The Sledding Hill (11 page)

“As a teacher and pastor, I understand the meaning of separation of church and state, and the material in this book is appropriate for neither.

“I have said before, and I say again, having been to the man's website, that his true agenda may very well be homosexuality. Homosexuality in this book and in several others he's written is treated as if it's as common as a rash. You just heard the testimony of a boy who now feels the decision to be homosexual is okay. Enough said. I'm about to call for a vote here, and I hope this school board, as it represents the community, will use common sense.”

The back door bangs open, and my tenacious buddy, soaked in sweat from running three miles at state cross-country-meet speed, stands backed by the porch light. He brushes past my dad, stops to ask Chris Crutcher if he's Chris Crutcher, is delighted to discover he is, and strides to the microphone.

The crowd is nearly dumbstruck. Though roughly fifty percent of them already understand the meaning of “surreal,” they'll
all
know it after tonight. They thought my boy Eddie was safely socked away.

“Hey,” he says. “I'll make this quick, because I have a feeling the night guys at the loony bin have already discovered the pillows under my covers aren't me, so they'll be here with nets in a minute. Two things: When I was out of my mind with fear because I kept seeing dead people all over the place, Mr. Tarter told me probably God was scaring me into being good, which meant scaring me into getting baptized. He and the Youth for Christ kids tried to get me to hurry up so I could join them here tonight and fight for getting rid of this book. But I was a bad guy, like a spy. I want everybody to know Mr. Tarter is the one behind all this. He told us in the youth group that he couldn't get directly involved because of the two hats he wears. I guess that's legal and everything, but it's kind of deceptive,
which teachers and preachers aren't supposed to be. Anyway, I read
Warren Peece
when I was feeling so alone I could barely breathe. I found friends there. They weren't as good as having my friend Billy B., but Billy B. is gone and my dad is gone, and my friends in this book stood in pretty good. Wanna know why? Of course you do. Because they felt as alone as I did. When I heard somebody wanted the book banned, it almost felt like one more friend was dying, and I couldn't stand that, so I turned myself into a spy to see if I could stop them. But I couldn't. They're too strong. Billy B.'s dad actually got fired from the school for reading to the kids who didn't read very well and the ones who couldn't afford to get the book on Amazon.com and finish it. A guy who works at the school got fired for firing kids up to read. Life gets ‘curiouser and curiouser.' I got that from a book.

“Anyway, I decided to do what Mr. Tarter said and go to Chris Crutcher's website, and guess what
I found. I found Chris Crutcher, and he lives only about a hundred miles from here. And guess what else? His phone number is right there on the website. So I called him up. And guess what else else? He came. So I'm not going to talk anymore and get myself put away again. I'm going to let him talk. Please welcome the author of
Warren Peece
and many other good books with bad words—Chris Crutcher.”

Almost in unison, the crowd turns to see Crutcher walking down the aisle.

“And by the way,” Eddie says. “I know I'm not Jesus.”

“G
ood evening. I appreciate your allowing me to be here tonight and giving me this time.”

Maxwell West stands. “Point of order, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Crutcher is not on our list of speakers. We have spent more than enough time to make a decision, and he clearly has an agenda.”

“Come on, West. Let the man talk. He drove a hundred miles; you want him to see us as inhospitable? He doesn't have any more of an agenda than
you do.” It's Robert McMaster, a logger who has been silent all evening. His words meet with general agreement.

But Mr. Northcutt comes down on Mr. West's side, citing his point of order as being valid.

The back door swings open again, and Montana West storms down the aisle toward the mike looking like Rosemary's teenager. She's wearing so much black and silver she could be mistaken for an Oakland Raider. Black skirt, black T-shirt with
LEVITICUS SUCKS
emblazoned in shiny silver across the chest, black boots. Every hole in her body not put there by the universe is plugged with silver jewelry, and she wears spiked wrist and ankle bands. She carries a black notebook right up to the microphone, brushing past Chris Crutcher. “Excuse me,” she says, and lowers the mike to her level. “I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman, I was supposed to deliver the pro-
Warren Peece
presentation, but my dad wouldn't let me out of the house until my homework was finished.”
She takes papers from the notebook and hands them to her father. “All done, Daddy. Check it for me, will you?”

Maxwell West does not take the papers.

“Young lady,” Mr. Northcutt says, “that shirt is totally inappropriate for these proceedings. I cannot—”

“You're right,” Montana says. “But my chest isn't big enough for ‘Mr. Tarter's Red Brick Church' or ‘The Bear Creek School Board,' so I had to settle for ‘Leviticus.'”

“I can't allow you to wear it here.”

Montana crosses her arms over her torso, with both hands gripping the lower hem of the shirt. “If you insist,” she says, and starts to pull it off.

“NO!” Maxwell yells. “DON'T YOU DARE, YOUNG LADY.”

She lets the shirt fall back. “Jeez. Make up your mind.” Montana takes out several pieces of paper from the notebook and holds them open in front of the microphone. “One out of three girls is sexually
abused,” she says, reading from the paper. “One out of five boys. The statistics on both boys and girls who are emotionally or physically abused are hard to zero in on because of definition, but understand that if you're in a class of twenty-five kids, there are several. Approximately one in ten humans is gay. Anywhere from twenty to sixty-five percent of the students in a high-school classroom are sexually active in some way; could be higher. Every class has at least one kid who's anorexic or bulimic and one who cuts herself or himself. I'm one of those. I cut on myself because it's pain I can control, instead of pain from you-know-where from you-know-who that I
can't
control. When I feel like I have no control, I get it wherever I can. When you try to control what we think, we feel out of control. We think you're cowards when you won't talk with us.”

“Montana, this is not the time or the place for this. I'm asking you to step away from that microphone. We'll talk about this at home.”

“You kidding?” she says. “You know how long I'm going to be grounded for this?” Then, “Of course you do.”

She turns back to the crowd. “Those are some of the issues that get talked about in
Warren Peece.
Can't give you the statistics on drug and alcohol use in our school, but it's safe to say there isn't a teenager in this room who doesn't know at least three kids who are in trouble. Mr. Tarter, and the rest of you teachers, too: The next time you stand in front of your classroom, give yourself a moment of silence, look around the room, and do the math. Ask yourself if you have the ba—the courage to talk to us about them.”

She stares at the section with the most teachers, adjusts the mike. “I read the book. I was pushed for time when it was assigned, and I was going to scam it; you know, read a little and pry the rest out of my friends or Ms. Lloyd, and slide with a B. But then you guys tried to censor it, so I read every word. Twice.

“It was a pretty good book. I've read better. But what was way cool was that a bunch of kids I like liked it way more than I did. They started talking about the issues and the characters and all the things teachers say they want us to talk about in regard to a book. You need to understand—some of my friends have never read a book cover to cover; I have friends who take pride in being ignorant. But they read this book and they liked it, and that's all anyone should have to say.”

The room is silent. Crutcher stands off to the side, trying to read the faces in the crowd. Eddie nods and pumps his fist slightly. He really wishes this girl would fall in love with him just so he could be seen with her. I wish she would, too.

Montana recognizes Chris Crutcher from his picture on the back flap, registers just a hint of surprise, and regroups. “Mr. Crutcher seems to be standing right here, and I don't know whether or not he has the guts to talk to us about those things, but I do
know he has the guts to write about them and that's more than we get from you most of the time. Thank you, Mr. Crutcher. And if I'd known you were here I wouldn't have said, ‘I've read better.'”

Crutcher smiles. “You can call me Chris.”

“If you don't want to lose us,” Montana says to the crowd, “stop trying to tell us how to think. It makes it almost impossible to respect you.” She squints her eyes at the board. “I know we don't have a prayer to stop the banning of this book, because I know how many of you are Red Brickers. So go ahead. Take it. We'll find it and read it, and we'll post a list at the city library of every book you ban and read every one of them. We'll carry them, front cover out, all over campus, and we'll talk about them, loud, with one another.”

Montana starts to walk away and quickly turns back. “And if you don't let Mr. Crutcher talk, you are nothing but cowards.”

Montana walks down the aisle to huge applause.

Crutcher stands next to the microphone, unsettled because he doesn't know protocol, whether to talk or wait for permission. He takes his cue from Montana West.

“Tell you what,” he says. “You don't have to let me talk. I don't have anything to say that could come close in accuracy to what you just heard. So my presentation is this.” He points to Montana as she walks out the back door. “What she said.”

Within a half hour, Crutcher is sitting in a local coffee shop with Ms. Lloyd and Dad and my good friend Eddie Proffit, who has miraculously been spared by the owners of the booby hatch.

By the time they get their second cup of coffee,
Warren Peece
and the rest of Crutcher's books have been removed from the shelves of the Bear Creek High School library.

I
sit high in the stacks for the next week while the Bear Creek High School library is cleansed of Chris Crutcher, and subsequently of Alex Sanchez and Terry Davis and some of Walter Dean Myers, Judy Blume, Alice Walker, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Cormier, Stephen King, and J.K. Rowling. It is also cleansed of Ms. Lloyd, because she can simply no longer work where there is no respect for literature. In truth, far more of the townspeople are against censorship than for, but the school board has the last say. The Reverend
Tarter and his followers were far less successful when they brought their same complaints to the city library.
That
board has not been infiltrated. Many high-school students begin using the city library almost exclusively, creating jobs for Ms. Lloyd and my dad.

Eddie Proffit has lived up to his last name, turning a handsome one (profit, I mean) on T-shirts and bumper stickers reading LEVITICUS SUCKS, though he did get a three-day vacation and had to come up with a written apology for wearing the prototype T-shirt, which he borrowed from Montana West, to school. He's offered Montana a fifty-percent cut. They're working out the details. His written apology was long and rambling and hardly an apology at all, but since it came with a promise not to wear the T-shirt to school anymore, he is reinstated.

I'm ready to go. Eddie has his feet on the ground, is running like a champ and filling his life with new friends (he's even edging toward Montana West with lust in his heart), many of them the kinds of friends
most people warn their kids away from—but the word is out that he might be Jesus, and he has attained antihero status among kids who wear Montana's colors. Our next run will be my last. He'll ask me to stay, and I'll say he knows everything he needs to know now and I'll just be in the way. He'll beg me, I'll tell him okay, I'll stay until he gives me permission to leave, and the moment he knows he's in control, he'll let me go. I'm not predicting the future; I just know my friend.

As I look back over this story, I believe more than ever it ought to be part of the stable of banned literature at Bear Creek High School, though I have been careful not to take the name of the universe in vain or use bodily or sexual functions as verbs or adjectives. The content alone will get the job done.

I can't get it published under the name of Billy Bartholomew, because he's just another dead white guy, but I can say all I know about what it's like being dead and not alter world philosophy one bit if I put
it under Chris Crutcher's authorship. I mean, who's going to believe
he
has the inside intellectual track on anything? The vast majority of the world's readership doesn't know who he is. When I burrowed into his mind to catch up on his books, I found him mired in the quicksand of writer's block. He hasn't completed anything in more than two years, and though his editor is a picture of patience on the outside, she's wondering if he's run out of stories. So I will this story into his Word files, but at twenty-one grams, I can't find a way to hit the
send
icon. I take it back out and pop it into his editor's computer under his name.

Imagine how surprised Chris Crutcher is to get
this
e-mail.

Crutcher reads the story, glances at the pile of Chapter One, Page Ones on the floor beneath his keyboard, recognizes this as similar to the ploy he used to get through high school, and fires off an e-mail.

Good-bye, Eddie Proffit, Dad, Ms. Lloyd, Chris Crutcher. I'm off to explore newly formed galaxies and black holes and experience the breathtaking power and grace of the universe. I'll bump against all of you soon. You probably sooner than the others, Chris Crutcher.