If you had to make a Christmas ornament out of the state of Virginia, Madison County is where you’d punch the hole to hang it. This shire is shaped like an arrowhead, or a teardrop, with the county’s straight eastern edge cutting into Culpeper and the promise of Washington DC beyond. The Western border is wiggly, a testament to the difficulty of land surveying along rivers and mountain ridges. James Madison was from here, Woodrow Wilson liked to fish here, and for the longest time the county avoided appearing in any national news whatsoever.
Then, like a customer who has finally decided to complain about the soup, a local dad named Christopher Wingate reached a tipping point in 2022. Concerned about sexual content, he championed the successful banning of 21 books from Madison High School’s library. This made national news, but suppressing information to “protect” children was unsurprising to me and everyone else raised here. In fact, because I was a kid when it happened — and there was never a police report— I only learned about my uncle’s accident in bits and pieces over the years.
Madison County, 1985.
Tires crunching down the gravel driveway launch Jon Graham out of his desk chair. He identifies the truck and considers the hiding place of his Colt .45. He bought it in naked adoration of Clint Eastwood and paid a second price for it shortly afterward, when he shot himself in the foot playing quickdraw.
The truck brakes next to his wife’s Subaru and consumes both vehicles in gravel dust. Jon recognizes Mr. Bowman and his son. His wife Lita doesn’t know their names, but recognizes them as local locals, generations-deep Madisonians who rarely smiled back when their paths crossed in the A&P parking lot, even after almost twenty years here in Madison County. Before she can ask Jon what the hell, they pound on the locked door. Jennifer and Bradley are upstairs playing with the toys they brought back from a weekend at their grandparents’ in northern Virginia.
Now they peer out of their bedrooms, terrified.
Men yell that they know Jon’s in there.
Men yell for him to get his ass out the house.
Lita is torn between questions for her husband and answers for her children.
Jon tells her to keep the kids upstairs and lock the door behind him. Do not call the police, he says. Then tells her the location of his gun. He turns on the porch light. She rushes upstairs to lock her children in Bradley’s room and looks out the window.
Lita is the daughter of a CIA man, a career spook whose career path took them to India when she was a child — there’s a tiny, sealed metal pitcher of water from the Ganges just by the door — and she is a second-grade teacher. She tells herself to be cool in the face of disaster, for the children.
“Some people dad knows from work…” she mutters preemptively. But they know something is wrong. Jennifer’s big eyes plead while she tugs at her mom’s leg; Bradley leans his thin frame out of the top bunk, craning towards the window.
From up here their silly, strong, cool dad looks scared.
Shouting warps its way into the house and clamps off the children’s questions. Lita snaps at them and then regrets it. There’s some low talking and gravel shifting underfoot. Some cigarette smoking. Doors eventually shut and the Bowmans drive back down the driveway and turn right onto Jack Shop Road.
Jon knocks on his own door, gets let inside, and one child attaches to each leg, hugging tight. He winces, knowing he has some explaining to do to Lita. It will be good practice for the version he tells his father.
His father would rather be playing tennis, or flying his plane. Hell, he’d even rather be in the next room with his quiet wife. Instead, Walter Wayne is on a winding and ludicrous phone call with his favorite son, which, long before its annoying and predictable end, reminds him of similar call about a decade earlier. That night a younger Walter Wayne, former Naval Engineer and father of six, was awoken by a call from the police saying that his adult son had been found in a Volkswagen van, smoking drugs and indecent with two lady friends and another friend. Caught because the van was a-rocking in the most obvious parking spot imaginable: the median strip of a highway. After making bail, Jon stood outside and watched the diminishing form of his father’s car and then realized he needed to find his own way home.
From a stack in Walter Wayne’s office, visible from the phone, his own handsome blue eyes look up at him from the cover of Virginia Business magazine. Below the masthead, close-cropped gray hair frames the tan face of the Greatest Generation’s man of the hour. As Jon spill his guts Walter Wayne’s resents that his investment and construction company can achieve literal front page status while his son, the former high school teacher and now chairman of the company— a father now, for chrissake — is pathetically falling over itself apologizing. Just like it did after the van incident.
He grips the phone in fist that tends to over-assert itself in handshakes. Before the ask even comes— which he knows is coming— Walter Wayne hates his idiot son, and loves this fleeting permission to admit that to himself.
Then there’s the ask. There’s always the ask. Then the silence. Then a number, an arrangement, because that’s what has to be done. What’s his choice, really? You don’t make the cover of Virginia Business to get dragged into white trash domestic mess like this. On the other end, a thankful Jon is very familiar with his father’s ruthless style of discipline — trash not taken out by children is dumped on beds, daughters not back by curfew get hosed down in the yard, etc. Any illusion that his father might be helping him out of sheer kindness is squashed when he interrupts to ask if there’s anything else.
There isn’t.
Click.
A few days later Bradley shows me where he’s been breaking bottles behind his house. My younger, bookish cousin leads us from the woods into a cow pasture, where the disc-shaped foundation of an old corn silo is covered with broken glass. We used to pretend to blast space rockets here, but today Bradley pulls out some glass orange juice bottles from the bushes and throws one spinning into the air. The crash is impossibly loud and the silence after it, deafening. I throw mine, still with some liquid in it, and the explosion tears me between running away and doing it again. We radiate strange, guilty auras when we slink back inside his house which Aunt Lita and Uncle Jon, in deep conversation, fail to notice.
Three Days Earlier
Jon admires his steamy reflection. He’s not Jackson Browne, exactly, but he’s not Meatloaf, either. Not bad for a guy in his mid-thirties. With the confirmed safe arrival of his wife and kids at his in-laws’ in northern Virginia, he considers the small pool of aftershave in his cupped hands. Hope — ssssss goes the sting of alcohol on all fresh skin south of his mustache — springs eternal. When he was a teenager he wrote an explicit, heartfelt letter to the sexy film star Brigitte Bardot and mailed it off, with incorrect postage and extra hope, to the address of “Paris, France.” In his early dating career, he parlayed his humor and charm into enough heavy petting green lights that he understood himself to be a ladies’ man. Much later, when he started to go bald, he made monthly trips to the state capital of Richmond under some business guise or other so that he could have synthetic hair plugs sewn and resewn into his escalating scalp, hopeful that he would never have to stop being a ladies’ man.
At his dresser, zoning out with the sock drawer open, Jon considers the route most likely to get himself laid tonight. On top of the dresser a little line of coke waits impatiently. With ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man” playing loud on the hi-fi downstairs he decides against cutoffs and a Hawaiian shirt. It’s a hot September night, but he’s not Magnum P.I. In homage to Richard Gere’s dressing scene in American Gigolo, Jon snorts the line — and Madison County isn’t Hawaii.
In his white linen slacks and nice shirt, it’s not so much that he forgets his children’s rooms that he just walks by them, focused. With Lita and the kids out of town his attention has diminished hypnotically, predictably, magically to a single point. Her name is Holly Bowman and she used to sit near the front of his class. Occasionally she flashed him her panties. It was with great solemnity that he had never tried to fuck her. In the years between her graduation and running into her randomly the other day in Madison, he bestowed upon himself an invisible halo, a quiet reward for not giving in to that particular impulse for so long.
In the aisle of the A&P she laughed at something he said, and then did that lingering eye contact thing, and then touched his arm. Suggested maybe they should go out sometime. Where was this kind of flirting in his life before Lita came along? Jon swears that women prefer married men, like, well, like two kids fighting over the same toy.
Downstairs he pours a bourbon neat and smokes a Marlboro Red on the porch. In the kitchen, below a framed needlepoint of Lita’s that says, “The 3 Best Reasons to Teach: June, July, August” Jim lifts his Trans-Am keys off the hook and strides out to his sports car.
The 1978 Pontiac Trans-Am came with an eagle painted on the hood and a T-top, that rare roof design halfway between a coupe and a convertible. The year Jon got arrested in the VW van he had to sell his cherry red VW bug to pay his father back. He loved that car, which he had named “Lollipop.” Before he became a ladies’ man you might say he was also a bit of a car guy. Nostalgia for Lollipop takes a prompt backseat to arousal when he places a hand on the slick, black body of the Trans-Am, a car immortalized as the real star of the movie Smokey and the Bandit and certainly the bossest ride he’s ever owned.
When the keys go back onto the hook later, his kitchen fills with giggling and a note of perfume. The tip of his house key, upon closer inspection, glistens with crystalline powder. Holly flips through Jon’s albums in the other room while he makes bourbon and cokes and stirs them with his finger. She’s sitting with her back to him, cross-legged, in front of the stereo. The V-shape the belt makes in her jeans as she leans forward draws him across the deep carpeting.
For a second, he applauds his planning and pacing of this rendezvous. Quite understandably, all the local places (the Pot & Kettle, American Legion, Horsefeathers) were out of the question. That meant either a trip up Rt. 29 to Charlottesville — maybe hit up the C&O, which could get expensive, and there was still no guarantee there wouldn’t be somebody there who knew him from Madison — or a house-date. So, house-date it was, an invitation back to his place to “party a little bit” and suggest, just hint enough to not be nailed down, that maybe later they could go out somewhere and get a drink in public that would never happen. He would have to entertain her, and this challenge morphed into a kind of chivalrous duty in his addled head. Smoking would be great. Drinking would be even better. Bust out some blow, he reasoned, and she’ll never leave.
Over her bare shoulder Holly smiles at Jon and holds up the latest Cars album. He crosses over to her.
At some point he whips out his Gibson guitar.
At some point she puts on Lita’s lingerie.
At some point she tells him that it was almost too much, seeing him pull into the faculty parking lot every day in his Trans-Am. The mascot painted on the front of the school is a Mountaineer standing on a mountain, and behind him a caravan of people and covered wagons. She wants to drive it now. Which is perfect because they get to “go out” but won’t get caught.
With the T-top off and Holly’s hair flying about the driver’s side, Jon’s Trans-Am trails an invisible party comet behind it composed of music, laughter, cigarette smoke and that sweet-sour redolence that can only emanate from the mouths of the profoundly sloshed.
Holly’s dad must have taught her how to drive because she handles the stick shift like a champ around these country roads. This thought coalesces into a compliment, but before it can escape Jon’s mouth, an oncoming car destroys her left arm hanging out the window, side-swiping the line-crossing Trans-Am and spinning it onto the shoulder of Jack Shop Rd.
Jon can only process the damage to his Trans-Am: demolished door and front panel, shattered windows and windshield, steering wheel detached, upholstery soaked. He isn’t the runner of the family, but he can still beat his track star sister in a dead sprint, which he replicates now by himself down the dark country road. Halfway home he notices the entrance to his brother’s property and slows down. His chest is heaving, and he thinks about going in there for help. The last time he came by was for his brother’s birthday, dropping a six-pack off on his kitchen table and wishing him “something dark and hairy” while his nephew, me, looked on unnoticed.
Before my unlabeled emotion landed as disgust it hung orphaned in the air for a beat, hovering between Dad’s silence and Uncle Jon’s uncensored expression. His expectant, goofy face could always make me laugh when I stayed over at Brendan’s, and I’d turn around and copy it in front of the Monday morning playground crowd after reciting Saturday’s SNL sketches. A version of it I would use after puns when I became an English teacher like him, another hopeful ladies’ man susceptible to flights of fancy based off a little eye contact in the grocery store. I was warned not to follow in his footsteps.
He keeps going.
When flashes of the crash return to him — pop of exploding windows, headlights, darkness, shrieking, black-looking blood on blue lingerie— he runs faster, shin-high scrub along the shoulder ruining his pants cuffs.
When he steps out of the shower it’s too foggy to notice himself. When State Police Sergeant Grant Squire rouses Jon he’s greeted at the door by a haggard version of guy he knows by name. Twelve years before Sergeant Squire will eventually get busted in his own two-timing, double marriage-collapsing imbroglio, he asks Jon if he can please come inside. Like it says on the door of his squad car, he protects and he serves. When he leaves, he pats Jon on the shoulder and the best three reasons to be a teacher are still the same. Jon looks over to where the Trans-Am keys used to hang before going upstairs and falling asleep.
Dave Gentry 