Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

These were the “hearties” of Fawx’s Mt., not a great deal different, truth to tell, from the other wonderful sapsuckers down South that might be classified under ordo squamata : yomp heads, mountain boomers, rackensacks, hoopies, haw-eaters, snags, pot-wallopers, buckras, goober goopers, scataways, pee-willies, wool hats, pukes, rag-geds, boondockers, dug downs, tackies, crackers, and no-lobes. It’s a kind of club—300-pound dipshits, always named something like “Hawg,” Kincaid, or Harley-who drink flask bourbon, have chigger-bites on their arms, and wear their hair either short or slicked back (the comb tracks are always visible) to reveal faces like those reversible trompe-l’oeil funheads you snip from the Sunday paper to fool someone with. They have no chins, are inclined to be goitral, and are always chewing down a blade of grass fiercely and absentmindedly. They are given to wearing suntans, white socks, work boots, and cheap acetate shirts, the sleeves of which are always rolled up to a point higher than the triceps brachii in tight little knots. They like whiskey with good bead, respect Shriners, whistle a lot, drive with one hand, slide crotch-first onto barstools, and — just “funnin’ “—love to hang around butt-slapping and goosing each other, punctuating certain remarks of course with that significant nudge just before they’re going to fart. They like to wade into swamps and jacklight rats, are big lodge-joiners, and know everything about guns which they always handle, silently, with phallic reverence. They have hands like cow-horn, with nails bitten to the quick. They have spools of rusting cable in their backyards, nail coons to the walls, adore rodeos, and their execrable grammar is half informed by protective coloration, half by rank stupidity.

Chainsaws are their toys. They’re given to sheep jokes, often engage in games with each other like “Squail the Pig” or rustic variations of “ Detur Tetriori : or, The Ugliest Grinner Shall Be the Winner,” and are fond of spitting contests. But the favorite redneck recreation is incest. They fear women, so hate them, but as most are latently homosexual they fear that even more, and so fifty times a day boastfully and loudly proclaim for each other’s benefit that they’d hump a rockpile if they thought a snake were under it. They invariably refer to their penises as “Big Sid.” They are usually married, but each willfully keeps confined to home his jittery gap-toothed wife, always either pronouncedly fat or thin — they all look as if they support nature on a diet of lucifer matches and gin — who, when not peeking half-wittedly around the doorframe of a dogtrot cabin, squats on her porch dandling a big thick-necked gosling of a child with a purple hairbow and an I.Q. that doesn’t even register, repeatedly telling it, “Wave to the street!”

They loathe sentiment but thrive on sentimentality, violently beat their women with pony-leads on Saturday night but weep with guilt at Sunday-Go-to-Meeting during the singing of “The Old Rugged Cross,” their favorite. In groups, they’re dangerous; each, alone, is a simpleton. Fanatically patriotic, they’re all knee-jerk defenders of state sovereignty and go blubbery at the mere sight of the Confederate Battle Flag. They’re either whispering sideways about Jesus or bawling obscenities, georgic in imagery, with stentorophonic might. They’re handy, can always tell one car from another, know the right weights of oil, love to use the word “ratchet,” and always know when to use baling wire and when to use bagging wire. They know everything about loggerheads, trace-chains, and hames and can always be found driving the backroads in trucks, filled with wood, wedged with chocks, toward a sawmill shed in the mountains. They all smoke, snite from the nose with the forefinger, and suffer from very particular ailments: Basedow’s Disease; gleet; fishskin itch; furunculosis; rodent ulcer; pyorrhea of the gums; Walking Typhoid; mucous patches; and tic douloureux. They all know shortcuts through the woods. They lurk.

It was a Saturday, then, much like the others, and all the feebs-in-overalls and donkeyphuckers one saw pitching hay in meadows during the week — they stand stock-still, with upright pitchforks, and stare out of expressionless faces as you pass — were now in high report. They’d met to be. And the best place was the general store.

Darconville and Isabel pulled up in front. The big car resembled a hearse, with Darconville undertaking, this time, to buy some cigarettes: he looked out the car window and, although torn between feelings of suspicion and frank amusement, got out and shut the door. A crow rased out of the eaves of the store.

The Diet of Schmalkalden had convened: there sat the country gnoofes, Hob, Dick, Hick, and a few others all perched on palings, eating cheese with clasp knives and whittling and spitting in the direction of a battered expectoroon behind them. Darconville couldn’t take it in all at once. It looked like a group of people— quocumque modo — who’d somehow just about managed to survive the Permian extinction: sowskins, ferox-faced oaves, hedge-creepers, pig-slopping curmudgeons, bungpegs and lickspittles, scummers-of-pots, and low ve-nereals with red-nosed papier-mâche faces gumming chaws of Mail Pouch tobacco. But what seemed incredible was that each and every one of them — minds, clearly, unviolated by the slightest idea — all looked remarkably the same , wearing in their faces the fatal traces of degeneracy and the physiological signs of the consanguineous parentage that caused it. Not a word was spoken.

Custodially, Darconville walked by Isabel into the creepy low-lit store, a sheet-iron stove prominent, its half-filled shelves a wilderness of canned abominations and pioneeriana: fishing tackle, diuretic pills, jerked beef, tires, secondhand rifles, tractor parts, wholesale tins of peas, hoses, galvanized pails, tins of fish roe, flypaper, thistle seed, and a magazine rack — Darconville stepped closer to look — crammed with back-issues of Midnight Cry; Watson’s Magazine, The Christian Banner, American Opinion, Menace, The Searchlight and, sanspareil of the lot, The Fiery Cross . Taking Isabel by the finger, Darconville nodded to that last magazine; she closed her eyes, smiled, and shrugged. How, Darconville wondered, could there be such innocence, such beauty, in the midst of such ugliness? She was a perfect lotus springing from a swamp. The greatest balsams, he’d heard, lie enveloped in the bodies of the most powerful corrosives; poisons contain within themselves their own antidote. He kissed her quickly, thinking but pray, not the reverse , and made his purchase.

The proprietor — someone, to Darconville’s astonishment, addressed him as Mr. Shiftlett! — stood behind the counter, serving notice on him with an arsonist’s eye, like the squint of one polyplectronic cock eyeing another; he was about three feet high and had the face of a barn-owl, angry, surprised, harelipped. He ignored Darconville’s pleasantries and, turning away, ended them with a rude fnast of disgust down his nose. And so they left.

Out front, as Isabel got into the car, Darconville heard from behind him one of the peckerwoods make a snort, followed by a dry ster-corous whistle — and he turned. No one moved. Darconville got into the car. Quickly, a young bumswink with hair the color of jackass stepped forward; it was a face full of mother-wit — the perfect redneck’s — with a long nose and a voluted nostril, and, turning to grin at his partners, he revealed a mouthful of imperfect teeth, pegged and pumpkin-seed shaped. Thin, tattered, and lousy, he scarcely retained a human semblance; in his filthy face two minute glittering eyes squinted furiously inwards at his nose. He hitched up his trousers with his wrists, spat sideways, and nodded toward Isabel. “I like a good milk cow myself, Captain,” he said, “don’ mean, yowever, I got to sleep with one.” Darconville kicked open the door but saw it was no good: he was suddenly looking down the barrels of two rusty shotguns, wagging impatiently up and down — and meaning go . He backed slowly into the car, where Isabel sat ashen, and then thundered away up a small road, driving as if behind them lay not a hill-town of twisted pines, broken fences, and scutch-grass but the Abomination of Desolation itself.