Free Time Done Been Won't Be No More by William Gay Page A

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
    T HE 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