William Gay - Time Done Been Won't Be No More

They came out of the city hall in Leighton and down the steps into the sunlight. The Crown Victoria waited at a parking meter and he got in and closed the door. It was a while before Claire got in. She stood by the car peering in at him, studying him as if he was something malignant, bad news on a glass slide. Finally she got in. Her jaws were tightened and muscles worked there and she clutched the purse as if it were some weapon she might fall upon him with.

But the sun was warm and Edgewater closed his eyes and turned his bruised face to it and just absorbed that and the heat from the hot plastic behind his head.

He could hear her fumbling out the keys. The engine cranked and they were in motion. They rode for a time in silence.

What do you have to say for yourself? She finally asked.

He opened his eyes. Not much, he said.

You son of a bitch. How do you plan on paying this money back? That was a big chunk of my motorcycle money.

He didn’t say anything.

You beat anything I ever saw.

Edgewater dug out the crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes the jailer had returned to him. He pulled one out and straightened it and lit it from the dash lighter. He turned and watched the sliding landscape. He didn’t know where they were going but the countryside was slipping away, field and stone and fence, cows like tiny painted cows in a proletariat mural. A dreadful flat sameness to this western world. It went rolling away to where the blue horizon and bluer sky were demarcated by windrowed reefs of salmoncolored clouds.

You wouldn’t even have called me. I had to go looking for you in that terrible bar and hear about you picking a fight with some war veteran. What’s the matter with you? I should have just let you rot there.

He seemed not to have heard. Beyond the windowglass a man clutching the handles of a turning plow went down a black field so distant he seemed in some illusory manner to be pushing plow and mules before him. Edgewater wondered what his life was like. What his wife said to him when he came in from the fields, what they talked about across the supper table. He would have two children, a boy and a girl. Later he would tell them a story as their eyelids grew heavy and sleep eddied about them like encroaching waters. A flock of blackbirds tilted and cartwheeled and spun like random debris the wind was driving before it.

I know as well as anything you did it deliberately. Set this whole thing up. You couldn’t just walk away like anybody else. You have to get yourself locked up and ruin the nice dinner plans I had made and waste all that money.

Is there much more of this? he asked.

I’ve just about had it with you. And on top of everything else you’re the coldest human being I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen some cold ones.

I’ll get out anywhere along here, Edgewater said.

What?

Let me out of the car.

She locked the brakes and the car slid to the shoulder of the road and set rocking on its shocks. Edgewater got out. A car was approached behind them. He turned and stuck out a thumb. In the sun the car seemed to be warping up out of the blacktop road itself, swift and gleaming and shifting through transient stages as if it had not yet assumed its true form. It shot by without slowing in a wake of dust and roadside paper that rose and subsided furtively to earth. He went on. After a time she put the Ford in gear and followed along beside him until he went down the embankment and climbed through a barbedwire fence and started across the field. She stopped the car then and shouted at him then gathered an armful of stones and began to hurl them at him. But her arm was poor and the stones fell wide as did the curses she cast that in the end were just words and he had heard them all so often they had become powerless.

He went on.

Night. Cold vapors swirled the earth like groundfog. Midnight maybe, perhaps later, it scarcely seemed to matter. The last ride had let him out on this road hours ago and he walked through a country which in these shuttered hours seemed uninhabited. Not even a dog barked. Just a steady cacophony of insects from the woods that fell silent at his approach and rose again with his passage, an owl from some timbered hollow so distant he might have dreamed it. Nothing on this road and he thought he’d taken a wrong turn but then it occurred to him that on a journey such as this there are no wrong turns. If all destinations are one it matters little which road you take. The pale road was awash with moonlight as far as he could see and in these clockless hours when the edges of things blur and the mind tugs gently at its moorings it seemed to him that the road had never been traversed before and once his footfalls honed away faint and fainter to ultimate nothingness it would never be used again.

The moon rose, ascended through curdled clouds of silver and violet. His shadow appeared, long and ungainly, jerked along on invisible wires, a misbegotten familiar he was following down this moonlit road.

It had grown cold with the fall of night and he thought with regret of his coat and blanket at Claire’s apartment but there was nothing for that. He looked both up and down the empty road but source and destination faded into the same still silver mist. He left the road and angled cautiously through branches and blackberry briars into the woods.

The passage of an hour had him before a huge bonfire, the piles of leached stumps and deadfall branches and uprooted cedar fenceposts with stubs of wire still appended roaring like a freight train and sparks and flaming leaves cascading upward in a funnel of pure heat.

He warmed awhile then seated himself on a length of log and unpocketed and unwrapped a candy bar and ate it in tiny bites, forcing himself to chew slowly, making it last. There were two cigarettes remaining in the pack and he lit one and tucked the other carefully aside for the morning. When he’d finished the cigarette he built up the fire and lay down with the log for a pillow.

Out of the dark a whippoorwill called three times and ceased, whippoorwill, whippoorwill, whippoorwill. After a time another called from a distant part of the wood but the first remained silent, as if he’d said all there was to say. Edgewater closed his eyes and for a time images of the day lost drifted through his mind like a disjointed film he was watching. Slowly he settled into sleep.

His dreams were troubled and he tried to wake but could not. In the dream he was in a Mexican hotel room. There was a bed, a basin, a chest of drawers. From rooms up and down the hall came shouts and raucous laughter but no one was laughing here. Here something had gone awry.

The girl on the bed was leaking. Spreadeagled on spreading scarlet as if her white body lay on an enormous American Beauty rose that grew as malign and ill-formed as cancer. The old woman and her smocked assistant were preparing to flee. Rats who’d choose any ship but this one. The woman said something in Spanish he didn’t understand and the man mimicked her hasty exit and left the door ajar and before he fled himself he leaned closely into her face and watched the fluttering of her eyelids and cupped his hand hard between her legs as if he’d contain her and don’t, he said, don’t, as if dying was a matter you had any say in.

He wanted out of the room and out of this dream and he went down the hall opening doors upon startled participants in their various couplings and a girl on hands and knees being mounted by her lover like a dog turned and studied him calmly over her shoulder with breasts pendulumed between her distended arms and her hair falling like a black waterfall and as her lover slid into her she looked away and Edgewater closed the door. In the room next a sailor was emptying a bottle of Rose hair oil into the graythatched vagina of an old woman and in the next a man turned to blow out the match he’d fired the window curtains with and he grinned at Edgewater and winked while behind him the gauzy curtains climbed the walls like flaming morninglories and the rosedappled wallpaper curled and smoked and stank like burning flesh.