Against the Country (11 page)

This is what I meant, mostly, by the “analogy” business above.

Said development prompted nearly everyone present to make for the relative safety of home, yet a few stayed behind, out of
curiosity, or gamesmanship, or because they felt safer in the firehouse than they did in the dark of the countryside, all of which I can understand. Later I heard, though the tale may be apocryphal, that these stragglers found themselves obliged to listen while the young man waved his gun around and sang forth his complaint, and that by the time the police arrived he had convinced them all of his need for immediate incarceration, yes, but also of the undeniable righteousness at work, somewhere,
somewhere
, in his decision to come to the party with a gun.

I do not claim to have any such righteousness at work on my behalf, only that I wish to be heard, and that I will take such measures as are necessary to secure myself a pulpit. I am unable, of course, to track down and shoot any member of my congregation who attempts to run off, but this should not be taken to mean that the runner will be safe, for ignorance and loss will attend such a creature always, and cowardice will be its constant shadow, and disdain will be its eternal reward from those who have made no retreat into that demimonde wherein a page or two glanced over is sufficient basis for the lie that the whole has been endured. Were I not word but true flesh I would hunt these carpetbaggers to the ends of the earth, and show them what mercy as they have thought to show me, and water all the dried-up creek beds of my childhood with their blood, and fertilize all the half-starved crops with their innards, and winter-proof every farmhouse window with their skin, and make hippie dreamcatchers out of their bones and sinew, and throw those chunks of them without obvious use (their brains) into the nearest ditch not occupied just then by a pair of country lovers unable to afford, or by their supposed common sense to locate, a simple town mattress.

Enough! Enough with asides and pale echoes of my shame! Enough with the fantasy that my past, or rather this wordy imitation of it, can be made to expectorate a worthwhile excuse for my crime! Enough with the conceit that a weeviled memory could possibly meet even the most basic requirements of this work! My brother has lately told me, and my father has since confirmed, that I took a shotgun down with me into the road that day, an old .410, as opposed to the rifle I remember with such vividness and such idiot pride. I have no doubt that their powers of recall far outclass my own, and so I hereby stipulate and declare:

It was a shotgun, not a rifle, and I may have loaded it, and I may have intended to fire
.

Enough, anyway, with the claim that an excuse has the power to absolve. Enough with theories about whether Jesus was or was not my bosom neighbor out there, and where He might have been (in town? abroad? tending His pot crop out back?) when I needed His hand to stay or steady mine. Enough with attempts to portray intemperance and incontinence as a subsidiary of sin, which arises not from us but from the land we walk and lie upon, I am sure of it. Enough with the notion that the schoolbus was anything more than a vehicle in that hideous place, and that its fermentation of an intemperate society within its walls did not constitute a form of resistance, or else a
variety of prayer, even if the prayer went unanswered and the resistance was no more than a snare laid by, and to the benefit of, Goochland County, Virginia.

Enough with my clumsy dance around the matter of skin: I did, in fact, notice that my schoolbus driver was not colorless but brown, and I did notice that the teacher who misconstrued the act of circumcision was not colorless but pink, and I did notice that the principal who refused to rid us of this woman’s inanity was also pink, and I did notice that the teacher who continually threatened to “go blerk” on her students was brown, and I did notice that the math teacher who had supposedly beaten the boy in the hallway (I was not there) was brown, and I did notice that the supposedly beaten boy who had supposedly raped the girl (again, I was not there) was pink, and I did notice that the gym teacher who yelled “Mix it up down there” was brown, and I did notice that the boy I did harm to because he had insulted my mother was pink, and I did notice that the teacher who then refused to see my mother on account of my being “in jail” was brown, and I did notice that the pill smugglers who tried to make a mule out of me were in every case pink, and I did notice that the young man who passed me my first marijuana cigarette (I thank him, I curse him) was pink, and I did notice that the fat boy with whom I battled on the bus was brown, and I did notice that each day in that place was a loud reminder that I was under threat by either and each of these shades.

Enough with the pretense that a bouncing back and forth between “brown” and “pink” will suffice here. The boy who brought his pistol to the party was the color of a ghost, or so I was told. The girl whose hair I did my best to aerate was a delicious sort of red-tinged yellow, though I would not think to call her orange. The gentleman who explained what his penis needed to see before it would consent to inflate was the color of well-steeped tea, with milk, and cinnamon freckles. The damsels
whose names I reluctantly invoked a few pages back were, in order, shyly tanned cow leather, supermarket honey, and a white rose petal bruised by the sun to absolute perfection. The Ronnies I knew were, respectively, mahogany and young pine.

Enough with this new little game, which allows me to pretend I saw so many tints out there that in the end I saw none at all, so freethinking was I at twelve or thirteen. Enough with the implication that I paid no mind when these people constantly referred to themselves, and to one another, as “black,” or “white,” or to some dignity-starved variant thereof, and that I made no use of this simple accounting system myself when recording the state of my pregnant friend (white, frightened, beaten), or of the boy who had achieved the impregnation (black, frightened, gone), or of the father who had lashed out at this circumstance with his fists (white, frightened, stupid), or of the suburbanite who had allowed a single taste of intercourse to transform him into a straw-chewing braggart (white, frightened, stupid), or of the boy whose penis had peeked out over the top of his trousers in an attempt to make my acquaintance (white, frightened, not necessarily stupid), or of all those children who believed that AIDS was less to be feared than “the
her
-pess,” and that despite these diseases the sine qua non of adulthood was always going to be “humping,” and whatever harm went along with that (black, white, most of them stupid, all of them doomed).

Enough with the implication that in my urge to assimilate and survive in that place I had never succumbed, for a week or two (or a month, or a year), to that style of thought which combines the mysteries of menstruation and lactation into a single, willful act of iniquity (apparently by way of the humping), and considers it a kindness to think the blacks no better off, really, than when they were slaves
and did not have to do for themselves
, and takes as gospel truth a moron’s worry that her daughter’s titties will droop if sucked on too much, and is
somehow able to work the algebra by which a young boy’s masturbatory adventures are worth far more to an older boy who demands to hear about them than they could possibly be to the masturbator himself.

Enough! Imagine a child in that bind, as often I do, and then saddle him with what idea of success a pair of unsuccessful parents have carried with them out of town, where good grades attract scorn, yes, but tend also to pay off in the long run and are not always taken for signs of arrogance or homosexuality. Give this child to understand that any deviation from his goal of good grades will be met at home with penalties he would gladly trade in for an everyday whipping, and by this method cause him to think his schoolbooks great and impossible charms. In the meantime, sit him on a schoolbus and make him wait.

Make him wait while the policemen who have followed his bus in anticipation of a scheduled fight there pull up behind its idling hull, and find their unhurried way around to its door, and lumber up its steps, and sidle among the children as if cops were the protagonists here, not the boys who have been fighting, nor the driver who will likely finger the bullied victim as the culprit, nor the former town child who had hoped that this brief cessation of movement might allow him a moment to study a suddenly readable page. Make him wait while the new girl starts to cry as the bus nears the field-bound loneliness of a home in every way superior to his own, and let him glance at the page while she refuses, as usual, to disembark. Make him wait, unable to think at all of the page, while that obese boy in back finds his mournful way up toward the exit, the dark stain at his crotch proof that the rutty roads have yet again bested his kidneys, his head hung low while he passes, as if to say, “I know, I know.”

Now:

Steal this waiting child’s books one afternoon under the cover of “play” (the game being never to give them back, though
he begs and explains that he has a test the next morning), and push him off the bus and into his driveway with the driver’s full collusion (she will, in fact, fold the bus’s doors on him as he tries to reboard and fight for his property), and leave him standing in a storm of red dust and derision while his future recedes. Allow him more patience than he has heretofore shown, and grant him the knowledge that his schoolbus will disappear down a nearby road for fifteen minutes or so, then return with no intention to stop, only to show him through the windows a familiar tension in the driver’s pursed lips and raised eyebrows, and a mockery of faces fanned out behind her, and a book or two held up in display of what has been lost.

Now:

Permit this child access to his father’s shotguns and ask what you think he might do.

My aim here is not merely to describe how at the age of thirteen or so a frightened and pissed-off white boy held up his mostly black schoolbus with a shotgun, though he did surely do such a thing; nor is it to overstate the worth of those stolen books, for they were of appallingly poor quality either as didactic tools or as objets d’art; nor do I have anything more than a sporting interest, really, in the argument that a child should be held blameless for his sins simply because he has been beaten on the bus, and beaten at school, and beaten at home, and has finally decided to set a few boundaries.

The crime itself is almost too plain to recount. I stood at the end of the driveway, where the dirt ended, or rather jumped out along the road toward Richmond. (Evidence, I suppose, that since losing town we had been trying always to regain it.) My brother, half hoping to see me kill someone, stood off to the right and behind me, his muteness relieved now and then by bursts of laughter. I took a step forward as the bus neared, the gun not fixed on anyone but only pointed downward, its long eye cradled in the nook of my arm. The wheels stopped shy of where I had expected them to, and a tenth or eleventh grader was sent out, probably by lot, to lay the books on the asphalt (or was it the gravel?), after which he walked backward, slowly, his arms raised, until he reached the door and scrambled up those stairs to what he might have believed was sanctuary.

At the time I considered those arms a tad dramatic (I had neither lifted the gun nor flirted with the trigger as I planned to), but once I had collected my books, and the bus had sped off, and the afternoon light had dimmed just enough to allow me to reflect on the fact that my parents would soon be home, and I would then have to explain what I had done, that unmeant mimesis of surrender came to represent everything wrong with the place, and with me, and with how I would likely respond when made by our father to pay for my vengeance. Yet my ass was strangely spared that night. Unable to reckon how a boy’s decision to meet his schoolbus with a shotgun could be explained away by either Bob Dylan or Minnie Pearl, my parents entered into a fugue state in which physical exertion was impossible and the rhetoric of my mother’s job at the boys’ home seemed the mind’s only refuge.

I remember how she worked the phone as the sun went down, sure that she could not get me out of this and in truth not wholly invested in the idea, because even more than she wanted to protect her child (which certainly on some level she did), and even more than she wanted her husband to whip the child (which on some level she always did), and even more than she wanted to reverse an injustice that could legally be charged against her, my mother wanted to be proved right in her fear-wish that an action by one of her children, and not by her man, would ultimately be blamed for the family’s destruction. She seemed almost to look forward to the day when the courts would take her second son away, and would subject him to counseling sessions and restraint holds and whatever other tortures the degreed hippies had devised for their little Jonestowns, and would release him only after his voice had changed and he had completed the steps in some or other “program” designed to crush any trace of his soul’s dissent.

Would not such an outcome imply, to anyone who looked into the matter, that this “special” boy had been so rotten as to
explain, in an ethical sense, his parents’ previous workhorsing of him, and all those mishandlings he had dared to resent, and the constant belittlement that was his apparent reward for having intruded upon their lives in the first place? The question, happily, was moot. RSVP no, delinquent homes of Goochland County. Regrets, military school (discussed that evening as a “best-case scenario”). Apologies, of course, to my mother, whom I do love, and whose good works are legend, and whose desire to be vindicated at any cost I surely share. Apologies as well to my father, who may secretly have preferred that a son of his gun down an entire busload of children, black or white, rather than allow a few textbooks to be stolen. Apologies to both these fine Americans if today they credit themselves, and a few frantic phone calls, and a borrowed hippie logic, and a half-dead bourgeois courage, with my subsequent freedom, for they would be wrong. It had already been decided, ages before, by the land itself, how a violence such as mine should be treated: delicately, lest in time a greater violence be lost. My mother, the pretty town girl, could not possibly have known this; my farmboy father could not possibly have missed it. Despite what obfuscations town and college had thrown up against him, he knew full well that the greater violence in him was likely to be me.