by William Gay
What’s your name, anyway?
Billy Edgewater. What’s yours?
Faye Ware. Did Willard look bad hurt when he come through down there?
He was moving a little fast to tell.
Me and Willard aim to get married, she told him.
You do?
Yeah. But we won’t live in this hick place. We’re goin to Chicago. Willard’s been there and he knows the ropes. He got him a tattoo there.
Curious place for a tattoo, Edgewater said.
He says up there folks mind their own business. Down here everbody meddles. Folks got it in for Willard.
Why?
The damn law. They got it in for him because Willard don’t take no shit off nobody.
Oh. Nobody except Tyler?
He was goin to kill Willard. He’s so jealous. He did cut him. I’m kindly worried about him.
He wasn’t hurt bad enough to slow him down any.
There did not seem to be much to say. They fell silent and Edgewater settled himself comfortably in the seat and drank whiskey. The radio played on: unseen dancers whirled and clogged to some fiddle tune unreeling far away.
Where you goin?
Home. Up east in the mountains.
You got a girl there?
Not anymore. He lit a cigarette, threw the match in the rain. He halfturned in the seat to face her, but he could not see her: she was just a presence he could sense, a warmth he could feel. Then her face loomed near his, wide-eyed and without definition.
Her mouth tasted sweetly of whiskey. She made an incoherent sound and it opened under his, her hands rose whitely to his face, pulled him tighter, as if she would merge with him, absorb him into herself, feed off him. Without releasing him she slid down in the seat, her skirt rode up, there was the white expanse of her thighs. He tossed the cigarette into the dark and propped the bottle against the gearbox. When he cupped her breast she gasped, a sharp intake of breath. Then she took his hand and guided it between her legs. She was already wet, he could feel the warm moisture through her panties. When he rubbed her with the heel of his hand her hips moved against him. He could feel her hands at his zipper.
Her head slid backward beneath the steering wheel. He could smell perfume, sweat, soap in her hair. You want to get in the back? She did not reply. He could see her eyes, the whites of them, her vague and harried face almost against his own. She opened her legs, pulled him onto her, reaching under him with her other hand to pull the crotch of her panties aside and guide him in. She was locked to him, heat and the hot musky smell of her but mainly the heat, a moist torrid warmth he thought he must drown in.
Beneath him her face was shadowed, lost to him. Where did his thrusts take her? Who rocked her on these waters, he wondered, did the face of Willard burn beneath her eyes? He thought of what Tyler had said, smiled twisted into the dark. The congenitally disaffected. He tried to call forth the lines of her face but he could not. She could have been anybody. He tried idly to recall a face from the past to bestow upon her but none came to mind.
Roosterfish must have been half awake already because when Edgewater came into the camp he was sitting cowled in his blankets watching him approach as if the dark held worse than Edgewater and he had been expecting it. He still had the pistol laid out and he had allowed the fire to die and only coals throbbed there faintly orange in their white cauls of ash.
All the company gone?
It left right after you did. It was by God mad, too. Did you have to rub his nose in it?
She’s no more Tyler’s than she is anybody else’s. If she’s anybody’s I guess she’s Willard’s.
Well, Tyler would dispute you, but he ain’t here. Nobody here but me and old Gypsy Rose. The least you could of done was bring me some back on a stick. I’da done the same for you.
The least you could do would be to use a little respect towards the girl I aim to marry. She’s coming after me in the morning and we’re going to Chicago and get us a tattoo, Edgewater said sarcastically.
Roosterfish did not reply. He lay back and drew the blanket about him but his eyes stayed open. He lay for a long time in silence like a man awaiting sleep the night owes him but will not pay.
You got to watch a son of a bitch like that got an in with the law, he said at last. A man like that won’t even shoot less his dice is loaded. I member when I’se little it was a county court clerk killed my mama. Him drunk as a bicycle and run a stop sign and run right over her and never even stopped till he come up agin a light pole. I’d just stepped off the curb watchin and I seen it all. I’se about six year old. I stood there watchin and I remember I could still feel her hand on my arm even if I knowed she was gone the way a cat or dog or anything else is that’s run over.
What’d they do to him?
Nothin to speak of. He got out of it. Bought his way out. I’se too little to know much about it. I reckon Daddy did finally catch him out and whup his ass but a thing like that don’t even tip the scales.
He lay still and quiet until Edgewater thought he slept and then he said: Daddy never liked me much, I never knowed why. He died of cancer in 1932 and I went to see him when he was bad off and he run me out of the room. I never knowed why that was either; a man ort to know how a thing like that can be. I stayed outside there and I kept thinking he’d call for me when he was dyin but he never did. They said he was breathin and then half a breath is all he took. That was it. I went to his funeral, but he didn’t have nothin to say to me there either.
His wineblurred voice sounded far away like some voice of accusation, of remonstrance that bespoke Edgewater with hindsight out of his own more recent past so he did not reply. He rolled his own blanket out and lay down on his back and saw beyond the bluffs and the shapes of cedars a break in the clouds where a three-quarter moon was haloed with golden rings and three stars were set within like jewels. Weariness lay on him like a coverlet. Too weary for words he lay conscious of the faint buzz of the alcohol and aware of himself miasmic with the smell of her lipstick and the sticky musk of her sex. A softer bed there than this. The path there less thorny than through this sylvan bottomland. The dreams less troubled there. Would my own father call my name? Time cheats us all. A face as hard and shorn of give as the rock where I lay my head. Yet I seem to recall other days. I recall the warmth of his flesh, the feel of his shoulders, the way the world looked from up there. The way the horizon bobbed and tilted when his feet struck the ground as though the very earth shook when he walked. Time is the enemy, time is the acid God pours on events to etch and change them, real and unreal are no more than words and interchangeable at best.
Did Willard ever come back through? he asked aloud.
If he did he tiptoed through, Roosterfish said. Willard’s gone. Willard is a lost ball in the high weeds.
He slept a little before dawn and he dreamed he moved across a homaloidal waste peopled only with the snags of trees scorched by ancient fire and the world was covered with white ash that rose and shifted with what breeze there was. There was a verdant blue horizon so far away it lay dreaming in haze and he knew without knowing why there was something dread about it. Something awaited him there and a fear of it lay in him heavy as a stone but it did not turn him back.
He grew weary and searched for shade to rest in but it was a surreal world of sourceless light that cast no shadows. He sat beside a hollowed treetrunk and felt terror at the pristine land of feathery ash he’d crossed and left no tracks. He sat numbly and he dreamt he slept, dreamt dreams of the mountains, of winter snows.
He awoke thirsty and tried to go back to sleep, dozed once, half-dreams of cool dark mountain water.
When they did come it was night again and there were ten or twelve of them and they left their cars at the ruins of an old warehouse behind the river. Save a lack of frivolity you might have taken them for hunters or revelers but there was an intent air of high purpose about them that precluded this. Then some of them donned pillowcase masks with eyeholes cut out and like
a convention of specters they filed past the caved wall of the warehouse and on past old machinery rusted and purposeless with years and through a thin grove of sumac. Sawbriars pulled at their shoes and the dew-wet cuffs of their overalls and then they came upon a low brick wall weathered pale in the moonlight and crested with a scrollwork of honeysuckle.
There was an old fallow hillside field they went across, angling toward the woods and the woods did not look like anything identifiable at all in the world of form but simply a concentration of the cool blue dark.
They were overalled men of indeterminate and myriad size and even one dwarfed among them, short legs scissoring to keep up, as if to prove the parable that a little child should lead them.
Then in a straggling line formless and without rank they reached the woods and one by one were swallowed up until the moonlit field lay dewed and silver and pristine and there was no sign at all that they were about.
Then from the deeper woods one called to another in a travesty of a whippoorwill and another answered, charting their progress into the disquieted woods.
———
There were approaching cries of nightbirds spurious and blatant but they slept on through them. When the men regrouped themselves and moved into the diminishing circle of light from the waning fire they came instantly and violently as if man’s darker side had been given brief corporeality and they embodied it.
Edgewater came awake to the sound of crockery and cookware kicked about and to a foot in his side. He arose blearyeyed with surprise to see Roosterfish being hauled from his fetid quilts, halfclothed and wildlooking, hand still clutching his covers, his eyes those of one in the seize of halfmen or demons of the night, some vast tribunal that had tried them and found them wanting.
Two of them drug Roosterfish erect and struggling, one hanging onto his arm, the other behind him, a constricting arm about his neck. But he wrenched free. He leapt barefooted toward the crated chickens and grasped up the coop with his one arm and tilted with its weight peered all about for an opening in the well of men.
There was none. He ran blindly toward the curving line and came up against two farmers without give or mercy. He was knocked back and fell and the coop dropped and one of the men fetched it a broganed kick that left it upended, the cocks disoriented and protesting with muted threat, their world spun off its orbit into the dark. Then it toppled from the ledge, scraped through brush, bounced, splashed in the water below.
Edgewater found himself held erect between a brace of them and facing a third, unflinching eyes dark in the expanse of pillowcase mask that rose and fell rhythmically with the man’s calm breathing.
I guess you didn’t figure on this, did you?
No reply.
I said did you?
If I had I wouldn’t have been here.
I’ll just bet you wouldn’t. Are you ready for your punishment?
The hands on his arms tightened, urged him forward, as if to better view some cowled judge peering down with eyeholes blind from oaken bench.
Punishment for what?
The man laughed and turned toward the woods. Is he cuttin them hickories?
He’s supposed to be.
I guess he’s pickin among em to get good stout ones.
These two drownded rats look like any’d be stout enough for them. They look too faintified to last till the hickories get here.
These were voices Edgewater recognized like voices the past expunged to exacerbate him. There was the farmer with the shed barn roof and others of his ilk and he had no doubt that Roosterfish knew them all. Then up from the troubled dark came the dwarf, himself perversely masked as if a pillowcase alone rendered him unidentifiable or yet he was some child apprentice learning his craft on the job.
One of you find that tackle box he’s got. Who’s got the ropes? Get them tied to a couple of these trees.
You want em together or one at a time?
One at a time’ll last longer; let’s make each of them watch the other.
You ready to confess?
Confess what?
Now you’d be the only one to know that, wouldn’t ye? Ain’t that what a confession is.
Goddamn what a pistol.
All right I confess.
That’s better. Confess what.
Whatever you got. You just fix the sins in your mind and I’ll confess to them.
I think we got the makins of a smartass here. He’s a two-hickory case if there ever was one.
Well, a man don’t have to stop with hickories does he? Nobody within miles and that river right down there. Trash like this nobody’d miss and there’d never be a word said about it.
I doubt the river’d have em.
The river was below them, invisible, an unseen movement through the dark. A screech owl cried fierce and feline from across the bottoms.
That boy ain’t got nothin to do with this. He’s just a hitchhiker I picked up. Just a feller I was helpin out.
The men laughed and one of them said, If this is helpin ye out I reckon you’re proud he didn’t set out to do ye wrong.
Where you come from, anyway? What all you done before you even got here?
I didn’t do anything, Edgewater said.
I guess you just fell into bad company.
Edgewater was silent.
Well, bad company ain’t jackshit to me. A man’s what he is no matter who he’s with and you got the look to me of somebody that don’t cull much.
You said that about bad company. I never said a goddamned word.
Now he’s cussin us. Give a man a chance to own up and all he does is cuss ye.
No tellin what he’s done and got away with.
He may be wanted somers.
He don’t look to me like he’s wanted nowheres, by nobody.
He damn sure ain’t wanted in McNairy County.
Drag him over to that sapling.
Less get the onewinged un first and save this un for last.
Let him tell what all he’s done first.
What all have you done?
Edgewater looked about him as if he had somehow fallen upon a merger of the crazed and vengeful. The worst thing I ever did was wind up with all you crazy sons of bitches, he said.
Someone slapped him hard and openhanded and he would have fallen had he not been held on his feet. They thrust him forward for another blow and Roosterfish said, Let me tell you cocksuckers somethin. Whatever you got planned better be fatal because I know ever goddamned one of ye. And I won’t rest till I’ve hunted the last one down. I’ll burn ye houses in the night. If I can’t catch ye out somers I’ll poison ye livestock. If I catch ye asleep I’ll cut ye throat and keep on goin. And the son of a bitch that kicked my roosters in the river is a dead man already and ain’t even heard the news.
You mighty loud chicken to be nestin in a den of foxes, the dwarf said. I think this one first. Head my man Roosterfish toward that sycamore.
The men holding Edgewater turned abstracted to watch and he wrenched his arms free and struck blindly and as hard as he could. There was a surprised grunt through the expanse of mask and almost instantly blood blossomed at its center and spread outward and a stick knocked him down and laid a line of fire across his shoulder blades. He arose scrambling and bent, feet running before he was even off the ground and all about him were shapes crouching with hands outstretched, weaving in the firelight. He could hear the stick whistling before it caught him again and this time it did not knock him down. It propelled him faster and uncontrolled toward the dim shapes of men and he dove past them into the beckoning dark. He lit rolling and trying to shield his head from the outcropping of limestone that seemed to be revolving beneath it. He was up and climbing, hands and feet clawing for purchase in the shale, he seemed to be going straight up in the dark, rocks falling soundless away to nothing behind him.
He attained another ledge with shapes struggling after him. Run, he called out to Roosterfish, but Roosterfish appeared stunned, stood unencu
mbered but peering into the depths that had taken his roosters.
The men were calling to one another from below and now even from the sides, the darkness thronged with them. They came implacably upward, misty forms clambering over the slick wet rock and hoisting themselves by the slender trunks of alders and a blind panic seized him, a realization that they did not intend to let him be. They were determined that whatever they were fated to mete out should befall him and they seemed vested with some higher purpose beyond vengeance. He plunged blindly upward and at right angles to ease the incline with hands thrust forward into the dark as if beckoning for whatever solace it might offer him and fending aside with them scrub brush coming at him in a rush as if it too were attacking him. Until he was on the topmost ledge and the moon came from behind the clouds and showed him the world below with silver clarity.
There he is. Who’s got the pistol?
The river was below him and he could hear voices all about him, a necklace of men with the string drawing taut. There was an explosion and a bright bloom of fire and somebody screamed and kept on screaming. He closed his eyes and launched himself over the tops of cedars into the void and there was a suspension of all sound. He drew his knees up to his chest and clasped them with his arms and it seemed an eternity down.
He plunged deep into swift darkness and he went down for a long time, he could feel the bottom, felt himself drug end over end over snags and embedded sticks like hands that would restrain him, he felt himself a scrap of paper in the wind.
When he broke the surface his face broke it first and he was on his back so that the first thing he saw was the moon looking down on him, remote, unforgiving. He was downriver and the cries of rage and invective were faint and shrill. He peered toward the bluffs and there were shapes aligned there like spectators but he could discern no motion so did not know if they were men or dwarfed cedars. Then he was borne on past other bluffs and other shapes that could not have been men but he imagined them there as well.
