Provinces of Night (10 page)

At the bar he unpocketed it again and smoothed it onto the Formica countertop. I’m buying a round for the house, he said.

The house? the barkeep said. Hellfire, there’s nobody in here but you and Sharp and Big Shaw.

Then I’m buyin a round for us, Albright told him.

 

S
HE DID NOT COME
the first night or the second and by then Fleming had given up on her but the third night a step on the porch brought him back from the edge of sleep. He waited for a knock but the door was simply opened without this formality and a warped rectangle of moonlight fell into the room.

Fleming?

Who is it?

Then he could see the dark outline of her body against the paler dark outside. She stood with a hand still holding the doorknob, leaning to peer about the room. Then she stepped out of the moonlight and he could hear soft footsteps approaching the bed. He was sitting on its side feeling about for his shoes when he felt her weight settle onto the opposite side of the bed.

Are you getting up?

Well. I thought I’d get up and talk to you a while.

It’s kind of dark in here. Cool, too. We can just talk here.

It is dark. I’ve got some matches here somewhere and I’ll just light the lamp.

Let the lamp go. This is nice, and my eyes are sort of getting used to the dark.

By now she had crawled into bed and settled herself against him. I
thought they’d never go to sleep, she said. I tried to slip off over here for the last couple of nights but they watch me like a hawk. Finally tonight Daddy got drunk and passed out on the couch and I just headed out.

Fleming had thought about this at some length. He had made tentative plans that in their wildest fruition might achieve her presence in a bed beside him but to have this happen as the first card dealt rendered his scenario worthless. He lay silently beside her trying to think of something to say. Don’t talk then, she said. He could feel her warm breath on his cheek and the cool weight of her hand on his bare shoulder. Then she pressed her face to his and kissed his mouth, gently at first and then harder, opening her mouth so that he could feel her tongue and sharp little teeth. Her breath and her flesh felt hot against his. She slid a hand down his side to his hip and then she jerked away.

You’ve got your pants on. What are you doing sleeping in your clothes?

Well. You never know who’ll show up in the middle of the night.

Get them off. Here, I’ll do it. She was unbuttoning his jeans and when he raised his hips to chuck them off he heard the soft sound of a zipper.

Wait, he said.

Wait? For what?

Stand over in the light and take them off.

Why not, she said. What the hell. You’ve seen about everything I’ve got anyway.

In the oblong area of light she posed for a moment like a parodie ballerina then pulled the dress over her head and dropped it to the floor. She slid her panties down holding them momentarily with a toe to step out of them then turned breasts bobbing to close the door. She vanished. He heard the thumbbolt click. It seemed to take her an eternity to cross from the doorway to the bed, in its span folks were born and lived their lives and died, whole generations passed away.

When she slid against him he had decided to remain calm and save all these moments for bleaker times, each instant a snapshot, a flower pressed in the pages of a Bible. But when she grasped his hand and placed it on her sex his mind reeled away and images shuttled like unsequenced
frames in a film. He was unaccustomed to such urgency and he thought that perhaps girls from Michigan were different, perhaps this was the way things were done in Detroit. She was pulling him onto her, saying, here baby, I’ll do this, and he felt himself sliding into her and she was whispering against his ear, No, baby, take it easy, slow down, we’ve got all night to do this.

Have you got a girlfriend?

No. I sort of had one last year but she took up with a football player.

Have you ever done this before?

Sure. Lots of times.

You liar.

Have you?

No. Find those matches, I’ve got a cigarette here. Do you want one?

No.

How come?

I just never took it up.

You just never took it up, she said. You talk funny. Sort of like a hillbilly and sort of not. You sound so serious. So solemn. What makes you so solemn, is the world going to end in the next few minutes? You act like you’re always thinking about something. Were you taking notes?

He had found the matches and struck one on the iron headboard of the bed and lit her cigarette.

I never think about anything, she said through the smoke. I just do whatever comes next, whatever the next thing is.

What’s the next thing right now?

Well, I’ve got to get home before he wakes up. Unless you wanted to try this again. I’ve been here almost two weeks and we’ve just got together. Look at all the time we’ve wasted.

When he walked her within sight of Dee Hixson’s house he didn’t even suspect what time it was. She walked close beside him in fading moonlight, holding his hand. He could hear her feet in the gravel, her breathing, hear his own breathing adjusting to hers. When they separated at the rise before Hixson’s cocks were crowing from Hixson’s barnlot. He stood awkwardly for a moment then leaned and kissed her. He
didn’t know if he ought to say he loved her and he didn’t know if he did and in the end he followed her lead and said nothing at all.

When he got back to the creek he had no desire to go back to bed so he sat for a time on the bridge, his feet swinging idly over the dark water. After a while a bird off in the woods somewhere began to sing and another took up the call. Before he knew it blue dawn light was fading out and the day began to gather itself out of the darkness. In the east a reef of salmoncolored clouds was rimlit by a bright metallic color he had no name for.

In old books he’d read the heroes were seized in the throes of self-denunciation when they’d finally yielded to temptations of the flesh, when they’d let carnality corrupt the spiritual. He felt that perhaps he ought to feel this way too, but all he felt was alive, as if his senses had been turned so that colors looked brighter, the tiniest sound had been given a bell-like clarity. He felt his fingertips could have read the words of a book as easily as if it had been printed in braille. He had been permitted brief access to a world of softer and warmer senses, and he was already planning how he could go there again.

 

S
HE CAME
for two more nights and then the following night she didn’t. Finally he went to bed but he kept getting up and going outside and standing on the top step listening. He imagined her feet clinking the stones climbing the hill, when a cloud shuttled from beneath the moon he thought he saw her crossing the bridge. At last he went to bed but it was a long time before he slept.

The next morning he was about early and he crossed up through a stony sedgefield and a growth of halfgrown cedars. Dee Hixson’s house sat at the mouth of a hollow, its tin roof rusted to a warm umber. The only vehicle parked in Dee’s yard was his pickup truck. Dee himself was sitting on the edge of the porch shelling fresh garden peas into a bowl.

Come up, young Bloodworth. What you up to?

Fleming seated himself on the edge of the porch. I was headed down around the old McNally place. Thought I’d see if ginseng was up yet.

It’s up. Starroot too. Blackroot, there’s a world of that back in there.

I’m about to run out of money. I thought I might make a few dollars that way.

Dee was a wiry little man wrinkled and dark as a shriveled apple. In his younger days he was supposed to have been mean but to Fleming he didn’t look big enough to have accumulated the reputation that mantled him. Yet his face was a roadmap of old violence. A knife cut on his cheek had been crudely stitched so that the healed scar and the dots where the stitches had been looked like a pale fleshy centipede crawling toward his hairline. Long ago a man named Scrapiron Steel had held him down and cut off the end of his nose with a pocket knife. A week later Steel had disappeared, never to be seen again in Ackerman’s Field or anywhere else. The way Fleming had heard the story he was at the bottom of a cistern covered by the stones that Dee had rolled in to cover him, but studying this old man shelling peas he had trouble believing it.

Fleming unfolded himself from the porch. Well, I guess I better start looking if I aim to dig any.

Well. You’ll need you a sack. Get one of them tow sacks out of that corncrib back there.

All right. Say, what happened to your company?

They’ve loaded up and headed out. Gone back north.

I’ll see you, Mr. Hixson.

You come back anytime.

 

C
AME THEN
plague days of desolation when loss ravaged him like a fever. The house was empty and dead without her. A place of ice, of perpetual winds. He heard her voice at odd times, echoes of things she’d said. He awoke once in the night and her soft laughter had just faded into silence. Once he distinctly felt her hand lie on his shoulder. Before she’d shared his bed, life had been pointless, but now it had become unbearable. She had appeared from nowhere and returned to it, but she’d taken over his life, left with a lien on his body, a mortgage on his soul.

He tried to remember what she had said about writing, about
Christmas vacation. To replay it word for word. I’ll snow you under in letters, she said. You’ll dread to see the mailman coming. He heard the clipped Yankee cadence of her speech tell him how much she loved him. He’d been haunting the mailbox since Boyd left but now he redoubled his efforts. The barren mailbox mocked him. He wasted long hours computing distances, estimating the length of time it took a letter to travel from Detroit, Michigan, to Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee.

In the final throes of desperation he began to check Dee’s mailbox as well, sorting through the letters for one with a Michigan postmark, a firm girlish hand filled with curlicues, the
i’
s dotted with little circles.

Then one day as he approached Dee himself was coming down his driveway toward his mailbox. Fleming fell in with him, as if they’d check the mail together.

You ever hear from Merle since she went back north? he asked casually.

Who? Oh, no, Merle ain’t never been much of a letter writer. Tell you the truth I’m sort of glad that bunch is gone. I reckon I’ve lived by myself so long I got used to the peace and quiet. Leastways her and that Randy got back together before they left.

Who?

Randy. Her husband. Big old redheaded boy. They set into fightin like cats and dogs for about a week there. Then she laid out on him somewheres a night or two and I reckon it taught him a lesson. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other by the time they left. It would about turn your stomach.

Fleming had simply walked away. He was crossing the bridge before he even knew where he was. He turned and Dee was standing by the mailbox staring after him.

Why that undermining little bitch, he said aloud. There would be no letters, no Christmas vacation.
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come hack again!
But by the time he had reached the foot of the hill he was feeling better and his face was a curious mixture of anger and rueful amusement. He took a small and bitter comfort in knowing that Randy was at least as big a fool as he was.