The Lost Country

by William Gay

  Stop the car. I’ll get out anywhere along here, Edgewater said.

  What?

  Let me out of the car.

  She locked the brakes and the car slid to the shoulder of the road and sat rocking on its shocks. Edgewater was out and perhaps thirty feet down the road before she realized he was gone. She sat as if undecided what to do.

  A car was approaching behind them. He turned and stuck out a thumb. In the sun the car seemed to be warping up out of the blacktop road itself, swift and gleaming and shifting through transient stages as if it had not yet assumed its true form. It shot by without slowing in a wake of dust and roadside paper that rose and subsided gently to earth. He went on. After a time she put the Ford in gear and followed along beside him until he went down the embankment and climbed through a barbedwire fence and started across the field. She stopped the car then and shouted at him then gathered stones and began to hurl them at him. But her arm was poor and the stones fell wide, as did the curses she cast that in the end were just words and he had heard them all so often they had become powerless.

  Billy, she shouted.

  He looked back as she was getting in the car, the sun on her hair.

  He waved her away onehanded without turning. He went on.

  He got two rides that put him farther down the line. Just before dark clouds blew in. Ominous lightning flickered briefly luminescent in the southwest, flickered as if in set relay up and down layered clouds. Then thunder rolled hollowly, a premature dusk fell on the land.

  Sometime back he had come onto the highway and now he angled toward the woods, gazing about for shelter, scanning the sky for rain. A bleak drizzle displaced out of November began to fall, and in a few minutes he was sodden.

  In a bare area near the road he came upon the site of a burned house, blackened rocks and rubble and smoked tin twisted like crumpled and discarded tinfoil. Lightning pointed out a log smokehouse beyond two foundation rocks. Its door hung impotent on strips of rotted leather. Kicking about him he went in, rested on a cardboard box of fruitjars and watched the lightning flash staccato and fierce through the unchinked walls. Cracks showed him a world in tumult, lightning-rendered trees bent and tortured in the wind. It rained harder, pounding on the tin, lulling him soporific. He half dozed.

  He dreamed again of his sister, could hear her voice faint with distance, across the miles, Tennessee to California. It had been his sister. The old man had not deigned speak to him.

  How is she?

  Lord God, Billy. Mama’s dead. We buried her Thursday.

  She fell silent, there was static in the receiver, trouble along the wires.

  Where was you, Billy? She wanted you there at the last.

  I don’t know. The brig. When was it you tried to get me?

  Lord we been tryin. You knowed she was bad.

  The operator told him when three minutes were up, charged for time passed, not for words, mostly there’d been silence.

  Her hair had done come out and everything. From them treatments. God, it was awful, Billy.

  Yeah. Well.

  Are you comin?

  Yeah.

  When?

  I’m on my way now.

  What’ll I tell Cathy?

  Tell her I had trouble. Tell her I’m coming. I’ll have to hitchhike.

  There was silence again, he could hear the voices at the other end, dim, indecipherable. She back on. The brig or a beerjoint one, she said all in a rush. Goddamn you, Billy. Why do you do like you do?

  He hung up. His hand ached, he had not known he held the phone so tightly.

  He awoke. He heard thunder and came to. The rain had stopped, there was a deep and lingering stillness. Then fieldmice moved softly about the joists, keeping their furtive rounds. Something conspiring perhaps against the interloper from the night beyond the walls.

  And what is the height of your arrogance, the geography of your righteousness? Oh sister, you’ve changed, you change still. You who squatted and pissed in the road in front of a carload of boys who dared you. All your drunken laughter in the moonlight. He told me so, in the alley behind the poolroom. It caused me great pain, sister, not the least of which was the arm he broke with the tire spud. When the weather is just so it pains me still. At sea it did, perhaps the damp.

  What are you now, where have you gone these years? You were a little girl, there was a dirty stuffed lamb you would not be shut of. Now factory floorwalkers berate you, and, undone, you weep against limegreen walls. We are all changed, time cheapens us all.

  He entered the outside. The night was clearing and there were patches of sky almost silver. Frogs called from some near pond, nightbirds took up the chorus. Whippoorwills from some deep hollow. He walked through the rubble, momentarily lost from the way he had come. The moon came partway out, Rorschach shards of clouds stringing over it medusalike, in the keep of some high wind unimaginable.

  Starting out he went the wrong way at first and was drawn to a lightning-struck tree burning away in the night. He approached it and stood in wonder, as if he expected admonishment, absolution. There was only the pop and snap of burning timber.

  He went on. He shambled down a hill to the highway, went on east as if there were some compass in him that would draw him home. His shadow trudged behind, a squat caricature of the man it joined at first one foot and then the other.

  Few cars passed. He thumbed them from force of habit, to no avail. No compassion for this hard traveler. In the small hours of the morning there was something sinister about him, he would not tire, the deep timber beckoned him to rest but he would not heed it. They watched from the womblike warmth of their cars as they passed him, felt perhaps a momentary quirk, a stirring of unease. Garbed in white, he was a wraith in their headlights, a spectral revenant reenacting some old highway carnage, a warning rising up in their headlights to encompass them. They went on, they wanted no truck with him. He was the phone that rang deep in the night, a death in the family, bad news at journey’s end.

  The next night. Cold vapors swirled the earth like groundfog. Midnight maybe, perhaps later, it scarcely seemed to matter. The last ride had let him out on this road hours ago and he walked through a country which in these shuttered hours seemed uninhabited. Not even a dog barked. Just a steady cacophony of insects from the woods that fell silent at his approach and rose again with his passage, an owl from some timbered hollow so distant he might have dreamed it. Nothing on this road and he thought he’d taken a wrong turn but then it occurred to him that on a journey such as this there were no wrong turns. If all destinations are one it matters little which road you take. The pale road was awash with moonlight as far as he could see and in these clockless hours when the edges of things blur and the mind tugs gently at its moorings it seemed to him that the road had never been traversed before and once his footfalls honed away faint and fainter to nothingness it would never be used again.

  The moon rose, ascended through curdled clouds of silver and violet. His shadow appeared, long and ungainly, jerked along on invisible wires, a misbegotten familiar he was following.

  It had grown cold with the fall of night and he thought with regret of his coat and blanket but there was nothing for that. He looked both up and down the empty road but source and destination faded into the same still silver mist. He left the road and angled cautiously through branches and blackberry briars into the woods.

  The passage of an hour had him before a huge bonfire, the piles of leached stumps and deadfall branches and uprooted cedar fenceposts with stubs of wire still appended roaring like a freight train and sparks and flaming leaves cascading upward in a funnel of pure heat.

  He warmed awhile then seated himself on a length of log and unpocketed and unwrapped a candy bar and ate it in tiny bites, forcing himself to chew slowly, making it last. There were two cigarettes remaining in the pack and he lit one and tucked the other carefully aside for the morning. When he’d finished the cigarette he built up the fire and lay down with the log for
a pillow.

  Out of the dark a whippoorwill called three times and ceased, whippoorwill, whippoorwill, whippoorwill. After a time another called from a distant part of the wood but the first remained silent, as if he’d said all there was to say. Edgewater closed his eyes and images of the day lost drifted through his mind like a disjointed film he was watching. Slowly he settled into sleep.

  His dreams were troubled and he tried to wake but could not. In the dream he was in a Mexican hotel room. There was a bed, a basin, a chest of drawers. From rooms up and down the hall came shouts and raucous laughter but no one was laughing here. Here something had gone awry.

  The girl on the bed was leaking. Spreadeagled on spreading scarlet as if her white body lay on an enormous American Beauty rose that grew as malign and ill-formed as cancer. The old woman and her smocked assistant were preparing to flee. Rats who’d choose any ship but this one. The woman said something in Spanish he didn’t understand and the man mimicked her hasty exit and left the door ajar and before he fled himself he leaned close into her face and watched the fluttering of her eyelids and cupped his hand hard between her legs as if he’d contain her and Don’t, he said, Don’t, as if dying was a matter you had any say in.

  He wanted out of the room and out of this dream and he went down the hall opening doors upon startled participants in their various couplings and a girl on hands and knees being mounted by her lover like a dog turned and studied him calmly over her shoulder with breasts pendulumed between her distended arms and her hair falling like a black waterfall and as her lover slid into her she looked away and Edgewater closed the door. In the room next a sailor was emptying a bottle of rose hair oil into the graythatched vagina of an old woman and in the next a man turned to blow out the match he’d lit the window curtains with and he grinned at Edgewater and winked while behind him the gauzy curtains climbed the walls like flaming morning glories and the rosedappled wallpaper curled and smoked and stank like burning flesh.

  His father and his sister were in the next room, the old man abed and the sister attendant. His caved face, his deathroom smell. The eyes of some old predator who’s crawled into his den to die. She turned from her ministering with a damp cloth in her hand and Edgewater saw that the old man had been berating her and she was crying. She dropped the cloth, turned away and leaned against the plaster. Finally she turned upon her brother such a look of sadness and loss that he wept despite himself. If you weren’t so…she said, and he closed the door in her face.

  Before the last door he stood holding the doorknob. It was hot to the touch and seemed to vibrate beneath his fingers. Something was holding it on the other side of the door. He realized that beyond this door lay whatever the other rooms had been preparing him for. He steeled his nerve and took a deep breath of the smoky air and twisted the doorknob hard and shoved the door open and fell into the room.

  He woke shaking and appalled and for a moment he didn’t know where he was, where he’d been. He wiped a hand across his mouth. He held his face in his palms. God, he said. God. He raised his face and hugged himself against the cold. The fire had burned to a feathery white ash that rose and drifted in what breeze there was and there was a steely quality to the bluegray light that stood between the trees.

  Objects were softly emergent, tree and stump and mossgrown stone, and to Edgewater these objects seemed to be attaining not mere visibility but existence, things that were being born into the world for the first time before his eyes and he studied these things in a kind of bemused wonder.

  He had a thought toward rebuilding the fire but more than warmth he wanted quit of this glade of dreams. He paused only long enough to rake the ash away until he found a glowing coal to light his cigarette.

  When he came out of the woods onto the roadbed there was already a faint roseate glow in the east and he went on toward it through the first tentative birdsongs. The world was awakening. All sounds were clear and equidistant, somewhere a cock heralded the dawn, on some unseen road a laboring truck shifted gears. A red rim of sun crept above the trees and consumed the horizon with gold and silver light.

  Hunger lay in his stomach like a fistsize chunk of teeth and claws and broken bones but his heart was lifting and his feet felt fleet and light. The day was new and unused and this day was one that had never existed before and he saw it as a footpath that led into a world that was sensual and manyfaceted and complex beyond his understanding, but for the moment he was comfortable in it and roofs and shelter and ill weathers were things of no moment. He thought the only dwelling he needed was the unconfined and unwalled world itself.

  ———

  Once more on the road, Edgewater came upon a store that was deserted and empty. Its shelves shelved only rat dung and dead roaches. He had some time back passed through a scrubby settlement where there was a building marked POST OFFICE with peeling paint and there was a deserted-looking church but there had been no store at all. The land he passed now seemed deserted, fallow fields without even grazing cows to watch his passage.

  His shadow was long before him and he feared that all the stores, should there be any down this way, would be long closed before he reached them. He had two candy bars and he ate the melting chocolate as he walked and when he came upon a concrete culvert that carried a stream beneath the road he angled off and followed the branch through bottles and scrap paper past these signs of habitation to where the water passed clear and cold over mossy rocks. He drank deeply from the stream and washed his face and hands. He arose and started back the way he had come through swarming gnats that fogged about his eyes and when he came back onto the road, there was a slack dissolute look about him.

  Roosterfish judged it about quitting time but the day’s labors had gone well and he thought he’d try one more service station. He’d lost count, this would be the tenth or maybe the twelfth, pickings were good here. He figured there must be a good market for gasoline in this part of Tennessee. Sinclair, Direct Oil, the dinosaur sign. He eased the Studebaker into the Direct station and cut the switch.

  The Studebaker was something to see, a one–of-a-kind limited edition. It was a green 1947 sedan, the model that looks the same coming or going, but its designer would have been appalled to see the grievous changes that had been manifested upon it. Half the cab had been cut away with a welding torch and the trunklid removed and a camper of plywood cobbled up behind it. A rolling shack, a sharecropper’s shanty on wheels.

  Roosterfish got out and surveyed the service station. The day was waning and the glass front of the building was awash with liquid fire. He went through the screen door. No one seemed about save a man in greasy coveralls behind a long counter. Behind the man a sign said NO CHECKS, NO CREDIT, but it didn’t impress Roosterfish. He was accustomed to a world marked POSTED, KEEP OUT, VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW. A world in which most every move he made was illegal in some form or other.

  The man set his Coca-Cola on the countertop and stood regarding Roosterfish. What he saw was a tall thin man with a missing arm. The left arm appeared gone from just above the elbow and the sleeve of the blue workshirt neatly safetypinned to the shoulder. The man wore carpenter’s overalls, worn but clean, and his neatly trimmed black hair was covered by a carpenter’s cap of striped blue ticking. He had pale blue eyes that looked benevolently and directly into the world’s own eyes and his hatchetlike face with its slightly famished cheeks was freshly shaven and gleamed with aftershave and there was about him a faint odor of Sen-Sen and Lilac Vegetal. He’d converted part of the greasy coin of his realm to a more digestible medium. Counting out nickel after nickel, dime after dime.

  What’d you do, the storekeep asked. Rob a paperboy?

  It’s money ain’t it? Still counting, never losing count.

  Well, yeah, it’s money.

  Says so right on it.

  Just count it out.

  Okay then. The coins mounded on the linoleum covered counter.

  They’ve got all this
new stuff now, the storekeep said. Looks like green paper. Foldin money, they call it. You can bend it and carry it around in a pocketbook. It’s the damnest thing.

  I’ll have to try it, Roosterfish said.

  Then Roosterfish hung his head a bit and leaned over the counter. I need a favor, he said. I don’t know who else to ask.

  The man shrugged. You don’t know me, he pointed out.

  I know. Of course I don’t. I’m passing through, a stranger here. I don’t like askin for help but I’m up against it. Pretty bad shape. I’ve gone about as far as I can go. I’m buttin my head against the wall and the wall won’t move.

  The man had taken from the breast pocket of his overalls a bag of Country Gentleman smoking tobacco and was constructing a cigarette. When he’d finished he fished up a Zippo and lit it.

  You wouldn’t let a man bum a smoke would you?

  The man silently handed the tobacco over and Roosterfish singled out a paper and laid it atop the counter. He tipped tobacco onto it and took it up and expertly twirled onehanded a professional-looking cigarette, thumbnailed a match to life and lit it.

  Ain’t had one all day, he said through the smoke.

  Just what is it you want from me? the man asked.

  I got a promise of job in a town east of here called Ackerman’s Field, Roosterfish said. Workin for my brother, he’s a carpenter up there. He’s goin to let me do trim work. I was on my way and last night down in Lake County, a motel in a place called Tiptonville—here Roosterfish looked about as if to see were ladies present—some son of a bitch stole every tool I had right out of my truck. Tools and what money I had.

  I still don’t see why you’re tellin me, the man said. This ain’t a bus station.

  Some of these old boys are a little dense, Roosterfish was thinking. Goodhearted but a trifle dense. I just need a little help, he said. A couple gallons of gas, a buck or two. Hell, half a dollar, anything.