Redneck Press with Fried Chicken and Coffee

My kid trans­ferred through every school on our side of the moun­tain. Only six, but a fighter. I didn’t teach him that. The prin­ci­pals ask, – “well, Mr. Doppler, where might Fred have learned to lash out?” Nature, I say. Too much vio­lence on this moun­tain – elec­tri­cal storms and rock­slides and pre­da­tion, balled insects wrig­gling in spider’s silk.

Car­o­line heard of a dif­fer­ent school in Bon­ham, some char­ity deal. My kid didn’t need anyone’s char­ity. But the author­i­ties said they would arrest Fred next time he fisticuffed on school prop­erty. They would put him in juve­nile. They’d rel­ish that record-breaking youngest arrest in all of Tennessee.

Car­o­line pried open the teaket­tle and palmed the wad of bills. It’d shrunken. We vowed not to argue. Bad exam­ple for Fred. So we packed all we had into the truck and lum­bered up the hump on the one road that crossed that moun­tain, a steep and pit­ted trace no longer main­tained by the state. We ripped through bram­ble and green switches, shed­ding use­less heir­looms. From the dizzy­ing ridge­line, grav­ity showed us to Bonham.

Still whiplashed, we set­tled into life on the wrong side. Our neigh­bor walked a big cat – maybe a pan­ther – on a leash. It was a dog’s leash and we saw it strain into the cougar or panther’s puls­ing neck. This guy ran a small zoo in the woods behind his prop­erty and he looked mean, and we knew his kind of oper­a­tion: cramped wire cages, no con­cern for the nat­ural habi­tats. But he was friendly, too, mean-looking and friendly. Fred wanted to pet the pan­ther so we waved and the zookeeper waved back, hand trail­ing smoke into the blue, and Fred put his hand out too, trust­ing both stranger and beast.

One morn­ing Fred came home early from school, a note pinned to his shirt so he wouldn’t lose it. We knew this. The note would list what it didn’t mean when your kid got infested with lice. It didn’t mean: a) your kid was (nec­es­sar­ily) dirty, b) you were (nec­es­sar­ily) bad par­ents. The note soothed: all who live around the moun­tain, it said — rich or poor, owner or laborer – could suf­fer the pecu­liar bio­geog­ra­phy of the region, its sum­mers per­fect for inva­sive forms of life.

I had ticks in my bed that sum­mer, and ivies creep­ing through the slits feral cats clawed in the screen. The note on Fred’s shirt also requested a meet­ing at the school. This was unusual, but the Bon­ham way I guess. In the mean­time, we dis­tracted Fred from the itch­ing. We asked him about school.

“We had to write our life story,” Fred said.

“What life story?” Car­o­line said, “He can barely write and he’s been asleep for nearly half of it.”

“His is a story of dreams,” I said.

“And then we had to write about our her­itage,” Fred said, “but I didn’t know what to write so I drew the sun.”

Car­o­line and I agreed that we should tell Fred the truth about his her­itage. How a strange par­a­site once divided the peo­ples of the moun­tain. How the patri­archs of those days quar­an­tined the sick hosts on one side, kept the healthy half on the other, and des­ig­nated the sum­mit a sort of peace wall where the two camps could dump their trash, each inch­ing the heap toward the down­ward cam­ber of the other’s side. There were episodes of cross-mountain raid­ing, loot­ing, and intim­i­da­tion, we told Fred, our eyes widen­ing as we made raid­ing and pil­lag­ing ges­tures with our arms. We delighted in embell­ish­ing the story, but I no longer knew how much of it I believed, and I real­ized that I could no longer dis­cern my father’s embell­ish­ments from the rudi­ments of the older story.

I only knew my embell­ish­ments with any cer­tainty. I told Fred that since we were deal­ing with his­tory, he needed to know that the story might split and braid into sto­ries. Inevitably some­one would lie to him. This was when Car­o­line rolled her eyes, but I was get­ting excited now. There were con­spir­acy the­o­ries, I told Fred, which were accepted in cer­tain cir­cles on both sides of the moun­tain. One of them involved my employer, I told Fred, and I’d have to relate it in a whis­per for fear of spies. I asked if this excited Fred. This excited Fred terribly.

The the­ory spec­u­lated that the bal­loon fac­tory in the val­ley kept  its own his­to­rian on staff, and that this bored man invented the par­a­site – going so far as to forge research abstracts, micro­bi­o­log­i­cal data, and an illus­tra­tion of the mag­ni­fied worm.

Speak­ing in my nor­mal voice again, I told Fred that these the­o­ries were largely dis­cred­ited, because the bal­loon fac­tory has done so much for the com­mu­ni­ties on both sides of the mountain.

I’d told Fred some­one would lie to him, and now it was true. It’s hell, toil­ing to man­u­fac­ture the sym­bols of some­one else’s party. For a pit­tance, too.

“Which side were we – did we have worms?” Fred asked.

“No one can agree about that, son, and our ances­tors left no writ­ten his­tory. They were too busy sur­viv­ing.” I pumped my fist to empha­size this point. “Sur­viv­ing,” I repeated, “that’s our her­itage, Fred.”

I met with the prin­ci­pal. He was some kind of monk. “You don’t want us to kill the lice?” I said.

“This is a Jain school,” the monk said. “We believe that every liv­ing being has a soul. We also think it would be a good les­son in patience if you used our alter­na­tive method. For your son, I mean. Com­pas­sion­ate removal is painstak­ing but ulti­mately quite free­ing, Mr. Doppler.”

“Thank you,” I said, “for that.”

I couldn’t com­plain much. The Jain­ism seemed to calm Fred. Night, and the frogs in the gut­ters throbbed close against the rent house, their song pinch­ing deep into the metal. None of the beasts of the wood could tell we’d moved in yet. .

Fred asked why he had lice. I had to think of some­thing. “It is the waters we swim,” I said, “the moun­tain whose shadow we live in. Mt. Par­a­site, after all.”

We still weren’t con­nected to the grid, so we lit the storm can­dles and cracked the win­dows. Car­o­line sat Fred in her lap and start­ing draw­ing the dead dog’s flea comb through his hair, drown­ing each louse in a glass of water with a blot of shim­mer­ing soap in it. Car­o­line was painstak­ing, her tongue peep­ing out in con­cen­tra­tion, her pupils sharp in the dark. “You’re not sup­posed to kill the lice,” I said. She looked beau­ti­ful killing the lice. She shrugged her bare shoul­ders and the zookeeper passed before the open win­dow, pre­tend­ing not to spy on our infestation.

The par­a­sitic is espe­cially taboo here – to call some­one worm is the slur of the cen­tury. We all know that soon the bal­loon fac­tory will out­source and float across the sea, and we’ll be left with noth­ing but this old rock of gneiss. It changes too, but slowly. We’ll have a lit­tle money from the gov­ern­ment. We’ll have our cool moun­tain mid­sum­mer nights.

We have to live together and all that jive, even in moun­tain ranges whose his­to­ries are defined by iso­la­tion­ism, retreat– I try to teach my kid that, as is appar­ently required of me. But already he senses the sub­tle vocal tim­bre of doubt in every plat­i­tude we hand him.

“I never see any­one go back there – do you think it’s really a zoo?” I asked Car­o­line, as she picked the nits from Fred’s scalp.

“No,” she said.

“Me nei­ther,” I said. “Won­der what he’s hiding.”

As the zookeeper moved far­ther from the win­dow, we could see him rid­ing his big cat like a horse up the mountainside.

Jack Boettcher is the author of the chap­book The Deviants (Grey­ing Ghost Press, 2009), and recent work appears or is forth­com­ing in Fence, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Puerto del Sol, and other jour­nals. He lives in Austin.