Provinces of Night (36 page)

I guess, Neal said. All right. Listen to this story though. Me and Albright was in the poolhall about halfdrunk thinkin about finding another drink of whiskey somewhere and we didn’t have any money. Right off we thought of de Nicholais. He’s always got a little drink hid away. We went over there, Jimmy was off that day, it was some kind of government holiday, Veterans Day or something, some such day. He wasn’t home, though, but the door was standing about half open and we decided to just go in and wait. Jimmy lives by himself and he wouldn’t mind, we’d done it before, or anyway I had. Anyway he didn’t come and he didn’t come and we got to looking for his bottle. We turned up the mattress, that’s where he usually keeps it, but there wasn’t no bottle there. Well, we turned that place upside down looking for whiskey and do you know what we found on the top shelf of his bedroom closet? Just guess.

What?

Well, are you going to guess or not?

Fleming was grinning. Just tell me, he said. Although I’m not sure I even want to know.

A sex doll, Neal said.

A what? A what doll?

One of them blowup sex dolls. It was the damnedest thing you ever saw. I’d always heard about them, but I sort of figured it was something folks made up, but there she was, and nothing would do Albright but he had to blow her up. We couldn’t find no pump and Albright he huffed and puffed around on her. I wasn’t about to blow that bitch up, no telling what you’d catch. Plastic clap or something. Pretty soon there she was. Big round titties, had these pink nipples on them. Had all these
orfices, orifices, little round holes everywhere. Little round mouth. Had this like mop of steelwool-lookin hair. Albright like to fell in love.

Anyway at first we couldn’t decide what to do with her. Finally we carried her out by the mailbox in front of the house and stood her up. I found some bricks and piled them on her little feet so she wouldn’t blow away. Taped her hand to the door of the mailbox and she looked for all the world like she’d just run out to see what the mailman had left her.

Probably something in a plain brown wrapper, Fleming grinned.

Probably. Anyway we parked down the street to wait on Jimmy. It was a while before he come. This woman come by walkin a little dog and neither one of them knew what to make of her. Finally Jimmy come and it looked like he seen her from a long way off cause he started loping. He was looking all around, like he was trying to see was anybody looking out the windows of the other houses. Then he just run by her and grabbed her under his arm like a football and run right up the steps and through the door without ever slowing down. You ought to have seen it. Hey, hand me that pack of Luckies out of the glove compartment.

Fleming popped open the glovebox and tossed the unopened package of cigarettes to Neal. Then he withdrew a pair of women’s underwear and held them upraised by their elastic waistband. Pale blue watered silk, Tuesday embroidered in black thread. He regarded them with amusement.

I guess we’ve all got our secret side, he said.

That damned Raven Lee Halfacre, Neal said. For somebody that fought so hard to keep them she don’t seem to put much value on them. They say Tuesday, but I believe it was along about Friday before I got her out of them.

The road was running parallel with a wire fence, beyond it dying grass, weeds the wind had tilted. When he looked up nameless birds were moving patternlessly against a gunmetal sky, like random markings on a slate. He studied them intently, as if they were leaving some message there for him to decipher. Suddenly he wanted to be anywhere else but here, desperately wanted to be somewhere Neal was not.

I believe I’ll just walk, he said.

What?

Let me out.

Neal slammed the brakes and simultaneously slid the car toward the shoulder of the road. What the fuck’s the matter with you?

There’s nothing the matter with me, Fleming said.

He opened the door and climbed out. He stood for a moment leaning his left arm on the car and holding the door with his right.

Well there’s sure as hell something the matter with you. It’s three miles to the old man’s place and coldern a bitch out there.

I’ll see you, Neal.

You’re about as crazy a person as I ever saw in my whole Goddamned life.

I may be. You’re not very subtle, are you?

What? Neal took a last drag off the cigarette and spun it past Fleming onto the roadbed. Fleming turned and toed it out in the dry weeds. I guess not, Neal said. I guess subtlety is not my strong suit, as they say. Or it could be I just wanted to tell you something.

Could be I didn’t want to know it, Fleming said.

You need to know it.

I’d just as soon be the judge of what I need to know.

He was still holding the car door. It seemed to him for an absurd moment that closing the door would in some manner alter the rest of his life. Mark forever a line between what had been and what was yet to be. He slammed the door and started through the brittle weeds up the roadside.

Hey.

He turned and gave Neal the finger. He heard the door open. You crazy son of a bitch, Neal said. He heard Neal’s feet in the gravel. Then the footsteps stopped and a car door slammed and the engine cranked. He could hear Neal laboriously turning the car in the roadbed. Pulling up, backing, pulling up again.

He looked down and saw that he was carrying the panties balled up in his fist. His expression was caught somewhere between a smile and a grimace. He tossed them away and the wind pressed them furtively into the clashing weeds like a dirty scrap of paper, old newsprint. He hunched his shoulders into the wind and went on up the roadbed.

 

T
HERE WERE
three carloads of them, two county cars and a state car full of Tennessee Highway Patrolmen. They had search warrants and official looking papers but as they had been expected most of the day they hardly disrupted the old man taking the pale sun on Itchy Mama’s front porch. Itchy Mama’s sources were wellnigh infallible and the whiskey had been removed hours before to a safer and more distant location and the old men watched all the legal proceedings with a bemused interest.

Deputies fanned out into the woods with sharp metal rods to prod the ground for jugs of contraband. Others searched the house with thoroughness and a mounting frustration but the place might have been a Pentecostal church so free of alcohol it was.

Bellwether seemed bored and he did not even participate in the search. He leaned against a porch support and smoked a cigarette, glancing occasionally at an old man in a gray fedora who sat beside a boy with dark hair and sleepylooking eyes like the old man’s. Bellwether knew the deputies wouldn’t find anything. He knew that Itchy Mama had a connection in the judge’s office, though he did not know who it was. Perhaps the judge himself, who knew. The moment a warrant was sworn out Itchy Mama would get a telephone call and everyone went into action. When the law had left and had time to get its collective mind on matters more pressing everyone would go into action again and move the whiskey back.

Finally the deputies strung emptyhanded out of the woods and made ready to go. Be a temperance meetin here at eight o’clock tonight, Garrison, one of the old men called to a deputy. Be testifyin and hymn singin. Everybody’s invited.

Bellwether rose to go as well. Crossing the porch he laid a hand in passing on Bloodworth’s shoulder.

Mr. Rutgers, I believe it is, he said.

 

T
HE DRIVEWAY
was exposed aggregate concrete, long and winding, snaking sinuously up through enormous evergreens Albright had
no name for but which he admired nonetheless. Finally the house came into view. Woodall had apparently done well for himself, for the house was huge, a long low ranchstyle dwelling shaped like the letter L. Before the house was parked a gray Lincoln Towncar and a white pickup truck; the truck immediately gave Albright a strong and unpleasant sense of déjá vu, and wrenched his insides with guilt. He remembered the truck idling in front of his house, he remembered Woodall taking off his cowboy hat and laying it carefully on the truck seat.

At closer range the house did not seem so opulent. There was an air of benign neglect about it. The paint was faded and peeling, the trim in places showed areas of bare wood. He was out of the Dodge and inspecting the cornice when the door opened and a middle-age woman came onto the porch. Albright couldn’t help noticing the front door itself was in bad shape, weathered and dull, the dark stain leached off the wood and everything in general just needed a good scraping and sanding.

Albright was wearing a paintspotted painter’s cap over his pale curls and he was studying the pocked and scaling fascia board with a professional eye.

What do you want here? the woman asked him.

Albright took off his cap and turned to inspect her. She was a squat ungainly woman with a hairdo that came down past her ears then curled abruptly outward. Her hair looked all of a piece, something sculpted from wood, a wig chopped carelessly out of dark mahogany and clapped onto her head. Albright judged her perhaps the ugliest woman he had ever seen.

Mr. Woodall told me to come out and look at the paint on this house, he said.

Mr. Woodall is dead.

I know he is. This was sometime back. This house needs paintin. It needs it about as bad as any I ever seen.

She didn’t argue. Gene was so busy he let things go quite a bit around the house. You appear to be a painter. Do you want the job of painting all this woodwork?

I owe Mr. Woodall somethin, Albright said. I figure to work it out. Paintin this house might not square it, but it’d go a long way.

I know nothing about that, the woman said. That would have been between you and Gene and Gene’s dead. I’ll pay you for your work.

I’d rather just do it to settle up.

What do you owe him?

Albright thought about it. To begin with I guess I owe him a house paintin, he said.

He began the next day. There was an enormous amount of scraping and caulking to do before he could begin the actual painting. As the paint flakes flew his heart grew lighter. He felt his debt being whittled down to a manageable size. The second day she came out and watched him at work. He thought at first she was keeping an eye on him to see that he did the job right but this seemed not to be the case. Perhaps she just liked to watch folks work. These were warm golden days of Indian summer and sometimes she would bring a book out to the lounge chair she favored. She would read a while then watch him work for a time. She wore hornrimmed glasses when she read but when she watched him she would lay them aside on the arm of the chaise and study him with no look at all on her face.

Toward the end of his first week she asked him if he’d like to use Woodall’s pickup truck to haul his ladders. It’s just sitting there going to waste, she said. I’ve been thinking about selling it. Gene was very fond of that truck. I may give it away, or let some junkyard scrap it out for parts.

This made no sense to him but he had about quit looking for sense in things folks said to him and he drove the truck anyway. It was easier than using the Dodge with ladders jutting ten feet out behind the trunk. He couldn’t help noticing that it handled a lot better than the Dodge, too. Sitting behind the wheel gave him an eerie sense of power, as if he were absorbing something of Woodall’s essence from the cab of the truck. He caught himself wondering what had happened to Woodall’s white superintendent’s hat, and he decided that if an opportune moment ever presented itself he would inquire about it.