Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

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.