by William Gay
I wouldn’t want to hurt you, Dennis said.
Wesley laughed. How long have you known me, Dennis?
You know that. Since the third grade.
Third grade. Have I ever lied to you?
I don’t know. How would I know that? Not that I know of.
I never lied to you. So I’m telling the truth now. I’m going to kill them. I’m going to kill them with an oar, not flat like I was paddling their ass, but sideways like I was chopping wood. I’ll take their heads off. Do you want out? I’ll ease over and let you out.
The boat hadn’t slackened. The oars dipped and pulled, dipped and pulled, with no variation in their rhythm. The boat seemed to have attained its own volition, its own momentum.
No, Dennis finally said, and he knew with a cold horror that Wesley was telling the truth.
Do you really think I’d stop long enough to let you out?
You never lie.
No.
I can ask you the one right question and you’ll lie.
Ask it then.
But before he could ask it, Wesley suddenly shouted. A hoarse cry of exultation. Dennis looked. They were aligned on a sandbar far downriver, three of them, the three canoes beached on the shore like bright metallic whales. Tiny dark figures in attitudes of waiting, watching them come.
Shouts came skipping across the water. Now he could see that Lester had his hands cupped about his mouth like a megaphone. It took you long enough, he yelled.
Wesley might not have heard. He was leaning into the oars, the muscles in the arms that worked them knotting and relaxing, knotting and relaxing.
They stood like the last ragged phalanx of an army backed to the last wall there was. They each held an oar. When the boat was still twenty feet from the shoreline Wesley bailed out. Oar aloft like God’s swift sword. He seemed to be skimming the surface, a dark, vengeful divinity the waters would not even have. He knocked Lester’s oar aside with his own and drew back and swung. The oar made an eerie, abrupt whistling. Blood misted the air like paint from an exploding spray can. Lester went to his knees clutching his face, blood streaming between his fingers. Wesley hit him across the top of the head, and a vulval gash opened in the shaven flesh. Dennis slammed the longhaired man backward, and he stumbled and fell into a thicket of willows and wild cane. He advanced on him, swinging the oar like a man killing snakes. An oar caught him across the bicep, and his left arm went suddenly numb. He turned. A man with a fright wig of wild red hair and clenched yellow teeth broadsided him in the shoulder with the flat of an oar just as Wesley broke his own oar across the man’s back. Wesley was left with a section half the length of a baseball bat. The redhaired man was going to run through the cane, and Wesley threw the stub of the paddle at him.
The longhaired man had simply vanished. Dennis had driven him into the cane, and he’d just disappeared. Dennis was almost giddy with relief. It seemed over before it had properly begun, and it had not been as bad as he had feared it would be.
Lester was crawling on his hands and knees away from the river. He crawled blindly, his eyes full of blood, which dripped into the sand below him.
Wesley picked up a discarded oar and walked between Lester and the growth of willows. He had the oar cocked like a chopping ax. Lester crawled on. When his head bumped Wesley’s knee he reared backward, sitting on his folded legs. He made a mute, armsspread gesture of supplication.
Wesley, Dennis yelled.
Kill this motherfucker graveyard dead, Wesley said.
Dennis crossed the sand in two long strides and swung onto Wesley’s arm and wrested the oar from him. Wesley sat down hard in the sand. He got up shaking his head as if he’d clear it. He crossed the sandbar and waded kneedeep into the river and scooped up handfuls of water and washed his face. Lester crawled on. Like something wounded that just won’t die. When he was into the willows he struggled up and stood leaning with both hands cupping his knees. Then he straightened and began wiping the blood out of his eyes. Dennis lay on his back in the sand for a long time and stared into the sky, studying the shifting patterns the clouds made. Both arms ached, and he was slowly clasping and unclasping his left hand. The bowl of the sky spun slowly clockwise, like pale blue water emptying down an endless drain.
He could hear Lester lumbering off through the brush. Wesley came up and dropped onto the sand beside Dennis. Dennis had an arm flung across his eyes. He thought he might just lie here in the hot weight of the sun forever. His ribs hurt, and he could feel his muscles beginning to stiffen.
I wish I hadn’t quit smoking and I had a cigarette, Wesley said. Or maybe a little shot of that jet fuel. Chastising rednecks is hot, heavy work, and it does wear a man out so.
Dennis didn’t reply, and after a time Wesley said, You ought to’ve let me kill him. I knew you weren’t as committed as I was. I could see your heart wasn’t in it. You didn’t have your mind right.
He was dragging off like a snake with its back broke, Dennis said. What the hell do you want? Let it be.
We need to get these boats back to where Sandy and Christy are. Damned if I don’t dread rowing upstream. Bad as I feel. You reckon we could rig up a towline and pull them along the bank?
I don’t know.
You don’t think they’d go back to where the girls are, do you?
I don’t know.
We better go see. No telling what kind of depravities those inbred mutants could think of to do with an innocent young girl.
Dennis suddenly dropped the arm from his eyes and sat up. He could hear a truck engine. It was in the distance, but approaching, and the engine sounded wound out, as if it were being rawhided over and through the brush. He stood up. The truck seemed to be coming through the timber, and he realized that a road, probably an unused and grownover logging road, ran parallel with the river. They know this river, he thought. The fourth man went to get the truck. Through a break in the trees chrome mirrored back the light, the sun hammered off bright red metal. The truck stopped. The engine died. Immediately Dennis could hear voices, by turns angry and placating. They seemed to be fighting amongst themselves, trying to talk Lester either into or out of doing something. A door slammed; another or the same door slammed again. When he looked around, Wesley had risen and gathered up two of the paddles. He reached one of them to Dennis. Dennis waved it away. Let’s get the hell out of Dodge, he said.
We got to get the boats.
To hell with the boats. We got to move.
Something was coming through the brake of wild cane, not walking or even running as a man might, but lurching and stumbling and crashing, some beast enraged past reason, past pain. Wesley turned toward the noise and waited with the oar at a loose port arms across his chest.
Lester came out of the cane with a .357 Magnum clasped bothhanded before him. It looked enormous even in his huge hands. Lester looked like something that had escaped halfbutched from a meatpacker’s clutches, like some bloody experiment gone awry. His wild eyes were just black holes charred in the bloody suet of his face. The bullet splintered the oar and slammed into Wesley’s chest. Wesley’s head, his feet, seemed to jerk forward. Then Lester shot him in the head, and Wesley spring backward as if a springloaded tether had jerked him away.
Dennis was at the edge of the canebrake running full out. He glanced back. The pistol swung around. He dove sideways into the cane, rolling, and running from the ground up as the explosion showered him with sand, the cane tilting and swaying in his bobbing vision. The horizon jerked with his footfalls. Another shot, shouts, curses, men running down from the truck. He’d lost his glasses, and trees swam into his blurred vision as though surfacing at breakneck speed from murky water. Branches clawed at him; a lowhanging vine hurled him forward like a projectile blown out of the wall of greenery. He slowed and went on. He could hear excited voices, but nobody seemed to be pursuing him. He went on anyway, his lungs hot as if he moved through a medium of smoke, of pure fire. The timber deepened, and he went on into it. He fell an
d lay across the roots of an enormous beech. The earth was loamy and black and smelled like corrupting flesh. He vomited and lay with his face in the vomit. He closed his eyes. After a while the truck cranked and retreated the way it had come, fast, winding out. He raised his face and spat. There was a taste in his mouth like a cankered penny, and he could smell fear on himself like an animal’s rank musk that you can’t wash off.
When he finally made it back to the sandbar, the first thing he did was hunt his glasses. They were lying in the cane where he’d dived and rolled, and earpiece bent at a crazy angle but nothing broken. He put them on, and everything jerked into focus, as if a vibratory world had abruptly halted its motion.
Wesley was on his back with the back of his head and both hands lying in the water. He looked as if he’d flung his arms up in surrender, way too late. Dennis looked away. He took off the denim shirt and spread it across Wesley’s face.
He dragged one of the canoes parallel with the body and began trying to roll Wesley into it. Wesley was a big man, and this was no easy task. He was loath to touch the bare flesh, but finally there was no way round it and he picked up the legs and worked them across the canoe and braced his feet and tugged the torso over into it. The boat lurched in the shallow water. By this time he was crying, making animal sounds he did not recognize as coming from himself. He threw in two oars and, running behind the boat, shoved it into deeper water. When he climbed in, he had to sit with a foot on either side of Wesley’s thighs in order to row. In the west the sinking sun was burning through the trees with a bluegold light.
Twilight was falling when he came upon them, a quarter mile or so downriver from where they’d been left. They were straggling along the bank, Christy carrying what he guessed was a stick for cottonmouths. He oared the boat around broadside and rowed to shore. He waded the last few feet and dragged the prow into the bank, turned toward the women. They were looking not at him but at what was in the boat. All this time he’d been wondering what he could say to Sandy, but he remembered with dizzy relief that she was deaf and he wouldn’t have to say anything at all. There didn’t seem to be any questions anyway, or any answers worth giving if there were.
Christy’s face was a twisted gargoyle’s mask. Oh no, she said. Oh, Jesus, please no.
Dennis sat on the bank with his feet in the water. Rowing upstream had been hard, and he had his bloody palms upturned on his knees, studying the broken blisters. Sandy rose and climbed down the embankment, steadying her descent with a hand on Dennis’s shoulder. She stood staring down into the boat. She knelt in the shallow water. Dennis stood up and waded around the boat and steadied it. He looked curiously like a salesman standing at the ready to demonstrate something should the need arise. He could hear Christy crying. She cried on and on.
Wesley lay with the bloody shirt still flung across his face. He lay like a fallen giant. Treetrunk legs, huge bronze torso. Sandy took up one of his hands and held it. The great fingers, thick black hair between the knuckles. She held the hand a time, and then she began folding the limp fingers into a fist., a finger at a time, tucking the thumb down and holding the hand in a fist with her own two hands. She sat and looked at it. Dennis suddenly wondered if she was seeing the fist come at her out of a bloody and abrupt awakening, rising and falling as remorselessly as a knacker’s hammer, and he leaned and disengaged her hand. The loose fist slapped against the hull and lay palm upward.
He thought she might be crying, but when he looked up her eyes were dry and calm. They locked with his. Nor would she look away, as if she were waiting for his lips to move so she could read them.
We’ve got to get him out of here, Christy sobbed. A road somewhere maybe; somebody would stop.
Nobody answered her. Dennis wasn’t listening, and Sandy couldn’t hear at all. He wondered what it would sound like to be deaf. What you’d hear. From the look on Sandy’s face across the body of her fallen warrior he judged it must be a calm and restful sound, the sighing of a perpetual wind through clashing rushes, a lapping of peaceful water that never varies or ceases.
EXCERPT FROM LOST COUNTRY
THE COURT HAD AWARDED HER custody of the motorcycle, they were going this day to get it. Edgewater was sitting on the curb drinking orange juice from a cardboard carton when the white Ford convertible came around the corner. A Crown Victoria with the top down though the day was cool and Edgewater had been sitting in the sun for such heat as there was. The car was towing what he judged to be a horse trailer.
Claire eased the car to the curb and shoved it into park and left it idling. She was wearing a scarf over her dirty blonde hair and an air vaguely theatrical and when she pushed her sunglasses up with a scarlet fingernail her eyes were the color of irises.
What are you doing in this part of town, Sailor?
Just waiting for someone like you to come along, he said.
You ready to roll?
He got in and slammed the door. Ready as I’ll ever be.
This was Memphis Tennessee, the middle of April in 1952, the convertible already rolling, washed-out sunlight running on the storefront glass like luminous water. She was driving down a series of side streets into a steadily degenerating neighborhood. Where winos and such streetfolk as were yet about seemed stunned by this regenerative sun and so unaccustomed to such an abundance of light that they drifted alleyward as if extended exposure might scorch them or sear away their clothing. Bars and liquor stores contested for space on these narrow streets and both seemed well represented. They had a stunned vacuous look to them and their scrollworks of dead neon waited for nightfall.
She glanced across at him.
God I hate the way you dress, she said. I’m going to have to buy you some clothes.
Edgewater was wearing a Navy dungaree shirt and jeans held up by a webbed belt the buckle of which proclaimed US Navy. I’m all right, he said.
Listen. You’re going to have to bear with me on this. Just hang in there no matter what happens, okay?
Wait a minute. What does that mean, no matter what happens? I thought we were just picking up your motorcycle.
Well, you know. They were my in-laws, after all. There might be a few hard feelings.
Here were paintlorn Victorian mansions where nothing remained of opulence save a faint memory. Rattletrap cars convalescing or dying beneath lowering elms. Shadetree mechanics stared into their motors as if they’d resuscitate them by sheer will or raise them from the dead with the electric hands of faithhealers.
Past a rotting blue mansion with a red tiled roof she halted the car and peering backward with a cigarette cocked in the corner of her mouth she cut the wheel and backed the trailer expertly over the sidewalk and down a driveway bowered by lowhanging willows.
Showtime, she said.
All polished chrome and sleek black leather the motorcycle seemed waiting and coiled to spring, setting alien and futuristic in the back yard.
Claire got out and slammed the door. Edgewater followed, climbing slowly out of the car like someone cautiously easing into deep cold waters. There were a couple of two-by-eights in the bed of the trailer and he aligned them into a makeshift ramp and turned to the Harley Davidson leaning on its kickstand.
A screen door slapped loosely against its frame. A short heavyset woman had come onto the back porch and she was crossing the porch rapidly in no nonsense strides and she was rubbing her hands together in an anticipatory way. Put one whore’s hand on that motorcycle and you’ll pull back a bloody stub, she said.
Hurry, Claire said.
He’d no more than raised the kickstand and angled the front wheel toward the ramp when the woman began to scream. You ruined my son’s life, you bitch, she yelled. She was coming down the steps two at a time and Claire turned and took a tentative step away but the woman closed on her remorseless and implacable as a stormfront and slapped her face hard then laid a hand to each of Claire’s shoulders and flung her onto the grass and fell upon her.
Shit, Edgewater said.
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He had the motorcycle halfway up the ramp when the screen door slapped again and a man with a torn gray undershirt came out with a doublebarreled shotgun unbreeched and he was fumbling waxed red cylinders into it. He dropped one and was at feeling wildly about the floor for it.
By the time Edgewater heard the gun barrel slap up he’d rolled the cycle off the ramp and straddled it and kickstarted it and he was already rolling when the concussion came like a slap to the head. He went through shredded greenery that spun like windy green snow, skidding blindly onto the street then across it and through a hedge before he could get the motorcycle under control and out onto the street again, leaning into the wind and houses kaleidoscoping past on either side like the walls of a gaudy tunnel he was catapulted through.
The imaged street rolled in and out of the rearview mirror then the white Ford appeared and followed at a sedate pace. Edgewater slowed and turned the motorcycle into the parking lot of a liquor store and she turned in beside it. The Harley idled like some fierce beast that wasn’t even breathing hard. She was laughing.
Hard feelings my ass, Edgewater said.
Do you believe this? My brother-in-law had to run out and wrestle him for the gun. He shot the shit out of that tree, did you see that?
I rode through it, Edgewater said.
Ahh Baby you got it all in your hair, she said, brushing it away with a hand.
They had to manhandle the cycle onto the trailer because she hadn’t thought it wise to stop for the boards and Edgewater lashed it upright to a support with the rope she’d brought.
That’s twice I’ve wrestled this heavy son of a bitch up here, he said. My first time and my last.
You’re in a good mood she said, grinning, getting into the car.
I’m not real fond of getting shot at, Edgewater said.
