The Lost Country

by William Gay

  He was making plans about Arizona. He was thinking about the white orb of the sun, the way the sand glittered, the way a shimmering haze of heat hung over the lights. He was thinking about sitting by a motel pool with a moneybelt comfortably buckled around his middle and a tall glass of something varicolored and potent in his hand and a lissome girl by his side in a lawn chair and anticipatory to his every need.

  Hey. What the goddamn hell you doin?

  He turned with heat in throat and eyes wild toward a young man who had been urinating against the side of the shed.

  Zip up ye britches and let’s go around front a minute. He raised his shotgun.

  What the hell’s goin on here?

  I’m robbin this son of a bitch, Roosterfish said easily. Suddenly he wasn’t afraid anymore. Walk ahead of me a step or two and go in and let these other fellers in on it.

  He had the stock of the shotgun cocked easily back under his arm when he threw down on them. The pitman turned from the scales with a rooster in his hands and just stood holding it for a moment, then set it gently down. He was eyeing his axe handle.

  Roosterfish figured it was a good a time as any. He maneuvered behind the pitman, lifted the shotgun and fired a blast through the ceiling. The only sound after that was the soft wisk of movement from a couple of roosters in one of the rings.

  All right boys if any of ye want to get out of here alive better do what I tell ye. He handed a brown paper bag to the redhaired boy next to him.

  I am kindly in a hurry and I ain’t sayin this but one time. I want all of ye to get ye pocketbooks and take the bills out. I want that redheaded boy there passin in front of yins with that poke there and sack it up. I don’t want drivin licenses nor huntin licenses or pictures of ye old lady. All I want is the money.

  The boy picked up the paper bag. He stood holding it and staring at it as if he expected to find there a set of directions advising him how to proceed.

  Go ahead, son, Roosterfish said. They ain’t nothin to it. You’ve picked cotton, ain’t ye? Just like that. Pullin it off the stalks and putting it in the sack. Two or three of the men had already unpocketed their wallets. The rest stood staring at him stolidly.

  I’ll tell you another thing. I got my back against the wall. I’m between a rock and a hard place and I don’t give a damn which way things work out. So if you got a notion about callin my bluff, you just save it. Cause I ain’t bluffin. He moved with his back against the wall until he came to the door.

  The boy was sacking up money, thin sheaves of precious green grudgingly given up and only then to the sweet persuasion of Roosterfish’s doublebore shotgun. Tithe up, boys, he said easily. I don’t want no IOUs nor holdouts. I got a long way to go.

  Outside he heard the throb of a car engine, the bump of wheels taking the dropoff from the main road: the motor ceased, he heard the cries of people and of roosters. Gimme that poke, son.

  The boy handed it to him. His face was very white and his freckles stood out like spatters of thick brown paint. Don’t come out of here till you hear me leave. And the first car on my ass gets its windshield blowed out. On the driver’s side. Roosterfish started easing toward his Hudson.

  He eased backwards out through the lot rapidly stuffing the money into his shirt as he skirted the shed and came to his car and thence upon a nightmare scene not conceived by or allowed for in any variation of his plans: an ancient Chevy stakebed truck with bundled cornstalks for homemade siderails set blocking his way out. Both doors were flung wide and three crates of chickens had spilled onto the roadbed and broken and the pinewoods seemed to be full of escaping chickens, crowing, cackling, fluttering, unable to get aloft with their cropped wings. An enormous woman done up in black muslin and two or three gangling boys were trying to catch them. She whirled an angry face upon Roosterfish.

  Hey. Help me get my roosters caught.

  Goddamn a bunch of roosters, he said. He looked wildly about him, peering back as if expecting around the corner of the shed the cautious arrival of faces more brave or foolhardy than the rest. Lady you better get that rollin scrapiron out of my way.

  You’ll just have to go around, mister. My chickens is all got aloose.

  They ain’t no around. The goddamned fence runs right up to ye truck there. Now how about backin up and lettin me out?

  She gave him a fierce preoccupied look. You can just wait.

  He waved the shotgun. Lady, I just robbed the goddamned outfit and I ain’t got time for smalltalk. Now will you get that thing out of my way before I blow it out?

  They Lord God, she said. She threw her arms heavenward in an attitude of mute supplication toward some higher power and her eyes grew round and huge. They rolled back and closed and she seemed to melt, the very earth to absorb her, she slid black and enormous and slack to the frozen roadbed.

  He looked halfdemented, he couldn’t think, a panic seized him. He leapt into the woman’s truck and began grinding the motor, patting the accelerator, peering wildly toward the shed where he detected a lurking movement of overalled men into the yard. A pair of level blue eyes met his across the truck door. A thatch of straw-colored hair.

  Hit won’t start. Hit’s hot, hit’s got a bad coil wire.

  Goddamn it to hell. Roosterfish leapt out and kicked the door too hard and started to run and spun back the way he’d been and steadied the gun across the cab and paused and aimed low. He fired one barrel and sent toward the contingent of fading men a veritable wall of earth and shredded leaves and sticks. He whirled and ran. She was arising from the earth, turned upon him eyes wide and horrible as he leapt past her. He was going at dead run. He ran into the pinewoods at an angle bisecting the corner and he came out in a cornfield where the going was smoother and he leveled out, breathing deeply and listening to the slap of the handgun and the increasing frequency of warping cornsticks breaking and what of the sky he could see tilted and bobbed crazily as if the horizon was in turmoil.

  He fetched up short breathing raggedly at the field’s edge and looking back through the field to the woods where a dark stain of cypress bled into the pine. He saw them running along the roadbed. He heard a distant shout and a man separated himself from the throng of men and brought a rifle to his shoulder. There was a puff of blue smoke and almost immediately the chunk of a bullet going to earth and then the flat slap of the report the wind rolled to him. He steadied the gun against the tree and fired low again and saw the air fill with shredded cornstalks skitting away and above the twin barrels, the men fading back into the cover of the pines.

  He felt better in the woods. He followed an old log road back through country he’d squirrel hunted as a boy and the lay of the land came back to him, it was unchanged. He figured they’d follow the road. He slid down an embankment to where the country flattened itself out then fell away in a hollow. He did not slow up. He pushed himself, wanted as much distance as possible between himself and the cockfighters.

  It was the second day before he came upon even so much as a trail or road, any sign at all that others had preceded him in these deep woods. The first day he walked steadily, angling what he judged to be southeast. He paused to rest, his back against the bole of a tree, the shotgun cradled across his knees. He stopped only long enough to catch his breath and then he was off again, up a slope so steep he must progress from ledge to ledge from the trunk of one sapling to the next. The leaves were wet and slick and as the day wore on they began to freeze, creaking dryly, accompanied him under his feet as he climbed.

  He topped out at last on the crest of the hill and stood trying to get some idea of where he was. He knew vaguely the way he had come but he was unsure of how far and even of which county he was in. All below him were misted hollows and umbered hills going blue and distant, dusk rendering the air smoky and opaque. He breathed deeply, the cold hurt his lungs. Even as he stood it grew colder. He turned the four points of the compass. Bound by a gunmetal sky, he was in a bleak and austere winterscape, an incomplete world, the only life
not yet colored, unpigmented save for delicate brushstrokes, shades of black and muted grays. He stood listening, though for what he was unsure: bloodhounds, shots, the distant shouts of the cockfighters. He expected to hear nothing at all, and all was silent save the gentle rattle of sleet in the leaves above him. He shouldered the gun and went on.

  Full dark fell on him caught up in a hollow’s undergrowth. Tired of climbing, he had tried to follow it to its mouth, found himself chest deep in a thick growth of brambles, honeysuckle that choked his movement. He held the gun aloft and trudged on like a man fording deep water. When at length the bracken showed no sign of diminishing he angled again up the slope until he could see the sky. Beyond the inkblack pattern of trees the sky had lightened as though some obscure light flared beyond it and it had begun to snow. He could feel the flakes sitting almost weightlessly on his upraised face, beginning to melt in his growth of beard.

  The wind was worse on top of the ridge. It was out of the north and stiff, and caught in a brief whirlwind of snow he stood disoriented, uncertain as to which way to go. He could find no break in the timber, no sign of a road or a light or a house. Nothing of shelter in all this dark. Only a series of inky horizons falling away from this lofty height that were only shapes, no more than accumulations of night.

  Sometime in the blackness he came upon an old stone wall winding its way along the backbone of the ridge. It was chest high and a foot or so thick, chunks in places fallen away from the effects of time and weather. He climbed it awkwardly, leaned the gun against the stone and slid down into a deep winddrift of leaves.

  He was weary, his legs ached from walking. Hunger gnawed at him but he paid it no mind. The wind was not bad here. He burrowed into the deep leaves, half sat with the stone wall behind his shoulders. He sat with the gun clasped in his hands and thought about nothing at all. After a while his eyes closed and he went to sleep to the sound of the wind whipping the snow off the coping of the stone wall.

  Perhaps at one time the wall had formed some sort of boundary, the domain of a landed gentleman from a wealthier time. Day showed him a skiff of snow on the ground, other signs of human habitation. He tarried idly, exploring. There were great stone chimneys high rising against the gray of the heavens but they framed a house that was not there anymore. Perhaps a fire so long ago that even the blackened earth had been leached clean by the seasons. Poking about he found shards of blue broken glass and a few old label-less bottles with rings of rust about their necks where lids had been. They might be money buried here, he told himself. He looked, slipping about but there was no one to see, listened but there was no sound save the wind sighing in the pines.

  Stepping through an old hedge he fetched up short and swore. He flailed at the air, caught himself in the tangled hedge. Below him the earth fell away in a well eight feet or so in diameter, its round walls smoothly bricked and sloping away to where water gathered at the bottom black as ink. Old cautionary timbers laid across it and weathered stumps lay about the opening. Goddamn, he said. Who knew what bones slept dreamlessly here. He retrieved the gun from the tangled hedge and retreated. Blowing across the well the wind moaned hollowly, played on the harp of the earth, an eerie wailing that followed him down the skeleton of a road and faded finally out when timber thickened and hills came between them.

  By near noon he was following a cherted road that did not seem to go anywhere. It was just a road. It wound around curves but when he negotiated them there was only more of the same, red clay banks rising into scrub pine and blackjack. But later he began to hear the sounds of labor, hammering, the whine of a chainsaw. At last he came upon a crew of men by and by rebuilding a bridge. Five or six of them who ceased working their labor to stare at his approach. There was a flatbed truck with a canvas doghouse on the back parked on the shoulder of the road and he saw then lunch boxes aligned alongside the water cooler. The men nodded to him but did not speak. Hidy, he said. He passed them, down the embankment and through the shallow creek. He could feel their eyes on his back. After a time he could hear the hammering commence again.

  A quarter mile or so from the bridge he came upon an old gray farmhouse. Curtains at the windows. Gourds strung on seagrass twine from the porch joists that the wind keened through. Woodsmoke hovering above the ground, sharp and nostalgic in the damp air. A bugeyed Bichon Frise came down a cobbled walk and barked at him fiercely.

  Roosterfish looked about him. Across the road a branch wound and the ground sloped away and he stooped and laid the gun out of sight on a ledge in the flintrock. He crossed into the yard, ceased when the dog snapped at his trousercuffs. Git, he told it. It barked ferociously. Hush goddamn you. I’ll cut your thoat with a pocketknife. He kicked at it ineffectually. Or maybe eat you, he added.

  The front door opened and an old woman came out drying her hands on her apron. Hush, she screamed at the Frise. The dog lay on its belly and with its tongue lolling, watched Roosterfish, malevolent with its black protuberant eyes. Roosterfish stepped around it and went on up the walk. How do, ma’am, he said. He already had his hat off.

  How do, she said. She was a tiny little woman with bright berry eyes, short frizzed gray hair. She adjusted wirerim glasses and waited for him to speak.

  Ma’am, is that your dog there?

  Yes sir it is. It didn’t bite ye did it?

  Oh no. I hate to even bother you with it. Roosterfish was humble, polite, you might say courtly.

  Well, what’d it been into?

  My crew’s fixin that bridge up the road and it eat my dinner. I had my lunch in a poke there on the bank and it got into it and eat it ever bite.

  They Lord. Why didn’t you take a switch to it?

  It had done eat it.

  Well. I don’t know what you had but maybe I can scrape you up somethin fit for ye dinner. You want to warm a minute while I look in the kitchen.

  Just anything atoll, Roosterfish said, crossing the sill. He stood reading homilies from the wall, reproachful. He warmed his hand at the potbellied stove, leaned over as if he could absorb heat and store it against cold to come. He looked about the room. The floor was littered with wood shavings, mounds of white long curls of ash or hickory and aligned against the walls were leaned axehandles in varying stages of completion and the worn velvet of a draw knife. On the mantle of a boarded up fireplace was a box of kitchen matches and he pocketed a handful.

  She came through the kitchen door carrying a brown paper bag and handed it to him. Its weight was comforting. When I seen you I thought maybe you come to buy an axehandle, she said as if she lived in dread of some shortage of axehandles.

  No ma’am. You make all them axehandles?

  Me and my husband used to make em but he died.

  Oh, you sell many of em?

  Not anymore. I guess I make em mostly out of habit. It makes the time go by.

  Roosterfish had the bag under his arm. I reckon I better get back to work. That bunch don’t do nothin less somebody’s watching em.

  And say you don’t want to buy no handle?

  I reckon not.

  He was already on the porch when she followed him out with an axehandle in her hands. Here. I won’t charge ye for it. If you ever see anybody needs one tell em Bessie Littleton’s got em.

  He did not tell her he owned no axe. I thank ye, he said.

  He went down the walk with the bag under his arm and the handle clasped in his hand. The bag felt warm against his ribs. He could smell fried ham, spicy smell of sausage, apple pie. When he heard the door close he leaned down the embankment and laid the axehandle atop the gun and picked them both up. He went on down the road. He looked back once and saw the curtains fall against the window and he wondered what she thought when he did not go back up the road. His arm tightened on the bag. After a few minutes the road curved and the house was as lost to his sight as if it had never been.

  Two or three miles from Harkness’s trailer there was a steep hill and cutback, so steep a vehicle must stop to make the curve
, take low gear to begin the long climb up the rutted and rainwashed road. Off the left side of the road was a descending thicket of halfgrown cedars lost in vine-encrusted hazelnut bushes and then a dropoff of eight or nine feet to a narrow and longfallow field. This was where Roosterfish took up his vigil.

  Roosterfish had become as desolate as the country he moved through, a haint. He suspected madness at his heels but had neither the strength nor desire to flee it. He let it engulf him, warm muddy water lapping about his thighs. At night strange noises whispered in his ears, the memories of old unforgotten wrongs crawled like succubi into his blanket wherever he made his bitter lonely bed. Sinister thoughts wormed into his half asleep mind like serpents, took on the configuration of animals unknown to him.

  By day he watched hawks wheel against the mute and limitless heaven. At night owls and doves called to him half asleep in brushpiles and the hollows of uprooted trees. Nearly two weeks later Aday and his deputies tromped through the undergrowth, found where he had lain long hours in wait for Harkness. There was evidence here, though unneeded, of the hours stacked one on the other like tottering blocks, pitifully insignificant when weighed against what came after. A crumpled cigarette pack, an empty Gypsy Rose wine bottle, gnawed bones of rabbits or chickens, hollowed out places or worse where he must have slept his troubled sleep, tromped out places in the willows where he had squatted and shat. Who knew what thoughts dwelt in his mind, what games filled the hours through which he waited as if some power higher than he had charged him with a watch he must keep.

  He waited almost a week for Harkness. On the sixth night while he hunkered watching, lights appeared on a distant curve and swept the tree branches like the tangible and immediate result of some prayer; the truck came on until he could hear it, Harkness rawhiding it as usual, impatient, slurring in the gravel, heading not as he thought for the life waiting in her bed but for its nether pole that Roosterfish took up when first he heard the truck.