The Lost Country

by William Gay

  I wish you’d woke me up when it started rainin hard. We can’t even get the damn car out now.

  It was that damn wine. Sick tastin shit. I drunk mine and I reckon I must of yours too. Did you not like it?

  I can’t drink that sweet stuff. Taste like Log Cabin syrup or something.

  Roosterfish arose. Well. I guess we might as well walk down and see what it looks like.

  It did not look encouraging. There was pooled water in the lowlands shoemouth deep and the earth beneath it was soft and sucking. They went on to the fescue field, halted at its edge; the field was a vast expanse of muddy water, the Studebaker at its center forlorn, derelict, some vessel cut adrift and abandoned. Water was up almost to the hubcaps and still rising. Roosterfish kicked at the spongy loam disgustedly. Well shitfire. I guess we’re just by God stuck.

  How bout tryin it around the edge?

  Naw. We’d just get stuck worser. Sink down in the damn mess and it’d take a tractor or a team of mules to pull us out and the fewer knows where I hang my hat the better it suits me. I had in mind to sell some prescriptions today.

  Some what?

  Magazine prescriptions. All I know is to wait till it goes down. Which it’s bound to sooner or later.

  They returned to the bluff in a deepening drizzle and wind stiff off the water. The day did not warm as it should. Edgewater dragged to the shelter of the bluff old stumps leached pale as driftwood, sections of windfall cedar, fencepost still adorned with spikes of rusted wire as if he divined some reversal of the seasons, a winter’s tale only the prepared would survive.

  Old promises and old liaisons haunted him, old obligations shunted aside. They came in the night like succubi that would not let him be; nothing was ever really lost, he could not forget anything. But there was nothing he could do. How can I roll, he asked them, when the wheels won’t go.

  The second day the rain fell undiminished and they moved to a higher ledge and built a fire there. They moved all their blankets and the crated bedraggled cocks and sat against the limestone wall of the bluff staring down into an unreal world, a mad swirl of water advancing far into the bottomland.

  The river inched upward, you could see it rising. Edgewater fixed a mark on a stump with his eyes, watched the river lap upward and coat it with foam, recede, return to it and draw it into turbulent darkness. The nether bank of the river was not steep and the water broke through here and seethed foaming and implacable into the flat spread of cornfields, leaving the woven-wire fences clotted with leaves and debris.

  The main body of the river was a shifting pattern of treelimbs and stumps and as he watched an entire tree went by, its branches turning slow and stately. There was a motley of rotted planking and ruined household artifacts and once the intact wall of a shanty riding the waves flat and slick, a deserted windowed raft, and he would not have been surprised to have seen tattered survivors clinging to its decks and watching the rapid shift of passing greenery with stoic eyes. A mule had been caught up in the torrent, it passed with eyes rolling white and wild, its head bobbing from sight then reappearing like some gross fishing float, its threshing impotent against the greater threshing of the current that bore it on.

  The river fascinated him, he’d not seen one so close before. It came to seem some lost highway of the undone, accommodating not wayfarers like themselves but debris and artifacts jettisoned by souls lost upon it, empty gestures of appeasement, offerings to a god not listening anymore.

  There were no storms now but a dull and remorseless rain from an invisible sky, a gunmetal firmament melting and falling as if the earth were some vessel it was intent on filling. Along the river’s edge and as far as the eye could see the world was misty green, a lush fecundity glutting on the rain and growing, softening the ridges, hazing the far blue treeline. Seen through the driving rain and the mist the landscape seemed to merge, field and road and woods bleeding together to form some cessation of clarity, vision from dream or madness, possessed of a weird and unreal beauty.

  They skirted the fescue field and ascended the sloping bank through a near impenetrable wall of dripping rushes and came out on the blacktop. They looked about them. In faded gray distance farmhouses set pastoral and unreal, dreamlike in the mist, so intangible they might vanish. The highway lay empty, finite, vanishing in a white wall of vapor at either end. The world was soundless, deserted, as if they alone had survived the flood. They crossed the trestle and paused to peer down, Edgewater momentarily dizzy at the movement of swift yellow water.

  The blacktop wound high past alluvial bottomland already planted in corn half underwater, water seeping silent and threatening, some demented irrigation system berserk and out of control. The road forked past there and the roar of the river began to fade. In the fork set a country store. Ancient gaspumps like relics of better days, or yet artifacts the race who dwelt here had progressed past and forgotten, or remnants of some more advanced culture, purposeless, monuments to some god proved false.

  They moved among the merchandise, careless Sunday shoppers seeking bargains. Few to be found here under the wary and jaundiced eye of the storekeep. There was tinned food and mounded harness and a tray of pocketknives enshrined beneath flyspecked glass. A rack of rakes and hoes and scythes that stood like a stack of weaponry Edgewater felt might ultimately be used to arm the agrarian populace against them should they not flee. Boxes of tissued utilitarian shoes open for inspection, shelves of Duckhead overalls, a smell of denim, dye, leather.

  I bet she’s rollin, the storekeep said. You still camped out over there?

  Yeah. Yeah, she’s walkin and talkin, all right.

  You liable to wake up some mornin someplace you never went to sleep.

  Roosterfish had approached the drink box, selected a bottle from the icewater. Nah. I’m on a ledge over there and the bluff’s steep. It ever gets up there they’ll be more souls than me huntin a higher roost.

  They’s a lot huntin it today, the storekeep said. Them in the bottom’s comin out by boat, if they comin at all. She still risin?

  Anybody about today?

  If they are they’ll be up at Simmons’s. Bad weather don’t hurt a bootlegger’s business.

  Edgewater sat on a drink crate and ate an enormous ice cream cone the storekeep built up from the freezer behind the counter. The taste and smell of vanilla was almost hallucinogenic, sensuous, Edgewater was reminded of drugstores long ago: there was a slow hypnotic ceiling fan he stared upward at and a clean composite of drugstore smells and racks of books he might have looked at had there been more money.

  The cone was handed down, the nickel paid, he could hear the flat clink on the glass counter. He was holding to the leg of his father’s trousers. Leaning down to lift him, the face was abstracted, a face with other, less pleasant duties to perform.

  Then back through the hot streets to a store much like this one and a storekeep much like this one, their eyes are all the same, like blackjack dealers.

  Till Saturday? This is Saturday, if I’m not mistaken.

  Till next Saturday.

  Oh, next Saturday, then. I reckon you owe about everbody on that other side of the street. What’d you do, bring ye trade over to spread ye business around?

  No reply. Then: you people always want it till Saturday. What’s Saturday, the end of the rainbow?

  I got some money comin Saturday.

  And you people always got some money comin Saturday. I guess if everday was Saturday you’d have the store and I’d be over there astin for credit. You reckon?

  They had turned and taken a step when the storekeep said: Well get it gathered up then.

  There had been a moment when the hand holding his tensed and he could almost see the flinty eyes, hear the words forming: You keep your goddamn groceries. Yet there were mouths to feed, eyes that even now watched the road for their return. There were empty pots and pans, a cookstove dormant and waiting. They turned, already eyeing the binned merchandise.

  The storekeep ha
d his ticketbook out, waiting with an air of exaggerated patience.

  Slice us about a pound of that round steak there, Roosterfish said, pointing to a cut of bologna in the meatcase. The grocer took it out, began carefully to slice it onto white butcher paper.

  You know that Simmons is a peculiar feller, he said, eyeing the meat wafered atop the scale. He leaned confidingly toward Roosterfish. He come down here late one evenin when they wadn’t nobody around and wanted to know did I want to make forty dollars. Naw, I told him. I figured he wanted whiskey hauled or somethin. Turned out all he wanted me to do was turn in at his driveway at exactly ten o’clock that night. Well sir, he laid two twenty-dollar bills right on that counter there and I done it just like he said. I turned in at ten on the money and shone my headlights in his window and backed out and left. I’ve wondered many a time what made my headlights on them windows worth forty dollars.

  There were signs portending Simmons’s before they got there. They could hear the flat slap of a small caliber pistol interspersed with purposeful pause as if some invisible assassin fired, took plenty of time and careful aim, fired again. There was a distasteful tinge of smoke in the air now, a smell of burning rags.

  Then they began to pass the wrecked cars that marked the boundaries of the property. There were innumerable cars, arcane makes and models, all crushed, an unclassified collection of highway disasters. The old man had used cars for every purpose imaginable. Three were tilted atop each other in the mouth of a deep gully, dirt half hiding the bottom one, as if flung there by some petulant giant. Chickens roosted and nested in them, eggs rotted there ungathered, guano mounded the seats. A dog chained to one and perhaps forgotten watched them down the road with surly eyes. A vast sea of cars, until it somehow seemed perverse, as if all civilization funneled its crumpled and bloody waste down to Simmons, who drew death from the broken cartons in some erotic gratification, experienced vicariously and from safety the split second in eternity when they changed from sleek machines knifing away the night to junk, the moment of no return when all control had been cast to the winds, the breathless hush of flight, metal on metal, the last rattle of falling glass.

  There was a thick greasy coil of smoke from the stovepipe lowering along the ground and there were four men in the yard and a fifth Edgewater first took for a child. They were gathered about a fifty-gallon oil drum and one of them was reloading a pistol.

  Hey Rooster, one of them called. You late for the ratkillin.

  I been late all my life, Roosterfish told him. And most of the time glad of it.

  Old Simmons had corn in this barrel and went down there this morning and it’d about all turned to rats. They’s thirty or forty caught in there fightin over one little ear of corn. We brung it out here and Pulley there’s about finished em off.

  Edgewater peered into the depths of the barrel. There were a dozen or more dead rats in attitudes of repose and others cowering spattered with blood in the bottom. They were gray rats almost as big as housecats and their tails were scaled, as big as his forefinger. They watched him with their little calculating eyes. He turned away with something akin to scorn.

  You might at least of turned the barrel over and let em run, Roosterfish said. Give em a sportin chance.

  I could of got em all a little bitty pistol and let em shoot back, too, Pulley said. But I decided against it.

  Pulley was tall and broad, an overalled barrel with appendages stuck on like afterthoughts. His face was hot and florid, flushed with blood. He had fierce little eyes not unlike the eyes that had stared at Edgewater from the depths of the barrel. He appeared to be drunk, the neck of a pint bottle protruded from a side pocket.

  What’s that smell? Roosterfish wanted to know. That’s the stinkinest smoke I ever smelt. The house ain’t on fire, is it?

  Pulley shoved a magazine into the butt of the automatic and gestured toward the house with his head. That damn Simmons, he said. He’s cold. He burnt all his wood back in the winter and he’s too stingy to buy more and too shittin lazy to cut it hisself. He’s burnin whatever he lays his hands on. Mostly clothes and rags. He’s burnt two three boxes of rags that old woman saved and nigh ever rag of clothes she’s got.

  Is he drunk?

  You might say that, Pulley told him. Pulley had on a short sleeve shirt, his arms were huge and freckled. He walked back to the barrel. But no drunker than a hog that fell in a salt barrel.

  The man Edgewater had judged a child was in reality a man of middle age, though he stood no taller than a ten-year-old boy. His back was hunched, a great misshapen lump of flesh rode between his shoulders. He was impeccably dressed. He had on a white shirt with a button-down collar and a pale blue tie that matched his powder-blue jacket and diminutive trousers. His shoes were glossy, as if they had been spitshined. He was watching all that transpired as if it were beneath him. There was a dignity to him, a kind of contempt, as if he carried himself above the joys common folk found in rat killing. The men seemed to subtly defer to him, as if he possessed the last word on everything.

  Been a game today?

  Nah. Tyler here come out to play but him and Simmons the only ones got any money.

  I might set in a hand or two, Roosterfish said.

  Simmons is too drunk, Tyler said. Tyler was the hunchback. He had a distinctive, almost cultured way of speaking. Simmons can’t tell the kings from the deuces today.

  Let’s go in, Roosterfish said. They’s sights I’d stand around in the rain to see, but Pulley shootin unarmed rats in a oildrum ain’t one of em.

  I’d about as soon walk on back, Edgewater said.

  And do what? Come on in and get a drink of whiskey.

  The air inside was close and hot and fetid. The one-eyed bootlegger was crouched by the side of the sheetiron heater and its sides were cherried with heat. The stove door was open and Simmons held before it poised some lank rag of castoff clothing like a tidbit for some curious beast still in the act of chewing. The old woman still sat on the carseat as she had before and there was another woman in a canebottom chair studying her hands as intently as if all the world’s knowledge was imprinted there.

  Goddamn, old Roosterfish, Simmons said jovially. I figured you was astraddle of ye mattress polin for the Mississippi.

  I’m still high and dry, Roosterfish said. You got any whiskey fit to drink?

  Simmons stuffed the rag into the stove and closed the door. He arose. He swayed gently, as if he moved to some music unreeling in his head. Got Bobwhite.

  Is that whiskey?

  Course to hell it’s whiskey. Ain’t you never heard of Bobwhite?

  How much is it?

  Dollar and a half.

  Seems like I have somers. Give us a halfpint apiece. Roosterfish was counting out quarters.

  Simmons left the room complaining about the weather. Blackberry winter came later every year. He could not take it like he used to. He came back with the whiskey and handed it to Roosterfish. Who’s ye runnin mate here?

  Why this here’s my boy. Got discharged out of the Navy and come home to the family business.

  The family business you run from under a bluff. He squinted his one rheumy eye in Edgewater’s face. He don’t favor ye much.

  Roosterfish had cracked the bottle, drank. I reckon he taken after his mama, he said. I hope he amounts to morn she did. She cut a trail with a drummer one morning when this chap was barely crawlin around.

  Women will do ye like they will do ye, Simmons said philosophically.

  The younger woman had arisen, stood holding the window curtain aside, peering into the yard. The old woman sat motionless. Perhaps she has died, Edgewater thought. He studied her covertly. She was dressed in some old black garment like mourning and there was a cameo brooch at her throat. She looked like an ancient, desiccated bird. She sat very still as if she were listening for the beginning of some faint, faroff sound. But when the flat slap of the pistol came she did not flinch.

  Edgewater opened the bottle of whiskey a
nd drank. It was cheap whiskey, raw in his throat. A blossom of fire spread outward from his stomach. He looked about for a chair, but there was none. Perhaps Simmons had burned them. He hunkered on his knees, staring at the watermarked wallpaper. Roses of some faded and unlikely hue climbed here. He wondered had she been young here. Perhaps Simmons had been born here, played about these floors while she watched him and dreamed the dreams you dream.

  The young woman turned from the window. There was a vacant, stupid look about her, as if she did not know where she was. Nor did she care. Her eyes were child’s eyes, a sly, lazy child. She sat and fell to staring at Edgewater.

  Tyler thought he’d get me drunk and clean me out, Simmons was telling Roosterfish. Son of a bitch. Scuse me, Mrs. Tyler, he said drunkenly, but she appeared not to have heard, was again lost in scrutiny of her hands. I drink and I gamble, Simmons finished. But not at the same time.

  We just thought they might be a game.

  Tyler’s a county court clerk or somethin. Smart son of a bitch. If he could keep his mouth off whiskey and his mind off pussy he could be president of the United States.

  Edgewater glanced at the old woman, Simmons intercepted the look. She’s deaf and blind, he said. She can talk but I reckon she’s about talked out. She don’t have much to say anymore.

  Well, I wisht he’d come on, the girl suddenly said.

  The pistol came again, there was a yelp of laughter.

  Hey, Edgewater said. Perhaps he shouted. Everyone turned to look at him save the old woman.

  What is it?

  What’ll you take for the rest of those rats?