The twisted perverted hillbillies portrayed in the film Deliverance were but your basic everyday Southern Baptist Sunday-school hillbillies, compared to the crazy cannibal hillbillies in the early Wes Craven horror film The Hills Have Eyes. The hills in that movie were thick with wild, idiot, feral children, with roaming packs of savage shadow-hillbillies you could only catch glimpses of in the corner of your eye until it was too late, and they were ravenously upon you. Stay on the main road, the old coot at the decrepit gas station had told the vacationing family from Cleveland who had gotten onto the wrong road, don’t go down roads around here that are only dotted lines on the map. But the recently retired Cleveland cop tough-guy dad, who claimed to have dodged spear-chucking “coons” and dogs thrown off roofs at him by the hillbilly white trash who came up from places like West Virginia to work in the auto plants, knew it all.
The Cleveland law-dog, tough-guy spanker-dad soon enough discovers himself crucified to a tree near his family’s silver Airstream trailer. Whereupon the patriarch of that clan of mountain monsters, who is your worst dream of a really big, bad, snarly, clearly ill-tempered, cannibal hillbilly, informs Dad that he intends to eat the heart out of Dad’s memory. He douses the chagrined Cleveland Dad thoroughly with gasoline and leaves Dad to scream and wail and howl inconsolably from the night like something pure animal for the benefit of his family as he is barbequed alive. In this movie, things quickly go from bad to worse for the little lost family from Cleveland, and before the night is over several other members have had to deal with real unpleasantness at the hands of the hillbillies, who lope about in the dark drooling and slobbering and giggling, and who have walkie-talkies and are sometimes actually rather jocular as they coordinate their attacks using the call- names of planets, Mars, Pluto, Saturn, Jupiter. For the little bitty baby they kidnap, the hungry hillbillies have special plans. They are real tired of eating dawg, it seems. Tenderloin, is how they refer to the cute, cuddly, pink little baby, and the hillbillies make it clear that for their menu, tenderloin is done to a turn.
What I couldn’t get out of my mind as I was driving around in the everlasting hills and sad dark hollows of Boone County hunting for my old cousin Jesco White, in order to begin my intended interviews with him for my book about weird West Virginians, was just how much that one bearded cannibal hillbilly boy, the one with the wild, black, bottomless eyes, the one who tore that chicken’s head off with his teeth and sucked the blood and guts out of its neck as though it was a fat, feathery straw and those innards sweet as lobster, looked like old Jesco White. I was armed to the teeth that day, true, but not really looking at all eagerly for trouble as I searched high and low for that curious and no-doubt dangerous individual a.k.a. The Dancing Outlaw. The most recent report I had been able to find was a news clip in the Charleston Gazette, the mountain state’s so-called “leading” paper, which read:
DEPUTIES REMOVE JESSICO WHITE FROM HOME PEYTONA (AP)—The Dancing Outlaw is out on the streets.
Jessico (“Jesco”) White, the former jailbird who danced his way onto primetime television, was removed from his home by Boone County sheriff’s deputies Wednesday after a dispute with his wife.
Norma Jean White said her husband beat her and fired a gun at her because she did not want to take their dog for a walk in the rain, said Sgt. R.A. Miller.
There was no evidence of gunshots or physical abuse to Norma Jean White, Miller said. But she filed a domestic violence complaint anyway, which prohibits Jesco from coming home until a hearing December 8.
White, whose passion for Appalachian mountain dancing was the subject of a television documentary, recently appeared on ABC-TV’s “Roseanne” sitcom.
I had written cousin Jesco a letter about my intentions that I wasn’t even sure he had received or that anybody had read to him, in which I told him of my wish to write a chapter in my West Virginia book based upon him and his turbulent but finally inspirational life.
In the letter, I pointed out all the parallels I had found in our lives, which was why I had been so intrigued when I had first seen The Dancing Outlaw. You had trouble with the law when you were younger, and so did I, I informed Jesco. I told him about the summer I was seventeen when I had been involved in those seven armed robberies up in and around Atlantic City, which had been the basic subject matter of my second novel. I told Jesco that his talent for tap-dancing was in some ways akin to whatever talent I had for writing, that they were both forms of very personal expression that had made us both somewhat different from the people around whom we had grown up, and they had been ways we both had used to enlarge our lives, were even in some senses avenues of escape for us both from the limitations our early environments had placed upon us. His interest in Elvis and the inspiration Elvis had provided him was not unlike my interest in James Dean and the ways I had tried to pattern my own youthful behavior in his rebellious image. James Dean’s picture was on the dust jacket of my second novel, I informed Jesco. I had been married to two women and I didn’t have any children either, although not for the exact reasons he didn’t. Still yet, there was a parallel.
Another parallel, and perhaps the most important one to me, was the complex, often painful, but finally loving relationship Jesco had had with his daddy, D. Ray. When Jesco had spoken bittersweetly of D. Ray on the video, bells of recognition had pealed for me, and I felt that I understood his mixed sentiments perfectly. I told Jesco that my own old dad had been a complex and often difficult man who I both loved and wanted to murder in some bloody manner with my own hands by turns.
When Jesco had wept while he was talking about his daddy in the film, I had envied him. I had wished I could feel such tears burn my own cheeks, for I hadn’t been able to cry yet for my own old man, not at his funeral in August of’88 nor whenever I visited the little mountain cemetery over at Ansted where he was buried. I told Jesco that I thought his story was an important story to tell, and a very American story, a story about struggle and hardship, but also one of ultimate survival and more, hope, for instance, and even triumph, and, most of all, renewal, which I, for one, considered to be the sweetest form of revenge. I did not mention my suspicions of his perfect clean getaway into the secret shadow-life of Elvis.
I followed Route 85 east along the Litlee Coal River outside of Madison, passing through any number of wide spots in the narrow road called towns, until, directly past a small riverside park in Van, I turned east onto an even narrower road that wound along a hollow crowded with neat little frame houses and doublewides that constituted a roadkill of a town named Gordon. I then hit a fork at a boarded-up gas station and bore right and, a half mile up the crumbly road, I had arrived at the Gordon Grill, a long, low, windowless cinderblock building with a single big metal door in front that was riddled with the clear indentations of bullets, which, according to rumor, had once been Jesco’s outlaw beerjoint of choice.
I pulled into the gravel and red dog across the road from that building of clearly bad intentions and studied it. There were several pickups and maybe a half dozen Harleys parked out front. I entertained the notion of having a couple of tall cold ones for the road within that dangerous establishment, while I made friendly inquiries concerning the whereabouts of the infamous Jesco White.
About that time, an ancient beat-up boat of a Buick pulled in and several longhaired, bearded, clearly armed-and-dangerous customers piled out. As they clomped along the concrete walk toward the big, bullet-dented door, they twirled and checked the chambers of their pistols.
When they pushed that heavy door open, I caught a serious beerjoint blast of blaring jukebox redneck music, and then when the door sealed shut behind them it was dead silent again, except for the soft cries of crickets by the creek and a distant car horn honking as randomly and forlorn - sounding as a hoot from an owl way back in the hills. About then, another rattletrap of a pickup pulled into the gravel lot across the road, and a rail of an old boy wearing that ubiquitous baseball cap and his seriously bovine babe got out and staggered arm in arm into the beerjoint, whose smoky yellow light flooded out about them like a halo in the moment they entered that roadhouse out of the eternal twilight of the hollow.
The urgent main adventure of my manhood might lie behind that bullet-blasted door, I reflected somberly, and then I pulled my own cap low over my steely eyes and slid out of my Red Ride. I strolled across the broken blacktop toward that roadhouse I imagined to be beyond any law, that smoky dangerous den of redneck moonshiners and mountain marijuana farmers and dope-dealing hillbilly bikers and gun-runners armed to the teeth, good old boys who woke up every morning feeling discarded and cheated and isolated, feeling proud and mean and full of outrage and violence and frustrated desire and as evil as the day is long.
I swaggered all the way up on the concrete porch and was reaching forward to push open the bullet-blasted door before I came to my senses. Zen-like, the realization had hammered me over the head like a baseball bat that no, I really didn’t require another tall cold one for the road, nor truly need any unreliable, boozy clues concerning Jesco’s hideout in the hills. A hand-printed cardboard sign taped to the door proclaimed: No Guvyhs—No knl-Pes—No
I swirled to fling myself from that place, but hesitated. Whereupon I whipped my ubiquitous ballpoint from my shirt pocket, and, imagining myself quite the masked wag (as in, who was that masked wag, anyway? Why, that was the Lone Writer!), I inked in No Elvis. Then I bolted wildly back across the blacktop to my Red Ride, not utterly unlike a bat out of hell.
The next thing I knew, I was high atop Williams Mountain, taking most curves on two wheels, until I spotted some letters arranged in the marquee before a little white frame Holiness of God church set back off the road in a stand of trees, whose message I slowed to read. It was the topic of next Sunday’s sermon: scabs die and burn in hell with the goddam devil. Whereupon I began a reflective, leisurely, twisting descent on a disintegrating road not on my map, drifting down and down sharply into bottoms where it was suddenly evening, and the dark coal-thick mountains rose up around me rugged and rocky and silent, and the submerged air of isolation in the narrow lonely hollow was palpable enough to cut with the old proverbial pig-sticker we West Virginians often carry purely for self-protection, such as my own German-made Kissing-Crane stiletto.
And then suddenly I found myself in the tiny town of Prenter, home of Jesco’s mom Birtie Mae, the “Miracle Woman.” I drove slowly down the one nearly deserted street that was downtown Prenter, maybe the saddest ruin of a town I had ever seen. The houses lining both sides of the road were these little, frame, mostly collapsed coal-company shacks, many uninhabited, windowless with fallen porches and paint long weathered away, and although the sun had come out and it had turned into a nice day, I didn’t see a soul in that forlorn, hopeless place, not even a mangy dog or cat. I had the strangest creepy feeling that I was utterly alone, as I drove to the far end of what could have been a ghost town, where I pulled into a wide heavily rutted lot in front of the only store in town, called, appropriately enough, the Area Supply Store.
Across the road I could see a Peabody Coal Company sign, and I had passed another one just as I was entering Prenter, which was the sign I was pretty sure where, according to the sketchy directions I had gotten back at the Coal Miner’s Kitchen (where I had stopped for a possum-burger and Bud brunch earlier), I was to turn back up into Birtie Mae’s dark hollow. But to be certain, I went into the Area Supply Store to double-check, and to pick up a six-pack of cold Buds to suck for company, and for courage, sure, to become, as they say, beer-brave.
I piddled around, browsing back shelves while I waited for the two hardcore country boys who were hanging around up at the front counter sucking RC Colas and bullshitting with the maybe four-hundred-pound cashier lady to mosey on. But they appeared parked where they were for the duration, so finally I picked up a six-pack of Buds and a bag of barbequed pork rinds. I carried them up to the counter, smiling like a dope and bobbing my head obsequiously as I do perhaps in hopes of persuading the world at large of what a well-meaning human being I am at heart. But it was pure bashfiilness on my part, and not fear, that rendered me hesitant and embarrassed around those—and all—strangers.
Both good-old-boys and the huge cashier, whose enormous bare arms looked like country hams tattooed with skulls and crosses and the countless names of men, eyeballed me with suspicion, checking out my limp ponytail and the tiny enigmatic tattoo of a sacred salamander on my right forearm and my sissy-looking sandals, as I put my items down and addressed my shyness enough to ask if any of them could give me the directions to Birtie Mae White’s trailer.
The three of them looked at one other as though I had asked about a shortcut to Mars, a planet just past Kentucky, and they all grinned in unison, displaying mouths of uniformly sharp, pointy, brown teeth. I suddenly recalled a horror story I had read years before about this traveling salesman who gets stuck in a town of people with pointy, brown teeth only to discover to his chagrin that those residents were the descendants of a sea captain and his South Seas cannibal wife, and, yes, he ends up in a stew. And then, like a flashback, Wes Craven’s crazy movie and its cannibal hillbillies with the names of planets returned to me. And then the huge cashier, who looked as though she alone could have supped upon every traveling salesman to pass through those parts in twenty years, said simply: —I wouldn’t go back in there if I didn’t have to go, mister. (Stay on the main road! the old man had begged the tough-guy Cleveland dad, don’t go down no roads around here that are only dotted lines on the map.)
To my trained eye, the creatures before me were clearly only halfhuman, clearly mutant hillbillies, half-this, half-that, who had come down out of the mountains from their roaming packs of savage, cannibal relatives with the names of planets only to refresh themselves with a few RC Colas and check out any travelers passing through for potential stranger stew. And perhaps the drooling, idiot boy with long, stringy, black hair beneath his baseball cap and wild, animal eyes called his monstrous companion Junior, when they were discussing the directions to Birtie Mae’s trailer, but to my trained-ear it sounded not unlike Jupiter. I thanked them for the sketchy directions and flung myself forthwith from that establishment.
Unfortunately, my modes of coping behavior are simple to the point of primitive. There is not much middle ground between my natural obsequious flighty tendencies and then, when something dangerous and dark clicks inside me, that mode driven utterly by the sort of adrenaline overload that once sailed that insane boy flying across a gym dressing- room back in junior high school to bury his fangs in the neck of that tough country boy named Charlie Wilkes.
Both of the clearly curious, cannibal hillbillies strolled out onto the front porch of the old Area Supply Store to watch me get into my Red Ride. In a moment of pure doper paranoia, I saw a look in their yellow, beady animal eyes that told me they wanted to eat the heart out of my memory. Those sons-of-bitches were clearly planning to follow me back into the middle of nowhere and cut off my return somehow and butt- fuck me blind, before they cooked me over a slow fire to a turn. Clearly those sons-of-bitches wanted to boil my dick for soup. Well, that sure wouldn’t be very much fun now, would it? I reflected.
I run about six foot and two hundred myself, and when I suck in my beer-gut and puff up I am fucken Teddy Roosevelt, and Teddy had stalked around to the back of his Red Ride and swung open the tire rack and opened the rear window and lowered the tailgate and took his Brazilian-made Saucha-Iga twelve-gauge shotgun (which is sawed off to the point of being legal by maybe an eighth of an inch) out of its case. I cracked my shotgun open and popped Remington Long Range Express shells into its two chambers and then clicked my shotgun shut. I closed up the back of my vehicle, and, keeping the shadowy presence of the mutants on the porch in the corner of my eye in case of sudden moves, I swaggered back around to climb into the driver’s seat like John Wayne.
I eyeballed the mutants meaningfully at that point, and placed my loaded shotgun within real clear easy reach. I pulled out slowly, keeping an eye peeled on the cannibal cooks on the porch. When I stopped to turn left onto the blacktop, I hollered back to those two humanly-challenged hillbillies, informing them in no uncertain terms not to let my ponytail or sissy sandals or yuppie-looking vehicle fool them, that if the truth be told my neck was evilly redder than either of their worthless assholes, and that if they knew what was good for them they would be well advised to keep their malformed members in their pants.
Whereupon, those mutant gentlemen had simply looked at one another and muttered in unison, huht.