedule here.

Take me to Drake’s Lane.

Where in hell is Drake’s Lane? the boy asked.

They were halfway back to the highway when the boy fell to thinking about Warren’s drive-in theater. He had suddenly remembered that Warren owned a movie theater in Alabama and he was thinking he might be invited to remain a few days and watch the movies and he was trying to think of any recent movies that might be playing when he came into a lethal hairpin curve and straightened it by leaving the road through a spinney of alders. The alders were whipping the car like triphammers and the boy was fighting the wheel desperately and wondering where the blacktop had gone. Great God, Warren said. The accountant had been asleep with her face against the glass and when she awoke she awoke clawing bothhanded at the shrubbery flailing the glass and she began to scream. The alders had thinned and he was going sixty miles an hour through a waving sedgefield. The woman was beating him about the head and shoulders with her fists and Warren was shouting, The brakes, the brakes.

The car lurched back onto the roadbed where the curve straightened and the boy remembered the brakes and applied them. The car came to a halt crossways in the road with the headlights outlining trees stark against the sky. The boy was shaking and he could feel icy sweat tracking down his ribcage. The motor idled smoothly and a disc jockey on the radio said, Now friends, I’d like to send this out to all the sick and the shut-ins, and a gospel quartet began to sing.

Now you’re catchin on, Warren said. This flat black thing, I think that’s what we’re supposed to be drivin on. These woods and shit, I believe I’d just try to stay out of them as much as I could.

We turned over in the woods three or four times and I’m alive, the woman said in an awed voice.

Fleming slid his hands under his thighs to halt their shaking. We never turned over, he said.

The hell we didn’t, she said. You blackhearted little liar. You tried to kill us. We turned over three or four times in the bushes and I seen every bit of it through the glass. I’ve wet all over myself and I ain’t ridin with you crazy son of a bitches one more foot.

Warren got out and yanked the back door open. The woman sat there a moment then she climbed out into the roadbed. Warren climbed
into the back seat and kicked out a hail of clothing and purses and empty whiskey bottles that rattled hollowly on the macadam. He got out and climbed back into the front seat. Let’s roll, he said.

Fleming backed the car onto the shoulder of the road and straightened the wheels and drove cautiously away. He looked once in the rearview mirror but all was darkness where the taillights faded out and he couldn’t see Hazel. He resolved to attend to his driving and when the speedometer hovered at forty-five he eased up on the gas. Warren settled himself against the seat and closed his eyes but he did not sleep. He seemed to be sobering up.