by William Gay
She could be the softest woman, Roosterfish said after a long time, as if he had forgotten Edgewater’s existence and was talking to himself, the night, no one. She’d fly mad about somethin and after a while she’d be like it never happened. You could just reach for her and she’d lean towards ye and she was just the softest woman I ever seen.
A yellow light came on somewhere far across the bottomland, the only sign of humans in this lonesome night. What woke them, what roused them about at this hour? Death, sickness, childbirth? Arrival, departure?
———
I need to be moving on east, he told Roosterfish the next morning.
Hell, I thought we had a deal.
Edgewater shrugged. I stayed awhile. I’ve got the money now to make it home. I need to be getting that way.
Son, we are gettin that way. We’re goin on east pretty quick. We’ll wind this county up and move on down the line. You stick with me and I’ll have ye in silk an satin. I’ll have ye eatin steak and drinkin wine got corks in it stead of screw-on caps. Just trust old Roosterfish.
Raincrows calling from a nearby cornfield warned them off, but he had no ears for them. Nor for the frogs calling from the pond across the way. A thunderhead lay like a tumor on the southwestern horizon but Roosterfish was blind to it, was giddy with triumph. He had money everywhere except his shoes.
It was not yet three o’clock and they had painted three barn roofs in the final phase of Roosterfish’s sweep before moving on east. They had taken in a hundred and forty-five dollars and enough of what Roosterfish called paint remained to finish another. It was not paint. It was a mixture of cheap re-refined motor oil and enough pigment to give it color; when sprayed onto a hot tin roof it immediately dried and healed over into something that looked like paint, but it was not wise to use it when rain threatened. It did not weather well.
It’s goin to rain.
Hell, it won’t rain the way our luck’s runnin. It’s goin around, you can tell.
I can’t tell.
Just take old Roosterfish’s word for it. Tomorrow night we’ll be eatin steak in the best restaurant in Savannah.
Edgewater looked at the horizon, scanned the heavens. Save for the thunderhead far in the distance there was not a trace of cloud in all that blue and nothing to threaten the serenity of this day in early June. There was a somnolent murmur of insects from the tranquil woods and the air was thick with honeysuckle.
The farmer stood with his thumbs hooked in his overall galluses and conversed with Roosterfish and a transparent look of craft came into his eyes.
You said how much?
Fifty dollars.
That’s highern a cat’s back.
We do good work. Go down the road and look at Escue’s barn if you got any doubts.
I ain’t callin you a liar. You said had just enough to do one more barn and it looks to me like you ort to give me a break on it.
Fifty dollars for a barn that size is a break. You try to get it done anywhere else for that.
The man did not reply. The barn loomed behind him, the roof rusted to a dull umber. The farmer’s two sons came silently and flanked him, freckled and sunburnt. One with a dished face watched Edgewater with vacant mindless eyes like the eyes of an old sepia photograph, a face with no name to put to it, just a displaced face out of a long time ago. The trio somehow fit together to form an implicit threat.
Paint ain’t milk, Roosterfish said. It won’t clabber if I don’t use it all today.
I’ll give you forty dollars.
Roosterfish turned to Edgewater. What about it, son? Can we come out like that?
If we’re going to do it then let’s do it. We need to be in Savannah.
My partner says forty then.
They drove down as close as they could get to the barn and began to unload the equipment, the three standing alongside the house and watching them.
Watch what I tell you about that old man, Roosterfish said, uncoiling the sprayer hose. I said fifty and he argued me down to forty, and when we get through he’ll come up with maybe thirty dollars. I’ve seen a thousand of that same son of a bitch.
You watch him. He’s got a mean set to his eyes.
Hell, let him think he beats us. I got maybe fifteen cents a quart in that stuff at the outside.
That’s not what I mean. I got a bad feeling about him. And it’s going to rain, too.
Rain hell. By the time the first drops come pitter-pattering down we’ll be in Wayne County with our feet propped up and somethin cold in our hands.
The sprayer was powered by an old kerosene-fueled compressor and Edgewater dragged it through waisthigh burdock and pokeweed to the edge of the barn, peering warily about constantly for copperheads. There was a hot still smell of baking tin and sere hay and the moted light fell white and oblique through the slats in the walls. An unseen woodpecker hammered staccato from the woods beyond the barn.
He cranked the compressor until it started and when it hit barn swallows and starlings rose aloft with protesting cries. The throb of the compressor seemed out of place in this pastoral setting, this bucolic countryside that looked like a sentimental painting of a peaceful landscape that never was.
Roosterfish tended the machine and kept the hoses strung and untangled and Edgewater started at the ridgepole and worked his way down, umber beneath him changing to a pale verdigris. After half the roof was painted they shut off the compressor and drug it around to the other side of the barn and started it again. Edgewater clambered up the ladder and turned on the sprayer and when he glanced southwestward he was amazed by what he saw. The thunderhead had arisen until it loomed almost to the sun and even as he watched the sun was swallowed, hung like a rind of gleaming disc against the black cloud like an eclipse. The air turned to smoked glass, thickened, his squat shadow faded transparent and then disappeared. The thunderhead seethed at its base as if feeding on all it passed across and forked prongs of lightning walked stilted about the horizon. There was a faint rumble of thunder, a mere suggestion of sound. There was already wind in the highest branches and there was a disquiet in the air. He swore and bent to his work, spraying a thin skim of oil on the hot tin.
At another time Roosterfish would be acting with importance, pointing out features of the equipment to the old farmer, but now he was silent and there were weightier things on his mind. Hey, Roosterfish called. We got to hurry.
The three men ambled slowly down toward the barn, the elder occasionally glancing toward the darkening heavens. There was a yellow-green cast to the clouds now and the thunder was clearly audible. All the world had darkened and lightning quaked constantly from one side of the gleaming metallic base to the other.
Hey. It’s goin to rain like a cow pissin on a slate rock.
If you can spray this son of a bitch any faster than I can then drag your dead ass up here.
The three had come down into the lot and stood all alike like clones of varying sizes with hands pocketed watching Roosterfish with interest. He was pouring the last of the paint into the sprayer and Edgewater moved over the hot tin like a man demented, spraying a poison green film over anything that moved in front of the nozzle and raising aloft to peer toward the approaching storm. The air was filling with flying bits of windtorn leaves whirling like chaff from a thresher and birds before it cried its dire intent. The wind ballooned Edgewater’s shirt and trouser legs and tilted him askew with its weight.
When he finished the last lower corner he slid the sprayer off the edge of the roof and did not even descend the ladder but leapt from the lip of the tin and landed in the weeds simultaneous with the first drops of rain. Roosterfish was coiling the hose before the sprayer even reached the ground.
Let’s get the hell out of Dodge, Edgewater said.
Roosterfish had the plywood rear door of the Studebaker open and he was hurling gear inside. Huge glycerinous beads of rain were falling and behind these scattered drops an almost silver wall of rain was moving slanted across the fiel
d toward them with wind-tilted grass portending its coming.
The three men aligned themselves beneath the eaves of the barn and watched Edgewater hauling the compressor through the weeds. The rain began singing on the tin and he was instantly sodden. Roosterfish grasped a side of the compressor with his one arm and they hoisted it into the back and latched the camper door.
They ran for the shelter of the tin and Roosterfish wiped the rain out of his eyes. We need to get on, he told the man. We got a job in Wayne County in the morning.
The man had his wallet out and he was counting laboriously. The wallet had a plaited leather fob on it like a pocketwatch and the cord wended somewhere back into the folds of his clothing.
Roosterfish kept glancing at his wrist though he wore no watch there. Gettin late, he said.
You reckon it got good and dry? the man asked.
Hell yes it’s dry. You could of fried sidemeat on that tin.
The old man was counting still. One of you boys been in my pocketbook?
One of them snickered and rolled his eyes upward to the rain shingling off the eaves.
I can’t find but twenty-seven dollars here, the man complained.
Edgewater had a cigarette in his mouth and all his matches were wet. He was going through all his pockets. The old man was counting aloud now, licking his thumb between bills. Twenty-six, twenty-seven. Edgewater threw the cigarette into the rain and glanced upward and saw with an inward sinking that the film of oil was loosening. The rain had penetrated beneath it and it had slid perceptibly, perhaps a quarter inch of it extended below the rim of tin. Take it, he told Roosterfish.
Roosterfish was shaking his head. I don’t know, that’s way short. I couldn’t of come out even at forty dollars.
Hell, I thought I had morn that. Tell ye what I’ll do. Gimme ye address and I’ll send ye a money order for the balance. Less see. What’d that be, thirteen dollars?
Roosterfish had seen the paint. He calmly took the scrap of paper the man proffered and dug out stub of pencil. He was writing down a nonexistent company at some nonexistent location. He took the twenty-seven dollars. The farmer now exuded goodwill. He seemed well pleased with himself. Yins come in and have some hot coffee with us.
Go, goddamn it, Edgewater thought. The paint slid an inch this time, then further still, surely they would see but they stood dumbly watching the rain froth bits of straw.
Thank ye anyway but we got people waitin on us, Roosterfish said.
The man nodded as if that was right too. Suit yourself. Boys, best get in fore the wind gets any worse.
The three walked into the rain, walked like cattle with lowered heads. Roosterfish and Edgewater ran to the Studebaker. As they wheeled around and the men were not yet halfway to the house, the paint lifted with a great near-liquid ripple and draped itself along the rim of tin, a vast green gelatinous fabric like a curtain closing some curious show, behind it the roof marvelously umber again, a reptile shedding its skin. The entire front section of membrane had separated itself delicately from the tin roof and risen like some enormous creature spreading gossamer wings in tentative flight then came abruptly unbound by the winds. Then the wind caught in it and it lifted, hung swaying, rose briefly intact and then shredded, great shards of it settling in trees and over the country like kites of ash, Fortean curiosities for the next day’s travelers.
They were far down the road when Roosterfish said, That is some closer than I like to see em played.
That bunch ain’t going to forget this.
They can tell their descendants about it for all of me, long as I ain’t around to hear it. Sides, I told you I’ve seen a thousand like him. Brain like a shittin chicken. If he’s constipated all he’d know to do be swaller a rat and sit on a hoop of cheese.
The night was heady with limitless possibilities. Heading back on the Jackson Highway they passed a seemingly endless string of honkytonks bathed in bright neon, intense as if the highway itself was consumed with garish fire. Headlamps blurred yellow in the falling rain, the rhythmic slap of the windshield wipers vaguely comforting. It was good to be warm and dry and setting out in the world of pleasure.
This looks like a good un, Roosterfish said, choosing a parking lot at seeming random. We’ll check out the women in this un.
Inside a huge bar curved like a horseshoe, a country band on a plywood stage singing plaintively of adultery as if a Greek chorus to the throng of men and women lining the bar. They drank beer for a while and after a time the barkeep sold Roosterfish a bottle of bonded in a paper bag and they began to drink boilermakers. Roosterfish checking out all the women, apparently dissatisfied, they moved on.
Edgewater began to get a little drunk. He lost track of the boilermakers and then he lost track of the places he drank them in, the bars became stagesets held for his approval and then discarded, ever renewed, ever the same. He did not know where the night went. The night began to come and go in scenes like snapshots, isolated frames with no continuity.
Roosterfish became enamored at last with a hefty blonde who had a blacked and swollen eye and strove to hide it with a black eyepatch like some debauched pirate. She had a coarse and ribald laugh, a scarlet cavernous mouth.
A young blackhaired girl, who told Edgewater she was a displaced Eskimo, led him across a graveled parking lot toward an aluminum housetrailer. He was fascinated with an Eskimo here in this land of so much sun. He fell and lay in the driving rain and she helped him arise. Looking up in a moment of terrible lucidity he saw on her face contempt, anger, impatience to have it over with and done. It’s not like that, he wanted to tell her. Her face looked older, disapproving. Faces out of his past shuttled there like a series of rippled photographs. He wanted to be in her favor, to impress her as he once had teachers, but he could not find the words. She did not want words anyway. All he had she wanted was money, and he needed that himself.
Another snapshot: eyes closed to a slit and feigning sleep he saw past his black-socked feet on the bed her going through his pockets one by one, casting garments aside, naked, breasts pointing and bobbing with her movements, the glossy thatch of her pubic hair. The mounded belly somehow erotic, but her face was bemused by her work, her dark eyes avaricious.
He lay supine and watched her. His money was in his sock, he could feel it comfortable against the sole of his foot.
Bedlam drew him out to the parking lot. Roosterfish had fallen afoul of the management. Feeling displeased or cheated he’d set afire the curtains in the trailer. Half-undressed he was hurled into the rain, lay on his back reclining in the mud. Slick healed weal of scar tissue covering the end of his stub. Displeased voices were reprimanding him, a threatening figure pointing to the slick rainwet highway with a blackjack. Roosterfish kept calling for Edgewater. He had a shoe on one foot, a sock on the other.
Rolling again. Other articles of clothing misplaced, lost forever. Sobriety only a vague memory. The Studebaker careening through the night. Fear of the law long gone, a thing of the past. Edgewater went to sleep to the strobic flash of headlights, the sound of Roosterfish humming to himself.
He awoke at first to sounds and sensations he could not at first identify. Reality was amorphous and sly, he could not lay hands on it. Slewing wheels, the splat of mud slathering the sides of the Studebaker. The whine of spinning tires, the stench of smoking rubber.
He looked out into a vast field that seemed inundated with water. He could not fathom where he was. The fields seemed endless, trackless on every side, he could not imagine how they’d come to be there or where they were.
He got out into the sucking quagmire of the fescue field and then he could hear the angry roar of the river off his right side. He looked up into black and weeping night. He knew where they were.
Roosterfish would try to go forward and when that would not work he would slam the car into reverse and spin backward. He beat on the horn angrily but that did not help either. Edgewater rested his forehead against the cold metal of the top, it t
hrobbed fiercely beneath him.
He opened the door. You might as well quit. It’s stuck.
Tell me somethin I don’t know.
What the shit are we doing out in the middle of the field?
We’re tryin to get to the goddamn camp, what do you think? Pickin blackberries?
How come you didn’t leave it on the highway?
I ain’t walkin through no such shit as this. Besides you was passed out.
I was asleep, Edgewater said.
I believe it’s goin a little.
Straight down, maybe.
Well fuck you, Edgewater. You ain’t got no right to bitch. Pass out on a man and leave him to do everthing hisself. I can’t do everthing.
Edgewater looked back toward the highroad where lights passed swift and distant and he could not imagine how they’d come so far in a sea of mud. You’re not even pointed the right way, he said.
Well, I was a while ago.
We may as well get out and forget it tonight. You’re going to blow the motor up.
Stand back and let the son of a bitch blow. They still makin em up in Detroit. I hate a goddamn vehicle won’t do right.
Hell, this whole field looks like a rice paddy. You ought to known better than to drive off in a mess like this. We need to be gone.
Don’t I know it.
They started out toward the camp, reeling drunkenly through the gummy mud. Roosterfish left the car running and had to go back and shut it off. He kicked the door panel. Trade you off in the morning, he told it. You son of a bitch. I knowed when I seen you on that carlot you’d bring me bad luck.
He had to go back one last time; he’d forgotten the cocks. He found a scrap of tarpaulin and covered the coop with it. The cocks made disquieting noises to themselves as the coop bobbed on Roosterfish’s shoulder, their small and fetid world borne drunkenly across a tilting landscape turned to water.
They woke to a grim and sodden world. Mist from the river shrouded the banks like fog and everything in their sight dripped with leaden rain. There was unseasonal coolness to the air. Even the crowing of the cocks sounded tentative and unconvinced. The two men moved sluggishly about their morning chores as if the air itself rendered all motion slow and difficult. They did not even speak until they had managed to build a fire and brew a pot of coffee. Then they perched before the fire like a brace of herons, coffee cups clutched in their hands.