The Lost Country

by William Gay

“Let’s see,” I said. Then, to add a bit of levity, and keep the mood going, I asked, “You want to go to the jailhouse in Vernon?” But my comedy was weak and my mother’s face conveyed to me a deep frustration that quickly devolved into sadness. I thought she was going to cry. I got serious. “Do you want to go and visit Uncle Carl there?”

  “Okay, no.” And then her lip started to tremble and she looked down the couch and out the window. She was afraid. There was no humor at all in connecting her very sharp mind to a broken voice.

  “Is Vernon the county seat?” William asked.

  “Yes,” Frankie answered, “same pissant courthouse on the same pissant town square as all the other county seats in this pissant state.” My brother did not like government.

  “Have y’all paid her land taxes? I just paid mine a while back.”

  Then my mother did cry out, “Okay, yes, yes, yes!” And wept and held out her hand to William, who took it. William sat down on the other side of her and settled in to looking at The Price Is Right on the television screen. Like there was nothing else that mattered in this world. My mother patted him on the knee and cut a smile now and then at me and her other son.

  When William and I headed out later, my brother Frankie leaned over to me and said, “I like this man. Sort of figured I might. Just a feeling I had, you know?”

  I do know. It’s what happens sometimes when you meet a good man.

  That chapbook? The one by the writer I’d never heard of? I sat in the back seat of my Ford Explorer and read it aloud to two other men, Kyle Jennings and Frank Turner Hollon. We were southbound back home, toward Alabama. A story called “The Paperhanger, The Doctor’s Wife, and the Child Who Went into the Abstract.” When I finished, the vehicle had slowed from seventy-five to fifty. Somebody finally said, Damn! And I said, “I gotta get this guy down to read in my bookstore. But I heard he doesn’t drive.”

  “Sounds like a road trip,” Kyle said.

  Yes, and what a road trip it was. Here and there, over and over, again and again. Until one day almost six years ago I got the news, behind the wheel, on my way to pick up William and go to a reading at Lincoln Memorial University, that my traveling buddy had died. But, because he wrote books, and because this manuscript was finally found, the road trip continues.

  Sonny Brewer

  The Lost Country

  Memphis

  April 1955

  The court had awarded her custody of the motorcycle, they were going this day to get it. Edgewater was sitting on the curb drinking orange juice from a cardboard carton when the white Ford convertible came around the corner. A Crown Victoria with the top down though the day was cool and Edgewater had been sitting in the sun for such heat as there was. The car was towing what he judged to be a horse trailer. It was early, not quite seven, but the sun was heavy on him, sensuous, a good spring morning.

  By the time she came he had almost finished drinking his breakfast and smoked a cigarette and was idly watching cars pass in the street. Birds called aloft on the trees above him, children bicycled past on their way to school. She had just got off the midnight shift and had not even bothered to change out of her uniform. memphis police dept., the emblem on her shoulder said, she had a badge to prove it. She was a meter maid.

  Claire eased the car to the curb and shoved it into park and left it idling. She wore a scarf over her dirtyblond hair and an air vaguely theatrical and, when she pushed her sunglasses up with a scarlet fingernail, her eyes were the color of irises.

  What are you doing in this part of town, sailor?

  Just waiting for someone like you to come along, he said.

  You ready to roll?

  He got in and slammed the door and looked out the window at the houses sliding by. Ready as I’ll ever be.

  Where were you last night?

  Here and there, he said. Around and about.

  You weren’t anywhere you were supposed to be, that’s for sure. I asked where you were.

  I’ve got an alibi, honest, he said. Get that light out of my eyes, will you officer?

  If you were as funny as you think you are you’d be something else. If you were as anything as you think you are you’d be a worldshaker.

  He was silent. He drank the rest of the orange juice and slid the carton into the floorboard. He glanced covertly at her when she stopped for a redlight. The car had a straight shift that was awkward for her. She missed low gear when the light changed, the car jumped and died. Well shit, she said. A wisp of ash hair had straggled from beneath her scarf, curled onto her forehead, she blew it away. She looked angry.

  I was at the library, he said. For a while. Then I just wandered around. I was in that bar awhile, the one on Central.

  She did not reply, showed no evidence of placation.

  They were in an older section of town, driving past mansions of splendid opulence, immaculate lawns where the grass looked as if it had been trained to grow some precise height and then cease. Rococo statuary arrogantly watched their covert passage, the battered old car did not linger long midst this splendor. The old mansions fell away, the houses grew ever smaller, tackier, as if they adhered to some abstract rule of diminishment that would render them infinitesimal should they continue long down this way. They drove on, like water that sought its own level.

  This was Memphis, Tennessee, the middle of April in 1955, washed-out sunlight running on the storefront glass like luminous water. She was driving down a series of sidestreets in these steadily degenerating neighborhoods. What winos and such streetfolk were as yet about seemed stunned by this regenerative sun and so unaccustomed to such an abundance of light that they drifted alleyward as if extended exposure might scorch them or sear away their clothing. Bars and liquor stores contested for space on these narrow streets and both seemed well represented. They had a stunned vacuous look to them and their scroll-works of dead neon waited for nightfall.

  She glanced across at him.

  God, I hate the way you dress, she said. I’m going to have to buy you some clothes.

  Edgewater was wearing a Navy dungaree shirt and jeans held up by a webbed belt the buckle of which proclaimed us navy. I’m all right, he said. I’m waiting for the loincloth to come back into fashion.

  Listen. You’re going to have to bear with me on this. Just hang in there no matter what happens, okay?

  Wait a minute. What does that mean, no matter what happens? I thought we were just picking up your motorcycle.

  Well, you know. They were my in-laws, after all. There might be a few hard feelings.

  Here were paintlorn Victorian mansions where nothing remained of opulence save a faint memory. Rattletrap cars convalescing or dying beneath lowering elms. Shadetree mechanics stared into their motors as if they’d resuscitate them by sheer will or raise them from the dead with the electric hands of faithhealers. There were unkempt grassless yards with dump-replevied lawn chairs blown askew by spring winds and derelict automobiles entombed, parts-robbed, on cinder blocks. They drove by people with no trade save porchsitting who watched them go by with no interest and meanlooking dogs hopeless on knotted chain tethers anchored to old car casings. There was everywhere a sooty despairing dreariness. Edgewater grew restless, he felt an embryonic need to be elsewhere.

  What do you think it’ll bring?

  I don’t know, he said. Four or five hundred maybe.

  What’ll we do with it?

  Whatever you think. We might buy a vinecovered cottage in the wildwood.

  Elves to do our menials, she said, smiling for the first time, scanning the houses abstractedly, looking for the one she knew so well, had no need to search for at all. Past a rotting blue mansion with a red-tiled roof, she halted the car and, peering backward with a cigarette cocked in the corner of her mouth, she cut the wheel and backed the trailer expertly over the sidewalk and down a driveway bowered by lowhanging willows. A motorcycle was parked in the driveway, a faded tarpaulin crumpled on the ground beside it.

  Showtime,
she said.

  The house was no better or worse than its brothers, replete with garish abandoned attempts at improvement, the side had been painted a hot electric pink and the front had been homebricked. The brick started at the corner and as if drawn by an aberration of gravity began a wavering descent, tended straighter, rising then, as if the house had been set upon by a band of drunken bricklayers with not a level among them.

  Edgewater got out and let down the tailgate, stood watching the house with some apprehension. He had not wanted to come, had pled other commitments. All polished chrome and sleek black leather the motorcycle seemed waiting and coiled to spring, sitting alien and futuristic. Claire got out and slammed the door, climbing slowly out of the car like someone cautiously easing into deep cold waters. There were a couple of two-by-eights in the bed of the trailer and Edgewater aligned them into a makeshift ramp and turned to the Harley-Davidson leaning on its kickstand.

  He stood regarding the motorcycle. The big ugly Harley had every kind of chrome that could be bought locally or mailordered out of anywhere appended to it and it had a distinctly heavy look about it.

  She stood looking the scene over narrowly, her in her cop uniform, her cop eyes, what’s the trouble here?

  They goddamn, Edgewater said. They could hardly roll it. Eight hundred pounds of shittin chrome, he said. Why didn’t he just gold plate it?

  She did not reply. Her face was red with exertion, throat puffed and splotchy.

  Come after it, I see, a voice said.

  Yes, I come after it. It’s mine, Claire said. I got the paper from the judge in my pocketbook.

  A screen door slapped loosely against its frame. A short heavyset woman had come onto the back porch and she was crossing the porch rapidly in no-nonsense strides and she was rubbing her hands together in an anticipatory way.

  Put one whore’s hand on that motorcycle and you’ll pull back a bloody stub, she said.

  It’s mine, Claire said, I got the paper from the judge.

  You know what you can do with your judge’s paper, she said. She spat toward Claire. Trash, she shouted. You slut, I didn’t think you’d have the brass. Lie on the stand about my boy the way you done and then have the spit about you to come in my very yard and bring him with you.

  I didn’t lie, Claire said. But it doesn’t matter. It’s over.

  Let’s go, Edgewater said.

  He’d no more than raised the kickstand and angled the front wheel toward the ramp when the woman began to scream, You slut, you ruined my son’s life, you bitch. She was coming down the steps two at a time and Claire turned and took a tentative step away but the woman closed on her remorseless and implacable as a stormfront and slapped her face hard then laid a hand to each of Claire’s shoulders and flung her onto the grass.

  Shit, Edgewater said, walking around the trailer. He grabbed the fat woman around the neck and began to tug her roughly off Claire. The woman whirled on him. He could smell sweat and perfume and stale deodorant and an unclassifiable smell of anger, musky, he thought of an enraged boar. He could feel her hot breath and hear her grunt and something hit him at the base of the skull so hard bile rose bitter in his mouth and he fell beneath their combined weight.

  The driveway was little blue granite pebbles. He lay on it studying them as though they contained some great knowledge, could he but decipher it. There was a roaring in his ears, there was an unbearable weight on him, lights flickered on and off at random.

  Billy, Claire called. He hit the woman in her stomach with his elbow as hard as he could and felt her slacken. He shook her off and got up. He grabbed the motorcycle in a haze of half delirium, he had the motorcycle halfway up the ramp when the screen door slapped again and a middleaged man with a torn gray undershirt came out with a doublebarreled shotgun unbreached. He was unshaven, bald, hirsute chest and arms, a looping belly like a half inflated inner tube about his waist. He was fumbling waxed red cylinders into it. He dropped one and felt wildly about for it.

  By the time Edgewater heard the gun barrel slap up he’d rolled the cycle off the ramp and straddled it and kickstarted it and he was already rolling when the concussion came like a slap to the head. He went through shredded greenery that spun like windy green snow, skidding blindly onto the street then across it and through a hedge before he could get the motorcycle under control and out onto the street again, leaning into the wind, houses kaleidoscoping past on either side like the walls of a gaudy tunnel he was catapulted through.

  The street rolled in and out of the rearview mirror then the white Ford appeared and followed at a sedate pace. Edgewater slowed and turned the motorcycle into the parking lot of a liquor store and she turned in beside it. The Harley idled like some fierce beast that wasn’t even breathing hard.

  Hard feelings my ass, Edgewater said.

  Do you believe this? He shot the shit out of that tree, did you see that?

  I rode through it, Edgewater said.

  Ahh baby you got it all in your hair, she said, brushing it away with a hand.

  What’d she hit me with, anyway?

  I don’t know. I didn’t see anything.

  She had to hit me with something.

  Claire shook her head. I’m just glad it’s over.

  They had to manhandle the cycle onto the trailer because she hadn’t thought it wise to stop for the boards. Edgewater lashed it upright to a support with the rope she’d brought.

  That’s twice I’ve wrestled this heavy son of a bitch up here, he said. My first time and my last.

  You’re in a good mood, she said, grinning, getting into the car.

  I’m not real fond of getting shot at, Edgewater said.

  She eased the car out into the street and headed north, glancing in the rearview mirror to check was the cycle secure. You’ll feel better tonight, she said. We’ll get you a sport coat somewhere and go out to a really good restaurant. Italian maybe, we’ll get a nice bottle of wine. Okay?

  Okay, Edgewater said.

  He stared out at the streets. Businesses were fleeing past the car like buoys in treacherous waters. Pawnshops, bars. A multitude of liquor stores that must sell one to the other.

  Who needs this shit? he asked no one. I don’t.

  The prospective motorcycle buyer lived in a town called Leighton east of Memphis. They drove toward it past tract houses and apartment complexes and onto a flat countryside of housetrailers and farmland beset by tractors that Edgewater watched move silent down cottonfields that seemed endless.

  He turned to study her against the slipsliding landscape. There was a faint blue bruise at the corner of her right eye and a scratch on her cheek but with the wind blowing her hair and the silk scarf strung out in the breeze she looked rakish and well satisfied with herself. In the brief time he’d known her she seemed always to be playing some role. Seldom the same one twice. Just the star of whatever movie today was. He’d had the impulse to glance about and see were cinecameras whirring away, a makeup man with his potions at the ready.

  Then as he watched her profile seemed to alter. The flesh itself to sear and melt and run off the skull and cascade down the linen blouse she wore and the linen itself blackened and rotted and the wind sucked tatters of it away and when she turned to grin at him, bone hand clutching the steering wheel, the hollow eyesockets of her skull smoked like a charred landscape beyond which a faint yellow light flickered and died. Her grinning teeth had loosened in their sockets and there was a blackened cavity where the right canine joined the jawbone.

  They were coming up on a white stucco building with a Falstaff beer sign framed by a rectangle of light bulbs. carolyn’s shady grove, the sign said. A quiet bucolic name that conjured up images of deep woods, of the creekbanks of his childhood.

  Pull in there, Edgewater said. He was determined not to accompany her to sell it, felt perhaps that he had done enough motorcycling for the day.

  What?

  Let me wait here for you. I have to make a phone call.

 
She’d already begun to slow but she turned to frown at him. This doesn’t make any sense, she said. We’re almost to Leighton. You can call from there. Besides, who would you call? You don’t know anybody. How’ll I get it out?

  Sell it as is, he told her. Sell the son of a bitch on the hoof.

  He was out almost before the car stopped rolling. Pick me up after you get your business transacted. I’ll be in there drinking a beer.

  She glanced toward the sign. Just make damn sure you keep your hands off Carolyn, she said.

  Edgewater crossed a glaring white parking lot of crushed mussel shells. The bar was set on earth absolutely bare of tree and shrub that belied its name. The stuccoed honkytonk seemed to have sucked up all the nourishment for miles around. dancing saturday night to live music, a placard in the window promised, but Edgewater was already touched by a rising desperation and he promised himself that by Saturday night he’d be dancing somewhere else.

  He went into a cool gloom that smelled of hops and cigarette smoke and all seemed touched by a silence so dense it was almost cloistral. A man seated at the bar watched him cross the room. Edgewater’s eyes were still full of the April light from outside and the room seemed a cave he was walking into, the drinkers seated at the tables troglodytes who’d laid aside momentarily their picks and were taking respite from their labors.

  Let me have a draft, he told the barkeep. He withdrew a worn and folded five-dollar bill from the watchpocket of his jeans. The barkeep filled a frosted mug from a tap and raked the foam into a slotted trough and slid the beer across the counter. The barkeep had Vaselined red hair parted in the middle and a red freckled face and brownspotted fingers like sausages.

  Edgewater took a long pull from the beer and lit a cigarette and sat just enjoying the silence. Even the drinkers at the tables were quiet, as if still contemplative of whatever had befallen them the night before. He could feel the silence like a comforter he’d drawn about him and he was glad that Claire and the motorcycle were rolling somewhere away from him.

  There was something jittery about Claire that precluded calm. She was always in motion and always talking. He’d watched her sleep and even then her life went on, her face jerking in nervous tics at the side of her mouth, her iriscolored eyes moving beneath nightranslucent lids like swift blue waters. Her limbs stirred restlessly and he’d decided even her dreams were brighter and louder and faster than those allotted the rest of the world. Watching her sleep he felt he’d stolen something he did not want but nevertheless could not return.