Provinces of Night (25 page)

I guess you know you’ve got blood all over the tail of that dress, Mrs. Halfacre said. It won’t come out. I reckon you think dresses like that are just give away.

The girl didn’t even reply.

Fleming was looking at Albright with a wary disgust, already dreading the long ride home. Something had changed during his absence, the very atmosphere had altered. Perhaps some shift in the magnetic field. Perhaps she’d asked Albright for more money, the twenty Fleming had given him was all he had. Spending the night here no longer seemed an option to be considered.

You know who he is, don’t you? the woman suddenly asked.

A curl like a comma, like a question mark, had fallen over Raven Lee’s eyes. She raked it away with a hand. Of course I know who he is.

He’s a Bloodworth and I won’t have one in the house after the way that cousin of his done.

What’s this about? Fleming asked.

Never you mind what it’s about, Mrs. Halfacre said.

Don’t pay her any mind, the girl said. She’s drunk.

Fleming laid a hand gently on the girl’s back. He could feel the bone knobs of her vertebrae through the thin cloth of her dress. Then he dropped the hand and set the wine down and arose.

It’s time to go, he said.

Albright turned. He laid the guitar in Mrs. Halfacre’s lap. She jerked it up and tossed it into a corner. What? Albright asked.

It’s time to go.

It’s early yet.

It’s time to go.

They went out into the yard. Moonlight through the branches made the yard black and silver, light and shadow, the clotted ivy was black as jet.

You’re drunk as a dog, Fleming said. Drunker than a dog. You’ll kill us both before we get to the city limits. I’d better drive and I don’t trust my driving much more than I do yours.

I can drive, Albright said. He clasped Fleming’s shoulder. I can drive better dog drunk than you can cold sober. Better asleep than you can awake. Trust me.

Raven Lee had followed them out. You better make him drive slow, she said.

Make him? You can’t make him anything. That’s like making the sun wait up because you need a few more minutes of daylight.

Albright was already in the car. The engine cranked, set idling. Albright was mopping condensation off the inside of the windshield with a wadded shirt.

Well, Raven Lee said. It was certainly interesting drinking a Coke with you. Thanks for the magazine. Do you reckon you’ll ever make it back down here?

I was just going to ask you about that. How about going to the show with me next weekend?

She nodded her head toward the house. You heard her opinion of Bloodworths.

I also heard you say you don’t tell her how to live her life and she don’t tell you how to live yours.

Well. She smiled. I guess you’ve got me there. You could try and see.

It’s a long way down here just to try and see.

Don’t you think I’m worth it?

Yes. I know you’re worth it. I’ll try and see.

Have you got a car?

Of course I’ve got a car, he said, wondering where he’d get one. But such minor details could be worked out later.

She suddenly placed both hands on his forearm as if she’d use it for leverage to raise herself higher and tiptoed and kissed him on the mouth. He turned to hold her but she’d pulled away and she was already going up the walk toward the house.

A mile or so out of Clifton Albright pulled onto the shoulder of the road. Maybe you’d better do this, he said. The road keeps fadin in and out like. I don’t know what’s the matter with it.

Fleming got out and came around and slid under the wheel. Albright had scooted over and was resting his face against the glass.

I might as well, Fleming said. If I’m goin to get killed I may as well have some control over it.

What would it matter if you got killed, Albright said. You was kissed on the mouth by Raven Lee Halfacre. What in the world did you do to her to make her do that?

Fleming didn’t reply. After a while he looked over and Albright was asleep with his head against the window. He drove on. The thought of her hands on his forearm as she’d tiptoed to kiss his mouth lessened the ache in his thigh, straightened the curves in the road toward Ackerman’s Field. The weight of her head on his shoulder as he watched the fireflies.

There was something oddly restful about the fireflies. He couldn’t put his finger on it but he drew comfort from it anyway. The way they’d seemed not separate entities but a single being, a moving river of light that flowed above the dark water like its negative image and attained a transient and fragile dominion over the provinces of night.

I
N DETROIT
Boyd had worked for a time in a steel mill, stoking furnaces in an atmosphere so charged with fire and noise and molten metal he seemed constantly to toil in the eye of an electrical storm, a place if not hell then certainly the room across the hall from it, a foundry that he felt might be more aptly occupied by scaleyskinned demons or other of the devil’s toadies. Then he got a job in a factory loading huge rolls of corrugated cardboard onto a machine that sucked the cardboard off the roll into itself and spat it out in cardboard boxes.

He was a man much to himself. He asked no questions, and in turn was asked few himself. He seemed to be descending into a well of silence so deep the hammering of machinery was as impotent to defray it as the discordant jangling jukeboxes that furnished the hillbilly bars he haunted at night. He’d eat his meager supper and bathe and put on clean clothes that were just like the clothes he’d taken off except laundered
and go into the nighttime bars where other hillbillies crossed and re-crossed in tangents of random violence as if they were all looking for something they’d lost.

These folk from Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri did not seem to melt into the common culture of the city. They seemed to have changed only in the matter of geography. They were who they were. Drop them into a beaker of acid and they would list down and rest unchanged on the bottom, unassimilated, unrepentant, unreconstructed. All these folk seemed to have more past than future and it was a common past of failure and loss and they seemed to recognize each other on sight as Masons were told to do.

So he never doubted that he would find them. The peddler was much given to drink and Boyd had only to haunt the bars in the hillbilly section of Detroit. Trash always settles to the bottom, he had told himself, drifting downward himself. The wonder was not that he found them, but that it took so long. They must have been moving through the gaudy neon half a beat out of sync, coming when he was going, arriving when he’d just left.

He saw them once crossing the street where Delancey intersected 114th. He saw them first from the back, but he knew them instantly, as if something had been encoded into him so that he would have known them from the ghost of a reflected gesture, from a scuffmark on the sidewalk. Boyd’s wife had said something and the man had turned to hear. Something grinning and obsequious in his manner gave Boyd a moment of unease, perhaps he was killing the wrong half of this couple. The peddler seemed deferential and indecisive. Yet something ran through Boyd tangible as a seismic tremor, he felt an actual altering of his heartbeat, a change in the speed of the blood coursing through his body.

He was stopped from killing the peddler not by any compunction at violence or even by the fear of getting caught in so public a place under the eyes of scores of witnesses but by the sheer and abrupt realization that it would be the end of something. It was less a jumping off place than a denouement. He had not thought beyond it. He did not know what came next. He was at the point on an ancient map beyond which the old cartographers had drawn dragons.

He went back to his room at the boarding house and lay on his bed
atop the covers with all his clothes on. He lay on the sweaty sheets with arms outflung in an attitude of crucifixion. He looked like a man who had fallen from an enormous height. There was a ceiling fan turning above him and he lay watching light play on the revolving blade. His life had honed itself down to a finite number of revolutions of a metal blade through dead air.

They came into a bar on Twenty-sixth Street. He watched them cross the room to a table near the back. The man came to the bar to order drinks. He stood at Boyd’s elbow unbeknownst as he did it. Like a man asking the Reaper if the seat next to him was taken. He ordered Boyd’s wife a whiskey sour. She used to be down on drinking but he guessed not so much anymore. He pondered how all good resolve is sanded away by the attrition of time and circumstance. The man paid for the drinks and left the bar. Boyd finished his bourbon and water and set the glass back. He ordered another. He drank it slowly, tasting the smooth whiskey on the back of his tongue. When he set the glass back empty he raked his change off the bar and pocketed it.

He was halfway across the room when the woman saw him. She sprang up, her chair fell behind her unnoticed. She had the peddler by the arm saying something harsh and peremptory to him. Instead of running the peddler jerked up the woman’s purse, and for a surreal instant Boyd thought that was funny; grabbing up a purse ought to be the last thing you’d do when someone was bearing down upon you with a hawkbill knife. But the man had opened the purse and was dumping its contents on the table. Coins went cartwheeling, lipsticks and bottles rolled off the table. A small chromeplated automatic pistol tilted onto the black Formica.

When the woman slapped the pistol away there was a moment when things could have gone either way. But Boyd was upon him now, there had been too many nights of absolute solitude, things had just gone too far, too far. The knife sank itself so deeply into the peddler’s viscera he thought his fist would go too, he jerked the knife upward with such force it wedged itself in the breastbone.

He rocked the knife free and turned and fled in what appeared one smooth motion, a movement so graceful it might have been rehearsed, choreographed. He came out on the street and then into it a dead run,
horns blowing and tires squalling and then he was crossing on the hoods and trunks of automobiles, leaping from one to the other, the outraged faces behind the windshields like the appalled faces beyond footlights of a stage where a play has gone horribly wrong.

He leapt onto the sidewalk still holding the knife and without slackening his speed. He went down a narrow alley between buildings that rose on either side like the limestone bluffs rising from the banks of Grinders Creek where he’d been raised, and the concrete he ran full tilt on, arms pumping, seemed to be a creekbed. He dreamed a fan of water that rose before him, that diminished behind his churning feet. He could see light at the canyon’s mouth, pale green diffused light like a May sun in willows, and he ran on toward it.

 

O
N AN EARLY
Sunday morning Fleming left the street and went up a driveway toward a white stucco house set back in a grove of pecan trees. The house was flatroofed and low and the windows had ornate shutters of wrought iron painted black that made the windows look barred when they were closed. He went up wide concrete steps to a patio where from a chaise lounge a great marmalade cat lying in an oblique square of yellow sunlight watched him with disinterested and insolent eyes.

He opened a storm door constructed of the same iron as the shutters and knocked on a dark wooden door. After a while it opened and an old man stood regarding him with a friendly quizzical expression. He came onto the patio and closed the door behind him.

Could I help you this morning, young man?

I’m Fleming Bloodworth, Mr. Marbet.

Ah. Boyd’s son.

Yes sir. We live down on the creek on that place you own.

Marbet took off his glasses and began wiping the lenses on a handkerchief he took from his jacket pocket. He seemed dressed for church. His cheeks were ruddy and shiny from being freshly shaven and he was wearing a white shirt and a necktie. The tie was maroon silk figured with tiny regal lions rampant across it.

How is Boyd getting along these days?

I don’t really know. He’s up north, working up there making cars or something.

Well. It’s a shame when a man has to leave his home to find a way of making a living. Is there something I could do for you? Would you come in and have a cup of coffee with us?

No, thank you. I just wanted to ask you something. I was back toward the river the other day talking to a man cutting timber and he was telling me something about the TVA planning to build a lake back in there.

Oh yes. They plan to build a dam on the river, they tell me for flood control. It’s going to be a huge lake, enormous. Most everything not underwater they’ll use for a recreation area. Camping, and so forth.

Will it affect your property down there?

It’s not going to be my property much longer, Marbet said wryly. As soon as we come to terms it’ll all belong to the TVA. No papers have been signed, but it’s just a matter of time. The way it was put to me, it’s not something I have a choice in. Not my decision at all. If I don’t sell they’ll just pay me what they consider a fair market price and take it.

Can they do that?

Oh yes. Certainly. They’ve done it a lot in the past, and I expect they’ll do it a lot more in the future.

Where does it come to?

Where does what come to?

The land they’re taking, or buying up. My grandmother lives back across the ridge there and I was wondering if she would be affected.

Oh, I know that place well. No. It’s a long way back through those woods. As I understand it, the TVA line will be on my property somewhere about that old crossroads. Do you know that place?

Yes.

I should have driven down there and had a talk with you, but to tell the truth I had forgotten about that house even being there. I never charged Boyd any rent, in all honesty I never considered that house worth renting. I have so much to look after, and that place just slipped my mind.

Well. I guess I’ll get on, then.

You’ve probably got a few months, but I’d certainly be making other arrangements. That’s all going to be underwater. If you need a place to live come see me. I’ve got a farm down there on Cane Creek I could use another cropper on. There’s an empty tenant house on it, and we’ll find something for you to do.

Well, I’ll think about it.

You’re well spoken and you look as if you’d make me a good man. Don’t think too long, I’ve got people asking about houses all the time.

All right, Fleming said. He turned to go.

We’d be glad to have you out at the church this morning, Marbet called.

Fleming raised a hand and went on.

 

T
HE DOG DAY HEAT
held into the tag end of August, and there were days when they’d just head out in the communal taxicab with no destination in mind save sufficient speed to engender a breeze through the rolled-down windows. Albright and Fleming would pick up the old man at the trailer, Bloodworth coming out wildeyed with the heat and fanning himself with the Stetson, reeling on his stiff leg like some casualty of the malevolent heat itself, a celluloid man left in the heat too long.

They might sit in the shade of itchy Mama’s front porch with others like them but not quite, old men who treated Bloodworth with the sort of deference they might accord exiled royalty or a man living under the edict of death. The old man holding one warming beer for hours and listening to the tales the old men told, telling some himself. Fleming and Albright sitting among these garrulous old sots like acolytes or apprentices, as if they were picking up the fine points of being old.

You need to let your chauffeur there take you deer huntin, E.E, Cater Hensley said.

Who’s that, young Albright here?

When they first started bringin deer into this part of the country Junior took it into his head he had to kill him one.

Hellfire, Albright said. I’ve heard this till I’m sick of it.

He just lived in the woods there for a while, Hensley went on. But he never did come up on one. Then he was drivin up Riverside one day and there was a eight-point buck standin right in a fencerow Junior got his rifle out and took a rest on the trunk and cut down on it. It never so much as blinked. He shot again. It didn’t even look around. Junior couldn’t figure how in the world he’d missed it. Clyde Tennison was with him and Clyde said it looked for all the world like that deer had heard how bad Junior wanted to kill one and was offerin itself up for a sacrifice. Clyde had done seen what it was but he said Junior shot up a whole box of 30-30 cartridges and that deer just wouldn’t fall. Junior kept sayin his sights was off. Shot off one of its horns and it never moved a muscle. Finally they walked out there to the fencerow and somebody had skinned one out for the meat and hung the head and hide over that fence. Clyde said that hide looked like it had been stood up before a firin squad.