Literary Ruralism (Part XXVIII): Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

This excerpt is from Bill Bryson's 2007 memoir of his 1950s childhood in Des Moines, Iowa--not exactly a rural place.  But this excerpt seemed a near perfect description of "white trash," a concept or category often invoked by my mom when I was growing up in rural Arkansas.  And it's interesting because, even though Des Moines is a city, the description of where the "white trash" lived in relation to the city of Des Moines, hints at the rural or, perhaps more precisely, the unruly, something akin to the wilderness adjacent to the city.  Also, the "white trash" hailed from either Arkansas or Alabama, southern places associated with such hoi polloi.  

The only real danger in life was the Butter Boys. The Butters were a family or large interbred, indeterminately numerous individuals who lived seasonally in a collection of shanty homes in an area of perpetual wooded gloom known as the Bottoms along the swampy margins of the Raccoon River. Nearly every spring the Bottoms would flood and the Butters would go back to Arkansas or Alabama or wherever it was they came from.

In between times they would menace us. Their specialty was to torment any children smaller than them, which was all children. The Butters were big to begin with but because they were held back year after year, they were much, much larger than any child in their class. By sixth grade some of them were too big to pass through doors. They were ugly, too, and real dumb. They ate squirrels.

Generally the best option was to have some small child that you could offer as a sacrifice. Lumpy Kowalski was ideal for this as he was indifferent to pain and fear, and would never tell on you because he couldn't, or possibly just didn't, speak. (It was never clear which.)Also, the Butters were certain to be grossed out by his dirty pants, so they would merely paw him for a bit and then withdraw with pained, confused faces.  

The worst outcome was to be caught on your own by one or more of the Butter boys. Once when I was about ten I was nabbed by Buddy Butter, who was in my grade but at least seven years older. He dragged me under a big pine tree and pinned me to the ground on my back and told me he was going to keep me there all night long.

I waited for what seemed a decent interval and then said, “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Because I can,” he answered, but pronounced it “kin.” Then he made a kind of glutinous, appreciative, snot-clearing noise, which was what passed in the Butter universe for laughter.

“But you'll have to stay here all night, too,” I pointed out. “It'll be just as boring for you.”

“Don't care,” he replied, sharp as anything, and was quiet a longtime before adding: “Besides I can do this.” And he treated me to the hanging-spit trick—the one where the person on top slowly suspends a gob of spit and lets it hang there by a thread, trembling gently, and either sucks it back in if the victim surrenders or lets it fall, some-times inadvertently. It wasn't even like spit—at least not like human spit. It was more like the sort of thing a giant insect would regurgitate onto its forelimbs and rub onto its antennae. It was a mossy green with little streaks of red blood in it and, unless my memory is playing tricks, two very small gray feathers protruding at the sides. It was so big and shiny that I could see my reflection in it, distorted, as in an M.C. Escher drawing. I knew that if any part of it touched my face, it would sizzle hotly and leave a disfiguring scar.

In fact, he sucked the gob back in and got off me. “Well, you let that be a lesson to you, you little skunk pussy, Poontang sissy,” he said.

‘Two days later the soaking spring rains came and put all the Butters on their tar-paper roofs, where they were rescued one by one by men in small boats. A thousand children stood on the banks above and cheered.

‘What they didn’t realize was that the storm clouds that carried all that refreshing rain had been guided across the skies by the powerful X-ray vision of the modest superhero of the prairies, the small but perfectly proportioned Thunderbolt Kid.

In case you didn't figure it out, Bryson referred to his childhood self as the Thunderbolt Kid. 

Cross-posted to Working Class Whites and the Law.