Against the Country (8 page)

Do I go too far? Is it wrong for a grown man, no longer a boy, to argue that the American schoolbus has been cruel to humanity when in fact it has not been wholly cruel to him, and regularly got him away from a panic-stricken home, and drove him on occasion to a teacher of some worth, and once even showed him an uncalled-for mercy that altered and perhaps even bettered the course of his life? What consideration is then owed this vehicle, and this situation, by one who to this day blames the vehicle, and the situation, for the very peril from which it eventually delivered him? what praise should he bestow upon an entity he knows full well to be a destroyer, by proxy if not by nature, when he finds that he himself has not been destroyed?

Marijuana first entered this boy when he was thirteen years old, and for that I might in good conscience blame the schoolbus, or at any rate its back-road emanation. I might upbraid it as well for the fact that the boy began to attack girls a year or so after the plant’s first attack on him. A familiarity with alcohol followed the onset of the girls (or, from their perspective, the onset of the boy), and this too I lay at the beast’s accordion door. Were it not for the constant watchfulness required of him between home and school, on top of what vigil he was forced to maintain at either destination, he might have adjusted to his lot with less grief and more grace. He might have understood that
in the country, and possibly even in town, alcohol was meant to
precede
relations between the sexes (and certainly relations between the same) and that anyone who did not know this had failed to approach either hobby soon enough. He might have understood that such a child was bound to be left out when better-prepared students snuck off to drink in the woods that surrounded the elementary school and just about everything else in that insipid county, or when older girls, the ones who had flunked, grabbed boys of his acquaintance and forced them to simulate (or, rumor had it, actually to perform) intercourse on the multihued yet drab bathroom floors. He might have understood sooner that a natural life, such as the naturalists promote and fail to comprehend, has little to do with a moral life, such as the moralists promote and fail to comprehend. He might have understood that ten or eleven, and not a hopelessly retarded thirteen, is in fact the proper age of introduction to dope.

I did not meet the hydroponic kind but rather what bored country children will cultivate in a clearing out back: small and pathetic plants, without sister or brother, that seemed well acclimated to the dew and the mist but surely found the sky’s unregulated heat lamp a hindrance to maturity, as did we all, and were anyway slaughtered well before they amounted to much, yanked from the earth to be dried and chopped up and fired and inhaled by higher beings whose boredom and desperation could not be undone by so spindly a remedy and could only (the boredom) be enhanced by what lethargy as the plant had to offer, or (the desperation) by what whiff of paranoia had crept up into the twigs and seeds from the awful clay below. Later encounters with industrial improvements to this weed would impress upon me the value of basic environmental controls and would secure in me the notion that I might not have troubled with the outdoor stuff at all.

I saw no natural prototype, though, beyond the berry or the nugget of gold, for the pills these children passed among themselves,
and bragged about, and fought over, and built great reputational fortunes upon, and eventually gummed and swallowed, just as I could see no rustic model, beyond the leather saddlebag or the tin bucket, for the plastic containers in which these psychotropic treats were kept. Identified from without as aspirin or Tylenol, and from within as dosages lifted from a parent’s understandable attempt to overcome the realities of the simple life by an appeal to what complicated illusions could be manufactured in town, these pills, and their counterfeit drugstore coffins, rode to school in the pockets of Levi’s jeans and the folds of Bermuda-bag purses and the anklets of Frye boots or Chuck Taylor sneakers, the idea here being not subterfuge of the usual type but rather a coyly conspicuous display such as Mr. Veblen might have appreciated, had Mr. Veblen been forced to spend two to three hours out of every day trapped with his subjects on a country schoolbus.

Proud of their bounty, and beholden to the relief it promised from the tedium of the day, larger than I was but not correspondingly so stupid as to assume that their shoes and their purses and their jeans would be free from investigation by weary and pissed-off administrators once we got to school, these children were forever on me to act as their surrogate and their stooge. Although a refusal to smuggle their bottles risked further bodily insult, and although a pill or two gone missing would have been considered no more than fair payment for a morning’s servitude, I turned those offers down, and for that I am almost sorry. With little effort I might have cornered the pharmaceutical traffic in that sad little county, and branched out into more fetching goods, and arranged things with the idiot fat boys who were even then expanding into idiot cops, and made a place for myself in the hormonally overburdened high school, and married and impregnated (in either order) the captain of the cheerleaders, or else her best friend, and bought up one of the nice plantation houses out there, and joined a
political party or both, and subsidized new uniforms for the football team every five or six years, and shaken hands at the homecoming games, and made increasing reference to the importance of Jesus Christ in my life, and paid for the upkeep on several pink churches and the biggest brown one, and so achieved a sufficient majesty, elected or appointed or stolen outright, as to allow my wrath to encompass the whole of that abominable county, the better to tax and incinerate it.

As it was, I chose a course that won me not useful employment but only continued humiliation, and gained me no reputation except that of a naïve and unhelpful coward, and did not recommend me either to future cops or to cheerleaders, and ensured that at the football games I would be in a marching-band uniform if present at all, and that later I would be unable to attend even one of these predictable routs with a reasonable assurance that hands would be offered mine in friendship and not swung at my nut in contempt. In the end I was robbed of what spiritual consolation I might have taken from the practice of politics and real estate, and afforded no better revenge on that county, or on the people who had so willingly surrendered themselves to it, than this frail and too bloodless composition.

Then again, my decision to shun those pills did delay a personal dependence on them by nearly a decade, and it would be evil of me to pretend otherwise, or to ignore how grateful I am for that brief window in which I saw more clearly than afterward and was not always a complete bitch to everyone around me. Said window was small, yes, and painted shut, and itself dependent on what class of pill could be got hold of each day, but that it presented at twenty-three or so, when I could thoroughly enjoy its blessings, and not at thirteen or fourteen, before my pallial palate had fully formed, was a stroke I cannot help but ascribe to the American schoolbus, and all that it threatened me with, and all that it led me to attempt.

How, then, to continue along the path I have thus far hacked out of memory’s bramble? How dare I apply today’s half-remembered hatred to an object that long ago, and without apparent motive, thought to exempt me from its own? By what right do I persist in my claim that this vehicle was, and remains, worthy of a violent and selfish attack?

Let us praise, then, or sing, or at any rate take a wider view of, the great American schoolbus: 450,000 of these behemoths gone out twice each weekday with no more than three or four children slaughtered on or by them in a good year. That is a remarkable record: three or four out of a possible score of 25 million. It is a testament to the restraint of schoolbus and driver alike, especially when we consider that most of these deaths are not fiery, as the rare if dramatic schoolbus explosion would have us believe, but are due either to a child’s being crushed by the wheels of the bus, or to the fact that many of these containers hurtle down the road, in the rural areas at least, at speeds of up to forty miles an hour (fifty on a decent downgrade) without the handicap of seatbelts.

I say again: this is a remarkable record.

We might ask what link could be drawn between the conditions on these moveable villages and those deaths that occur later, in homes (such as the one I was stunted in) where no more than an unlocked closet door ever stands between a child and a rifle or a shotgun or both; or in schools where these guns, which apparently do not kill people themselves, arrive now and then armed with deadly children; or in bars where the prison-like atmosphere of the bus still prevails; or in prisons where the bus-like atmosphere of the bar still prevails; or in cars and trucks
whose occupants have just left the bar, or the prison, and know far more about the confluence of long roads and alcohol than they ever will about the confluence of human beings and seatbelts; but we cannot establish beyond a reasonable doubt that our scholastic transport has made any deliberate effort to erase us from this Earth, or that it has been directly responsible for anything more than its own fair share of preventable murders.

That is why I must now raise my voice in approbation of the American schoolbus. That and the luck that I was not killed on or beneath it myself, nor did I die later in a bar or a prison, or on one of those gray asphalt arteries that seem almost designed to connect these sad termini. My death was more spectacular and, as of this writing, has yet to conclude. The cause was self-abuse, and although I learned a good deal about that subject on the schoolbus I am forced to acknowledge that I might not have survived as long as I did, and might already be confined to a hole in Goochland, or in one of its numerous imitators across this dim continent, were it not for the tutelage I received as we rumbled past those sullen pines and along those irate dirt roads.

Do I regret that my education was not of the sort to be had from books but was more in line with the “common sense” half the nation now believes to be of greater value than the ability to read? Let me answer that I was thankful to have gained any wisdom at all out there, seeing as how little was being offered through the schools. Do I count myself a weaker student of the cornpone philosophy because, by the grace of ruined yet thoughtful parents, I came not to fear and avoid the written word but to fear and approach it? From what I saw, the country child fared no better with the land’s lesson than he did with the book’s. True, he tended to announce a mastery over the former when it was clear that he would fail at the latter, but he napped in nature’s classroom as he did in any other, and sought to get by on good attendance alone, and
put the whole of his faith in a glib native cleverness he wrongly assumed was not also available to those possessed of a library card and a paid-up residence in town.

I myself blew nearly every test the weeds administered, but out of horror I did remain awake in that place, and worked through the problem sets as best I could, and spent considerable time on the experiments, and just as I will not recognize as my superior in the field the jean-shirted fool who has removed himself from town for moral or aesthetic reasons (which are anyway the same thing) and now pens tone-deaf encomiums to the dirt, I will not bow down before the baseball-capped, goateed man-child who attaches himself by vacuum seal to the government tit yet insists that the nation’s wealth flows like a river from its pristine source (himself) to condescending town, and who will cast his vote in fury for whichever candidate most convincingly implies that Jesus hates all the tax-exempt town fags too.

He had the same schooling as I did, this patriot, and the same long sentence within that mobile metal hull, and the same chance to observe for himself the limits of a life defined by the conviction that town is the source of all hurt known to man, and that Jesus is not the peaceful town Jew we encounter in the New Testament but rather a vengeful country Christian who attends all the gun shows, and that town dwellers would take their punishment right here on Earth (so that heaven-bound country folk could enjoy it too) were it not for a school-bred habit of liberal terrorism against God’s American law. Some part of science is always Satanism, insists this citizen. Wrestling tickets are a thoughtful anniversary present. A ring around the moon means snow.

Except for the ring around the moon, and that part about science, only the notion of an angry country Christ makes any real sense to me now. Had I been dragged from the comfort of town by lesser beings so as to profit a real-estate scam that
would never in turn profit me, and would forever cause town people to assume that I hailed from the weeds by personal choice and not by someone else’s criminal action, I might be inclined toward a vengeful attitude myself. I might raise up an army of ignorant orcs to go against those who had so shamelessly enriched themselves by my removal and then shunned me for my provenance, or I might recognize in the orc’s plight something of my own, and so come to pity him in his victimhood, and so come to despise him for his weakness, and so come to torture him by means of an extended and then suddenly withdrawn favor. Energy permitting, I might also do my best to curse, and to salt with humanity’s tears, the land beneath town and country alike, provided I could find a spot that had not already been cursed and salted eons before by another creature of vast and unspeakable consequence, whose motives I could guess at but never quite discern.

The schoolbus was, I have no doubt, a servant of that creature, and oftentimes I took it for, or beheld in its dun and green innards, a physical manifestation of the creature’s great animosity toward me. It ought to count for something, though, that at one point or another I suspected every vehicle and building and plant and person in Goochland of the same, which opinion time has not softened any (and time in town has only ossified), and that none of these entities ever educated me so thoroughly as my schoolbus did, nor showed me so intense a concern, nor suffered from me so grave an insult. I know full well that I owe this benefactor a debt whose principal I will never be able to touch. By my gestures here I hope only to pay down the interest.