Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

His name alliterated comically, this proud initiate to the Park and Ride, but I remember him best by how perfectly ashamed I felt for all of humanity on account of what he had said. The pregnant girl had a name too, so apt to her sweetness and her situation that it would be a pleasure to render it here, though in truth I remember her less by her tag than by the fact that she quietly confided in me, of the boy who had climbed through her window that night, “He mmped me. He mmped me good.” She actually said the “ mmped. ” What is a name compared with that?

What is a name compared with I have the fear of Jesus in me or They had to use the jaws of death ? Why are writers so easily enamored of the stupid technique by which “John” is made to convey a certain blandness, or at most the notion “herald,” while “Jane” calls out with her own sort of blandness, even if the clumsy intention is to reference Lady Grey, say, or Ms. Mansfield, or any number of other Janes (or Jaynes) who by their boldness lost a plain or pretty head? Whether I am beyond such tricks or they are beyond me is beside the point. I will permit myself neither the luxury of names that have no claim on my memory nor the laziness of them that have plenty. “Ronnie” means more to me than every “Romeo” and “Charles” in the world put together, more than any flighty and bothersome “Jay,” yet its employment here would rent me only a word-doll we might dress up poorly between us, powerless (it or we) to render what the land led actual Ronnies to say and do out there, always to my chagrin. Could any doomed “Juliet” or “Emma” or “Daisy” possibly compete with my doomed “Jennifer” or “Cindy” or “Sera”? Surely not, though even the most talented reader might gather from the latter three no more than queen (the first) and ashes (the second) and angel (the last), in which case all is lost, despite the fact that those particular interpretations, in that particular order, do draw an eerily accurate map of the tractor path down which American country girlhood is usually forced to sashay.

The one character I am tempted to name at all in this narrative, if only as a form of copyright protection for his descendants, is a boy whose name I do not even remember, though he produced what is easily the best line from my childhood, if not from my entire life. I say “boy,” but in actuality he had failed so often that I guessed him to be in his early twenties by the time he caught hold of me in the back of a junior-high classroom, and hypnotized me with eyes no less horrified than my own, and yelled, by way of boast or introduction, “My dick don’t get hard till it sees the pussy!” Later on I heard he was killed in a car wreck, along with some others, but that line of his is immortal, or ought to be. In walking, waking life there was a name for him, but not for that. Some actions, some utterances, deserve to be their own name.

It was a rifle, not a shotgun. “Shotgun” might sound better here, and might make for a flashier tale, but it was a rifle nonetheless, and I did not load it, and I did not intend to fire. That is, I had a fair idea of how to load a rifle, and I knew where the ammunition was bound to be kept (conveniently near the firearms, praise Jesus, in my house as in any other), and I was a good enough student even then to match the numerals on the box with the caliber requirements of the gun. Still, I did no such thing. I merely retrieved the rifle from the closet under the stairs and carried it down with me to the road below, thinking not of the violence it could do but only that it seemed, of the possibilities before me, the closest to what I imagined a Hatfield or a McCoy might have on him, or a sun-bloated corpse from the War Between the states: a dark brown stock devoid of any style, a long steel barrel devoid of any accuracy: a gun that looked able to kill, and was purposed for that, but seemed wholly unconcerned with where its hole was finally punched. I confess that my father owned such a gun, and that I fetched it out of the closet one bright afternoon and took it down into the road, thinking not to bring destruction along with me but surely a kind of terror.

I do not remember if before or after this incident my brother and I attended a party for young people at the volunteer firehouse a mile or so south, astonished that we had been asked to go and even more astonished that we had been allowed to; I do not know, therefore, whether to count said party as yet another rejected excuse for my behavior or as a desperate vindication of it. Neither is worth much, but the excuse has at least the charm of being refused.

We walked to this party on newly paved road, and not on the old stuff, which might be a clue that the party happened after my indiscretion, except that I remember the road being paved well enough, and not made mostly of cracks and gravel, when I stepped out into it with my father’s gun in my arms. The formal approach to the firehouse, which jutted off Richmondward from our road, comprised the same twin tire ruts we knew from our driveway, and from God knows how many other such byways pumping that sad little county’s animus around, and so offered less of a surprise than that the firehouse’s cheap aluminum walls hid from the elements an excellent wooden floor, suitable for dancing.

That floor may not have been made of wood, of course, and those walls may have been made of something fancier than aluminum, and the approach may not have been the ruts I recall but rather a truck-shat gravel, which would surely have eased the fire trucks’ way out onto the road, unless they were not fire trucks at all but only area pickups and secondhand town ambulances bought with too many miles on them, in which case this was not a fire station in the first place but rather a “volunteer rescue squad” outfit, though I cannot say as I care. It is within my ability to do an all right job with the facts, I suppose, and were the facts any match for the truth, which I swear formed me more than I formed it, I would probably do so. But a fact can lie as dependably as can anyone’s truth, and is often enough only what most people will agree to out of their own personal stashes of error, or else what was once said or written down long ago by someone no more diligent, and far less tasteful, than I. Americans will, I have noticed, stomach a great deal of mendacity, and spread it around, and rally to it even when they know it to be mendacity, so long as they can be assured that in doing so they have acted “professionally.” Yet I need not stomach and spread such mendacity myself. I need not exchange a flaw I know to be true, because it is at least mine, for what is likely no better than a pilfered guess.

It was a rifle, not a shotgun, and I did not load it, and I did not intend to fire .

This party, whether I remember it badly or well, or whether I remember it well but render it unprofessionally, stands out with such insistence in my mind that I am tempted to think it an analogy for my art and way in this world. There were no adults around, that I could see, and I wondered how an unattended child, our presumed host, could possibly have secured such a space, at once new and strangely disappointing, all on his own. I wondered how he could have gathered us to him as he had, and placed a can of genuine Budweiser beer in every hand (when he was in a legal position to obtain none), and maintained on his face that generous country smile, and ignored the signs of obvious and impending disaster all around him. I wondered where the stereo had come from, and why that redhaired boy, the rumored swain of the girl who had complained about her titties on the bus, kept putting his head between the speakers like he did. I wondered what the hell we were supposed to do if a fire broke out tonight.