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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Censlus
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Right now I wish I could heed Tim Allen’s advice not to stand too close to a naked man, though I suppose, by my younger brother’s five-year-old logic, Bill Sparkman wasn’t naked, on account of still wearing his socks. He was also wearing a whole mess of duct tape, round his hands, his feet, his eyes, his neck, pinning his Census Bureau ID to his shoulder, right alongside the rope around his neck. And he’s got one word written in felt pen across his chest, and that one word took his death right out of my hands: fed. There’s still a red rag in his mouth, and I’m waiting here, because the FBI say they’ve got all their physical evidence, and today’s the day we get to cut Bill down.
But the FBI’s late, which is typical, since we’re out in nowhere, and even folks from around here can get lost coming out this far. We been working the scene in shifts, to preserve chain of custody on anything we might find, but that means I’ve been working twelves without much sleep between em. See, I know Bill Sparkman. He subbed at my daughter’s school, and while I never met the man, and he never taught my daughter, I’ve seen him around. Most bodies, not that I seen all that many, but most get to be just bodies for a time, before some grieving relative finds me to tell me who they were. Bill ain’t like most bodies, and I know him, and his story, well enough to know he shouldn’t be where he is now. Bill was an Eagle Scout and a local director for the Boy Scouts, and he’s got a kid, and they lived a few streets down from me. He wasn’t getting enough hours teaching, so to supplement his income, he was working part time for the Census Bureau. I tend to ignore the mad shit percolating out of folks like Michelle Bachmann and Glen Beck, but at a moment like now, I can’t not draw the line between their paranoid partisanship and the creak of the rope around Bill’s neck as he swings just a little in the breeze. Reminds me of a thing my daddy told me: “There’s nothing on this Earth more dangerous than a damn fool with their damned fool ideas. Trade em their damn fool ideas for guns and the world would be a safer damn place.” The man loved to swear, but the lord (through my momma) wouldn’t let him say worse than “damn” without catching hellfire. Now Bachmann and Beck and their kind like to talk about government takeovers, and other nonsense, but the census ain’t some new liberal concoction, and predates fascism and communism by a fair shake: our first was in 1790, and was conducted by Thomas Jefferson. We’ve taken a census once a decade since the country got started. And far from mutating this year into something invasive, the only major change to this census is that they dropped the long form questionnaire- in effect, this census is less intrusive than in years past. But I got a naked man swinging by his neck from a tree- one of my neighbors, to point the fact. I ain’t a fed, but being as I work for the state of Kentucky, I think I’m just one step below that. But it ain’t really about that. Just like the black folk who got lynched in these parts weren’t strung up for being dark- not even for being different and not acting the part. They died for fear, for ignorance- folks who believed the government was taking too much of their money, and trying to do too much for someone else with it. The funny thing there, and I mean the dark cosmic irony sort, not the laughing out loud kind, is the only conspiracy was the one they and theirs hatched. Democrats ain’t raised taxes yet, haven’t really substantially deviated from Republican game plans, truth be told. So the idea that the feds are making a grab now, well, it makes about as much sense as stringing up a part-time teacher, single father and Eagle Scout thinking he’s got an eye to infringing your freedoms- which is to say it makes not a damn bit of sense at all. |
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