The Lost Country

by William Gay

  Behind the windshield his face, latticed by the night, and in the lights of cars he met his face was devoid of expression, the mouth slack and wet, glossy satyr’s eyes slightly protuberant, the face changing only when he smoked and drank from the bottle he clasped loosely with his right hand while he drove.

  Perhaps he had some subliminal instinct, vestige of other cultures, other times. He seemed to scent out availability in a woman the way a dog can scent impending death. Availability seemed his only criterion. They all fell his way, the young, the old, the maimed. The pretty, the disfigured alike. Pussy’s pussy if it’s hung on a dog, he liked to say in those days. There was about him a quality of true democracy, the dusky sisters below the railroad tracks were not deprived of his favors. Some compulsion moved him. Something that put him down these roads at dusk toward whoever waited, whether he knew it or not. As if the entering of another’s body gave him renewal, some power over others, replenished whatever wells of arrogance he drew upon, the swagger that propelled him from one point to the other.

  He seemed to know when a rift appeared in a marriage, was not averse to putting it there himself. It was said in half believing wonder that he could tell when a woman was going to be widowed, before she knew it or the doctor knew it or the undertaker even suspected. That when the event transpired he would be there cap in hand, offering his own peculiar brand of condolences to the bereft.

  He was a backdoor man, a through the window in the dark man, a braggart, the man who crawled into your still-warm covers when you went to work in the morning.

  It was told about Flatwoods what he did to Freda. The tone of discussion was awed disgust, save when Harkness did the telling; he did most of the talking himself.

  I was on her screwin and she was just layin there like she’d dropped off to sleep or was tryin to remember the recipe for Aunt Myrtle’s pickle relish and I said, Goddamn your soul to hell. Here I done laid out seventy-five cents for you a fish dinner and Christ hisself couldn’t of kept a tally on the beer bottles, and you got the nerve to put such as this on me. I’se about drunk or I wouldn’t of done it. But the pistol was layin right there in the floorboard and I thought, by God, no other man won’t get stuck with no such sorry pussy as this is.

  Two or three men straggled off in disgust but Harkness was oblivious. He went on with his tale.

  I tried to shoot her right in the pussy but I missed and got her there in the leg. If they’s ever anything done about it and I have to go to court about it I’ll tell the judge, Hell, it was self defense. She had one of these here snappin pussies and it come at me in the dark and it was me or it.

  People waited for father or brother to come out of the woodwork and annihilate Harkness but no such appeared. She had come from nowhere, to nowhere was relegated. When she got out of the hospital, she boarded a bus with her suitcase and the box she carried her blond wig in and she was gone.

  People said: Somebody’ll kill him one of these days. But nobody did. Everybody knew he carried a knife and that he did not mind using it. In time it came to seem that he was kept alive by sheer professionalism, by mastery of what everyone had come to think of as his craft.

  The odors and sound of the dark were ordered senses of her existence and from where she lay on the screened-in back porch she isolated them one by one as if that would entice sleep. This summer she preferred the porch. Here the night was fecund with scents of summer; here was the antithesis of death, a steady and tireless wall of sound from cicadas and crickets, the heavy sounds of insects and bats thwarted by the screens, the lush sweetness of honeysuckle and hyacinth. This summer she felt kinship with a world rampant with life.

  Inside, her mother slept in a chaste medicinal darkness, in a smothering claustrophobic room that she thought had taken on the characteristics of her mother, so much that it stifled her, she could not breathe there: or perhaps the person she had already begun to think of as a halfmad old woman lay in taut sweaty silence, awaiting the touch of murderers and rapists, straining to hear footfalls where no footfalls ought to be. Sudy herself bait, guarding the old woman’s sanctity. Rapists might pause here on the porch first and, satiated, proceed no further.

  After a time there was the first sound that broke the ordered pattern of her nights: a car engine that grew louder and coughed and ceased on the highroad. She half rose from the cot. It’s Bobby, she thought, but it did not sound like his car. Perhaps he’d traded. Then voices came, disjointed and fragmented like voices in a dream or voices the mind conjures the ear into hearing. Raucous laughter the balmy wind brought down pointless and sourceless, the laughter of fools or drunks or both.

  She arose and wrapped the sheet about herself and walked barefoot to the edge of the porch. Moonlight fell silvery and bright, the moon itself close and full, lowering itself onto the world, a sinister beauty. The night was a carved relief in black and silver, dark trees with their tenants of whippoorwills and owls seemed secretive and imbued with meaning she knew but could not articulate. Beyond them the rising hills and fields were a luminescent tapestry tending away to nothingness, a world profoundly of the night.

  All soundless in virginal white she went nunlike, a wraith fleeing through high dewy grass. In the summertime she could not see the road from here. Had it been winter and the trees sere, there was a banked curve from which she could watch the road’s traffic accomplish itself, but now lush greenery blocked from her vision even of the old road, which was below the highroad and was just a healing scar going to sumac and sassafras. She crossed the yard to the old springhouse and turned there following the branch tiptoeing delicately over slick rocks through watercress and mint with the babbling of the brook overlaying the unfocused voices. In the night her face was as ovoid and white and featureless as the moon, seemed touched as well by a refracted luminescence.

  She crouched beneath the branches of a walnut tree, felt the rough bark of the bole through the sheet; she was naked beneath it. Above her something moved evasive and covert in the branches, she could smell the astringent odor of walnuts. The voices separated themselves, gained clarity.

  She recognized with something of shock the voice of her brother. A bitter twist of disappointment, as if he had betrayed her, visited her with evil, or heard of wrongs done and come to avenge them.

  The year she turned seventeen Sudy watched spring come with a feeling she’d never known, a heightened awareness of the world’s awakening: trees budding and tiny wildflowers pushing through last winter’s wind raked leaves and time seemed to slow and spring came so immutable and infinitesimally slow that she became aware of each unfolding leaf, aware simultaneously of life rising in her body like sap, so that it seemed she had never been alive, was being born now as well: all the life that preceded it was one vast uneventful day seventeen years long. All the things that mattered happened that spring; she had always been a good girl, quiet, they said, never a word out of her all these years and they did not know what to say to her, were completely unprepared. All they had for weapons were threats and silence and they were not enough.

  You won’t let him come to see me, she told her father. You let Buddy lay drunk and drive up in the yard with his whores and come in and get blankets and...

  He’d slapped her hard and for the first time she tasted the blood from her burst lip and that had seemed slow and drawn out as well, the red face and the hand coming so slow she could have dodged but didn’t and her hair sprang out and the incision of minute capillaries brought the warm salty rush of blood.

  That spring Bobby Yates had an old black station wagon with the seats out of the back and he would get to the top of the hill and cut the switch and lights and coast off the main road to the old grownover skeleton of a trail left from when the wagonroad ran below the highroad and she would meet him.

  All those balmy spring nights she’d come out soundless with her shoes in her hand and move fleet and spectral through the wall of awakening sounds and past the incessant call of frogs from the springhouse and sit
beside the cracked faulted chert till he came. It was another world at night, a world she’d slept through, had never known existed. By moonlight the wildflowers looked fragile and of wondrous delicacy, tiny harebells and roosterfights and bluebells that looked as if they thrived as she did on the silver light of the moon, as if the merciless glare of the sun would sear them away.

  He was above her and inside her when they’d heard the first sound and they’d thought it a dog or fox but it intensified and they looked just as the cudgel struck the side of the station wagon and the glass went. The door opened and her father’s face was nigh unrecognizable, he could not find room to raise the stick and he was jabbing with it wildly as if it were a frog gig or a spear. Bobby was swearing and sliding across her body and then her face and out the back and around and for a moment father and swain stood locked and swaying with the stick clasped between them like figures from her nightmares given corporeality by some dark magic: then her father stopped and stood very still as if he’d heard someone speak his name and he was waiting to hear it again. He made some incoherent sound and fell and when they knelt beside him his face was already blue, a dead face watching up at them from the patch of violets he’d fallen in.

  God Almighty damn, Bobby said. He was holding the stick. They’ll say I done it, he said. He threw the stick as far as he could and climbed behind the wheel of the station wagon then had to get out and push with a shoulder to overcome its inertia and leap back in when it began to gain speed down the slope, going black and soundless and hearselike through and under the gray and silver branches overhanging it and it as well somehow spectral, a prop made carnate from a madman’s dreams.

  Bobby? She ran a few steps and the engine coughed and bucked and the lights came on and it seemed to vault into the night. She went back and stood there above her father and looking down she saw with horror that she was naked, that he had carried her clothes with him when he’d gone.

  An old car lusterless even in the strong moonlight, a flat worn black that seemed to draw light to it rather than reflect it. The doors were sprung open but there was not light inside either. Then they got out. There were three of them, her brother and two men she did not know. Drunk, she expected. Lacquered so with shadow they seemed somehow sinister, a cabal of warlocks paused to plot some vague evil, fallen upon the land under cover of darkness: a car passed and they all turned alike to watch its lights and she thought, Oh no, it’s Bobby, but it went on, lights yawning among the willows, wheels sliding in the gravel, cutout throbbing fullthroated when it reached the straight, the pitch of the engine rising as if the night held something it was fleeing. As if the night ahead was any better.

  The tall boy walked toward her, paused at the road’s edge, fumbled with his trousers. A silent silver arc into the dark weeds. She shifted her weight, turned into deeper shadows of the walnut as if to avoid his eyes. Dew was soaking through the sheet, she came aware of her nakedness beneath it. She opened the sheet to the night air, she could feel it drying the perspiration, feel her skin tightening. She looked back toward the road and the man had finished, turned back to where the car was parked.

  Oh Lord, they’ll wake up Mama, she said to herself. For the one with the cap had withdrawn a guitar from the backseat and had begun beating on it, a tuneless frailing devoid of rhythm or melody or anything vaguely musical, just a dissonant and out-of-tune pounding he began to sing over. It seemed curiously as if the song and its accompaniment were unrelated or were performed by different people to different songs. It went on and on, a rambling obscene song that seemed to have endless verses. Her brother Buddy began to sing with him; she only half listened, for she was thinking, He died right over there, in the weeds, and Buddy singing some nasty song right there where it happened. Then she thought: Why he don’t even know. It looked like somebody would have told him, Buddy had his arm about the man’s shoulder and their voices grew louder and less restrained. She sat bemused listening to the song’s progression.

  The third man was lying on the turtledeck of the car, an arm thrown across his face. He did not appear to be listening to the song or to be doing anything at all. He seemed apart from them. Perhaps a hitchhiker they’d give a ride to, waiting with patience for them to take him wherever it was he was going. He was still, he might be sleeping.

  The song ended on the socially redeeming note that V.D. inevitably followed illicit dalliance and they began another but could not remember the words, trembled away, voices and guitar ceasing tremulously in dissonance.

  The man in the longbilled cap was putting away the guitar, Buddy asking: You reckon Harkness got him any of that? And the man collapsing in laughter and saying, If he did I bet he’d found him a cherry. Settin on that snake probably drawed it up tightern a buttonhole, and she thought what on earth, are they crazy?

  She sat so for a long time listening to their obscene banter, their pointless and drunken memories paraded for her, mute audience to a dumb show of the damned, as if they were familiars she’d conjured for her entertainment by occult rite: while the night slid its weary way homeward, while the moon hung poised over the Cimmerian horizon and then settled onto it, partly obscured as if the jagged branches were drawing off the light from it and leaving it in darkness, invisible, a thing of remembrance only. A dead and fabled world.

  Bradshaw’s face twisted momentarily, tears stung his eyes, his face ravaged by a grief Edgewater would not have thought him capable of. Perhaps some phantom out of his childhood had touched him, brief gentleness he’d forgotten or let pass unrecognized. He turned away from the table, wiped his eyes with his sleeve.

  How come nobody got word to me?

  The old woman turned from the stove where she was frying meat. How? she asked bitterly.

  Bradshaw had no answer, just wordlessly shook his head.

  There was a sliding window above the table and through its moted glass light fell on a worn oilcloth, a red and white checkered maze that shimmered hypnotically, a geometric pattern that would draw Edgewater into it. He looked away, past gauzy motionless curtains to where the yard ended not by any cessation of grass but by three strands of barbed wire beyond which a belled cow grazed, its bell echoing its movements like some encoded message for the blind. There were jays calling from somewhere past the perimeter of the visible world and the cries of crows from a near cornfield.

  When did you get in? She was forking up bacon from popping grease.

  We got off the bus in Ackerman’s Field this morning. Run up with old Arnold in town and he brought us up to the road.

  Edgewater smiled at his lies while studying the girl minutely, from long habit, as if to commit to memory every detail of her he might ever need: what might be used, what discarded. She sat across from him at the table, sipping coffee from a blue cup. Her face looked sleeprobbed, as if she had been instantly transposed from sleep to here. Her blond hair was tousled, she had an old white bathrobe wrapped about her. He thought her face a trifle too round, but the skin was smooth as fired pottery, a pale glaze unpored or blemished and the blue eyes looked serene, untouched. Innocent. Deep wells blue with distance, remote, fabled repositories for such innocence as remained in the world.

  I kept hearin somebody up on that old roadbed last night, Sudy said. She stared into the steaming coffee.

  Likely that Yates still sniffin around after you, Bradshaw said, unperturbed. Now that I’m back all that mess’ll be straightened out.

  It wasn’t Bobby, I know his car.

  I expect you do.

  Whoever it was they was cussin and carryin on something awful. She stared out the window, the blue rim of the cup hiding her mouth. An orange butterfly fluttered against the window screen, a fragile and shimmering iridescence.

  The woman dished up bacon and eggs, fried potatoes. Well, you’re back anyhow. Say you got laid off?

  He was slicing up his eggs. The company I worked for went out of business, he said. Me and Billy heard of this job down by Chattanooga. They hirin up there and payin go
od money. We headed that way. I didn’t think about him bein dead.

  Him? the girl asked. He was your daddy. Can’t you call your father nothing but him?

  Your place is here with us, the old woman said. Not traipsing up and down the highway. There’s work enough on this place, and always has been, if you’d but do it.

  Lord, it’s been a long road back here. Nothin but trouble.

  You can write, can’t you? the girl asked. They’re still deliverin the mail, anyway the last I heard.

  He ignored her.

  Edgewater ate abstractedly; he had heard it all before, in versions better than this one. It was taking on the fabric of myth, of fable. The woman was studying him, eyes limpid and pale behind the glasses, bitter, as if all the world’s sorrows trickled down and pooled here. She glanced away as if she sensed in Edgewater things she did not want to know, sensed a predator in him, would have none of him.

  As soon as he saw the old woman start across the field he began searching for the keys but he could not find them. She must have had them on her. Bradshaw did not let it deter him. There was an old rusty crowbar in the toolshed and he hooked it behind the hinges one after the other and just tore the door off.

  Well ain’t that sweet?

  The Chevrolet gleamed richly with wax that had been buffed to a mirrorlike finish, the chrome had been cleaned and polished and even the white sidewalls had been scrubbed.

  They walked into the shed, admiring the lustrous black car. The shed was barely big enough to accommodate it and they were scrouged between it and the walls. Bradshaw could not get over it. What’d make her do a thing like that? he kept asking. Why it looks like a brand new one. Even the inside was scrupulously clean and the upholstery smelled rich and pristine. Locked so in the shed the car had sat like a shrine, a monument. These two like covert desecrators ransacking the past, the fallen door some laboriously plundered tomb entrance.

  Bradshaw checked the oil and held the dipstick to better light and squinted at it. Look at that. She’s even had the oil changed. I bet she’s had it greased and everthing. Won’t we knock em dead, Billy? Is this transportation or not?