Jellybeaners

The bent, rundown shack, patched and cobbled with gray pieces of crating and splintering brown pallet board, windows covered with ripped opaque plastic, squats in a heap off Stout Street, coal smoke twisting out its chimney like vapor from an ebony nostril.

Three children wail hysterically, run in circles, pull their hair, and scream at their father, resting on his knees beside the dilapidated rust-brown ’92 Plymouth Horizon, the driver’s door flung open.

A school bus squeaks to a halt and four children bounce off, stop in their tracks, and stare open-mouthed at the scene.

Vane Sarge Walker pulls up in his beat-brown 2001 Chevrolet pickup. A trained emergency medical technician, volunteer firefighter, long-retired military serviceman, and recently retired Forest Service ranger, he lives nearby on a fourth-generation family farm.

The Mount Vernon Volunteer Fire Department’s red-light-flashing, chartreuse EMS vehicle approaches, the wail of its siren whining faintly, building in slow crescendo as it roars down the twisting mountain valley cut by the ancient Tellico River, which falls down the mountain grade toward the village of Kituwah Falls.

The dirt driveway, strewn with clinkers—cindery particulate chunks of burnt coal dragged out of the leaky furnace and tossed into the potholed driveway—steal Sarge’s attention.

A homemade doll mother Sizer crafted and gifted her three-year-old Ashley the previous Christmas sits with its broken neck propped against the largest clinker, the head mashed flat.

Jumping out of his pickup, Sarge purposefully fixates on the doll, briefly ignoring the cacophony, takes a few seconds to collect his wits, and then slowly turns to face the inevitable.

The toy’s face, black-button eyes fixed on eternity, glistens wet-red in the short March dusk, staring directly into a gunmetal sky. A dirty-black tire track ends at its chin.

Sarge can neither swallow the sob nor fight back the wave of salt water cascading down the stubble on his cheeks before he turns to face the disemboweled heap lying in the driveway beside the driver, wrapping, then unwrapping his arms across his chest, choking between screams.

Poor Ashley. One more notch on the pill mill tree of shame, thought Sarge.

This couldn’t go on. Someone had to put a stop to this…

We’re going to pull those sonsabitches out by the roots, come Memorial Day.

Studying a raven circling high over the ridgeline to the east, he swore to himself:

Or die trying.

Samantha Walker’s Journal

Dear Mr. Stephens,

I reckon you’re my primary audience, since you assigned this journal. Threatening Bo Wruck with death was simply a warning to keep him from wrecking me again, like he did back in October, but my known rifle skills put some meat on the ultimatum.

I’ll fulfill your contract and stay out of jail. Anyway, it would set a bad precedent for the valedictorian of Kituwah Falls High School class of 2016 to deliver the graduation-day address holding a wireless microphone in a prison video feed.

But I also want to address my future kids from this journal, should I have any. You never know. I can’t really get my mind around this assignment unless I picture an audience. Sorry. It’s not that you’re not enough of an audience, but you get it, don’t you?

You said you’d burn our journals at the end of the semester, Mr. Stephens. But keep mine. I’ll hide it at home in case there’s any self-incrimination, or any fingers pointing at Bo or Leeza’s gang. No one will be able to find this until I’m gone, or until it doesn’t matter anymore. I promise.

So, here goes, kiddies. You’re not even sexed, yet. Just tiny little bitty microscopic eggs, semi-human, collecting dust. Not much dust, as I’m only 18. Not yet in the prime of reproduction age. Not yet in the prime of anything, really. Yet, so much has happened already, my babies. So much…

My life so far has been a full-blown, nature-based, high-definition, enhanced surround-sound, motorcycle-injected highlight-reel for a long stretch. A Disney childhood city folks would find impossible to fathom.

But wondrous rides come to a natural end, sadly. They tell you there’s a happy ending. Well, maybe when you’re 90 and senile in an old folk’s home, then you do get that blissful state of looking back at your life with nostalgia. But all in all, it’s a lie. Nothing but a lie… Life, they tell you, is supposed to be happy.

It’s not.

And maybe if you’re part of the popular crowd, then your life will be different from mine. Never being part of the popular pack has its advantages. Like, I was always gangly. The ugly duckling, tallest kid in the class, pimple-prone. Good luck making Miss Popular with that giraffe look. Not to mention the teasing, asking me what the weather was like in the clouds up there. Makes me want to spit and say it’s raining. You develop a thick skin this way. And you see things, stuff others don’t want you to see, but you do. Again, maybe because you’re staring down from that high in the sky. Thankfully, some of the boys caught up in high school, both in size and pimple production. Nerdish. Love that science, which is perhaps a direct link to the Cherokee genes. Natural science. Being in touch with the elements and all that, like my Native culture asks of me. There was that connection, you know.

Then, in the middle of my junior year at Kituwah Falls High School, my body started to blossom. Buh-bye, ugly duckling, hello, um, swan? I wouldn’t quite put it like that. I’d already been shaped by that point, not someone to bow along to the crowd.

Mix that reality with my already aggressive, take no prisoners, double back flip off the chicken house, wheelie-for-days, crack rifle shot, straight-A student, type-A Alpha-Woman attitude… and you get Trouble with a capital T.

And that caught the eye of some people. Well, one in particular. And I really couldn’t be happier, you know.

Jasper Whitlock—the tall-handsome-sandy-haired-math-brilliant-boy-next-door. We both enjoyed long, slow rides up and down the glorious Cherohala Skyway, mountain breezes pleasuring our skin as we glide through diamond flicker maple forests along the twisting highway, throttle light in the gloved hand. Or the Tail of the Dragon—that world famous Tennessee twister—US 129—sporting 318 curves in eleven miles. A parallel asphalt universe, a death-trap, but not ours; available, but shunned; a pariah, our Tellico River and Fontana Lake and Trans-America Trail and the vast Cherokee National Forest, where buffalo once roamed, fat on windfall chestnuts. Where ancients prospered so long ago, now dwindled to a few dozen, driven into the mountains or down a path of starvation, but genetically linked to the Walkers through the ages, completing my soul and making me eternally connected to the natural world.

Long before the Jackson Death March, aka the Trail of Tears, the bitter slog to Oklahoma, that dusty-polluted-oil-pipeline-fracking-prairie-square of a crud hole.

Don’t get me wrong.

I hold nothing against the people of Oklahoma. How could I? Many remain related to me through Cherokee blood. Kituwah (GID-ah-wah. That’s how you pronounce it, in case you didn’t know. Is the place still standing in your time? Does it still exist?).

But you have to understand something, my babies. I’ll tell you it all went to Hell in a handbasket. Bear with me, my younglings.

The government told Oklahomans, Kansans, and Texans to plow up the land following the Homestead Act of 1862, told them “the rain would follow the plow,” and told them to replace prairie grass with wheat, kill the buffalo, who flourish from minus 70 Fahrenheit to plus 110, replace them with cattle, which only survive from 0 to 90 Fahrenheit.

So they did.

They shot nearly all the buffalo, leaving most to rot on the ground, and turned the prairie over with Charles Newbold’s cast iron contraption.

When the winds blew, the plow-raped prairie dust drifted east across America—residents of Jamaica actually found themselves covered in Oklahoma prairie dust—during the 1930’s. Wheat prices fell, and cattle flopped and turned stiff on the desiccated plain. The government quickly issued reports that the settlers were fools to plow up the prairie in the first place.

See where that gets us? Listen to the government, then hear the government say you are an idiot for listening to the government. Repeat this process generation after generation, and you are up to date with 2016:

ISIS terrorism filling the holes of security we left behind in Iraq, after we listened to the government say Iraq held weapons-of-mass-destruction… Listen to the wonderful news that there is no end to the natural gas underground here at home, so fracking it is… and that now causes earthquakes in, guess where? Oklahoma… Hearing from the government that we need genetically modified organisms in the pantry, as these are better crops, built to withstand just about anything, excluding a nuclear bomb going off… and then overgrazing pastures to fill the gut of the 39% of US adults that are morbidly obese, with salmonella, E coli, shigellosis, listeria and staph-infected meat.

Ooh, that sounds good!

Hearing we need yet one more rapine oil pipeline strung across the land. Agriculture and cities sucking down the water table as fast as possible. Subsidized farmers taking corn off the table to make fuel that sucks fresh water at an ever-faster rate. California in deep drought, on the verge of collapse, our truck-farmed vegetables dying on the vine… while a chemically-sprayed-orange-faced-politician-wannabe tells us there is no drought, whatever we want to hear, truth be damned. He wants the job, make Americans hate again. We’re going down the pit, my babies. Can you see it, yet?

The old white man won’t go up on his roof and nail a shingle. “Bad knees,” he says; needs oxycodone every day—pass the bottle, rattle rattle—watching Mexicans do the job, but hating Mexicans for taking jobs.

The old white woman loves watermelon and tomatoes and sweet corn, but won’t stoop to pick one off the vine. Let the dirty Mexicans do that from dawn to dusk, then hate them for their work ethic—they stole my job, bastards. Not that the old white woman would ever work from dawn to dusk roofing the house or picking the vegetables, craziness running more rampant each day in the Big Pharma-pushed opiate-jangled and alcoholic mind.

One-third of the nation disgruntled, on the couch, listening to news tailor-made to enrage their hearts. This is 2016, my unborn children. You want happiness? There’s more than a pill for that. There’s one such tablet for everything, actually. And believe me—you’d need that to live in my world.

Silent Colorado mine holes, full of poison, breaking loose and rushing onto what remains of the Navajo. Greedy Wall Street crashing the economy and receiving a bail out, too big to fail, while wages for the middle-class remain at 1970 levels—pass the Lortabs, wash them down with Colt 45.

Damn Guatemalan children running from gang warfare and wanting freedom—show me a ten-foot wall, and I’ll show you an eleven-foot ladder. The hordes are coming! The hordes are coming, and not “winter is coming,” as in this story we all know in my time where, would you believe it, there actually is a wall to keep out the unwanted!

But this state of affairs, everything it’s all become— it’s much more than an 18-year-old needs to think about, and I don’t, really. So why am I running my pen off in these pages, huh? Well, it’s fun to write about it all in this journal. It all just pours out, you know. I can get all worked up and run my mouth endlessly, and no one cares. Maybe you, Mr. Stephens, but perhaps not even you in the future, little ones.

Wait a sec, hello? If there is a future. Why should I spend time thinking about what the grown-ups screw up on a daily basis?

They tell me I am the future. That my peers and I are the ones with the keys to tomorrow, that we’re the ones who will make America great again.

Pfft. Can you see me laughing my ass off here?

My generation will probably screw it up worse. In wanting to do better, we’ll aim higher… into the darkest mess ever to try to cover up the crap of those who came before us. Not worth getting worked up about, really. I reckon every generation thought their elders were screw-ups. You, in the future, know the truth of that, I bet.

But enough of the future, of which I am totally clueless. Let’s come back to what I actually know. Right now, I must think about grades, college, and motocross. Do you even know what that is, in your time? Do you kids even get out of the house and go on vehicles and other stuff, or is the world finally fully virtual?

Anyway, motocross helps me blow off steam, so it’s necessary. It’s my release valve, children. If all the crap inside me bottles up, I get into trouble. That’s why I’m scribbling here today. Bo Wruck broke my collarbone last October, and I let myself get bottled up. It ended in a death threat. I chose this journal and counseling over jail. Had a good record, so they let it slide. Bo never got caught with his shenanigans, so he’s scribbling, too. Nearly dashed my brains out against that poplar tree, but he’s simply scribbling like me.

However…

Mr. Stephens teaches history, and history teaches that we’ll repeat the same mistakes if we don’t pay attention. And the longer we sleep, or zombie-out-on-electronics, or suck opiates, or down power drinks while flopped on the couch and remain self-deluded and brain-fuzzed-on-sugar—pass those Chips Ahoy and another beer, please—the more difficult it will be to fix the mess. The diabetes. Lines lengthening near dialysis machines. Cancers of every organ proliferating like, well, a cancer. Bigger, heavier scales, so we don’t crunch the little ones made for lighter generations.

Dilemma. Who has time for such lofty questions, and frankly, who cares? Being 18 and having to care about the history of bullshit-I-didn’t-create. I just want to be 18 and enjoy Jasper, motocross, hunting, fishing, kayaking, and riding the Cherohala. I want peace, my version of it, and screw the rest of the world and all their crap that makes it such a disgusting place. I don’t want to think about all this…

But what if I have kids who’ll read this in an even crappier world I never attempted to improve? Big dilemma.

Twice, the government told Americans to be patriotic, line up, and charge German machine gun emplacements while breathing mustard gas (WW1) or ducking whistling V-2 rockets (WW2).

Congress promised $500 per man, before the first conflict began, to attack those Germans—kill them all!

However, when Doughboys returned to America sick with the flu, they infected millions of loved ones unintentionally. Thousands died. War might not have come to our shores, but the Grim Reaper tagged along for a ride, anyway.

Then the US government attacked their own so-called Bonus Army with fixed bayonets and tear gas—Patton and McArthur’s troops did this—as the repatriated troops camped in Washington, waiting for the promised cash to feed their starving families.

Don’t believe it? Google Bonus Army and see what pops up. Google must be your lifeline in your age. Or do you have a Siri popping up everywhere in a truly globalized world now?

Two or three generations later, the government advises us to frack the land. They even subsidize the effort… then say we are idiots for listening and ruining the ground water with chemicals.

I can see it coming: leaders endlessly repeating the mistakes of the past—a never-ending cycle that perpetuates itself. No wonder schools from sea-to-globally-warmed-sea stopped teaching civics. Who needs morals or a code of ethics when the goal is to destroy by all means and cover our asses whenever any mistake—and trust me, there will be many—is made? And now, the Tennessee legislature is debating whether or not to strip all textbooks of Middle Eastern history and Arab culture. That’s a world too fraught with conflict, with radicalism, a world too tainted by all things bad, so we cannot allow it to contaminate the pure minds of our kids. Ha! Do you think they know that algebra, coffee, and mint juleps are Middle Eastern inventions? Mint juleps!

Can you hear yourself lecturing, Mr. Stephens? You taught me all this. Made me look it up through verifiable sources and cross-reference, so I’d know it was true. No wonder you can’t get the Yankee stigma out of your name around Kituwah Falls, even though you’ve lived here 30 years. Really teaching American history! Shameful. Yankee bastard.

Can you hear me giggle here? One of the benefits of journaling is that you can cuss, which I can’t at home. Sarge would whip me in a heartbeat. Sorry about that, kiddies. I’ll be moldering in the grave, and you’ll be looking at pictures of a gray-haired, slope-shouldered hag when you read this. If I get to that age, mind you. Nothing’s ever guaranteed in our times.

Is this rambling now also an ode? To my Cherokee forefathers-mothers-brothers-sisters cast out of Eden, bitch-slapped and driven from Shangri La, turning back to throw one more glance upon running streams, plentiful game, tilled ground, herds of buffalo, strong enemies to test their mettle, but not so powerful that you and yours are annihilated. A wave of human white rats jumping off ships by the tens-of-thousands, gobbling up the land and maiming it beyond repair—New Jersey, Oklahoma—and coming to a head via Andrew Jackson, a talking head, often drunk, shock of white hair, red-eyed and swaggering precursor to Hitler, teaching the finer advantages of concentration camps—a patent Jackson never registered, but the idea his funny-mustachioed German protégé perfected, made factory-efficient. Jewish slave labor handmade each V2 rocket, forced to indirectly kill before they themselves were snuffed out by the thousands in those gas chambers.

Dark, indeed, these angry thoughts, but you’re requiring that I write them down, no matter that my style is a crazed Jack-Kerouac-cacophony of pissed-off-ness.

Mrs. Johnson, our beloved English teacher, assigned Kerouac, Dharma Bums, On the Road, The Town and the Country—my favorite—and now I find myself in a stream-of-consciousness phase, blubbering down personal stuff here on this stay-out-of-the-jailhouse paper in a rushing see-smell-hear-taste-feel-everything way. Kerouacian cussedness.

But when you’re pissed, it’s best to lay it all out there, screw it, beating the bed with the tennis racket, take your dad’s old Colt .45 service piece out to the back yard, set up a dozen glass jugs—or better yet, an old washing machine, a dog-turd dead computer, a printer forever leaking ink all over your hands, some kind of man-made-pain-in-the-ass machine begging to get blown to smithereens… and then don’t you just love the physicality of those rounds popping off in your hand, smoke flying, parts scattering across the yard like so many limbs torn off a beast? So cathartic. No need to poison yourself on drinks or drugs; you actually need a physical release, like riding motocross, cross-country running, and sex (I assume).

*sigh*

Sam Walker, 18 and still a virgin; in love with a kid named Jasper, a gangly, gap-toothed-kid I’ve known my whole life. Crawling floors as babies. Slobbering upon claw-foot chairs. Licking chicken poop before screaming parents could stop us. That’s the wonderful thing about it, being together since birth. But that’s also the terrible thing, for neither of us has been out of the county except for motocross races, and those places were all in East Tennessee, and folks here are pretty much all alike. Mostly.

Except, well… Jasper. He makes the world a better place. At least, he makes my world so. There are lots of things I need to tell about Jasper, but for now, just realize that we adore the same children’s book, because it’s much more than a kid’s book. This wonderful thing is sort of an Ecclesiastes for kids, or a Proverbs for the puerile. We repeat little gems from this little book when inspired.

A French aviator named Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ran out of gas as he flew over North Africa, and the time he spent waiting in the desert inspired him to write The Little Prince.

While preparing for rescue, Saint-Exupéry met an alien visiting from a nearby heavenly body, Asteroid B-612. This space-alien Little Prince leaves home because he loved a certain flower, but they couldn’t get along, so the Little Prince heads out and visits a King on the planet of the king, and this ruler turns out to be vain and narrow-minded. Imagine that.

The Little Prince next drops into Africa, meets the French aviator, and during their desert wanderings, they encounter a fox and a snake. The Little Prince learns a great deal about life from his desert time and his new teacher before returning to his asteroid home.

Their journey, subsequent hardships, and final departure leave a mark on the pilot.

Isn’t Christianity based on the concept that life is a desert? The main characters of the Old Testament wandered 40 years. What they learn on the journey is the basis for the wisdom found in that book.

In the New Testament, Jesus ventures into the desert for 40 days to match wits with the Evil One.

There’s a theme running through it. Cornelius and Sarge read The Little Prince to us when we were kids. They never preached to us. They just read that little book, in soft tones, a hundred times. More than The Bible, actually.

So Jasper and I have taken The Little Prince, made it ours, and share those desert moments of wisdom whenever they pop up and hit us in the face. You have to keep your eyes open and speak only when the desert moment uncloaks.

And here’s the kicker. When I mentioned the book to you, Mr. Stephens, you said you loved it, as well. You had memorized whole sections. You and your wife Jewel repeat lines to each other constantly. Makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

In little Kituwah Falls, you make your own entertainment if you’re not glued to electronics. But as soon as you’re lost in the mountains to the east, the reception goes away.

Sure, we have TV and the internet and cell phones and iPads and iPods and iCrap of all kinds. And most people are holed up in the living room or basement, tapping buttons, basking in the glow of a high-definition flat screen. It’s good training for a life stoned on opiates, I reckon.

But us, we don’t fall into that trap. No. We have our desert, and we fill our desert moments. Together. Side by side.

Something I hope you, my babies, manage to also do in your time…

Kituwah Falls, once an ancient Cherokee trading post, is wired to the point that few venture outdoors for fun.

Neither Cornelius Whitlock—Jasper’s dad—nor Sarge spent their childhoods indoors. Cornelius climbed every ridge he could see, kayaked every navigable stream, and drove his old Subaru with the kayak lashed on top to conquer others. Sarge ran trap lines as a teenager, hunted deer and turkey, fished for trout, rode dirt bikes twelve months out of the year, and became an Army Ranger before he was 23.

And because that’s how these men grew up, it also affects our reality in a place where few, like I said, venture out, unless really necessary. For us, time indoors means sleeping, studying, cleaning, or cooking. We have computers for school, limited to homework time, or to look up words if the dictionary doesn’t cut it. Cornelius turns us loose to research stuff now and then, if it’s school-related.

Jasper and I grew up listening to 60′s rhythm and blues, hearing things like groovy, badass, bitchin’, candy ass, dork, lay rubber, shag ass, raunchy, scarf, meanwhile, back at the ranch, and a thousand other idioms that now naturally fall off our lips. When you grow up on Motown and The Who, well, Miley Cyrus and 50 Cent sound candy ass, and country songs about tractors sound stupid. My opinion. I do love Pharrell Williams, Shania Twain, Justin Timberlake, and tons of Americana bands; but the more old school, the better.

“Only the children know what they’re looking for,” said the Little Prince.

Mr. Reuben Stephens, my school counselor and college prep history teacher, isn’t much like anyone around here, or maybe anywhere.

Though, I reckon, once you get to know them, folks are folks most anywhere in the world, in that they want to protect their families and do right by them.

*giggle*

I just read that back and it sounds awfully hillbilly, but that’s my voice. I know English better than Kituwah, the Cherokee language. I can only recognize a few Kituwah words and phrases.

Sarge made a reader out of me, and I can tell in a heartbeat whether a writer is a reader or just a bullshit artist.

Well, kiddies, I already feel better after scratching this down on paper. This sweet black pencil is working its way across the page like a self-propelled word spreader, Mirado Black Warrior HB2, like lettering on an ammunition box. Wonderful lead, crappy eraser that fell out, leaving a gold-colored cylinder hole, sans pink piston, scratching through paper, making yellow holes when the pink is petered out.

But I’m still so pissed, still mad. All these words on thirsty white paper, and I can still see my fingers around Bo Wruck’s throat, see his forehead in my rifle sights, feel the duct tape unspool to hold the car bomb in place under the driver’s side floorboard of that creepy Escalade he borrows from his mom, who is fueled on pill money, prescription drugs.

You want to know how it all went down the drain? How everything turned for the worse? Yes, kids—let’s face the elephant in the room, shall we? The bane of our little society, the highest grossing business in our lowly town, but under the table, off the books, safely out of the hands of the taxman.

“If you get too cold I’ll tax the heat, if you take a walk I’ll tax your feet.”

How many kids my age can quote George Harrison? Jasper, Amanda and I are Beatles fans and speak a secret Beatle language, you little piggies.

Life was so good before the invasion of the opioid-peddling mind-snatchers.