Provinces of Night (35 page)

I guess that’s why you set the trailer in the back corner of the place, he had said, but this was so self-evident it did not even require an answer. It seemed to Fleming that it was the old woman’s business, hers and E.F.’s. It was not his, and if you came right down to it it wasn’t Brady’s, either. It went back further than either of them. He also didn’t like being
told to keep his mouth shut, and he liked even less being painted into a corner and having to tell the old woman a direct lie.

Grandpa bought a trailer, he finally said. Or sent the money and had Brady locate one and buy it. He had a stroke back in Little Rock, a mild one I reckon, it don’t seem to have impaired him much.

Where’s it at, this trailer? Back across that field somewheres? That’s where the music was comin from.

Back up past it towards the blacktop. Me and Brady set it up for him.

That’s the craziest thing I ever heard in my life, his grandmother said. If he had to live in a trailer why wasn’t it set up over here where the power and water is? That’s just about as crazy as you livin like a gypsy and sleepin wherever night catches up with you when you could have a warm bed ever night and a full plate three times a day. If sense was gunpowder ever one of you men put together wouldn’t have enough to load a round of birdshot. And folks goin around sayin I’m losin my mind.

Look, he said, this was not my deal, I was just helping Brady set it up, and I was ordered to keep my mouth shut. If you say anything to Brady he’ll wind up putting some kind of curse on me.

I’ll keep you out of it. I aim to have the straight of it, though, I may put a few curses of my own, I ain’t above it.

Well. I reckon I better get on. I guess I’ve done about all the damage I can do here for one day.

She looked at him fondly. You won’t never make much of a liar, she said. I can see right through you like lookin down into still water. I expect law and politics is goin to be out of your reach.

She was silent a time, and he had already turned to go when she said, What’s E.F. like these days?

I don’t know what he was like any other days. I don’t know what to tell you. He’s just an old man, has to go with a stick. Kind of easygoing, talks about music all the time.

He must’ve calmed down with age some. Easygoin is not a word anybody would put to E.F. back when I knowed him. You tell him I said come by here some day. I done some talkin once a long time ago when I should’ve been keepin my mouth shut.

He turned to go. She would have told him more but he didn’t want
to hear it. All these old troubles were burdensome and hard to carry, folks would load you down if you’d let them. He had plenty of troubles of his own, old and new, and he did not want to be further encumbered.

 

F
LEMING WITH
a sharp putty knife was scraping calcified bits of gasket off the heads while Albright cleaned the block. Albright had been drunk the night before and had given himself a tan with a bottle of suntan lotion called Mantan that was supposed to darken the skin chemically but had succeeded only in giving him a curiously piebald appearance. He’d tanned the palms of his hands, between his fingers, most of his face save round areas about the eyes which remained albino white and gave him the startled look of a raccoon.

You put me in mind of a spotted horse I had one time, the old man said. Come out of north Mississippi, I named him Cisco. His pattern of spots was laid out a whole lot similar to yours. Course I doubt he could have rebuilt a automobile engine.

I doubt if he could drive one just into the ground, either, Albright said. Just down to the ground and then into it. You’d think a man would know when to pull a car over to the side of the road and just cut the switch off.

Well, Fleming said, you said it needed overhauling anyway, and I’m helping you do it. Plus I bought that rebuild kit with the last of my typewriter money.

You couldn’t drive a typewriter to Clifton anyhow. Haul Miss Halfacre around on it.

That was my thinking exactly, Fleming said.

What I don’t understand is how you broke the inside light out of it. Plastic cover and bulb and everything. What happened to it?

It was the beat of anything I ever saw, Fleming said. We were going up that long hill before you get to Clifton. The motor was knocking louder and louder. When it knocked that last time, the loudest lick of all, that light blew up and scattered little pieces of white plastic all over the car. I didn’t understand it, not being a mechanic. I expect a mechanic could figure it right out. Probably something to do with the wiring.

Albright stopped scraping for a long moment and looked at him. I guess that explains why it don’t say
Taxi
on the sides no more, he said.

 

S
HE SET
the tone arm carefully onto the spinning record, waited. It was as the old man had told, the record was unused, there was scarcely a hiss as the needle tracked the grooves. The banjo commenced so abruptly it must have been going full tilt when the recorder was switched on thirtyodd years before. The old man’s voice, smoky and sardonic, almost mocking, but you couldn’t tell if he was mocking you or mocking the song or perhaps mocking himself.

She glanced at Fleming sharply, as if the voice had startled her. She opened her mouth to speak, then remained silent. The voice cast out words and drew them back misshapen, twisted to the nihilistic thrust of the song; phrases foreshortened then elongated, drawn out in entreaty.
The last time I saw my woman, good people, she had a wineglass in her hand. She was drinking down her troubles with a nogood sorry man.
The banjo seemed at an odd counterpoint to the voice, the blues rushed and almost discordant, playing out of the melody and then back into it. The banjo at times sounded as if it were playing a different song entirely, a song you could barely hear seeping through the walls of time itself, the banjo and the voice each telling a separate story, the music an almost satiric comment on the words and on the singer who was singing them, reducing the disembodied singer to a specter you could see through, and all you saw when you looked was a swirling empty darkness.

God, she said. He sounds a hundred years old and terribly pissed off. What’s he mad about? I don’t get this at all.

But when the voice and the banjo ceased, halted abruptly as if the old man’s pain or rage had spent itself, she set the needle back at the beginning and let it play through again. When it had played through a second time she turned the record over and played that, a driving raucous banjo, the voice so disaffected and distanced from everyday life it wanted completely gone, wished itself a mole in the ground.
Well, the railroad man, he’ll kill you if he can, and drink up your blood like wine …

Well, she said when the song ended, that’s about as far from Bing
Crosby as you can get. He’s strange. Strange but good. It leaves you feeling like you heard something important but you can’t quite figure out what it was. What’s your grandfather like?

I don’t know. What anybody’s like. I think he’s just an old man who’s about decided he misspent a good part of his life.

When was this made? Do you have others?

Back sometime in the twenties. I’ve got three more of them.

She closed the lid of the phonograph so that it looked like a small suitcase. It was checked in a red and white plaid, with white musical notes emblazoned on it, and its appearance formed an odd juxtaposition to the songs that it had just played.

He sounds black.

So what? You look like Pocahontas.

I’ve seen photographs of Pocahontas, and I’m much prettier. Seriously, when can I meet this old man?

Never, the boy said. He’d just take you away from me without even trying and head out to Arkansas or somewhere. Not, he added hurriedly, that you’re mine to take.

I’m yours if I’m anybody’s, nobody else wants me. Do you think he’d marry me? I always wanted to marry a real blues man. You’re not one, are you?

I could learn.

She shook her head. You don’t learn that, she said. It’s just there. It sounds like he spent his whole life trying to unlearn it. Trying to forget it.

I don’t see how you get all that just from listening to two songs.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I think too much. I sit in this room, I listen to dead people singing and I read books dead people wrote. I read strange things into it. Or maybe I just need to get out more.

He had crossed to the window and held aside the curtain to peer into the back yard. A bleak day which held winter like an implicit threat. A wind scuttled leaves along; even as he watched leaves fell and drifted away. On a strung length of clothesline perched a temporary bird. A lean black cat paced beneath it, as if charged with guarding it from other less civilized cats. Its hypnotic eyes never left the bird. The bird flew and the cat sprang impotently, its paws batting empty air.
Down a concrete driveway a little girl was learning to ride a bicycle, her mother following, the mother’s mouth calling anxious warnings Fleming couldn’t hear.

He dropped the curtain and turned. I think I’m getting a little too fond of you, he said carefully.

She looked up at him from the iron cot she slept on. I don’t think you can do that, she said. I think people need to be as fond of each other as they can.

Be serious for once.

Why? You’re always serious enough for both of us. Besides, maybe I am serious.

I’m getting too dependent on you. Using you to get through the day. You need to tell me to just get away and leave you the hell alone.

Just get away and leave me the hell alone, she said.

He turned back to the window. The cat was playing with a leaf, rolling it over, slapping it intently. Fleming thought it might be practicing for the next bird.

She rose from the cot and came to stand beside him. She laced an arm about his waist and leaned her head against his shoulder. They stood staring at nothing. A cloud passed the sun and the light grew dense and somber.

This is no way to bring me to my senses, he said.

I don’t want you at your senses, she said. You’d be even duller at your senses. Will you take me to meet that old man?

Sure. If you’ll stand by me like this a day or two.

Make up your mind. I thought you wanted let alone.

He turned her to him and raised her face and leaned and kissed the hollow of her throat. She seemed all there was to life. He hoped obscurely that she could save him, but he did not even know from what.

 

L
ET ME TELL
you this story, Neal said. Do you know Jimmy de Nicholais, that works in the post office?

I’ve seen him around the poolhall, Fleming said. I don’t really know him.

He was staring through the car glass across a flat sweep of field, a bleak and wintry landscape. Trees were baring and already the sky had a look of immeasurable distances, the winds that morning had borne a trace of ice; cold was coming, cold hard on man and child, cold hard on old men in unheated rattletrap trailers.

Hey, he said. You want to come out tomorrow and help me rig up the old man some kind of heater? He bought one of these little sheet-iron jobs and I figured we might take that window out of the back and put in a piece of tin. We could elbow the pipe right through there.