William Gay - The Long Home

“Hey, Winer. Seen any women?”

“Just from a distance.”

“What you been doin tonight?”

“Running with the crazy folks,” Winer said.

“Hell, let’s run with a few more. I’ve got a sixpack or three in here with me. I’s just fixin to go out and see these women I know. You want to ride out with me?”

Winer considered his options. “Why not,” he said. He got into the car. “Drive down by the tieyard. I’ve got some stuff in that old Buick I need to pick up.”

Down fabled roads reverting now to woods Winer felt himself imprisoned by the dark beyond the carlights and by the compulsive timbre of Motormouth’s voice, a drone obsessed with spewing out words without regard for truth or even for coherence, as if he must spit out vast quantities of them and rearrange them to his liking, step back, and admire the various patterns he could construct: these old tales of love and betrayal had no truth beyond his retelling of them, for each retelling shaped his past, made him immortal, gave him an infinite number of lives.

They drove through a land in ruin, a sprawling, unkept wood of thousands of acres, land bought by distant companies or folks who’d never seen it. Yet they passed unlit houses and old tilting grocery stories with their rusting gaspumps attendant and it was like driving through a country where civilization had fallen and vanished, where the gods had turned vengeful or perverse so that the denizens had picked up their lives and fled. Old canted oblique shanties built without regard for roads or the uses of them, folks for whom footpaths would serve as well. Dark bulks rising out of the mouths of hollows, trees growing through their outraged roofs. Old stone flues standing blackened and solitary like sentries frozen at their posts waiting for a relief that did not come and did not come. Longdeserted ghostroads, haunts of homeless drunks and haphazard lovers.

“I thought nobody lived here in the Harrikin anymore.”

“They don’t hardly.”

“I can’t say I blame them. How far is it to where these women you know live?”

“I don’t know. Eight or ten mile. Open us up another one of them beers.”

The road worsened until in places Winer only suspected it was a road, faint vestigial imprint of where a road had been, narrowing, choked by the willows lowering upon it and always descending, Hodges riding the brakes and gearing down, until it was a wonder to Winer that folks still survived in so remote an area. They forded nameless shallow streams, wheels spinning on slick limestone, slid lockwheeled on into brackenencroached darkness, darkness multiplied by itself so that you would doubt the ability of light to defray it.

Where the woods fell away the ground leveled out and Winer could see the sky again. The rain had ceased and the clouds had broken up and a weird, otherworldly light from the stars lay on the land. Here buildings clustered together, yet still empty, unlit. They passed great brick furnaces brooding starkly up out of the fields attended by purposeless machinery black and slick with rain, silent. The roads intersected here and the car rattled over a railroad crossing where trains did not cross anymore.

“Right about here,” Motormouth was saying to himself. Past a house indistinguishable to Winer from any of the others the car slowed to a crawl, Motormouth peering across Winer toward a lightless building that looked like an old schoolhouse save the yard was cluttered with the deceased bodies of automobiles so dismembered they appeared autopsied. Motormouth blew the horn one short burst but did not stop. They accelerated and drove around the curve past the house.

“We’ll go down here to the lake and turn. Time we get back she’ll be out by the mailbox and waitin.”

“She? I thought there was more than one of them. Women, you said.”

“Well, yeah, that’s want I meant. Her and her sister.”

Winer had long since stopped believing anything Motormouth said but he did not want to get out here. Wherever here was it was mile from anywhere he had ever been and he had not seen a lighted house, a telephone pole. He guessed wherever he was was better than sleeping, these days he had come to feel that life was spinning past him, leaving him helpless. Sleep only accelerated this feeling of impotence. While he slept the world spun on, changed, situations altered and grew more complex, left him more inadequate to deal with them.

Where they stopped by the lake’s edge there was a pier extending out into the water. Past it under the still sky the water lay motionless as glass. It was a lake of india ink, the dark water tending away to nothingness where lay no shoreline, no horizon, just the blueblack mist above it where his mind constructed miragelike images that were not there. In the night it seemed to go on forever and this to be the point where everything ceased, land’s end, everything beyond this uncharted.

Motormouth lit a cigarette, arced his match into the black expanse of water. “This used to be a good place when I was a kid. Use to be kept up and you could swim in it. Now it’s growed up with some kind of chokeweed and a man’d have to swim with a stick in one hand to beat the cottonmouths off. You see that bluff down there?” He pointed westward along the waterline to where a shapeless bulk reared against the heavens. Jagged slashes of trees serrated its summit and above them hung a wirethin rind of brasscoloured moon. “That’s a old quarry, like a big cave. It used to be the whitecaps’ headquarters, them nightriders used to meet there fore they’d raid somebody. Now it’s road goes in, and a turnaround. Folks parks in there and screws, or used to. I guess they still do. I used to bring the old lady out here fore we got married. It’d be hot, July or August, we’d swim awhile then go back in there. God, it was dark. Black as the ace of spades.” His voice grew rueful, coarsened by the hard edge of the past. “Them was the good old days,” he finished. “Whatever luck I ever had just dried up and blowed away.”

Winer did not immediately reply. He stood silently staring at the dim outline of the bluff within which the whitecaps had met, in his mind he could hear the horses’ hooves click steel on stone, hear the vague, interweaving voices through pillowcase masks. In some curious way he felt pity for Motormouth but at the same time he felt a man was accountable for what he did and he felt a man made his own luck. He thought of Oliver. William Tell Oliver seemed the only person he knew who was at peace with his own past, who was not forever reworking old events, changing them. “You talk like a ninety-year-old man getting ready to die,” he told Motormouth. “All you need is some kind of a change.”

“Let’s change our luck right now,” Motormouth said. “Let’s ease on back up the road.”

He drove a little way past the house and stopped the car. They did not have long to wait. Almost immediately footsteps came up behind the car. Winer turned. In the pale light a heavyset black man was coming alongside the car. He swung a shotgun in his hand as casually as if it were an extension of his arm. “Lord God,” Winer said.

“Hey.” The black man was at the window. He leaned an arm on the roof, peered in. Motormouth leapt wildly in his seat, then appeared frozen, his right hand on the ignition key, his left on the steering wheel. “Hey there,” he said. Winer slid down in his seat and stared down the starlit road, dreaming himself speeding along it, all this forgotten.

“What you whitefolks wantin out here?” Light winked off a gold tooth, the eyes seemed congested with anger. There was no deference in his manner, the hour and the place and sawed-off shotgun seemed to have precluded all need of it.

“We—” Motormouth’s mind reeled far ahead, constructing in one quantum leap an entire scenario, characters, dialogue, events. In that instant of its creation it became truth to him, absolved him of all wrongdoing, all evil intentions, and he became confident of his mission.