A Country Tale
Miss Lily Stutsen always narrated the driver�s education videos, because she liked to hear the sound of her own voice. She knew how boring the videos were, for she had had to listen to so many, so she made up her own stories and told them to her rapt audience (she only imagined this, as Simeon Davies was doodling on the table in his felt pen, and Becky Jessup was flirting with Jerry Adams again � but of course he was bored of her and was slowly trying to block her out � and Reuben Evans was counting his money again, as he was going to buy that cd player after school, and Evan was back at his spot at the window, looking at all those roads leading away from this town, and he would imagine going his lonely way). She had always imagined better and bigger things, but that was where it had stopped, for she was always imagining. Back in college, she had imagined herself as a great politician, speaking to her constituents all over the state and one day speaking to her old town about how she was going to really change things; but this dream was interchangeable with the one about being a Nobel prizewinning physicist, or poet laureate, or ballet dancer, and on the bad days, just a housewife. But she had waffled, eventually dropping out of college to start her preliminary writing career. It had never started, and here she was, making up crash stories to her 11th grade class who couldn�t and wouldn�t give a damn, and she was lonely, so lonely, and stuck in the town she had always wanted to leave.
Miss Stutsen always narrated the Driver�s Ed videos, because she didn�t trust the people that were talking. Get the wrong ideas to you kids � as if they weren�t thoroughly sanitized of anything close to a new idea before they were released, and they were all film strips from the Sixties, anyways. Being sixteen to her was an unparalleled achievement of Satan, and her prudish spinster pose prevented anybody from ever piercing the soft marrow of her heart. She hated all of the kids, and said that we�d all die fiery deaths on the highway because one day, we would get into a car and drive fast. Breaking the speed limit, she would say with audible disdain. Honorable citizens, she said every day, did not break the law. She was emphatic; anyone who chewed gum (to her almost a hanging offense) would somehow end up last in line to actually do any driving, and then there were some who inexplicably were driven to madness and almost-accidents whenever she sat in the passenger seat.
Her favorite filmstrip was one entitled Hooligans in Cars, or Real Death on the Highways. Not so much because the title was very illustrative and aptly worded for her taste, but that it featured hometown hero (apparently deceased) Buddy Hawford.
�After a night of hard drinking,� she narrated herself, over a mute television, �Buddy and his hooligan friends took off for a joyride. They did not wear their seatbelts, Buddy was obviously intoxicated while driving, and furthermore, they had their, their, things, out the window! Indecent! Those hooligans were too busy heehawing and hollering to skerr up dead folk from their graves..."
She liked the word �skerr� but she never said her �eh� sounds, only some �uh� sound that made me wince. I would always look out the window then and see all the roads leading out of this town, and silently wish I was on my way.
To continue, �hollering to skerr off yalls truly and all those crows, like em have up at the Hawford farm, and well, Buddy stuck his fool head out the window of� not his pickup, but his little Japanese convertible and doncha know it, his head was found 30 miles yonder. Truly. Gad.� Then, the police chief of the big suspenders came in and gave us some little speech about how to drive and how not to drive, and how if you didn�t be careful, all roads led to the pen. And yes�em, the po-lice get their man, every time.
It always made me a little bit shivery down there in the base of my spine, to think about some dangerous lil� stunt like that. You know, that little buzzing feeling when you�re excited and secretly wanna do stuff you know you can�t, because all the rest of them kids in the room � they all thinkin� the same thing. Some Rusty Wagon (brewed nearby, of course) or some moonshine from Becky Jessup�s dad�s secret still (believe me, makin� out with Becky in her basement always gave me spinning head syndrome, and not just from her patented liplocks) and then they�d be sitting up in Red Callahan�s old Ford � and not because they didn�t have any city boy SUV�s or Z3s or black Explorers with the chrome and bling-bling and all, but because it was just so much funner to be kickin� it old-style, like it had been done for decades.
Pap Callahan had crashed the pickup into the side of their barn one balmy night before getting called off to Vietnam, and so had Grandpap Callahan when he was a young stud back in the Forties (that�s Big Red to you, mister, he�d say to me whenever he passed by our house), but in those days, the chicken house was there. With all those big factory farms and such, little fry had no business trying to be competitive, and so, the Callahans dropped chicken farming and went back to corn and milk. They kept their old Bessie out in the yard until Big Red felt like a steak after one more unsatisfactory meal of corn mush, baked corn on the cob, and cornbread, and so Bessie too went the way of the chickens.
As I was saying, all those damn fool kids would all sit up in that pickup and try out some more of their drunken antics, which always ended up rather badly (and not funny, as I always thought they would) with Simeon Davies getting a whomping two weeks in the county pen � that was a record, seeing as Mr. Jessup, after he�d discovered Becky had been stealing his shill and using the basement as her private boudoir (and a good thing I had broken up with her by then, so it wasn�t me he found down there), broke an arm busting some poor sap�s front teeth and even then, he only got a weekend. Somehow Mr. Jessup had gotten it into Councilman Dick Adams� head that he was drunk, and public drunkenness was no big crime, was it? Not in these old parts, no sir. And neither was abuse? But of course, George Schulman (that poor sap) was dirt poor; he lived across the tracks, and he didn�t really matter, did he? His parents didn�t even vote! There was the little matter of a fire in Dan Kooneman�s cornfield, and that too became big � before anyone knew it, it was eating up the Callahan�s finest as well. For months afterward, the pickup got a brand new coat of rust out in the rain as Red would stare dejectedly out the window of the barn, where he had to (forcibly) start acting like a farmer and not like some teenage hooligan.
Even as I sat there in that driver�s ed class, I knew I was gonna do things different. If I was gonna go, I was gonna do it in style, and nuthin� like these country boys neither. I worked hard and I knew it, just like Sally Kooneman, who was Dutch and said things funny so that everyone laughed at her at the same time that they were jealous of all the good things going her way: valedictorian, check; Four-A club poster girl, check; Lions Club award winner, check; volunteer of the year, check; yearbook editor, check; full ride at local college, check; and then to crown it all, Miss Powwow, which rated higher on the blossoming country socialite�s hit list than the prom itself.
Believe it or not, our town was named Powwow. At one end of the town, some mean old crosseyed fella that grit his teeth all the time gave a bunch of money to the town council to get the name changed from Hole-in-wall or something equally absurd, and then set up the Powwow tobacco factory (have a Powwow on us! we all used to whisper as we lit one of the stubs the big kids left smoldering in the dust) that made the air smell foul some days, and it was all I could do to not wish that I lived somewhere else. Maybe even with Jeffrey Dahmer up in Milwaukee. I thought, at one time, that rotting humans wouldn�t smell half as bad, until Dave Schulman (poor sap�s father) opened up the Callahan crypt one fine June afternoon and I caught a whiff of Big Red laying on his slab in a marble box above the ground, which I didn�t even know they did these days. Yet there he was, smelling like none other after a solid 10 years of ripening.
One day out of the year, all the Powwow executives came for their annual powwow (they had grown big, and they had branches all the way out in Trister County, Reglerville County and even into Ohio a bit). After their boring meetings at which they announced how they would send hit squads after the boards of Philip Morris and RJR and hijack the entire cigarette trade for the entire Midwest, they got all hot and bothered by the teenage girls in their hiphuggers and bathing suits (with hint of thong, as modern beauty required the G-string) and thick voices and artistic dreams and how they were gonna change the world, and the one who showed the most skin usually took the gold home. That is, five thousand dollars, a new John Deere tractor for the farm and a lifetime supply of Powwow tobacco, to increase the cellulite and yellow the teeth. Sally, when she dropped the on-again, off-again bun hair, her schoolmarmish glasses and her bargain bin outfits, well � she was a looker like no one could believe. When she later got into Wellesley College and out of this town, everyone said it was because she flashed something and got her acceptance letter the next day.
Back in those days, when I was still learning how to flash blinkers of my own, and less dramatically � left, right, left, right, stranded by the side of the road � Sally was public enemy number one, and most days, I wanted to pound her smart and stuck up face into the mud puddle outside Ms. Hawford�s trailer, where we had algebra 2 and biology everyday (Ms. Hawford never talked about it, but her dead brother was the Buddy of our driver�s ed nightmares). Sally would sit there, excitedly answering every question; her brown hair would slide up and down her pink Garfield shirts that I swear I�d seen in Meggie Callahan�s closet last year; her jade charm bracelet jangled a F, flatted a bit; her glass-green eyes would shed quiet invisible tears when she wasn�t in the center of all things academic; and all this I soaked in, and only I could see. When Ms. Hawford (whom I had had a crush on since forever) fought with her about some issue about diploid and haploid numbers in animal cells during some forgotten biology lecture, I wanted to pull those little gold ringlets out of Sally�s ears and run away with them, so that Ms. Hawford would win the argument and I would be hero of the hour. I knew, somehow, that that would never stop her, so instead, I put up my own hand and resolved the argument by giving the right answer in all its glory. Sally never forgave me.
I still think about her sometimes.