The Lost Country

by William Gay

  At the moment the truck slowed almost to a standstill to negotiate the curve, Roosterfish arose like a grim and harried necromancer from the brush and raised the gun aloft and in almost the same motion fired both barrels into the windshield. The moment the glass blew out he was instantly assailed by a wall of sound, the explosion of the gun and glass splintering and rushing inward engulfing Harkness’s ruined face like some perverse and twisted warping window peered through to find Harkness blind and already dead and still clutching the wheel, the sharp cacophony of country music rushing over him like remnants of a world he had abandoned, the sawing fiddles and twanging guitars and maudlin gospel songs from the truck’s radio as if he fired not on Harkness but into some complete hillbilly band that supplanting Harkness bore the truck on toward where he still peered down the shotgun.

  Perhaps he thought Harkness had already cut the wheels for the curve, perhaps he did not think at all, acted through instinct and nerve and memory of his deed committed countless times in fantasy, calloused by the endless commission of it in his thoughts. He stared unbelieving as the truck leapt the shoulder of the road and bore on toward him through brush that slapped against the rockerpanels and over headhigh saplings warping under the bumper and headlights. He cursed and threw the gun from him and leapt aside into the darkness just as the fender caught him knocking him off balance as if the headlights froze him where he stood. He pushed vainly at the slick metal with an arm he did not have, gibbered mindless at the night as the bullhorns hooked his coat, as if some beast of myth as remembrance already doomed had constrained to take him with it, impaled him, dragging him into its mad descent. He spun off balance, the very earth he stood on tilted, ran like liquid beneath his feet.

  Some nights Edgewater would climb the stairs to the apartment over the poolroom and stand outside the door and sit for a minute on the top step and wait. The stairwell was ancient concrete, a green lichen grew there, faintly phosphorescent. It might have been carved from some underground stone, a passageway cut by troglodytes in some subterranean world. The stairway was concrete as well, blackened by generations of feet, carpeted by a film of ground-in grime and debris and cigarettes and the accumulated filth of years.

  He would sit on the top step, patient, as if he waited for a homecoming, and stare down to where the lichened steps descended to streetlevel and to the sidewalk beyond where cool neon fell perpendicular to the darkframed oblong of light the opened door made. Wind blew a scrap of newspaper, old news of separation and reconciliation, hands-on violence. There would sometimes be the sound of sirens as the police ministered among the restless, telltale fragments of disquiet like faulted splotches of the night: siren wailing, an ambulance unmindful of redlights came past the Snowwhite Café and he could hear the rattle and slap when it hit the railroad tracks and saw in his mind it rock back on its shocks and spring flatout into the long sloping curve past the tie yard, drawn by violence, like a moth to flame, unifying folks’ troubles, a carwreck, a shooting or cutting in Sycamore Center.

  He woke to an unaccustomed silence. He’d fallen asleep to the muffled jukebox lamentations about the wild side of life from the jukejoint below and the disembodied voices coming through the ceiling and floor that were full of imprecation, rebuke or entreaty that had never separated themselves into words. His eyes moved in their sockets. It was dark in the room and for a time he couldn’t remember where he was or how he’d come to be here, but sometime in the night he realized that he had loved not her but the child and past that maybe not even the child itself but the idea of it.

  Then the pale ceiling materialized out of the void and the blind eye of the ceiling light bulb formed itself as if the room needed his perception of it in order to take its place in the scheme of things. Then in the silence he became aware of a soft whispering, slurred words beyond all deciphering. Sleet at the windows sang harsh on the glass front of the poolroom. It was a bitter wind along curfew emptied streets.

  He got up. It had turned very cold in the night and he swore when his bare feet touched the linoleum, immediately feeling around for his socks and shoes. With the blanket hooded about him he crossed to the windows. He pressed his face against the cold glass. He could see the back streets, the car lot down the way, no soul about. He could hear the wind whipping hollow up the alley. In the white photoelectric glare of the streetlamps nothing moved save the wind-driven sleet scouring against the windowpanes. Then a garbage can lid turned soundlessly into the street like some strange wheel come unmoored and spun away like a tossed coin.

  He crossed the room and flipped the lightswitch but the light just flared once like a flashbulb and died and he dressed hurriedly in the darkness and with a cigarette lighter held aloft plugged in the hotplate. He held outstretched palms over the burner until it glowed red and turned and filled the coffee pot from the sink and set it atop the coil. Shit it’s cold, he said. On his knees then, waiting for the water to warm, he looked like some penitent object before an electric god. Praying for heat, for the mercury to climb.

  Edgewater seemed outside himself, absorbed into some Ur world. With his head cowled still and his innocent luminous eyes he looked an acolyte to some obscure and aberrant offshoot of Buddhism.

  There was no clock and no way to know what time it was. As if it mattered. He thought, This moment is all there is. What I have in this moment, like the very moment itself, is all there is. There was nothing before this, and nothing after. I am hemmed in and trapped by this moment, by now. Where was I before, where will I be again? Even as I saw now it is gone, but where? How can I hold it to me, how can I delay it? But it is too late. Late is late and it’s late. Inside his mind time grew soft and elastic and stretched a shifting skein of thread that bound the clock hands and would not break. He stuck a finger into the coffee water but it seemed not to have warmed at all. Fuck, he said. He unplugged the hotplate, rose and found his coat and folded the blanket nearly military style in the darkness and tucked it under an arm. What now?

  The possibilities swam in the wavering yellow glare of the lighter. What to take, what to hurl overboard to lessen the weight. There seemed nothing to take he could not do without, nothing that would diminish his holdings for being left. He crossed to the door and opened it and slipped onto the landing. He closed the door behind him for the last time. Some switch had clicked in the night, in the moment before his eyes came open, some circuit breaker had blown, time to roll, time to move down the line to where the water tastes like cherry wine.

  Edgewater stumbled down the stairs and into the windy night with misbuttoned shirt and untied shoes. He stooped and tied his laces and fumbled out a cigarette and lit it and leaning against the wall stood smoking. At length he entered again into the cold night, shoulders hunched. He crossed the empty parking lot and there was no sound save the hollow scrape of the wind turning a paper cup against the frozen asphalt, a scuttling keening like a ship’s hull scraping ice. The sky was an inverted bowl of dark above where the streetlights tended away and the lights in the residential streets burned blue, cold and soulless, illumination without comfort or warmth, a cool otherworldly glow.

  High looping winter winds sang lonesome through the telephone wires and moaned as if dialed there, filled with disembodied voices of despair, the wires were hurrying along their way. He looked like a man waiting on an overdue bus. Even as he watched in the cones of yellow light from the streetlamps, the sleet began to change into snow, huge feathery flakes that rode the updrafts of wind and bellowed in the alleyway’s windy mouth and settled in the frozen streets and rose again and accumulated in shapeshifting windrows.

  He crossed the street and struck out south with the wind at his back. Past jewelry stores and five-and-dime variety stores with Christmas cheer under plateglass like red and green tinseled memories out of the lost country of his childhood. No cars passed. The traffic lights shifted, directing ghosts of traffic to their phantom destinations. Ackerman’s Field looked like some town under curfew, some plague beset plac
e abandoned, the last one out forgot to turn out the lights.

  Past the parking lot and the alley black with shadow the tie yard loomed, its stacked ties all chinked with sleet and the railroad tracks curved shining and ran on and on infinite as a promise, an invitation to be taken up at will. Tarpaper shacks where the disenfranchised of both colors lay dreaming, rocking in the lee of more gentle shores. The nights would not replace what the day had taken away. The nights were never long enough.

  High and dolorous, a dog howled from behind the darkened shacks and was taken up howl on howl by whatever strays have accrued themselves to the human flotsam lodged here, little more than strays themselves. A cry passed on and shuttled down in staggered relays like news of some dread import, sinister discarnate shapes or voices not designed for human ears. Far out past shantytown an awakened cock cried a false dawn and at the deserted Mobil station a stopped clock proclaimed it twenty past seven forever. Time blank and meaningless here. All there is now is night.

  Merchants’ windows brightly lit and piled with wares waiting like baited deadfall traps to snare the day’s customers. Celluloidish jewelry for ladies of taste, men of means wink coldly from its backdrop. His own image shrouded in this crushed velour, eyes black and shadowed, recessed, the eyeholes of a skull, an ancient pharaoh’s skull among faded and tattered funeral silks. Behind his reflected right shoulder a cruising prowl car almost ceased, crept interminably along in the street, a featureless reflected face studying him from beneath the blue cap. A beefy sinister face with no expression, save that of threat, as if he would lift this provender through shards of glass. As if they had anything he wanted. He half turned without looking at the police car, continued a few steps on. A restaurant. Rows of tables stacked with chairs. The sleet had turned to snow. It was snowing hard and swirling in the streetlights. There were thin wisps of it in the street, drifting in the bitter wind. The cruiser had stopped and sat idling, blue puffs of exhaust dissipated in the snow, the face still watching, a window rolling down.

  Hey.

  Edgewater stopped and turned.

  You got a home you better be headin that way.

  He walked toward the corner, turned by the First National Bank. He passed on by the florist’s with its wreath of tacky piety and past the dentist’s office with windows filled with carded arrowheads like some arsenal of weaponry for whatever ancient warriors were still extant and drumming. Into the alley with the wind at his heels, hurrying him along: slapping some loose shutter or boarding at the back door of these merchants’ warrens and a displaced garbage can lid clanged harsh and hollow and atonal on concrete and then no other sounds save these.

  Lights wheeled on at the alley’s nether mouth and came on slow and implacable and stately. Illuminating garbage cans slowly being covered, wearing thin cowls of snow and a fluted glimpse of a black cat and Edgewater trudging hands in pocket and head lowered into the snow. He glanced up and through the glass it was the same cop’s face, the same calm look of suspicious insolence. Vague recriminations for crimes dreamed or imagined. A look such as would deny even the existence of innocence. The brake lights came on briefly surrounding him in a bright red haze of drifting snow and he looked at his feet, at the crisp fresh tracks the cruiser had made. He watched. Then it went on.

  Out of the alley onto South Maple and the wind was at his face now and it was snowing harder. He looked once passing a streetlight and the snow looked infinite, a soft feathery hush sifting endlessly down from a void that went on forever. Some phenomena that had survived time, was as old as earth. There were no lights he could see anywhere save the streetlights and he stood halted a moment listening, as if he were being inundated in silence and trapped in some snowfall paperweight perpetually tilted.

  He went on. Past picket fences white in the streetlight and shuttered windows glowing from the soft inner nightlights. He felt already gone, outward bound. A hunger for a world where he could make some connection struck him. The world you see in four-color advertisements in the Saturday Evening Post, father and mother and two freshfaced children admiring the new Buick, the new Frigidaire, basking in the warmth of the new Amana forced air furnace. Later they’ll tuck the children in their beds. Where visions of sugarplums dance. Reckon what you have to do to get the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. A world only told about, only rumors reach the hinterlands there.

  He went on, past the schoolyard and the converted funeral home where the souls of the numberless dead drifted aimless or spoke and whispered without purpose into the ear of the living.

  He came out on the highway and then he could see the neon from the Cozy Court Motel. No one about, things slow tonight in the motel trade. His feet felt frozen, he hoped she had the heat on, he’d lost the feeling in his toes.

  The restaurant at the motel, cheery light burning in the night, stayed open all night and he crossed the red and green yuletide neon and ordered a cup of coffee. There was no one there save the waitress and she looked as if she had been or was asleep or wanted to be. She set his coffee down and wiped with dull persistence some nonexistent stain with the damp cloth she was holding.

  What’s the matter, Billy? The big boys take your coat away from you?

  He was spooning sugar into the steaming coffee. Three spoonfuls, four. Not eating right, needing energy. Pouring cream up to the lip of the cup. It wasn’t this cold when I came out. I wasn’t expecting it to snow like this either.

  It said on the radio it’s already four inches on the ground in Memphis. Is it sticking here yet?

  Beginning to.

  They looked out the windows but they were steamed up and there seemed no world at all beyond the harsh yuletide neon.

  You want a little drink?

  I don’t reckon tonight.

  Do you mind if I have one? Will you not say nothin to nobody?

  It’s nothin to me.

  That cheap sonofabitch comes in here prowlin and sniffin around tryin to smell it on me. I have to hide it a different place ever night.

  She was kneeling behind the counter with rounded knees bared and reaching into a cabinet and she had her mouth open to say something when the door opened and she leapt up, a hand smoothing at her red hair, a dark roan bristle at her armpit.

  But it was not the manager. A thin youth in a too small suitcoat stood rubbing his hands together briskly and blinking, his eyes toadlike at this unexpected light. Snow crowned his lank strawcolored hair, began to melt there.

  He looked all about the diner inconspicuously. A curious sullen face, sharp and narrow as an arcbit turned sideways. Eyes scanning the flyspecked list of sandwiches. Hamburger, cheeseburger, BLT. Apparently no favorites there. Gimme two coffees to go, he said, holding up two fingers as if she suffered some hearing impediment, or he some speech defect. He turned to the jukebox, stood hipslung reading the song titles, his lips moving as he read. As if he studied the list for some obscure purpose, as if great and transcendent knowledge were inscribed there.

  He crossed to the counter when she set the coffee down and he laid a dime on the counter with a soft and final clink. The coffee came in brown paper cups with twin flaps appended on them to hold them by. He had his fingers through the slots and both coffees aloft and stood studying Edgewater as a tailor might use his eyes to measure a man for a suit of clothes. The eyes were more yellow than any other color.

  Good buddy, lemme talk to you a minute out in the yard.

  Edgewater turned to see but there was no one there save himself. What about?

  I just need to ask ye somethin.

  Outside the wind had died and the world was going white and soft, a blurry fairyland beneath the glare of light. He began to wonder idly how he was going to get home, if he was.

  What is it?

  Buddy, what about some pussy?

  What?

  He said it again.

  Edgewater stood studying this diminutive lecher. This curious apprentice pimp. Perhaps taking some esoteric test in a college for pimps, being g
raded at a distance by some professor of this craft. Some strange whore in mismatched drag. He felt displaced.

  Where is it at?

  Right over there. The pimp was pointing. The motel was a long barracks-like building divided into units and there were two or three cars parked facing it. It was toward these cars that he vaguely gestured.

  How much?

  Five dollars.

  There was an old claycolored Ford. The door opened onto it. The backseat was piled up with a jumble of suitcases and clothes and blankets and there was a girl curled sleeping in the front seat. She was very pretty.

  Here. He handed her a cup of coffee when she opened her eyes and she sat holding it numbly for a moment and looking dazed as if she did not quite know where she was or as if in waking her he had drawn her back from some more pleasant land. She had been resting her cheek on her hand as she slept and the prints of her fingers showed white on her face. She had brown curly hair and looked about fifteen. She was wrapped in an old army blanket.

  When did it get so cold?

  It’s been turnin cold all night. It’s snowin too.

  They Lord. We won’t never get home. Did you find any gas?

  I don’t know. Not yet.

  You don’t know?

  Not yet.

  Edgewater was shivering in the cold. In the warmth inside the motel he could hear a compressor or thermostat kick on and a heater start and he thought of the summer air blowing through the rooms where implement salesmen and more experienced whores than this one lay dreaming. Dreamed satiated and ginsoaked and limbs interlocking in tousled blankets. Did they dream of lost times that would not come again? Of chances lost, roads not taken?

  Come around here a minute, Edgewater said. I want to talk to you.

  The boy closed the door and opened it back when she said something.

  What?

  I said could I play the radio?