Finley J. MacDonald

Spoilage

 

Cos picked his way between cedars sluing silver-pink belts across old-man’s beard—climbed between pyramids of glass bottles and thick-jointed bamboo busting from steam-buggy engine compartments.  Through shrouds of needlepoint, Oro shoved out, hefting up behind a ruck, eyeing the blackspined lay of the strand.  They trod bottle sand pursed by footgear of Sea Jaspers, among stumps and bamboo shafts, where yegs from the village had yanked apart Jasper wind screens.  Gusts fussed up scents of cooked barrow and rockrose and washed basalt.  A yeg’s bawdy ragmag rattled in the sand.  Oro picked it up.  Beneath the title Father’s Business, a mig was gripping her bodice.  The strip below read, The Mig Ma Don’t Know About.

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Oro took a seat upon crumbling steps.  Will you look at Cos.  Just look at him.  Leaping among shafts, palm fronds, barrow bones, and plots of ragged turf, hair wood-dark and furling, Cos drove ghost crabs from their crags.  A scar marked his crimson cheek where he had fallen through the steps of the old factory—Oro’s wrongdoing, said Old Nean, and it could so easily have been a higher step.  On a distant mudflat, a skiff fishtailed, brimming with flags and buoys, steam-motor bubbling, cockswain poling, yeg pushing, but then, both pushing.  Configurations of herons overpassed a far-flung jumble of Hog City, humming distantly with steam buggies and buzzbikes.  Jet pillars combed the swells that came to them leadbrown and sloshing and ornately whorled and brightly popping and hissing and sizzling and foaming like poured ale among clumps of net.

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Snatching up Jesus beetles on the point, Oro and Cos had the day before sighted tubs slipping in, roofed, girded, and roped.  They waded ashore and fanned out upon the strand—hunting bantlings, it was said.  While Oro and Cos hiked back, campfires flared up down the spit.  Later, while Cos and Oro were ragged by fleas in the loft, Old Nean dressed a line of iron spearheads, eyeing the door, slumping before a window boarded-up, a sweat-blackened hat shoved to the back of his head by a naptha lantern hissing above clay pots and rough planks.  Melting into the shadow that cloaked the high-piled Castrol-Koko-Qulao stove and hung lids, Gimcup was gazing into her coffee jar, nose crooked and lips coarse.  Did they carp back and forth, in their common space, over a common threat, Gimcup over her jar, Old Nean over spearheads?  No.  They did not.  The spearhead made its snick, snick, snick, snick, snick, snick, snick.  Old Nean’s forearm wove.  Tugboat.  So was he styled in youth.  Still good with a felling axe or a log roller.  But, like an old sunken marsh log, Nean really did not stick out, granting his twenty kinds of knots and soapmaking.  He was not gregarious.  Nor was he shut-mouthed like Gimcup.  Nor hearty.  Nor a drunk like Qualdo Jacobs.  Nor astute like Wye’s mother, Alis.  His legs were prodigious and his feet, shod in cut-down gumboots, left huge prints as he shoved a path in switch grass to the muddy pool of sliding eels, muttering thet plonker Trayly Miloos’ll be a calf in a caiman bog when he finds out there IS a judgement day and never paying for what is handed over into your hand is just proper thieving.

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Oro laid her palm along the edge of the flapping mag.  Over a sea like tin, freighters crept, slower than clock hands, smoke trailing.  A circuit of cays birthed pale explosions, undercut by a turquoise belt, through which, one day, she’d slip free.  Oro mouthed syllables, groping at meanings like fumbling at keyholes with a ring of odd keys.  She turned to a mig with truculent eyes, hair curling and crowblack.  Remindful of Rya, eldest Stableground mig, who’d fill lists for a family of six in Wye’s mother’s shop.  Alien and prescient, each eye a single darkness, she’d slide betwixt bins of eggs and rows of turnip water, eclipsed for a moment by the dried, hanging shark, fondling the edge of a mirror reflecting sacks rolled down to beans.  Yegs been after you yet?  They will be.  Like bees on bugloss.  You keep out ahead, hear?  We migs must stick together.  Between mouthfuls of smashed goat, Old Nean had fulminated against “that nail” who heaped shame upon the heads of her folk—imaginably, by taking up with a “slick” from Hog City, or worse, one of the “hectors” of Koko-Qulao, who owned the fish factory, the ferry port, and all else on the cay, outside of stills.  And the Wagoncross.  Or she might have been waylaid.  Rya.  In a torn sark.  Casting wild glances back at a line of Sea Jaspers with eye patches.  After a cockswain got you down, said Wye, his tongue’d grow long while he hunted a way in.  And he might just plant.  Whereby folk would call in their whelps when you came along.  

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Above the edge of the ragmag, Cos poled the fire pit.

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“I’ll tell.”

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“I will say you are a fabler.” 

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“Let's head off to the factory.”

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“You muffed Old Nean’s instruction on that?”

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“Well then?”

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“The dam ways?”

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“All right.”

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Cos flung his pole, and waves slammed and showered while it worked back to shore.  Oro scraped a basin and covered the ragmag with an elephant ear and sand.  Stomping for toads, Cos dashed ahead, and they pushed under vines massing, spilling in chutes and blossom-stippled capes.  Under the canopy, in a dappled bedlam of ruck and hornwort and mossclad blocks, leaves shuffled, and spears of light pinpointed blackthroats jerking and darting, wings blurring at the tips of soremouth blossoms. 

Wealdfowl burbled, and toads produced a reat, reat, reat.  In the air heavy and stinking of hogplum, a goatsucker bleated, distrait and bereft.  They followed a barricade of moss-covered buggies, moribund clunkers pig-a-back, disgruntled, and crustacean, buggy-eyed as purgatorial sleuths.

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In a veering of bobwhites, they broke out on the wagon track and took the narrower fork up that hollow with split-bamboo fences staked like raveling baskets and sordid cabins with tin patches and hung rags and sharpbeaked cockerels out front moving in jerks or wallowing.  Trailing harness, a forkbearded distiller eyed them.  A stray scraped its ear, spine a curved serration over a splay of ribs.  They skirted streaked gravestones, crossed a split oak, and climbed on in a sparkling rush of birdsong.  While Cos and stray went after hill pigeons, Oro pulled off the cap that Wye had pulled from a bin in the Wagoncross, trussed it to her forearm, and dropped in thornapples.  Blue suits you, she said.  Millinery caps they calling ‘em.  Cityfolk all sporting them.  You thread this through and under.  Oro sat against a trunk and gnawed grainy flesh and tossed pits.  In the distance, a sea erne revolved over a riddled, ashen fortress with turrets irregular and slumping like cans in Badshine’s smelter.  Jungle crows cawed in the hollow, and hill pigeons swept up a wooded draw.

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The stray was yaffing.  

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Cos clambered to a busted snag.  He shoved his arm in a hole, and he came back at Oro, stray bounding alongside.  He traipsed down to the split log and shuffled out over rickracks and kept his fist down in the water and wiped his fingers on his leg.  With the Millinery cap heavy with thornapples, Oro searched the current that twined around boulders and slipped dark and bubbling under nodding hummocks.  She gave it up, and they mounted the slope, and the roar of the stream faded.

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“What you drown that creature for?”

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“Crackbeak never did profit no swain.”

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“Nor done you harm.”

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They did not speak again.  Limestone jingled under their feet, and shapes loomed—pale, quarried stones, arches, hollows, domain of tree spirits, repositories of bones.  In spaces between trunks, blossoms drifted and settled upon jagged walls and sinking tanks and rusted shells: a corroded armory, stark, alien, sunken, and decrepit.  Columns of mist mounted over the stream, and the dam vaulted from tossed foliage.  They climbed steps chopped into the slope and darkened by anemic springs.  Oro set out. 

Halfway along the rim, her skirt furled under the rail and snagged on wire-edged mesh.  Below her heels, a metal grid clung to the shell, and the current barreled out, plunging in a chaos of timbers.  She clawed the rail, and the millinery cap slipped from her fingers and tumbled in a cascade of red balls.  She jerked her skirt, casting a frantic glance at Cos—and then broke loose and shuffled on.  A good way below, on the butt of a log, lay the blue cap, laces trailing in the current.  

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She stepped down the brink, rubbing her palms down her ruptured skirt.  Halfway across, Cos came eyeing the slopes, coal-green and traced with salvage trails, his feet taking rhythmic bites, then turning his head call at the stray as it paced the brink.  He clambered down rubble at the edge of the dam and scarpered ahead, and Oro trailed, plucking finger limes, skirt billowing and housing gusts.  She went dropping peels upon needle-quilted furrows of the salvagers’ track while Cos slipped beneath pines subdued and knowing in their stillness.  They crossed a sloping meadow strewn with riveted shapes.  Damselflies hovered over blooming licorice, dawnflower, and ferns like blood-spotted fish skeletons.  Constructions huddled tinclad and emptily windowed.  They mounted crumbling steps and jerked on a door.  While Cos toed out across littered floorboards, Oro kept to the entry, holding her nose, skirt flapping, thigh chilled and displaying.  “Watch you don’t end the both of us.”  He banged doors to rusty wallboxes.  While Cos instrumented a dismal clatter, Oro leaned in a windowsill overlooking scrub plantains and thorn wattles and water gums.

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At the foot of a soot-colored structure, three figures passed a jug and gestured with smokes.  Neighbor Slee.  A coil of rope and hammer in his belt.  Stag-like, he towered over the others, and the breeze carried his edicts.  Echoing that day Cos had busted through.  Wood cracking like an axe hit and loach spear tumbling.  Firing up splinters of wood.  Oro felt her thighs.  Mere holdings in skin.  A future on piglets, since she’d never said don’t you go up there, Cos.  But had she said it?  Cos then going anyway?  She held her torn skirt.  Traded out.  Just like a lame moke.  Through the chink of the loft, she had seen Old Nean’s bulky shadow widening on bright sod, shanks golden near the naptha lantern.  Muttering over the buzz of Jesus bugs and leaning close to light the tall cockswain’s smoke.  Old Nean cracked a jar.  The long-faced neighbor turned and laid his eyes on her, jar in one hand, smoke in the other, one tooth shining.  Through scraggy bristles, his tongue curved, trembling.  When the hunt began, she’d cover her face.  Cover her eyes under rancid hides tacked about the joists while he hunted.  Cos was beside her, pointing out the empty window with his pipe.

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“Your pot and pan.” 

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“Cap it.”

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“To honor and mind.”

 

“Cork that jug.”

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The three cockswains heaved into the soot-colored colossus and could be seen stuttering up through multiple levels.  The skeleton echoed with soft collisions, and butcher birds swooped from broken columns, hopping where they’d stood.  Oro moved on, scraping over wires and rusted rods.  She squatted over a heap of warped covers, and she pulled out a single volume, the paper divided into rectangles, the handwriting, elegant, painstaking.  Feb. 24.  For blotter.  92.00, Feb. 29.  For type C. bolts.   Jan. 2.  For nails.  She opened another.  Gowe S. 494.  Mender 494.  Hoss P. September 740.  Vargoss and Boer, 4492.  Another was adorned within in arrows and lines, metal sleeves and barrels labeled double cylinder; cross compound; low pressure turbine.  

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The pipe clattered.  Rooted near wallboxes, a lank of rusty chain over one shoulder, Cos picked up his hands like a dirt puppy eyeing a whipsnake.   A pale clockwork child, lips round and red, shuffling back toward the collapsing, littered stairway.  Oro dropped the tome.  Raising and settling each foot, she navigated broken widgets, eyeing the scratter.  Plaster, tomes, cans, staves.  A kitchen scale.  A ceramic lid.  A Typomatic.  A lathe-turned baluster.  A scuffed knee.  The mig’s ankles were wired, and the bare shoulder was scraped and smudged and blackened as if she had been dragged in a burn.  Still wearing a blue millinery cap and framed by black curls, the face, with its eyes open but blank, was the broken, purplish countenance of Rya, eldest of the Stableground migs.

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Finley J. MacDonald grew up in Sun River, Montana.  For the last decade, he has lived in China, currently in Zhuhai with his partner Yang Meiting and his daughter, Molly.  He teaches English writing and contemporary issues at Sun Yat-sen University. His fiction and nonfiction have been published by Anomaly, Menacing Hedge, Queen Mob's Tea House, Crack the Spine, Lotus Eater, Nude Bruce Review, Hungry Chimera, Slippage Lit, Near to the Knuckle, Embodied Effigies, and Shanghai Literary Review.

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