A fictional magic
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.
What escapes this flytrap of a county allowed those boys I cannot say, nor do I recall which one of them was later executed by better-prepared criminals in a Richmond warehouse once the degreed hippies had either cured him or inspired him to run away. Certainly no delinquent of my acquaintance chose to settle in Goochland afterward, though that may have resulted less from a hatred of the degreed hippies than from a fear of the weedy and wooded tick nursery in which troubled teens, and troubled midwesterners, were meant to be reborn. At any rate the place tended to breed its own delinquents and had no need to adopt. It tended also to grow its own hippies, albeit of a sort who romanticized non-nonviolence, and owned guns not to hunt but because there was “a government conspiracy against pot,” and made use of their freedom from society’s “hangups” (and of their jobs at town sewage-treatment plants) to buy great heaps of cocaine and pornography and automotive equipment that almost demanded resale, and who considered bluegrass “too classical” (and the blues itself “nigger music,” where not interpreted by Lynyrd Skynyrd or the Allman Brothers Band) and were ever eager to “fight for” what they believed in, though I noticed that they kept no muscle and trusted more in mandalas and spirits than in soap and simple medicine to ward off the “bad energy” they and their college-pressed counterparts alike believed to radiate solely from town.
The county produced its own cops too. I am told that the fat boy with whom I fought on the bus became one.
National color wheel
Only a dull allegiance to fashionable notions of the truth could convince me to argue that these hippies and delinquents and fat future cops and sad future relatives were somehow responsible for what befell me on my long ride through that excuseless desert. Excuseless because the sun had never managed, for all its effort, to turn the soil there entirely to ash, and so had never managed to impoverish Goochland’s impoverished to the degree one might ignore in, say, Ethiopia or the Sudan. Excuseless because the storms drawn there did not pinpoint and obliterate trailer homes as one might laugh at in, say, Missouri or Kansas or Oklahoma. Excuseless because the River James, although it made an effort to flood whenever the air warmed and a sun shower came near, displaced mostly cows and not people, and kept at all times a Richmondly course, and despite a full complement of deadly potions did not sicken and destroy the county’s residents, or deform their children, with enough enthusiasm to rival a Bhopal or a Love Canal.
At a certain point the Goochlander comes to accept that no great drama is likely to arise and give form to the evil he perceives all around him, not because such a drama is impossible but because it has been staged already, so immense and unfinished that the eye is unable to see it for a breach or a flood or a storm or a sun. Grateful for the fact that the mosquitoes there impart nothing worse than sluggishness, and that local snakes and spiders rarely kill, and that something like water can usually be sucked up out of the gault, he seldom looks up from his toil, or from his trip to the gas station or the convenience store or the clinic or the courthouse, to consider that although this maelstrom has long since wandered off, across hills and plains and oceans and decades to claim its countless, nameless victims, the conditions under which it was whipped up in the first place still apply, and find him in the fields, and work themselves upon him as they did upon those who gave succor to this hypnotizing force in its infancy, and preached that it would be a boon to our world and not a burden on it, long before anyone thought to call it the United States of America.
I hardly mean to imply here a regret over the foreign lives ruined by my native arms and industry, for I understand that a brown belly distended by hunger abroad allows a pink one at home to be swollen by gluttony. I understand that a piece of shrapnel through the brain of a sand dweller’s child allows a subdivision dweller’s child to acquire a piece of parchment it has not earned and probably cannot read. I understand that for every outlander tortured to death in a faraway jail cell an American retains the freedom to announce that he has taken Jesus into his heart and will not release Him until all the homosexual abortionists have been killed. My purpose is not to belittle these gains: I aim instead to shriek and point at what made them possible, to show that they are not the product of a notion one group says has been wisely expressed and another says has been utterly betrayed but were in fact spawned by something older, and hideous, and considerably more real.