Against the Country (9 page)

Here, then, is what I learned on, or because of, the American schoolbus:

(I should make it clear that what follows is but a sample of the ore I struck there. The lode itself stretched back for acres behind the self-pleased grins of the tormentors on the bus, and for fathoms below the excuses they or their playground counterparts gave on the rare occasion when one was solicited (“We was just playing” or, if there was blood, “He told lies on my momma”), and for light-years beyond the calm with which these overused lies were then accepted by the adults who settled such matters with what at first appeared to be an uncommon laziness of mind and morality but eventually showed itself to be a perfectly common inability on their part to free themselves from the contexts of their own childhoods, which were likely as rude and odiferous as the ones they now failed properly to police.

(Few moments can compare with the realization that one’s state-salaried protector, who stands before one in physical maturity, with children at home, and perhaps another in gestation at eye level, is in fact a huge and brutal child herself, with humiliations to avenge or to reenact so that her bitterness might be alleviated or heightened. In particular I recall an elementary-school teacher who refused to see my mother at a parent-teacher conference because I was “in jail,” by which she meant that I had been suspended from school as a result of my having
been stalked, before her rheumy and delighted eyes, by an ambitious classmate who assumed that an initial victory in a playground scuffle entitled him to score additional points on me by insults to my panicked yet conference-attending mother until (it was actually scheduled, this fight) bloody snot issued forth from our nostrils, and saline from our eyes (or was it the other way around?), and we were both of us “jailed” not for our crimes but in order to end the entertainment on a note that promised, to an irresponsible and nostalgic audience of grownups, the best chance of a recidivism.

(Among these spectators was a gym-teacher-cum-recess-monitor whose vanity was such that the sound of his own voice, and even the smallest indication that it could still intimidate children of eleven or twelve, was enough to distract him from the severity of our mayhem as he pimped across the blacktop and took account of who took account of him. Now and then, to his credit, he did realize that a football game had been arranged on the field below between a team of brown students and a team of pink, at which point he would stop and yell, “Mix it up down there,” though as soon as the brown team sent over its worst player, and we sent over ours, he seemed satisfied that his authority had been recognized, and he never troubled us again. To my disappointment, and eternal shame, I hoped always that he would look down and record the fact that I had not myself been traded, as this was an occurrence rare enough to invoke in me a pride almost as blind as his own.

(This fraudulent adult was complemented by a math teacher who struck me as a sane and serious gentleman disinclined to notice what ugly plot lines we children wove all around him but who reputedly (I did not see it myself) took a boy out into the hall one day and beat him without mercy, the boy having reputedly (I did not see it myself, nor, I am sure, did the math teacher) raped a young girl. Across the hall from where this alleged beating took place, over an expanse of waxed tile where many others
certainly did, there taught, or pretended to teach, a woman whose enormous flaps were supported by stems so thin I thought the whole of her flower sure to collapse one day and crush me in my chair. Her subject was history, or geography, or some apt American amalgam of the two, and her method was another apt American amalgam: of outright violence and the delusion that she was somehow a star. She was forever throwing erasers and chalk at us, lest our attention wander briefly to our studies and we forget to study her. When that approach failed she would bellow out, “I’m a go blerk!” which promised the physical deployment of her bulk against one or more of the children in her care, a situation much feared but of course out of boredom encouraged. (“Blerk” may have been a rural bastardization of “berserk”; that is certainly how it behaved.)

(I remember too, a few years later, a biology teacher who answered someone’s inane or mischievous question with an impromptu lecture on the subject of circumcision, which in her telling involved the removal of a layer of epidermis from the penis and scrotum, so that the entire apparatus was essentially skinned. At first I took this to be a brilliant joke on her part but soon came to realize that it was an actual tenet of her belief system. When I then challenged her interpretation of the procedure, and asked how a person could become a certified teacher of biology in the Commonwealth of Virginia when she could not answer so basic a question about the human anatomy, she explained that she was a married woman and should know. I countered that I was a circumcised man and should know better. (I was not: I was a circumcised boy, the son of an uncircumcised man who could not be bothered to cover, as he stumbled down the stairs toward the stinky little bathroom in which we were all of us forced to empty ourselves at night, an enormous piss erection we would certainly have seen less of in town.) When I went further, and suggested that her husband might have been mutilated in a farm accident he
was too ashamed to recount with any accuracy, I found myself in the principal’s office, seated across from a man who for all I knew had forfeited the whole of his genitalia, as he could not be convinced to dismiss this teacher and so spare us the damage of her continued instruction.

(Worse even than these failed chaperones, yet somehow more glorious, was the preacher’s wife who operated, and acted as if she owned, and by any practical measure did indeed possess, our schoolbus. Held in this woman’s compacted frame, and apparent in the herniated vessels of her eyes, was all the western Goochlander’s disappointment and suspicion and rage, concentrated by troubled years out there into a single beam of arbitrary judgment upon everything she thought she saw. When that beam found me in the elongated mirror just above her worried brow, and swept across my face, and probed me for signs of earthly misconduct and spiritual stain, I did my best to remain still, whether I had sinned recently or not, though I could never quite quiet my eyes, which focused alternately on her stare in the glass and that from the trees along the road just beyond. Ultimately this vegetation would show me less kindness than did the woman, but in the moment it could be counted on at least to provide a constancy in its belligerence, whereas the woman seemed almost to flirt with my future, and to play the demiurge with my destruction or survival, and to amuse herself with the question of whether, by her petty rewards and institutional punishments, I would come to recognize her dominion over me and every other terrified creature on the bus. I will allow that I did.

(I will also allow that no one’s anticipation exceeded mine when she pulled her vehicle to the side of the road because of some fight between the older boys, and rose up in her might and her housedress, and indicated by smirk and by beam which combatant she would hold accountable and which one she would likely forgive, though she could not have known any
better than we did what had sparked the dispute in the first place, and had caused all those disappointingly muffled impacts of bone-backed flesh upon bone-backed flesh. Hence the mystery of which boy she would finger took on an import, and promised a thrill, that the fight itself could not possibly match. How exciting, I agree, to see a carless twelfth grader beaten into subconsciousness by another carless twelfth grader over some imagined or inflated slight; how much
more
exciting to know that the dazed teen might then find his world wrecked for good because he had, a day or a week or a month earlier, looked the wrong way at, or dared entirely to ignore, his driver.

(Good on this woman, and good on every country person who does not consult the facts before dispensing justice but insists upon resources more readily at hand. Though those resources be amputated from reason they might still provide, in the interstice between what the land has done to her and what the land has done to her passenger, the possibility that an actual criminal, a true sinner, might be shown a random mercy the courts no longer care to provide. I am that criminal; I am that sinner; and as such I am one who looks back with some fondness on a witch who drafted and applied a personal law to her personal hell, and whose stranglehold on her riders tightened wisely once we had left the theme of the main road and turned off onto those dirt-road digressions that sent pebbles to ping against window and wall, and dust to settle in the folds of our clothes and our memories, and a melody of tortured rubber to harmonize with the basso continuo of an overtaxed engine and, sempre toward the end of our westerly route, the high ostinato of children weeping.

(This woman either heard none of it or was unmoved, seeing as how it was inferior to the music produced by her own son, a particularly gifted soloist, when the sickled cells within his pipes caught and clogged and he sent forth a cadenza, loud and low, which could not help but impress. I do remember that
on at least one such occasion, prompted by a private hurt the boy might have understood but the rest of us did not, she answered his groans with a melody of her own. For miles and minutes, as the gravel shot up, and the soil crept in, and the seats jostled, and the engine bucked and pulled, this woman threw her head back and screamed, for anyone who had ears to hear it, “People do they devilment in the dark! People do they devilment in the dark!” Good on her, and good on every country person who insists upon resources more readily at hand.)

A mosquito has just now managed to kill itself in my drink. Am I to conclude from this that the creature was overly attracted to sweetness and so doomed to die sooner or later in someone’s pool of poison? Or am I to conclude that this bug thought itself more clever than the usual bug and so deserved to be shown that it was not? Was this action, in other words, a display of hillbilly derring-do, or was the mosquito being uppity? Is the second sort of suicide to be judged less ignorant than the first, and is it therefore to be called more sinful? Does the soul contained in the first mosquito repair to heaven, where its death is applauded for a lack of pretense (even if that lack was plainly contrived), while the second goes directly to hell? will the first return as something better than a mosquito? will either be among the next wave of tiny winged demons that stab and sicken and annoy me? Perhaps I should simply pour out the contents of my glass and begin again.

Some years had passed before I was able to understand that the odd adult who pestered me was not my teacher per se but was more properly a lesson to be learned. I did, now and then, come to think of one full-grown Goochlander or another as an angel sent to deliver me, but even the angels out there could be sobering examples of what a country boy might turn into, and so I tended to study them rather than give myself over to their care. My true schoolmaster, and I imagine everyone else’s, was
that fungal entity beneath our feet, that foul root whose works now surpass those of the hopeful republic which once sprang up in opposition to it (and not, as fools have commonly supposed, in communion with its opposite) and then began to wilt. My classroom was everything this entity had managed in the meantime to touch and taint: farm and family, field and tree, stillborn neighborhood and ubiquitous church, playground and parking lot, road and rut, bike and car and truck and bus. My schoolmarm was that child who sat beside me and chided, or a few seats before me and wept, or anywhere near and threw fists down upon me, or across the aisle with her back against the hull, her jaw engaged with gum or cud, her eyes in search of a vessel into which she might pour what helpful knowledge she had gained in that place but never found cause to employ.

Long before I knew what the continuation of the species entailed I was privy to its utter debasement (both the species’ and the continuation’s) by my supposedly wholesome young instructors, each of whom was, and probably still is, a fine advertisement for why humanity might just as well be allowed to peter out. I was grabbed by an older boy and asked, or told really, “You play with it, don’t you? You rub it till it feels good,” and not released until I had answered in the confused affirmative. Another boy taught me (I had asked him nothing) that there were “two holes, and you put it in the top one,” which even then struck me as unimaginative. A girl of fourteen or so informed me that her “titties” now drooped (I could not make out either one) because she had allowed too many boys to suck on them,
according to her mother
. And here is a taste of what country children had by my day accomplished with the Socratic method, which blessed me with a number of practical insights: “Why did the farmer trade his wife in for an outhouse?” “What is transparent and lies in a ditch?” The answer to the first question was, apparently, “Because the hole was tighter and it smelled better.” The answer to the second was “A
nigger with the shit beat out of him” or, for extra credit, “A nigger with the shit fucked out of her.”

I do not mean to propose that a town education at the time would have been any classier, only that it might have lacked the particular nuance we enjoyed out in the country. The town child was not, I imagine, presented each day with the theory that brown people are lazy and stupid and so worthy either of pity (from the pink person whose heart is open) or ridicule (from the pink person whose mind is closed). (Or was it the heart that was closed and the mind that was open? And did the heart not then go in for the ridicule, and the mind the pity?) The town child was not likely to hear menstruation referred to as a “nursing period” with no lack of comprehension on anyone’s part, or to learn that a high-school girl’s pelvis had been “shattered” the night before in the backseat of a car parked on a dirt road near one’s home, or to hear a father say to his son outside a rural grocery store, “I wouldn’t fuck her with your dick,” and to know personally the twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl under discussion. The town child was presumably spared the indignity of involvement in a half-hour-long debate about whether “the man” or “the woman” does “the humping,” with only some of the participants familiar with the gerund and the rest somewhat too familiar. The town child was not eventually confronted, as I was on a schoolbus in the early 1980s, with the metaethical horror of the following exchange: