The Lost Country

by William Gay

  Slow down buddy, she said. We got all night. A hand on his spurious cock, apparently detecting there nothing to deter her. Her breath hot in his ear. He banged his head on the door, paid it no mind. He was trying to haul down her panties, she lifted her hips to aid him, he felt her hands at his zipper.

  Her tongue tasted of ambrosia, he knew with a detached and rueful sadness that this was a feeling that would never come again.

  Onehanded he was trying to force his trousers down over his hips. There was a slack acquiescence to her legs. What light there was fell across her face and illuminated it twisted as if in pain, the eyes vacant as holes charred and hungry. When the trousers were in her face, down his fingers worked briskly at the windings of tape.

  She was keening some high note through her nose, a mindless siren song of want and she grabbed his hand and shoved it between her legs. Her hips were lurching, her crotch wet and slippery. He had two fingers inside her, three. She writhed under him, pulling him blindly toward her, her lips were sucking at his neck.

  You want it? he asked her.

  Yes, she whispered, yes.

  You sure you ready for all of it?

  Give it to me.

  He thrust himself into her, came almost as soon as he did, a series of spasms rocked him, he felt caught in some vast tide that hit him wave on wave and beached him. When he was through he lay drained atop her while she pitched and bucked and clawed at him. Slowly he stopped spinning, the world righted, clicked into focus. He noticed with annoyance her nails were hurting him. Finally motions began to slow as if she were winding down, some great erotic doll with a mainspring broken and then she was still save for an occasional spasmodic jerk of her hips, as if they moved through no bidding of hers. Her face twisted away from him. Did you come? he asked her solicitously.

  No.

  Funny, I thought you did.

  You lyin son of a bitch, she said.

  I fucked you.

  Not by a damn sight you didn’t, she said. She was rising, trying to see him in the dark.

  Is something wrong? he asked her. He picked up the ear of corn from the floorboard and laid it across her breasts. She looked as it dumbly. You through with it, he told her. You can keep it for a souvenir and use it any time you want to.

  She was beating at his face with the ear of corn, half crying. You dirty bastard. You’re crazy or something. He grabbed her hand, shook the corn free. Get off me and let me up.

  Bradshaw raised himself off her and hauled up his pants. He still had on his boots. She was cursing him steadily, slipping her panties on. He watching with something akin to regret, the flash of pubic hair abruptly gone. She was buttoning her blouse.

  Get out of the goddamned way and let me out.

  Suit yourself. He opened the door, kicked it wide, it rocked on its hinges. A cold breath of the night came in, scent of rain and wind and of trees. She got out while Bradshaw was fumbling around for the ear of corn. Here, he said, tossing it to the ground beside her feet. Absentmindedly she stooped and picked it up, as if in a daze. Frozen by the domelight, she looked momentarily uncertain about the wisdom of getting out in the rain so far from home. Miles of dark yawned like an engulfing chasm. But she didn’t speak.

  I got oranges to pick, Bradshaw said. He slammed the door and cranked up and spun backward and the last time he saw her she was standing in the diminishing glare of lights, one writhing shadow among many, just watching him go and with the ear of corn dangling from her hand like some impotent and forgotten weapon.

  There were few evenings now that the pickup was not parked in the Bradshaw yard, long about dusk you’d see him slam its door and saunter toward the house, cap in hand. The old woman said, Here he comes.

  At first when he came it was ostensibly to talk to the old woman. Reminisces of times past. To see did they need anything, now that there was no man in the house. He would sit and smoke his pipe in the old armchair by the window, eyes half closed, and watch the girl. He was an impression of stolidity, who could believe those tales they whispered? Solid. Substantial, a man of means and a not inconsiderable amount of power, an employer of men, renter of houses, a grocery store in Flatwoods.

  After a visit or two he made no secret of his purpose. Then the old woman would retire and leave them like some courting couple to their own devices. Harkness plied her with gifts, with attention, with all the wiles the years had sharpened, lacking looks or charm or even common decency, he fell back on other methods. There were few nights when she did not find him awaiting her when the Dewdrop closed and she stepped into the chilly night. She was ashamed he came, that people thought she would leave with him. There he was waiting again, wiping a clean space on the steamed up window, peering with speculation at her, at the absurd horns on the pickup truck, while he knew the only thing waiting for him was the cold rented room where the silence vibrated so that you strained for voice you could not quite hear.

  You need to get out more, he’d tell her. See what the world’s like. Perhaps at night she lay awake and thought. She, who had so few of the world’s frivolities, could see from where she lay in bed the box of candy shaped like a heart, bottles of cheap scent a whore would have thought tacky. But no one had ever given her even so tawdry presents as these, her riches doubled effortlessly by the dresser mirror behind them. Knew them not as simply ends in themselves but harbingers of others, more opulent, wonders springing from an inexhaustible source. And most of all she felt the deadly weight of silence, the nearness of the two graves the past year had brought.

  She would walk back toward town and he would follow along behind, cruising at four or five miles an hour past the sleeping houses and locked and nighted businesses without trying to get her to talk, just watching her as if he would shield her from whatever might befall her, some grotesque guardian angel in a tricked-up pickup truck.

  Perhaps in some way he could not articulate, he saw her as his lost young girl, dreamed of her slavishly with soft flesh after years of women with sagging breasts and bellies, thighs that the flesh listed on like water, felt in her a rekindling of youthful fires, alloy he could heat and shape to his choosing.

  Then one night he waited for the traffic light to change and she walked on a few steps and then ceased. There were promises of money to be considered, of soft gowns and see-through underwear and warmth on winter nights. Even now it would be too warm in his truck, yet here on the sidewalk the wind whistled hollowly off the asphalt, sang eerily in the highwires looped above her. When he reached across to open the door on the passenger side there was nothing at all on his face.

  Harkness owned some land in a part of the county named Sandy Hook and he bought a secondhand housetrailer and set it up there for her. Sandy Hook had once been part of the vast holdings of a phosphate concern, empty soils gleamed coldly where trains used to run laboring through the desolated countryside. The land here looked as if some ancient cataclysm had befallen it, its moors and rocky barrens absolutely lifeless, even the trees singed and dead, standing branchless and black, as if they had been scorched. Old brick furnaces and half fallen walls winding nowhere rememberable lost to kudzu and ivy channeled the hollows, remnants of artifacts of some old ceremonial magic. You would drive for miles and you would not see a house, a hunter, a fence.

  It was country that befitted him very well. Here he was answerable to no one, any trespassers were answerable to him. Perhaps he felt she would be safe here, safe from the younger men he knew must someday come along, for the ways of the world were his as well. An enforced solitude like a parody of fairytale fortresses, a fairhaired princess amidst her radio and truestory magazines awaiting him. Glad to see even so remotely human a face as his, to hear any human voices.

  Roosterfish was driving an old titleless Hudson about the color of dried blood and it wore tags borrowed from a Hardin County junkyard. But if he was a fugitive he did not act like it. He came and went as he pleased in Edgewater’s room, as if he had some appointed rounds to keep. He’d drive the
Hudson around town and if he met the law he would just nod at them and keep on going. He seemed to have crossed over into some land of unconcern. Edgewater decided he must be mad.

  Everyone knew Roosterfish. He’d hold court in the poolroom, a great favorite with the daytime idler. His illgotten gains flowed from him in a seemingly endless supply, buying beer for the crowd, maybe drinking one himself and telling his tales and listening to theirs. These old men and young with nothing to do but sit about the pool hall resting from no exertion in particular and possessed of little past and no future and endless talking, settling among themselves the vagaries of human nature.

  Ofttimes the talk would turn to D.L. Harkness, all the old myths and new ones more recent than his memory: him and Clyde Warren was down at McKnight’s one time drinkin and they got to arguing about this old dog Early had. Just a stray cur somebody dropped on Early and stayed cause he fed it. Bout eat up with the mange. Anyway, they got to arguing about that dog. Whether if you skint a dog it would die or whether it would live. They kept on an on and getting louder all the time and directly Harkness bet him twenty dollars. He’s mad. He got out his knife and helt that dog and skint it. And it alive. They said it was so sickenin Warren got to tryin to renege and Harkness wouldn’t let him. Well sir, he completely skint that pore old dog and it died like Warren said it would. Harkness just wiped his knife on his britches and pulled out his pocketbook and paid off. People’s to blame for it. People’s just let him get away with all such as that till he don’t even pay no mind to it anymore. They’ve let it get to where he thinks whatever he does is right.

  They shot pool but Edgewater soon gave up trying to beat him. Roosterfish walked the balls with a graceful careless ease, breaking the rack and running them in rotation, breaking again.

  You ever do that for a living?

  Not in a good long while. I learnt there ain’t no man good enough but what he don’t come up agin one better. Best pool shot I ever seen come in this very poolroom one time wearin raveled out overalls and brogans you could nearly smell the pigshit on and he had this round, innocent face like he hadn’t been off the farm but about fifteen minutes. I shot a pretty fair stick back then but I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. Anyhow, he stood around watchin me with his eyes bout like goose eggs and he kept tryin to get me to play him. I ain’t got time to play ye, I’d tell him. He kept on. Finally I give him a good lookin over and I’se drinkin a little so I told him I’d play him one game for fifty dollars. I figured he’d took off a load of hogs or somethin and his money was burnin a hole in his pocket. Well sir, he went back out to his old rattletrap car and brung in a custombuilt cue stick I bet cost three hundred dollars. Come in a plush-lined case look like a snake casket. When I seen it I felt like somethin kicked me in the ass right hard and I never got a shot. He just blowed me away. Turns out he was going all through the South takin on all these fellers that thought they was hot like I did.

  ———

  On Sunday morning, when Edgewater awoke, Roosterfish had rolled his blankets and gone. As if he were some hard traveler with vast distances to cover and who must be on the road before good light. The only sign he had been there at all was an empty Gypsy Rose bottle tilted against the wall. Edgewater went with his morning coffee to the window and peered across the street for the old Hudson but it was gone too.

  The last time Roosterfish’d been here, there had been only a stomped circle of earth with the brush bush hogged off, but now there was a square windowless building framed up of unplaned yellow poplar set in a glade where the stumps of the trees it was built from still gleamed white and truncate and the tops and brush were in piles yet unburned. The building had a concrete floor and a new tin roof glittering in the winter sun. A bluelooking stovepipe pierced its roof and thick smoke rose and dissipated before the stiff wind and above the pipe hovered a transparent flux of quaking hot gasses.

  By ten o’clock a motley of trucks and cars and even a wagon or two littered the newground, like some congregation of worshippers gathering for arcane service. The glen rang with the crowing of cocks. They seemed to be everywhere, strawlined coops in the backs of pickup trucks, the trunks of cars, overalled men moved to and fro under the shadeless trees with cages under their arms. Here and there buying and selling and swapping, but the main business was inside where the cocks were. Here and there a halfpint glittered in the sun.

  Slouched against the south wall of the shed for what fugitive warmth there was, Roosterfish looked them over. A crop of hardankles for sure. Some pretty roughlooking good old boys here today. He kept looking for Harkness. He could feel the weight of the handgun in his jumper pocket but he did not figure to need it. He had his unbreeched shotgun slung casually across his arm and no one had even paid it any mind. He had parked the car and simply walked up as if he had been doing a little rabbit hunting. He idly scanned the gunracks in the windows of pickup trucks. A deer gun or two he might have to do something about a little later.

  In this fragile light there was about the fighting cocks a sinister beauty. Something ancient and unchanged, predatory qualities held over from more primitive times. Their bottleglass eyes cold and remote and at an absolute remove from fear. Calm, certain. A worn sun from the winter solstice laying across their feathers a sheen of iridescence, brilliant fiery orange, scarlet, sleek bluegreen. Long tailfeathers rippling with the wind. The purest glossy jetblack, cool creamy yellow about the breast, as if they had been shuttled through a color spectrum swirled and molten. He watched them with a long practiced eye, felt some old kinship stir within him. A similarity of qualities here perhaps. The old traits of arrogance and independence, obsolete save in these cocks bred solely for the purpose of maintaining these very bloodlines.

  Inside the building there was a hot fire in the heater and he stood warming his backside and idly watching the progression of fights in the cock pits at the other end of the room. There were three pits. A fight would commence in the first one, move to the second when both combatants were so weary or near death as to cast the outcome of the fight into question, then a match with other owners and fresh opponents would commence in the first. A flurry of betting, side betting. Fifty dollars here, a hundred there. He watched with no great interest. He figured it mattered little who won or lost, in the end the money would reside within his own coat pocket.

  A boy of fifteen or sixteen with a near dead rooster on his hands. The boy was loathe to admit defeat, a dispute was rising. He kept urging it back to the fight, but it no longer suspected where the fight was, its eyes were pecked out, it seemed preoccupied with some more important war being waged inside its brain: some miniature power failure there, cataclysm on a minuscule scale, whole sections going into blackness, an icy wind down empty corridors. Its head lolled loosely on its neck. The boy pried its beak open, forced breath into its lungs, he squeezed water from a rag onto its head.

  The pitman was a short stocky man with gartered sleeves and a hand-rolled cigarette appendant to his bottom lip. That rooster’s dead, son, he said.

  The boy knelt with the rooster and began removing the cockheels from its legs. Die, goddamn you, he told it. He arose with it and carried the cock out the door to where rose a mound of dead or dying cocks. He pitched it outside.

  The fights went on, the roosters weighed atop delicate scales and so matched accordingly. Money endlessly changed hands, Roosterfish watching with his acerbic jaundiced eye. The day drew on, bottles were tipped back. He waited impatiently for Harkness. There was a harsh burning in his stomach, his throat felt tight. He wanted it over. The pile of dead roosters grew higher. A fight erupted near the cock pits and boiled by him with meaty sound of flesh falling on flesh and a canebottom chair splintering and flattening beneath their thudding feet. The air seemed to fill with flying chickens and feathers, the disquieted cock’s quarreling. Watch the goddamned heater, the pitman yelled. First man turns it over answers to me. Roosterfish flattened himself against the wall while the pitman took up an axe handle and
brandished it threateningly, the fight progressed across the floor and the wall of men that contained it flowed through the wide door and out into the yard.

  Roosterfish stayed by the stove, hand above it, palm lowered over the rising heat. The pitman winked at him. Outside he could hear the cursing, the grunts of blows dealt and received. The pitman at last shrugged and went out with his axehandle and Roosterfish could hear him berating the men in the yard. After a time a truck coughed and started and then another and the pitman came back in, heading a straggling crowd, and the fights commenced again.

  A man he vaguely knew but whose name he could not remember offered him a drink. He accepted the bottle, shivered involuntarily and handed the bottle back. Where’s old D.L.?

  The man laughed. D.L.’s pussywhipped, he told him. He drank from the bottle, a spiderweb of spittle he wiped away with his jumpersleeve. He’s found him some young stuff I guess got him purty well housebroke for a while. Got it set up in that trailer he’s got by Buttermilk Ridge and I spect he’s sleepin in today.

  By one o’clock he had decided Harkness was not coming and was forced to reform his plans. He went outside again and sat in the car and ate a lunch of sliced cheese and crackers he’d brought wrapped in waxed paper. He washed it down with wine from a bottle he brought out from beneath the seat and slid into his jumper pocket. Twin paper-crimped cylinders of double-ought buckshot were fed into the open chambers of the shotgun. Their brass primers staring back at him like two expectant eyes. He got out, made ready his plan, checked to see was anything blocking him in. There was not.

  There was a blue GMC truck with a racked deer gun near the woods and upon ascertaining no one was looking he crept inside. He had the door open and he had cocked the barrel under his stump methodically levering out the shells. Dry little metallic clicks.