Stones in the Road

Chapter 3: The Doctor Will See You Now

“What about your parents, Wiley?” Mr. Ledbetter—Stephen, he insisted on being called—asked as we sat in the cramped backseat of Jackson’s Jeep on the two-hour drive home to Tupelo, Mississippi. Noah was scrunched between us, distracted by a graphic novel about zombies. He wasn’t much for reading, but it wasn’t much of a story.

“My mom lives in New Albany,” I said.

“And your father?”

“He died a while back.”

“Ah,” Stephen said, smiling.

“Ah, what?” I asked.

“Whenever I meet a homosexual, there’s always something about the father.”

“Is that right?” I asked, bristling at the use of the clinical word homosexual, as if I were a butterfly pinned to a display board and he was a scientist inspecting my s****l organs.

“It is,” he said, nodding. “The father is missing. Absent. Dead. The father has abandoned them, was abusive. Perhaps an alcoholic. Perhaps emotionally absent. There’s always…something.”

I pursed my lips, wondering where this would lead, knowing I would not like it. As indeed I did not.

“So what are you getting at?” I asked at length, taking the bait.

“You don’t see the connection?” he asked.

“No,” I admitted.

“Perhaps these homosexual feelings…perhaps they indicate the absence of the male presence in your life?”

“I’m gay because I miss my daddy?”

“Something like that. I realize it’s controversial.”

“It’s a crock of hot stinking crap,” I said, rather ungracefully.

“Some of the things closest to us are the hardest to see,” he pointed out.

“There’s not a lot of data to support that point of view,” I said.

“But there are some,” he said, putting a lot of emphasis on the word “some” and making his verb agree with his subject. “It’s hard to be utterly conclusive in matters of the mind.”

“So your own son is gay because…you abandoned him?” I asked.

“There’s always been a distance between us,” he said simply.

“So he’s gay because you weren’t there for his baseball games?”

“I was there as much as I could be, but my work kept me busy.”

“And what do you do, sir?”

“I’m a psychiatrist. Didn’t Jackson tell you?”

No, he did not.

“Anyway,” he said grandly, “there will be plenty of time for talk later once we’ve become acquainted. I must say I’m very curious about Mississippi. It’s a solid red state—and we need all the solid red states we can get.”

“We do?” I asked, incredulous.

“Of course we do. We need people who believe in the American dream and the American values of hard work and self-reliance, not a bunch of moochers on food stamps drowning us in debt.”

My jaw fell open.

“I don’t know if we can take much more of Obama,” he went on. “The man’s not even American.”

I closed my mouth, felt something tighten in my belly. I looked in the rearview mirror and tried to catch Jackson’s eye, but he was busy talking to his mother.

“Not even American?” I repeated in disbelief.

“The man was born in Kenya,” he said dismissively. “His father was a Marxist. What could such a man possibly know about Americans?”

“Kenya didn’t exist at the time of Obama’s birth,” I pointed out.

“Say what?”

“There was no country called ‘Kenya’ when the president was born,” I said.

“Well, wherever he was born. What difference does it make? Kenya. Jamaica. China. Florida. It’s all the same damned thing. He’s not one of us and never has been. He’s a product of his Marxist upbringing. And at the end of the day, that’s all any of us are—products of our upbringing. People don’t change. Not really.”

“So you think he’s a Marxist?”

“Of course he is. Giving away other people’s money—what do you think a Marxist is? I believe in hard work, making your own way in the world. I do not believe in the president of the United States giving away the hard-earned rewards of my efforts. I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

“People on food stamps must really burn your ass.”

“We are the fattest country on the face of the earth. We have obese people coming out of our ears. What on earth do people need food stamps for? Don’t they have enough to eat already? And then they use their food stamps to buy candy bars and pizza so they can make themselves fatter. What’s the point of it? Why not do them all a favor and scrap food stamps and let them go out and get jobs like the rest of us?”

“Most of the people on food stamps are kids,” I pointed out, glancing down at Noah, who was one of those kids, since we were so far below the poverty line we’d never have so much as a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, not to mention anything else.

“Look at the obesity epidemic,” he retorted. “There’s Michelle Obama in the White House trying to get our fat kids off their fat bottoms and do some exercise once in a while. The best way to get these fatsos to lose weight is to get them off the food stamps and make them find jobs.”

“Even the children?”

“Why not? I worked as a child. I had two paper routes. Two of them. I got up at five o’clock every morning and rode my bicycle all over town delivering newspapers. It was good for me. During the summer I worked at a bait shop. I stayed out late at night at the golf course and harvested night crawlers. I got twenty-five cents a dozen when I sold them the next day to the shop. I didn’t sit around and wait for the government to give me an Obamaphone or whatever the latest thing is. I worked for a living and I’m proud of it, and I don’t want my tax dollars going to pay for those who don’t want to work, who think we owe them something.”

“Well, all right then!” I exclaimed.

I sat back in my seat and frowned.