Extended family provided Valley dwellers with
the sort of security ordinarily afforded by employers and public agencies in
the broader world. When minor disasters
hit, such as summer wildfires and winter blizzards, folks sought the help of
relatives rather than that of the county or the Red Cross. A few extended families ensconced in the
rugged draws of the surrounding hillsides were so self-sufficient you rarely
saw their ilk in town. It was probably
just as well that the rest of us didn’t venture into those parts very
often. A lot of the people living along
the rutted dirt trails supplemented their slender incomes by growing weed or,
more ominously, cooking meth.
Regardless of social circumstances, the
Valley exerted a strange, centripetal pull on its natives. I remember the case of one young lady who was
fortunate enough to earn a full-tuition scholarship to a good private liberal
arts college. After graduating, she
worked several months in Washington as a White House intern. Most new college graduates would have parlayed
these accomplishments into a solid job or getting into a competitive graduate
program. Instead, she returned to the
Valley, unemployed, to live with her mentally ill mother and rehab failure
father. Family is family, after all,
even when they poison your life.
It's little surprise, then, that kinship in Stultus Valley frequently
took on an ugly cast. In fact, domestic
dysfunction was one of the Valley’s few spectator sports. The first incident which comes to mind took
place on my very own block. My next door
neighbor then was James Hall, the Stultus County sheriff. James was a tall, burly man whose physical
stature belied a teddy-bear personality.
James’ nice-guy demeanor and approachableness resulted in a steady
stream of constituents coming to his front door with some grievance or other.
Early one morning, around threeish, I was
roused from a sound sleep by a godawful ruckus.
This was unusual; the very best thing about Linden was that it lacked
the street sounds you’d have to put up with elsewhere. Ordinarily the only thing you heard in the
dead of night was the occasional hooting of owls.
A peek out the living room window gave me a front-row
view of unfolding events. The source of
the commotion was a diminutive middle-aged woman shouting and pounding on
Sheriff Hall’s front door. Cattycorner
across the street was a young man in handcuffs being led by two deputies to a
cruiser parked at the curb, lights flashing.
I recognized the guy. He was the unemployed live-in boyfriend of
the checkout clerk at Linden’s hole-in-the-wall grocery, recently discharged
from the military after a tour in Iraq.
It appeared that he’d taken exception to something his boo had said,
evincing his displeasure by first beating, then choking her. Fortunately, she managed to get away long
enough to dial 911. Before the cops
arrived the boyfriend, this heroic combat veteran, called his mommy for help.
And so there she was, at this ungodly hour,
demanding that Sheriff James Hall, clad in but a t-shirt and sweatpants and
rubbing the sleep from his eyes, order his deputies to release her only child. James, often too accommodating for his own
good, normally afraid of losing even one vote on Election Day, this time put
down his bare foot and said no.
Mom was apoplectic. “I’ll have your badge for this!” she
screeched, as if she could somehow invalidate the will of the Stultus County
electorate with her unbridled wrath.
Peering through the drapes, taking it all in,
I suddenly realized the harridan having an emotional meltdown on James’ front
porch looked awfully familiar. After a
moment, I remembered who she was. She
was Belinda Marinero, the new administrator for the county domestic violence
prevention program.
If it hadn’t been for the harrowing ordeal
her son’s girlfriend had just suffered at his hands, I would have laughed at
the irony. Not that I was surprised that
someone in the Marinero clan had gotten into trouble. One of the few entertainments in a town like
Linden was the county court docket published biweekly in the Valley’s only
newspaper, The Stultus Rooster. The name Marinero appeared often, this one charged
with burglary, that one with public drunkenness, another with assault,
etc. Word had it that there was a
Marinero relative in state prison for manslaughter. Still another was in the county lockup,
indicted for child molestation and awaiting trial. I guess you could say that being a Marinero
held a sort of rural outlaw cachet, but I wasn’t terribly impressed.
Back to Belinda: I’d met her only once, and
that was enough to form a bad impression.
About a week earlier, I’d attended a board meeting for the town
community center. Since it was noontime,
a few folks arrived early to have lunch first.
When I got there, Karen, the center’s director, was sitting at the table
with a companion who was wolfishly devouring what looked like fettucine alfredo
from a takeout container. The woman was
fiftyish, haggard, with badly dyed auburn hair and a heavily lined, vaguely
simian face.
This, I was told, is Belinda. Belinda ceased her pasta slurping long enough
to nod and say, mouth still full, something along the lines of, “You’ll get to
know me soon enough,” whatever the hell that
was supposed to mean.
It wasn’t long before I found out. Belinda’s personality matched her swinish
table manners. I was at the meeting to
discuss a recent study commissioned by the state concerning risk factors for
child and spousal abuse. The study found
that these risk factors included low levels of educational attainment, economic
distress, and substance abuse.
All of this was pretty boilerplate stuff,
conventional wisdom to anyone working in social services. I was merely the messenger, of course, but
Belinda seized upon my report as a personal affront. She tore into me with an unexpected fury, red
faced, voice increasingly strident, telling me with a near-murderous intensity
that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. Why, her rat bastard alcoholic ex-husband
left her when little Jacob was still crapping his diapers, leaving her to support the family on a cocktail
waitress’ salary. She didn’t need some overeducated smartass telling her she was someone who might abuse her
kid.
The room fell silent. I’m seldom at a loss for words, but Belinda’s
unprovoked, hate-laden tirade left me speechless. Karen, normally quite friendly towards me,
fixed me in a hard stare. These people
were exceedingly tribal, and I’d been in town long enough to know I was
alone. As the outsider, I was wrong. Knowing it would make things worse if I
actually tried to reason with Belinda, I simply closed my report and the
meeting moved uncomfortably on.
I’d mostly put the incident out of my mind
until young Jacob decided to use his girlfriend as a punching bag. And what happened to the star-crossed couple,
you ask? About what you’d expect,
actually. The district attorney didn’t
press the case against Jacob with much zeal.
After all, you don’t want to jail somebody who’s related to half the
county and is Linden’s one and only Iraq war vet.
In the end, Jacob was merely fined and given
a year’s unsupervised probation.
Shortly thereafter he moved back in with the girlfriend, who was
overjoyed to have him back.
A true story, sadly. But that’s what family means in Stultus
Valley.
© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar
