School had just started, and I was more than ready to escape the lockdown of home. On the first day, we had to catch the bus down by the highway because all the rain had washed out our road. Honestly, it didn’t seem that bad, but the bus drivers—mostly older ladies—weren’t taking any risks, and the school didn’t have the funds to fix a broken axle. The walk wasn’t too bad, maybe a mile from where we lived at the top. There were nine of us at the stop, including these first-grade twins and two unfortunate high school guys from different families who were, as we understood, doomed to be “bus riders” for life. Even at my age, I knew that if you were sixteen and could land a job at a fast-food place or grocery store, you could earn enough to get yourself a car.
We stood there like a little crew, watching adults head off to work—if they were lucky enough to have a job. Maggot and I were grinning like fools, trying not to shove each other out of excitement from all the stuff we had to say. Or not say, in my case, because Stoner’s words still weighed heavy on my mind.
School was still school. Math class greeted us with, “Hey kids, remember math?” No, Mr. Goins, no one remembered. And as always, history meant fifth-grade Virginia studies, so it was all about Jamestown and the doomed settlers. Maggot and I slipped back into our usual rhythm without missing a beat—firing rubber bands at a wasp trying to escape through the English classroom window and scanning the lunchroom for girls willing to part with their fries. Fun fact: Maggot was almost a year older than me, but due to some early life complications, it took him extra time to grow big enough for kindergarten. That’s how we ended up in the same grade—lucky for me. With him around, I felt a thousand miles away from Stoner and all the misery he brought home. If his goal was to make my home life so unbearable that I’d want to go to school, it worked like a charm.
By the time school let out, the twins’ mom was waiting with her ATV to haul the little ones up the hill—a true blue-ribbon mom, that one. The rest of us were left to fend for ourselves. The idea of enforcing the ban on hanging out with Maggot felt ridiculous now. We weren’t even sure where the “ban zone” started anymore. You had to guess when you got within sight of my house.
safe we took a few hours screwing around before making it all the way up there. I poked my head in the door and hollered but nobody was home. I went in, got a Snickers out of the fridge, and went to my room. End of story. I wish.
Mom gets home from work, yells how she hopes I had a good first day, I yell back it was okay. Then Stoner gets home: “What in the goddamn motherfuck, Demon. Get in here now.”
I had tracked in some mud on the kitchen floor, and Stoner was losing his shit. It was mud, okay? I am a kid, and we live in a place that is made out of mud. Fine, I took off my shoes and put them outside, then got the mop and bucket. I’d cleaned up worse. Mom in her times of lapse was a drinker of
the toilet-hugging kind. Maybe where I got my weak stomach from. She’s standing by the sink saying nothing, with her hand over her mouth in case it was to get any ideas. Stoner is in the doorway, hands on hips like he’s the
badass warden in Escape from Alcatraz.
I start mopping the floor, and Stoner asks what I think I’m doing. I tell him I am mopping the floor, spelled with a silent As you can plainly see, dumbass. He says he doesn’t think that’s going to do the job. Honey, he says, do you think that mop is going to do it?
Mom looks at him. Shakes her head, no.
Stoner agrees that it is not. What he wants, I eventually figure out, is to see me down on my knees with a rag scrubbing the damn linoleum. With a bucket of water and Clorox, in case somebody wants to eat off that floor or maybe open a fucking tattoo parlor.
Fine, scrub the floor I did. Mind you, I’m still of an age where most
moms don’t want their kids messing with Clorox at all, my own included, as far as I knew. The fumes were getting me kind of high. I finished up and washed out the rags in the sink. Mom still right there with nothing to say about it. I looked at Stoner, needing to be done before I puked or passed out.
“Your boy says this is clean. Does that look clean to you?” Mom looked over at him, surprised.
“Or does it look like his usual half-assed effort? Because I can still see his damn tracks on that floor. Can you not see the goddamn shit your son tracked in?”
Mom looked weird. I mean, she was in her regular work clothes, slacks and button blouse, Croc flats for standing in all day, hair in the ponytail she wore to look professional. But she had a glazed look, doped. Which she couldn’t have been, I thought. Did I want her to whip out a blade and slice him up? No. But something. For her to wake up in there for godsakes and
see how mad is better than sorry. But all the mad Mom ever could muster just leaked right back out of her in tears and puke. Finally she said, “Demon, you better go on and clean it again.”
Bullshit. There was nothing to see. Mom’s eyes were excellent. They
were about the only part of her head that always worked right. Whatever, I scrubbed the floor again, and as much rage as I put into it, they’d be lucky if there was any linoleum left. I dumped the bucket again, rinsed the rags again, threw them into the bucket like a ball I was firing home from the outfield. Pushed past Stoner to get myself out the door. He caught me by the collar of my T-shirt and dragged me back inside.
Where the hell did I think I was going, was his question, because I wasn’t done yet. Let’s all take a look at the living room, he said. More muddy
tracks on the living-room carpet. Mind you, that carpet was nasty and old to begin with, stained since the dawn of time. Me and Mom were far from the first to live in this trailer. Stoner asked me what I saw and I said, A shitty- looking carpet. He said, That’s right. And he needed it clean. Because how was a man supposed to do his weight training on a floor that looked like
that?
I had some suggestions that I kept to myself. Mom got out scrub brushes and the StainZaway, handed them over, and went off to hide in the kitchen. Stoner stood over me while I scrubbed at the stains with the Clorox rags and sprayed them with the carpet cleaner and by the way was getting krunked as a kite. Maggot and I had tried out StainZaway for this exact
purpose one time, and got educated. There are better and worse things to huff, and StainZaway is a fast train to pukeville. Especially if there’s bleach in the mix.
So now all I can think of is puking, and Stoner making me clean up puke, then the stains of that, and I’m going to be on my knees here huffing StainZaway till somebody kills somebody. It shouldn’t take long. I’ve got snot pouring out of my nose and this insane ringing in my ears, the theme of the X-Men show in my head. That one tune over and over, soundtrack to me scrubbing fury holes in the goddamn carpet: Da-na-na-na NA na na! Da-
na-na-na NA na na!! It’s so loud in my head, I honestly can’t tell if it’s coming out of my mouth or not, but it must be because Stoner starts yelling at me to shut the hell up. And I’m screaming back at him Da-na-na-na NA na na! because by this point I’ve pretty thoroughly lost my mind.
All I remember after that is me throwing shit around and him grabbing both arms behind me in a hammerlock. His hand covering my mouth so I can’t breathe. With nothing else to fight with, I bite down on his hand.
Sweet Jesus how that feels to sink my teeth in the meat of his hand and taste blood. Like I’m Satan, and all of life has trained me to this achievement.
I wound up in my room nursing a busted lip and hopefully nothing busted inside, though it felt possible. I sat on my bed listening to all this clanking and thumping which was Stoner shoving a thousand pounds of his stupid free weights against the outside of my bedroom door so there would be no escaping from Alcatraz. I tasted blood in my mouth, mine and his. It
crossed my mind to hope I wouldn’t get hep C or some such shit, but Mom always swore Stoner was clean and didn’t do any drugs. Just a lot of beer, in his line of duty. After he got me penned in, I heard yelling, mostly him, a
little her, more him, then quiet. Maybe they went out. Maybe they sat down and had a bite to eat before Home Improvement came on. It was nothing the hell to me.
I curled up on the bed and cried, which I hated myself doing, and then got up and puked. In my trash can, since I wasn’t getting out to the bathroom. Upchucked the Snickers and all the french fries I’d scored off the sweet Weight Watcher girls at school, which was a shame since prospects for dinner looked dim.
I thought of running away. Getting out the window would be no small trick, since it only opened a few inches. It could break, though. It was quite a drop from there, our trailer being set on the hillside, but I could do that, with probably a minimum of broken bones. After that I was at a loss. The only place I could see going was next door, obviously not far enough.
Where else was there? I thought of Aunt June. The woman was known to take in strays. I was sorry I’d never called Emmy, but Mom wouldn’t pay for long distance. Emmy probably had moved on by now. I thought of her
anyway, stuck in her doom castle, and felt even sorrier now in my situation of lockdown. Hitchhiking as far as Knoxville without getting picked up by cops was a stretch, and once I got there, I didn’t know any address. Doom castle, second floor. What a useless dickhead. Knowing basically from birth that my mom was not to be counted on. And still no plan B.
I didn’t get let out for school the next day, even though I heard Mom telling him they had attendance officers that would be calling if I stayed out of circulation too long. He said if she knew so much about raising kids, how’d she wind up with a rabid biting dog for a son. Before she went to work, she tried to explain I would need bathroom visits and some kind of food. Then left Stoner to rule over me. Never did any two guys have less to say to each other.
Eventually I was allowed back to school, but on lockdown the rest of the time. A freakish existence. I told Maggot I was thinking of running away, which he advised against. He said I had nerves of steel and Stoner would be crushed in the end. I don’t remember how many days this went on, three or four, plus a heinously boring weekend. It all ran together. In the evenings I was hearing shit being said between Stoner and Mom that I didn’t like the
sounds of. At all. The Peggots also were probably not liking the sounds of it, with windows being open at that time of year. I tried to blot them out by drawing in my notebook, inventing various genius ways to crush the Stone Villain. Eyeballs and gauges flying out of him with action lines and little cloud bubbles—Pop! Pop! Or I would bang on the wall with my baseball bat for hours at a stretch: thud, thud. To shut the two of them up, or drive them crazy if that was still an option.
Then one evening late, the door flies open and there stands Stoner.
Surprising me in my T-shirt and underpants eating a bag of Cheetos in bed because why the hell not, if that’s all there is. Reading an Avengers that I’d read, oh, nine thousand times already.
“Your mom wants to see you,” he said.
Interesting, I thought, what’s the catch. I had no intention of getting out of bed, but there he stood. I’d not realized he was home. Stoner had been going out in the evenings a lot, working some weird-shit hours or more
likely carousing, because who needs their beer delivered that close to closing time? He must have come back to the house without my hearing his truck or his bike. Obviously. I asked him what Mom wanted, and he said
she was wanting to show how much she loved me. A weird enough statement to make me nervous. I yelled for her. No answer.
“Mom!” I said louder, bolting out to the living room. Nobody, nothing.
“MOM!” And now I’m thinking, Goddammit, she’s moved out. She marries the bastard, and I get stuck with him. In the kitchen there’s crap everywhere, dishes in the sink. A gin bottle on the table, oh shit. Oh hell.
Empty. Not a new sight to my eyes. Stoner has this look on his face I could kill him for.
She’s in the bedroom. Lying there in her clothes, shoes and all, passed out. Faceup, not dead because that’s the first thing I checked. Breathing, so she didn’t drown herself yet. There’s pill bottles on the thing by the bed, closed, so I screw open the childproof caps one at a time, three bottles. I don’t know what they are, Xanax and shit she should definitely not have around, but the bottles aren’t empty, thank God. She didn’t down the whole batch, so she’s just going for a Cadillac high, not the total checkout. But God knows she could get there anyway. Mom being not the most careful driver.
“Call nine-one-one,” I tell Stoner, and the damned fool asks why.
“Call nine-one-one!” I scream at him. “Christ, you ignorant asshole! She might have OD’d.”
At this point I’m not even thinking what “ignorant asshole” will get me in the Stoner rewards program. I already know. Life as we’ve lived it is over.
