Provinces of Night (34 page)

How long do we have to wait?

I have no idea.

Life with you is so interesting. Is this the way you always meet girls?

Look, he said. I’d like to tell you I’m sorry for all this, but if I did I’d be lying. I am sorry that you’re having to walk, and I’m sorry you won’t ever go with me again. But I’d rather be here with you, with all that blacktop in front of us, than what I’d be doing at home.

What would you be doing?

I don’t know. Reading, sleeping. Nothing. Listening to my cells break down and die. What would you?

Listening to the radio probably. There’s this radio station in Nashville, WLAC. Nights they don’t play anything but blues. Old blues, songs you never heard of. Songs by Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson. You ever listen to it?

My grandpa gave me some records he made a long time ago. He said whoever labeled the records thought he was a colored blues singer. They say Race Records on them.

What were the songs?

One I remember was
James Alley Blues.
One named
Sugar Baby.
I wish you could hear him play and sing. He sounds … he just sounds strange. Like nothing I ever heard on the radio.

Maybe I can hear him sometime. Can you not play the records?

I don’t have a record player.

I do. Bring them the next time you come.

By the time we get to your house you probably won’t allow a next time, he said.

It seemed a long wait. They fell silent and after a time he could feel her steady breathing against his throat and when he looked at her her eyes were closed and she was asleep. When the car returned it lingered only long enough for a few drunken threats then it left again. He shook her gently awake. She awoke reluctantly, as if into a world she wanted no part of.

I think they’re gone.

She was rubbing her eyes. Oh God. Do we have to? I was dreaming I was in the swing on the front porch.

We could just stay here. Set up housekeeping here by the river. Move us in a bed and a cookstove.

Trust a man not to forget a bed. Or a stove. Food and sex, that about covers it, don’t it?

After a while she rose and reached an arm to pull him up. If another car comes we get off the road, right?

We get off the road immediately.

It was after four o’clock when they reeled drunkenly up onto the front porch. Somewhere a cock crowed mockingly. She turned at the door and kissed him. Goodnight, Fleming.

Goodnight hell, he said. What am I supposed to do? I’m looking for a place to lie down.

Well you can’t sleep here. Mama wouldn’t let me have a boy here all night.

The night’s about shot, he said. She’s probably passed out anyway.

She opened the door. Wait here, she whispered. She crossed the room quietly, disappeared through the bedroom door. The house seemed full of the woman’s breathing and he was already sitting on the couch pulling off his shoes when she returned.

You have to be out of here before Mama wakes up, she whispered.

All right. He tried to pull her onto the couch with him but she came reluctantly and only for a moment. She kissed him and when she pulled away he was too tired to make more than a token protest. She’s asleep, he said.

She gave him a sharp annoyed look. Let’s save something, all right?

Save it for when?

For sometime I’m not dead on my blistered feet, she said. Just be gone when she wakes up. She wakes up mean sometimes.

He covered the couch with the blanket she brought and turned out the light. He tried to go to sleep but the couch exuded the sour reek of years of dried vomit and finally he got up and made a pallet on the floor. He kept thinking that after he rested a minute he might crawl into Raven Lee’s room and talk her into letting him into her bed but he was too tired and he guessed she was already asleep. He was still thinking about it when he drifted into sleep and when he slept he dreamed that he had in fact been welcomed into her bed. She had grasped him with waiting arms and clasped him into her and he was approaching a moment almost apocalyptic in its intensity when the broom slammed into him the first time.

He leapt up wildeyed and disoriented. The room was full of daylight and Mother was trying to kill him with a broom, screaming at him all the while. And then just lay up and sleep in my own Goddamned house, she screamed. The broom caught him a solid blow alongside the head.

Hellfire, Fleming said. He wrestled this mad harridan for the broom and threw it against the wall and made for the door. She recovered the broom and came through the doorway swinging it and he retreated off the porch into the yard.

And don’t come back, she yelled at him. She threw the broom at him then went back in and slammed the door. He stood in the dewey grass a time wishing he’d slept with his shoes on. Then the door opened partway and a shoe came sailing into the yard. Another. When the door slammed again he picked them up but he waited until he was safely into the street to put them on.

O
UT OF ALL
the infinite destinations the night held Boyd had just the sound of music he was moving toward and he had been following it for some time. It waxed and waned and at times ceased entirely and he’d thought at first it was just folks playing music, maybe grouped on a porch somewhere, but as he drew nearer he could sometimes hear brass instruments and a female chorus singing harmony and once even an entire orchestra playing big band swing,
In the Mood
, and the idea of all these phantasmagoric folk crowded onto someone’s porch and jostling for room made him grin wryly and he judged it a roadhouse jukebox.

He was following a road that wound through heavy timber, dark trunks like inkstains seeping down a page, velvet pine foliage against the sky. After a while a three-quarter moon eased up over the treeline and the dusty road went white as milk, Rorshach patches of grass
bleeding through the white dust that rose and subsided with Boyd’s footfalls.

When the honkytonk came first into view he could see it through the trees, or the light from it, a bright outside light mounted on a utility pole. He climbed an embankment and cut through thinning scrub pine and came out in a graveled parking lot.

The building was set back from the road on earth so bare it looked bulldozed. It was a white stucco building in a mock Spanish style and blue neon script read
WRIGHT’S PLACE.
Everything looked stark and bare in the light from the highwattage bulb and even the air was bluelooking and cold. The door to the honkytonk was closed but yellow light spilled out the windows and the chimney smoked and music drifted out like something dangerous seeping from an imperfect container.

Boyd squatted on his heels and studied the dozen or so cars on the parking lot. He fished a cigarette pack from a shirt pocket and felt it between thumb and forefinger to ascertain the number of smokes left: two. He tilted one out and lit it and just squatted, halfhidden by the pines, studying the cars. After a few minutes he rose and walked among them, still dragging deeply on the cigarette, studying the license plates.

A green Hudson Hornet bore a Tennessee license plate. The doors were locked and the windows frosted over and even leaning and peering in he could make out nothing inside. He turned and glanced at the warm yellow light from the honkytonk and fingered the change in his pocket but after a moment he climbed onto the turtledeck of the Hudson and lay back against the windshield and closed his eyes. He could hear the wind worrying the tree branches, a paper cup scuttling across the parking lot. When the cigarette burned his fingers he tossed it away.

The sound of a door closing opened his eyes but it was only a man and woman coming out of the roadhouse door. He could hear the man’s voice, but not what he said, he could hear the woman’s soft laughter. They moved hand in hand around the darker side of the building and embraced and parted and eased along the building until shadows took them save the flash of the woman’s thighs when she raised her dress then the man’s leaning torso blotted even that. In the world but not of it, Boyd watched them couple with a bemused disinterest.

He was weary and he dozed offa time or two but it was so cold he’d shake himself awake and the icy metal was freezing him through his thin clothes and finally he rose and slid off the car and stamped about just to get his blood circulating. Goddamn a bunch of Missouri winter, he said aloud. When the hell’s closin time around here? He noticed the man and woman had gone back inside and he guessed it was too cold even for that.

He was on the trunklid again when the doors of the honkytonk opened and folks strung out toward the cars. A fat man in a gray gabardine suit came weaving his way toward the Hudson. When he saw Boyd he stopped and gaped at him.

That’s my automobile you’re sitting on, he said.

I was sort of hoping it was, Boyd said.

How about sliding your ass off it, the man said. That’s a new car and I paid two hundred dollars extra for that paint job.

Boyd slid off it. I need a ride to Tennessee, he said. I got sick folks there.

I’m not going to Tennessee, the man said.

You’re wearin Tennessee plates.

They let me run them in other states, the man said dryly. They work coming or going. I’m out of Nashville on my way to Indiana. I’m a traveling salesman.

What do you sell?

The man studied Boyd with sour amusement. Was you fixing to buy some of it? he asked.

I might.

I’m in women’s undergarments.

Boyd allowed himself a slight smile. I don’t know if I’d be advertisin that around, he said.

The drunk man had a thick head of wavy black hair brushed up in a pompadour and he kept smoothing a hand across it as if he’d feel was it combed right.

You hear the one about the dumb country boy ordered him a girl out of the Sears and Roebuck catalog?

No, Boyd said.

When it come all it was was this brassiere and a pair of stepins. The
old boy just raised holy hell. Wrote them a letter threatening to sue. All I got was the harness, he said. Where’s the rest of her at?

Boyd grinned a tight mirthless grin and looked away across the trees. They were just a jagged ironlooking blur rising from the pale gravel. The cars were gone now save one other. The moon was well up now and the parking lot looked purposeless and desolate.

The fat man had his car keys out. He came around to the driver’s side of the Hudson. I’m sorry you got sick folks but I’m not going to Tennessee, he said. I wouldn’t go to Tennessee on a bet. I wouldn’t go to Tennessee if you deeded the son of a bitch to me.

All at once he got a peculiar look on his face. His eyes suddenly focused as if he was trying to see something very far away. Then he leaned toward the car and rested his forehead on the cold fender. Sick, he said. The car keys dangled from his right hand. He was wearing shiny wingtip shoes with little ventilating holes in them and abruptly he jerked convulsively and vomited on them. Arghh, he said. Oh, Jesus, I’m sick. He retched. A shudder ran across the tight gabardine fabric of the jacket.

Boyd hit him as hard as he could behind the left ear and the man’s head rebounded and bonged the fender and he slid silent and slack onto the ground and halfturned then lay with his head in the gravel. Blood black as ink crept out of the fat man’s nose and down his cheek.

Boyd kicked the car keys out of the puke and picked them up gingerly. Then he leaned and wiped them on the salesman’s suit. As he was doing this he heard a door close and looked around to see and there was a man coming out of the darkened roadhouse. The man turned and locked the door. He’d started toward the remaining car when he glanced toward the Hudson then he paused and came on toward Boyd.

Come on, Boyd thought to himself. Nose in, why don’t you? But he knew the man would have either a gun or a slapstick and he was wondering which and what pocket it would be in. What’s the trouble here, he thought.

What’s the trouble here? the man asked.

I believe you’ve overloaded him a little, Boyd said easily. He was all right then it looked like it hit him all at once. He took drunk and puked a while and then I reckon he just laid down to think things over.

It looks like his nose is bleedin, the man said.

He fell against the car, Boyd said. He’s all right.

Where do you figure in this? I don’t remember seein you inside.

I’m his cousin, Boyd said. His wife sent me to see about him.

Looks like she sent you a little late, the man said. Can you get cousin home?

Yeah. He done give me his car keys. Reckon you could help me get him laid out in the back there?

When that was done the man turned and went to his own car. He cranked it then Boyd started the Hudson. The cold motor turned over a few times and caught, set idling smoothly. Boyd backed around and followed the car out of the parking lot, red taillights winking through the exhaust. He drove onto the road, easing off the accelerator and letting the taillights pull farther ahead. When they vanished around a curve he slowed the car to a crawl, widening the distance, and when he judged it safe he pulled the Hudson onto the shoulder of the road, stopped and got out. He opened the back door. Last stop, he said. Everybody out, end of the line, everybody off the bus.

He grasped the fat man’s feet and heaved. A shoe came off and Boyd slung it away. Goddamn you’re heavy, he said. The man came sliding feetfirst across the seat and tilted and rolled slackly onto the road. Boyd took a leg beneath each arm and dragged him off the road into a thin stand of sassafras and stopped and stood breathing hard. Then he went through the salesman’s pockets. He took his cigarettes and a Zippo lighter with the likeness of a naked woman on it and a wallet and a thin sheaf of bills from his right front pocket. He went through the wallet and removed the money without counting it and dropped the wallet onto the fat man’s chest.

He stood looking down at the sleeping man. He lit one of the cigarettes with the Zippo lighter. The fat man was lying with his head in a bed of fistsize rocks and after a time Boyd leaned and worked the coat off the man, struggling to pull the tight sleeves off his arms. He rolled the coat into a pillow and grasped the fat man by the pompadour to raise his head. When he did the hair came away in his hands and Boyd stood staring for a moment at the crazylooking thing. It looked like a great hairy spider his hand was disappearing into. He shook the thing off his hand then wiped the hand on his jeans. Goddamn, he said. Then he
raised the man’s head and worked the coat under it. Looks like women’s undergarments ain’t the only thing you’re in, he told the fat man.

 

H
ER HAIR WAS
drawn thinly back on either side of her face, the line of scalp that showed where it was parted like old parchment. The face itself dark and corrugated as an old walnut kicked out of the leaves in the woods. Her eyes were near lashless and murky, like water that had once been clear and clean clotting up with seaweed and slime. Already the cataracts that would blind her created shifting islands of darkness, areas of whatever she was looking at that had simply been negated, did not exist anymore.

Have you not got anything to do that’s better than settin and talkin to a old woman?

I guess not, Fleming said. Here I am doing it.

Well. You’re in a sorry shape then. Leastways as long as you’re here maybe you’ll tell me the truth about somethin. You’re not much of a liar are you?

I never was much good at it.

Sometimes I believe E.F.’s come back here, she said. You don’t know anything about that, do you?

He’d been lying back with his eyes closed and his head against the metal of the lounge chair. Now he opened his eyes, saw to the composure of his face. What makes you say that?

I’ve been hearin banjo music sometimes in the evenins, she said. Long about dark. You ain’t took up banjo playin, have you?

No.

Brady can barely play a radio so I know it’s not him. Anyway he was settin right where you are one night when we heard it, so it couldn’t be Brady. You know he looked me right in the eye and swore up and down he never heard it? Said my mind’s gettin bad.

In fact Brady had told the boy the same thing, that the old woman was getting feebleminded, that time had shifted around her so that she didn’t know if something happened fifty years ago or yesterday. That she might arise in the middle of the night and cook breakfast, running now
on some time inside her head that was utterly dismissive of clocks and calendars. That she might then turn around and cook the identical meal again.

He said he had arisen at one o’clock in the morning to go to the bathroom and discovered the old woman taking a pan of biscuits out of the oven, turning to break eggs into a bowl for scrambling.

Fleming had always found information related to him by Brady chancy at best, it required a certain amount of consideration. Everything had to be factored in, the look on his face as he told you, the intensity of his voice, what he had to gain or lose in the telling. After all this had been considered you could arrive at some approximation of the truth. But when he’d told this what had been on his face and in his voice was a kind of quiet horror, and Fleming expected all or most of it was the truth.

Now she turned and studied his face intently. What about you? Do you think I’m goin crazy, or do you think I heard a banjo?

He thought about it a time. I’d say if you thought you heard a banjo you probably did, he said.

Anyway I knowed that song, she said, and fell silent, remembering not just the tune but the pattern of the fingers on the strings, the words to it floating into her head though there had been no words with the melody that came drifting across the field, the words had just risen unbidden from memory:
Got no use for a red rockin chair, I got no sugar baby now …

It was one of E.F.’s songs and I’ve heard it a thousand times, she said. Do you know anything about this?

He sat for a time thinking about conflicting loyalties. You keep your mouth shut about this, Brady had told him. What’s done is done, and there ain’t no changin it. She’s better off thinkin he’s dead, or whatever it is she does think. She’s hardly ever out of the house and there’s no need for her to know he’s even in this part of the country.