The Lost Country

by William Gay

  Sounds like they’re comin closer.

  It damn sure does.

  The sounds had separated themselves into male and female, assailed and assailant. There were bitter curses, threats of dire harm, cries of protestation.

  Do you reckon they seen the fire and are headed over here?

  Looks like it.

  Goddamn it. Help me find that old brown tackle box. That’s where my piece is. I’ve put up with about all this old crazy shit I aim to.

  You want me to throw a bucket of water on the fire?

  I guess they done seen the porchlight, no need in turning it out. They don’t seem that interested in us noway. Roosterfish was dumping out the contents of the tackle box, looking for shells. He broke the gun and loaded it, stuffed a handful of shells into his pocket.

  Light that lantern will you? I hear somebody running.

  Up out of the fog a figure appeared with only the sound of its approach to warn them and as though it gained visibility all in a rush or had stumbled half-dressed and instantaneous through some curtain separating reality from fantasy: it leapt upon them fully realized, a crazed man or boy wearing only a shirt and it unbuttoned and distended capelike behind him. His pedaling feet were unmindful of rocks and roots but leapt unshod through what Roosterfish had always thought of as his bedroom and out the other side, hands clutching a pair of trousers as though he intended dressing up for whatever fate held in store.

  His eyes were wild and his greased hair rose and fell all in a sheet and rode his head like a flat skillful cap and there was a bleeding cut tending from his jawline down his throat. When he came upon Roosterfish and his enormous pistol his eyes rolled and he ran sidewise like a shying horse with his hands making clawing gestures at the air as if for purchase: as if the honeysuckle air was some medium he swam or flew through and he made a whimpering sound in his throat but he did not slow his pace but ran fulltilt into the darkness with bracken crashing in diminishing series as if whatever lay before him could not possibly equal whatever it was he fled.

  Lord God, Roosterfish said. Who do you reckon that was?

  I guess it was Willard.

  Well he was in a shitfired hurry.

  A girl was crying in a harsh and animal-like yelp and earlier there had been the sounds of blows, a stick or strap falling on flesh but they did not hear this anymore, as if their source had grown satiated or perhaps just fallen behind. What they did hear was running steps and rocks and shale falling into the river in continuous and steadily approaching splashes. Then ragged breathing and a girl too sprang past the near-opaque wall of fog and was amidst them all in disarray, some woodsprite or nymph the disciples of Pan had ill used. She was naked except for a pair of panties still wound miraculously round one ankle and a brassiere twisted so that one breast bobbed above it and the other below.

  She fetched up short near Roosterfish and gestured mute and desperate toward the still-fallow dark that had expunged her and stood panting hard for a moment. Rape, she said at last. Stop him. She stood breathing deeply and then stooped to untangle her panties, pausing before rolling them up to pick offending bits of twig and honeysuckle from her pubic hair and she stood with breasts unplumbed peering apprehensively into the fog as if it was the already rippling surface of some vast water she expected something dread to surface from. There had arrived imminent with her a hush of all sound as if the night quieted to hear what transpired. The river alone moved implacably on, disinterested, above this tawdry tableau.

  Who is it? Who’s after you?

  She did not reply save to gesture again toward the dark. She drew near Edgewater, as if she might hide behind him, and Edgewater himself felt an unreasoning fear, uncertain what beast or predator might next spring upon them.

  When Tyler strode into the circle of yellow light he came casually as if he had been strolling along the river when all this madness erupted around him. He was swinging a walking stick jauntily along and the hand-shaded face peering myopically at them was bland as still water.

  My man, Roosterfish, he said, not bowing exactly but performing an abrupt inclination of the head and neck, an acknowledgement. And the Rat King himself, I believe it is.

  Then he ignored them and started toward the girl. She had swung onto Edgewater’s arm and begun a whistling expulsion of breath. Don’t let him take me, she said.

  You trifling little slut, Tyler said. I’ll learn you when to run. She was behind Edgewater as though whatever small shadow he threw might hide her, might swallow her up.

  Roosterfish was sitting on a rock with the tackle box in his lap and the pistol athwart his knees, and he kept cocking it and holding tension on the hammer and letting it fall gently to.

  When Tyler was directly in front of Edgewater, he ceased. Rat King, I believe you’re standing between me and something I’ve already bought and paid for.

  Edgewater stood staring down at him. At this gross parody of a man cast in miniature from some faulted and misshapen mold: shoulders humped as if God had freighted him with more weight than a man should bear, childsized legs encased in boots of patent leather, the wide maroon tie painted with the likeness of a rearing palomino that glowed as if it might have batteries concealed about its person. The straw boater adorned with a cockfeather. He could smell him. Cheap perfume, Sen-Sen, whiskey, dissolution: all the sweet smells of deliberate ruin, the carrion smell then of slow and self-inflicted death.

  He looked down into the glossy little eyes as depthless as a stuffed animal’s or the result of some inexpert taxidermist’s art and saw there for one moment pain, a quick flash of outraged dignity; then perhaps they read on Edgewater’s face not fear, but pity, for they went instantly malevolent, a loathsome doll’s eyes.

  I’d hate to cut through you to get her, but cut through you I will.

  You do whatever suits you.

  Have a drink of wine, Tyler, Roosterfish said.

  Another time, Tyler said without turning his head. I’m not here socially. I’ve got a little unfinished business with Miss Ware.

  Funny the way folks describe a thing. You call it unfinished business. Rape was what she hollered.

  Tyler turned then. She’s down to the bottom of the barrel. She is the bottom of the barrel. Rape’s all she’s got left to holler. He gestured with his arm and hand, fingers together, thumb extended, a curious stagy gesture like an actor playing to the balconies, to a vast audience beyond the lanternlight. Now I don’t feel called upon to share my business with any man. But since we broke in on you here and disturbed you, I’ll tell you. I gave her twenty dollars. That’s a lot of money. When I give twenty dollars for a fucking, I want it in the biological sense. She gets the hots for some sawmill hand or poolshark and they give me the slip. Anybody planning to lay up and fuck and drink on my twenty dollars is living in a dream world.

  You can’t buy me with twenty dollars, the girl said. I’m not a whore.

  You might not have been up till you took my twenty dollars.

  Roosterfish sighed. Well. I don’t know. In a world of inequity yours is not the least of them. But all I know is I’m tryin to sleep and I got naked people trompin over me and you with that stick and no tellin what in your pocket. I don’t give a goddamn what you do, as long as you do it somewhere else. But nobody’s gettin beat to death tonight. Not here.

  I’ve already apologized for interrupting your sleep. I apologize for Miss Ware, since she seems uninclined to. I apologize for the boy. Did he come through here?

  He damn sure did. And you can write him off. Nothin short of a bloodhound could even pick up that feller’s scent.

  Tyler smiled. He thought for a minute I was going to cut his throat.

  He thought it longer than that.

  Well, that’s neither here nor there. You show me a deed to this place and I’ll be on my way.

  I got it right here in my lap.

  Tyler sighed. So you have, he said. He turned to Edgewater. And what does Rat King have to say about it?

 
I’ve already said it.

  I see everything in black and white, Tyler told him. He who is not with me is against me.

  Ever how you want it.

  That’s right. How I want it. And you’re lining up with them?

  We’re not linin up with nobody, Roosterfish said. But you ain’t killin nobody or whuppin no girl here tonight. Not while I got a scattergun in my lap.

  You think that’s the only gun in the world.

  It’s the only one I see.

  Fireflies drifted over the river, winked in and out of sight in the fog, gleamed like plankton in the eerie medium, otherworldly creatures earthbound.

  Edgewater stood watching Tyler. Tyler was not paying him any attention but was peering past him at the girl as if to see was she worth dying over. She was adjusting her breasts back into the pockets of her brassiere and her face was lowered, her eyes half-closed to her work. In the wan light she looked young; save for the breasts she could have been a child at her toilet teleported here by some dark communal magic, object of these old men’s winter dreams.

  I want my twenty dollars.

  I ain’t got it. I give it to Willard.

  Willard owes me more than money. What Willard owes me money wouldn’t pay the interest on.

  Willard’s gonna kill you.

  Willard’s took to the deep pineys. Willard’s never killed anything except a halfpint of whiskey and his mama’s dreams.

  Can you drive? Roosterfish asked the girl.

  Yeah.

  You better get up on the road and start drivin then. Tyler ain’t leavin for a few minutes yet. He’s goin to visit awhile and drink some wine with us.

  I come and go as I please, Tyler said. I won’t bother her tonight. I’ve got plenty of time and I don’t mind waitin till the cards fall my way.

  I want him to walk up there with me, the girl said. I’m scared of the dark. She had her hand on Edgewater’s arm.

  It didn’t bother you a while ago.

  Tyler turned his head and spat into the darkness. I think she’s got you picked to finish what Poindexter started, he said. Poindexter kindly got interrupted.

  You go to hell, the girl said.

  I don’t have twenty dollars, Edgewater said.

  Come on, she told him.

  They walked all the way without speaking but he could feel her beside him, once in the dark her hip bumped him, he could hear her breathing. They skirted past the river where half-immersed trees loomed dark bulks through silver fog and walked around the fescue field on the upper side where it was driest through shadows darker even than themselves and she took his hand beneath where unseen owls watched yelloweyed and silent from the keep of the trees of the night.

  Then out of the woods and into the field at once limitless and finite where the world lightened incrementally and the fog was corporeal, a moist wall they moved through, solid through solid, to where the embankment loomed and elderberries and sumacs became opaque presences of the night, shrouded cedars were denizens of some unreal world gathering out of the mist to harry them on.

  The car was in a sideroad, the door still open, a yellow glow from the domelight tending away to nothing. When they came into the circle of light Edgewater looked about him, the car in disarray and evidential of violence and sudden departures. Willard’s missing shoes, so placed as if he had leapt out of them and fled: a dress crumpled in a silken ball, a purse upended and contents strewn as if from some moving vehicle. The scant remains of a halfpint of whiskey propped against a stump. The radio played on, sang the mindless virtues of barn paint.

  Edgewater picked up the whiskey and sat on the stump. He drank, lowered the bottle. Bobwhite again, he said to nobody. She was sliding the dress over her head, he glimpsed detachedly the moonwhite expanse of her belly, the rounded mons veneris of her panties. Her face appeared, hair disarranged by her dress, beaded with water from the fog.

  It wasn’t true what Tyler said. He’s crazy.

  What?

  About why I wanted you to walk up here. I really was scared. I guess I didn’t have time to think about runnin down there. I just seen the fire and figured it was somebody campin out. It was the only place to run.

  It doesn’t matter.

  I guess not. She began to pick up scattered coins, photographs. He wondered idly was there one of Willard. She studied her face in the mirror of a tortoiseshell compact, kneeling, rapt as if in prayer, knees rounded and brown below the hem of the white dress. She applied lipstick, pressed it smooth with her mouth. Her eyes cut to him on the stump watching her.

  What are you lookin at?

  Nothing. He arose, drank again. You better get that stuff arranged and get out of here. He won’t stay down there forever. Roosterfish won’t shoot him and likely he knows it. He’s got you boxed in here with his car.

  Can you back it out of the way so I can get out?

  I can if the key’s in it.

  It was. He cranked the car and wheeled it back onto the blacktop. When the girl had Willard’s car turned he pulled it back in and cut the switch off.

  She was waiting on him. Want to ride around awhile? she wanted to know.

  I guess not.

  Why?

  I’m heading out in the morning. I need to get to sleep.

  Head out tonight and I’ll give you a lift. Come on, I don’t bite.

  What the hell. All right.

  Going across the trestle the bridge swayed, steel on steel protested their passage, warned them back. Edgewater had only crossed it on foot: it might have lain in wait like a deadfall, might yaw apart like a rising drawbridge, twisting I-beams warp like foil, cars skidding lockwheeled down a rusted plane to the river.

  She turned left at the crossroads and stopped at Simmons’s. There was no light on. She got out without speaking and he watched her walk to the door and knock and after a time the door opened. Still no light came on. The staggered ranks of Simmons’s derelict cars were softened and rounded by the fog, their crushed contours smoothed. Roses and hollyhocks grew among them, wild roses might take them yet. Debris of denouement.

  He closed his eyes and felt the cool plastic upholstery and the healing balm of the summer night scented alike with pigsty and roses. He listened to the silence, to the untroubled dark. He opened his eyes and drank the last of the whiskey and reached down and turned on the radio. Now a country comedian was on, Edgewater listened soberfaced to him, to the audience that would draw him into their laughter.

  Somewhere outside there were voices, a door’s closing cut off short, and wraithlike she came down the muddy walk and got in. She had a halfpint of whiskey with her and a bottle of Seven-Up to chase it with.

  Underway again. The road twisted and shifted, a spinning skein of yarn, a madman’s shuttle reeled off as they used it. She drove slowly until they topped out on higher ground and the headlights abruptly broke through the fog, a world of icy clarity he’d forgotten. Once rounding a curve they came upon pedestrians, an old man and a bent old woman clutching a shawl. Edgewater had her stop the car and back up and he offered them a ride but they would have none of him. The old woman shook her head mutely and clasped the shawl tighter and the old man kept walking down the road staring at its litterstrewn shoulder as if he had lost something among the baubles of bottlecaps and cellophane and expected to come upon it. They went strolling along beside the car until at last he rolled up the glass and they fell behind.

  He did not ask where they were going, perhaps felt it did not matter. They drove on through a defoliated area bleak as if it were being prepared as a sanctuary for the mad or damned: a birdless forest where trees rose black amid stark branches of telephone poles. A road led off through it and she turned, a chert road tending downward again, crossing a stockgap and wending up through rainbowed cedars the color of copper within whose branches sodden birds roosted like black and mutated fruit.

  Where she finally stopped there was a rock quarry like an enormous amphitheater, shapes of machinery vaguely saurian, hazy in
the tangible air, cliffs rising dizzy and plumb.

  Why did you come here?

  Tyler wouldn’t ever think to come here.

  Nobody would think to come here. Besides, he’s probably forgotten you by now.

  Not Tyler.

  He stared through the windshield, and when she cut off the wipers silent rain blurred the scene. It ran like watered ink, and when she turned off the lights the darkness was absolute. He began to hear the rain.

  Hand me that light out of the glove compartment and I’ll show you where we swim.

  They got out and walked cautiously to the shelf of rock. The batteries were weak in the flashlight and its beam barely penetrated the fog.

  It caved in a long time ago here. Folks say there’s a steamshovel down there deep, Willard’s seen it. It’s two or three men down there they never did get out. I’ve heard old folks that was here then tell about it and they said it was like a earthquake or somethin.

  He shined the light toward the dark abyss. Where the limestone ceased there was only fog. The ledge fell away below, a great misty wall of stone scored by drillbits and hammers, and across there was nothing, the light did not reach the other side and when he dropped a stone it vanished before he heard the splash.

  You mean people swim in this place?

  Sure.

  How do they get out?

  Here. She took his hand and guided the light toward a roll of woven wire fencing strung out down the precipice. It was secured around metal stakes in drillholes. It’s like a ladder, see? You can climb right up it. The beam of light followed it over the edge and down to where the fog took it.

  Edgewater stared at it. It vanished in the haze and he wondered how far it went on before the water began, what waited there. A curious primitive stairwell to the waterlogged chasms of the earth. Life there mutant and strange. Life is adaptable, he thought, will not be undone. Pale slugs thrive in sewage, flesh so loathsome it belies the name. What mutations here. A beast from the land of counterpane lies dreaming among marrow-sucked bones of divers past. He arose and when he did she took his arm, swinging the light along. They got back into the car.