Provinces of Night (2 page)

Such town as there was and what there was of it asleep. He trudged through a high-class section of town, into a neighborhood where watchdogs from the dark porches they watched refused even to acknowledge his passage, as if he’d achieved some measure of invisibility. Or was utterly alien to their frame of reference, emissary from some race set apart. He put his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders in the wet coat and coming into what appeared to be the business section of town looked for something that might be open. A cab stand, a bus station, an allnight diner. The wet black sidewalks gleamed where the streetlamps pooled and particolored neon pulsed in the streets like a gaudy heartbeat.

Tires sloughed softly on wet macadam. An engine slowed, almost pacing him, the engine idled down so that he could hear the lick the full-race cam was hitting, and he thought
cop
without even turning to look. A soft breeze had risen in these western flatlands and in the street-lamp’s globe of yellow, rain swung slantwise in a silver spray.

Hey.

Boyd turned. A blue and white cruiser was creeping along, driver’s side window down, slab of beefy red face peering out. Jowly as a bulldog. Hard cop’s eyes, like shards of agate splintered off by the blow of a hammer.

Can I help you?

Not in any way I can think of, Boyd said.

Where are you going? Boyd had increased his pace but the cruiser compensated to match him, the cop’s face intent as if he’d commit him to memory should he be called upon to identify this visage from a witness stand or as if he’d compare it to some handbill seen long ago on a post office wall.

Somewheres it’s dry, Boyd said. Am I breaking one of your laws or something?

None that I know of. It’s just that it’s three o’clock in the morning and most folks is in bed asleep. I seen you walking and thought you might have troubles of some kind. Be looking for a doctor or something.

I don’t reckon I need one, Boyd said. He took a deep breath, held it, forced himself to contain his anger. I was visitin some folks out by the levee, he said. Got caught out in the storm and sheltered under a bridge back yonder. I live east of here, in Lewis County, and I figured there might be a Greyhound station here.

There ain’t no bus station as such. They sell tickets out of the Bob-White Cafe and the bus stops there for pickups. But not till seven thirty in the morning.

And there ain’t nothing else open?

There may be somebody hangin around the cab stand. Get in, I’ll drop you off.

Boyd knew the difference between an order and an invitation. He got in. He sat clasping the door handle. Thinks I’ll steal his fuckin town,
Boyd thought with sour amusement. As if they had anything he wanted. The cruiser eased through the sleeping streets, Boyd’s eyes cataloging a five-and-dime, a jewelry store, the aforementioned Bob-White Cafe. Closed, closed, closed, please call again. The entire town of Tiptonville, Tennessee, posted off-limits this April morning in 1952. If he pulls up in front of city hall he’s goin to be one surprised son of a bitch, Boyd thought. He won’t know what hit him.

The cop didn’t speak again. He stopped in front of a small rundown storefront where a sign said
TAXI
and Boyd knew he was meant to get out. He did. He closed the door and the cruiser eased away. The plate-glass front of the cab stand was cracked in myriad fissures mended with duct tape and the entire window bulged slightly outward as if barely containing some internal force. There was a padlock through the hasp on the peeling green door but a cab parked at the curb before it and Boyd could see a pair of shoe soles propped against the driver’s side window.

When Boyd rapped with a knuckle on the glass the shoes moved and a man raised up in the front seat and rolled a bleary eye up at him. The man wiped a hand across his face as if he’d erase sleep and cranked down the glass.

You needin a ride?

You know where a man might buy a drink of whiskey this time of night?

I might. Get on in here, no, get up here in the front with me. It’s fell a flood ain’t it? Looks like it fell a good bit of it on you.

I got caught out in it, Boyd said, getting in and pulling the door closed. How far is it to this bootlegger’s?

It ain’t never far to a bootlegger, the driver said, cranking the engine and pulling out into the street. Won’t be no more than a fifty-cent run.

They drove out past the railroad tracks. A string of boxcars and flat-cars stacked with crossties was pulled onto a siding and Boyd turned and watched them out of sight. They rode on past poultry houses with rows of lighted windows that looked long as freight trains and past cotton-fields wet and blacklooking in the headlights and across a rickety bridge that popped and snapped ominously under the cab’s passage and to a bricksiding house in a treeless earth yard.

He don’t sell nothin but halfpint bottles, the cabby said. I think it’s a dollar and a half for a halfpint.

Boyd walked toward the porch beneath a bare lightbulb suspended from a wire that seemed to descend out of the dark heavens themselves. When he knocked a tiny door within the door opened immediately as if they’d had word here of his coming and a moleshaped man stood regarding him benignly from among his stacked cases of bottles.

Let me have two halfpints of whiskey.

I ain’t got nothing but peach brandy left, the man said. I sold a sight in the world of whiskey tonight. Everybody in this part of the country must of decided to get drunk.

Just let me have whatever you got then.

When he’d paid for the brandy and paid the cabdriver Boyd had one lone dollar left and this he folded and slid carefully into the watch pocket of his jeans. In the cab he cracked one of the bottles and drank and offered it to the cabdriver but the cabby waved it away.

Lord no. I ever started drinking when I was behind the wheel I’d likely drive clean off to Asia or somewhere. I can’t be trusted drinkin and drivin an automobile.

Shit ain’t worth drinkin anyhow. Kind of sickly sweet. I bet enough of this stuff’d give a man a hell of a hangover.

I’ll tell you what it’ll give you in Lake County, the cabdriver said. A few days in the crossbar hotel. Where do you want to go? They’ll vag you in this town, you ain’t got a pocketful of money.

About two hundred and fifty miles from here, Boyd said. I guess that’s more than a fifty-cent run, ain’t it. How often they run that train out?

Ever day. Them flatcars of ties leaves some time in the mornin headed towards Jackson. You goin to have to get somewheres until then.

Let me out at the railroad tracks then.

 

H
IS MOTHER
had gone in the night with no word of her intent though the signs were there if you cared to read them. In his mind Fleming could see her covert departure. Perhaps carrying her shoes, tiptoeing toward the door past the moonlit windows, light to dark, light to
dark until she vanished. Until the night negated her, made her transparent as the shade in some old grandmother’s ghost story, sucked her down where the light goes when you lean and blow out a candle.

She had long been a silent woman, in her early thirties but old before her time, life passing her by, the world going its way without her. She had grown stingy with words, whole days spent in sullen silence, as if her supply of words was being exhausted and she must parcel them out one by one.

He had watched the sallow mask she wore for a face and wondered what went on behind it. A year ago he came upon her burning a box of his books, feeding them one by one to the wood heater. They struggled for a moment over the book she was proffering to the fire. He wrested the box away from her and she threw the book she was holding and slammed him hard in the side of the head. You dreamyeyed little fool, she spat at him, expressing once and for all her contempt for the written word, those who would read it and those who would attempt to transcribe it in spiralbound notebooks.

The night she vanished Boyd had shaken him awake, holding aloft the kerosene lamp, something strange in his face that was echoed in his voice when he spoke.

Where’s your mama?

Fleming didn’t know anything to say to this. He got up and followed Boyd into the front room. Boyd was searching all about the room though there was no place for her to be. He seemed in the throes of a grief so grotesque it was almost comic, and Fleming watched him with a dispassionate emotion approaching contempt.

If this don’t beat any damn thing I ever seen, Boyd said.

The boy went back to bed. After a while he heard the door close when Boyd went out and then close again when he came back in. He waited for the sound of the bedsprings creaking when Boyd went back to bed but he never heard it. At length he turned his face to the wall and went to sleep.

 

B
OYD WAS
half asleep when the cars were coupled to the engine, a loud metallic shunting and a series of jolts he could feel in his teeth. He
raised up from the straw he’d been lying in when the cars began to move, the dark landscape of light and shadow sliding past the open door. He drank from the opened bottle and put it back inside his shirt with its brother where he could feel it cold and smooth against his belly. He took out his tobacco and began to build a cigarette, watching past the flare of the match sleeping houses streaking past like islands afloat in the moving sea of night, the train’s speed increasing, so that he was caught in a rising tide of exhilaration at its sheer movement.

I wouldn’t mind one of them smokes, a voice said.

Boyd leapt involuntarily at the sound; he hadn’t known there was anybody else in the world. At length he could make out a shape, a darker shadow among other shadows.

I ain’t goin to bring it to you.

The shadow stirred, and Boyd could smell the man, a rank sour compound of perspiration, whiskey. He reached the tobacco across when the man hunkered before him, the man separating out a paper and sifting tobacco into it, light slant across his bearded jaw, long lank strawcolored hair that fell like a shadow across his eyes.

I had some money I’d buy a sack of my own. You ain’t got a quarter you’d let a man have have you?

All I got is a dollar bill and there ain’t no way of breakin it. If I had some change I’d give it to you.

That dollar’d work, the man said. His face was wolfish in the orange flare of the match, somehow unreal through the exhaled smoke, not like a man but the malevolent embodiment of one, just another obstacle the angry fates had stood in Boyd’s path.

Boyd was gauging the man’s size and he didn’t reply. He was confident of his own size and strength, once when he’d worked at the tie yards he’d on a bet shouldered and walked off with a seven-by-nine crosstie on each shoulder. He could feel the tensing muscles of his thighs, the rockhard biceps, and he drew comfort from them. Boyd was as fastidious in his personal habits as circumstances permitted and he thought, if I can get past the smell of him I’ll be all right.

How about a little drink of that whiskey?

I ain’t got no whiskey.

The hell you don’t. If there’s one thing I ain’t never mistook about
it’s the sound of a whiskey bottle lid bein screwed off. There ain’t nothin else in the world sounds like it.

Why don’t you just get away and leave me the hell alone? I ain’t botherin you.

Let’s have that dollar you been braggin about.

Boyd shoved him hard backward but the man seemed to have been expecting it and when he came up he was opening a hawkbill knife that just appeared from nowhere. Boyd crouched and waited for the thrust of the knife and when it came he grasped the arm as hard as he could and broke it across his knee. The knife spun away. As he stooped to pick it up the man gave a cry of animal rage and butted him so hard he went backpedaling away until his feet ran out of surface and he was falling, a nightmarish vision of the door receding not only upward but jerked hard to the right, the wheels clocking and gears gnashing like hell’s jaws and abruptly he was rolling knees over head down a stony slope, pain that was liquid fire flaring in his sides and strange lights flickering behind his eyelids. He fetched up at the bottom of the slope sitting on his haunches and watching the vanishing train with a stunned disbelief.