Little Bill kept sitting there like he didn’t hear her. He kept his head down.
Mrs. Powell said it again. “Bill, take off your hat.”
Little Bill said, “I can’t.”
Mrs. Powell walked over to him. “What did you say?”
Bill said, “I can’t.”
We were all feeling for him now.
Mrs. Powell walked over to him and said, “What did you say?”
Bill said, “I can’t.”
“What?” she said again. “Take off your hat.”
“Please no,” Little Bill said.
“Take it off.”
“Please no.”
“Take it off.”
“Please no.”
TAKE IT OFF!
And so he did. He took off his toboggan real slooooooooooooooooowwwwwwww. That’s when we saw it. His skull was bald and shiny and bright and so pale that you could see the veins running all over beneath the white skin.
“He has lice,” Bobbie Jo said. “His mother makes him shave his head when he gets lice.”
One of the other kids said, “You’re bald, Lil Bill. Did your mother do that?”
Little Bill tried thinking something up quick. He knew we were in 9th grade now. He knew he was too old to have lice. The only thing he could come up with was the wrestler King Kong Bundy. King Kong Bundy was bald. Little Bill was bald. Little Bill said, “I’m trying to be like King Kong Bundy. I want to be a wrestler. I want to be like King Kong Bundy.”
Then he was walking around us showing us his wrestling moves, showing us his muscles. He wanted to be like King Kong Bundy. Goddamnit. He kept saying it like it was true, like he didn’t have lice, like the whole world was one big stupid lie that he believed in his heart.
I told him it was okay. I told him the same thing during history class the next period. I told him to keep his head down and just read his Crapalachia history book and it would be okay.
So we read about the accidents of history. We read about the James River and Kanawha Turnpike, which was a one-lane road that passed by our house. It was the way west. George Washington and the Virginians built it, but the New Yorkers built the Erie Canal. The Virginians found out that water travel is faster. The Virginians lost. Therefore, New York became New York. But imagine if we would have won. Imagine Crapalachia as the center of the world. Imagine skyscrapers rising from the mountains.
I read about how Governor Arch Moore kept 100,000 dollars in a refrigerator in his office because he loved cold, hard cash.
I read about how to stuff a ballot box. Have the party boss at the end of the road in a truck start with a blank sheet of paper that is the size of a paper ballot. Send the first guy in with the blank ballot stuffed in his pants. On the way out have him hide the real ballot in his pants and put the fake ballot inside the ballot box. Take the real ballot back to the party boss. The party boss fills it out and gives it to the next guy who goes in and slips the filled in ballot in the ballot box and brings out the blank ballot. This goes on all day. This goes on all day and then the men are paid in liquor. This is how you get them drunk and steal an election fair and square. This is democracy.
Then Frog raised his hand and told the teacher, “Do you know that Charles Manson grew up in West Virginia? His mother was a prostitute in Clarksburg.”
The teacher told him to be quiet.
Everybody laughed.
Frog told us again that it was true.
Then we read about how you build civilization. They built the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel by digging a big ass hole in the side of a mountain. They used a bunch of poor people to dig it. A poor person means either their skin was dark or their accents were thick. That’s the best way to do anything — get a bunch of poor people to do it. So they cut and cut into the mountain but there was a problem. They didn’t wet the dust from the cut limestone — so the men developed silicosis. The men started dying by the tens and then the twenties and then the hundreds and then — the thousands? Since they were poor the company just buried them. There was an investigation a few years later but no one cared. They were poor people. The official statistic was 476 but the truth is over 1,000 of the 3,000 men lost their lives in a few short days.
And then we read about the number of coal miners killed.
In 1931: 1,456
In 1932: 1,192
In 1933: 1,051
In 1934: 1,214
In 1935: 1,216
In 1936: 1,319
In 1937: 1,399
In 1938: 1,077
We read about the Farmington disaster and how the smoke rose from the mine and the miners’ wives ran to the mine to see if their husbands were dead. The wives waited outside the mine for their husbands, but their husbands never came. The company didn’t pay the miners for the half day they missed due to their death in the explosion.
In 1939: 1,062
In 1940: 1,361
In 1941: 1,226
In 1922 my grandmother’s uncle was stuck inside the Layland mine for three weeks after an explosion. When they pulled out the bodies, some of the shoelaces were missing. Some of the miners weren’t killed. Some of the miners were so hungry they ate their shoelaces. They died of starvation.
I read about how this proves something. It proves one thing. It proves that poor people are not smart, and only poor people are desperate enough to work in a hole and then thank god that they have a job working in a hole.
Then I read about what happens to bravery. William Marland was governor of the state of WV. He tried to put an excise tax on coal and the industry broke his ass down. He started drinking. He disappeared in the ’60s. A reporter from the Chicago Tribune was riding in the back of a Chicago taxi cab. He looked up at the name of the taxi cab driver. He said, “Hey you have the name of the former governor of West Virginia.”
The taxi cab driver said, “I know. That’s me. I was the governor of the state of West Virginia.”
He was an old man. He was a drunk. He tried to protect and help the people once. This is what happens to you. You wind up a drunk, driving a taxi cab in the city of Chicago.
We read and we learned and then we smiled the smile of killers. We had the smile of Charles Manson inside of us.
Later that day someone must have said something about Little Bill’s bald head and lice. But Little Bill didn’t say anything. Little Bill just walked over and smacked the guy upside the head. Then he started kicking him. He reared back with his leg and kicked. The dude on the ground didn’t saying anything else. The other guys the dude was with circled around. Little Bill laughed at them. Mrs. Powell was going to walk over and say something, but Little Bill shook his fist at her. He said, “What? You want some of this.” Then we knew. We knew Little Bill really was on his way to being King Kong Bundy.
We knew we wanted to get lice too — so we could shave our heads and kick the shit out of people who gave us hell.
CHECKERS
I was getting tired of playing checkers with Nathan. I even told him a couple of months earlier that I wasn’t going to play anymore because he was always beating me. But here I was playing checkers again for some reason.
I jumped one checker and then waited. He made a move and then I made another move. He made a move and pointed to the toys in front of his chair. It was a ceramic hog with these giant testicles hanging down in the back. There was a rubber frog and a plastic puppy and a small stuffed alligator, but he kept pointing at the hog balls. Then he pointed at his chest. I finally said, “Gosh, Nathan, I’m trying to figure out where I’m going to move my checker. I wish you’d quit pointing at the hawg nuts. This is part of the reason I don’t like playing.”