The Lost Country

by William Gay

  Delicate light fanning out from the east brought him awake as the night slackened its weary hold. A first faint unreal illumination called to him with the daylight’s warm balmy breeze, thick with the blossoms of honeysuckle, and disparate odors from the river, musky and rank. He rose from the creek bank and wandered across a field. A stiff wind high above him drove the white clouds ahead, their shadows moved like the tracks of behemoths across the field. He came upon a near abandoned road.

  The sun in ascension. Edgewater’s clothes began to steam as if they burned with some curious singeless fire. Or he was some refugee newly up from the nether regions, a touch of brimstone hovering about him yet. Far on his left hand and across a stream like molten silver in the sun, a farmhouse and barn lay and, as he watched, pigeons rose above the barn in a diffuse cloud. Caught so in the sun they glittered like shards of tinfoil spinning in the wind. The road wound through unkept greenery wet with dew and burdened with grass blossoms of caterpillar cocoons, silver and near translucent in the sun.

  Further around a bend in this green-thronged road he came upon a house with windows stoned blind and door a yawning emptiness. A chimney half-fallen, yawing away from the house, so that at the eaves there was a hand’s span of daylight between. A cur dog went deeper into the weeds, watched him with surly eyes. Perhaps he kept some vigil, awaited some long-gone master. A return of child’s laughter, some refusal to accept abandonment that would persevere against all odds. Does force not move mountains? The yard was littered with wind-driven shakes, weeds in promiscuous abandon. No one hailed him from these unglassed windows, called from the tilted porch. Whatever revenants dwelt here expected no company down this weary road.

  Further still there was a church and a grassgrown graveyard and he began to feel that he had come ashore in some land beset so with plague or violence that all its inhabitants had dropped their tiresome lives and fled for other climes leaving only their dead and their castoff dwellings.

  He sat for a time and rested among weathered stones and marble spires so old all traces of their manufacture had been erased and they seemed some anomaly of nature. A concrete crypt shifted by forgotten tremors. Old out-of-date resplendence. A fallen stone angel with a broken wing. Earthcaught, her face against the rampant weed looked up at him serene and untouched and so remote it looked worlds removed from the mawkish tawdriness of his life. And from these other lives already spent, old stories long told, teller and listener alike perished to the shifting seasons. Who learned by their telling, who profited? While they lay with clasped hands and sewn eyes, the world spun with its cargo of dead through a black and trackless space unfathomable, beyond comprehension. His mariner’s mind fell to pondering on its command. Who kept the lookouts, whose hand steadied the helm? Or was it a ghost ship looming soundless out of fog and St. Elmo’s fire in a night as black as only a night in the China Sea can be?

  The cries of doves from some far hollow reached his ears more mournful than the voices of these old lives enshrined here, and thoughts of his own more recent dead brought him erect and back onto the road. There was a momentary vision of her behind a steam table, hairnetted, ladling food out to strangers, weary, weary beyond words. Earning the money for his graduation ring. In a wild nonstop orgy of abandonment, he’d drunk it up to the last drop at a string of roadhouses that went as far off into the night as a man had the will and resources to travel. A goodly part spent on a willowy blonde who ended up getting sick. Graduating ringless and remorseless, but are there not circumstances extenuating beyond control?

  Goddamn you, Billy, why do you do like you do?

  He put it from his mind. It was a good warm morning in June with the dew drying and money in his pocket and the world might lie in wait past any curve in this strange road.

  There was a store set down in a crossroads amidst all this desolation, weathered board and batten behind its RC and Bruton snuff signs, built high off the ground as if whoever built it had been wary of rising waters.

  He prowled its gloomy aisles, gathering his purchases, carrying them on one arm. A good solid pair of shoes, a complete change of clothing, him squinting to determine sizes in this poor light.

  An old woman sat by a cold heater and rocked and darned or knitted and he wondered about the light and then saw she was blind and past all concern with light. Her hands moved at the construction of some grotesque garment and she rocked on unmindful as if she were a resident of some land that lay between this world and whatever waited beyond.

  Would they be anything else now?

  Edgewater selected razorblades and cigarettes and matches and turned momentarily toward the meatcase where specimens lay in state or like museum pieces in flyspeckled glass.

  But the storekeeper was afflicted with some malady, his face was inflamed and pustulate with open sores, something dread in riotous final stages. His eyes looked one step beyond dementia and as if he were not there at all, he had no curiosity about this unshod and unshirted wayfarer, perhaps his own misery precluded any commiseration, even any knowledge of what passed before him and everything was done now by rote. Leprous or cancerous perhaps, goitered and misshapen and proclaiming its malignancy to whatever of the world chanced here. Edgewater suspected the existence of other strains, dread strains.

  Just take out a cold drink.

  He paid and went out, the screendoor slapped to by its keeper-spring. He was halfway down the steps cradling his purchases when he went back and opened the door.

  How do I get on the highway?

  The storekeep pointed wordlessly on down the road.

  Thanks.

  Come back.

  He passed from sight of the store and wondered for a fey moment had it been some alchemical conjurement of the fates or had it been real. Perhaps it was even now being dissembled and drug from off the stage, crated in numbered crates to be stored in some alcove of limbo, watched and guarded by whatever stagehands moved in divine stealth in the wings of his world, to be patiently kept for reassembly in the chance he passed this way again.

  Marvelously altered and respectable, Edgewater appeared through the curtains of elderberries shrouding the road and continued on his way. A few cars passed him now. A convertible with two girls slowed and the brake lights came on and they turned to watch his approach, one a pale blonde with a hand to her hair. He must have failed some esoteric test for the brake lights went off and they sped away.

  An old hopped-up Ford full of boys full of beer slewed in the gravel and rocked on faulty shocks and slid to a stop several yards ahead of him. A wild red face peered back down the road to Edgewater. Hey, you tired of walkin?

  No, Edgewater said.

  The driver appeared momentarily confused. He had been going to say, Well, run awhile. Well fuck you, he finally said inadequately, and sped away.

  Later he got a ride in a pickup truck with a vacuum cleaner salesman. The truck was filled with vacuum cleaners, wares and an upright model even rode in the seat beside Edgewater. The salesman kept up a running wane flow of conversation across it and Edgewater began to think of it as a silent third passenger. He wondered did the salesman talk to it when there was no one else to talk to and in their private moments did it answer him back? He studied the country’s slide away from him in a shifting green frieze and after a time they hit the blacktop and there was a different sound to the wheels.

  The salesman fell into a grim awed silence when they came over a rise and suddenly onto a scene of carnage. There were revolving lights of varied hue and an ambulance that looked poised to spring, its businesslike rear doors open, attendants sliding stretcherburdened down a clay bank into a cotton field, wreckage strewn about the highway. When they stopped the first thing Edgewater heard was the crackles of the radio in one of the police cars, disembodied voices, detached and calm and hard on that a low wailing. Somebody has shore played hell, the salesman said.

  The convertible with the two girls had come head on into a Mennonite wagon. Far down the road he could see pie
ces of it, a seat, an axle and two wheels intact with tongue between them set cattycornered in the road and there was a horse lying there that did not stir. The car had continued on into a lightline pole and the pole had been severed and lay in the cotton field fouled in its wires. Sunlight winked off a blue glass insulator. The road was treacherous with broken glass and curving smears of scorched rubber showed where the car had been.

  The man got out and Edgewater sat where he was. The salesman in his rumpled suitpants and white shirt Edgewater could see sweatstains in the back approaching a highway patrolman scrawling on a pad. Edgewater pondering what horrors written into the notebook. How they were made coherent. How could order be formed from this chaos? Even then the two attendants half straightened alike with the girl limp between them and laid her onto the stretcher and immediately seized it up and bore it toward the road. The slack form resembled nothing that had ever housed life. Nothing that had ever raised a soft hand to windtossed hair.

  An old Mennonite couple all in their pious black lay broken. The bonneted woman was sitting, legs at an unreal angle. She seemed to be trying to crawl toward a bareheaded man lying on his back and staring at the high silent press of clouds borne south. As if locked in a deep study to unriddle the mysteries of the universe, what sped them in the keep of the heavens, and all the while steadfastly ignoring the keening of the old woman.

  There were details he did not want pressed on Edgewater, not through effort to see but as if his mind were being forcefed harsh electronic bits of knowledge. A vague wind stirred and cooled the sweat at his throat and it ruffled the dead man’s hair and rolled his flatbrimmed hat teasingly against the dewberry briars. A broken bottle of suntan oil lay spreading on the hot asphalt. Down the glass-strewn road lay the Mennonite’s goad, there were attendants arriving to see to the second girl.

  The highway patrolman seemed vexed with the salesman. He pointed at the truck Edgewater sat in and then down the highway where the horizon undulated with heat and the salesman shrugged and turned. As he returned to the truck he veered off his path and stared wonderfaced into the wrecked convertible. When the policeman said something in a harsh voice he went on.

  She was froze on the peg, he told Edgewater in awe when they were cautiously passing around the wagon wheels. He said it as if being frozen on the peg was result and not cause, just another casualty of this wreck on the highway. Some curious chastisement.

  She was froze at one-twenty. Lord, they must have been movin. It was blonde hair and blood all over that dashboard.

  Edgewater said nothing. They passed over the pool of suntan oil and there was a shoe in the grass at the road’s edge. The old man’s goad twisted beneath their wheels and something wrenched in Edgewater when he felt it. Something stirred in him akin to fear. He had always suspected something of control in the world, some relationship between cause and effect. It all seemed random, careless, slipshod. It was as if the past and present had come explosively together, had tried for a breathless moment to occupy the same space in time. Matter and antimatter meeting head-on through some misplotting of their course, some unfactored error. Yesterday and today greedy for the same abstract instant, each annihilating the other.

  Dawn came but it did not awaken him. Then light from a sun tracking high above the treeline was on his face but Roosterfish slept on through it. He was lying across a log, left cheek in the sand, arm beneath him. His shirt was ripped from tail to collar and his back was lacerated with welts and encrusted with dried blood. A ragged line down his cheek where blood had tracked from above the hairline. About him the camp was a shambles, cookware scattered, plates and cups broken, blankets muddy and trodden upon.

  Perhaps the cock crowing below him awoke him, for he soon stirred and tried to rise. He rose by degrees, as if every motion pained him. When he was sitting he cradled his head for a time on his arm and appeared to be oblivious of the world he tenanted.

  Later he climbed down the bluff following the sound of the cock but it was not the blue after all, only the red cock he used for a sparring partner for the Allen Roundhead. One end of the coop had splintered on an outcropping of limestone and the blue was gone; he looked down but all he saw was rolling water.

  He opened the door at the end of the coop where the red cock was but it would not come out. It huddled in a corner, watched him with distrustful eyes, wary of this freedom held like bait.

  Ye might as well come on out in the world, he told it. This travelin life ain’t for you. Find ye a nice hen somers and settle down.

  He looked back once and the cock was watching him go, peering through the slats in the cage.

  The money was gone and camp held nothing worth salvaging. Nor did he tarry long at the Studebaker. The field was still too muddy to attempt rescue even had he felt like worrying with it. He threw gear out the back until he found a change of clothes and the shotgun hidden under the piled hoses. He worked hurriedly, feared other repercussions, did not plan on being here when the other shoe fell. His eye flickered often to the road and back, every car a threat. The first thing he did when he found the shells was load the gun and then he felt a little better.

  He looked back as he crossed the field but he was not losing anything he regretted losing. He felt somehow different, as if all that was extraneous had been cut from him leaving only the essential: he had arrived at some curious destination. He was the core of his being. Divide him or multiply him times himself and it would all be the same. All there was left was purpose.

  A fortuitous ride and a strange vehicle became Roosterfish’s windfall. He got the ride at a truckstop at Adams with a crewcut young Alabama man on his way to the Sunday races at Lawrenceburg.

  The car was a wonder to Roosterfish. It had a primer spotted Chevrolet body with a twelve-cylinder Cadillac engine so huge that the fenderwells had been cut out with a torch to house it.

  You have to jack it up and pull the front wheels off fore you can even change the spark plugs, the boy told Roosterfish with pride. It had a Lincoln transmission and rearend and it had sections of railroad rail welded beneath the chassis for stability. You ort to see it corner, he said. You’d have to have a bulldozer to turn er over.

  This farmboy who had come into his own in the age of the internal combustion engine drove him from Adams to Savannah. He told Roosterfish more than he had ever wanted to know about engines, transmissions, and carburetors. His voice was evangelical, he was a prophet of some new gospel, baptized in highoctane holy water. He accepted with blind good faith Roosterfish’s story of stolen vehicles and tools, a job on a vague horizon. What do you think about this car, he had asked.

  Well…it seems like it might be idling a little rough.

  The boy laughed. Watch this, he said. He pulled a switch in the floorboard and immediately the motor smoothed out with a hum like a Singer sewing machine. I got a cutout in here, he explained. I can let her hit on part of the cylinders and when I want to I can throw the rest of em in like this. Listen at it purr. You could balance a quarter on that motor.

  They were sitting parked in a drive-in restaurant in Savannah eating hamburgers when opportunity presented itself. He had the cutout open and the motor loped and missed and wheezed like a detuned tractor so that the entire carbody jumped and vibrated and was a great source of interest to a man in the car across.

  The car was a new Oldsmobile lacquered a deep metallic blue and its owner kept favoring Roosterfish and the automobile with looks of amused contempt. Finally he could contain himself no longer. He threw his Coke cup out and glanced at the crewcut boy.

  You better get this junkpile home before she flies apart on you, he said. I believe there’s a city ordinance about leavin scrapiron like this on the street anyhow.

  The boy was picking shredded onions out of his hamburger and dropping them one by one out the window. He did not even look at the Oldsmobile. She generally runs pretty good, he said. Just got a little miss in her. She gets away from the lights pretty good.

  I hope
to shit you got a miss. What you runnin, a Massey Ferguson? Say she gets away pretty good? You want to run her? Lay five on her and roll her out and I’ll just blow you away.

  The boy had finished his hamburger. He wadded the waxed paper into a ball and threw it out. He seemed very businesslike now. He looked the man level in the eye and he smiled a small smile. I’ve got fifty goddamn dollars says you won’t blow me nowhere, he said.

  The man in the Olds grinned in disbelief. He cranked the car and sat listening to the stroke of the engine and the reassuring lick the car was hitting. Roll her out, he said.

  The Chevy died twice before he was backed out but he was finally turned to his satisfaction. They gave the money to Roosterfish to hold. The man in the Olds came up with two twenties and a ten and Roost-erfish’s friend gave him a crisp fifty so new Roosterfish looked to see was the ink dry. They let him out at the corner and he stood watching with the bills clutched in his fist. He seemed to detect some heat from them, a warm cheery glow that crept up his arm and throbbed comfortably at his elbow.

  When the boy hit the cutout the man in the Olds jerked his head around limbernecked to see what transpired and there was a curiously stricken look on his face. Its shape seemed to elongate and lose definition. When the light went green the Chevy was gone so fast even Roosterfish was amazed. The hybrid leapt and was gone in a long undulation wail of rubber and was almost at the next light before the Oldsmobile’s spinning wheels caught traction.

  People on the street turned openmouthed to watch and a prowl car coming out an alley was interested as well. Its red light began to revolve and its siren gave one brief squall as it spun onto the main drag. When the boy saw it he had the signal blinker on for a right turn but decided not and the Chevy seemed to squat on its springs for a millisecond and then it was gone in a full throated roar on across the Savannah bridge with the prowl car in its wake.

  Roosterfish turned to run. He turned at a jeweler’s and ran down an alley past a shop where a giant’s eyeglasses hung suspended and past the smells of cooking from cafés and on where the alley narrowed and the surface became cobblestone or weathered brick. He slowed his pace to a dignified purposeful stride past little white shanties, their porches adorned with blacks in rocking chairs and gliders who turned to watch him listlessly on his way. He had the money wadded in his fist and his fist shoved deep into his overall pocket and his feet were weightless with elation.