The Lost Country

by William Gay

  He was in Chula Vista when the private detective her father had hired found him. He had never seen a private detective and so studied this one with interest while they rode, disappointed in this laconic young man who looked more like a CPA than anything out of Chandler.

  Her father was very well off. He studied Edgewater across an immense shiny escritoire. Edgewater stared at the desk. Its top was formed by blocks of different rare woods, rubbed and polished until it gleamed.

  The man looked at him from a vast distance, as an entomologist might study some new but unimportant species of insect.

  I just wanted to see for myself what kind of piece of trash you were, he said.

  Edgewater had no words to say.

  Why didn’t you take precautions and why didn’t you take her to an abortionist? How could this thing have happened?

  I didn’t know, Edgewater said, felt how inadequate that was.

  Why didn’t she come to me?

  Edgewater shrugged, arose.

  Sit your ass down.

  Edgewater starting for the door, already reaching for the knob.

  Was it yours?

  Yes, Edgewater said, though he did not know, could not have known.

  He was in Arizona before he came to himself, before he felt right. He had slept on the desert and when he came out onto 66 the sun came up. It came up all at once and in it the highway was as straight as a chalked line and gleamed as if it were made of crushed jewels. He had never seen it so before. It would take him anywhere in this round world he cared to go.

  Bradshaw covered all Edgewater’s haunts but he could not find him. A kind of embryonic unease lay in him, a feeling that things were not right, that the world was full of things going on that he was not privy to, things that he could immediately bring to rights did he just know why they were. A feeling that the ground he stood on was plastic, warping, that the center of things had shifted subtly from its orbit.

  Where’s old Edgewater? he asked Swalls.

  I couldn’t say, Swalls told him. I never set myself the task of keeping up with him.

  Bradshaw drinking, the upraised beer bottle a receding cone of amber light he sighted along. He set the bottle back. I need to find him. That old boy get out by hisself in the world and no telling what’ll happen to him ’thout somebody been around to look out for him.

  Swalls shrugged. He’s three times seven. I guess he can take care of hisself.

  Late of an evening, out in the yard and away from the old woman, Bradshaw asked Sudy about it straight out and she just told him. I’ll kill the son of a bitch, he said.

  The old Chevrolet rolling again and Bradshaw halfdrunk, a sack of beer riding in the seat beside him, watching the road reel to him, a road barren of hitchhikers and of Edgewater’s malign presence. In these long hours he played out what he would do. What he would say, what Edgewater would reply. Talking to himself in a kind of soliloquy of anger. He felt betrayed.

  The next morning he wordlessly left home again, still alone, poor, bitter company. The highway this time, across the county line, bearing on east. Idling with grocery store loungers, shadetree mechanics, filling station attendants. Have you seen a feller looks like this? He wished for a photograph. He began to feel that Edgewater was laying low, had took to the woods one last time, traveling off the shoulder of the road to avoid the pursuit he must surely expect. Yet in a part of himself he did not even acknowledge the existence of, he was glad that he did not find him. It was far easier to try and fail, to tell Arnold, I’da killed the son of a bitch if I could of caught him.

  He was going into a land of hills. Behind Edgewater there was a long sloping straight road. Ahead of him, it rose and fell, wound toward the far mountains in a series of undulations and was lost from his sight. A sere summer was going serer still, already the leaves were dying. The scent of them in the haze, a ripe bitter scent of premature autumn. All the world seemed dying, death ran through it like the veins in a leaf. The far hills were bright, they seemed to flame with reds and yellows and oranges, bright as if their coloring had been left to the hands of children. Above them the sky was a hot metallic brassy blue and the horizon seemed to waver as if it were incorporeal, as if composed of some element transigent as mist or smoke.

  He turned at a distant sound and stuck out a thumb and watched coalesce out of some like matter a shape at first near liquid and wavering down the shimmering highway and then it solidified into a car as it approached, as if it had undergone some curious metamorphosis. The car hurtled past him without slowing, a brief wind soon lost, a glimpse of an old woman with harsh purple metallic hair. Some kind of small furry dog watched him disdainfully from the fleeing back windshield. A few scraps of discarded paper, dust covered, settled themselves back covertly amidst the encroaching sumac.

  He went on. The world warped here, some vast declivity in its surface, himself at the epicenter. At last starting up the other side, an insect struggling on glass, he grew short of breath, paused among the roadside refuse and looked back the way he had come intently as if he expected pursuit. The road lay barren and silent. The very air seemed leaden and still. Below and to his right a vast hollow stretched and curved away. In the distance a mist rose from its depths amidst cedars blueblack and hazy. Above him buzzards or hawks wheeled. He walked on.

  It was his second day and the distance he had covered meager. He had been on the road before good day and although he had been thumbing whatever had passed, once even with amused desperation a wagon, nothing had stopped. The day wore on. The sun past its zenith, began a swift recession sliding down the mauled red of the western world. The air was full of the acrid smell of dried leaves and golden with some sort of haze half translucent that rendered the sun small and distant, a distinct orb the color of blood. Clouds boiled up breathlessly then rose to obscure it. Its hot red glow lit the clouds from behind as an intricate and rococo thread of fire traced their outline against the heavens. Like minute fractures in the serene face of sky limning farther and yet more awesome fires, hunting some vaulted space where perpetual holocausts flamed behind the cool deceptive blue.

  Before dusk he finally got a ride. A truck transporting something covered with ropelashed tarpaulins coasted by on a long careening downgrade, stopped with a hiss of airbrakes and waited. Edgewater ran the last few steps and got in, glancing sharply as he did at the shapes on the bed of the truck, rectangles the size and configuration of caskets stacked beneath the green tarp. Then he was in and the door slammed and the truck eased on. The door would not catch. He slammed it again.

  It’s broke. You got to raise the latch up here and then shut it.

  The driver was small and redfaced. Tiny crisp curls covered his head, everything about him seemed red save the mottling of brown freckles and the muddy blue eyes.

  Where you headed?

  Up in East Tennessee but so far I ain’t havin much luck.

  It’s gotten dangerous to stop and pick up hitchhikers. Man might end up in a ditch with his throat cut.

  I guess so.

  The driver was downshifting for a broken line of hills that came out of the dusk chimerical and indistinct, a dark Rorschach world they were driving off into. He had turned the lights on. Edgewater stared into the frieze of shifting images striding past the window. A house floated by swimming in blue watered ink, as if everything beyond the truckcab was immersed in deep water, had lost reality and definition, all distances seeming on some common level the same. A series of lean-tos had been added to the house, the roof line of each adhering to the original structure so that it sloped perpetually earthward. The final addition appeared to Edgewater to have been useless to anyone over three or four feet in height.

  The company won’t have us pick up nobody. What do you think about that?

  Edgewater turned to look at him. The man was young but already his face looked frozen, cast into some permanent expression of anger. Acne spread out from his cheeks in a harsh scarlet rash. The eyes were fierce and congested, as
if unable to handle the turbulence of emotions assailing them, a great snarl of them bottlenecked seething within the bony little skull. Above them his brows were arched as if the world were constantly besieging him with a series of surprises, none of them pleasant.

  I think it’s a hell of a note, Edgewater said. From my viewpoint anyway.

  You goddamn right it is. You see what I think about their goddamn rules, don’t you?

  What?

  You settin here ain’t you?

  Edgewater glanced down as if to ascertain his whereabouts.

  The hell with em, the man said, an invective so bitter and all inclusive as to fall alike on all the world save himself and Edgewater.

  Who do you work for?

  The Iron City Casket Company over to Iron City, tightfisted bunch of son of a bitches.

  So that is what you’re haulin back there.

  Yeah. Hell of a load ain’t it?

  I guess so. How many you got?

  I don’t know. I don’t load em I just haul em.

  Oh.

  Not bein smart with ye or nothing, it just ain’t my job to load em is what I mean. How many would you say?

  It looks like thirty or forty.

  I reckon so. Enough anyway for a lot of cryin widder women and grinnin undertakers ain’t it?

  Edgewater did not reply and the driver fell into an uneasy tense silence. He glanced occasionally at Edgewater as if awaiting further comment, as if he would draw him into whatever forge shaped his rage. They were coming into a community of some sort; faint lights flared across bare fields. They passed a church all lit and ringed with cars. Finally the driver said: You know what the markup on them motherfuckers is?

  What?

  They got maybe thirty or forty dollars worth of lumber and materials and then they sell the son of a bitches for three or four hundred dollars. Don’t that sound to you like a good business to be in?

  I guess so.

  You guess so. I guess so too. All they need is a fuckin mask and a pistol. Then the undertaker puts his markup in there and gets his slice of the pie. Don’t it look like some of that profit would get passed on? Don’t it look like somebody as far down the ladder as me ort to get a taste of it? You know what I make a hour? When Edgewater did not reply he said, Seventy-five cents a hour, by God.

  Edgewater was trying to envision a casket factory, imagining what a solemn duty this must be. Imagining an assembly line of blackclad workers of soberfaced visage armed with screwdrivers and saws through which a casketloader conveyor moved soundless and stately. It seemed a strange vocation, a craft perpetually reminded of death, steeped in it. He could not conceive this but he did not need to be reminded. A man did not need constant reassurance of his fate, did not need to have his final shelter about him as a terrapin carries its shell.

  Why don’t you just quit?

  The driver gave Edgewater a brief sullen look, as if Edgewater had in some subtle way aligned himself against him. Times is hard, he finally said.

  I got to get me a donut and somethin to eat, he said again after a while. He stopped at a store in some town so small as to be nameless and unknown to mapmakers. A community set on the rim of the hills with a grocery store and a filling station, below it lay truckers’ lights like spilt jewels. Edgewater went in with him, got a drink from the red cooler by the door. He laid a nickel on the counter. The old man ensconced behind the counter nodded, took it solemnly.

  The driver was waiting at the meat case. An old woman sliced off thick slices of ham and cheese onto white butcher paper, she was dealing out crackers one by one from a carton. Edgewater went out into the warm summer dusk. Dusk was deepening. It was almost full dark now. You could see night coming. Above him the sky was clear and an orange-red crescent moon hung above a line of jagged black. Stars were strewn random and happenstance above him. Here in these higher elevations he felt himself more akin to the galaxy that stretched beyond comprehension, felt an eerie timelessness, a clock not begun to measure. More remote from the earth, from its plagues and its weary duties. A denizen somehow displaced eternally halfway between, unable to belong fully to either dimension. A familiar of memories that were more than the metal he rested against, more corporeal than the bottle chilling his fingers. Conjured by faces already dead or just waiting in the wings.

  Far off in the dark a line of fire crept over a ridge on the horizon, burned itself into his retinas, ebbed and quaked like lightning frozen in perpetual arc, widened then and spread, a hot acid dissipating the night. Moved down the slope as if feeding, the only thing left alive in all that dark.

  He lit a cigarette. There was a loose corner of the tarpaulin and he lifted it. Beneath the canvas the surface of the casket was cool and smooth to his hand. Starlight fell on its burnished bronze luster. He touched it with his other hand, saw dimly the reflection of his fingertips appear there like a hand reaching to clasp his own, of a self already lost and mouldering, disembodied from the desolated wastes of dementia. The surface of the casket hummed beneath his fingers as if charged with some tellurian current and then it warped before his eyes and ran like melting glass, solidified to wood ancient beyond reason, moldcrept and wormscarred pine and the cold finality of the grave lay on him like a nameless and unspeakable embrace.

  He turned away. He sat on the running board and drank the last of the Coke and finished smoking the cigarette. After a time he got up, set the bottle on the gas pump, and walked toward the truck. He had his hand on the door handle when he turned back the way he had come. Beyond the point where light from the store windows failed, the way lay dark and secret. The darkness writhed with shapes he could not discern. To hell with it, he said. When the driver came out wiping his mouth on his sleeve Edgewater was standing on the opposite side of the highway with an air of infinite patience.

  You ready to roll?

  I reckon I’ll roll back this way if I can.

  The driver looked at him in disbelief. Hell, you said you’re goin east.

  I was then.

  Goddamn feller. I knowed you was just out joyriding up and down the road I’da left you where I seen you. Youda been better off.

  Thanks anyhow, Edgewater told him.

  The driver shook his head and got into the truck. It rolled away. Edgewater stood quite still in the pooled light and waited. Then after a time the light there clicked out and the old man and woman came out. They glanced at him and then they went on their way. He sat on the curb. It was a long time before he got a ride.

  Edgewater had been gone for a week when Bradshaw came into Goblin’s Knob and there he was, drinking a beer and listening to Swalls tell lies as if he had been there every day and not somewhere Bradshaw could not find him. He was not drunk, just sitting, and when Swalls moved on down the bar he offered Bradshaw no explanation, no word at all.

  The jukebox was singing about honkytonks to two old men in overalls. Honky tonkin, honey baby.

  Edgewater sat and nursed his beer while Bradshaw stood there, searching for a way to say what they both knew he had to say. For she would be showing by now and the old woman in a killing rage, the air filled with recriminations and threats.

  She’s my baby sister, he said at length.

  I know who she is, Edgewater told him. You don’t have to pimp for your own sister. Is there anything you want me to do?

  He waited for Bradshaw to swing, hoping he would. You would have thought him retarded but he was not. The balls of his feet felt light and his head shiningly bright and clear as if some astringent had washed all the fog away and his left shoulder began to tingle, all the way down to his fist. There was no expression at all in the empty eyes.

  But Bradshaw seemed to slacken, just shook his head from side to side.

  They were married the fifteenth of September by a county judge in Ackerman’s Field. The judge intoned the words in monotonous rote and Edgewater found his attention wandering to a calendar just behind the judge’s left shoulder which bore smiling and benign portraits of the
city police department and to the folded wad of greenbacks that seemed to warm a small rectangular patch of thigh beneath his pocket. The old woman had cosigned a note at the bank that morning. She had attended the wedding by necessity, it was she who must give Sudy away.

  It had been a busy time for Edgewater; he had been moving in the world of commerce, toying with the playthings of the respectable and moneyed. Small entrepreneur borrowing money at the bank, renting a house, dickering with old man Grimes at the carlot over a beatup green Chevy Fleetline and leaving in its stead a not inconsiderable portion of the fresh green bills.

  When they came out of the courthouse after the ceremony a front tire was flat. He could not believe it. He stood uncertain of how to proceed. Then he unlocked the trunk to get out the spare and the jack, knowing full well what he would find. The trunk held only two empty beercans and a bent tire spud, all furred thickly with oily dust. Wait on me, he told them as if they might drive away with a flat. I’ll be back in a minute. They got into the front seat and seated themselves, the old woman poised and dignified as if in some chauffeured limousine, moving protectively at Sudy’s side as if she would protect her thickening body from the snide eyes of the world.

  He crossed the street diagonally to the service station and sent a mechanic to fix the tire. He bought three cans of beer and drank them seated on the commode in the tiny men’s room, one after another, and stood the cans carefully in the corner.

  Assessing his face in the mirror on the towel rack, he looked strained and curiously desperate, harassed. The eyes were saturnine, wolfish. Bought and paid for, they mocked him. He straightened the shoulders of Bradshaw’s old white sport coat. I can handle it, he told them and went on out.

  They carried the old woman home and with the backseat and trunk piled high with groceries and her castoff plunder they drove late that afternoon to Grievewood where the rented house waited. Grievewood was not a town or even a settlement and it was a community only through grace of them choosing to live there. Grievewood was just a geographical location, a name. Halfway to Goblin’s Knob and then left down a winding dirt road.