The Lost Country

by William Gay

  Bet me.

  I got a brother-in-law a deputy sheriff. All it takes is one little phone call.

  I don’t care if you and J. Edgar Hoover go coonhuntin ever Friday night. You try to stop me from loadin my whiskey and we’ll knock you on your gimlet ass. Less you got a phone right handy. I don’t see no wires running out of ye pocket.

  You might do that, the man said agreeably, if you was about fifty pounds heavier and twenty years meaner. And if I didn’t have that dog here and somethin in my pocket a hell of a lot handier than a telephone.

  Edgewater looked at the dog. It stood highshouldered and wary, its black eyes watching them, sharp little ears pricked up. It did not look like a dog at all. It looked like a weapon.

  You cocksucker.

  Take it or leave it. I do all my out-of-state business on consignment. They might be something wrong with that whiskey. I’ll pay ye when it’s gone.

  Sure you will.

  Or you can explain to the law what you’re doing with thirty gallon of untaxed whiskey in a dry county.

  What kind of dog would you say that was?

  A big one, Edgewater said.

  It looked like one of these here Doberman Pinchers to me.

  They were nearing Moulton, a scattering of random lights. Bradshaw had fallen into a deep depression worrying about his money. Here I am broke, he said. No whiskey and no fillin station neither. I’m ashamed of myself. I never thought I’d live to see the day I’d stick two hundred and ten dollars up a wild hog’s ass and holler sooie.

  Coming up on the city limits he pulled off the shoulder of the road and ceased. I can’t do it, he said. I’m quittin my whiskey or money one.

  How do you plan to do it?

  Hell, I don’t know. I just aim to.

  If you had the whiskey could you get rid of it anywhere else?

  Hell yeah. Cates’d take half of it and Early maybe half. But I had planned to make me four or five extra dollars a gallon down here where it’s scarce.

  It’s not scarce now.

  Have you got a flashlight?

  They may be one in the dash pocket.

  There was but the batteries were dead. Edgewater took them out and rolled down the glass and threw them out the window. Let’s go see if we can find a hardware store open.

  They walked around the square in Moulton but all was shuttered and barred. All save the sidewalks rolled up and a few strolling young couples, a lit movie marquee and a tired-looking old woman in the ticket booth sat like something preserved under glass. We need a crowbar, Edgewater said. What’s in the trunk?

  Just a spare and a jack and like that.

  Drive on out the road.

  They found a little country store open outside of Moulton but they did not sell crowbars there, the merchant a little curious perhaps about what emergency this time of night necessitated a crowbar. He did have flashlight batteries and Edgewater reloaded the light. Out of sight of the store they stopped and checked the trunk.

  Edgewater handed him the tire spud. Maybe that’ll prise the boards loose. He was taking the bumper jack apart. He took the foot off the bottom and clicked the jack to the top and off the post. When it was all apart he was left with a length of rectangular steel almost four feet long and an inch and a half or so in diameter. He tried it for heft, then threw everything back into the trunk. Let’s see if we can find anything to eat.

  They ate hamburgers and French fries at a café on the Decatur highway. They had apple pie with melting cheese on top for dessert and coffee and then watched the clock’s hands crawl on.

  I dread that damn dog. What we ort to do is buy a can of arsenic and about a pound of hamburger and mix up a part of it. Drive by and throw it out and come back in an hour or two to see if he’s got a stomachache yet.

  I don’t know about poisoning a man’s dog. Always seemed a little sneaky and chickenshit to me.

  You’ll think chickenshit when he uncouples ye damn leg and runs off with it.

  They were the café’s last customers and the waitress began locking up. They got one more coffee to take with them and sat in the car watching the lights go out one by one. Nick’s Café, Nick’s Café, the neon blinked in cool purple urgency. It blinked off in mid blink and the white stucco café stood identityless and abandoned. The dark from somewhere inside a pale glow from a streetlight. The rawboned waitress came out with a ring of keys in her hands and locked the door.

  Well, Edgewater said. Let’s kill some time. This is a hell of a day. Start out repossessing cars for old man Grimes and end up repossessing whiskey for you. There’s got to be a lesson in there somewhere.

  They parked a hundred yards or so below the house in a curve where the road widened. Raise the hood up, Bradshaw said. If the law comes by they’ll just think somebody had car trouble and went on.

  Well, you better take the keys.

  They started across the field fording a mist of vapors that seemed to be rolling out of the earth through stubble of cutover cane stalks and here and there rearing politely shocks of bundled cane like phantoms or an audience of mutes. Edgewater looked up once and the sky was clearing, a high swift press of vaporous clouds caught in some wind that bore them transparent across the face of the stars: the clouds seemed still and behind the firmament in motion a rush of stars streaking toward the edge of the universe, a vast armada of warships with running lights gleaming through the fog pressing swiftly on to the void at the world’s boundary.

  They paused before they got in hearing of the house. What’ll we do if it starts barkin? Bradshaw whispered.

  Get behind some of these cane stalks and try to wait it out. He won’t think too much of it. A bootlegger’s used to getting woke up in the middle of the night.

  The dog did not bark at all when it came. They were easing up behind the crib, keeping it between them and the house. It came loping and near soundless around the corner of the corncrib, lethal, ears laid back and muzzle aloft. Lord a mercy, Bradshaw said to himself. Black dog of folklore and legend, warning of death, Satan’s fires, hellhounds on their trail.

  Edgewater shifted his weight, imagined that he was Babe Ruth, having pointed out the right field bleachers and thus committed. When the dog leapt he imagined it a hard fast one across the center of the plate and he swung the steel jackpost with all his might. He put his entire body into it. The weight of the dog bore him off balance and backward and to the wet earth but he scrambled up still holding his weapon. He had caught the dog alongside the head or shoulders and it lay inert, its feet moving a little as if it dreamed pursuit. He could not tell whether it was dead or unconscious and he did not look to see. Bradshaw was already prying at the slats with his tire spud. The boards were old and rolled off like jagged teeth at the bottom and came free with ease. He tore three of them loose and pulled away from the wall and crawled through them and disappeared. Edgewater could barely see the light, a mere ghost of light. He could hear a soft cautious bumping inside and almost immediately Bradshaw began to set out whiskey and align it beneath his makeshift door.

  Edgewater began to carry the jugs across the canefield four at a time, bent like a broken field runner. After the whiskey was all out Bradshaw set through the aperture three half gallon cans of peaches and crawled out carrying an old Malacca walking cane he’d found inside and he was wearing an ancient black derby with cobwebs depending from it.

  You can have ye pick, Billy.

  Goddamn it. Let’s get back to the car before we argue over the spoils. I don’t see why you all the time have to pull this crazy old shit.

  Hell Billy, you logged the day out. You pick.

  Oh, all right. I guess I’ll take a can of the peaches. This other stuff seems slanted toward a more esoteric taste than mine.

  Suits the shit out of me. I wouldn’t take a purty penny for this mahogany cane.

  Tripping across the field, Bradshaw was so lifted by getting the whiskey back his feet barely touched the ground, a mad pantomime clown with hat cocked and c
ane atwirl, fleet and soundless.

  ———

  After Edgewater quit he hung around the house and there were days when they stayed abed almost all the day, times that he would remember as idyllic in light of what came. She swore undying love to him and she’d come to him with a kind of frantic desperation, a longing that would not be satiated, a wound that would not heal.

  There were other days when the hours went by in silence and they moved so slow you could almost see their passage. The day might pass without her talking and her eyes looked far away and self-absorbed as if she’d gone somewhere he couldn’t follow. There was a serene and complacent look about her as if she’d been visited with some duty to perform or some task to execute that rendered her unmindful of the minutiae of life. She could shut him out without a word. If she noticed his touch at all she’d just move the hand away in annoyance, turn away, but the eyes would not change at all. There were worlds in them no one went but herself.

  These days he might sit for a time on the stoop in the cold wind and translucent winter light. The wind was in the brittle leaves, it told him old tales of winter snows long melted and cold’s privation and a need for security seized him. He felt in a sort of limbo, he dawdled while the fates decided his case.

  He borrowed Swalls’s bucksaw and with it and the axe began to lay in winter’s wood. There was an umbered slope behind the house and he’d cut trees there, saw cuts off and roll them down the hill through the gray sedge and watch them mound up against the crib wall. He sat and smoked and rested between cuts in a detached kind of contentment, aware simultaneously of the cold and of her below him moving about the kitchen and the pot of coffee warming on the stove and the blue smoke rising from the brick flue.

  He chopped dead pines and cut them to kindling length with the bucksaw and stacked them chesthigh on the porch. He split the cuts of red oak with the axe and stacked wood until the porch was ringed with it, like castellated battlements he’d peer across toward an enemy held at bay.

  You must expect another ice age, she said, but he had no time to answer. That morning there’d been a frozen glaze along the borders of the window, a thin white skim, candied sugar scrollwork so fragile it broke beneath his fingers. The last of the geese went south in a shifting V and he read something akin to desperation in their cries.

  Long after he had more than enough wood and on days when she’d no need for him, he’d sit on the crest of the hill as if he were waiting for something and watch what of the world he could see. The hill was high and steep and from its summit he could see far in the distance through the winterbared trees, the highway, broken lines of it between the hills.

  Commodities were given out on the third of the month. This was always a windfall for crippled Elmer. He had traded a five-pound box of cheese for eight bottles of Red Top ale and he drank them all alone down by the tie yard. He drank them slowly, rationing them out to himself, his wheelchair parked in the narrow alcove between two stacks of crossties. Uptown someone might see him and ask for one of the ales. It was easier to avoid than to refuse, for he had only rice left to trade and rice was a slow mover. He could not have given it away. The alcohol gave him a sort of convivial desire for companionship, but not enough to make him give up the beer. He drank the ale and with only what thoughts he had he watched the slow drift of fall constellations above the rim of the ties and listened to the pitch of voices he knew ease to him from the boxed walls and pasteboard windows of shanties across the tracks.

  He had nowhere to be, no one awaited him, so he sat still in the balmy night, talking to himself, occasionally laughing softly as if at some old joke. All the beer gone, he sat cradling the last empty bottle and listening to the diminishment of sounds, the town going to sleep about him.

  When all was still, he wheeled himself out and looked covertly around him and when he was satisfied he went up the incline to the blacktop and past the streetlight through fogging bugs to the corner and left there. Skirting the square he went down past the shoefactory unmindful of signal lights, for the streets were empty now. The way was declivitous here and the wheelchair picked up speed, dizzily he could feel a breeze drying the sweat on his face lifting the strands of lank hair, hear the near silent hum of the tires. With a kind of careless drunken skill he negotiated a curve onto Pine Street, drew from the ratty folds of the shawl covering his withered legs a length of wood worn slick with friction and sweat and applied pressure to the tire spokes, slowing himself with a mental admonishment about speedcops lying in wait and the knowledge that a cornfield lay near here.

  It was not a proper cornfield but a dozen or so canted stalks planted at the end of the garden but it would serve his purpose. So unproductive as to preclude harvest, the stalks still held the half-formed nubbins, hardened now in withered shucks. It still had not rained and the earth in the garden was as hard as the street so he had no trepidation about easing the wheelchair off the blacktop, wheeling himself with some effort through dry weeds and across the rockhard clods and fossil-like marks of the plowshare. He could not raise himself to the ears of corn but grasped the stalk and bent it to him and broke the ears free. He looked at them disgustedly. Were he a farmer he would not even allow to mature sick puny specimens as these. He would long ago have chopped them down with a hoe before someone saw them. He put the corn on his lap beneath the shawl and backed himself out through the brittle stalks that broke beneath his wheels and back across the sidewalk to the street. There was a smell of the sere cornstalks, of the earth.

  A city policeman pulled him over on Vine. He had been wheeling down the middle of the street, imagining himself a truck driver, and had not even heard the car, steered abruptly for the curb when the lights hit him. The cop stopped and looked him over. A not unfriendly face, a face of gentle admonishment, but implacable, the voice a kind of benign malice.

  What have I told you about driving that thing in the middle of the street? You gonna kill yourself or cause somebody to wreck and maybe kill them.

  Elmer didn’t reply. On his face was a look of spurious respect that would not have deceived a child. Under the shawl his hand clutched the ears of corn, began to rub them together and shell kernels from one hand to the other.

  Where you goin anyway?

  Just ridin around.

  You goin a roundabout way to be headin home, that’s for sure. You know what time it is?

  I ain’t got no train to catch. What’s it to you anyway?

  The cop got out and stood by the back door.

  Come on and I’ll run you out to Sycamore Center. We’ll just fold your chair up and put it in the back here. Save you a mile or two.

  I’ll go home when I want to and when I do I’ll go under my own steam. Ain’t you got no bankrobbers to catch? Ain’t you got nothin to do but worry cripples?

  You up to somethin, ain’t you?

  Hell no.

  Then why won’t you let me take you home?

  I can’t go home for a while. Mama’s got a customer out there.

  The cop sighed and pushed the car door to and got back in. You just see you stay out of trouble, he said.

  Elmer was quick to sense appeasement. You got a cigarette? he asked.

  The cop started the car. I don’t smoke, he said. The cruiser began to roll.

  You got ary chew of tobacco? Elmer called after it.

  The chicken house he sought was set in the backyard of a white frame house off Vine and Mill streets and repeated nocturnal visits and knowledge of its inhabitants had rendered him bold enough to wheel past dark sleeping windows and to pause only a moment to listen. All he heard was the quiet hum of a refrigerator compressor. A watchdog came around the corner of the house and stood stifflegged watching him but he and Elmer were old friends and at length the dog came and laid his head in Elmer’s lap to be petted. Elmer stroked his ears for a moment and then shoved him away, mind on bigger game. He wheeled toward the doorless chicken house, his anticipatory face not unlike the face of other more able predator
s, sharp, foxlike, cunning little ferret eyes.

  When at length he backed out through the dark aperture he was swearing softly and wiping chickenshit off the wheels onto the shawl. The inert bodies of three pullets mounded the shawl over his lap. Where the feeling began above his pelvis he could feel the heat of them, their hot blood still yet somehow vibratory with the shock of life so suddenly gone.

  Wheeling about to turn his eyes suddenly widened with momentary fear and he was face to face with a man in the yard across. There was a scraggy thigh-high hedge that separated the two yards and across it a man stood watching him, a look of mild amusement on his face. The man had on an old suitcoat too small for him and one sleeve of it dangled empty and there was about him as well something secretive, something that allied them as cohorts in some conspiracy. The figure nodded formally as if he had met some acquaintance in the street and turned and walked across the yard without looking back. He glided into place next to the adjoining house, peered through a bedroom window.

  Elmer was back on the street with his chickens when it occurred to him to wonder why Roosterfish was skulking about his own backyard like a burglar, staring through his own windows like some perverse windowpeeper of the night.

  The old house was cold and drafty when the weather began to turn chill. Edgewater looked about it to see what could be done. In a bedroom piled high with broken furniture and boxes of junk he found a stack of window panes and part of a can of glazing. He got a case knife and pried open the can. It was still pliable enough to work with. He took out all the broken panes and replaced them, used the knife to putty the panes in the sashes. He built a fire and climbed up in the attic to see was the flue sound, sniffing for smoke, watching for light through the old brick, found a can of tar and patched a leak he had found in the roof.

  He had planned to seal off some of the bedrooms so that the house would be easier to heat. Prowling through the junk stored in old pasteboard boxes he fell to reading old newspapers, magazines, clippings saved about folks long dead. Keepsakes and souvenirs put away and forgotten, memorabilia of other years. In a boxed envelope: a collection of old-fashioned valentines, old-fashioned sentiments, childish scrawls in faded pencil. Old memories he took to himself like debris out of his own past.