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.
The beer helped with that, the concern over parents and charred country remains and so forth, as did a particular girl. She was from the center of the county, older than I was and with hair the color of dark, oiled wood, and she gave no hint that she either despised or pitied me for the numerous times I had probably been beaten before her large and curious eyes. In fairness I cannot say for certain whether she was physically present at any of my humiliations, only that she would have known about them, though it would be nice to be wrong about that too. As I stood beside her, already altered by the beer, and stuck on what to say, a boy came into the firehouse and demanded that the music be turned down, whereupon he announced that two of our number were “doing it out in the ditch.”
What I have related thus far is not necessarily what I meant by that audacious “analogy for my art and way in this world” above. Nor is the phrase explained by the fact that upon hearing of the goings-on in the ditch I began to laugh and (in imitation of television’s imitation of vaudeville) spit my latest mouthful of genuine Budweiser beer directly into the pretty girl’s hair. I remember that she glared at me, bedraggled, with either a new or else a renewed scorn (I will never know), and was quickly taken off by her friends to wash the incriminating odor out of her hair. I myself was taken off by my brother to witness the fornication, which act we had heard tell of but never ourselves observed, let alone performed, in a ditch or otherwise. We were bound to be disappointed. All the ditches we came upon were empty of people, if not of sin, and the grass around these gouges admitted of no rustle, except where we yelled “Copperhead!” and kicked the next boy’s legs out from under him, sure in our inebriation that he would not land ass-down on an actual snake. By the time we returned to the firehouse, and the too-bright bustle within, the girls had rinsed out my victim’s tresses and were indicating by means of folded arms and theatrical huffs that a formal apology was expected. We decided that I should probably go ahead and offer one, as that was bound to be funny, whereas a refusal to do so would not necessarily be.
I found my lady with a comb in her still-wet hair, and as I opened my mouth to speak she took my hand in hers and led me away from the others. She walked me to a spot in the front room where we could be alone, if not unseen, and I made no objection to that. She sat herself calmly on a wooden chair there, and pulled me down beside her, and held my eyes for what seemed like a minute or two but was probably only a systole. She then asked if I was sorry for what I had done, and I said I was, which was true but also, by that point, a thoroughgoing lie. She smiled at this, the lie I think, and leaned in close enough that I could smell the soap and mall-bought eau de toilette in her hair. Her eyes met mine at a distance of two or three inches and allowed me to focus on what I hoped or even believed might be her intention. This accomplished, she reached back and pulled the hair off her neck and whispered, in a voice too womanly for either one of us, “Then blow it dry.”
Pistol
That was my second erotic experience in the rural parts, that I know of, and the only reason I do not count it superior to the first is that it involved no direct dealings with pain and so can hardly be considered representative. I felt little beyond a sudden rush of warmth, and a dizziness that increased the more I stared into those eyes, and blew into that hair, and asked myself whether I would vomit before or after I had kissed that self-satisfied pout. I harbored some further concern that a vomit might propel a further round of alcohol into her hair, and so undo not just the pout but also what delicate ministrations had lately been done in the bathroom, yet I cannot locate any real guilt in the thought. My attention was applied, as it has been ever since, to the aesthetics of the problem: even then I understood that a vomit might rob the scene of its crystalline charm, or else overdo it, and so I resolved to attempt the kiss prior to any discharge, rather than after, which to this day I contend was the proper approach. Sadly, I was unable to test out the theory: word began to go around that a young man, “bullshit” over some perceived slight by a girl on the premises, or possibly out in the ditch, had squired a pistol to the party and was wholly prepared to use it.