Make him wait while the policemen who have followed his bus in anticipation of a scheduled fight there pull up behind its idling hull, and find their unhurried way around to its door, and lumber up its steps, and sidle among the children as if cops were the protagonists here, not the boys who have been fighting, nor the driver who will likely finger the bullied victim as the culprit, nor the former town child who had hoped that this brief cessation of movement might allow him a moment to study a suddenly readable page. Make him wait while the new girl starts to cry as the bus nears the field-bound loneliness of a home in every way superior to his own, and let him glance at the page while she refuses, as usual, to disembark. Make him wait, unable to think at all of the page, while that obese boy in back finds his mournful way up toward the exit, the dark stain at his crotch proof that the rutty roads have yet again bested his kidneys, his head hung low while he passes, as if to say, “I know, I know.”
Now:
Steal this waiting child’s books one afternoon under the cover of “play” (the game being never to give them back, though he begs and explains that he has a test the next morning), and push him off the bus and into his driveway with the driver’s full collusion (she will, in fact, fold the bus’s doors on him as he tries to reboard and fight for his property), and leave him standing in a storm of red dust and derision while his future recedes. Allow him more patience than he has heretofore shown, and grant him the knowledge that his schoolbus will disappear down a nearby road for fifteen minutes or so, then return with no intention to stop, only to show him through the windows a familiar tension in the driver’s pursed lips and raised eyebrows, and a mockery of faces fanned out behind her, and a book or two held up in display of what has been lost.
Now:
Permit this child access to his father’s shotguns and ask what you think he might do.
Sanctuary
My aim here is not merely to describe how at the age of thirteen or so a frightened and pissed-off white boy held up his mostly black schoolbus with a shotgun, though he did surely do such a thing; nor is it to overstate the worth of those stolen books, for they were of appallingly poor quality either as didactic tools or as objets d’art; nor do I have anything more than a sporting interest, really, in the argument that a child should be held blameless for his sins simply because he has been beaten on the bus, and beaten at school, and beaten at home, and has finally decided to set a few boundaries.
The crime itself is almost too plain to recount. I stood at the end of the driveway, where the dirt ended, or rather jumped out along the road toward Richmond. (Evidence, I suppose, that since losing town we had been trying always to regain it.) My brother, half hoping to see me kill someone, stood off to the right and behind me, his muteness relieved now and then by bursts of laughter. I took a step forward as the bus neared, the gun not fixed on anyone but only pointed downward, its long eye cradled in the nook of my arm. The wheels stopped shy of where I had expected them to, and a tenth or eleventh grader was sent out, probably by lot, to lay the books on the asphalt (or was it the gravel?), after which he walked backward, slowly, his arms raised, until he reached the door and scrambled up those stairs to what he might have believed was sanctuary.
At the time I considered those arms a tad dramatic (I had neither lifted the gun nor flirted with the trigger as I planned to), but once I had collected my books, and the bus had sped off, and the afternoon light had dimmed just enough to allow me to reflect on the fact that my parents would soon be home, and I would then have to explain what I had done, that unmeant mimesis of surrender came to represent everything wrong with the place, and with me, and with how I would likely respond when made by our father to pay for my vengeance. Yet my ass was strangely spared that night. Unable to reckon how a boy’s decision to meet his schoolbus with a shotgun could be explained away by either Bob Dylan or Minnie Pearl, my parents entered into a fugue state in which physical exertion was impossible and the rhetoric of my mother’s job at the boys’ home seemed the mind’s only refuge.
I remember how she worked the phone as the sun went down, sure that she could not get me out of this and in truth not wholly invested in the idea, because even more than she wanted to protect her child (which certainly on some level she did), and even more than she wanted her husband to whip the child (which on some level she always did), and even more than she wanted to reverse an injustice that could legally be charged against her, my mother wanted to be proved right in her fear-wish that an action by one of her children, and not by her man, would ultimately be blamed for the family’s destruction. She seemed almost to look forward to the day when the courts would take her second son away, and would subject him to counseling sessions and restraint holds and whatever other tortures the degreed hippies had devised for their little Jonestowns, and would release him only after his voice had changed and he had completed the steps in some or other “program” designed to crush any trace of his soul’s dissent.
Would not such an outcome imply, to anyone who looked into the matter, that this “special” boy had been so rotten as to explain, in an ethical sense, his parents’ previous workhorsing of him, and all those mishandlings he had dared to resent, and the constant belittlement that was his apparent reward for having intruded upon their lives in the first place? The question, happily, was moot. RSVP no, delinquent homes of Goochland County. Regrets, military school (discussed that evening as a “best-case scenario”). Apologies, of course, to my mother, whom I do love, and whose good works are legend, and whose desire to be vindicated at any cost I surely share. Apologies as well to my father, who may secretly have preferred that a son of his gun down an entire busload of children, black or white, rather than allow a few textbooks to be stolen. Apologies to both these fine Americans if today they credit themselves, and a few frantic phone calls, and a borrowed hippie logic, and a half-dead bourgeois courage, with my subsequent freedom, for they would be wrong. It had already been decided, ages before, by the land itself, how a violence such as mine should be treated: delicately, lest in time a greater violence be lost. My mother, the pretty town girl, could not possibly have known this; my farmboy father could not possibly have missed it. Despite what obfuscations town and college had thrown up against him, he knew full well that the greater violence in him was likely to be me.
That is the truth of the matter, and that is all I mean to relate. There was even less call for my mother’s panic than there was for my belief that a young man’s raised arms in the road that day had been anything more than a halfway decent attempt at comedy. Fifteen hours after the incident I boarded the schoolbus and told the driver I was sorry for what I had done and would never trouble her again, after which she said, “Well, you see that you don’t.” So evidently normal was my behavior the previous afternoon that she seemed almost annoyed by my apology for it. We proceeded with the usual gossip and drug negotiations to school, where I repeated my speech to a mostly amused principal, did perfectly well on my test, and was neither robbed nor challenged all day long. Later on, the bus dropped me off in the usual spot and pulled away leisurely while I stood affixed to the end of our driveway in something like grace. I listened for the engine’s groan to dissipate, and for the crunch of my brother’s footfalls on the gravel to cease once he had reached the softness of the yard, and for the dogs to quiet once he had entered the house, and then I could hear only the wind through the tops of the trees, and the pants and paws coming back at me over the clay, and I knew that something entirely inhuman had worked to secure my pardon out there, and I was overcome by faith and by fear.