The Lost Country

by William Gay

  The man was silent. I don’t even see what a onearmed man could do as a carpenter, he said at length.

  It’d surprise you what a onearmed man can do when he’s up against it, Roosterfish said.

  Well. I’m sorry about your tools and all, but this ain’t no gravytrain I’m ridin here.

  I know. That’s fine, I appreciate you takin the time to listen to me. Sometimes it helps just talkin about your troubles.

  He turned to go, paused to crush the cigarette out in an ashtray by the door. He paused for a moment as if awaiting something. The cash register chinged behind him.

  Hell, hold up a minute, the man said. Roosterfish turned. The man was proffering a bill. A five, Roosterfish’s expert eye discerned. I been down and out myself, the attendant said. If this’ll help, take it on.

  God bless you brother, Roosterfish said, making a mental note to include the Direct Oil Company in his prayers that night.

  Just don’t piss it away on whiskey, the man said.

  Roosterfish was going through the doorway. I don’t much hold with spirits, he said.

  His radar was infallible when applied to the presence of police cars and he saw the one parked across the street immediately, though he didn’t acknowledge it. He got into the Studebaker and closed the door, the five-dollar bill exuding a subtle and reassuring warmth against his thigh. When he pulled into the street the cruiser cranked too and eased along behind him. He glanced up once to the rearview mirror then ignored the cop. He’d been just a shape behind the wheel, stolid and inevitable as the rest, and Roosterfish figured he’d come in a box stamped: one Southern smalltown cop. Nightstick and gun and attitude included. Red lights flashed and sirens sounded. Roosterfish pulled over.

  He heard the cruiser door open and looked right toward a brick schoolhouse beyond an expanse of green lawn. Children were swinging on playground gymsets and laughter rolled toward him bright as unstrung beads. Laugh it up, he told them. Wait’ll you see what’s around the next bend in the road. He took a deck of Camels out of his bib pocket and began to peel away the narrow strip of cellophane with his teeth.

  License and registration.

  Roosterfish dealt them up.

  The cop was scrutinizing the license. You a long way from Ackerman’s Field. What are you doing down here?

  Passin through, lookin for work.

  You a mechanic?

  No.

  You seem to have been patronizing all our garages and service stations. Was you looking for work at all of them?

  Roosterfish didn’t answer.

  That’s against the law. It’s called soliciting.

  I didn’t know soliciting was against the law.

  It is here.

  I really wasn’t doing that anyway. I was just askin for a favor. Is that against the law?

  It damn sure is.

  There seemed no fitting response to this. Roosterfish at length began his wellworn tale of Lake County tool thieves, the purloined money, the carpenter job, but he was interrupted.

  Get out of your vehicle, the cop said. Open up that back end and let’s see what all’s back there. We’ve had a string of burglaries around here.

  Roosterfish felt on firmer ground. I wouldn’t steal a nickel from the richest man on Nob Hill, he said, climbing out of the Studebaker.

  The interior revealed a battered suitcase, five or six fivegallon buckets, two wire cages with fighting cocks in them. Over all a rich smell of raw gasoline. Roosterfish’s worldly goods revealed to their essence.

  What’s them chickens for?

  Roosterfish pondered this. Finally he said: They’re not for anything. Whatever chickens are for. They’re just chickens.

  They look like fighting cocks to me. Cockfighting is a felony in the state of Tennessee.

  Well. That’s why I got them in separate cages there. So they won’t tie up and fight. Won’t break the law.

  Goddamn it you know what I mean. It’s against the law to fight roosters and bet money on it. Are you that dumb?

  I’m pretty dumb, Roosterfish said.

  I could arrest you, the cop said. He closed the camper door, opened it and slammed it so that the latch caught. I could vag you, but I’ll bet you’ve got money in your pocket, don’t you?

  A little, Roosterfish said. He dealt up his hole card. Listen, he said, I’m just doin the best I can. Life’s hard for a onearmed man.

  Life’s hard for one and all, the cop told him.

  Roosterfish was silent. He thought about bringing up hearth and home, old grayhaired tearstained mothers, but a man needs to know when to quit.

  I could lock you up but the county’d have to feed you and if you’re clean the judge’d just turn you loose. I think the simplest thing is you just get the hell out of my county. I’m going to follow you to the county line and I don’t ever want to see that rollin piece of scrapiron around here again. Are we right clear on that?

  Yes, Roosterfish said. Which way do you want me to go?

  Any way that suits you, the cop said. Let’s pretend that right here is the center of everything and that any way you go in a straight line will get you somewhere else. Just pick a direction and head out.

  Roosterfish drove eastward at a sedate pace. The cruiser followed, red light pulsing. We look like a goddamned parade, Roosterfish thought, grinning at himself in the rearview mirror, but he had always had a great fondness for parades and he did not let it bother him.

  Roosterfish drove past the last grocery store late in the afternoon, surveyed it carefully as he passed. They were all beginning to look alike. Double Cola signs, Bull of the Woods chewing tobacco, 666 Tonic. Even the same whittlers lollygagging on upended Coke crates. He turned into the graveled yard of an old church and leafed through his notebook to see had he been there before. He had not. He backed onto the chert road and drove slowly back, easing up to the gaspump. He adjusted his striped painter’s cap, his expression of hangdog humility, assumed the air of a man cruelly put upon by the world, but who will not acknowledge defeat. Hard times on the land.

  How many?

  The man was heavyset, stolid. Cold little eyes as compassionless as a hog’s. A hard sell for sure.

  Good buddy, I’m in trouble, Roosterfish told him.

  The man looked up and down the road as though there might be prowl cars, bloodhounds, pursuit.

  My name’s Lipscomb. I’m a housepainter by my trade, and I got promise of a job over by Clifton, if I could just get there. I’ve had sickness and the loss of a loved one. I’ve pawned most of my tools just to get this far and I ain’t got a red cent left. Not a cryin dime. You my last hope.

  Dubious of this honor he still stood stolid, scratching his head.

  Roosterfish had intended asking for three dollars, automatically compensated down. Two dollars would get me way down the line. I’d stop on my way back and settle up with you.

  I give gas to everbody comes through here I wouldn’t even be here when you come back. If you did. Now would I?

  Well how about just a dollar to get me somewhere else? She’s settin right on the peg. He waggled his stump. Life’s hard for a onearm man.

  Life’s hard for one and all, the man said. He was peering into the Studebaker. I might swap them chickens.

  Lord them ain’t eatin chickens. Them’s fightin cocks.

  They’d still sweeten up a pot of dumplins.

  That Allen Roundhead there’s won upwards of two thousand dollars.

  Maybe you could get him to spring for the gas, the man told him.

  Just move ye foot back. I got to get on.

  There was a logroad that came up before the blacktop did and he turned in here and turned off the motor and got out. He opened the back, drug out one of the five-gallon cans and walked bent onesided with its weight and with wrist and elbow hoisted it onto the top of the hood. He unscrewed the gas cap and got out his siphoning hose.

  While the gas ran he checked the sun, called it quitting time, the self-employed keep hours
of their choosing. He did a quick accounting of the worn wadded bills in his pockets. When he was through he shook the can to see how much gas remained and went back and rested against the open front door. Some of these McNairy County folks is rockhearted sons of bitches, he told the chickens.

  Roosterfish, in more congenial surroundings, had taken for his dwelling an abandoned fishing cottage on a cliff above the Tennessee River. No one knew he was here, the wrong season for fishing and no one stumbled across him. No fishermen had come and probably no one cared anyway. The road up here was long and winding, the Studebaker would barely negotiate its steeper turnings. Wind or the slow accretions of time had tilted the cabin on its axis of foundation stones and when Roosterfish first found it it had been the keep of raccoons and foxes. Now it was swept and scrubbed and cozy as a badger’s den. He’d furnished it with recycled window curtains over the one window and the broken table he replevied was covered by a new oil cloth lithographed with coffee grinders and spice bottles.

  But he thought he’d take dinner on the veranda tonight. The evening air was pleasant if a little windy and he built a fire in a brick grill covered with an oven rack he found in a dump. When the fire was burning well he set two castiron skillets atop the rack. Waited a bit. Spooned in lard, watched its slick oily slide across the warming black surface.

  Fish tonight. Catfish done up in white butcher’s paper and tied with string. He rolled the fillets in a bowl of seasoned cornmeal, checked the temperature of the grease, laid the breaded fish aside and began peeling potatoes.

  The grease sizzled when he laid in the pale catfish. Rich smell of seared cornmeal, bright crinkling odor of black pepper. He sliced potatoes into the other skillet, wary of the popping grease.

  While things cooked he took a pint of whiskey from beneath the seat of the malformed truck. Sipped it slowly with one eye on his dinner, holding the whiskey on the back of his tongue and diluting it then swallowing. Good bonded whiskey. I.W. Harper bourbon, no popskull crazyman’s potion here. Taking the whiskey like a sacrament, like the distillation of all his past, while the river moved below the steep bluff like the comforting murmur of days out of the lost country of his youth and the light slowly went down in the world.

  When the food cooked he ate from a blue enameled plate, catfish crisped and browned and greasy potatoes and lightbread fresh from its cellophane wrappings. Done, he mounded the plate with potato peelings and scraps and raked everything over the bluff into the river and scoured the plate clean with sand and stowed it away. The night drew on, the farther trees like textured fabric against the deepening twilight and the river louder. He set out the caged cocks before the fire and filled the trays with water and the feedbins with cracked corn. The wind was rising, you could hear it in the leaves, in the soft clash of branches. Ain’t you a meanlookin son of a bitch, he asked one of the roosters. The cocks just watched him with eyes like bits of black glass. The wind guttered in the grill and the light running across the cocks looked every shade in the spectrum, gold and red and indigo and gradations of deep seagreen.

  The level fell in the bottle. Roosterfish felt comfortable and warm, at peace with the world, squire of all he surveyed. He set the bottle carefully on a stump and rose and took from the truck a fiddlecase, from the case a fiddle and a bow.

  How about a tune? he asked the roosters, and clasped the fiddle with his chin and the stub of his left arm, bowing with his right, the strings opentuned to accommodate the way he has to play since he can’t note anymore. He wasn’t drunk but he did a crazy little jig just the same, the demented fiddle evoking kilted highland dancers and whiskey flowing like water and longlashed eyes cutting at you in the smoky firelight.

  Then after awhile he recased the violin and just smoked and drank and listened to the river. A lone whippoorwill called out of the timber, another, and he asked the rooster, Ain’t that a lonesome sound? I bet you can’t do that.

  More of them, a chorus of them, a choir, he’s camping in Whippoorwill City here.

  He took a drink. We goin to get Harkness, he told the fighting cock. Him and his rooster too. We’re just bidin our time, gettin us a grubstake. Buildin up the kitty. Me and you. You take the little one and I’ll take the big one. He sipped. Or if that don’t suit you, you take the big one and I’ll take the little one.

  The cock fixed him with an arrogant black eye. Firelight ran like quicksilver on its iridescent metallic feathers. It looked like caged lightning, like some gaudy killing machine from an alien world.

  When full night came he carried the cages into the cabin and while they made querulous complaints he lit a kerosene lamp and when he reglobed it the yellowlit room sprang fullformed out of the dark with its comforting familiar features and he lay down on an old Salvation Army cot leveled with bricks and took up from beneath it a wellworn truecrime magazine he found here, and sipping from time to time he read these dispatches like a diary the world kept of its heinous and bloody doings.

  After a time there was a murmur like distant thunder and he went out to see. Sure enough, far downriver, a staccato flickering between and above the trees, the sky flaring electrically and subsiding and flaring again. Just a murmur of thunder, a realm of thunder, an almost lost memory of thunder. The wind was at the trees again, they whispered and clashed in liquid disquiet and the air smelled like rain and the wind on his face was warm and damp.

  Some time in the night he woke and the rain was pounding on the tin roof in a downpour without variation, but he’d retarred the roof weeks ago and he didn’t worry about leaks. He listened to it rain for a time and then he eased back down into dreamless sleep.

  There were days when Edgewater’s desire to be home was near manic, when he pushed himself with ferocity and recalled, with self-loathing, money he had in times past thrown so carelessly away. There was idle time to repent, but he repented small things, a guitar pawned and not redeemed, drinks bought for buddies, for whores with only first names. Greyhound buses passed him, the blue smell of diesel fiercely nostalgic, faces looming down strange as if they inhabited some other world. Then it was gone and the land it moved across was as green and flat as a pool table.

  These days all the demons of deeds done and deeds imagined seemed to coalesce into one, some gaunt outrider of the fates whose footfalls coincided with his, who while he lay in troubled sleep pressed on untired, came implacably on with a vague and timeless inevitability: then it would seem that the family he moved toward were no better, surcease had flown when he did. Death had enlisted them in its cause and scattered them wherever its winds decreed them, left them with seeds of their own to sow, small plagues of their own to spread. He did not know what drew him on. The girl was no more than a name and a packet of abandoned letters, a ring a shyster jeweler had unloaded on him in San Diego, a face he could no longer call to mind even in half-sleep.

  He moved across country of dreary sameness, he wished for mountains, hills, anything that would break the featureless monotony of flatlands. On a map he picked up at a service station Highway 70 lay like a spoke in a wheel that had Nashville as its hub. Another spoke led away east to Chattanooga. There were rides to be had in Nashville. It loomed like a goal on the horizon he moved toward.

  There were few rides here. He rode in rattletrap pickups with wizened old men and he crouched in the cabs of flatbed trucks trapped in small malignant whirlwinds of bits of straw, dust, fertilizer. Country moved away and there was yet more of the same, as if he were lost, they were all lost, going in circles. It was as if they moved through some area where the process of creation had been set in motion long ago, and, demented, it continued to produce a country new and yet eternally the same.

  The newlooking cars with out-of-state tags would not stop for him and he came to believe that no one was going anywhere. Just down the road is all. To the grocery store, to town on Saturday. Town was never far away. Sunday there were carloads of people bound for church, stiff and straight in old highbacked cars lacquered with dust. Little girls
like cut flowers. Boys with grim visages who turned to stare at him with envy down this dusty roadway.

  He strayed off Highway 70 with a garrulous peddler of Watkins products and rode all day with him, watching with interest as he dispensed from the loaded backseat nostrums and tins of pie filling and vanilla extract and boxes of exotic-smelling spices. He sat idly in the spicy heat amidst this merchandise outside a tarpapered shack while the peddler screwed a gaunt old woman with snuffjuice at the corner of her mouth and lank strands of dead irongray hair she smoothed coyly away. The peddler came out buttoning his fly and gave Edgewater a knowing wink.

  He thought vaguely of San Francisco.

  Where’d you find her?

  Find her hell. She found us. Me and Tubbs was both broke and lookin for somebody off the ship to hit for five bucks when she hollered at us. She was standin outside this apartment building, Lord, she was seventy if she was a day. She said she bet we was lonesome so far from home on Christmas and she said she had a whole turkey and trimmins cooked up and nobody to eat it but her. We was broke and who knows, she might have had a bottle up there. So we went up and Tubbs screwed her first.

  Jesus. I thought I was bad but I can’t hold you a light. You sons of bitches are perverted.

  Hell, MacPherson said. She wanted it. I didn’t know they wanted it that old.

  They don’t in Huntsville, huh?

  Not that I know of. Tubbs was screwin her and it didn’t suit him somehow and he had the bottle of Fitch’s Rose Hair Oil in his ditty bag. He upended her and poured it in her and went back at it.

  Hellfire, Edgewater said, then sarcastically, Did she come?

  Like a Winchester repeatin rifle, MacPherson assured him solemnly.

  Edgewater riding with a talkative sewing machine salesman. The car the salesman drove was comfortable and the flat country had slipped away with deceptive ease. The salesman was generous with his cigarettes and he was glad of an audience for his tales and it did not bother him that Edgewater mostly rode in silence. His tales all seemed to concern his various escapades with housewives. Most of them had him with clothing in hand escaping from windows, back doors, or hiding under beds and in closets. His narrow escapes were many and his virility had entered into female folklore, and under the cumulative weight of all his evidence Edgewater was forced to conclude that sewing and machine were the two most powerful words in the English language and that when combined they produced an aphrodisiac of irresistible and unreckonable potency.