STRAY COUNTRY

Consider the most silent character of the American horror film.  The character always sketched in silhouette high on a hill.  As stark and tall as Mother Bates.  As ramshackled as a cannibalistic family of killers in west Texas.  As small-town boring as Judith Meyers.  There's a reason the house is center of American horror.  It tells us who's inside.  It tells us with its gables, with its eaves, with its rain gutters & with its windows.  With its porches & with its storm doors.  If you listen, it'll whisper. 

Pack 100 of them together on a converted plot of farmland and what might they say, whimpering all at once?  Maybe something about the animals inside.  Hungry beasts with bottomless stomachs growling like chainsaws.  Beasts a lot like pigs.

Let us credit the Mormons with bringing the churches to the suburbs.  For building brand new churches in a brand new world.  America moves to the suburbs, and the Mormons followed suit.  Because Mormonism always was a frontier religion.  A religion looking west.  A religion that got out ahead of the roads.  A religion that saw a city in a dried-out primeval lake bed.

And the rest of Christianity followed suit.

But if you've noticed God doesn't quite have the sway he used to.  If you've noticed prayer just isn't a punchy as it once was.  If you feel like there is radio static when you tune your ear to Heaven.  If you've ever felt like Old Scratch mechanized sin for the industrial age - you might consider the cost of dilution.  If spreading worship and prayer, psalmody and communion across too many chapels built too quickly have spread God's grand fist too thin.

Consider whether the world you inhabit belongs to you.  Portrait of a quaint suburban street.  Green manicured lawns.  Polite little houses standing in a row.  Pansies in the flower beds.  The family dog on the porch.  Children's bicycles left on the lawn, playing cards in the spokes.  And remember, it's all on lease.  A type of loan.  Costing three percent on a good year and ten plus in a bad.  Laprell Ferris, Ken Paul, Kim Gardner, Gloria Earl, Lyle and Susan Mumford may be the faces you see waving every morning, opening their garages every evening, but they are guests living in someone else's house.  If they salt the city with their own sweat for forty years, maybe, just maybe they'll get to keep it.  But if they fall behind in this dog race we call life the real owner will come home.  A tall man in a dark suit.  A cheap man.  A nickel and dime man.  A man without a face.  Without a heart.  A man nobody ever sees but by what his hands soiled in the grime of dollar bills do - which is take, and take, and take some more.  Because to you this may be a 'home', but to him it's only a commodity.  An indistinguishable good.  Something to be bought, sold and traded in open markets.  Same as corn.  Same as salt.  Same as grain, gold, beef and gas.  If his transient treatment of the American family's roots disturbs you, perhaps you'll understand why white plastic grocery sacks follow in his wake. 

Perhaps you'll understand why suddenly, the boys don't want to go home.

Friday night.  The church is dark.  Empty.  All dust and dry silence.  Two boys hide among the left-behind lint of good choir men and women.  Nose to carpet in the strange downpour of scents.  Ears open for the pig squeal of a white plastic grocery sack.

Consider the sounds you've never heard inside a chapel.  A gunshot.  An advertisement.  A politician.  A smoker's drag.  Pornography.  Sunday football.  Radio static.

For the churchgoers among us, past or present, consider if among the catalog of sounds you've ever heard inside a chapel includes a white plastic grocery sack.

Strange, isn't it, that an item crawling through every American rain gutter, blowing across every American highway, clinging to every suburban chain link fence has never come inside. 

Almost as if God has an opinion on the matter.

Have you ever considered what a ghost of our time would look like?  A ghost from the world of today.  Not something out of books.  Not something out of stories.  A real ghost.  Perhaps, it would still be white.  Maybe, it would still be wispy.  But it would no longer favor graveyards.  It would no longer haunt church grounds.  It would grow out of the real world.  The greedy, dusty, dollar-bill world.  It would no longer moan.  No longer howl.  But speak in radio-static gibberish.  Just picture it.  A synthetic shifting face with the blistering scream of the advertiser, the clenched fist of the pit-boss, the desperate prayers of the manufacturing class.  Such a ghost would reflect all the tangled and transient, uprooted parts of society.  Reflect Americans who cashed out their churches and doubled down on office space.  A ghost with the pig squeal of television-static in its throat and a vapid, plastic soul.  The kind that would blow around behind office buildings, slip across four lanes of traffic, and hang off fences in schoolyards. 

Just what would a ghost of today look like?

Perhaps it would look very much like a white plastic sack.

There is a slaughterhouse not far from your home.  Chances are you've never thought much of it.  Chances are it makes you feel safe.

Go for a nighttime stroll.  Wait for the month of rain.  Let the cold into your bones.  And tell me whether or not you feel some kind of ancestral hearthstonian warmth swimming through the cone-sized glow of a street light.

They were originally put in for safety. 

Because no matter how old we get, no matter how many atoms we split, no matter how much money we print, no matter how many steel birds we put in the sky, no matter how much we reign mother nature we're still afraid of the dark. 

But on this nightly walk stop, if you will, beneath the warm soup of light and look up.  Chances are you'll find a slaughterhouse.  You see there is a horror story in the insect world.  A machine that culls bugs by the millions.  Located on every corner of every street in every city in every country.  Something mother bugs warn their young about.  Something father bugs feel calling to them.  Something children bugs baste themselves in night sweats over.

Just how many insects were slaughtered to keep you safe at night?  This is a cone-sized corner of Stray Country.  A pint-sized lens by which to see perhaps the modern world is not as safe and clean and carcass free as it pretends to be.

Once upon a time folks looked at breeding money the way Americans look at breeding siblings.  Something that shouldn't be done.  A perversion.  An act that takes a thing that's supposed to be barren and makes for bad offspring.

The janitor's about to review something I told you back in Chapter 9 -

Breeding money's how we got to plastic sacks

Although truth be told the janitor should have used the term 'inbreeding'.  Because once humankind had wrangled a couple dollar bills they took to mating them like dogs.  But don't forget.  The first two dollars they started with were family. 

It's 1987. 

We're twenty generations deep in a bog of inbred genes.

If you've ever seen a white plastic grocery sack blowing across your tidy suburban street and found the sight ugly, grotesque, malformed, revolting or offensive to your senses . . .

if you've ever stumbled upon a white plastic sack stuck in the muck of a gutter and thought of all the disagreeable aspects of the frustrated, frightened century in which you live, this jangled century of trash and heavy industry and total waste . . .

Consider its pedigree.  Consider the family tree.

An evolutionary biologist would tell you humankind lost their tails twenty-five million years ago.  The janitor of Bonneville Junior High would tell you it was lost sometime after Thomas Edison started flicking on lightbulbs across the country.

One of them is more correct than the other.

He may wander.  He may ramble a bit.  His voice may be cattle-branded by Phillip Morris.  But there's a story in there.  A tale about how humankind only lost their tails 100 years ago.  And consider, if you will, what a tail was originally for - to keep from tipping over.

It's 1987.  The world is feeling a little topsy-turvy.

. . . and we've reached for something else to steady the wobble in the carousel.

Consider the following calculus.  Two boys.  Going into a junior high school after hours.  To count the number of condoms in a dead boy's locker.  In order to determine whether the boy smothered himself with a white plastic sack or was murdered by the ghost of a dead smoker looking for their very last Marlboro Red.

If this kind of arithmetic makes sense . . .

Welcome, to Stray Country.