The Lost Country

by William Gay

  What? Simmons was looking at him in disbelief.

  The rats. Are they for sale?

  Hell, everthing I ever owned is for sale. But I never heard tell of sellin no rats.

  What’ll you take?

  Shit, I don’t know. Reckon how many’s left?

  It don’t matter. Just give me a price for the lot.

  Hmm. Is a dollar and a half too high?

  It sounds fair to me. Edgewater had arisen, was digging in his pockets, uncrumpling a dollar bill, finding dimes.

  Just for my own information, what did you plan on doing with em?

  I don’t know yet, Edgewater said. The notion just struck me I wanted some. He dropped the money into Simmons’s outstretched hand.

  I lost the papers I had on em, Simmons said. He stood drunkenly looking about the room. I know I had them pedigrees here somewhere.

  I better see about my stock, Edgewater told Roosterfish. Roosterfish had almost finished the bottle. He drained it, studied the painting of the bird on the label. He stood the bottle against the wall. He was shaking his head from side to side. He was laughing. You crazy little son of a bitch, he said.

  It was cool and damp in the yard. It was still raining. Pulley was aiming, steadying the pistol with his left hand, the barrel resting on the rim of the drum. He fired just as Edgewater approached the group.

  Edgewater looked into the oil drum. There were two rats left, crazed and slick with blood. Roosterfish was coming out the door grinning, a fresh bottle in his hands. Pulley was aiming again.

  You about to shoot my property, Edgewater told him. I bought these rats from their owner.

  Done what?

  They’re my rats. I gave seventy-five cents apiece for them.

  You’re so full of shit it’s comin out your ears. How come you want to start somethin up with me?

  I can get a receipt if you want to see it.

  He told me I could shoot these rats.

  They were his rats when he told you that. They’re not his rats anymore. They’re my rats.

  Why that’s the craziest goddamned thing I ever heard. What do you aim to do with em?

  I may have a market for them.

  Tyler was grinning to himself. I knew it, he told Pulley. I had that boy figured for a livestock dealer all along.

  Why they ain’t nothin but goddamned gopher rats.

  These are special rats, Edgewater said. Royal blood runs in their veins. If they were people they’d be princes, kings.

  They about to be dethroned, Pulley said, aiming.

  Hold it just a minute, Tyler said, grinning. He turned to Edgewater.

  You say you can produce a receipt for these animals?

  You could holler at Simmons.

  Hey Simmons.

  Simmons appeared in the door.

  You sell a pair of rats to this boy?

  Hell yeah, Simmons said. Is he not satisfied with em? I sold em as is. If he ain’t satisfied he’s just stuck. They wadn’t no garntee on em.

  It was more a question of ownership.

  Oh, he owns em all right.

  It looks like they’re sure enough his rats, Tyler told Pulley commiseratively. He can law ye if ye shoot them.

  I guess you’d be his lawyer, Pulley said disgustedly. You bench-legged little shit you.

  That was either the whiskey or the pistol talking, Tyler said. I can’t tell which. Put the gun in your pocket and we’ll see what he has to say.

  Pulley stood uncertainly holding the lowered gun. Edgewater pondering what to do with his rats.

  Just start to point it at me, Tyler said. I’ll open you up like a can of peas.

  This is between me and him. I ain’t gettin straight-razor’d over some fuckin rats.

  Edgewater found a burlap bag in the crib. Help me get my rats rounded up, he told Roosterfish. He held the sack while Roosterfish tilted the drum. The rats scurried about inside and at last scampered into the bag. He stood holding the bag, swinging it lightly. He could feel the frantic movement of the rats straining against the burlap.

  Tyler winked at him. They look like good breedin stock, he said.

  The others had fallen back, stood awkwardly watching Pulley and the gun.

  You as crazy a son of a bitch as I ever come across, Pulley told Edgewater.

  Edgewater had started wending his way among the cars. Roosterfish got his sack of bologna and bread and followed along behind.

  Chickenshit, Pulley called.

  That was the notorious rat king of the Chicago stockyards, Tyler said.

  When they reached the top of the hill Edgewater dropped the bag by the side of the road and nudged it with his foot. After a moment a rat peered out whiskerfaced and sniffed all around him, scurried into the brush. The other followed.

  I don’t know about you, Roosterfish told him. Did you ever fall a long way and light on your head?

  ———

  The day was long and monotonous but when night finally did fall without the setting of any visible sun but some mere incremental darkening of the world and an almost perceptible compensatory increase in the pitch of the water below them Edgewater wrapped himself in the blanket and lay on his back watching the play of shadows, the flicker of firelight teasing about the stone ceiling.

  A vague peace would come over him, not yet resolution but a feeling of uncontrollable postponement, fateful decisions the elements had wrested from his hands. He came to think of time not as some amalgamation of scenery and people and voices and deeds that rushed overwhelmingly over him, but as a flat winding ribbon of asphalt he moved along. There were sideroads and alleys branching off it and logroads bowered by dripping rushes and empty houses abandoned to progress: gaptoothed treeline and people hidden with secret lives he would never know. But all the time that counted was the serpentine road, slick and black with rain or dazzling bright under a high tracking sun. His advance along it was a measurement of his allotted time and he could delay it on the sideroads, while he stumbled down alleys crept with lichens, time stopped, all the world that he mattered to held its breath and waited.

  In some perverse way he could bend time to his will: time had curious warps in it and pockets of elasticity and he was at its center and he could move it to his whim.

  Yet in the night there were voices that bespoke him out of a past recent but already lost, out of faces dimming and remote, faces he would never see again. In the unsleeping dark out of a night alive and vibratory with voices he might recognize the timbre and cadence of one he had known, old acquaintances lost and gone that returned like familiars or revenants to carry forth in ghostly enactment liaisons long terminated, incubi and succubi that would not let him go. He could not forget anything, nothing was ever ended, ever really lost.

  Once with something akin to fear he heard Jenny speak, but there were no voices beyond the grave, casket lids close gently on silence inviolate.

  Sometimes past dusk and downriver carlights would arch upward toward the high bridge trestle. In search of what? Who were these interlopers in the night? Lovers, revelers, gamblers on the lost highway? Could he but share their musky dark his own dread would be assuaged, shards of it pressed onto unwary strangers as if he were some salesman dispensing under pretext these evil and unnameable wares, until all the dread that accrued to him was shuttled away, weight shifted to other shoulders, and, with his own lightened, he could move on.

  In the morning the rain had ceased but the sky looked dark and sullen. By midmorning a streak of metallic rose appeared in the east where the sun broke briefly through and they took heart. They walked down to see what sort of shape the car was in and debated between them how long it would take the field to dry out. But before they were back to the shelter of the bluff the sky smoothed over seamlessly and rain began to fall anew. It rained for three more days.

  There was a disquiet to the river this rainy night. Lights hovered about the trestle, looped like fireflies above the curving highway in something like desperation, as if the
y were trapped in some asphalt maze. There were sounds the night brought to them where they sat like an encampment of eavesdroppers, unwilling conspirators in the passing of the night. Car doors slammed, voices from the bridge reached them disembodied and robbed of identity, an incoherent dialogue composed of the voices and the roar of the river and the eternal dripping of the trees that Edgewater felt he had listened to always. An occasional squad car passed, red light diastolic, fishers of men.

  Just look at em, Roosterfish said, gesturing vaguely toward the lights, uncapping a bottle of Gypsy Rose. The young uns runnin after pussy and the old uns from it. And ever one of em drunk as a fiddler’s bitch. Tomorrow they’ll wash up in jail or the hospital or across from the old lady and wonder what they done. People around here get squirrelly as hell of a Saturday.

  Perhaps they heard the ticking of death’s clock, Edgewater thought. Would try by any means to slow or speed it according to their preferences. To drown the metronomic precision of it.

  You may notice I keep to myself a lot, Roosterfish went on. That’s because I’m leery of them crazy fuckers. I’ve seen too many cuttins and shootin scrapes and I know where the line’s at.

  What line?

  The line between bein here and expectin to get up tomorrow mornin with my life still in one piece on one side and wakin up in a cell knowin I killed somebody, or not wakin up at all, on the other. One minute you’re arguin with somebody and the next one somebody’s dead. You don’t know where the line’s at ever minute you in a world of trouble.

  Seem to me you take a lot of chances.

  That’s because I know where it’s at. A man knows that can get closer than one that don’t.

  Edgewater squinted his eyes. I never figured you for a philosopher.

  A man by his self a lot gets to studyin.

  I guess so.

  What about you?

  What about me? I’m not much of a philosopher.

  Roosterfish paused with a drink from the bottle. I had a lot of time to think when I’se in prison.

  What were you in for?

  I was framed. Ah, hell, I know what ye thinkin. Everbody I ever met was framed cept a feller that they had in there for fuckin dead women. You talk about a son of a bitch with a mainspring busted. A undertaker. He never said if he did or he didn’t but I guess that’d be kind of a hard frame to set up. I’ve often wondered what kind of a look he had on his face when whoever caught him walked in on him. It’d be hard explainin a thing like that.

  Considering you met him in prison I guess it must have been impossible.

  Anyway, my uncle set me up. He had a barn the insurance was gettin hot on and he talked me into burnin it. Hell, I’se a kid, I didn’t know no better. I’se accommodatin. They caught me and I kept waitin for him to come down and say it was all a mistake. I’m still waitin. That was the first in a long line of valuable lessons I learned.

  Wouldn’t they believe you?

  Hell, I never told them. I’se young then. I’d read too many storybooks, I thought everthing had a happy endin.

  What was prison like?

  It was like hell. That’s exactly what it was like. They had ever kind of crazy son of a bitch in there you could imagine. They had people in there for rapin and killin. They had people in there for fuckin babies and people in there for fuckin ninety-year-old women. They was a boy in there raped and killed his old black mammy. Got up about seventeen and raped her and smothered her to death with a pillow.

  At least they were locked up, Edgewater considered.

  It ain’t nothin wasted, nothin you don’t learn from. It learnt me two things. By and large people ain’t worth a shit and I never want to be back inside them walls again.

  They fell silent, listening to the river. Edgewater tentatively sipped at his wine. A motor ceased, a car door slammed up on the highway. Roosterfish could not let the subject go.

  Hell, even the goddamned guards got squirrelly. They had one used to put on his uniform off duty and go out and direct traffic and arrest people. Thought he was a damn law. And them guards was cold, cruel people. They ever got ahold of one by accident that had any human about him he didn’t last twenty-four hours.

  Down through the scraggly woods on the upper side of the fescue field flashlights appeared, descending the grade. They came out of the woods and skirted the field, intent as purposeful fireflies, side by side, maintaining their distance like malevolent eyes.

  Reckon who that is?

  Lord, I don’t know. Coonhunters, maybe, seen the fire. I hope they’re sober. Failin that I hope they’re peaceful. Lot of these highrollers think Saturday’s wasted if they don’t kick the shit out of somebody.

  Maybe somebody swore out a warrant.

  And they found us this quick and waded out here tonight to serve it? Not likely, I never seen one with that much energy about him. Them ain’t hasslin drunks or tryin to catch somebody screwin is settin on their butts somers drinkin coffee.

  The paper boy, mused Edgewater. A preacher. Census taker.

  They fell silent and watched the company drawing nearer. You got anything in the nature of a weapon?

  I got me a twelve gauge with the barrel sawed off and the stock cut down to a pistol, but the barrel’s loose and I ain’t never shot it. Lord knows what sort of damage it’d do to them and me both. And whoever else happened to be in the neighborhood.

  Through the misty rain two apparitions drawn up like moths, they came on to the fire dressed alike in dress pants slathered to the knees with mud and white shirts open at the front and with the collar turned up. Their shoes were layered with sticky clay so that they looked like outsized clown shoes, and one of the men, when they went into the flickering half-sphere of light, began to kick his feet against a ledge, first one and then the other, dislodging the gummy mud.

  Roosterfish turned his head aside in annoyance when the light struck him in the face and the man turned it aside.

  Hidy.

  What say?

  We seen ye fire and thought you was somebody else.

  I reckon not. Just us.

  The men hunkered before the fire and extended their hands to its warmth as if the night were cold. Edgewater did not know them but he had seen hundreds like them. He had seen them in beerjoints and cafés on Saturdays and outside locked poolroom doors before daylight, as dispossessed as any tenants evicted from their homes. The light flickered about their faces and their hard eyes and there seemed to be an inherent violence to them, arrogance and defiance as much a part of their genetic makeup as the color of eyes and hair. Their eyes were remote and studied and Edgewater wondered idly why all the faces he saw in this vast land seemed to allow for no middle ground between arrogance and servility.

  We seen ye light and thought you might be a feller we’re lookin for. You ain’t seen nobody around here tonight have ye?

  No, Roosterfish said. Just lights and cars up on the road there.

  Poindexter’s our name. Our little brother Willard’s down here on the river somewhere. You know that little sawed-off feller Tyler?

  I know of him.

  Tyler’s huntin Willard too and we got to find him first.

  We ain’t seen a soul. Yins care for a drink of wine?

  They took the bottle with dignity and drank and passed it one to the other. Lord, ain’t that old river rollin, one of them said.

  I reckon so. We got off in here drunk and got our car stuck and stranded ourselves. When you reckon she’ll go down?

  They Lord, they ain’t no tellin. I ain’t never seen her on a stem-winder like this. Ever time it quits and the clouds break up she just clouds back up and sets in again. Feller was down by where them Mennonites live and he said they was two or three feet of water in some of their houses and cows standin around belly-deep. Said they was drownded-lookin chickens ridin planks and buckets and whatever wouldn’t sink. No tellin at the crops it’s ruint. Is they any way we could help you get ye car out?

  Couldn’t no cattypillar get it
out now, Roosterfish said. I’se drunk like I said and I just kept settin her down. I thank ye for offerin.

  Roosterfish laid a piece of cedar on the fire, gnarled and gray, worn by the weather as smooth as driftwood. Watched it catch, the rich aromatic gasses flared blue.

  The men arose. I guess we better get on. We got to find Willard.

  He may be up at Simmons’s place. It’s usually a crowd up there.

  We was headed up there next. And say you don’t know Tyler?

  Just when I see him.

  Pound for pound he’s the meanest son of a bitch ever wore out shoe leather. He’ll cut ye if he can and if he can’t he’ll lay for ye. He’s got a little pull with the law around here and he’s as overbearin as they come. I reckon somebody’ll just have to kill him.

  The other one spoke. Willard’s out with a whore Tyler thinks he owns and Tyler’s huntin him. We out tryin to stop a killin or at least see it falls on the right side.

  They started back toward the field and coincident with their going a soft drizzle commenced. Through it they watched the lights swing misty like something vaguely sinister seen underwater.

  There goes an accident fixin to happen, Roosterfish said. And I damn sure hope it happens somewhere else.

  They were already in their blankets and the fire waning when next they entertained company. They were abed but not asleep, for there were voices from the road, tones threatening but words indecipherable.

  I thought you said you had privacy down here, Edgewater complained. Hell I slept in quieter bus stations than this.

  Well, it was back in the winter. Hell, I don’t know what’s the matter with these crazy sons of bitches. Man finds hisself a quiet little place and ever goddamn drunk in the world tries to move in on him.

  I guess the neighborhood’s going to hell, all right.

  I’ll be glad when all this water’s gone. If you ever catch me in McNairy County again you can mark it down I’m either drunk or crazy. Roosterfish arose to his elbow, listened to the beleaguered night. The rain fell still and it lent an unreal air to the sounds, they came now vague and sourceless, now with knifelike clarity, like vestiges of some ancient and spectral violence, as if the Poindexters had been harbingers of some dark pageant of mythic transpiration from when the trains labored phosphorous-laden through just such nights as this one, through the slow moth-flecked summer darkness, the curses of tired miners, the easy laughter of the whores who plied their craft from cardboard river shanties.