The Lost Country

by William Gay

  Edgewater set out toward another house where wetwash hung frozen on a wireline but a door banged behind him and as he turned a young man naked to the waist and barefoot threw a pan of water onto the grass. For an instant the water was opaque and silver and a mist of steam rose off the ground.

  Hey you.

  Edgewater didn’t stop.

  What the hell you doin sneakin around my yard?

  Just passing through, Edgewater said without slowing.

  I wonder if a load of birdshot in the ass might hurry you along?

  Fuck you.

  Why goddamn you. The voice was enraged as if he had focused on all the grudges he bore against all the world. Edgewater ducked under the clothesline where a shirt rose all in a frozen sheet like some surreal door and he could hear the man running across the yard. Edgewater stepped behind the corner of a shed where stood a motley of tools should he need them. He waited for a time until he heard the door close and he went on.

  At the Southside Café he ordered a cup of coffee from the redhaired waitress and sat idly reading the menu.

  Sugar? she asked.

  You might just stick your finger in it.

  She winked at him. I’ll do better than that, she said. She set the coffee somewhere out of sight beneath the level of the bar and he heard a lid unscrewing and a soft liquid sound of pouring and then she set it atop the formica with a flourish.

  There you go. Should put lead in your pencil on a day like this.

  He didn’t care for the taste but he drank anyway. The first sip seemed almost all whiskey. He picked up a copy of the thin county paper and carried it to an empty booth near the window and sat facing the outside and unfolded the paper to see what news the world held for him. It seemed scant. The first page was taken up with notices of birth and obituaries as if all that transpired in between these two absolutes was ambiguous and of little moment. The society pages then perhaps. He was idly reading the advertisements when she approached and laid face down an oblong cut from a newspaper. The back held the picture of part of the frontend of a car and the word Plym. He turned it over and the heading read: RITES HELD FOR EDGEWATER INFANT. He read the short notice but it was dates and names and it told him nothing he did not already know and perhaps far less. He folded it carefully and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

  Thanks.

  I just thought you might want it.

  Well, thanks again.

  You want some more coffee?

  If there’s any of that same pot left.

  If there ain’t we’ll brew up another one, she said. She gave him a slow wink with a gray eye and walked back to the counter letting him watch the backswing shift of her hips and his eyes could trace abstractly the elastic of her underwear. When she brought the coffee she sat across from him and sipped her Coke and they sat quietly looking out at the day waning where it lay behind her like a backdrop or projected image, she like some drunken instructor or interpreter who might make it coherent to him. As they sat a few cars went by with their lights on and after a time she arose and turned off the neon sign and came back.

  He offered to pay her for the coffee when he got up but she waved his hand away. Forget it, she said. You want the bottle? she asked in a lower tone.

  I guess not. See you later.

  She followed him to the door like some host loathe to be left alone. When you gonna walk me home, Billy? Sure is dark and scary when I get off at midnight.

  One of these nights.

  You still livin up there over the poolroom?

  Yeah. He stood half in and half out the door, dividing the warmth from the cold like the old witch in a childhood weatherhouse boding ill seasons.

  Bet it’s nice and quiet up there. When you gonna let me find out what sort of place you got?

  His reflection in the glass door was superimposed over the darkening outside world like some brooding ascetic, the lines of his lorn face horribly delineated, he appeared some old monk or hermit, possessed by some esoteric belief not adhered to in all this world. Any time, he said and stepped into the cold.

  Tonight? she asked but the pneumatic door closer cut it short and he pretended he hadn’t heard. He turned and raised one hand and saw her own raise doubtfully beyond the steamed up window and he struck out across the yard toward the highway.

  He was tempted but he knew all things have their price and he just did not have the coin of the realm. Talk, pretense, excuses. He did not feel like saying that he did not think she was cheap and that he knew she was not that kind of girl.

  It was just one of those crazy things. Just one of a thousand nights of those crazy mixed up things. He was dry, talked out, empty. Inside he felt dark and shrouded and bitter and overdrawn at whatever arcane bank account had kept him solvent these long years.

  ———

  Coming down past the hotel Edgewater saw with some interest that traffic was snarled under the redlight. Approaching he came upon corridors blocked up, some sort of disturbance in the street, horns blowing and he could hear angry shouts and curses. A policeman pulled up to the curb and got out and strode purposefully to the intersection.

  Crippled Elmer was abysmally drunk and he was directing traffic. His wheelchair was in the middle of the street and he wheeled himself madly first one way and then the other, waving his arms meaninglessly in the air. Somewhere he had come upon a whistle and he blew it shrilly. His head lolled drunkenly on his shoulders, he stopped blowing the whistle and gave unintelligible directions to the line of factory workers backed up by the traffic.

  The policeman grabbed the wheelchair by the handles and whirled it around with no trace of ceremony and wheeled it angrily to the curb where his car sat. Onehanded he threw open the door and spun the chair around facing it and laid hands on Elmer’s shoulders.

  Where you takin him?

  Hell, I’m takin him to jail. Where’d you think I’se takin him? He’s so drunk he don’t know he’s in the goddamned world.

  Elmer’s eyes stared unfocused between Edgewater and the cop while his fate was debated. He began to sing tunelessly some old song. He had vomited on himself.

  I’ll take him home if you won’t lock him up. If he gets home he’s too drunk to get back up here and cause trouble.

  Who are you, his guardian angel?

  I just hate seein him locked up. He can’t pay any fine to get out.

  I know it. But what the hell can I do? I can’t let him run that thing wild. He’s gonna kill somebody.

  I promise you I’ll get him home.

  When Edgewater came pushing the wheelchair up to the porch the old woman with matted hair and snuffjuice around her mouth came out and stood watching him try to hoist the wheelchair up the steep steps. He couldn’t make it. Elmer’s sodden and boneless weight shifted like water and he was about to spill out of the chair. Edgewater was holding his breath because of the smell and his face grew red. He lowered the chair back to the earth and backed up a step or two and stood breathing deeply.

  How about giving me a hand?

  Just leave him there. He sleeps in it.

  It may rain.

  He could use it, she said. If you get him up here he’ll just roll off the porch and hurt hisself.

  He’d freeze to death tonight. Edgewater turned the chair and backed it to the edge. He got up on the porch and lifted Elmer with a hand under each armpit. He drug him across the back of the chair and his feet fell lifeless and askew on the rough boards of the porch. Myriad small shoplifted articles fell from his pockets in a curious rain. Quit goddamn it, Elmer said. The old woman sniggered as if he had done something of infinite cleverness.

  The room was unlit and fetid. Heavily curtained windows stayed even the light from the sun. When his eyes adjusted to the dimness he could see that the room was furnished only with crates and boxes and old mismatched chairs with burst upholstery and gangrenous padding.

  He hoisted Elmer into an old armchair and looked about for something to cover him with, at length he lai
d a throw rug across his lap. One bleary eye opened and closed like a lens taking Edgewater’s picture.

  The old woman had followed them in. Her eyes were bright and fey on alcohol and pills.

  Keep him here. If he gets back uptown they’ll lock him up.

  She was doing something to her hair. A look almost coy on her wrinkled Kewpie face. How about me and you havin us a good time?

  Edgewater doubted she had a good time left much less one to share but he did not say so. He didn’t say anything at all. He went out into the grown up yard.

  He was almost back to the crossroads when he heard someone hail him. He looked back. Elmer had drug himself onto the porch, was struggling to reseat himself in the chair. When he was in he started across the yard. He grew tangled in the weeds. Edgewater could see his hands spinning the wheels, he could hear him swearing. He was free, coming on toward the road. Hey, Billy. Wait up.

  To hell with it, Edgewater said. He went on.

  He walked down to the blacktop and crossed it and took a shortcut along the railroad track, walking the ties with a wind at his back that seemed to hurry him along. As he walked he kicked a can along the rails, the world here seemed lost and forsaken, there was only the sound of the wind whipping and the hollow rattle of the can skittering when he kicked it. The eerie silence of these old rails with weeds long grown up through them. As if they were some ancient and inexplicable anomaly of nature instead of the works of man. Perhaps in times past hobos had run along here pacing the train, swung themselves up by the catwalk and flattened in out of the wind, but a man would grow old here waiting for a freight to come highballing out of the night.

  Dreams of why troubled him less and less these days but he dreamed he woke far in the night and the room was full of light and sound. Red light backed the room with a strobic intensity and washed even the tangled bedclothes where he dreamed. He sat washed scarlet and all the world was a circular wall, a world of sound, sitting so amazed and rapt his mind began automatically to sort and identify them, prowl cars, ambulances, perhaps a fire engine, as if all the earth’s emergency vehicles had been summoned to preside at his demise.

  He dreamed he arose and dressed to go into the world to see what was all this commotion. He stood by the window hauling up and belting his trousers. He saw speed below his window, low and squat, an ambulance with siren, an undulating wail and lights bathing the white façade of houses and porches, a rich velvet claret in a measured start and cease as if geared in some manner to his heartbeat.

  Down the street and through the alley and the cause of all this disorder seemed to be near the railroad tracks. All manner of official cars and trucks were there and the train stood black and long and halted with only a measured hiss of escaping steam to mark its presence and a vast crowd of folk rubbing the sleep from their eyes and staring toward some mishap ahead of the engine. Far up the track the headlight gleamed like a searchlight searing the night out of the way and here he came upon the remnants of a wheelchair, wasting warped and shredded chromium and the mangled scraps of a man scattered among the ties like scraps some feeding beast had dropped and he fell to his knees in the gravel.

  With the curious illogic as dreams sequence and implement themselves, he had a flashlight and he unpocketed it but a man in white laid on his arm a restraining hand. Don’t shine that light, he said. Have a little respect. Far up the track Edgewater could see an old railroader in a striped cap walking toward him with a lantern swinging along in his hand from side to side hypnotically, but though he watched for some time and though he could see the railroader’s legs scissoring through the misty night, he did not seem to get nearer and the bill of his cap kept his face in shadow.

  That’s Crippled Elmer, he dreamed he said.

  It’s Elmer, the man agreed. But he ain’t crippled. He’s a baseball player. He’s got a fastball you could light a cigarette off of.

  What was he doing in a wheelchair then?

  He just had it tricked up where it would ride on them tracks and he got his schedules crossed. A laugh came out of darkness, for this man’s face was in shadow as well and something dread lay cold on Edgewater and it came to him that this was some tableau arranged for his benefit by all these faceless men and the dream was so stark and vivid and moved on so many levels of reality he grew afraid. A caution seized him; he felt he must think this out carefully. He felt he had to see a face, any face, something familiar out of all this dark. Then as if reading his thoughts the man released his arm and Edgewater sat holding the light and knew he was afraid to illuminate the disembodied head lying between the ties. The man beside him chuckled a little to himself in some secret amusement and looked toward the heavens and, as if his glance engendered it, a skiff of clouds rolled from across the face of the moon and a steely pale light began to inch across what of the world he could see. He turned to peer up the gleaming track where the old signalman still walked like something mechanical fixed in position and back to where light crept up the ties and he could trace the splits and grain of the ties with his fingers and see tiny starshaped spatters of blood and the cold light on the rails and even as he sat waiting for the light to reveal the face he dreamed he awoke.

  But he did not awake. He was walking up a road out of his childhood and he felt he had been away for a time but he did not know where or for how long. It was summertime and he was barefoot and the road lay thickly accumulated with fine dust that felt soft as velvet and this dust powdered the fronds of sumac depending into the road from the wall of encroaching greenery; all the sounds of summer fell on his ears as clear and tranquil as they ever had in life.

  The road ahead curved, lost to his sight as it always had and he knew all he had to do to get home was walk around the curve and climb the rising bank up stone steps laid into the loam but when he progressed around the bend he stood halt and wonderstruck by what he saw. There was nothing, no mailbox and no steps and no house atop the bank, only the smooth rolling verdant countryside with no houses anywhere in sight and just a limitless expanse of incremental shadings of green all the way to where it grew misty with distance and met the deep blue of the sky. All the country he looked on was sown with some sort of wheat or wild grain that looked thigh high to him and a wind blew a little out of the south and ripples ran on infinitely across the field like a wave on water. He went a little away into the grain and then stopped undecided and he turned to the four points of the compass and even the way he had come had closed behind him, gone elastic and shimmering. As he watched, the image solidified like rippled water clearing the grain field as well and he felt he was seeing the world as it was before civilization had a mark upon it or else untold millennia after civilization had perished.

  Uncertain where he was or what to do, he climbed the bank where he had been to the top and peered all about and then sat to rest awhile and think about things. He lit a cigarette and sat smoking and pondering his fate and after a time he looked up and he could see in the distance a man wending his way through the grain and by the time Edgewater had finished the cigarette and carefully blackened out the butt in the damp earth the man had neared him and climbed the bank and squatted by Edgewater. He had a grainhook or scythe with a crooked handle and two wooden handholds on it and he unshouldered it and laid it carefully beside him.

  I don’t guess it’d hurt to breathe a minute, the man said agreeably.

  Edgewater peered at him closely. The man seemed to be about forty, a tanned, healthy country-looking face. Anglo-Saxon, one of Agee’s famous men perhaps. High cheekbones, thin blade of nose, a day’s growth of stubble. The eyes were squint from the sun but the irises were a deep guileless blue and the face looked all in all like someone who might give him directions. As he made ready to speak, the man withdrew a sack of Country Gentleman from the pocket of his chambray shirt and sitting on his heels began to build himself a cigarette.

  You live around here?

  The man shrugged, licked the cigarette paper and made fast the paper with his index
fingers and brought out a kitchen match.

  Here and everywhere else, he said.

  I used to live right here.

  The nut brown skin around the eyes crinkled with amusement.

  I guess you don’t no more?

  I guess not, Edgewater mused. What happened to all this? The house and the family that lived here?

  I tend all this now, the man said. He blew out pale smoke. I got all this land. You must be talking about another time.

  Well, yeah. It was another time.

  He waved an expansive hand. I tend all this now.

  It seems like an awful lot for one man to do.

  The man laughed dryly.

  I always been adequate to the task. I get a little help from time to time, people working on shares, so to speak.

  I’m lookin around for work. Maybe I could get a week with you? This looks like a world of grain to take care of.

  You doin all right where you are, the man told him. Maybe in time. All in good time.

  I wish I could have found who I was looking for. I had something to tell him.

  You can tell me, the man said.

  He leaned forward and spat onto the earth and laid his cigarette stub in the spittle and watched the slow crawl of moisture up the paper. Satisfied he pushed it from him.

  The world is full of fools lookin for places ain’t there no more. He arose and took up the grain hook. I’ll see ye, he said.

  Take it easy.

  The man climbed down the bank and started off into the sea of grain leaving behind a diminishing trail that smoothed itself out like a wake a man might leave swimming and after a time he was only a dark moving dot in all this green.

  Edgewater awoke and lay bathed in sweat for a moment before he arose and washed his face in the bathroom. He came back out and sat in the chair by the window wishing for daylight but this night seemed timeless. In these clockless hours before day he knew he’d overstayed his welcome but he didn’t know what to do about it. He knew he was leaving but there did not seem to be anywhere he wanted to go or any face left in all the world he cared to look on.