Twelve by Twelve

by Micahel Powers

  Homeschooling blends well with wildcrafting — life on the creative edge of the system — because freeholders like the Thompsons have greater control of their time. Having escaped from the nine-to-five, they are free to live and educate themselves a bit like the world’s Idle Majority does.

  “WHY DON’T YOU RENT THAT HOUSE?” Kyle asked me one day while I was talking with his mom. He pointed to a two-story farmhouse that I’d hardly noticed until then. It lay in a clearing across the Thompsons’ pond, right off Old Highway 117 South. Puzzled, I studied the house, and then looked to Michele.

  “The thing is, they’ve gotten so attached to you,” she said, “that they want you to rent that house when Jackie gets back.”

  The house wasn’t particularly inviting. In fact, it looked a tad creepy. All the trees around it felled, too close to the highway. “Who owns it?” I asked.

  “Bradley.”

  “Of course,” I said. Bradley seemed to have a hand in everything. I wondered, momentarily, how someone so landand property-rich could avoid the temptation to “sell out” his ecological values.

  “Well, to be honest, we’d all love it if you’d rent it,” Michele said.

  “That’s kind of you,” I said.

  “Will you deal drugs out of there?” six-year-old Greg asked.

  “Greg!” Michele reprimanded. “I’m sorry. It’s just that … well, the girl who’d been living there. Cops busted her with fifteen thousand dollars in crystal meth.”

  I shifted from one foot to the other. I knew crystal meth, cocaine’s poorer cousin, was common in both urban and rural areas of North Carolina, since it was so cheap to make. It was so common, in fact, that people, when giving you a tour of their home, would routinely joke, “and this is the meth lab.” But I never would have imagined it being produced one house over from the 12 × 12.

  “We’d seen men coming in at all hours of the night,” Michele continued, “and so we thought she was a … you know. But turns out the whole place was a giant meth factory.”

  The wind shifted direction. Cutting through the smell of the Thompsons’ place — the smell of a farm — was a hint of the oppressive, dead scent of one of the nearby industrial chicken factories. A giant meth factory? Just through the woods from Jackie’s beehives, heirloom teas, and honeysuckle; right on the banks of No Name Creek. I felt a little queasy.

  Michele seemed to notice and went on, “We’d much rather you moved in than another Section Eighter. Just don’t move in until after the ‘meth-busters’ get here. The squad that detoxifies the house.”

  I looked down at her the faces of her kids, the same ones who had recently been learning math and world currencies with me. I said, “As in, ‘Who ya gonna call?’”

  “Meth-busters! Exactly. It’s in the police department. The drug is so toxic that it gets into the walls, floors, drains, everywhere. The ‘meth-busters’ use even stronger chemicals to get rid of it.” My queasiness began to turn to nausea. “After that,” she said cheerily, “it’ll be ready for you to move on in!”

  As if meth-next-door wasn’t enough, a “cheeze” scare suddenly hit Adams County. It was headlined in the local paper after the drug — a cheap blend of heroin and Tylenol PM — killed several high school kids in Texas, and rumor had it that North Carolina dealers were adding it to their repertoire. I noticed the Thompsons eyeing José’s and Graciela’s kids, with their dark hair and skin and baggy pants, with even more mistrust, perhaps seeing possible cheeze dealers — the very ones they’d left the trailer parks to escape.

  After that, on my walks and bike rides, I began seeing a different North Carolina. I noticed more despair on the porches of roadside trailers and run-down houses, heads hanging low, eyes staring blankly into the awakening landscape. Every day one hundred million Americans take drugs, and this statistic hit me viscerally, with a former meth factory next door and cheeze scaring my neighbors. The 12 × 12, perhaps because of the abundant energy I was absorbing from nature and the physical exercise of biking and walking, had inspired me to limit caffeine and alcohol in my diet. I had only the occasional coffee or glass of wine now. This made me even more sensitive to all the pain, anger, and estrangement being deadened by drugs.

  “IAM A DRAGON / Fire is one of the things I favor /And sometimes acid.”

  I was reading aloud to Leah outside the 12 × 12.

  “Now we know who ‘the dragon’ is,” Leah said.

  “Do we?”

  This was Zach Thompson’s poetry. The thirteen-year-old had passed me a copy of the poem along with a sixty-page novella called Fallen Dragons that he’d written for an English assignment. When Leah saw it in the 12 × 12 she said, “Ooh, I love reading thirteen-yearolds’ fiction,” and dug in. At one point she laughed and said, “Check this out: ‘Two hundred feet and closing, the dragon spread his wings, and his two clawed feet spread. An innocent buck looked up, but too late. The dragon’s massive claws wrapped around him like a soft taco wrapped the meat, lettuce, and hot sauce.’ ” She giggled, and continued, “His teacher — one Mr. L — took a red pen and crossed out ‘like a soft taco wrapped the meat, lettuce, and hot sauce.’”

  We read the rest of Fallen Dragons aloud, a tale of hatred, blood shed, and destruction, in which the protagonist — a dragon curiously without a name — kills everything in sight. We wondered about the inspiration for this angry, violent persona. The poem “I am” gave clues.

  “Start again,” Leah said, and I read:

  I am a dragon,

  Fire is one of the things I favor

  And sometimes acid.

  I terrify people.

  They just don’t

  know, Know who I am

  I am a dragon.

  I am the drums, loud and obnoxious,

  But I help people with the anger

  I talk to them when they beat me.

  I am me,

  This poem is me

  So you think you knew me,

  So what do you think of the real me?

  We talked about who the dragon might be. It seemed to represent blight. I only knew the Thompsons in their hopeful present phase, pursuing a dream of living as organic farmers. But Zach probably still had the trailer park horrors vividly in mind, horrors that now seemed to be following his family into Pine Bridge. Just beneath the dream was the flattening, the deadening; the nameless dragon.

  I BIKED TO THE QUICK-N-EASY in Smithsville to call Leah on the pay phone. Fluorescent lights; the hot dogs rolling in a glassed-in oven; a dozen types of malt liquor; a bounty of chewing tobacco. I was studying the drink selection when an African American woman, maybe early thirties, came up beside me with two daughters. “You want the blue one?” she asked her toddler. Her older daughter grabbed a Coke, and she a king-sized Dr. Pepper. “You from around here?” she asked me.

  I told her I was staying at a friend’s up the road for a while.

  “I know everyone here, and I said to myself, ‘Who’s that guy?’ ”

  We introduced ourselves. She was Pam. She said, “Me, I’ve never lived outside of Adams County, only traveled once to Myrtle Beach.”

  Her older girl jumped in: “You’ve been to Busch Gardens!”

  “Oh yeah, there too.”

  “These your kids?”

  “Nicole … and Darleen,” she said, beaming. “Darleen’s thirteen, going to the eighth-grade prom, but they treat it like a high school prom. You should see her in her dress. She’s like, like a beauty queen.”

  “What was ninety-nine cents?” A customer was complaining loudly about his receipt to the cashier.

  “This,” the cashier said, pulling a beef jerky out of his bag.

  “Says sixty-nine. The bigger one is ninety-nine.”

  “Oh.”

  “I know, I’ll just trade it for the bigger one.”

  “I’m always tryin’ to shit somebody,” said the attendant.

  Pam turned away from me and joined their conversation, saying with a friendly grin: “She di
d it on purpose!”

  “Yeah, I know she did. Ninety-nine! Now we’re square.”

  The customer left with his purchase, and Pam looked back at me and said conspiratorially, “You know I went into Ashboro, you know Ashboro? No, well, you can get there in twenty minutes on the back roads if you ever want to go somewhere more exciting than here, but anyway I went to Belk’s there and got her a prom dress that was $250 for $24.99. Don’t tell her.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  “And I got the shoes for $19.99. They look like Cinderella slippers on her.” She looked over at Darleen, her pride obvious. “You know a lot of folks think she’s my sister,” she said. “Soon she’ll be off to college. But I’ve still got her. At that prom, she’s going to be a real Ms. America …”

  Pam stopped speaking; she was the only one in the Quick-N-Easy still talking. Someone turned the radio up. Something terrible was happening across the state line at a place called Virginia Tech.

  THAT EVENING, LEAH CAME OVER to the 12 × 12, still in her work clothes: a long brown suede skirt and a cream sweater. She got out of her car, her hair falling in a flop over one shoulder, and hugged me, whispering, “How horrible.” We went straight over to José’s, to see how he and Hector were taking it, talking as we walked about the “why” of the Virginia Tech slaying: earlier that day, over the course of several hours, a Virginia Tech student had shot and killed thirtytwo people, wounding scores more, before committing suicide. Part of it must have been plain mental illness, but that couldn’t have been everything. Does our culture sometimes value production over life and alienate people to the point where mental illnesses deepen and going postal becomes routine?

  At José’s, an enormous fire blazed in the backyard. The thirteen-year-old Hector, his back to us, was burning garbage. Though the fire burned just fine, Hector threw additional gasoline on it, sending the flames up so high that they singed the treetops and licked his hands and arms.

  “Hector!” I called out.

  He spun around, equally surprised and self-conscious. Had he been thinking of the kids killed a hundred miles away, across the border in Virginia?

  “Quemando basura” — “Burning garbage” — he finally said, turning his back to us again. He put the gasoline can down. Leah and I stared into the flames. The fire dwarfed Hector’s small silhouette. No Name Creek rushed by reflecting the flames.

  The fire made me think of America’s early pioneers, not Mexicans and Hondurans settling twenty-first-century North Carolina, but the European immigrants who arrived long before José and Hector. As they caravaned through the American heartland, they sometimes lit the prairie on fire to announce they’d found water. A poetic gesture, but also an overly extravagant one that captures something of America’s ethos, where ebullience over one beautiful thing leads to destruction of a greater one.

  In the firelight I regarded the rest of José’s property. Not yet a year since he’d cut the red ribbon to his new house — the neighbors and Habitat for Humanity volunteers applauding — and the place was already beginning to suffer from neglect. The back doorknob lay rusting on the porch right where it had fallen off. Several screens were ripped and one window cracked. Bicycles lay rusting outside, and — though José’s prized carpentry shed was immaculate — his tool shed’s roof panels were starting to cave in. Perhaps his carpentry shed was immaculate only because he’d just finished it two months before. It stood sturdy, padlocked, but had not been treated.

  “My dad’s inside,” Hector said into the fire, a single military plane zooming overhead. Graciela’s dog rounded the house, looked surprised to see us, and changed course, limping in a slow arc around the fire, and disappeared into the woods. Yellow and white-headed dandelions and other weeds made their way through the mess of a poorly mowed crabgrass lawn.

  Inside, José told us, “I sent Hector to burn garbage so he wouldn’t see any more of the terrible news.” There was no place to sit on the messy sofa, so José busily moved aside a jacket, a newspaper, some component parts of furniture he was making. The TV was too loud. Leah’s face scrunched up a bit over the volume and the images of dead bodies on the campus. Unenthusiastically, José bit into a fish stick. He offered to make us some, but we weren’t hungry and declined.

  A reporter interviewed a Virginia Tech professor who’d hid in his office as the students were slain. The journalist asked the professor how the students would deal with all of this the next day, and the professor’s voice caught, as he held back tears.

  “Got him,” Leah whispered, and then: “Christ! This is what I hate about journalism. Everyone at the station was itching for that: someone whose voice would catch dramatically.”

  Hector came in from the back, his arms soot covered, and slumped onto the couch. José scrambled for the remote to change channels. But Hector saw the bodies. He sighed and started playing video games on a laptop next to Leah as his dad flipped to the telenovela La Fea Más Bella.

  To lighten the mood, José began talking in Spanish about the lives of the soap stars now on the screen: “That actor is from Mexico, but his parents are Dominican, and the other guy was born in Mexico but his parents are from Spain. The female actress, La Fea, her mom was a Mexican beauty queen far prettier than her daughter …”

  Eventually I asked Hector in Spanish, “How are your grades?”

  “Huh?” He was engrossed in his game, killing chickens with a shotgun and pitchfork.

  I repeated the question in English. Still just a blank look. José shifted in his seat and was about to say something when I went on, “Do you get As, Bs, Cs?”

  “Cs, Ds,” Hector said, looking back at the soap, frowning, and then back at his screen. “I need more chicken bones. You see” — he showed the screen to Leah — “I’ve got a record now, but I need more bones.”

  I slept poorly that night and woke up just after sunrise thinking of Weimar, Germany. I hadn’t thought of it for a long time, but in the summer I was nineteen, I spent several weeks digging through the former Buchenwald concentration camp garbage dump near Weimar.

  It probably wasn’t the wisest choice for a sensitive teenager like me, but I signed up for an East-West peace exchange in which twenty Soviets, Americans, East Germans, and West Germans — it was the summer of 1990; the Berlin Wall had fallen, but the USSR was still a country — got together in the Buchenwald trash heap and dug for personal items to return to the victims’ families, almost fifty years after the Holocaust. If the families were not found, the items would go to a museum in Buchenwald to educate the youth of the newly uniting Germany about the dangers of fascism.

  I unearthed prisoners’ spectacles, coins, cups, and belt buckles. Almost none of it could be linked to specific people, so it ended up in the museum, next to the human skin lampshades and light switches made out of mummified thumbs — items that Ilse Koch, the wife of the camp commandant, ordered to be made from gassed Jews. Next to the museum was the oven chamber, with people-sized ovens, where tens of thousands of prisoners were incinerated after being worked, flogged, or shot to death. At night, I collapsed, sometimes in tears, onto a cot in my bedroom: a former SS barracks.

  When I got back to Brown to begin my sophomore year, I signed up for Professor Volker Berghahn’s Modern German History course, and I read everything I could on National Socialism. I thought that if I could understand Hitler, and the millions who willingly followed him, on an intellectual level, I might be able to fight similar evils in our world today. During a college recess on Long Island, I once asked my parents over dinner: Didn’t they see the parallels between our society and that of Nazi Germany? The Germans killed Jews, but we were killing the planet with acid rain and global warming. Then it was genocide; now it’s ecocide. Why were we collaborating?

  Just five miles up the road from Buchenwald is the town of Weimar, where, while the ovens burned tens of thousands, life went on as usual with weddings, church on Sundays, and kids going to school. How can we understand and explain such docilit
y at the gateway to the Holocaust? Hitler’s internal policing explains part of it, but there was also a certain amount of denial — there are films of Weimar residents brought to Buchenwald right after the defeat of the Nazis. They were truly shocked and many fainted. After the Virginia Tech slayings, down by No Name Creek, I smelled the light stench of the chicken factories: Was there a similar floating stench from the Buchenwald ovens? Like Weimar’s citizenry during World War Two, we twenty-first-century Americans don’t want to know exactly what kind of animal torture takes place in the factories, nor how undocumented Mexican labor is being exploited, nor, in a larger sense, what kind of effect our overconsuming lifestyles have on the planet.

  A big orange sunrise burned right into a No Name Creek that blazed more strongly than I’d ever seen. Down deep, rich lacquer and satin. These deeper lights interacted with surface textures, dimpled, shingled, wavy, calm, and streaky. I looked away from the glare, back toward the 12 × 12 up the hill. The previous day — the day of the Virginia Tech massacre — 171 people died in bombings in Iraq, and in the ten previous days thirty-two Americans had been killed — the same number killed at Virginia Tech. With all this violence at home and abroad, is it any wonder our kids lose themselves in chicken-slaying video games, cheeze, and dragons, and that the number of emotionally disturbed children in America has tripled since the early 1990s? At what point does the blight become too deep?

  16. HOLDING HANDS WITH EXTINCTION

  EACH DAY, AS I WALKED THE TRACKS or the creek’s edge, I’d hear my father’s words from his hospital bed, You’re a man without a country. The words rang truer every day.

  Paul Jr. stopped by the 12 × 12 two days after the Virginia Tech massacre. As we sipped some of Jackie’s rosebud tea outside, we talked about it for a while and then lapsed into silence, staring out at the ever-taller winter wheat and the thickening forest.