The deal here was, I would get a do-over. Like Stoner did, walking out of our mess to start his clean slate. I’d planned on hating his guts permanently for it. Now came my turn, and I kind of hated my own. How was it fair to Mom, being still alive with all new everything: clothes, room, killer amazing castle house. New grade in a new school where I was the new boy.
The house alone, Mom would have killed for a peep inside of. She used to tell me how she and her friends would lay out of school and break into teachers’ houses in the daytime to see what booze they had, what was in their bedroom drawers, like porn, vibrators, etc. I was living with a teacher. God alone knows what was in his bedroom, but you could open a store with the crap he threw on his living-room floor. Plus beer in the fridge, Jim Beam in the cabinet. Given how early he went to bed, the man was just asking me to teach him how to share.
But that didn’t make life easy. At Jonesville Middle they had two little cement bulldogs on towers out front, like guarding the place, and on it went from there as far as being baby-town. An office lady in her clack-clack
heels walked me to my new homeroom, and I’m thinking, Lady I hitchhiked to fucking Nashville, you think I can’t walk down this hall by myself? All these puppy eyes looking at me like, New boy! Please don’t hurt me! Was it a town versus country thing, I don’t know, but these kids were oversize Haillies and Brayleys with their wet-combed hair and buttoned-up shirts, some with breakfast crumbs still around their mouths, I swear to God. Sixth graders. No comprehension.
Did they know more than me as regards pronouns and subjunctions, Roman civilization etc.? Yes. Being checked out of school mentalwise for
the last year and then some, I was so far behind it looked like a race with my own ass. But the weirdness wasn’t in what I didn’t know. It’s what I did know. How to watch your back at all times. What a hooker means by “fun” and an asshole means by “discipline” and a caseworker means by “We’re working on it.” And money. Christ. Watching these kids pull it out of their pockets in fistfuls of fives or ones or tens, holding out the whole wad for
the lunch lady to pick through, like they don’t know the difference. Or don’t care. Outside at recess, betting and losing actual quarters over utterly ignorant shit, like who holds his breath longest or will that bee fly up Miss Wall’s dress and sting her twat.
What stood between this pack of blind puppies and me was the education of how many batteries drained, bags of garbage hauled, hours clocked in and out, makes the difference between a oner and a ten. I was inked with
the shit-prints of life: thrashings, lies told, days of getting peaced out on weed, months of going hungry. I didn’t want to be like these other kids. But I didn’t want to be the freak fish out of water anymore either, dead sick of that. Feeling every minute like somebody’s going to call me out, tell me
I’ve got no business walking around that place in expensive new shoes, and should go back to whatever shithole I crawled out of.
The Air Maxes, new jeans and all that, another story of weirdness. Angus took me shopping. Coach headed off to Saturday practice and said to go get me what I needed. Nobody asked me, we just took off in U-Haul’s Mustang, Angus up front with Snake Man, me in the back seat fixing to shit myself.
How far would this adventure go before they found out I had smoke-all in the way of cash, being the question. Pretty far, was the answer. I tried telling Angus I would stay and wait while they did their shopping, but she said not to be an idiot, get out of the car. U-Haul stayed. I followed Angus into Walmart, down one aisle after another with her throwing stuff in the cart. First groceries. What did I like to eat, she wanted to know. Anything that’s not rotten, the more the better, I said. She rolled her eyes like I was purposefully being a dick.
“I’m serious,” I said. “You don’t want to know some of the crap I’ve eaten before.”
“Like what?” She frog-eyed me. “Human livers? Used Tampax?”
Jesus. I meant things like the Mr. Goodbar I ate after it ran through the McCobbs’ washer. But this Angus individual was like, frayed-electric-wire level of shocking. I think the boy version worked better, except for that not
being a person. She leaned into the cart with her elbows sticking out and
tore around the store playing her sick game. She’d hold up a box and yell, “Which do you like better, yo—this, or toe jam? This, or shark piss?”
We left some shoppers ready to lose their lunch and moved on to menswear. I told Angus I wasn’t buying any clothes.
She stared. “What is your deal, dude?” “No deal. Thanks all the same.”
She shook her head like I was a mental case. Which pissed me off. I didn’t yet know the rules here, fine, but I couldn’t see Angus getting to treat me like a dipshit.
“I like what clothes I have, okay? I’m good. Can we just go?”
“You’re good. This is the look you’re going with, then. Color-blind scrub opens up a can of Wayne’s World.”
“Screw you!” I said. I laughed though, because the other choice was punching a girl, not allowed. Plus she wasn’t wrong. That day I was passable, Bugle Boy T-shirt and army jacket, but I’d been sporting some too-wide collars and a lot of acid wash. Baby-shit-brown tennis shoes, shaped wrong, like shoes from some other century. “It’s not really my stuff,” I said. “I mean, it is. But I got it all free from this girl Jane at my grandmother’s.”
“You’re going for drag queen then, in some Jane person’s clothes.” “Not hers, her brothers’. Their hand-me-downs.”
“Shut up. Miss Woodall has boys living in her house?”
“No. I never technically saw any brothers. Just their clothes.”
Angus looked me up and down. “May I say the brothers of mystery have handed you down some weird-ass apparel?”
I told her to go to hell, for real. I didn’t feel like explaining how you get used to people looking at you like trash, so it’s hard to care what kind of trash you put on the trash every morning. Or that my other choice of shoes came with a bread bag. I told her I wasn’t color-blind, not that it was any of her business. Just not picky.
“So be picky. Clothes make the man. What’s the Demon angle?”
A coach’s daughter in a castle house gets to have angles. It was not the flat cap today but an old-time man hat with a tiny orange feather in the hatband. And orange Chucks. So like, matching, she’d thought it out. But I had a boy brain, zero cash, and no possible Demon angles. Our cart was
blocking traffic around a marked-down underwear rack, and Angus gave no shit.
“Shoes,” she said. “Everything starts there. Essay question. What shoes would you want to wear to the ass-kicking of your worst enemy?”
It was tempting to picture that. Enemies I had. For kicking Stoner across a parking lot, right away my mind started drawing in extra features the
shoes would need, like poison-dart spikes and jet packs for a quick getaway. Nothing real, in other words. I couldn’t give any answer, and she acted again like I was being a purposeful irritant.
“Just say!” she yelled. “What the hell kind of shoes would make you happy?”
“Fine, Air Maxes!” I yelled back at her, because who wouldn’t. “But I’m not getting any the hell kind of shoes today because I’m fucking broke,
okay?”
Some shoppers hit their brakes, like they’d never heard an f-bomb before.
To be fair, there were kiddies about. I notched it down. “I don’t have any money,” I said.
Her gray eyes got that water look they could have. She seemed worried, maybe running her mind backwards over her morning with this new broke- ass version of me, just like I’d had to do after the girl surprise. “Sorry,” she said, and for once I didn’t mind that word. It looked good on Angus. I’d been waiting for it.
“Forget it,” I said. “Can we just get out of here?”
“No. I’m saying, sorry for not getting straight with you. My bad.” She whipped a slice of silver out of her pocket and tilted it up and down in the light, like a mirror flashing code. “Meet the Master,” she said. Kissed it, put it back in her pocket, and said yes, we were getting out of there. I would be kicking no ass in Walmart Nike knock-offs.
We flew that credit card all over the damn county. From Walmart Supercenter to Shoe Show to T.J.Maxx, ferried around by Snake Man. No cash needed, the Master did the talking, or in some cases just Coach’s existence. Like at Hardee’s for lunch. We walked in the door with a freaking force field of worship around us. Guy at the counter didn’t even ring us up, just said on the house as usual, say hi to Coach. The manager
came out to say the same, and asked if Coach was putting in some person to sub for QB1 with the elbow injury. U-Haul told him he was not really in a position to say, being only assistant coach, but don’t be surprised if that
substitution happened. Everybody in the place kept watching us while we ate. Like, if we dropped a fry on the floor, they might grab it up for a souvenir. Did I like all the attention? Maybe, if nobody knew the real me and I could pass for some person that just normally wore Air Maxes without a speck of dirt on them. U-Haul, definitely yes, on liking the attention.
Angus was so chill, you couldn’t guess.
Angus shocked me up one side and down the other. By being into cars, for one thing. It started with seeing a ’57 Nomad, and after that we had a contest of naming anything cool we saw. U-Haul knew a lot, but damned if Angus didn’t know her share. This chick was not your average. You’ll say sure, being raised with a dead mom, but guess what, I grew up with a dead dad and you won’t see me doing girl shit. Plus they had this Mattie Kate individual around the house at all times. Not just for chores, she’d sit with you in the kitchen after school and drink Cokes and talk if you had questions, which I had a few. Should I be doing my laundry, making my
lunches? Answer: No. She did all that. I told her I was pretty used to doing everything for myself like laundry and worst case, paying the rent. She laughed and said not to be putting her out of her job. She said mine was just to be a little boy. Weird. I’d not had that job before.
She knew I was no tiny tot, though, because she asked if I needed her to get me an electric shaver. (Embarrassing, but yes.) And got me a thing of Old Spice deodorant without asking did I want it. (More embarrassing.) She was just this extra-nice lady with no husband and a little boy that played Pop Warner football. She had wrinkles around her mouth and wore the
elastic-type pants like an older lady but not totally over the hill, you could tell. Her eye makeup she did like bird wings. The point being, if Angus had questions about girl-type things, vacuuming or eye makeup, she had somebody to ask. Pretty sure that didn’t happen. Angus seeming more like the type to go get inked with some me-not-pretty thing like a barbwire necklace. But she picked no fights with Mattie Kate or her dad. Nor even U-Haul, which was a concern. The man oozed slime. He was always touching and petting his face and grimy red hair and other things that were just wrong, like the seat of the booth where Angus had been sitting, after
she got up to refill her drink. Creepster. But he’d been working for her dad forever, and people get used to things.
She did know he was a liar. That much she told me. The real assistant coach was Mr. Briggs, a paid teacher that taught history at Jonesville
Middle and was JV coach, plus helping out with the high school team. In
practices he coached defense, where Coach worked mainly with offense. U- Haul was just an errand boy, paid part-time out of the booster funds. Angus said he acted more important than he was, and got away with it by saying
he was “nobody” while pretending he’s assistant coach. Like bowing down and sweeping his lies behind him.
We got on okay, myself and Angus. After our tricky start. Fashion advice, no thanks, but she told me what to look out for at school, being two grades ahead, and I told her some of the history of me. How was I related to Betsy Woodall, where all had I lived. This would be after her dad went to bed at seven p.m., seriously. We’d do homework and watch TV in this upstairs bedroom with no bed in it that she called the den. Just beanbag chairs and
the TV she rescued from the sports tornado downstairs. She had an absolute rule of no athletic equipment allowed in her den, penalty of death. As far as other entertainments, popcorn fights, throwing M&M’s at each other’s mouths, pretty much anything went in the Den of Angus. I felt bad for
Mattie Kate having to clean up, but Angus said the same thing, she needed her job so don’t take it away.
It was hard to get used to being tended to like that. And to rules.
Homework gets done, period. No running around on school nights. Pharm parties, not on your life. I didn’t even bring up the idea of getting into her dad’s liquor. Angus had her whole tough act and called a lot of shots in the house, helping to make the grocery list, calling to get the heater fixed, that type of thing. Coach wouldn’t notice till the fridge went empty and the
pipes froze, the man was just all football. But Angus had no big worries that I could see. Everything in that house got taken care of, me included. If I stayed here, would I turn into one of these Jonesville Middle School babies? Not something to worry about, I knew. Nobody ever kept me that long.
