Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

When the father of that boobless child we had been to the beach with (or would that be later?) set his drink down, and walked out of a bar along Route 6, and stood in the road and waited (for minutes? for hours?) until a tractor-trailer hit him, and bounced his meat up ahead, and caught it up quickly and dragged it, they say for miles (but who was there watching? who took these measurements? ), all the while air braking and trying not to jackknife across the road, I made every attempt to spot this stain from a passing car window but could find no real easement there. Had it rained in the interim and washed all the iniquity away? I had thought myself luckier when that taxidermist blew his stuffing out near our home and, although the scene was days since dealt with, I ran to it and believed for a moment I had located a puddle of the dead man’s blood, with some chunks of brain floating in it, though this turned out to be but rocks and clods dressed not in blood but in motor oil, which may very well have issued from the pan of an altogether different suicide.

When we drove to such sites (the crossroads where that van had met up with a maple, say, at eighty miles per, and had accordioned with all those drunken kids inside, only one of whom may have honestly wanted to die; that hill where a farmer we knew had “realized” that his brakes were out, and so had encouraged his son to jump but had remained seated himself, and so had perished in flame and metal when his truck collided with the obligatory freight train below), we were not unaware that our treks involved their own potential risk and reward. All road travel in that place was attempted suicide, after all (or homicide, depending: our instructional manual, Defensive Driving , served each and either need), and one was not considered much of a driver unless one had been in a “tragic” crash. Beyond that, no “tragedy” was considered much unless someone had actually died in it, and no death was considered much unless the deceased had been (a) “cut in half” or (b) “burnt alive” or (c) both. There were but a few exceptions to this nomenclature amongst the living and the left-alive. “Vegetable” bought one a piquant and so an almost respectable glory, as did “most of his face is gone” and, of course, “wheelchair.”

When that paralyzed fellow, a graduate, I am guessing, of the high school, who retained his face but whose younger brother, a contemporary of ours, had seemed since the accident to have less of one, came to lecture us in the gym about the dangers of alcohol, and of arguing with one’s parents about the dangers of alcohol, and of imbibing more of the dangers of alcohol, and of climbing behind the wheel of a muscle car one’s parents had paid for in a misguided attempt to see one teetotaled out there, we scanned the stands above us, and sought out the shadow-face of the shy little brother, who laid back while the abstinence speech was under way, shifting only a little (in agitation? in hope?) when his precedent arrived at the God part, and said how grateful he was for the wreck, and the wounds, since without these he would never have been in a position (legs wrapped around his back, insensate toes pointed up at the welkin) to get off the dangers of alcohol and receive His love, which baffled a small but thinking minority out there (meaning me, mostly, but also, I prayed, the shy little brother), since why would a person praise the wheelchair for rolling him toward Jesus but not the alcohol for rolling him toward the wheelchair? Then, bless or curse him, he reached back and praised the alcohol too.

When he finished the segment about how his penis still worked, having described to his satisfaction (and our rapt disgust) the process of intimate massage that allowed him, theoretically, to defy the constraints of his injury and procreate, all became crystalline. Up through then the lines of his argument had been too various, and one could not tell where, exactly, he sought to collect the acclaim he felt himself owed by a gymful of deliberately suicidal country Christians. (Or were we a gymful of deliberately Christian country suicides? I suppose it cannot matter now.) He seemed proud of it all, really: the alcohol, the anger, the car, the wreck, the rehab, the getting off the dangers of alcohol, the cursing of Jesus before and during this trial, the humble acceptance of Him ever after, the weirdo sex stuff, the insurance-bought van in which he now got around to his various “ministries” better than any of us did, thank you very much. Personally, I was no longer looking for clear-cut answers by the time he started in on the slide show but only for a sign that he had not lost his sense along with the sensation.

When the lights dimmed, and his voice rose a fifth in register as he began to click enthusiastically from frame to frame, lingering longer on the Afters than he did on the Befores ( A : the crushed car, so like all those others we had hunched around in our denim to admire at whatever gas station was nearest the crash site; a puff-faced him in traction, his short mom hugging a too-tall surgeon; he trying to do that parallel-bars rehab thing while an enormously fat therapist screamed at him; he leaving the hospital in a wheelchair and giving a feeble thumbs-up; he proselytizing before a congregation (his?), backed by a robed and beaming choir; the arrival in his driveway, with balloons, of the insurance-bought van; B : he smiling out-of-doors with comely and half-dressed friends, a can of genuine Budweiser beer in each hand; a half-empty (or was it a half-full?) bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the bucket seat, “ironically” strapped in; a recently washed and waxed muscle car, black (or was it dark blue?), our hero installed behind the wheel, waving goodbye out the window (barely visible within, passenger-seated, the cautiously elated face of the shy little brother!)), I saw that this cripple had indeed held on to his sanity, and I wondered whether any of the administrators on hand were in a position to realize, if only by our wild applause at the end, that this presentation they had intended for a warning was in fact a well-built and powerful recruiting tool, at least as effective as what the Army and the Marines would later muster.

When, ages after (though in truth it must have been but a matter of months), on my way to sell cigarettes and maxipads to Richmond’s West End, in what I recall (conveniently?) as a light rain, I found myself slowed by a state trooper and waved on past a wreck that reminded me, in a painterly sort of way, of a certain frame in that paralyzed young preacher’s slide presentation, improved upon here by the addition of what looked to be a tall man’s corpse thrown up high on the embankment and covered by a crisp white sheet just beginning to spot through now with blood, I found myself moved almost to tears. Not by what pain and fear this driver might have felt ere he died, nor by what would soon be felt among those who had thought that he belonged to them (and so thought that they belonged to him), but by the overwhelming sense of how proper death often looked against a country backdrop, and how perfectly beautiful its ugliness could usually contrive to be.

The line between death’s admiration and death’s desire thins considerably, or I suppose it may thicken, when one drives it at ninety miles per on a foothilly one-and-a-half-lane road, rising up out of mist for a weightless breath before diving down into it again, an unseatbelted sister beside one in the cab, screaming happily until she says, softly, “What the fuck is that?” and one sees, or thinks one sees ( does one?), a faint flash of red (or was it only orange?) in the haze below, and so stomps on the brake, and then slides, and then spins, and then comes to a miraculous halt mere feet behind a car whose driver has decided to park on a foggy-bottom creek bridge so skinny one’s peers have dubbed it “the eye of the needle.” One gets out and walks back up the hill a little (why?) before turning and running down after the car (an old Continental, one insists it was) in a frenzy to know , or else physically to attack the knower, but stops short, as one’s vehicle just had, and retakes one’s place behind the wheel, and drives around and away from this fogmine (one’s sister spitting curses out her window), reflecting on the fact that upon stopping this murder-suicide had at least, unlike oneself, thought to switch on his hazard lights.