The Lost Country

by William Gay

  Hell, we got a dance right here, Arnold said gleefully. He had a proprietary arm about their shoulders. You boys git out and I’ll show you around.

  They stood uncertainly in the bare front yard. Two or three starved-looking dogs sniffed at them about their cuffs to see were they edible. While they stood as if awaiting invitation, voices arose inside, rose higher still as others joined in, female shrieks of distress. The door flew open and banged against the wall, there was a man framed briefly against the interior light. There were doorsteps there but he did not use them. He leapt out in the yard, his face terrorstricken. It was all instantaneous. His head whirled in one desperate search for cover and he ran for a scraggly stand of pines bent forward, arms flailing the night, his footfalls the only sound there was. Then the door filled again and a big black man leapt down the steps with an unbreeched shotgun in his hands, fumbling shells into it as he came, eyes white and wild and searching among the crouching shadows. He breeched up the gun.

  Out my motherfuckin way, he told them.

  They needed no such advice. He ran a few steps and dropped to one knee and fired one barrel into the spinney of trees. By the time the blast had died away he was again running toward the woods. Bradshaw had turned around spinning back onto the gravel road.

  Arnold was apologetic. I just don’t understand it, he told them. It was real quiet last time I’se out here. Bradshaw gave him a withering look of contempt and made no other reply.

  It was late when they got to Ethridge and things did not go right here either. Bradshaw had grown sullen and uncommunicative. He drank steadily and watched the night slip away, replace unwanted scenery with yet more of the same. He had come to dimly suspect some vast conspiracy of his enemies. Some plot concocted by Bonnie and Chief Aday to keep him from getting bred. The dance was being held in an enormous long building that had once been a roller rink and it was surrounded by rows on rows of cars. They could hear the music long before they got in, discordant shards of guitars and fiddles, a lachrymose hillybilly voice. I’d walk for miles, cry or smiles, for my mama and daddy, it sang.

  Bradshaw was pointing out a car to Edgewater. It was a yellow and black Mercury with enormous mudflaps and hubcaps designed to look like wire wheels. That goddamned Bobby Yates’s new car, he said. Sniffin around after Sudy. I may just whip his sorry ass.

  That ain’t Bobby’s car, Arnold said. Bobby’s in Michigan or someres.

  I wish you’d sort of hold it down, Edgewater told him. I’m gittin a little weary of this shit. You keep on the way you're going and you’re gonna have us all in jail.

  He may even have Sudy in there tonight. I’ve told that son of a bitch the last time I’m gonna tell him. Next time I’ll show him.

  Hell, Arnold said. Settle down a little. Let’s go in and pick us out one. I bet there’s women in there stacked three deep.

  Behind the restraining arm of the bouncer couples closedanced and swayed to the music of the bands. A rotating ceiling light bathed the dancers in a dreamy and romantic glow. The bouncer shook his head. No stags allowed, he said firmly.

  Bradshaw shook his head in disbelief. He gathered his faculties. I’ll give you to understand I’m not no goddamned Staggs, he finally said. I’m a Bradshaw and have been all my life. I got a drivin license in my hip pocket here to prove it.

  The bouncer’s face was almost pitying. Edgewater was grinning, trying not to laugh. He turned and watched girls’ soft faces dreaming past him on the dancefloor.

  I don’t care what’s in your hip pocket, the bouncer told him. You don’t get in here tonight unless you’re a couple and at the best I don’t see one. You ain’t but half a one. If you want in you’ll have to bring a girl like everybody else.

  Bradshaw became inarticulate with rage. Edgewater and Arnold grasped his arms and pulled him bodily out the door and down the steps. He jerked free and fell upon the yellow and black Mercury and began kicking the side of it.

  Fuck this shit, Edgewater said. Who needs it.

  Then Bradshaw ceased and went and set down on the concrete steps.

  It may be some girls’d come in by themselves, Arnold told him placatingly. We’ll just ask em and take them in. Bradshaw was staring at the Mercury in deep thought.

  I need me a possum, he told Arnold at last. You ain’t got one on ye have ye?

  A what?

  Bradshaw was getting in a better mood. Ain’t you never put a possum in nobody’s car you didn’t like? Hell, they’ll shit all over it and tear up the upholstery tryin to get out and make the damnest mess you ever seen.

  In a kind of detached unbelief Edgewater drove them around looking for possums out the residential area into the country on little winding backroads. Bradshaw and Arnold hunched forward peering at the roadside as the lights illuminated it. But they could not find any possums. Apparently they had all stayed home.

  It beats any goddamned thing I ever seen, Bradshaw said savagely. You don’t want a possum you’re kneedeep in the sons of bitches and when you need one they ain’t one to be found nowhere.

  The only decent thing that happened to Arnold all night was that they let him out at his home. Thus he was not there when the cruiser fell in behind them. It followed them from the city limits on toward town, stalking them, somehow predatory, an insolent and arrogant beast suffused with confidence of its prey. Bradshaw’s hands were rigid on the steering wheel. He sat with an uncustomary stiff erectness, eyes straight ahead, some besieged statue.

  Don’t look back, he cautioned Edgewater, peering into the rearview mirror. Act like you don’t see em. They may not do nothing if we just ignore them.

  The red lights came on even with the water tank and Bradshaw drove dumbly on. The siren came in one brief burst and he pulled over to the curb and ceased. He sat, pounding the steering wheel gently with the palms of his hands. I guess ignoring them just don’t work anymore, Edgewater said.

  He turned to see. The car had halted behind them and there was an officer getting out. Someone else remained in the car, a diminutive shape, perhaps a girl. Bradshaw was looking too. Hell, it’s Aday. That underminin little slut put him up to it, he said. He told Edgewater to act sober.

  Hell, I am sober, Edgewater said. The unperceptive world would have seen in the face at the window something fatherly, benign. A middleaged face with sagging jowls, mildly quizzical watery blue eyes, the face of the law, all of authority standing between the sleeping in their beds and such amoral miscreants as even now sat silent under his stolid stare.

  Something the trouble? Edgewater asked him.

  There may be, the man said agreeably. We’ll see. Could I look at your license, Bradshaw? Bradshaw had it ready. Aday read it carefully, front and back, as if its manufacture was somehow foreign to him, as if its secrets eluded him. He did not hand it back. He ignored Bradshaw’s reaching hand and stood holding the license.

  What was you wobbling so for back there?

  Wobblin? I didn’t know I was.

  Didn’t know? You looked like you’d lost something and was drivin along lookin for it first on one side of the road and then the other.

  Well, that’s news to me.

  In your shape that may very well be. You been drinkin, ain’t ye?

  No.

  Then if I’se you I’d sure feel hard at whoever it was poured it all over me. You smell like a hog that fell in a malt barrel.

  I might of had a beer or two.

  What about you there, Silent Cal?

  I’m not drinking either, Edgewater said.

  We ain’t done a goddamned thing.

  Maybe, maybe not. But how about usin obscene language to a lady? Aday’s face tightened and anger flared and died in his eyes.

  I been up since six o’clock this morning, Bradshaw said. Any ladies seen since I left the house must of scaped my notice.

  How about public drunkenness then and disorderly conduct? How’s that suit you? How about driving while intoxicated and how about what all you got hid in this car I ai
n’t even searched yet?

  Shit, Bradshaw said.

  Aday opened the door. How about you boys takin a little walk out in the street here and back. So I can sort of judge if you’re in command of your faculties or not.

  Edgewater walking. The girl watched, a small malign presence by the dashlight. He looked away. The dark bowl of the night was full of stars, full constellations rising far and far. The red lights from the watertank illuminated above him a smooth metallic ovoid, great arachnid legs of girders and beams descending lost in mist, some intradimensional insect descending to spirit him away to other shores. A car paused to watch him, pulled slowly around him, pale faces on their way to freedom.

  Bradshaw when he walked felt called upon to execute some cocky variant on an about face and ended disoriented and uncertain of his bearing, leaning, appeared poised for flight into whatever meager cover might lie beyond the throbbing redlight. Edgewater leaned tiredly against the car, heard already the final clang of steel doors. Git on over here and get in the back, Aday said.

  Aday drove Bradshaw’s car and Bonnie followed in the cruiser. Bradshaw turned once to watch her. He looked back to the front, studied malevolently the cropped hair on the back of Aday’s neck. You needn’t be so goddamned smug, Bradshaw said. I’d a been in your shoes if I wanted to lay out twenty dollars like you did.

  A man with a mouth like yours could fall down that staircase goin up to the jailhouse, Aday told him. More’n one feller got banged up pretty bad like that.

  Hell, no hard feelins. A poor son of a bitch falls for a whore like that’s got enough troubles without my addin to em. You just remember the sun don’t shine up the same dog’s ass every day.

  Aday was turning into the courtyard, before them the courthouse rose up stark and forbidding, its dark bricked edifice sinister as some bastioned medieval castle.

  It does when one dog’s the chief of police and the other one ain’t, he told Bradshaw mildly.

  Reality touched Edgewater only in places of transiency, jails and bus stations, the highway. Horizons and locks and timetables spawned in him a desperation, an aching need to be gone.

  Asleep in the harsh and whiskeysmelling dark, he saw his mother’s face, the weight of his father’s hand, dreamed old childhood words and deeds long past recall.

  In a long ago December dark his grandmother died behind weathered stone walls, he could hear through the canted screen door her noisy dying, the rasp of her breathing from out the cool oily air like some malign beast panting faint and fainter from its lair. From the porch the breathing became no more than the rattle of such leaves as were left in the still and frozen trees. From out of the dark too came still and profound the soft voices of the mourners, her sons and daughters brought back by death like flung stones regathered, and in the yard winter light on freshly minted cars with northern tags, inside them a smell of newness, a smell of distances crossed, of strange and prosperous lands.

  This same still and silver light on his cousin’s face, so surreal and clear that he could trace with clarity the intricate veinery of her eyelid, the eye itself closed, the lash a sooty pooling shadow, her naked breasts as white and poreless as marble, as chill as December stone flowers that perhaps bloomed only on such winter nights as the scythe was abroad in the land.

  Her touch as soft as any before or since, her lies as sweet: the uncle opening the door on them then, its near soundless click itself a testimonial to the quality of his work on Detroit assembly lines. Perhaps he bolted on this very door, had no foreboding that he would one night open it so that moonlight would fall oblique on his near-naked daughter as no light ought to fall as no father ought to see his daughter, standing necktied and awkward and halfapologetic before anger seized him.

  Yet his father had cried. The face turned away when Edgewater mounted the steps to the Greyhound bus and to whatever lay farther beyond it and the harsh face had crumpled, eyes mirroring his own with surprise as if his face would not do his bidding, with the shock of it surprising them both. The old man never cried. Yet he turned away, there was the worn chambray of his back, across his shoulder bisecting the face of his mother which did not exist anymore in any form approaching this, existed only in such dreams when reality and fantasy swirled like ink spilled in water, clouds of ever paler black fanning outward and lost.

  The window he peered through was the eye of a world that he was forsaking or that was forsaking him. Through the window of the bus, the town falling away pathetically sudden and faces burning there as if his mind had by some dark alchemy etched their likenesses eternally into the glass. Beyond these images that watched him with benign unconcern, a backdrop like juryrigged scenery of amateur devising, a threadbare tapestry of houses thinning out, woods beginning and deep hollows from whose cedared mouths a mist of time itself rose like smoke. Faster now and dusk hard on his heels and the maw of the night opening before him, a rushing collage of the mountains and the scattered yellowlit windows of the woods and the trees, the trees, the trees.

  The jailer brought them plates and set them on a long benchlike table and then he fetched up from his overalls an enormous ring of keys and opened their cells. Breakfast was fried bologna and eggs. Two slices of untoasted light bread and coffee so translucent Edgewater could see the bottom of the tin cup. The eggs were fried hard, done to a rubberlike texture and their edges were burnt lace in congealing grease.

  Bradshaw stuck a fork in an egg, dissecting with the tines and cutting them up. Busily shaking out salt. Just add ye tip onto the bill, he told the jailer. Me and Billy here’ll settle up when we check out.

  What I hear that may be some time, the jailer said. He relocked the bullpen and went out of sight and they could hear his steps on the stairs.

  They were halfway through with breakfast when the girl came. She came up silent and stood leaning against the bars watching them as if what she saw did not please her greatly. Her face was calm, her gaze appraising. If you ain’t a finelooking pair, Sudy said evenly.

  I can explain everything, Bradshaw said. His effervescence seemed to evaporate. His eyes were slick and evasive. He chewed endlessly and swallowed and the mouthful seemed to lodge in his throat. He could not meet her gaze. He sat staring at the tin plate where his loaded but unraised fork was at rest and he waited, perhaps for her to leave, or to deliver whatever message she had brought.

  Any explanation you got you can save for Mama, Sudy said. I imagine you could use the extra time to study one up anyway. You don’t owe it to me, even if it was me up half the night listening to her ravin about you bloody in some ditch somewhere with that car wrapped around you.

  Hell, ask Billy here what happened. He’ll tell you. Goddamn miserable excuse for a law they got in this town.

  She turned on Edgewater a look of exaggerated attention, as if she waited breathless for whatever such wonders he was about to reveal. Then the expression faded and there was nothing there at all, the face bland and innocent and the eyes deep and blue. It was a strange look, as if the face had no emotion of its own to reveal but awaited Edgewater like a mirror, willing to reflect whatever images he chose to cast there.

  Edgewater laid his silverware down and arose and walked into his open cell, stared out the window at the roofs of buildings below him, flat tarred rectangles outlined by cinderblocks. The courtyard seemed far below, the bars too tight to squeeze through. His chin rested on his forearm. The windows faced east and he could feel the warm comfort of the sun, see it fall knifesharp through the edge of the window, see spectral motes of dust spin weightless in elliptic orbits, feel its weight on his face like the palms of a woman’s hands. Unseen pigeons cooed softly, he could hear them scrambling about the roof over him, then the beat of their wings.

  When do you start to work? the girl asked Bradshaw.

  They not hirin right now, he told her sullenly. How’d you know where we was anyway?

  Some woman call the house way in the night and when I picked up the phone she just said you was in jail.
When I asked who was it she just hung up.

  Now who’d pull a sorry trick like that?

  I figured you’d come nearer knowin than me.

  Damn meddlin busybodies. Did Mama send any bail money?

  All she sent was seventy-five dollars and I had to prize it out of her hand a bill at a time.

  Hell, that ought to be enough. Have you been to the judge’s office? How much is my bail?

  They fined you seventy-five dollars. Mama called before I come out here.

  Bradshaw sat for a time in awkward silence. He glanced at Edgewater still at the window. Edgewater seemed lost in the study of whatever Saturday commerce moved below him in the streets and appeared not to have been listening.

  Well, what about Billy here? Didn’t she send the money to get him out too?

  I told you all she sent was seventy-five dollars.

  Me and him was in this together. You go tell her I said loan Billy enough to pay his fine. How much is his?

  Twenty-five dollars. But she won’t do it. She paused, looked obliquely at Edgewater. She said he was the one got you in here in the first place. As if you ever needed any help and I told her so.

  Damn, Sudy, how come you always come down so hard on me?

  She stood clasping the purse. Edgewater had turned, watched her. Their eyes met and she stood awkwardly, somehow like a little girl playing grownup, the grace of womanhood always just out of her reach. She dropped her eyes from Edgewater.

  I’ll see if I can get some more money, she said.

  Get it where?

  I’ll go try to cash a check.

  I always thought you had to have money in the bank to cash a check.

  Just let me alone, all right. I’ll be back in a little while. Just wait here.

  We wasn’t planning on goin anywhere, Bradshaw said sarcastically.

  This time when she came the jailer was with her. He unlocked the cell and motioned them out. They followed her down the stairs, their footfalls hollow and echoing in these sepulchral halls of justice and onto the first floor. Idlers they passed glanced at them without much interest and they pushed through the heavy door and out onto the steps. Edgewater took a deep breath, already there was a smell of autumn in the air he filled his lungs with.