I grew up in a small town in Southern Arizona mostly made up of military members, Border Patrol agents, and Raytheon employees. All of the other people that live there own or work at businesses like grocery stores, restaurants, and gyms so the first group of people have something to do when they get off work and someplace to buy things in bulk on the weekends. Everyone is fairly well-off and comfortable. That’s my home town. And plenty of other people’s, too, even if they aren’t from the same one as me.
So, you can imagine the kind of people that went to my high school. Their parents were engineers, aircraft mechanics, and federal law enforcement officers, or they worked at a business in town. Most of us lived in suburbs of little stucco boxes crammed so close together that you could hear your neighbor’s landline ring. No one owned a horse. We were far from “country,” and the only thing “Western” about us was our location relative to Destin, Florida (the other nesting ground for snowbirds), so we chose skate shoes and graphic tees over traditional cowboy or country wear. We were suburban teenagers.
Except for one group of boys that were a year younger than me (juniors) and had decided our town was to be the epicenter of the New South and they were to be the harbingers. A Western South, or something. They’d walk around school in a group, plaid snap-button shirts, dirty jeans, boots, and patchy, reddish-blond beards that covered more neck than cheek. Lips all full of chaw, the whole belt-buckled gittup. It started with two of them. Then, by meiosis or some other scientific process they would probably deny, they multiplied to five.
Then, they started flying flags.
On one corner of their big, dumb work truck that they didn’t use for work, they had fastened up a confederate flag. On the other corner, the flag of the United States. I don’t know why it bothered me. Well, there’s the obvious reasons (cue the “states rights” argument people). But I think it was the blatant ignorance or stupidity of the act that got me——gets me still. I’m sure they had some explanation for the flag of the victor and loser of the same war flying at the same time, but I’m also sure it wouldn’t have made sense. It’s not like they were history or political science buffs. Maybe they had family in South Carolina but so what, I have family in Ohio. Maybe they were just finding an identity. There were some things going on in the news at that time regarding the confederate flag though, so I think they were trying to garner some of that attention too, which——edgy.
This went on for a few months. By that time, they had heard all the arguments from the AP US History students and had remained staunch in their support of a group of dead traitors from somewhere they had never been. I never actually saw them argue back, but the flags did not come down.
On my last day of school, the seniors got released earlier than everyone else. As we all walked through the parking lot to our cars to leave high school one last time, I saw it——the truck, flags flapping in the breeze——and something told me that the driver’s side door would be unlocked and I’d find exactly what I thought I would in the cupholder of that sunbleached ’90s F-250.
So I pressed in the silver button on the door handle with a click, pulled, and voila. In the cupholder, my predictions were confirmed. A Gatorade bottle——one of the big ones——full of a brown liquid that had a bunch of little bits peppered in it, just waiting for me. I guess if you want to act southern you have to chew tobacco, so you’d need something to spit in, but why you’d let it get so full is beyond me. I’m glad the owner didn’t feel the need to empty it, though, because I opened it up and dumped those twenty-eight ounces of stale tobacco spit all over the fabric bench seat of his truck.
I felt bad for the truck——for that big, tobacco spit stain I put into its tan cloth interior. A shame, really, that such a machine (assembled by Yanks in Detroit no doubt) had to be driven by such a dumbass. I put the cap back on the bottle and replaced it in the cupholder, shut the door, and walked to my car. A week later, I graduated. I haven’t been back to my old high school since.
Chris Swartzentruber is an undergraduate student in the Creative Writing program at The University of Arizona. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his lovely wife and many different pets. His favorite revenge story is the song “Rocky Raccoon” because it warns of the dangers of ego, anger, and foolish pride through a revenge story gone wrong. Also, it’s a song about a raccoon.
