The scorching tar, his raw kneecaps, the sun beating down on the exposed skin of his arms and legs and the nape of his neck; these are the sensations he will remember years later. Then he will spin yarns about boyhood summers spent in Appalachia, deep in the hill country of West Virginia. Now he is just focused on not pitching ass-over-teakettle off the eaves of this house. It’s hot up on this halfway shingled roof, and the biting flies and midges offer no reprieve to lofty souls such as Charlie Moore’s. Not that Charlie feels particularly lofty at present, sweating his balls off under the sweltering southern sun. He feels sticky and shaky and sour.

Mopping sweat and a crust of salt from his sun-tanned brow, he scans the hills and valleys that will hereafter become etched in the folds of his cerebral cortex. The dips and ridges stretch on as far as the eye can see, mimicking the topography of his still-maturing brain. These ancient structures show signs of more recent development, but not much. The roof he is standing on belongs to a house on a hillside that makes up one side of the central sulcus of this valley. In the distance, mounded hills wade through a bank of steel-blue haze as they must once have risen from the floor of an ancient ocean. Rubble mountains, worn down over five hundred thousand millennia. Blunted and brought low by time. The earth showing through the tangled foliage is reddish clay and tumbledown stone. The busy landscape compliments Charlie’s disorganized state of mind during this, his summer of discontent.

“Where’s your head at, kid?” says Vinny from the downslope of the roof.

“It’s too hot,” says Charlie, rather than admitting the truth: that his head is back at camp in the bowels of the hill country or worse yet, back home in Pennsylvania.

“Climb down and get some water then,” says junior pastor Pete, punctuating the directive with a staccato burst from the nail gun, “and grab another coil of nails and a fresh bundle of shingles while you’re down there. First rule of roofing work: never come up the ladder empty-handed.”

Charlie scurries down the ladder and over to the orange Gatorade sports cooler sat on the tailgate of Vinny’s pickup. More of the water winds up in his hair and on his brow than goes down his gullet. He is hot—that part was no lie. Before heading back up the ladder with the requested items he rescans the horizon from the lower hillside. From the ground the haze over the stunted mountains becomes itself a permanent fixture of the landscape, a mountain of mist. His mind goes out into it and wanders.

“You got heat stroke or something?”

Rolling his eyes, he tosses a coil of roofing nails over his shoulder like a gunnery assistant and hoists a fresh bundle of shingles into the crude pulley system jerry-rigged for the purpose. “Can we quit soon?”

“Quit?” says Pete, who despite—or perhaps because of—being a good Christian fellow is turning out to be both a demanding taskmaster and an enthusiastic ball-buster. “I wasn’t under the impression you’d started working yet!”

Scaling the ladder, Charlie dons once more his bonnet of damp heat. “This summer is bullshit,” he says under his breath.

“What was that?”

“I’m bored,” he revises. “There’s nothing to do here.”

Pete looks around like this is news to him. “I see half a roof we’ve got left to do. It’s not supposed to be a vacation.” But he relents, taking mercy on his teenaged charge. “Why don’t you go ask Mrs. Farrow to make us a pitcher of her lemonade then.”

So it’s back down the ladder, back around the house and down the hillside to the kitchen door, which is propped open with the screen shut to permit the languid breeze and keep out the teeming bugs. Through the smoky wire he can see the old woman puttering around her cluttered kitchen. The lack of unoccupied countertop and cabinetry bespeaks the sort of comfortable domestic disarray for which his home has always wanted. His mother’s house back in Pennsylvania, with its overclean surfaces and sterile modernity, is outfitted with fixtures that would look more at home in a spaceship than a home.

As he stands there thinking this his host begins rooting around for a pitcher and a wooden spoon. The lemonade is of the chalky store-bought variety, but Charlie has drunk his volumetric body weight of it and then some within this past week. Which isn’t saying much. He’s too skinny, although Uncle Lou promises he’ll pack on muscle soon enough if he keeps working out. He’s up to thirty pushups at a pop now.

“All right out there, Charlie?”

Feeling foolish at being caught mulling again, he says, “Just needed a break, ma’am. Maybe some more lemonade if that’s okay.”

“Sure is. Coming right up. Hot one, ain’t she?” The wooden spoon clinks rhythmically against the sides of the pitcher as Mrs. Farrow stirs the powdered mix into a cloudy whorl.

“Yes ma’am.”

“No shame flagging, day like today. A body gets idle in the heat, ‘specially men and boys. And don’t deny it, sonny Jim—an old lady knows.” She softens the jibe with a wink and a creased smile. Charlie, once again unsure how to respond, nods and smiles sheepishly. “There’s a lot worse jobs than roofing, being out in the open air,” she continues. “My Virgil mined coal for fifty-one years, all the way up ‘til the day he turned sixty-eight and they told him ‘grandpa, you don’t want to spend your Golden Years down bottom of a sunless chute, do ya?’ But it was the only life he knew.” Mrs. Farrow’s cloudy blue eyes shine with the memory as she hands him the sweating lemonade pitcher and a stack of souvenir basketball cups. “Now how ‘bout after you drink this and bring some to your friends you go help Jack with that gamecock of his?”

At this, Charlie perks up. Birds fascinate him. Once he read that birds are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs, and seeing the big ill-tempered rooster that keeps its lair under the back porch, he can believe it. As for Jack? He is ambivalent towards the tow-headed, gap-toothed tween whose perpetually dirty features wouldn’t be out of place in an older time themselves. Like colonial times, maybe. Jack is at most three years Charlie’s junior, but to Charlie’s suburban sensibilities there may as well be two hundred and fifty-three years separating them.

Right now only the dusty denim of Jack’s rear end is visible. It protrudes from under the porch as he peers on hands and knees into the lair of his fighting rooster. RED ROCKET, reads the name carved with a penknife into a beam over his head.

“Hiya Jack.”

The boy nearly scalps himself on the underside of said beam at the sound of his name, but recovers in a flash and offers an easy, incomplete grin. “You gon’ help me with Rocket?”

“Your grandma said you might want a hand.”

“Sure, sure I do! He’s a real mean sumbitch,” Jack says with pride.

“I bet.”

“Here, lemme grab him for ya.” Jack disappears under the porch. There are the sounds of a brief scuffle, the indignant squawk of an aggravated rooster, and Jack reappears with blood seeping between the fingers of his right hand. “Daggun spurred me! Sumbitch spurred me!” He shakes the hand, sending a spray of ruby droplets arcing to the red clay, then holds it out palm up to show off the cut. The wound is superficial but oozes blood.

“Real mean sonofabitch you got there,” says Charlie. He is aware that Pete, if he catches wind of this sort of talk, will chide him. But making the right impression on this cockfighting, half-simple-yet-impressive hill boy seems strangely important all of a sudden. He regrets this tack almost immediately as Jack’s face breaks once more into a gap-toothed grin.

“Okay, your turn. Wanna hold him?”

Charlie does and does not, but when in Appalachia… “Sure.”

“C’mere then! I’ll distract him and you sneak up and grab him from behind.” Undeterred by the sight of his own blood, Jack is already scrambling back under the porch.

“How am I supposed to grab him?”

“By the legs, don’t you know nothin? Jus’ look out for his spurs! And throw an arm around him to pin his wings or he’ll wallop you with ‘em. Oh, and he might bitecha. Spurs is worse though.” This vital instruction is delivered in a breathless jumble as Jack disappears once more.

Going to all fours, Charlie crawls after Jack into the shadowed underside of the porch. The space is larger than it looks from the outside. The unevenness of the hillside creates tall-ceilinged pockets where Charlie can rise to a crouch and Jack to a stoop without getting too many spider webs in their hair.

“You gonna behave yourself this time, Big Red?” says Jack, circling left. Charlie waits a second, then sidles right, keeping to the outer perimeter of the space. He can see Rocket’s fierce golden and black eyes fixed on Jack, raptorlike. The gamecock’s posture is pugilistic, yellow-scaled legs taut and tensile, bone spurs like scimitars, cruel and curved and formidable. Admiring the bird, Charlie glimpses its ancestry among the terrible lizards of prehistory.

Jack clucks a taunt, and Red Rocket takes a threatening step towards his young master. Jack clucks again, and Rocket charges. It is now or never. At the last moment Charlie darts forward and seizes the rooster around the legs, narrowly avoiding impaling his left hand on one of his spurs. Jack eyes him with newfound respect. “Got a good grip on ‘im?”

“Uh-huh,” says Charlie, holding onto the furious rooster’s legs and pinning his thrashing wings like told. “I guess.”

“Good. Now bring him here and shove him in this crate.” Once again Charlie is almost spurred following this directive, but he gets it done. Before he has even shut the crate Jack starts off around the house, calling, “C’mon, let’s go!”

“Go?”

“To the fight, dummy! C’mon!”

Charlie wavers for less than a second before following. Moments like this he recalls something Dad used to say, one of many Dad-isms which Mom likes to say only prove he wasn’t suited to be one in the first place: Ask forgiveness, not permission.

Leaving Pete and Vinny on the roof and the pitcher of lemonade on the tailgate of Vinny’s pickup, he goes.

The four-wheeler ride to the cockfight is an exhilarating, nerve-shredding thrill. Sitting behind Jack, hugging the seat with his knees and clinging to the frame of the ATV with one hand and Rocket’s crate with the other, Charlie wonders how the main event could ever top this. He cannot resist giving an exalted whoop at the peak and valley of every hill, which are frequent and blur together like on a rollercoaster ride because Jack is driving fast. By the time they reach their destination, both boys are red-faced and breathless. Rocket, after the jolting ride of a lifetime, is uncharacteristically subdued. This won’t last.

The cockfights are held in a sandy dell that must once have been the bed of a long-parched stream. A ring of tattered lawn chairs, makeshift seats fashioned from milk crates and stumps, and weathered beach umbrellas encircle the fighting pit. Crushed beer cans and empty dip tins festoon the bowl of the dell. About a dozen tweens Jack’s age gather on one side of the pit. On the other, gaggles of surly teenagers stand smoking cigarettes and swigging clear liquid from mason jars handed back and forth between them. The younger kids seem curious about the newcomer, but a few of the older boys look displeased that Jack has brought a tagalong from out of town. Some of them resent the mission that brings Pete and Vinny, and less vitally Charlie, to their impoverished neck of the woods. Pastor Niall back at the main camp called Appalachia a ‘food desert.’  

Jack lets Red Rocket out of his crate, and the spectators size up the challenger. The older kids begin wagering cigarettes, beers, and swigs of moonshine on the outing of the contest. They must know something about the other bird, because few bets go Rocket’s way. Once Charlie sees the champion, an old brutish gamecock with a torn comb and scarred wattles who looks like he might still have more than a little raptor in him, he understands why.

Unprompted, a tall suspenders-wearing boy spits and says, “We don’t put razors on ‘em or nothin’ like they do over in Sawyersville. It’s pretty much humane.”

“Yeah,” says another. “Like nature intended.”

Nature has violent intentions if it has any, Charlie figures, and this afternoon he gets his fill. The combatants circle one another, piercing eyes locked and neither giving ground. Posturing, gauging distance, searching for signs of weakness, each waiting for the right moment to enter the fray. The audience hushes. On some unseen cue, the roosters spring forward and meet in a whirlwind of beating wings and flashing spurs. They separate squawking, neither having scored more than a glancing blow. Once, twice, thrice more they enter the fracas, beating their wings and stabbing with their spurs. It is difficult to tell who is getting the better of the exchanges, so many feathers fill the air. On the fifth clash, one of the gamecocks emits a squawk of pain. From the more seasoned spectators, cheers and hushed gasps in equal measure.

When the dust clears, Red Rocket is minus an eye. He retreats, reeling, crimson blood and gore seeping from his maimed eye-socket. One of his wings hangs askew, but Rocket seems too dazed to retract it. Charlie wonders how far that spur penetrated his skull. The victor struts before the spectators and his vanquished foe, looking for all the world like a prize fighter relishing a big win. One of his spurs is coated in gore and grit.

“Sumbitch,” murmurs Jack. Then, louder, “Goddamn mean sumbitch!” There are angry tears in his eyes.

When Charlie can no longer stand the brutal scene, he turns away. That is when he hears a snap like a twig breaking underfoot. Only when he sees Rocket spasmodically beating the air with his wings as he hangs limp from Jack’s hands does he understand that the boy has broken his prize bird’s neck as a mercy. The rooster continues to shudder until his flaps dwindle to a tremble and finally desist.

The return ride on Jack’s four-wheeler is more subdued. Once more Charlie clings to the seat with one hand and the chicken crate now containing Rocket’s cooling carcass with the other. Jack shows his somberness and honors Rocket’s memory by reserving his whoops only for the most dramatic hills. He skips some of the smaller jumps altogether.

When they get back well after dusk, Pete spends half an hour chewing Charlie out. After dinner Vinny gets his licks in too, since they took his shiny red pickup off-roading to go looking for him and the front fender’s all scratched to hell now. They’re considering—very strongly considering, Pete says several times—calling his mother if he doesn’t straighten up. As Charlie drifts off to sleep that night his last thought is: this summer blows the Big One. Absolutely gags on it.

As a show of thanks on the final day of the missions trip, Mrs. Farrow makes the volunteers a celebratory lunch, which they eat at a picnic table in the yard while admiring the newly shingled roof. The main course is a platter piled high with fried chicken. It is the most delectable, mouth-watering fried chicken imaginable, and Charlie can’t stomach a bite. Nor will this glorious chicken, hot out of the fryer with its skin perfectly crisped and breaded with aromatic spices that lend a special heat to the tender, succulent flesh, feature in his later recollections.

Jack, on the other hand, eats his fill and asks for seconds.

No, this isn’t the story Charlie will choose to tell years later, that of a kid and his fighting cock. The story he will tell then is a much cleaner tale of adolescent ennui, of a boy adrift and a girl from New York who both won and broke his fickle young heart in the space of a week and was forgotten within a month, of an abandoned camp in the mountains where the showers were fed by ice cold snowmelt and housed wolf spiders bigger than your hand. And those things happened too. But it’s the pathos and agony of the cockfight that will stick with him longest, spurred into the deepest holler of his hippocampus.

– B. P. Gallagher