The Lost Country

by William Gay

  The room was austere, utilitarian. It could have been a motel room, a furnished but untenanted apartment. There were no girlish stuffed animals, no movie star portraits adorning the walls. All there was to hint her occupancy was some floral scent, faint and somehow vestigial.

  Long used to sifting through the artifacts and debris of other people’s lives, he prowled through her dresser drawers. In the mirror his face was abstracted, intent on his work. A burglar stealing not valuables but knowledge, the minutiae of dull lives, a hunter familiarizing himself with the habits of his prey. Neat stacks of clean underwear, stockings, the familiar blue box of Kotex. A purse he emptied, glancing to see was the door locked, aligning the contents on the dresser top: seven dollars and odd change; a lipstick, unused, hidden in a zippered compartment. A bottle of scent, the same cologne the room smelled of. Something wrapped in a clean pair of panties. Curiosity piqued he unwrapped a halfpack of Camel cigarettes, laid them bemusedly on the dresser, his face absorbed, obscurely rewarded by this find. Some old dumpkeeper prowling through the garbage of the well-to-do.

  He took up the cigarettes. A secret smoker, perhaps. What greater vices, more cleverly concealed? He tipped the cigarettes out one by one, felt them, smelt the tobacco. When all the cigarettes were aligned before him he picked up the package, peered into it, pecked out a snapshot rolled so that it would fit through the package opening. Each life no matter how small had its obligatory secret. No matter how insignificant the body, this was where it lay buried.

  From the snapshot a young man regarded him, smiling, cocky, head a mass of light curls. In the background lay what appeared to be a stream of some sort and a tangle of brush and the boy was holding to the sun and the eye of the camera a string of fish. His other hand held a rod and reel. He was bare to the waist and there was what looked like a scar running the length of his breastbone, a narrow tapered scar like a spearpoint or arrowhead. The sun was in his face and he looked haloed with light, grinning, his teeth white and even.

  Edgewater put everything back the way it had been and undressed to his shorts and lay atop the covers on the bed. After a time he got up and turned out the light and lay back down staring at the dark unperceived ceiling above him and listening to the sounds of the night beyond the window and thinking about nothing at all. He lay vaguely alert as if he did not allow himself to completely relax anymore. The world was wide for him but surprises few. Anything could happen, the inexplicable was commonplace. Scissors aloft and a mad harridan’s face twisted, the old woman might break in on him, or even now the law might be rolling down the highway toward him, somewhere there were papers with his name affixed to them, needed only serving to alter his life forever. He lay awake listening but all he ever heard above the ordinary sound of the night was the back door open and close and the sounds of her footsteps approaching down the hall. Soft, clandestine. He raised up on his elbows, not so much in anticipation as curiosity; he’d not expected her so soon. But the bathroom door opened and after a moment he heard water running. It ceased and he heard her go back out.

  He lay back down and thought of the old woman. He doubted she slept, expected that she as well heard the covert steps, the doors gently pulled to. Eavesdropped for the illicit intrigues of the summer night, suspicions honed razor sharp by the bits of knowledge the years pressed to her. He imagined her sleep troubled as well by the knowledge that the dark fox of her nightmares slept this night safe and dry within the henhouse walls.

  Sudy came through the house carrying a clean dress and the iron. Set the board up and plugged the iron in. Her eyes already defiant although the old woman had said nothing at all.

  When silent admonishment did not stop the ironing the old woman said, Just where do you think you’re goin?

  I’m goin to the show with Buddy and Billy.

  The old woman snorted. Them going to a show? You go off with them and no tellin where you’ll wind up.

  Mama, he’s my brother.

  You still ain’t agoin.

  I set here on this creek day after day till I’m nearly crazy. I’ve got to where I can’t tell one day from the next, and somebody hints that they don’t mind—not ask me, mind, but just don’t care if I go—and you think I’m not going?

  You ain’t agoin.

  Try and stop me, Mama.

  Bradshaw endured only the cartoon and a reel or so of the feature. Endless gunfights and bloodless denouncing held no charms for him. No black and white sunsets could hold his attention for long. He kept reaching across Sudy and punching Edgewater’s shoulder. Hey, Billy. Let’s go over to the poolroom and drink one. Pick Sudy up when the show’s over.

  Edgewater half arose but her hand was on his arm. Was there pressure there? He could not tell but he sat back down. It’ll be over in a minute, he whispered. I want to see how this comes out.

  Bradshaw was contemptuous of such smalltown pleasures. I don’t see how anybody can watch a cheapjack movie like this. He done chased him by that same rock four times and shot at him forty times and never even reloaded.

  I want to see how it comes out anyway.

  Shit. Bradshaw got up and they heard the door open and saw a rectangle of outside light briefly fall and vanish. They sat and watched the movie, and after a time her head infinitesimally and slowly settled toward him until at last they touched, the weight of her hair against his shoulder, not an unpleasant burden to bear. He could smell the girlish scent she wore, clean odor, some floral cologne. When he turned to kiss her she was waiting. Her eyes were open and questioning. She did not speak.

  Arm in arm they came out into the mothflecked night amidst a crowd of darting and yelling children and into a world of brightness and noise.

  Bradshaw was sitting on the hood of the Chevrolet with his arms crossed waiting. He was a little drunk and he had a sullen look on his face. He looked all around him appraisingly as if he hoped someone not too big or skillful might goad him into a fight but no one paid him any mind at all.

  On the way home he did not say anything at all except to refuse Sudy a trip to the Daridip. He glanced at her a time or two as if he had things on his mind but he kept them to himself. She had settled herself against Edgewater in the backseat as soon as they were outside the city limits, as if she had been awaiting darkness. Streetlights fell away. He crept a covert hand across her thigh, pressed between her legs a weight she neither spurned nor acknowledged. Her lips against his throat were wet. Bradshaw halfglanced at them. He accelerated.

  There was a stockgap of old railroad rails across the road past the trainbed and he hit it at eighty, a harsh clanging of reverberations that rocked the car so that it squatted and sprang. He hit second gear and the wheels spun, night fed the road at a dizzy pace.

  Her cool hand was in Edgewater’s and he laid it on his penis. When he did she did not move the hand but she raised her face and looked at him. Something of calm acceptance in her look touched Edgewater in a way he did not care to analyze. In some infinitesimal way he did not like, the world was altered.

  She had a reputation for being dour and practical. What she could not use she did not want. Even Harkness, not one for aesthetics himself, said of her, If she can’t eat it, fuck it, or bust it up for stovewood she don’t want no part of it.

  She had long been parsimonious and the older she got the harder she squeezed a dollar. Dollar bills passed through her hands with painful slowness, they might have had glue on them. Bradshaw would spend them and have to wait agonized in limbo till she parceled out more. He grew tired of bills that trickled to him in twos or threes. He searched for her purse before he asked her but apparently she had anticipated him.

  I need some money, Bradshaw told her.

  You might get you a job, she said. They pay off ever Friday for that, I hear.

  Mama, I got in applications everywhere from sawmills to garment factories. They ain’t nobody hirin.

  They ain’t hirin drunks in poolrooms and beerjoints, that’s for sure. You must be afraid to ask sob
er. She changed the subject. How long’s that Edgewater boy goin to be in my house?

  I couldn’t say. I don’t think for him.

  Nor for yourself neither, seems to me. What do you mean bringin trash like that into your sister’s house? Puttin him in her very bedroom?

  What’s the matter with it?

  Jails and asylums and unrespectable houses is full of the evidence of what’s the matter with it, she said.

  I don’t see it like that. Besides, you don’t know what all me and him’s been through. Me and him’s tight. Don’t you go sayin nothing to hurt his feelins neither. You do and I’m long gone from here.

  You better keep a close eye on your sister, she told him. I can’t be with her all the time with you haulin her all over the county.

  Don’t you trust her? Ain’t you brought her up right? Don’t she know right from wrong?

  No answer. Bradshaw had on his town clothes, his hair wet and slick, a knowing look in his eyes, they wandered out to where the Chevrolet waited. Time in its flight seemed dizzying, the world with its myriad diversions spun past him. He trapped here pleading poverty.

  Daddy had ten thousand dollars insurance. What happened to that?

  Why Lord he never had no such a thing.

  Yes he did. How do you get by then? How do you pay the house payments ever month?

  Her voice stopped him. Don’t cuss me. Not if you expect anything when I’m gone. I’d as soon leave it to Sudy as not.

  I need some money.

  She had produced as if by legerdemain a folded bill: a ten. He reached for it but she was not yet through with him.

  I want you to swear on your daddy’s memory to watch her around him.

  I ain’t no spy. She’s my sister, and Billy’s my friend. He saved my life.

  She gave him the bill. I’ll give you ten dollars a week.

  Fifteen, Bradshaw said.

  The old woman heard her footsteps in the hall, soft, careful, yet somehow imbued with urgency. She waited for the bathroom door to open, the click of the lightswitch, but it never came. The steps went to the door at the end of the hall. The door opened soft on soundless rungs. She has to get something out of her dresser, she told herself. She lay taut and sleepless, held her breath for as long as she could and listened for any sound, the sliding open of a drawer, the reclosing of the door, heard at last only the expulsion of her own breath, the cries of the night beyond the walls. So it’s tonight then, she thought.

  She made to get up but something stayed her, something perhaps subliminal, some old halflost knowledge of other times unknown and unacknowledged, some kinship with others of her sex that ran deeper than pride or anger or even blood and recognized without admitting it what had made her daughter lie sleepless till this hour of the night and then move with wraithlike stealth to the bed where Edgewater slept or waited, understood wordlessly the urgency she had already half suspected and feared and seen in her daughter’s transparent face. She turned her eyes to the wall, the face old and bitter, dark and tearless and wrinkled as an apple left to rot in the sun.

  What? Edgewater asked. What? He had raised up on his elbows at her touch on his shoulder, lay peering out wide-eyed at her in the darkness, still half asleep as if he did not recognize her. Her hair was un-braided, fell to her waist. Between the pale loose braidcrimped strands of it framing her face, her features were paler still, the eyes alone were direct and intense. Be quiet, she said softly, stopped his mouth with her palm. There was a faint smell of soap or perfume on her hands.

  Get up, she whispered. She removed her hand, stepped back for him to arise. When he got up she looked quickly at him and then away while he pulled on his pants. She took a blanket from his bed and folded it and he followed her out the door.

  That dry summer the woods were afire and the air had a taint of woodsmoke. The yard was full of moonlight. She started toward the car but he caught her hand, led her down the path to the back of the mulberry tree. Its branches shrouded the ground; there the earth sloped down an embankment and when they sat on the spread blanket the house was lost to his sight. She had her arm around him, he could feel the bulk of her body, the weight of her heavy breasts through the thin gown. Her breath was warm against his throat, a baby’s breath.

  I was afraid you was goin to leave, she said.

  When he kissed her, her eyes closed, fluttered open to meet his own, turned away in their sockets to the dark. He pulled down the gown about her shoulders, studied the smooth cool mounded flesh with something akin to detachment so that she said, What’s the matter?

  How far would you have gone, he thought. What would you do if I hadn’t come here, if I didn’t do what I’m going to?

  Nothing.

  He stroked the nipple, pinched it gently between forefinger and thumb, felt the barely perceptible pressure of erectile tissue growing beneath his touch. A vague and momentary elation touched him. Here in the moonlight her white and Nordic body was a country he could explore at will. She sat half erect, pulled the gown over her head. Her body was lush and white. She opened her legs for him and when he penetrated her she made some soft sound in her throat, neither pleasure or pain, perhaps just acknowledgement. The shadow of his face threw the lower part of her face in darkness and her forehead and eyes in stark moonlit relief, an early sere leaf had caught somehow in her hair. Her eyes were wide and unobstructed and he studied them as he moved, as if there was hidden in her depths an answer to a question he had not dared ask.

  She lay totally submissive while he labored above her, her legs out-flung like some beached life from the ocean depths, some grotesque beast dividing, joined only at the crotch, struggling for life in this otherworldly medium. Or yet some wanton sacrifice in a pagan rite yielding to whatever dark ritual the gods inflicted upon her.

  He lay on his back, stared into the depths of her above him. He could discern the rolling shards of the treehouse, felt momentarily that the timbers might have hung poised all these years full and awaiting him, childish carpentry turned lethal by whatever fates dogged his steps, dropped soundless and ironic to impale him where he lay.

  She touched his face, dropped her hand to where sweat pooled in the hollow of his throat. Next time we’ll go down by the creek, she told him. Nobody’d see us on that sandbar down there. He did not reply. He arose, pulled on his trousers and walked down by the brook. He washed his face in the cold water, his hands, felt sand list past his fingers in the cool depths, his hands beneath the surface like white aquatic spiders, his reflection rippled and unrecognizable as a specter. Soundless she came up behind him naked as he arose facing the dark hill where the cemetery lay; he felt the warmth of her body lay on his back like a brand, felt her breasts pool against him, her arms encircle his chest, wisps of her sweaty hair against his neck. It was a weight not to be borne.

  An unease touched him, and a need to be elsewhere as sharp as fear. An apprehension, as if he had spent money that he did not have, made some unspoken commitment he could not keep.

  It was two nights later, far into the night, the girl was just a white shape standing quiet beside the bed, peering down myopically to see if he was awake. He was. He got up, picked up a quilt from the couch, led her out of the house. It was lighter outside this time. Moonlight fell flat and white, shadows ran deep and infinite. She moved to open the car, but Edgewater said no, spread the quilt where the moon threw the car’s shadow black as bottomless water, drew her down to the dewy earth.

  I can’t do this, she said, breathing hard, the voice kept saying, I can’t, even while she was. You’ve got me to where I don’t know what I’m doin, excusing herself as she thrashed and struggled as if for breath, silvered by the moonlight. Then she lay quiet, the pale hair curled and damp at her temples, her body slick with sweat. He looked down into her face but the look was gone, would never have the exact same look again for him.

  He got up, leaned against the car, his folded arms resting across its top. The metal was cool, comforting, a soothing hand.
He stood so a long time, wished vaguely for a cigarette. After a while he heard her stir, come up behind him. What’s the matter, she wanted to know. There was nothing wrong. Her body was a slack, definitive weight. A total dependency shifted onto him so that he felt a familiar disquiet. He was looking toward the west, and now she looked with him. Somewhere distant the woods were afire, just a line of red fire pulled tight as a burning thread, easing over the horizon, pulsating, contracting, then widening faster down the slope as if it were feeding. As if it were alive, as if it were the only thing left alive in all that dark.

  Decorous and cleanshaven they left the next morning to find work, the old woman watching the car as Bradshaw backed it carefully out of the shed, touching its polished surface with apprehensive fingers, as if she regretted her offering it already, as if she dreaded seeing it roll out of her sight. The girl came up beside her, stood watching her brother with a cynic’s eyes.

  You drive careful, the old woman said.

  Of course I will, Mama, Bradshaw said abstractedly. He was easing the clutch out a little, pushing it back in, rolling the wheels impatiently, eager to be gone. In a hurry to find work to busy idle fingers lest they fall to the devil’s purpose. He turned, scanned the driveway behind him. Sudy, will you run them chickens out of the way?

  You better not run over my Dominicker, the old woman said. The girl had begun throwing pebbles ineffectively at the chickens pecking in the grass. Shoo, shoo, she was saying.

  Oh, hell, Bradshaw said. He popped the clutch and spun backward, began to cut the wheel toward the driveway.

  And you better not be drinking that old whiskey, her voice rising to be heard over the throbbing motor, ending in a breaking shriek, her face contorted, some mad old harridan shrieking unheard imprecations on deaf ears.

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, Bradshaw said, easing into second gear. The last thing Edgewater saw was the girl in white, watching them go for a moment and turning back toward the house, somehow forlorn.