The Lost Country

by William Gay

  You know I said it’d run the battery down.

  You won’t let me do nothin.

  He closed the door hard and a small avalanche of snow fell from the window trim. He brushed it from his hand and they walked around to the back of the Ford. A prowl car passed with its tires hissing in the snow and dipped off the hill and out of sight in a white slipstream of exhaust.

  What is it?

  What kind of deal is this? Edgewater asked.

  No kind of a deal to it. I ask you if you wanted some pussy and told you how much it was. Do you not think it’s worth five dollars?

  That’s no whore in there.

  You damn right it’s not. That’s the freshman queen of Lawrence County, Alabama.

  I take it’s also your wife.

  We’re on our honeymoon. We been to Nashville and we had nothin but hard luck. To top things off, the car tore up and it took all our money to fix the shittin thing and then nothin wouldn’t do her but she had to see the Grand Ole Opry. That’s a hard town. We’re flat broke now and the car’s out of gas. They throwed us out of the motel at eleven o’clock this morning when our time was up.

  Couldn’t you wire home for money?

  Our folks washed their hands of us when we got married. Strangers as well and I know strange. I’ve ask for help and all I’ve got is hard looks and kiss my ass. Fuck it. Do you want it or not?

  Edgewater took a five-dollar bill out of his pocket and handed it to the boy, who glanced at the denomination and shoved it deep into his pocket. There was a yellow gas can in the car, he took it and turned without speaking to Edgewater. He opened the door on the driver’s side. You do like I said, he told her. He turned without closing the door and Edgewater watched his thin and angry figure retreating under the streetlamp, the sound of the gas can bumping his leg rhythmic with his walking. Carrying his gasoline like some amateur arsonist trudging on toward the kindling point of the world, distanced from the throes and turmoil of life as if long blackballed, like some soul doomed from its membership not to inhabit the world, only to bear witness to.

  She sat beside him without moving, stoically staring out the windshield at the mounding snow and beyond that, further to the stucco wall of the motel, as if it were something they were speeding toward. He put an arm about her shoulder and gently drew her nearer. She came grudgingly but without protest, a leaden weight stiff against him. He could smell the warmth of her, curiously intertwined, a little girl smell of spearmint and a woman’s perfume and lipstick and he thought he could divine through the bone structure of her face the way she had looked as a child. Her profile was clean and bright as the profile on a newly struck coin and she was very pretty. There was an ache in him, a regret for all the coinclean profiles, all the slender grace, all the lost homecoming queens of youth. Snowflakes fell on the windshield and lay without melting and formed patterns of wondrous intricacy. She was crying, still without moving. Tears moved down her smooth cheeks, he stopped one with his fingers and they came faster.

  Stop crying.

  I can’t.

  Say you’re from Alabama?

  Yeah. Lawrence County. You ever been there?

  Yeah. Town Creek.

  We were supposed to go down to Mobile and see the ocean but I’ll never see it tagging along with him. Have you ever been to Mobile?

  He had, yet there was no one person or deed to recall it to him but a series of separate pictures like snapshots from a summer vacation, holographs of marvelous clarity, a montage of shifting images: a ravaged land of limestone and red clay bleeding through like old blood, honeysuckle pinewoods dark and still and moribund days in the sweet hot sun and naked breasts he could trace the blueveined heartbeat in.

  A mosaic of desperation. He remembered backwaters of the Tennessee River, brackish and tepid. A motorboat knifing the water and a waterskier bent and briefly airborne spanning the wake with careless grace. A girl with a vacuous face looking stricken in the sun, in a yellow bathing suit and later when he removed the halter of it the breasts were shockingly white; soft against her, tan and even as he watched the nipples pucker and draw taut, as if some chill wind blew across her supine body, as if she drew from his touch some occult cold that started there and fanned outward and would ultimately destroy her, a slow arterial movement of dark heart’s blood slushed with ice, slow and slower and cease.

  A bootlegger. A black bootlegger with an enviable Sunday afternoon business, an unbelievable string of cars going around his house like some great dislocated traffic jam and coming out the other side. Going in he had met a car of the Alabama State Police. A casual wave of the hand, he’d waved back. Two enormous back porch coolers set filled with nothing but tallboy Bud at fifty cents a bottle. It was told he had a halfwhite daughter in a New England finishing school and it was told the fix was in so high and wide that the Budweiser truck dropped below the Tennessee line into the land of prohibition to make his deliveries.

  He tasted her stiff lips, a musky taste there of sleep. Her eyes were open, a welled black enormity fringed with dark lashes that would draw him under.

  Quit foolin around. Just do it if you’re going to.

  Do you want me to or not?

  I just want it over with. I want to go home.

  He released her and lit a cigarette and smoked in a thoughtful silence but she did not move away. She seemed drained of all volition, a weight to be guided and controlled.

  You want to go in that café and get something to eat?

  He oughtn’t to have made me.

  No. But he just told you to. He’s not making you.

  He’ll beat me if I don’t.

  Then tell him you did. Tell him I couldn’t get a hard on, tell him whatever he wants to hear. Or just tell him to go to hell.

  He opened the door. It was not much colder outside than in. As he got out she took his arm and moved to forestall him. Don’t go. Go on and do it. He’ll whip me if you don’t.

  He wanted done with her as well.

  He got out anyway and returned to the café. He foresaw other stops for her before she was in Alabama.

  His coffee was cold. He drank it anyway, a bitterness tempered with sweetness.

  What’d he want? the waitress asked.

  He’s down on his luck, Edgewater said. He had something to try to sell me.

  You buy it?

  I couldn’t afford it, he told her.

  He went back out and wanted to be moving slowly homeward through the night. It was surely near day but no sign of it or any indication anywhere that the snow would cease or even slacken. It was already halfway to his knees and from beneath the domelit water tank a dog came out and stood bellydeep and perplexed. Her face was in his mind, her clean sweet youth like the shards of a dream or a taste in his mouth. She might have been his last young one ever. The last one with a gossamer shred of innocence still restraining her. Dweller of some halfway house between. He wondered idly why he had simply given the boy the five dollars but he did not know why he had not used her anyway. A seed of doubt had been sown. He would never believe her and the seed might grow and drop the fruits of it. A chill wind blew up from the west, lay on his back like a weight. He was chilled to the bone, felt half frozen. The wind drifted the dry snow, swirled it about him like a blizzard. He felt a chill beyond the capability of weathers, beyond the ice the December night lay on him. The world is indeed wide, surely highways led to Lawrence County, Alabama.

  He climbed back in the car, leaned and kissed her lips, her eyes open, fringed with thick lashes. Her lips clasped together, prim, she twisted her face away from him.

  He’ll be back in a little bit. Do it if you’re going to.

  Do you want me to?

  I just want to be anywhere but here. I want to go home. You heard him say for me to, you gave him money.

  He got out again and walked slowly across the parking lot, hesitating at the door of the café, looked back at the girl in the car and opened the café door.

  Harold hasn�
��t got a gas can back in there has he?

  I can look. Why? the waitress asked.

  I just need one a minute. They’re out of gas.

  She disappeared through the door and after a moment returned with a yellow can. You better bring this back, Billy. He’ll have my ass if it gets gone.

  Outside he carried the can back to where the car sat and stood peering speculatively at the other cars. He looked about. Last summer’s watering hose tending down from a spigot and with his pocketknife he cut a length from it. While he beat it against the sidewalk dislodging from it lozenge-shaped pellets of ice she got out and watched with interest. The car across was a new Cadillac and apparently full of gas for he refilled the can four times, each time setting it in the snow and siphoning the gas into the tank. When he was through he turned without speaking to her and carried the can back inside and when he returned she was still outside shivering and watching it snow as if it was some wonder she was unused to.

  Get in. We’ll see if it’ll start and get the heater going.

  She got in beside him and the car cranked on the first try. While it warmed up he got out and scraped the ice off the windshield and when he got back behind the wheel he seemed heightened in some way, a curious euphoria had seized him. For no reason at all he thought of Bradshaw. Sweet home Alabama, he said.

  Reckon what time it is? What could he be doing?

  It must be near daylight. I guess he’s waiting for a gas station to open.

  You mean there’s not one?

  I doubt it.

  You knew that all the time. She shifted her weight in the seat, slid a little nearer, just a suggestion of weight against his shoulder. How many cans of gas would you need between here and Town Creek? he wondered aloud, but she did not reply. He was lost in study of her mintclean profile against the beleaguered glass and perhaps he saw more than was visible. She was time and generations of forebears moving halfperceived through the warped glass of the past and in the planes and angles of her face he read their tale, their travails and ultimate indomitability. For this, at once cause and result, there was about her and about the past she lead like some dread familiar an air of blooded dissolution of sweet gentle ruin.

  She turned and watched him as a bird might return the unblinking glass stare of a serpent at the moment when the identities of victim and predator shift and merge, become one duality of violence.

  How many times would you have had to stop between here and Decatur? he asked her.

  She halfsmiled. I dare you, she said.

  He released the clutch and the car spun backward through the snow. In this instant he saw in his mind’s eye a snapshot, the old image of himself merging with the image of himself now, a black and white Polaroid of a young man standing before the edge of a wood. And even as he watched and attempted to hold the image steady in his mind the edges blurred, it microscopically shifted, began its escape: a furtive order sliding from the scenery that has locked it toward the white and pristine void at the picture’s edge.

  Afterword

  Finding The Lost Country

  by J.M. White

  In the last few years of his life, William Gay would read from a forthcoming book he called The Lost Country. He had signed a contract and had a deadline of February 2012 to turn in the manuscript. The publisher announced that it was forthcoming; it was listed on Amazon. William would talk about the main characters, named Edgewater, Bradshaw, and Roosterfish. He liked to remark that Edgewater was the most autobiographical character in all his books. As February approached, I asked him how the book was going and he said he had written it but now he couldn’t find it.

  Within a week of telling me this, William was dead. In the last year of his life, he had been having seizures and then a heart attack, which he survived only as a result of some good paramedics who jump-started his heart in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. After that, he had a pacemaker, but within a year he was gone.

  The day after he died, the publisher for The Lost Country called to ask me to go to Hohenwald and see if I could retrieve the manuscript. I tried calling William’s kids, but no one was answering. A few days later, the phone rang. It was William Junior, who said he had a tub full of notebooks and wanted me to help go through it. I went to Hohenwald at the earliest opportunity, where Junior showed me William’s ashes in a cardboard box on the mantel. Then he brought out a plastic tub full of William’s handwritten notebooks. He and his brother Chris had gone into William’s bedroom and found the notebooks piled on the floor of his closet. They put them in three plastic tubs; William took one and Chris kept the other two.

  I started looking through the tub, and almost immediately I spotted Edgewater and Roosterfish in some of the notebooks. Junior gave me the tub to take home, and I stayed up most of the night sorting the notebooks into piles based on the characters that appeared in them. William’s writing was not easy to decipher. The notebooks were filled front to back with tightly written script; notes were written on the sides of many pages and across the top margins. He didn’t cross his t’s or dot his i’s, so many of the words were difficult to make out—the letters t, i, a, and e were nearly identical.

  The next day, I got some expandable folders and organized the notebooks. There were The Lost Country notebooks, notebooks of published short stories, music writing, and notebooks from Provinces of Night. I made an archival list describing each notebook and labeling it. I took the tub back to Hohenwald and picked up Junior and we drove over to meet Chris. Once there, Chris brought out the two other tubs. I offered to do the same sorting process with these, and he sent them home with me.

  I could tell there was a significant amount of unpublished material, including twelve notebooks from The Lost Country. In one of the notebooks, I found a synopsis in a letter to an agent. Once I had everything archived, I carried all the papers back to Hohenwald. All together, Junior and Chris had fifty-eight handwritten notebooks. I called the publisher. He was excited to hear about the notebooks and asked me to get a copy to him. Within a week of sending copies of The Lost Country notebooks, the publisher called saying they were rejecting the manuscript. I was disappointed but was totally undaunted. I knew that until we had all the material typed, we just didn’t know how much was there. The synopsis laid out the plotline, so I had something to follow. A small group of William’s friends started typing The Lost Country notebooks and passing the material back and forth. We all agreed it was as great as anything he had written. I began laying out the typed sections based on the synopsis.

  Each time I visited Hohenwald, different family members urged me to go visit the house that William had built in 1978, where he and his wife Diane raised the kids. Finally one day I drove out and found the house. It is built like a log cabin, using four-by-four beams stacked like Lincoln logs. William’s daughter Laura had been living there with her husband and their four kids, but she passed away from cancer a month after William died. I pulled up in the yard and Kory, Laura’s husband, assured me that it was all right to go up into the attic. Dallas, one of the older kids, went with me. The opening to the attic was covered with loose boards. Dallas pushed the boards aside and we climbed into the low attic.

  I have never seen so many spider webs, they were hanging from the rafters like Spanish moss, the air was thick with them like gossamer curtains suspended from the beams. There were magazines strewn all over the floor three and four layers thick. There were cardboard boxes filled with Rolling Stone and Playboy, along with more literary stuff like Harper’s and Atlantic. Dallas was pushing around through the magazines and came up with an old spiral-bound notebook.

  One wall was lined with bookcases that ran the length of the room, stuffed full of thousands of books. I knocked down the spider webs and looked at all William’s old books. At one end of the shelves I found a cardboard box with the lids folded shut. When I looked inside, it was filled with typewritten sheets of paper—hundreds of pages of old cheap typing paper in various stages of decay and yellowin
g, lots of them bent and crumbled. I looked through the pages and saw the names of the characters from The Lost Country. It was a total mess; some of the pages had numbers on the bottom, but most didn’t, and the pages didn’t seem to be in order. I closed the box and sat it by the steps. It was getting dark in the attic. Dallas had come up with a couple more notebooks, so we piled everything together and headed down.

  Kory agreed for me to take all the materials home and figure out what they were. I couldn’t believe my luck. I had found a typed copy of The Lost Country and a bunch of handwritten notebooks. The box smelled like stale cigarette smoke mixed with mouse dung and it was covered with a deep layer of grime. When I carried it into my office and sat it on the floor, my cat circled it, sniffing it and looking it over very intently. I opened the box and laid the papers out on the floor. It was a jumble, a hodgepodge, the pages totally out of order.

  I brought in a box of plastic sleeves and put all the pages in plastic protectors. I started sorting the pages on the floor. Each time I found a character name, I put that page in a pile. It took me a couple of days to make it through the box. When I came to the end, I had four stacks, a couple of them quite substantial. I had three for each of the main characters and then one large stack for all the pages without names.

  I found one page that had “The End” written in pencil at the bottom. Some of the pages had handwritten page numbers in the bottom right-hand corner, and the page that said “The End” was 231. I put the pages that had numbers in order and read through them and then read the unnumbered pages and started fitting them in. Only about half of the pages were numbered, but it wasn’t too difficult once the storyline became apparent.

  The team of Susan McDonald, Shelia Kennedy, and I started comparing the material from the notebooks with the pages from the attic. Shelia entered all the pages from the attic into a computer file. Then we were able to take material from the notebooks and compare them to the typescript. It was plain to see that the notebooks were the source of the typescript, since it followed the notebooks word for word. Then we were able to fill in any missing pages of the typescript with the material from the notebooks. After a few weeks of sorting and arranging, we had all the material integrated. We had the entire manuscript, except for a few pages leading up to “The End.”