If his features froze up while we were at play in the trash pit, then I knew a car would soon pass by and see us, or just had, and I knew the family’s already loud reputation was again on the rise. If his eyes sounded anger, with grace notes of resentment and enervation, then I knew we were about to be, or just had been, called upon to perform yet another dirt-intensive labor that would diminish rather than augment our situation. If his eyes read guilt, with descants of panic and rage, then I knew he was about to be whipped, or just had been. If he avoided my presence all day long, and did not simply stand beside and ignore me as he did at most other times, then I was probably about to be whipped myself. If, from field or yard, he looked to the house with pursed lips and narrowed lids, or stared hawkeyed and open-mouthed at same, or stayed fixed on his chore, or went slack in the shoulders, or went suddenly rigid, or considered the middle distance, or threw his implement down and wandered off into that middle distance, then I knew our mother was due for, or had just begun, or had just completed, her next hysterical aria in the opera buffa that had resulted when her folk-guitar fantasy of a country life collided with her husband’s more powerful Jew’s harp.
And if my brother did not show his usual relief when the recitative set in, and if he rocked back and forth on his bed after dinner, and listened through our window to the softer but no less horrible hum of yard and pit and weed and forest, and if he seemed particularly attentive to the silent scream that rose up off the obliging little road in the background of this étude for washboard and moonshine, then our weekend, I knew, was over, and I understood that when I awoke, and perhaps even before, the beast would be here to summon us again with its own despicable music.
Balloons
I was more prepared for my second fistfight on the bus but still lost it. A high-school girl who had had a bad day lit into me when some boys in back asked me to get her attention; I did. She had an overhand style that was hell on my ears and the top of my head, and although I caught her here and there on the breasts I was soon overwhelmed and started to bawl, which seemed only to inspire her: the blows came faster and with greater force than they had at the outset, and by the time they tapered off I could not say with any certainty where I was. This girl beat me with such an exuberance that I thereafter conceived of human beings in her part of the world as no more than hatred-filled balloons in search of a rent by which to empty themselves on me. Once delivered of their gasses, these balloons could be reasonable and even kind (such as when this girl phoned our home to apologize for her assault on what was, after all, a blameless boy still in elementary school), but I learned that circumstance soon patched and reinflated them, and caused them to wear again a bloated and uncomfortable look, and ensured that they would be ready to vent themselves on whatever fool was unlucky or unwise enough to nick their rubber the next time around.
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.