The Lost Country

by William Gay

  With the stub of his left arm pinning the blanket about him he fumbled in a cardboard box and brought out a charred and handleless coffeepot, started toward the river. He appeared some crippled monk or hermit of simpler times, the old brown blanket episcopal vestments of some arcane order. He approached the river and descended the bank with some caution, for after the torrent fallen in the night he had detected sometime before first light a subtle change in its tone, a deeper, swifter pitch to the language it spoke, entreaty forsaken for threat. He dipped the pot into the roiling yellow water and climbed back up the incline and dropped the blanket, revealing himself already dressed, marvelously prepared for whatever honest toil this day might offer up for a man with one good hand.

  He had ringed old purloined cinderblocks and atop them he set the grill from the abandoned cookstove. He crumbled tinder, bits of dry sticks and leaves from beneath the bluff. Soon a wisp of white smoke arose, fragrant in the morning air.

  While he waited for his coffee water to boil he got a cup of cracked corn from a lard bucket and fed the two gamecocks. They watched him from their slotted cages with their fierce, arrogant eyes. He came back and from a Styrofoam icechest laid out two eggs and a round cut of bologna still in its white butcher paper and a half-loaf of bread. He set a skillet on the fire and poured in half-congealed bacon grease from an old jelly jar. He watched its slow spread across the bottom of the warming pan and then he unpocketed his knife and took up the round of bologna. He sliced wedges off it into the pan, peering intently at its texture, its grain, white chunks of fat, here and there a porcelain shard of tooth or bone laid like a pearl. Who knew what curious beasts had fallen so that he might have this meal. He threw a good handful of coffee into the roiling water.

  After he had cooked and eaten his breakfast he immediately busied himself about the camp. He washed his meager utensils and put them away in the icechest with the food and carried chest and all around the bluff to where the incline decreased and hid it and the blanket behind the uprooted stump of a windfall poplar.

  He got the crated cocks on his shoulder and started across a narrow peninsula thick with willows. He came out in a field sown in fescue and skirted it, keeping in the old wagon road that followed the course of the river. Below him he could see the skeletal trestle spanning the river where the bridge crossed.

  It was some distance to his car. By experience he had learned that the wagon road was passable only in dry weather and at the first drops of rain he had driven back to higher ground and pulled off the shoulder into a sideroad. When he came upon the Studebaker, he set the cocks down and unlocked some panel windows on the plywood camper. Already a smell of hot plastic hung about the interior. He gave a cursory examination of the oddments of equipment in the back: compressors and pumps and coiled hoses like sleeping serpents and signs proclaiming various trades, none his, but he expected no discrepancies, these were honest folk about. He stood still for a time, just listening to the sounds of the morning: jays quarreling in the trees, the chattering of a squirrel, a cock crowing from some misty farmhouse. The sun slowly warmed him, he drew strength from it like a soothing balm. The sun rose steadily, seemed not to be shining through the sheltering branches but annihilating them, scorching them away. He judged it near work time, checked the sun against his pocketwatch. He stowed the crate of chickens in the back and got in the car. He had high hopes for this day, as he had for all days, each day no worse than the best of them.

  Roosterfish was a man of many guises. He would paint your barn, spray your roof for leaks, exterminate your termites, sell you what he called a magazine prescription. The exterminating business was the most profitable, but he had been thinking about retiring this line. It entailed too much crawling around. The customers expected at least a modicum of show. Even if what he sprayed foundations with was no more potent than river water, he still had to crawl under musty floors expecting to be snakebit at any time and ruining his clothes.

  So when he saw the hitchhiker ahead he already knew he was going to stop, knew what he was going to say. The man alongside the road did not even thumb him, appeared to consider it a waste of effort, plodded on with eyes fixed on the wavering treeline. Roosterfish stopped anyway, leaned across to unlock the door then peered back once to where the empty highway lay flat and straight.

  The door Edgewater reached for had a magnetized sign affixed to it: WEST TENNESSEE EXTERMINATORS, INC. Perhaps it afforded Edgewater grim amusement; if the fates had a sense of humor they might come for him in such a fashion. But he opened the door anyway.

  Get in, get in, if ye don’t mind ridin with the chickens. Ye’ll have to set em in the back there. I’m a chicken with one wing myself.

  Edgewater put the coop into the back atop the motley of cans and sprayers and hoses. When the door was closed and they were rolling he said, Where you heading?

  Just down the road apiece. Where are you?

  Further than that.

  Wherebouts you comin from?

  San Diego.

  They Lord. Out in California? How long’s it took you?

  I lost track. But I made a stop or two along the way. I stayed a while in Memphis.

  Where’s home?

  Up around Monteagle.

  A long way come and a long way still to go.

  I guess so.

  You in a hurry?

  Not anymore.

  How you fixed for money? It ain’t none of my business but I guess if you were rollin in money you’d be drivin or ridin a bus one.

  I’m a walking depression. I got discharged from the Navy and my mustering-out pay lasted awhile, but it finally all got away. I don’t worry about it.

  Least you don’t have to worry bout gettin robbed. Way this country’s goin to hell even the highways ain’t safe no more. Folks won’t stop to pick ye up and ye can’t blame em. Why they found a feller over in Decaturville in a ditch had his throat cut from ear to ear. Decked out in a tailormade suit and a silk shirt with snap-on ruffles on the front. Car gone and wallet gone and a money belt around his belly with fourteen hundred dollars in it. Roosterfish’s voice sounded rueful, subtle comment perhaps on man’s inhumanity to man, or regret that he had not been first on the scene. You can’t trust nobody no more, he finished.

  Edgewater rode in silence, he might have been asleep.

  You short of money, me and you might work up a deal, Roosterfish said. You ever done any sterminatin?

  Any what? Edgewater wanted to know.

  Edgewater decked out in a twin of Roosterfish’s cap, becoming knowledgeable in the termite business. Already a vice president, mentor and protégé, craftsman and apprentice at their work. An old man watched, held somnolent from the shade of a chinaberry tree while they strung hoses, wire, pumped air into the portable sprayers. Roosterfish at his potions like some alchemist of old.

  Edgewater crawled under the house, dragging the electric drill along with him. The house was built close to the ground and the nearness of the floor joists oppressed him. There was no finished floor above and as he crawled on his back Edgewater could see slatted light flicker through the cracks and hear heavy footsteps in the rooms above.

  From time to time he would hammer on the sills, turn the drill on and let it run a few minutes as Roosterfish had told him. Sounds of work being done, money being earned. He lay on his back listening to the whine of the drill, smoking. Scraps of old newspaper were stuck to the planks. He read disjointed accounts of old doings, juxtaposed bits of people’s lives. Social recounting of folks long dead. Among the guests at Mrs. Lamson’s reception were Forrest and Retha White, now deceased. The old papers were foxed and yellowed with age. Sepia faces trapped in time smirked at him with spurious goodwill.

  There was a musty, claustrophobic smell under the floor, dryrotted lumber, graveyard earth the sun had perhaps never shone on. Then more. Feeling watched he looked behind him and saw near his shoulder the mummified remains of a dog leering at him from out empty eyesockets. The dog was on its be
lly with forepaws extended as if inviting petting, a kind word. But its teeth were bared in a snarl of eternal ferocity.

  Edgewater fled in a curious crablike motion using elbows and heels, forgot the drill and had to haul it in by the cord. He crawled into the sun. The sky was as blue as any sky he had ever seen and the sun falling through the greenery was hot and bright. He breathed deeply, then rolled the cord around the drill and put it in the toolbox in the back of the Studebaker.

  I’m through in under there, he told Roosterfish.

  Roosterfish was engaged in spraying some sort of oily liquid around the foundation of the house. Well. We still got to spray a little bit in under there.

  I’m through in under there.

  The old man paid Roosterfish, wetting his thumb with his tongue, rubbing each bill with care to see it practiced no deception on him. He asked for a receipt and Roosterfish wrote him one in the name of Clyde Turnbow, principal stockholder in West Tennessee Exterminators.

  We don’t usually fool with these little jobs, Roosterfish told him, pocketing the money. I done it mainly for accommodation. Had a little spray left from a schoolhouse job over at Selmer.

  I preciate it, the old man told him.

  Back in the Studebaker Edgewater took the proffered money and without counting it slid it into the pocket of his jeans. What’d make an old man termite a shack like that?

  I don’t know.

  Don’t you feel funny about taking his money?

  No. I give him what he paid for. You think he could get that house sterminated for what he paid me? Hell no he couldn’t. How funny’d you feel about what of it I give you?

  A termite would curl his lip at that old shack.

  I don’t know. I guess maybe it makes em feel important. He can tell folks he got his house sterminated. Hell, he can prove it. He’s got a receipt in the bib pocket of his overalls.

  I doubt if you could drown a termite in that shit we sprayed if you dropped one in and laid a rock on it, Edgewater persisted.

  Hell, don’t lose no sleep over it, Roosterfish grinned. We hadn’t got his money he’d just piss it away on grocers or somethin. You a likely sort. You hang around me awhile and you’ll have somethin in ye pockets besides ye hands.

  They rode in silence for a time. Then Edgewater said: There was a rotten dog under that floor. Just laying there. No tellin how long he’d been dead.

  Roosterfish looked at him curiously. A dead dog never bit nobody I ever heard tell of, he said.

  Out of an ingrained sense of caution Roosterfish did no termiting close to home so it was a long drive back to the river. They did two more jobs and then stopped at a restaurant outside Selmer called The Golden Saddle and ate there. Roosterfish and Edgewater confidently among the country club set. Flush times. Roosterfish inquiring solicitously after Edgewater’s steak. Was it rare enough? Tender? Edgewater slowly chewed bites of the red meat savoring each mouthful. There was a garden salad, a baked potato with cheese atop. Tender mushrooms he rationed out to himself. He’d forgotten such pleasures were still extant in the world.

  We ort to do this more often, Roosterfish said. He folded his napkin when he was through. Edgewater was still eating, he was eyeing the apple pie on the table across. Now I got some places to show ye, Roosterfish told him.

  It’s a bootlegger down by camp there, Roosterfish said. Edgewater would come to believe that Roosterfish had committed to memory some esoteric traveler’s guide of whores and bootleggers not procurable in service stations.

  Edgewater climbed the steps to the bootlegger’s, knocked on a glassless door. There was a little door within a door that opened inward on soundless hinges, a hard pallid face that looked out without recognition or interest. Beyond it against the far wall stacks of pint bottles of wine, halfpints of whiskey, cases of beer stacked to the ceiling. A hoarder’s dream.

  What do you want?

  Four pints of wine.

  Who are you?

  He said tell you Roosterfish wants it.

  Oh. What kind, then?

  He said Gypsy Rose.

  The man turned, shuffled goutily away.

  Edgewater stood looking into the room. On an old carseat against the wall sat an old, old woman staring at nothing with rheumy, unfocused eyes. Her clawed hands clasped each other in her lap and she sat decorous, patient, as if she awaited something a long time coming. A sorrow, a nameless dread, lay on him like a plague.

  Here you go. Was it anything else?

  No. He handed over the two dollars.

  All right. Come back.

  The next day they stopped at a country store and bought a chicken and a loaf of bread and two onions. Get something to drink, Edgewater said. That evening the fighting cocks watched expressionlessly the demise and cleaning of their storebought brother, the dignity of their own doom foreordained. Roosterfish roasted the chicken on his improvised grill while they sipped wine, treacly, a burning aftertaste, extract of no fruit Edgewater could call to mind.

  A long cool summer dusk lay on the river, a sleepy humid tranquility. When the light was gone bullbats darted among the trees, fed among the gnats and bugs thronging the river.

  How about this place? Roosterfish asked him.

  Well. It sure beats sleeping in smokehouses and living on candy bars.

  I reckon a man’s always wonderin what’s on down the road. But if you ain’t in no hurry you ort a hang around awhile and get ye a stake. Find ye a girl and settle somers around here. If a man ain’t got to be no place in particular one place is good as another. Ast me. I been all over and they ain’t thirty cents difference in none of it. Besides, they’s lots of things I can’t work by myself, on account of my arm.

  What happened to it?

  Roosterfish looked at his arm, made a fist. The tendons tightened, flared like drawn wire beneath the flesh.

  Nothing happened to it.

  I meant the other one.

  There ain’t no other one. This is all I got.

  Roosterfish thought of saying he had lost the arm at Anzio, Normandy, wherever advantageous it might have fallen, but somehow he knew Edgewater would not believe him. I got it tore off in a sawmill, he finally said.

  Edgewater winced. How come they call you Roosterfish?

  Lord, I been Roosterfish all my life, nearly. Started when I’se just a kid. Course, Roosterfish ain’t nothin but a fancy way of sayin cocksucker. I forgot who it was called me that first, you know how boys is always cussin one another. It was one of my buddies, and it was all in fun. If I’d a just let it pass that’d been all of it, but I didn’t see it that way. I raised hell, we fought and I lost, and I was Roosterfish from then on.

  He turned the chicken, basted it delicately with grease. I reckon you hear a word over and over it stops meanin anything, or changes. I’ve had women call me that. Mr. Roosterfish this, Mr. Roosterfish that. Old ladies call me that and I hardly ever even think about it meanin cocksucker.

  How’d you get into your line of work?

  Like everything else, a little at a time. I started out straight. I’d really termite em, but hell, folks didn’t know the difference. One time I’se out of spray and I just went ahead and done it anyway. Money spent just the same, and I got to thinkin. After that I’d just mix up a mess of whatever I had and shoot it on.

  One of these nights they’ll all band together and tar and feather your ass. Or lynch you.

  I’m a student of human nature, Roosterfish said. I’m going to school, you might say.

  Seems to me you’re putting other folks through school, Edgewater said. The school of hard knocks.

  Shit. You ain’t dealin with no amateur. This here is an old established firm. I know these people. Hell, they ain’t like rich people. They don’t think like em. I steer clear of folks with money, I ain’t that ambitious. Poor folks is my customers.

  Never heard of Robin Hood, huh?

  That’s a crock of horseshit. Robbin from the rich and all. You’re old enough to know about the law.
You’ve heard of the law? Well, they in the rich man’s pocket. He loses fifty or sixty dollars, all kinds of folks want to jump bad. Yes sir, they say. We’ll get that back for ye in the mornin. Poor man loses it, they say, Well, we’ll do what we can. Here’s some papers for ye to fill out. Don’t you know better’n to trust folks passin through like that? Besides, a rich man gets madder’n hell. A poor man is so used to things goin wrong, he thinks he’s got it comin to him. He halfway expects it. He’ll cuss a little or pray a little, dependin on his beliefs, and that’s the end of it.

  Maybe, Edgewater said. He drank wine and watched the river going indistinct until its near invisible motion grew murky and mysterious. All the sounds of the woods were the sounds out of his childhood, they became more real than Roosterfish’s voice.

  Sides, I know when to quit, and I spread myself pretty thin. I work the backroads and steer clear of town. Hell, hardly any of these folks got cars. Time word gets around I’m somers else, doin somethin different.

  Or in the penitentiary one.

  Maybe. Not so far. The work’s light and the money’s good. I don’t worry much about orphans and widderwomen. I guess I been screwed so much in so many different ways my first reaction’s just to whirl around and pop it to somebody else. Besides, I got troubles of my own, ain’t you?

  I guess every man’s got his demons.

  Do ye? Roosterfish judged the chicken done, began to carve portions onto paper plates. What’s yourn?

  Everybody but me, Edgewater grinned. So it doesn’t ever bother you conning folks like that? Taking their money or chickens or trade or whatever.

  I don’t know. I don’t think about it much. I guess when you get fucked over past a certain point you turn it on other folks ever chance you get. A man’s got to live. The Bible tells you that even the lilies of the field got to eat.

  Even the lilies of the field got to eat?

  Yeah.

  What the shit does that mean?