The Lost Country

by William Gay

  Pettijohn, you in enough trouble as it is. You want it worse?

  That’s the way I’m used to it.

  Listen. If I give you my word I’ll release you on your own recognizance right here, tonight, will you give me that pistol and let these fellers get some sleep?

  I might think about it.

  I don’t want to hear about you thinking about it. I want to know if you’ll do it or not.

  And you won’t be right back down there after me?

  I give you my word.

  Well. All right then.

  Parnell appeared. First his hand, then two agate eyes rising over the railing. Satisfied he came on around the corner.

  Keep your hands in sight.

  There was a moment when he hesitated, you could see it in his eyes. But he was already committed. More’s the fool, he straightened his hero’s shoulders and came on. He was bringing out a ring of keys the size of a grapefruit, he was unlocking the cell door. He was not looking at the gun, he seemed to be ignoring it in a studied kind of way. The door was open and he was halfway across the floor when Pettijohn reneged.

  Get down there beside Morton and say your prayers.

  You gave me your word, Pettijohn.

  It’s worth about what yourn is. Don’t you think I’ve heard you talk out of both sides of your face? Now make your peace with God Almighty cause it’s too late to do anything about this world.

  Pettijohn, you’ll live to regret this.

  Don’t you wish you would.

  Hodges, you and Hinson draw his fire.

  You want us to just start shootin, or what?

  On them knees or I’ll drop you where you stand.

  You boys’ badges is on the line.

  Parnell got awkwardly on his knees. Some reluctant penitent. Everyone watched with interest, seemed to find a grim pleasure in Parnell’s predicament. Parnell seemed helpless. His rough-hewn face seemed to go shapeless, the fine bone structure underpinning it to soften and shrink. He seemed old, tired. His eyes were fixed on the floor beneath him.

  Say them.

  He closed his eyes. No, he said. He seemed to be saying it to himself.

  Pettijohn moved the barrel of the pistol a foot or so to the right of Parnell’s head and fired. When the report slammed his ears Parnell’s eyes opened wide and horrible and his entire body slackened as if the bones would not support it. His hands half arose then fluttered limberly back to the cell floor and lay there palm up, the fingers moving a little like the appendages of scorched spiders and there was a dark stain spreading out from the crotch of his knife-edge khakis.

  Hell, you ain’t so tough. I wisht I’d had a camera when I pulled that trigger. Ever man had a picture like that in his hip pocket he’d be a better man ever day of his life. He pulled the trigger again. This time there was a dry snap and he stood staring at the pistol in disbelief as if it had betrayed him. He snapped it four or five times in rapid succession and looked all about him nervously, his eyes slick and evasive.

  Parnell was getting up dignified and ponderous and you could see life draining back into him like claret poured in crystal. There was a fierce glint to his eyes and he appeared not to notice when the two deputies crossed the cell floor taking out their blackjacks as they came.

  Pettijohn threw the pistol at them and looked about for something to hide him. A rock, a church, sweet night itself. Jesus’s love to appear incarnate and bathe these miscreants in its rosy glow. There was nothing. Oh, Jesus, he said.

  Morton was upon him, for a moment he and Parnell stood swaying as if in dispute as to whose claim was valid. The deputies milled about them like dogs circling a fight. When Morton shoved Parnell aside Hinson hit Morton above the ear with his blackjack so that he staggered and went limberlegged for a moment but he did not let go. He stood swaying like some dancer struck deaf. The rest were closing on Pettijohn. They forced him to the darkest corner. He whimpered when his back reached the concrete. They were upon him.

  Silent as sleep Edgewater and Bradshaw arose as one. Substanceless as shadow down the concrete stairwell, almost no sound down the dark steps. Two steps at a time, three. Chests tight with exhilaration. They were already out the heavy exterior door and on the street when they heard the sound of rushing feet above and behind them. A great uncoordinated stomping and running of what sounded like thousands of booted feet. The night they’d rushed into was harsh and mothflecked but when Edgewater looked up it had cleared and the sky was a great spill of stars.

  Haul ass. Sounds like they all comin.

  Down an alleyway Edgewater ran full tilt over a lean and startled hound foraging garbage cans and fell embracing the dog, scrambled up in a din of outraged yelping and garbage can lids clanging. And turned all about to see where was Bradshaw. A long shadow scissoring with no backward looks toward the alley’s mouth. He ran after him.

  They crossed an alley behind the pool hall and ran past sleeping dwellings awaking dogs from house to house in a great gamut of noise laid howl on howl until Bradshaw stopped his ears with his palms and veered through a backyard to where a scraggly stand of timber adorned a vacant lot. Slowed here where moonlight showed the way between the trees, peering back to the street where porchlights were coming on in random gradation, and somewhere, it seemed now far from them, what sounded like a scattering of pistol shots. They came out of the timber and crossed clotheslined yards and angled down a slope. There was a sawmill there, silent and still in the moonlight, a long covered shed and lumber stacked in neat piles.

  Beyond the sawmill a spreading thicket of dark undergrowth drew them like a magnet. They plunged into it and ran for a long way, halted somewhere deep in the brush and lay breathing hard. Edgewater pillowed his face on the cool damp earth, felt the loam and moss against his cheek. He fancied he could hear from the core of the world spinning beneath him a heartbeat, renewed and sustained, the sound of life itself.

  They came down a dry branch-run choked with shards of rotting lumber and castoff bedsprings and up a steep bank to a thin stand of sassafras through which showed pale and remote a sort of half light, a mere lessening of the dark. Caution edged them through the bracken, halted them where the timber ceased. It had clouded up again during the night and a soft drizzle fell, mute, as if the air about them was turning to liquid that misted their vision, pasted their hair lank and wet to their skulls.

  The clearing opened up into a field like a pasture but there were curving ramps studded with metal speaker posts like truncated or dwarfed trees set out in soil that would not sustain them. Beyond them an enormous screen rising out of the mist on twin posts the size of telephone poles. A great blind rectangle dreaming in the fog, crystal eye sleeping and awaiting colored visions to coalesce out of smoke and manifest themselves. In the foreground there was a stubby silver housetrailer shaped like a cigar and a white stucco building low and square and boxlike. They sat for a time in silence and waited. No cock crowed morning, no watchdog announced these interlopers of the dawn.

  She ain’t here.

  How do you know. You wrecked her car.

  She had an old Chevy too. Besides, I knowed she wouldn’t be here. She’s shacked up somers drunk, damn her. But I guess it’s my fault. She got used to it and now she can’t do without it. You would have thought she could of held out longer than this, though.

  I don’t give a shit about her sex life. Or yours either. If we’re going we ought to’ve been gone. I’m getting the hell out of here. You can do whatever suits you.

  Shit, Billy, now hold on a minute. I know we ort been across the county line by daylight. But I ain’t goin nowhere without my mad money. You know what all I done for the bitch? Well, she wouldn’t hardly pay me, what I got in bed and at the table was about it. So I got too slick for her. I sold tickets and evernown then I’d take their money and not give em no ticket, just wave em on in. I’d pocket that. A dollar here, five there. Change I’d squirrel away sellin hotdogs and such. A man don’t look out for hisself won’t nobody e
lse.

  Where is it? She might have found it by now.

  Wrapped up in meat paper in the bottom of the damn deepfreeze. She wouldn’t have thought to look there even if she’d knowed I had it.

  Well, let’s get it and get out of this son of a bitch. If I never see Wayne County again it’ll be a year or two too quick.

  I’m about ready for a change of scenery myself.

  Burst popcorn bags and crushed Coke cups. Spilt popcorn like a patch of dirty snow. A condom draped limply across a speaker like some arcane Piscean life, slick with the slime of primordial seas. This strange specimen mounted here for approval. Kicking through halfpint bottles and beercans. She’s let this place go to hell already, Bradshaw said, looking about with a proprietary air.

  The doors were locked but Bradshaw jimmied a window. You wait here a minute, he told Edgewater. I know where everthing is and it’ll be quicker like that.

  Quick’s the way I want it. We don’t know when somebody’ll come drivin up.

  You can see the road good. We could make the woods.

  I believe I’ve made the woods about my limit for this lifetime.

  Bradshaw was climbing through the window. Edgewater stared toward the screen and below it to where the highway ran. He watched with held breath a car pass from his sight. The road vacant again save for swirling groundfog. Time passed. He wished for a cigarette, a drink, for distance. Come on, he called into the dark interior.

  Bradshaw threw out several bags of potato chips. A carton of cigarettes. Climbed out clutching under his arm a frozen package done up in white butcher paper. Talk about ye cold cash, he snickered.

  Are you ready now?

  But Bradshaw was laying aside his parcels, reaching back inside the building. With some difficulty he brought out a big black and yellow chainsaw.

  What the fuck now, Bradshaw?

  Hold on now, Billy, Bradshaw said. He had set the saw down, knelt beside and unscrewed the gas cap, inserted a finger to gauge the depth of gas. I ain’t stealin it. I just aim to borrow it a minute. He put the gas cap back on, felt the chain for sharpness. How about totin the money?

  Bradshaw arose, hefted the saw. Edgewater gathering up bags of potato chips, stuffing the carton of cigarettes inside his shirt. Nobody calls me everthing from a chicken to a motherfucker and skates, Bradshaw said. She’s got it comin. He was striding off toward the screen.

  Knowledge broke upon Edgewater like a wave of illumination. Oh for sweet Jesus’s sake, he said. He started out after Bradshaw. When he was even with him he grabbed Bradshaw’s arm. Come on, Bradshaw, he pleaded.

  Bradshaw did not pause. You just gonna have to humor me on this one, Billy. Hell, you heard the way that slut talked to me. It won’t take but a minute.

  Edgewater released him with a weary resignation and sat down on a mounded ramp and leaned back against a speaker post. He opened a bag of potato chips and began to eat. Bradshaw had knelt in the wet grass near the screen and begun to crank the saw. When it started he arose with the saw and studied the screen. Apprentice woodsman sighting upward, studying angle of inclination, wind direction. After some deliberation he leant and began to saw the post, the whine of the saw loud in the pastoral morning. Pigeons arose uncertainly from the summit of the screen. Edgewater arose as well and retreated until he judged himself safely out of range.

  When the post was cut through the screen trembled, a great ripple ran over the smooth white surface, the post a mainsail trembling in a rising wind, it tilted, twisted with a great wrench of tortured wood. Bradshaw was already hurrying toward the second post, the saw held like a weapon. The raucous whine cutting through soft pine.

  Edgewater was opening the package of money. Ripping aside the white paper. Caught in the clear seize of ice were quarters, halfdollars, bills of all denominations. A cornucopia of frozen money. Elation lifted him. The world was wide, possibilities infinite for a man of means.

  He looked up as the post split, running ten or twelve feet in the air, splintering, Bradshaw leaping aside as the base kicked back. Even Edgewater was awed. The sky seemed to be shuddering. He began to gather up his potato chips. The screen struck the ground with the force of an explosion, crumpled, warped on itself like smoldering paper. Bradshaw was already coming at a lope, the saw abandoned, skirting the still quivering expanse of rubble. Hot damn, he was saying. He rubbed his hands together briskly. I wish she had two or three more. I’da made a clean sweep.

  Are you about ready?

  Hell yes. Let’s move it down the line.

  They had run seventy-five or a hundred feet when Bradshaw suddenly stopped dead still and seemed to be considering something. I’ll be right back, he said.

  What now? Edgewater wanted to know, but Bradshaw was already in an ungainly lope back toward his pillage. Edgewater hunkered on his knees. Weariness lay heavy on his shoulders. He lit a cigarette and smoothed the wet hair out of his eyes. When he looked back he just shook his head. Bradshaw had his shirtsleeve pulled down over his hand like a mitten and he was wiping fingerprints off the chainsaw.

  They came in on the back of a flatbed pickup truck, erect behind the cab through a country of seemingly endless ascents over hills and down a long steep grade with the old pickup’s brakes smoking and slipping, as if the world was concave and they were speeding toward its center. Below them a winding creek or river cleft the landscape. When they crossed it and came out the covered bridge, the road wound up a sloping incline through scraggly pines where a rusted beer sign sprouted out of a tangled rot of kudzu. Bradshaw pointed and gestured toward the top of the hill. When Edgewater only shook his head in wordless incomprehension, he made gestures as if he were drinking an invisible bottle of something and when the rise leveled out he began to bang on the roof of the cab with his fist.

  The truck eased over to the shoulder of the road and ceased across from a faded clapboard building with a high porch and they leapt unsteadily onto the roadbed. After the breeze from their motion, the air here seemed stifling. Edgewater could smell the pines, hot and astringent.

  We thank ye til ye better paid, Bradshaw told the truck driver. You ort to come in and have a cold un with us.

  The wizened old man just shook his head and raised one tentative hand in a gesture of goodbye, dismissal. The truck rolled away.

  We ought to stayed with him as far as he was going.

  Hell, Billy, we ain’t ten mile from home. And I been spittin cotton across the last three counties.

  They stood unsteadily, legs not adjusted to firm earth after the slewing truck bed. Sailor’s legs so far from the sea. Squinting against a sun brutal off the white graveled parking lot and blinding off the decks of two cars parked there they crossed to the porch where canebottom chairs were aligned and inside to a cavernous coolness, to an amalgamation of smells. The sour winy smell of beer and the smell of old hot pine leaking from the floor and a residual smell of sweat and time.

  The barkeep was a big scarred man who did not greet Bradshaw as if he were a long lost brother or a hero returning from the wars. In fact he stood regarding these two as if they might be the avatars of some bad news not yet in sight. He laid his magazine aside and watched them cross the marred dance floor, Bradshaw executing a little buck-and-wing as he came, solitary heel and toe to a silent jukebox.

  I’m back, Swalls, he said. Get out the beer and lock up ye daughters.

  Young Bradshaw, Swalls said, without affection or surprise. I thought maybe I’d never see your like again.

  Give us two cold ones here.

  Swalls was waiting to see was there money forthcoming. I believe I got a little ticket on you here from before you left.

  Hell, I thought I paid that. He was digging in his pocket, dragging out a tortured-looking bill, spreading it flat on the bar, the reassuring face of U.S. Grant. Take it out of this and you still ain’t give us them cold ones.

  Swalls set out two cold bottles and took up the bill, studied it in better light as if to discover there marks o
f inept engraving.

  Goblin’s Knob’s the meanest honkytonk in three counties, Bradshaw was saying. He drank down half his beer, sighed deeply. These old boys come off a Beech Creek and everwhere around here and you talk about tough. They bust each other with chairs just to warm up and then they set in about nine o’clock and just teetotally demolish this son of a bitch. Swalls had to get him a set of prints drawed up so he could get her back together on Sunday mornin.

  Seems like I remember you sayin if you ever looked at this place again it’d be through the windshield of a Cadillac.

  Well hell, Bradshaw said, taken aback for a moment. Well shit, I had to leave it out in the yard. You don’t think I could drive a big thing like that through that pisspoor excuse for a door you got, do you?

  Swalls made change from a sack with a drawstring top, aligning the money carefully on the bar, coins atop. Boxes of merchandise behind him cloned in the mirror where they hunched like revenants guarding their provender. Goody’s headache powder. The cure may be bought where the disease contracted. In the mirror Bradshaw and Edgewater reflected darkly, washed up here like refugees or derelicts. In the lethargic air from a fan, a yardlong strip of flypaper black with flies rotated like some perverse carnival ride in miniature. A jar of pickled sausages, phalli in cloudy vitriolic fluid.

  The day began to wane. The western window went red and then a pale rose, stained glass in this house of the unsaved. A cool blue shade lay on the east. They drank beer and Swalls went back to his magazine, abandoning it only for sorties to the beer cooler.

  After a while a man came in looking all about him as if deadfalls lay in wait. A thin face shadowed by a greasy duckbill cap. A face curiously androgynous, aesthete. The eyes were skittish, nervous, as if something were continually in pursuit of him and he could not tarry long. He was carrying a crokersack bound with wire and when he perched on a stool he sat the bag by his side and stopped it with his foot as if it might escape or someone might take it from him and Edgewater thought he detected motion there, a convulsive movement of the burlap.