A/N: More fun and games with the Bagwell family...
Chapter Two – Duplicity
Travis did not let go of his grand plan. His son would be the President of the United States and everyone would know that he, Travis Bagwell, had done something worthwhile and important. Little Theodore was going to redeem the whole Bagwell family. The trouble was Travis didn't know the first thing about how someone got to be the president. In fact, if you had asked him, he would have been hard pressed to come up with the logical route for a doctor or a dentist or a teacher to take. As far as Travis was concerned these people were born into their roles, just as his son was born to being the leader of the free world. One thing Travis did know was that presidents didn't go around talking like the rest of the white trash Theodore was growing up with, they had proper learning, they were persuasively articulate (two words that Travis would have struggled to understand). To address this problem Travis made a special purchase for Theodore's third birthday. Most three year olds in the houses around the Bagwells' somewhat dilapidated dwelling were getting push bikes or big, colourful balls so they could learn to throw and catch. Theodore, who could neither read nor write being, despite it all, a normal three year old, received a thesaurus. Every night, when other mothers and fathers were reading nursery rhymes or fairy tales to their children, Travis would read him two or three pages from the leather bound thesaurus, stumbling and stuttering over every third word until the sounds swam through little Theo's head at night while he slept.
"You have to remember these words," Travis would say as he closed the book and placed it back on the shelf, "You gotta be smart, boy. Only smart men become president."
Theodore did not disappoint in that department. Whether due to his father's persistence with words or to his complete lack of stimulation at home, Theodore excelled in the classroom running rings around his pre-school classmates. The teacher's marvelled and engaged in numerous gossiping discussions in the staffroom where they ruled out any possibility of inherited talent.
"He'll burn out," said Mrs Tatler, a veteran of the pre-school circuit and only two years from retirement. It was the same thing she said whenever one of her pupils showed the slightest ounce of above average intelligence. The truth was, she didn't trust clever people, she didn't think it was right to know things all the time, and she certainly didn't like being smart mouthed by a precocious toddler.
"It's gotta be all him," said Mrs Foster, a kind faced young mum who was currently five months pregnant with her third, "His father…well, he's what my husband would call 'typical white trash'."
"What about his mum then?" chipped in Mr Jamison who loved to gossip just as much as the women, "Ol' Mr Bagwell couldn't get anyone else to sire him a child so he used his retarded sister."
"Mark!" cried Mrs Foster, appalled, "Please!"
But Mrs Foster's protests were drowned in a sea of truth. Everybody knew that Audrey Bagwell, the poor dear, was Theodore's mother and that his father, Audrey's brother, made very little attempt to deny it. So it was that Theodore, oblivious to the scandal of his very existence, was pitied and judged and watched wherever he went in his white trash town. Travis told him that people whispered behind their hands and looked away from him because they knew how clever he was, he might have even believed this himself, but it didn't take long for Theodore to become sensitive to the way people reacted to him. No child wants to be different.
Quite apart from the challenges of his home life, Theodore now had the trials and tribulations of school to deal with. He soon learned that utilising his full vocabulary within earshot of any of the boys in his class would lead to trouble. Far from being delighted to be confronted with a word they didn't understand like his father was, they seemed to take it as an insult that he should know anything that they didn't. Consequently, Theodore adapted, as we all do, becoming the boy his father wanted at home and the boy who wouldn't get beaten up at school. Being accepted within a group of peers presented problems of its own. Theodore Bagwell lived in a rough neighbourhood, the kind where broken windows and graffiti were so commonplace that the locals barely noticed any more. The older brothers of the boys Theodore went to school with stole cars at the weekend and then set them alight in deserted fields, whooping and hollering as the flames licked the dark sky. It became a badge of honour to have a run in with the police. Theodore was seven when he ran from the cops for the first time. He and his friends had been sitting on the bridge over the road and taking it in turns to throw stones down on the cars below. Ten points if you hit one, a hundred if you caused a crash. When Travis found out he struck his son with the back of his hand and shook him until the room lurched and span, but even as his father screamed and hollered at him Theodore knew he would do it again because that was what you did if you were a white trash kid from Alabama. Within two years he had an established criminal record for minor misdemeanours ranging from keying shop windows to covering the newly painted wall of the school canteen in thick black pen. The least Travis could have done was keep up his anti-crime stance but in a remarkably short time his anger made way for amusement.
"Boy's gotta have fun," he would say to the few he could call friends, "No harm in it." The way he saw it, rebellion was a normal part of growing up and surely even the president had done his fair share of harmless pranks. Theodore, who could now conduct whole conversations which could exclude his father with ease, would grow out of it. And maybe he would have done if circumstances had not forced his path.
The reason for Travis' acceptance of his son's delinquency was simple. Despite the negative effect of his peers when it came to the law, Theodore was still amazing his teachers. He worked hard to achieve this, something that he did, not because he enjoyed it particularly, but because his father's love seemed to be entirely dependent on his ability to achieve high grades. Any indication that he wasn't clever was met with sudden and surprising violence. Travis had even smashed a bottle over the head of someone in the local pub when they had insinuated that his son took after his mother in the intelligence department. And Theodore, brainwashed as he was from infancy, truly believed that there might be something to his father's wild talk of international politics.
"You'll never get there if you don't work, Theodore," his father would say as he placed the thesaurus with its now dog-eared pages on his son's lap. So Theodore worked hard because he was going to be president someday.
There has been precious little mention of Audrey in this account of Theodore's childhood years. Ever since the birth of her son, Audrey had retreated even further into the background. The unexpected and unexplained pain that had been labour and delivery had traumatised Audrey and poisoned her mind against her brother in a way repeated rape had never done. Travis found her resistant to even the most innocent of his advances. It didn't take long for him to learn to ignore her just as his mother and father had succeeded in doing. Theodore, as children do, accepted his mother's barely there presence in his life without question and, tragically, ignored her just as completely as his father. Not once did he reach out to her or share some new childish discovery. She cooked painfully simple meals and kept the house in a reasonable state but she did not try to hold the child she had carried within her, nor did she have any input into his emotional or intellectual education. As a result, the adult Theodore would retain precious few agreeable memories of his mother regarding her instead as one might regard a ghost, someone who was there but not there, and, whether it was right or wrong for him to judge her so, she became one of the many people who should have been there for him but wasn't, one of the many people he could blame.