Read Online Provinces of Night by William Gay - Free Book Online Page A

The office was a tiny metal trailer with the wheels removed shored up on concrete blocks. A set of steps of raw lumber led to the door. The truck halted before the trailer and a man got out. Heavyset man wearing khakis and a broadbrimmed gray cowboy hat. He removed the hat and laid it carefully in the seat of the truck and put on a white hardhat and adjusted it over one sleepylooking gray eye. He seemed not to have noticed Albright.
    Albright cleared his throat. I was wonderin about a job, he said.
    I don’t reckon I need nobody today, Woodall said. He was studying the working men, looking all about as if to see was everyone accounted for.
    Albright played his hole card. They locked up Clyde Edmonds last night.
    They did?
    Cleve Garrison arrested him last night in Baxter’s on a drunk and disorderly. He was drunk as a fiddler’s bitch. He’d of needed a seein eye dog to find his way across the street.
    He was running the crimper, Woodall said bemusedly.
    He won’t be runnin it today unless it’s got a hell of a cord on it. That’s why I thought you might need somebody.
    I don’t need just anybody. I need somebody that can operate a crimper.
    Hellfire. I can pick it up. I was drivin a tractor when I was ten year old. Runnin a haybaler. A crimper’s a plaything next to a haybaler.
    Woodall was thinking. His left eye had a cast to it as if he’d see a wider range of things than other men and Albright was never quite certain which eye was watching him.
    There’s not much to it for a fact, he finally said. I don’t have anybody I can spare to put on it, so I’m going to have to give you a shot at it.
    I won’t let you down.
    We’ll get you a hardhat out of the trailer here. We’ll have to fill outsome papers anyway. This here is a government job and everything has to be wrote down five or six times.
    He had ascended the steps and was unlocking the office door. Albright was glancing about to see was anybody watching him get hired. They went in. The air in the trailer was hot and stifling and Albright felt sweat break out instantly all over his body. Woodall set him to filling out forms and began rummaging through a wooden box of hardhats and rubber boots. He laid a blue hardhat upon the desk.
    You have to wear this hardhat all the time you’re on the work site.
    Have you not got another white one like you got? Albright was licking the point of his pencil, studying Woodall’s hat.
    These blue hardhats are laborer’s hats. This one I got is a superintendent’s hat. It might be a little early in the day for one of them. I been here twenty years and I own the company.
    Oh. Well. Blue’s all right. One of them blue ones’d suit me just fine, I reckon.
    Listen to me about this hat. You got to wear it all the time. This is a government job and the sons of bitches keep sending inspectors around trying to catch me fucking up. They catch a man working without a hat it’d be a hellatious fine on me and no telling what else. You got it?
    Albright signed his name with a flourish. I got it, he said.
    Let’s get going then.
    Woodall was already going down the steps, striding off toward the tall brick building. Hey, Albright called after him. Where’s this crimper at?
    Woodall turned. It’s on the roof, where did you reckon it was at? Do you not know what we’re talking about here?
    Course I know. I just didn’t know if it was already up there or if we’d have to carry it.
    They stood before a ladder leading to the roof. Albright looked up. The sheer brick wall, the ladder telescoping into the nothingness of a hot brassy sky. He judged it forty or fifty feet.
    That ladder sure is one long son of a bitch, he said.
    It don’t go but from the bottom to the top, Woodall pointed out. Let’s be for going up it. Time’s wasting and there’s a world of metal waiting up there to be crimped.
    Albright took a deep breath and squared his shoulders and laid ahand to each side of the ladder. He started up. The ladder swayed