From All the Roads Between
By the time our school bus would get to El Monte Road, Jax and I would be the only kids left. We’d bounce along past the open fields, past Carter’s egg ranch, past a whole lot of run-down houses, dust clouds, and weeds. We lived right off El Monte, at the five–point-five-mile marker, at the end of a long, rutted, dirt road, our houses preceded by two battered mailboxes askew on their dilapidated wood posts. It was a bone-shaking journey by car and almost impossible by bus, so Ms. Beels would pick us up and drop us off at the mailboxes every school day, rain or shine. Those mailboxes were where Jax and I would start and end our long journey.
Ms. Beels, a short, plump woman who wore mismatched socks and silly sweaters, was our bus driver from the time we were in first grade all the way until high school. She was the only constant and reliable person in my life. That is, besides Jax.
Every morning she would greet me with a smile and every afternoon, just before closing the doors and pulling away, she’d say, “Get on home, kids, and eat your veggies,” as if our parents could afford such luxuries. Her life was exactly the same, day in and day out, but she still put a smile on and did her job well.
When your family is reduced to nothing, you look at people like Ms. Beels with envy. Even though driving a bus in a rural, crackpot town isn’t exactly reaching for the stars, at the age of ten I still looked up to her. She had more than most people I knew back then. She had a job.
We lived in Neeble, Ohio, population eight thousand on a good day, home to ex-employees of the American Paper Mill factory, based in New Clayton. Most of the workers moved out of New Clayton just after the factory closed and brought their families to the rural, less populated towns where rent was cheap and the odd job less scarce.
My family had always lived in Neeble. My dad had grown up there, and his dad too. They would commute to New Clayton together when the factory was still running, starting and ending their days together the same as Jax and me. They were good friends and good men—at least that’s how I remember them. And we had a nice life for a while. My father called what we had at the end of that road a little slice of heaven. And it was . . . for a long time. But if there’s a real heaven here on earth, then there has to be a hell too. Jax and I learned that the hard way.
He and I weren’t always friends. In the beginning he was just a smelly boy with dirty fingernails and shaggy hair covering his eyes. In the early years, I barely heard him utter a word except for “yes, ma’am” and “no, ma’am.” He’d shuffle behind me all the way down that dusty road to where Ms. Beels would greet us. We’d climb onto the yellow Fern County school bus and hunker down for the long hour-and-a-half drive to school. I always sat in the very first seat, and he’d walk straight to the back.
As we passed through town, we’d pick up a whole bunch of kids, at least thirty of all ages, but the two I remember well, besides Jax, were world-class assholes. I was convinced that Mikey McDonald, with his blond crew cut and baggy pants, wanted to make my life hell.
“Emerson? What kind of name is that? Isn’t that a boy’s name?”
I would roll my eyes and try to ignore him. I never got a chance to ask my parents what kind of crack they were smoking when they named me.
By the third grade, Mikey had a crony: Alex Duncan. Whatever I was carrying, they would walk by and try to slap it out of my hands, and then they would sit in the seat behind me on the bus and torture me all the way home. “Maybe you can marry a book someday, Emerson Booknerd. Haha, Booknerd. That could be your last name.”
Alex had a big birthmark right on the end of his nose, like he had been sniffing shit. For so long I kept my insults to myself, but everything changed in the fourth grade. The factory had been closed for almost a year, the money was running out, and my father wasn’t doing anything but drinking and listening to talk radio. Rush Limbaugh’s Oxy-laced voice was more familiar to me than my own father’s. He was shutting down. He had stopped talking. He got mean and so . . . my mom left. She left me alone with him, without even a brother or sister to help shoulder the burden.
Everything changes when a man can’t afford to put food on the table. Some men rise to the occasion and find a way to make ends meet, no matter what it takes. Other men have too much pride to see that their life is crumbling down around them. My dad was a third-generation American Paper Mill worker, and Jax’s dad was the same. It was all they knew.