Natural Selectors
(short story)
Natural Selectors
Bud Smith
There used to be some pretty tough gangs around here. My father started one when he was a little kid. My uncles were in it too.
They called their gang The Natural Selectors.
There were plenty of other gangs but none as brutal, or efficient, as The Natural Selectors. They used to catch kids cutting through their woods after school and make them either join the gang or die.
If if my dad or my uncles happened to catch somebody who refused subjugation, The Natural Selectors would string the rascal up in a dogwood tree and slice their main arteries and collect all that blood in a fifty-five gallon drum.
Fifty-five gallon drums were easy to get back in those days because my granddad worked for Parker Sullivan. He could get you all the drums you ever wanted.
But most of the time when they caught a kid passing through their grove of trees—meaning the woods behind my dad’s house when he was a boy—the interloper was smart enough to join the gang and survive.
Then would come a probationary ‘hostage situation’ where the new kid were forced do my father’s or my uncle’s homework at gunpoint.
Of course, inevitably, another trespassing interloper came along … and then the new kid who was probate could ‘kill in.’
A lot of good kids died.
But this is how my uncles met my aunts. This is how my mother came to know my father.
Many years later, when I myself was just a little boy, I began to think my life was hard. I began to complain.
My mother said, You shouldn’t whine like you’re doing, you have it so much easier than we did when we were your age.
She’d say, We had to drink fifty-five gallon drums full of blood.
She’d say, We had to dismember little boys and girls all the time.
We didn’t have finger-paints, she’d say.
At a barbecue, or picnic, without bringing it up, I’d often have to hear an old chestnut story—usually told by my uncle, how when Aunt Valentina was ten years old, the Natural Selectors had to hang a rival of hers upside down and then were forced (by society) to soak that little girl’s pigtails in gasoline and set them aflame.
Seeing the horror on my face, my uncle would try to brighten the mood. He’d defend their actions by saying, This was a different time, my boy.
He would say. We had to watch her burn alive so you don’t have to.
One time I even got up the nerve to ask my Aunt Valentina about it. Why they’d had to commit all these atrocities.
She said, Believe me, we weren’t the only ones. She placed a loving hand at the nape of my neck and said, But you with your Mario Kart and your Donkey Kong Jr., could never understand. It was a different time.
When I was six years-old, I began to have reoccurring nightmares about my aunts and uncles: them tying my hands to the Durango and my feet to the Cutlass Sierra—ripping me in half. I’d wake screaming and my mother would come into the room and cool my forehead with a wash cloth and then sing me lullabies in the dark. The lullabies were about how precious it was to be alive and how good all the living people were on this gentle earth.
One time I even worked up to the courage to confess to my mom that I was afraid of them all, all the surviving members of The Natural Selectors. She laughed at that and said I needn’t worry. She said love has been in town for thirty-something years. The gleeful butchering I’d heard they’d done in their youth was an extinct act. I was safe, she’d say, I could play in any woods I wanted, the world had changed.
But I wondered how any of them could really know with certainty that the world had changed when they, themselves, had never crossed town limits. The only one who ever had was my father and he wasn’t coming back.
I was too old for lullabies but I remember the last one Mom ever sang me. It was about how some memories were sad and yes, regrets were valid, but in the end the world had slid out of its disgusting cocoon and revealed itself to be a beautiful monarch. This lullaby had an enchanting melody. A further verse said things were always getting better, just look at how wicked her parent’s generation had had to be: loaded onto steel ships to raid and reeve foreign lands and made to unload machine guns into crowds of school children and to drop endless bombs on sleeping cities that never awoke, slept eternal as irradiated wastelands of bone and ash—how do you think that made Grandpa Earl and Grandma Franny feel? Not good at all. But did I ever have to do that? Will you? What a difficult melody in the end. Good night. The lullaby concluded with the monarch flying away.
There was a pivotal mellowing that came about in the later adolescences of the Natural Selectors. Any wuss kid of my generation can tell you all about it. They make us study it in school.
We all learned about it. Now it’s your turn.
It all changed for the Natural Selectors, our town, and the world really, the day Clem Elizabeth came to town.
Clem Elizabeth was my parent’s age, just thirteen years-old then. He was a sunburned beanpole who’d moved here in the middle of summer from a better place, a western paradise where he had enjoyed free reign of fields and meadows, forests and rivers, hell he’d even frolicked in the surf. He’d been something of a nature boy. Now he was stranded here and his guard should have been up but he was whistling and grinning ear to ear, in love with the towering anvils which were our eastern clouds. He was training to be the star of our track and field team (just like he had been back home) when school came back in session in the fall (but our school had no track, had no field, my family had long converted both into a mass grave).
If Clem Elizabeth was one thing, he was a person of great love, if he was a second thing, it was bubble-gum-clacking-oblivious.
He had no idea he was forbidden from running through The Natural Selectors woods.
All summer he sprinted through those woods singing songs of love, unaware he was the bane of The Natural Selectors—that he was their adversary. He alluded them through each and every heat wave, no idea those woods were off limits, no idea my mother and father and my uncles were hot on his heels with axes and sledgehammers. But they could never catch him. Clem Elizabeth was very fast.
Now this next part is very intense.
I have a hard time believing it myself.
But it’s true.
Once you get my uncles liquor loose they’ll admit to this.
One day in August, The Natural Selectors gave up trying to catch Clem direct. Instead, they got smart and captured Clem’s little sister, Susie.
It’s kind of hard for me to fathom but they drove nails into little Susie’s eyes.
She didn’t die from it.
Then they stuck little Susie up in a metal cage swinging in the trees and used little Susie as bait.
All day they hid in the bushes and egged her on to scream but she wouldn’t. They knew any moment Clem Elizabeth would come and save his sister but like I said, he never understood anything that was going on.
Not to say Susie begged and pleaded with the Natural Selectors and not to say she wailed and moaned and called attention to the trap, quite the opposite, she handled herself with dignity and poise, she stayed quiet even as her captors threatened to blast shotguns at her cage. Soon the sun fell and little Susie couldn’t discern the light slipping away but she must have felt the chill of the air and must’ve heard the daybird’s shift end and the nightingales clock-in.
Blood had stopped oozing down her face and soon she became overcome with something worse than tears, the belief that her big brother would soon arrive with a torch in one hand and a sword in the other.
But that night, Clem Elizabeth lay dreaming in a big duck-feather bed.
He dreamed he was a duck on a perfect lake with a mountain reflected in its face and he was going quackquackquack with all his loony friends and you know what it wasn’t? Duck hunting season.
And listen, all I’m saying is, he didn’t exactly rush over at first light either.
Me? What do you want to know about me? Well I’ll start by telling you that I’m the kind of guy who couldn’t harm a honey bee. I haven’t been in a battle in my life. I get four allergy shots every two weeks. I don’t understand anything about the old days, be it war, famine, even mild recession. Our duplex has central air. My mother coddles me. She won’t let me swim in my uncle pool because the concrete contains the pulverized skeletons of hundreds of young dipshits their gang eliminated from this world on principle alone.
When I was eight, I asked my uncle Ray why the adults weren’t violent anymore. Why they’d become coaches and teachers and florists. He told me everything had changed the morning Clem Elizabeth came to the woods with his hands up and surrendered himself in exchange for the life of his little sister.
As they lowered little Susie down from the trees, Clem came to know exactly who the Natural Selectors were because he could see into their hearts. The cage touched the forest floor. Before she was even released from the cage he went up to each Natural Selector and kissed their hands, and told them they didn’t have to live this way. There was room for something new our town had never known about. Love. And something else, if you can believe it. Mercy.
You’re not supposed to be here, My father said.
Where? Clem Elizabeth asked.
Various weapons were revealed to him then.
Susie Elizabeth did live by the way, I don’t want you to get the wrong impression of my family. She went on to be my second grade and then fifth grade teacher.
But long before that, back on that fateful morning of mellowing, after The Natural Selectors had denied the existence of love and denied the existence of mercy, they left Susie locked in the cage and decided to make a long spectacle of Clem’s demise.
He was stripped named and dragged by his neck out of the grove of trees.
My father lashed him to the jungle gym for all to see.
They would skin him alive over the course of a few days and leave him for the birds in the sky and the wild dogs to finish off.
You can have the honor, My father said.
Out flashed my mother’s blade.
My uncle said he’d never seen someone so skilled as my mom. To look at her now, you’d never know how many scalps she’d taken that dreadful summer break.
This particular work was to be her masterpiece.
She grabbed Clem Elizabeth’s golden hair and yanked his head forward.
His scalp came off in a red mop.
But then, Uncle Ray said to me, there amidst the screaming came a deafening thunderclap and it started to storm.
Nobody could see an inch in front of them.
The Natural Selectors fled the playground. From the relative shelter of the trees they could see the swing set and slide and Clem thrashing on the jungle gym.
Lightning struck the school.
The power went out far as anyone could understand.
The rain stopped. The sun came out. Big and warm.
Little Suzie finally spoke. She didn’t ask to be released. She asked to take her brother’s place. But they didn’t let her go. Eventually they walked back to Clem. His eyes were full of fear. He was still tied to the jungle gym but the golden hair was back on his head.
It was a miracle, I said to Uncle Ray.
Yes, Uncle Ray said, It absolutely was but we didn’t realize it right away. It wasn’t until the second time that morning that your mom scalped Clem Elizabeth. Given time, that scalp also grew back. We knew it then.
I told Uncle Ray I didn’t believe him, and he took me for a walk through his glorious house and into a room I’d never seen. There, in a sunken den, Uncle Ray showed me his shrine.
On the main shelf of the shrine was what he purported to be Clem’s first scalp.
On a lower shelf of the shrine, there rested the even more miraculous second scalp.
The final hairdo that’d regrown after the rainstorm—the one they’d let Clem keep—well, I could see that anytime I wanted. Clem lived just two blocks over. It’d been many years since that morning. Clem Elizabeth had lost some of the hair to male pattern baldness but the rest of it was still on his head in a shock of glorious white.
Though he was not the kind of guy to belabor the violence done to him that day—Clem was the rare radical who aggressively let you know he forgave you of everything, everything, everything, everything, bygones were gone, every time he saw you at the grocery store, every time you were stuck next to him in a waiting room, every time you passed him on a jog, he flashed a devastating peace sign.
But, I said to Uncle Ray, There’s one part of your story that doesn’t make sense. Ms. Elizabeth was my teacher. She has pretty eyes. Blue eyes. The bluest. Ms. Elizabeth’s eyes are fine.
On a final, lowest shelf of his shrine not only lay the the rusty fillet knife used that morning but a pair of galvanized penny nails stained a dull crimson.
Uncle Ray said, I saw it happen and I saw it unhappen.
Who drove them? I asked
He wouldn’t tell me but I can guess.
After the brutality to the Elizabeths was dealt and then undone, The Natural Selectors threw in their towel and disbanded forever.
In the shade of Clem’s mercy they left those woods and became docile citizens, like I said, florists and cat sitters and whatever else, one of them even a volunteer EMT.
After the disbandment, my father’s time here lasted only a few more months. Whenever he looked at Clem and Susie, a part of his spirit eroded until he was no longer himself. A week before I was born he followed the railroad tracks over the trestle and out of the swamp. He didn’t leave a note. He’d packed a suitcase and put the hammer in it too.
For some reason the rest of my family just goes on with their lives, unashamed, as if it really is true they had no choice. After all, it had been a different time.
Those that remain tell me it used to be a hard world and I should be grateful for how soft it has become.