The Lost Country

by William Gay

  Bonnie?

  Bonnie ain’t here. The face was closed and bitter. Who are you anyway?

  Bradshaw snickered to himself. Bonnie would know, he said.

  Come on, Edgewater told him.

  I know she’s in there, Bradshaw told the woman. There was a wooden porch or platform constructed of two-by-fours in front of the trailer and Bradshaw walked unsteadily up to it and rested his arms there. The woman stepped back into the semidarkness of the trailer and made to close the door.

  I want to ask her to go to that dance at Ethridge with me.

  She ain’t here I done told you.

  Bradshaw fell into ruminative silence. He stared away across the field to doves foraging and a fence curving away to a nothingness lost in yellow flowers. Well, is there anybody in there that wants to go to the dance at Ethridge? he finally said.

  My husband’ll be in in a little bit, she told him. He might want to talk to you about it. The woman closed the door and Edgewater heard the bolt slide home. He leaned out the window.

  I reckon that ain’t Bonnie?

  Her sister-in-law or some damn thing.

  You ready to go back to town? Or somewhere?

  I reckon so. I hate coming this far on a dry run though.

  I’d hate gettin my ass blown off by somebody I ain’t even met.

  All right then. I sure wanted to see Bonnie though.

  They were not halfway back to the blacktop when they met a car coming flatout in the middle of the road. Edgewater took the ditch run and went steering through pokeweed and blackberry briars with Bradshaw grabbing at the air with his hands, climbing half out the window as if of a mind to jump. Stop, stop, he kept saying. It’s her. They ceased crosswise in the road and Edgewater backed up to right the car. The other car had stopped as well and was slowly backing up the road toward them. There were two girls in it.

  When they were parallel with them the girl shoved her sunglasses up on her forehead. She was a slim girl tanned very darkly from the sun and she had black hair that gleamed sealike and sleek, wound up smoothly at her bare shoulders. There was a vestigial and faint prettiness about her but her eyes were old and wise and Edgewater had seen eyes like them in bars and countries far removed from this backroad. Well hello, sweet thing, she said to Bradshaw.

  I see you still takin your half of the road out of the middle, Bradshaw said.

  I got things to do and people to meet.

  Where yall been?

  Over to Napier swimmin.

  Why hello, Linda. You too stuckup to speak?

  The other girl raised a disinterested hand. She was less pretty than the dark haired girl. She was very fair and had bleached-looking platinum hair. You got a cold beer in there?

  We got one but you have to come after it. We want to see what you look like in your bathing suit.

  The girl got out and came around the car unselfconsciously. She had on an orange bathing suit as brief as a heretic’s prayer and as convention permitted. Her body gleamed with richly scented oil as if she were the sex object of some holy embodiment who had prepared her vessel to preserve it for other ages. She looked like trouble to Edgewater, but that was only a thought in passing. Trouble had never meant that much to him.

  What say, jellybean, she said to him. Water from her wet hair beaded slickly on her smooth white stomach.

  Bradshaw handed her a can of beer. Listen, he said. Me and Billy’s goin over to Ethridge tonight to the dance. We lookin for a couple of volunteers. How about it?

  She lowered the beer can. Edgewater could not see her face: he saw the can descend and the orange hemisphere where the car door breached her breasts and her belly and her tilted hips. There was a faint gold down on her stomach below the navel. She rested against the warm metal of the car. He could smell the warmth of her.

  You’d have to talk to Bonnie about it, Linda said.

  I already got a date, Linda. Sorry, Bonnie answered from the car.

  Hellfire. You mean I come all the way out here from where I come to see you and you won’t even break a date to go with me? Who’s it with?

  Chief Aday.

  Aday? What you going with a burntout old cop like that for? He must be sixty year old. What’s in it for you?

  Twenty dollars, she told him.

  Bradshaw fell momentarily silent.

  I’m goin with him all the time now. He helped me get that trailer. If you was out to the place I guess you seen it.

  Yeah, I seen it. Bradshaw got out and walked around to the other car to where Bonnie sat. Edgewater heard him say, Now you ain’t done forgot me this quick, have you?

  I ain’t forgot you but I still got a date.

  Between the girl’s slim arm and the hourglass curve of her waist Edgewater saw Bradshaw lean down, a hand on either side of the window, bracing himself, bend to the girl’s dark face as if he were whispering secret knowledge in her ear, some occult password that would grant him passage across some ephemeral border. Then he seemed to be gnawing at her neck, chewing her ear.

  Quit, she said. Now quit that. I told you I can’t and I can’t really.

  You know damn well you can if you want to.

  No I can’t. He’d whip me. He’d lock you up too.

  Sure he would. You know he would. He’d shit and fall back in it too.

  You don’t know him. He’s crazy about me.

  Well, I am too and I want you to go with me tonight. What if I died and you didn’t go with me. What if I had a car wreck and was laid out all mangled and bloody. Think how you’d feel. You’d wish then you’d of went with me.

  I hate to hear a grown man cry, Bonnie said to no one.

  You don’t have much to say do you, jellybean? Linda asked Edgewater. Has the cat got your tongue? Edgewater was still staring at her stomach.

  Sure I do, he said. What do you want to talk about?

  Bradshaw had said something they had not heard. Then Bonnie said: Well that’s how it is. You can root hog or die.

  Hell, I ain’t payin for something you laid on me for nothing time and again.

  She pulled the sunglasses back down over her eyes. The last fleeting glimpse of them revealed them hard and unaffected and as removed as if she were already miles away. Yet she grinned at him, a flash of white teeth. No tickee no shirtee, she told him.

  Bradshaw kicked the side of the car as hard as he could. Dust flew from the rocker panel, there was a whumphing sound and a dent appeared in the door. He grimaced for a moment, surveying onelegged, clutching his right foot.

  Piss on you, Bradshaw told her. I knowed all along you was a whore. I wouldn’t fuck you with a borrowed dick. God knows what I’d catch.

  You just keep on. Go back to fuckin Mama Thumb and her four daughters, she told him. You always been safe enough that way. She had started the motor. Linda, get your butt in the car.

  I got to go, Linda told Edgewater.

  Don’t rush off in the heat of the day.

  She gave him a little wave with her fingers as she went around the car.

  In a childhood nigh forgotten by everyone save Bradshaw, she had been his sweetheart. She was the daughter of a judge and her blood ran back to forebears who long ago came up the Natchez Trace and settled the county but somewhere along the line things went wrong; a streak of wildness going back perhaps to these very forebears, to a time when the country was vast enough and wild enough for one to do anything he felt like. Her name was Caren Ricketts and along about the seventh or eighth grade she started growing breasts and by the ninth grade nothing was the same. The breasts had risen perfectly into separate and improbable cones that the tight sweaters she affected showed to an advantage almost breathtaking. She had learned to paint her lips a glossy red and her hair was bleached to a burnished platinum. She had discovered a way of crossing the study hall that drew all eyes to her, a loose-hipped walk that disrupted whole classes and inspired masturbatory fantasies on a plague-like scale.

  She had discovered older men as well. Serviceme
n home from Fort Campbell, sailors home from the sea. Aging alumni with nothing to do all day but shoot pool and drink splo whiskey all night and home nowhere save the memory of the hometown crowd chanting their names like a litany. Riding with these gangling long-legged heroes of near mythic proportion to the fabled places of the surrounding counties. Club Cloverdale, Elkin Springs. Dancing there to the local band, riding through the summer night to Napier Lake, Firetower Ridge. The moment of sweet surrender eternal, a loop tape she could and did play again and again.

  There were things to be kept, things to be cast aside, she was a juggler high on sex and country music and white whiskey and she could not hold onto everything. One of the first things to go was Bradshaw.

  Bradshaw was nothing anyway, a nobody. In fact he was worse than a nobody, on her scale he was a somebody with a minus sign, because his father was a preacher; preachers did not figure very high in her scheme of things. Once as a child she had gone with Bradshaw to church. His father was preaching at the Primitive Baptist Church and when he knelt and prayed at length nigh interminable and then arose he had left in the wake of his raving a circular area of the floor wet with spit. Caren had looked at him with a kind of detached revulsion and she told it all over school that he had spit all over everybody in the first three rows.

  Bradshaw had his memories, or perhaps they had him, for they would not please him: once in the seventh grade they had been behind a chainlink fence watching the football team practice. The players were lying on their stomachs, backs arched, hands locked to their ankles, rocking back and forth. They look like they’re screwing the ground, Caren had mused, and hearing her say the word had the force of a blow. Screwing. Her soft ladylike voice. The word was branded whitehot onto the smoking lobes of his brain. It was eternal. It had fueled countless secret and sweaty nighttime fantasies, it would fuel countless more. To him she was Eros personified, as if all history’s musky female sex had been distilled and cast in her image.

  He used to try to keep up. By the time he discovered whiskey and shantytown gangfucks and niggerized cars running on luck and stolen gas she was already out of his reach. She had eloped with a pipeliner and went to Nashville to become a country music singer. She was gone two years. Whatever craft she plied in those years no one ever saw her name on a jukebox, heard her sing on the Grand Ole Opry. When she did come back she had lost the pipeliner somewhere along the way but she did not seem to miss him; she had learned that the world is wide, pipeliners easy to come by. After a while she went to work as a waitress in first one and then another of a series of county line beerjoints and she had stories of the seamy side of show business. Nashville was her Hollywood, her Babylon.

  Bradshaw would still try his luck from time to time, but he was hopelessly miscast in her mind, she refused to update the picture she had of him. He kept track of her, was subtly obsessed with her slide down the social scale. He could not rise to her level, perhaps she’d fall to his. He kept up with each abortion, each lost boyfriend. They were all points in some elaborate game he played in his head.

  The last he’d heard she was married to a truck driver and he thought her lost but one Saturday night in July he walked into Goblin’s Knob and there she was coming through the kitchen door with a tray of freshly washed beer mugs. Bradshaw could not believe his luck. Somewhere a god had smiled down on him. He ordered a mug of beer and drank and wiped the mustache of foam off his lips and just looked at her.

  Hey, Buddy. How you been?

  He strove to keep calm. The sight of her maddened him. She had set the tray down and begun to remove the mugs and stack them upside down on a towel beneath the bar. He watched the movement of her breasts as she worked. His mouth felt dry.

  I been all right. Been travelin around some. What you doin back around here? I heard you was married.

  Well, I may have been when you heard it. I’m not now.

  What happened?

  It’s a long story. Ain’t they all?

  Damn, Caren. Me and you ort to get together.

  Why?

  Why…for old time’s sake. We go back a long way. We could talk about the times we had.

  We never had any times, she said. Her eyes dismissed him, wandered over the few drinkers at the scattered tables. Refugees from dog day heat. Her appraising eyes ceased on a rawboned man wearing a gaudy cowboy shirt. Then they turned back to Bradshaw. Old times are gone anyway, she told him. New times are all there is.

  Bradshaw drank in silence for a time, watched in the wonky barglass the camaraderie about him, himself alone at its center in the mirror, no part of it.

  Come on, Caren. Let’s me and you step out tonight.

  She smiled at him. I can’t, Buddy. You know I always had bigger fish to fry.

  He drained his mug and arose. You’ll come around.

  When hell freezes over, she said, then smiled to take the edge off it. No hard feelings.

  He winked at her. We’ll see, he said, and wended his way toward the door, glancing once toward the man in the cowboy shirt.

  Late of an evening then you would see them begin to gather in the poolroom like an enclave of the damned, taking pause at some lost waystation of doomed souls. Seated at the bar awaiting night and whatever promises it would ultimately leave unfulfilled, they had an air of wistful patience. Surely the night held more for them than darkness. Yet there was something anticipatory about them, something lost, they were like worshipers drawn to this curious tabernacle as if it alone would shelter them from whatever apocalypse fell beyond the reach of its diastolic neon. Grim faces in some medieval mural of freaks and jesters, curious and animate statuary sought out by a collector with a bent for the grotesque.

  Old men with vague war wounds and metal plates in their skulls held a drunken discourse with themselves and when their rheumy eyes did focus on the world about them it was as if they viewed it across some chasm unimaginably wide and as if it were some land they had left and could not remember the way back to, no more tangible than the plot of space and time that had been their childhood.

  Old spent whores devoid of pretense and their young protégées patinaed with guile moved alike among them with a ribald and predatory ambiance. Edgewater could sense there was a kinship here, a curious brotherhood of the forsaken, the unwanted, the obsolete. Yet their coarse laughter that drew Edgewater near to them out of whatever darkness mocked him, was a story that he could not quite overhear, a joke that was missing the punchline, a voice, no more.

  Crippled Elmer cadged beer with a sort of wistful desperation while his mother searched faces foreign enough to these shores as to be unaware or desperate enough to be unmindful of her generosity with gonorrhea spores and body lice. Her wrinkled face powdered and rouged grotesquely as if her cosmetologist was a failed undertaker so inept as to be drummed from the craft, her hair an electric orange red so absolutely divorced from anything that ever grew on a human head that it appeared something purloined in haste by mistake from the trunk of a clown. She wore brash and groundless confidence like some bright garment of youth that did not fit anymore. She forced on Edgewater a drink of Bobwhite from a halfpint she wore on a string about her neck like some gross bauble. Hauled up from whatever grubby depths of her garments and warmed to body temperature by her collapsed and withered dugs. The bottle itself lipsticked and scented alike with dimestore perfume and the acrid musk of her body; the bottle tilted to her upraised face and upon his ears like some backdrop or soundtrack to whatever drama he played out came through the graffiti-ridden walls of the men’s room the click of the pool balls. The clanging of the pinball machine, the drunken voices crossing boast with complaint, farther yet and lost a wailing ambulance was shuttled down the endless walls of the night.

  Bradshaw and Edgewater fell in with Arnold and he had a place that he would show them. A honkytonk where the women were easy and the whiskey cheap and the music loud. They piled into the Chevrolet and commenced a drunken wandering journey through backwoods and timbered ridges, Arnold�
��s voice a confident buzz of promises.

  I wouldn’t take just anybody out here, he told them, his face sly and foxlike by the yellow dashlight. Oh, you’ll like this place. Its pussy wanders in and out all night long with a glass of whiskey in its hand and all you got to do is ask. Now how does that sound to you?

  Bradshaw was unconvinced. I lived here all my life and never heard of no such place. I ain’t hid under a washtub all that time or my light under a bushel neither.

  As if already half demented, Arnold had slipped into some occult realm of dreams and conjured up by telluric alchemy a fantasyland to his order: available pussy and whiskey without end, the law here unarmed or feeble and no questions asked, no papers to be looked at.

  The foraging headlights showed them a land of blackjack and shadows and canted shanties more akin to lairs than dwellings and down winding hills through deep hollows where the faces of politicians stared blandly back from telephone poles, old churches with scripture scrawled like threats of dire intent. Coal oil lit shacks and straggling lines of blacks along the littered shoulder of the road who turned to stare them past with expressionless faces.

  The hell with this, Bradshaw said. I’m going back and try to get Bonnie to go to Ethridge to the dance with me.

  It ain’t much further, Arnold reassured him.

  Then ultimately to a clearing where there were four or five old cars ringed about a sprawling shack through whose slotted walls and boarded windows spilled out yellow light and the sounds of an unamplified gutbucket guitar and a loose and heavy shuffling of feet.