Against the Country (7 page)

That was my first taste of rural intimacy, and no similar encounter has since outdone it. All the elements were there: the unforeseen approach, the unwilled brutality, the ebb of
awareness, the inchoate shame, the fear that abides. Even the apology will not strike the initiate as uncommon and may actually spur in him, as it does in me, a nostalgia for that lull after the passion when, the bruises still fresh on his face and his arms, he reviews the event and searches vainly for a victory in it, and considers what program of defense might at least have eased the defeat, and wonders whether a sudden diplomacy might not have avoided the insult altogether, and asks whether the phoned-in apology was not in itself a variety of insult, and so considers a hopeless revenge (balloons), and so considers a hopeless truancy (balloons at home), and finally ponders the worth of a soothsaying brother who could not be bothered to sit up in his bed and point at the road and say, simply,
A high-school girl will beat the shit out of you on the bus
.

While this brother denied me useful intelligence, and for the most part kept to the cocoon our predicament had caused him to spin, and while our sister endured her own haunted hayrides to and from an even smaller brick building in which little was taught and less learned, I became the regular chump in short but violent bouts whose only purse was my all but guaranteed humiliation. No offense on my part was necessary: the schoolday or the night before would see to that, would so swell these creatures, and so fray their fabric, that only the slimmest pretext was ever required for the inevitable breach to be directed at me. I was set upon for being “white” (I was pink), for being “racist” (I feared all the hues I saw equally), for being a “honky” (which word amused me), for “laughing” (I admit to it), for being “funny looking” (fair to say), for being “bucktoothed” (I was never), for having “freckles” (I concede the point), and finally I was called out by a fat boy roughly my own age on the charge of being “skinny.”

Due to what pressures had built up inside of me, and due to what bus-and-blacktop combat techniques I had picked up from my recent string of defeats, and due also to some weight-bred
slowness in the fat boy, I came out the surprise victor in this one, and so began my parents’ sad introduction to our Jeffersonian community, such as it pretended and failed to be. Apparently all was right when I was the victim in these beatings, but as soon as I gained a foothold, and caused a bully to bleed and sob (I am told that toward the end I made a serious bid to break the fat boy’s arm), I was judged a nascent sociopath, the clear instigator of a number of previous disturbances, and there was some talk of my not being allowed to ride the bus at all.

Because my mother had recently found work at a juvenile-delinquent home nearby, in a forgivable attempt to locate what few town-like elements could survive out there (and in the certain knowledge that we would otherwise all starve); and because this job availed her of a strange new lexicon that considered any child who pled his own innocence to be a potential “incorrigible” who was “putting up a front” in the hopes that he would not be “held down” and made to confront either his “authority issues” or his “homosexuality”; and because my father, although pleased with this sudden brutality in his son, was not fool enough, or man enough (perhaps it is the same thing), to oppose both his wife’s new science and her eternal belief that there was something “off” about her second child; my guilt in the matter was assumed and agreed to, and I found myself treated thereafter as a special case.

An ad hoc committee of driver and principal and parents decreed that I should sit in the frontmost seat of the bus, on the right, just above the door, and beside me at all times should sit the innocent fat boy. The idea here, I knew (and the fat boy must have), was to force an intimacy between us and thereby a friendship, despite the fact that an intimacy already existed and a friendship never would. He caught me unawares and won our second fight by means of a quick move that saw me pinned beneath his fat; I went for his eyes that afternoon and was able to take the rematch. The fourth or fifth encounter ended with
an uppercut to my privates; the fifth or sixth, to his; and so on. Even my brother began to show some alarm at the brute predictability of these bouts, if not also an anticipation of them. As for me, I remember most clearly the long rides afterward, the fat boy and I both in tears as we swore additional violence but mainly stared out in silence at the scrub pine and scrub pasture that were our common yet undeclared enemy.

There were other foes the fat boy and I could not share. The degreed hippie types who worked at the delinquent home, amongst whom my mother believed for a time that she had found an air pocket of sophistication in the gob of tobacco spit that had become her existence and ours; these “group workers” and “group leaders” and so forth who thought that thermal underwear and down vests bought at a Richmond mall, as well as jugs of corn liquor bought off the odd local, put them well in touch with the rural experience but in no way compromised their superiority to it (given the sort of progressiveness that would enable them, for instance, to consider the purchase of a sexually explicit educational film their criminal charges did not require and would not anyway be allowed to see,
as it happened to feature one of the degreed hippies
); these bearded mediocrities who approached every being they met or engendered as a broken wing they might nobly fail to repair, whose minds were but marginally less dented by drug and drink than were those of the teenagers they cowed and annoyed; who with these marginally better minds perceived only a benevolent and therefore a fictional magic in the earth below, and in the pine needles above, and so were flabbergasted each time yet another boy bolted in yet another frantic attempt to achieve town; these denim-butted frauds who led my mother, and eventually my father (
my father!
), to half believe all over again that nature could be a
palliative to human despair and not merely its origin, which idea would inflict upon us the redundant horror of camping and canoe trips we could not afford to take but for equipment borrowed from the boys’ home and idiocy borrowed from the same; these damp-eyed sensitives; these hypocritical bear-huggers; these vicious pacifists; these martyrs to self-involved frankness somehow convinced my mother that her son’s “antisocial” behavior might predicate a well-meant but legally disastrous physical intervention by the delinquents who, because their keepers were too “understaffed” to school them privately, and because the law demanded (and I believe still does) that criminal children be granted the same poor chance at education as any other American, found themselves shipped daily into the county high school on the very scow that collected me.

I cannot adequately describe the shock with which I greeted the news that juvenile delinquents rode my bus, but I might do all right with my worry over the fact that I was to be held personally accountable for any damage they caused or caught between their confinement and the high school. Which particular riders these young addicts and stabbers were eluded me for some time, either because they had gone to some effort to disguise themselves or because they were so comfortable with what level of violence presented on the bus that they saw no need to raise it, but I did identify them finally by their utter disregard of me. Destined to disprove the ludicrous theory that delinquents will rise to a runt’s defense, and apparently unaware that they could now beat me themselves without fear that anyone but their victim would be blamed, these T- and flannel-shirted boys, who fancied the same chokers and hickeys as everyone else, and in whose hair could be read the same struggle between the Virginia humidity and the Virginia dirt, gave themselves over to the depressed topography our bus studied twice each weekday and, I imagine, paid particular attention to those spots where a teenage hitchhiker might not seem too great a threat, or a temptation,
to a driver whose desperate passenger had no idea in which direction town actually lay.

What escapes this flytrap of a county allowed those boys I cannot say, nor do I recall which one of them was later executed by better-prepared criminals in a Richmond warehouse once the degreed hippies had either cured him or inspired him to run away. Certainly no delinquent of my acquaintance chose to settle in Goochland afterward, though that may have resulted less from a hatred of the degreed hippies than from a fear of the weedy and wooded tick nursery in which troubled teens, and troubled midwesterners, were meant to be reborn. At any rate the place tended to breed its own delinquents and had no need to adopt. It tended also to grow its own hippies, albeit of a sort who romanticized non-nonviolence, and owned guns not to hunt but because there was “a government conspiracy against pot,” and made use of their freedom from society’s “hangups” (and of their jobs at town sewage-treatment plants) to buy great heaps of cocaine and pornography and automotive equipment that almost demanded resale, and who considered bluegrass “too classical” (and the blues itself “nigger music,” where not interpreted by Lynyrd Skynyrd or the Allman Brothers Band) and were ever eager to “fight for” what they believed in, though I noticed that they kept no muscle and trusted more in mandalas and spirits than in soap and simple medicine to ward off the “bad energy” they and their college-pressed counterparts alike believed to radiate solely from town.

The county produced its own cops too. I am told that the fat boy with whom I fought on the bus became one.

Only a dull allegiance to fashionable notions of the truth could convince me to argue that these hippies and delinquents and fat future cops and sad future relatives were somehow responsible for what befell me on my long ride through that excuseless desert. Excuseless because the sun had never managed, for all its effort, to turn the soil there entirely to ash, and so had never managed to impoverish Goochland’s impoverished to the degree one might ignore in, say, Ethiopia or the Sudan. Excuseless because the storms drawn there did not pinpoint and obliterate trailer homes as one might laugh at in, say, Missouri or Kansas or Oklahoma. Excuseless because the River James, although it made an effort to flood whenever the air warmed and a sun shower came near, displaced mostly cows and not people, and kept at all times a Richmondly course, and despite a full complement of deadly potions did not sicken and destroy the county’s residents, or deform their children, with enough enthusiasm to rival a Bhopal or a Love Canal.

At a certain point the Goochlander comes to accept that no great drama is likely to arise and give form to the evil he perceives all around him, not because such a drama is impossible but because it has been staged already, so immense and unfinished that the eye is unable to see it for a breach or a flood or a storm or a sun. Grateful for the fact that the mosquitoes there impart nothing worse than sluggishness, and that local snakes
and spiders rarely kill, and that something like water can usually be sucked up out of the gault, he seldom looks up from his toil, or from his trip to the gas station or the convenience store or the clinic or the courthouse, to consider that although this maelstrom has long since wandered off, across hills and plains and oceans and decades to claim its countless, nameless victims, the conditions under which it was whipped up in the first place still apply, and find him in the fields, and work themselves upon him as they did upon those who gave succor to this hypnotizing force in its infancy, and preached that it would be a boon to our world and not a burden on it, long before anyone thought to call it the United States of America.

I hardly mean to imply here a regret over the foreign lives ruined by my native arms and industry, for I understand that a brown belly distended by hunger abroad allows a pink one at home to be swollen by gluttony. I understand that a piece of shrapnel through the brain of a sand dweller’s child allows a subdivision dweller’s child to acquire a piece of parchment it has not earned and probably cannot read. I understand that for every outlander tortured to death in a faraway jail cell an American retains the freedom to announce that he has taken Jesus into his heart and will not release Him until all the homosexual abortionists have been killed. My purpose is not to belittle these gains: I aim instead to shriek and point at what made them possible, to show that they are not the product of a notion one group says has been wisely expressed and another says has been utterly betrayed but were in fact spawned by something older, and hideous, and considerably more real.

I side with those of my fellow citizens who hold that a great being, rather than a mere idea, created our nation, and inspired every principle by which it was then codified and rendered explicit, and tinted every aspect of its rampancy thereafter, from the beiges and greens of its squared georgic cells to the tars and grays of roadways made to circulate the bumper
crop of idiocy grown out there; from the rainbow varices of urban centers where that idiocy is then repackaged as American pride to the domed white skull in Washington where our elected minds think no better than to turn that pride into law; from the bright red stumps of the once proud and now foreshortened soldiers formerly charged with the enforcement of said law to the duller red bricks of the country high schools where so many of these victims are recruited, and the slicker red (or orange, or black, or blue) of the paint jobs on the pickup trucks these children bankrupt themselves to buy at sixteen, and the rusted green or silver beneath which they pray at night but neglect to make a go at their homework, and the stained-glass wonders behind which they are dependably led to believe that what set the national color wheel in motion was not their own delicate pride but rather the divinity of a preacher just as prideful, and just as delicate, two millennia previous on the far side of the Mediterranean.

Of all this wheel’s tinctures, I say that there is none so bleak, and so powerful, as the vitamin-rich urine backing the black symbology on those enormous metal bees that continue (despite, or in possible collusion with, the pickup trucks) to ferry our sacrificial nonvirgins from home to high-school parking lot, and from high-school parking lot to patriotic field trip, and from patriotic field trip to high-school parking lot, and from high-school parking lot to pregame prayer circle, and from postgame prayer circle to hamburger joint, and from hamburger joint to high-school parking lot, and from high-school parking lot to Bible retreat (is this legal?), and from Bible retreat to hamburger joint, and from hamburger joint to high-school parking lot, and from high-school parking lot to military base (has this honestly never happened?), so that the flower of our native ignorance might be pollinated and multiplied, and its rancid dust might forever rain down upon the world.