Provinces of Night (9 page)

She was halfcrying. Get the hell away from me, she said.

Where the creekbed fell away to a thighdeep pool Fleming went under and when he came up pulled the girl under with him. He opened his eyes underwater and she had a wildeyed look of panic on her face as if she were drowning. She was frantically trying to unbutton her blouse.
She surfaced sputtering and choking. She gagged and spat a mouthful of water. She was still trying to undo the blouse but her hands were shaking. When Fleming grasped both sides of the collar and jerked the buttons spun away and she shrugged out of it and reached behind her back to unhook her brassiere. There was a coppery glint of stubble in her armpits, red welts already swelling on her sides.

She went over to the bank of the creek and sat down. She began to cry. The hornets seemed to have departed but he could see them downstream circling their ruined home and the air was vibratory with an angry hum.

She stopped crying and glared at him. You could at least turn your head, she said.

He looked away and when he looked back she had the bra off and was raking crushed hornets out of it. Her breasts were starkly white against the tanned flesh of her stomach and shoulders save the rosecolored nipples and the dark aureole surrounding them. His mouth felt dry and there was a faroff ringing in his ears.

I told you to look the other way.

How many times did they get you?

I don’t know. A lot. I can’t stand this, they stung me all over. She was dipping water in her cupped hands and rubbing it over her breasts.

You’re not allergic, are you?

How the hell would I know? I don’t even know what kind of bugs those were.

They’re not bugs, they’re hornets. Why on earth would you slam a rock into a hornets’ nest?

I told you I didn’t know what they were. It was just a big gray paper thing and I wondered what would happen if I hit it with a rock.

That’s what happens.

Well. I’m from Michigan. They don’t have the things hanging from lampposts in Detroit.

The girl had covered herself as best she could with the blouse and beneath it she sat hunched and miserable. Fleming’s stings hurt as well but the sheer fact of seeing the girl and talking with her seemed to diminish the pain. She had blond hair with auburn lights in it and eyes of clear guileless blue and light played on the angles of her face in an interesting way. There was a faint prettiness about her but also something
vaguely familiar, and he kept wondering if he’d seen her before or just someone that looked like her.

She was wearing dungarees cut off into kneelength shorts. They didn’t get down into your shorts, did they?

She gave him a catlike look of anger. Don’t you wish, she said.

I’ve got to get my fish, he said. He went back down the creek with some caution but the hornets seemed preoccupied with assessing the damage to their home and they ignored him. He found the fish washed into a stand of cane in shallow water. Some of them had flopped off the forked stick and he gathered them up and threaded the stick through their gills and went back to where the girl was.

She had put the bra and blouse on and tied the blouse across her stomach and seemed to be making ready to go.

If you’re from Michigan what are you doing wading up Grinders Creek?

We’re on vacation down here. Daddy works at Ford in Detroit but my Grandpa Dee Hixson lives close to here.

I live right across from Dee. Up on that hill on the other side of the road.

I didn’t know there was a house up there, you can’t see it from the road. What’s your name?

He told her. They had begun wading up the shallow water toward the roadbed. He knew now why she had seemed familiar. What’s your name? he asked her.

Merle. Daddy named me after this movie star named Merle Oberon. You think I look like her?

For a minute I thought that was her drawing back that rock.

She poked him lightly in the ribs. What are you going to do with those fish?

I planned on having them for supper. You could come over tonight and help me eat them.

What, you mean with you and your folks?

I live by myself. My folks are in Detroit Michigan.

They are? Where in Detroit?

I don’t know. They’re looking for work.

You mean you live all by yourself?

All by myself.

God. I wish my family would go off somewhere looking for something and leave me alone.

Suddenly Fleming did not want them to go their separate ways. He did not want to go back to the still house and wait for Boyd or for any of the other things he seemed to spend his time waiting for. Come on over tonight, he said. We’ll eat the fish and listen to the radio awhile.

I’m not much on radios. In Detroit we’ve got this big twenty-one-inch Crosley TV It’s like having a movie theater right in your house. Anyway, I don’t like fish, I’m always afraid of choking on a bone.

I’ll pick the bones out for you.

Are you a smooth talker or what, she said. I’ve had boys promise me a lot of things but you’re the first one that ever offered to pick out fish bones.

The creek widened in a shoal before they came upon the bridge until it was no more than ankle deep near the bank and at the edge where a riot of cattails grew it was almost lukewarm. With his pocket knife he cut a handful of the reeds and gave them to her. These roses were just growing wild, he said.

First you tear my clothes off and then you bring me flowers. What a man.

Will you come?

I don’t know. I might. There’s sure nobody else to talk to around this Godforsaken place. We’ll see.

I can do this, he was thinking. All I have to do is just be as normal as everyone else. All I have to do is just not blow apart like a two-dollar clock. Just pick words and put one of them after the other like a baby learning to walk, like a drunk carefully crossing the street.

He reached out suddenly and touched her arm. She jerked it away as if the touch had burned her then gave him a curious smile and linked an arm through his.

Why did you touch me like that?

I thought for a second you weren’t real, he said.

 

H
E HAD PRIED
the fish and ate a plate of them leaned against the front wall of the house watching dusk descend and sipping a Coca-Cola chilled in the springbox. In the wintertime he could have seen the lights from Dee Hixson’s house but the trees were riotous with summer growth and for all the lights he could see this might have been the only house in the world.

She might come and she might not but the later it grew the more he doubted she would. Would she come in the dark? Perhaps she was scared of the dark, they probably don’t have dark in Detroit. They have twenty-one-inch Crosley TVs but they don’t have hornets’ nests hanging from the lampposts.

He thought how ludicrous he would be wandering the streets of Detroit. He smiled, thinking for a moment of the four of them, Boyd looking for his wife and him looking for Boyd and Merle, all of them moving through a maze of brick buildings and dark circuitous alleyways and everyone just half a beat out of sync with everyone else, wandering each alone in the electric dark and any destination reached one just quit by another.

He set the plate aside and leaned his head back against the wall. He felt a curious solitary contentment. The world he’d heard rumored seemed enormous, roads led everywhere free for the taking, any one you chose had a destination at its end.

In the west a star winked on like a pinprick through the faulted dusk to a greater light beyond. Another. Bats came veering out of the murky purple twilight and one hollow over a whippoorwill called to him, brother calling to brother.

 

I
N THE TWO DAYS
following Junior Albright’s destruction of the crimper the white company truck stopped in front of the small frame house he lived in three times. Each time Junior froze, hardly daring to breathe. Each time the horn honked three loud blasts, waited. A truck door slammed and Albright was mousequiet and mousestill, hearing in his constricted heart the heavy tread onto the doorstep, the measured
hammering that shook the door on its hinges, rattled the glass in its unglazed sash.

The third time Albright was crouched in the kitchen and heard Woodall trying to turn the doorknob that Albright had had the foresight to thumbbolt, heard him yell in frustration, You’re just making it harder on yourself, Goddamn you, ain’t you man enough to even open the door? I’ll catch you out sometime.

Which he did. Albright was sprawled in a chair in the poolroom watching Clyde Sharp clean out Big Shaw at straight pool. He was drinking a can of Falstaff with salt sprinkled on the can’s top. He had just taken a swallow of beer and licked the salt when he felt a heavy arm settle about his shoulders.

You a hard man to find, Woodall said.

I didn’t know I was lost.

Well you was. I’ve been out to your place three times but I can’t ever seem to catch you at home.

I was out back there once when I seen your truck leave. I hollered at you but you just drove on off.

Well. No matter. We’re both here now.

I figured you just brought my check out, you know for that day I worked. I just decided to let it slide on account of that crimper actin up the way it done.

No, Woodall said. It wasn’t quite that. As a matter of fact I have a receipt in my pocket where I paid the rental company for the very crimper you’re speaking of. Eight hundred and sixty dollars. That’s the amount you owe me. So you see it’s not something I can let slide, the way you can.

Big Shaw stooped and sighted drunkenly down the length of his pool cue, looking directly into Albright’s face, one eye closed as if in a conspiratorial wink, and Albright leaned to the side in case the ball went wild. On the break Shaw had once laid out a man named Jess Cotham colder than a wedge so that he had to be lain on the concrete floor and water poured on his face. This time the cue ball just kissed gently off the seven and scratched in a corner pocket, but when Big Shaw stepped back Albright suddenly saw a folded twenty-dollar bill that had been hidden by Shaw’s polished dress shoe. The little engraved two and
zero were clearly visible at the corners and powerful as some occult or Masonic symbol, and Junior looked about to see if anyone else had noticed. He sat trying to devise some plan to recover this windfall without Clyde Sharp falling upon him with a pool cue.

Are you listening to me?

Mmmm?

I’ve got a note fixed up at my office trailer. I never thought that you would have eight hundred and sixty dollars. I never thought that you would ever have eight hundred and sixty dollars at one time so the note says that you will pay me thirty dollars a month for twenty-eight months then twenty dollars for the last month.

They Godamighty damn. That’s nearly three years.

Well, if you wanted to pay sixty a month we could shave that time nearly in half.

Some months I don’t have thirty dollars. Besides, there was somethin wrong with that damn crimper to make it behave that way. Runnin off the way it done. I believe the throttle hung on it or somethin. Anyway I don’t believe it’s my place to pay for it.

You are going to pay me that eight hundred and sixty dollars. We’re not even discussing that. What we’re talking about is how. You need to drive by tomorrow early and sign that paper so we can get it notarized and make it official.

I ain’t signin shit, Albright said. And how about gettin your arm off my shoulder.

If you’re not there by quitting time I’m lawing you, Woodall said. I’ll take you before a judge and get a judgment against you. If you’ve got anything I’ll take it. If you ever get anything I’ll get that. You’ll wind up losing your car. If you work I’ll garnishee your check. You’ll pay it one way or you’ll pay it another. I’ll see you tomorrow.

Albright closed his eyes and listened to Woodall’s footsteps fade away. He was in bondage for three years, in debt with nothing to show for it. Here his life had never properly gotten up to speed and now Woodall was holding a mortgage on the next three years of it.

He rose and stretched, elaborately casual. He sauntered off toward the toilet at the back of the poolroom. As he passed the table he dropped his lighter and watched it fall within six inches of the twenty-dollar bill,
stooped and gracefully scooped them both up. The bathroom reeked of urine and stale vomit but he paid it no mind, studied the bill minutely in the light of the bare ceiling bulb and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger as if he’d ascertain its authenticity. It had a rich crinkly texture and seemed official enough, coin of the realm, minted in Washington, D.C. He slid it into a pocket and went out.