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.
Want of angels
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.
And so we have want of angels, those among us who wish to die, apparently, yet find ourselves unequal to the task. We have want of country-strong ones who will ride that gas pedal for us, and cut the brake line, and blow us straight to heaven. Or else we have want of town-minded ones who will slow us down a smidge while they push that stalled Lincoln off into the creek bed below (or was it a Ford?) and convince us to take up Proust. Certainly we have want of higher beings who will help us decide whether we are country people at all or are only just pretending to be, under a hypnosis, self- or otherwise, and whether there exists a difference between these concepts large enough for us to consider it here. At minimum we have want of a passable excuse for the delay.
The chickens had to fetch me mine. Almost without my noticing, these fluffy and white little leghorn hens had formed themselves into the vibrant georgic community Mr. Jefferson had long ago promised and promoted, shooting eggs out their anuses at a pretty pace and gathering for jocular corn klatsches before and after each moonlit mealtime. True, there were setbacks: I began to find open sores beneath the wings again, which caused me to worry that I had made of their rooster too much of a brute, and I was helped along in that suspicion one moonless night when my mother sent me out to fetch a few eggs, and I kicked around the coop yard for my nemesis and, not finding him there, stepped in through the coop-house door and immediately felt his barb penetrate the outer knob of my right ankle to the bone. But in general these birds seemed to have adjusted quite well to their situation, and I observed that when not eating, or laying, or being raped, or volunteering for one of my aeronautic experiments, they banded together in an ongoing project of their own, such as I imagined might lead on to cathedrals.