The End of the World as We Know It (16 page)

Mrs. Lackman may have been a fascist dictator, and she may have abused the child labor laws, but we did learn to read. We learned to add and subtract. And we learned to sit for hours at a time at long tables with other attractive, well-mannered boys and girls and not make one single peep, except for the occasional, very occasional moments when Mrs. Lackman would stick her head in the door and ask how we were doing.

And, given a couple of pints of heavy cream—heavy whipping cream—and, of course, a Mason jar with a really tight-fitting lid and one of those rubber rings that goes inside it, I could still make a pound or two of butter, even if I were in the desert, even if I were in the frozen, barren tundra, even all by myself without one single hope of salvation, even without so much as a single Saltine cracker. You just shake the jar.

When we were little children, if my brother and sister and I wanted something really badly and all other entreaties had failed, there was one that always did the trick. We'd work ourselves up to an anguished howl and say, “But Mama, I need it. I need it for school.” You had to sound really frustrated and kind of heartbroken, but it worked whether the desired item was a box of pencils or a new pair of roller skates. Needing something for school was unassailable, even though we never had any money.

I wanted this certain new pair of sneakers or a new plaid flannel shirt, something, anything that hadn't already been worn half to death by my brother, and even sometimes people before him; I wanted some new and wholly mine thing in the worst kind of way, but we had no money, and so I had to resort to the need-it-for-school argument, and that broke my mother down and she agreed. “Oh, all right,” she said. She sent me to Mr. Swink's dry goods store in town, where I was told to charge it. “Put it on the never never,” as my aunt used to say.

All the store owners knew us. There weren't any credit cards. You just signed for it. Years before, my mother used to stop in Mr. McCoy's grocery store after school and charge money so she
could go to the movies. She had an amazing amount of gall, my mother. And she always got away with it.

McCoy's sold McCormick spices and they had, in the window, a thermometer advertising the company. The different temperatures were marked by different spices, so one hundred degrees was chili pepper and so on down through whatever spices they could think of that corresponded in some metaphorical way to various temperatures. One cold day my grandmother ran into a friend of hers who said, “Yesterday it was lemon, but today it's all the way down to ginger!”

So I wanted these new sneakers or whatever it was, some trivial thing, and my mother finally relented because I needed it for school and all, and I decided, one Saturday afternoon in September, to walk to town and get them. It was two miles, and you walked down the creek, which was almost violently sexy—you could take your clothes off and nobody would see you or if somebody did see you maybe Something Big would happen; you saw old beer bottles and crumpled packs of cigarettes and used rubbers, and every single thing was invested with a kind of erotic promise. You could get rubbers out of machines in gas stations for a quarter, in the foul-smelling bathrooms, and I knew what they were because my brother's friends had told me.

Then you left the willowed water and walked up a hill and across a big long field by the two-lane road, past a pond that was frighteningly rumored to have no bottom at all, ever, so if you fell in, you would never be found, not if they dredged the pond forever. Then you walked over the crest of a hill and you could see it, the town, spread out before you like Oz, and you walked
down through the university campus and then you were on the actual sidewalks.

Town was an exciting place compared to where we lived, largely because there were other people there. It was great, living in the country, it was a bucolic extravaganza, and it provided an almost endless number of ways to play, what with mud-clod wars and the endlessly cool waterfall in the creek and black-snakes in the bedrooms and everything.

My brother and sister both had bicycles, but I never had one, even though, as one of my mother's friends recently remarked, every child in America had a bicycle. My mother said I could ride my brother's bike when he wasn't using it, but when do you use a bicycle except after school and on the weekends? At night? Alone at night? So I was often left to my own devices while they were off careening down gravel roads and hurtling into creeks where they sustained any number of life-threatening injuries involving trips to the emergency room.

One hot summer day I was in my grandmother's dining room and she had these gauzy curtains, her summer curtains, just fine light gauze, as fine and pretty as a bride's veil. They were blowing gently in the breeze and they were just irresistible, so I took out some matches and set them on fire. I just simply thought on a sweltering August day that it would be a fine thing to do. I actually did it twice, in both my grandmothers' houses, at different times. Then I crawled under the dining room table to watch the flames creep up the walls. I sat there watching my grandmothers' fluid curtains burn and waiting to be punished. It was both gut-wrenchingly magical and masochistic at the same time. Curtains like that are probably totally flame-retardant now.

So there was an almost endless number of hilarious things to do. But the almost endless part was very important, and there were many, many things that town had that we didn't have. Store windows. Ammonia Cokes. Movies. Rednecks with their sinewy forearms and hollowed-out chests lounging around by the Rockbridge National Bank, which was run by Mr. Rader, who knew everything about everybody, rednecks in their overalls spitting tobacco on Main Street. New clothes nobody else had worn. An alleyway you felt a little creepy walking through.

It was a nice day. Virginia in the fall is exactly the right temperature, the kind of temperature you imagine dreams would be in, if dreams had thermometers. It has both the nostalgia of summer's end, like a stove slowly cooling after you've turned it off, and the anticipation of almost everything else, the color, the cold, the clear hazeless air, the earth with a thin crust of sparkling frost, and, in the distance, the mountains a deep, true indigo.

It was a nice day and I was walking to town, where there were people and you could get lost in the crowd, although there wasn't really a crowd, and it would have been hard to get lost, since there were only six stoplights and most of the people knew who I was anyway. But I was walking to town and the new sneakers or the new shirt would somehow magically make my life more, well, more acceptable. I would be the envy of all. I would be good-looking and strong and dark and intense instead of just superficially clever. So, in a way, now that I think of it, I really did need this thing for school.

In the middle of the big field, I saw a group of boys I knew from school. They were in my grade and they were smoking cigarettes, just walking along with a vague air of bored menace.
And then they saw me, and they started my way. There was nowhere to go, the road was far off, and I knew them from school, and I never imagined that I was myself in any kind of trouble.

The leader of the gang was George Hazelwood. He was surrounded by five other boys—well, they weren't exactly boys; I mean, some of them shaved already, having failed various grades in their tortured academic careers, failed more than one. They all had hair like Elvis. Bad Elvis hair, lank and dirty and greasy. The oldest one, Henry MacLaine, was probably fifteen. Henry MacLaine was really, really stupid. He was fifteen and he was only in the eighth grade. You have to be pretty stupid for that.

George Hazelwood was the leader of the gang because he was so fat. He was rotund. Rednecks tend to be either fat or really, really skinny. George was the kind of white trash fat you get from eating too many sandwiches made out of Merita bread and peel-off baloney and biscuits fried in lard and everything else boiled in fatback, which is a kind of glutinous form of salt.

We were all, my sister and brother and I, preternaturally skinny, because we never ate any kind of snack food that came out of a bag and we never ate between meals and we never had Cokes, unless we went to visit the Learys, where they had potato chips and Fritos and dip, something we weren't even allowed to say, much less to eat except when we were there (or at the Fords', who also had dip). The Learys always kept a case of Cokes on the back porch from the bottling plant on Route 60. When you took a Coke, you put a nickel in the little hole in the crate, and when all the Cokes were gone, the nickels paid for a new case.

The whole conglomeration of boys, fat and skinny, surrounded me, giving me the kind of grunts that pass for
hello
in that set, and they asked what y'all doing and I said I was walking to town, and then they all pulled in a little closer.

“You ain't sorry?” Henry MacLaine asked me.

“Sorry for what?”

“Sorry for that thing you said to George last Saturday in town, right in front of the Rockbridge National Bank.”

“I never saw George last Saturday. I don't even think I was in town.”

“Yes you was. Wasn't he George?”

“Yep. He was definitely in town.”

It kind of took me aback that George Hazelwood could use the word
definitely
in a sentence.

“And you said some things. You said something to George in front of the Rockbridge National Bank. Right smack in front of the bank.”

“I—”

“You said, ‘George Hazelwood, suck my dick.'”

“I did not.” I didn't even know what it meant to suck somebody's dick. I don't think I had ever heard the word
dick
before, but even I could figure out that, whatever it meant, it wasn't something you said to a fat, greasy, lard-soaked classmate in front of the bank.

“That's right. You said, ‘George Hazelwood, you suck my dick.'”

They were stupid, they were socially and economically dispossessed, and they didn't know I was wearing my brother's old clothes. They thought I was one of Them, the ones they did
yard work for, the ones whose silver their mothers cleaned, the ones whose driveways their drunken fathers plowed when it snowed or whose garbage they carried to the dump.

Then George Hazelwood pulled something out of his pocket. “You see this?” he said. “This here is a switchblade. My brother brought it back from the army. It's got a real long blade on it.” And then he pushed a button, and the blade flashed out and it was, in fact, really long and it looked really sharp, and I was surrounded by a group of my actual classmates who had pulled a knife on me in the middle of a perfect Saturday afternoon on which I was going to acquire the one thing that was going to make all the difference, just by signing my mother's name in Mr. Swink's book.

I was very short at the time. The autumn grass was up over my waist. I weighed ninety pounds. George Hazelwood wasn't much taller, and he never would be, but he was so fat and he had a switchblade in his hand.

George Hazelwood was quivering with venom. He was like an enormously fat, dirty-nailed, acned, pig-eyed redneck pudding, and the thing that was clear and steady in my eye was the faces of the boys around me, and the very long, very sharp blade that was getting closer to my face. I could tell that these boys really didn't admire me very much. You could tell they didn't think a new flannel shirt or a sharp pair of Keds would make much difference in my general persona.

“We don't like that. We don't like that kind of talk, do we, George?” Henry was not about to let go of this.

“I don't suck dick,” said George, and he said it in such a way
that I knew, whatever sucking dick was, it was just not in George's best interest to do it. Not at all. “That wasn't very nice.”

“I didn't say it.”

“Yes you did. Nobody says shit like that to me.”

He was kind of like this guy who moved to town later in my life, when I was a teenager. He called himself the Wild Man of Chicago, so I guess he had lived there, and he wanted in the worst way to kill a local real estate broker who had crossed him in some vague way. There was no apparent reason for this, nobody knew what the source of the dispute was, or how long ago it had taken place, but there was also no reason to believe that the Wild Man wasn't serious when he said it.

“And you know how I'm going to do it?” said the Wild Man. “I'm going to sneak into his house one night, when he's in the shower before going to bed, and I'm going to stab him in the heart while he's standing there. And you want to know why? Because that is the most humiliating way for a man to die. Nekkid.”

George Hazelwood was kind of like a juvenile version of the Wild Man. “You see this knife?” he said. And I really, really did. I really did see the knife in George Hazelwood's hand.

“You just might get to town missing one of your ears. I just maybe might have to cut one of your ears off.”

That's when I said the stupid thing. It was one of the most stupid things I have ever said, and the humiliation of it haunts me still.

I said, “George, I seriously doubt it.” My tone was so acerbic, so dripping with hauteur and acid, you would have thought I was one of the characters in a Noël Coward play. You would
have thought I was Lew Ayres playing the drunken brother in
Holiday
, by Philip Barry. I was twelve years old. I was four-foot-eleven and I chose that exact moment to behave like an asshole toward a fat juvenile delinquent with a switchblade in his hand.

The minute I said it, I knew it was the wrong thing to say. It was worse than saying “Suck my dick,” because at least only tough guys said something like that, whereas etiolated wimps said, “I seriously doubt it.”

The switchblade moved up until it was just under the lobe of my ear. I could feel how sharp it was. George Hazelwood's hand was steady as a rock and the other boys' eyes gleamed with bloodlust and impatience. George was standing so close to me I could smell the wood smoke in his pathetically worn shirt.