“See, the thing is, most people who are doing dumb stuff are afraid that they are going to be losers in life, so they put other people down to try to get those other people below them – but see, pushing people down means you are moving down too. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. actually explained all this, but you know folks do not listen.”
16-year-old Tom Stepforth was explaining some of the facts of life to his little brother, nine-year-old Vertran.
“So, explain this to me like I'm five," Vertran said, "but five like Lil' Robert next door who is out there arguing our grown cousins and their parents down about the algebra of counting to any number in just two numbers and X,” Vertran said.
Tom just shook his head.
“That boy has a red crayon and some big drawing paper and has learned how to make an equation and is doing a whole mathematical proof – Rob is a sweet little boy, but also nuts!” Tom said.
“What's that thing Pop-Pop says about genius and madness?” Vertran said.
“Yeah,” Tom said. “Anyway, while they deal with that, it's like bullying at school – some kid is getting beat up at home and is scared about people in the whole world and so starts bullying other people so as not to be bullied again. But beating up people doesn't help you understand the stuff you gotta learn at school, so you end up flunking out and starting out broke and probably going to jail or meeting somebody like Col. Lee in high school on a day when he doesn't care about killing you in front of his future wife.”
“Yeah, that's a bad way to start – or end,” Vertran said. “I have noticed that high school is really where stuff starts to go down.”
“And it just keeps going down,” Tom said. “It's like Grandma talks about folks fighting for that last piece of chocolate cake on the Titanic, not even realizing that maybe fighting on the last seat of the last lifeboat makes more sense if you must act a fool before dying.”
“Oop – the burn,” Vertran said. “Big Mama is ruthless!”
“Yeah, I know,” Tom said, “but she also is right. Think about it, Vertran. You have a captain trying to break a speed record – about to retire, got a whole great career, but trying to be more important than someone else. You got another officer who can't be bothered to get water to show it's cold enough for icebergs, so he just gets some ship's water and lets the captain test that and says nothing so he looks he did his job. And these two gotta go down with the ship like everybody else on the crew, but they just wanted to be first in the hierarchy of losers on that whole ship of fools.”
“Is this why the world is so messed up and big parts of Lofton County have just gone down?” Vertran said.
“That's why I'm telling you about it,” Tom said. “Tomorrow is the beginning of the end of the county high school, and the beginning of folks needing to write checks to everybody that has gone there, including Col. Lee. So, Capt. Ludlow's father and elder brother offered to build it, but some new firm underbid them because old Ludlow had built enough and he and his son were too old-fashioned and it was time for new blood, blah blah blah.
“Well, the building is sliding off the foundation, and when one of my classmates got plastered into the wall, that's when the door opened to find out that A. half of what's in the wall may as well be cotton candy, and B. the cotton candy is flavored with asbestos.”
Vertran processed this, and then shook his head.
“Because they were jealous and wanted to be somebody, they used cotton-candy type of drywall and asbestos?” he said.
“It's running tomorrow in the Lofton County Free Voice, and I'm sharing the byline,” Tom said. “The real story is that half the people on the planning commission have known all this time, but didn't want to repair it after kids like Col. Lee's first wife – read, folks that look like us – started going there, because what was supposed to happen was that the white families were supposed to take their kids out and go to private schools. But at the same time they kept making decisions to make sure pretty much everybody in the county is going to stay poor, so... .”
“Uh oh – we're about to blow up the whole county, again,” Vertran said.
“Yep,” Tom said. “This is how it always ends, so we gotta stay humble, become who God wants us to be, and never get caught out there fighting for a spot in the hierarchy of losers.”