Christmas was coming, and I was nervous of Coach getting done with me. This being the time of year people start noticing who’s family and who’s not. I asked Angus what they usually did for Christmas. She said nothing much. We were up on the roof cleaning the gutters.
“But what do you do?” I asked. “Like, where do you go cut your tree?”
She squinted her eyes at me. She’d worn her oldest, stickiest Chucks to climb out on the tin roof, while I stayed on the ladder. “You mean that stupid thing of a tree inside the house?”
Not even whenever she was little? Not even then. “We’re not religious,” she said, like I was the one being weird. And I was like, Who said religious, this is fucking Christmas we’re discussing. Who ever heard of a kid thinking it’s no big deal?
Angus was that kid. If she wanted something, Coach always just said go buy it. No need to involve fat guys in fake beards. Another one of these Coach rules that was just normal to Angus, like no pets, always do your homework. She said Christmas was a downer for him due to her mom dying of her cancer right before or after, possibly the day of. She wasn’t sure.
Normally this guy named Happy would have been cleaning their gutters, but Mattie Kate had called and called. Finally his wife answered and said Happy fell off a barn and broke his back, so call back in a few months.
Coach didn’t trust anybody else to work on that house, mainly due to nobody wanting to do it. It was over a hundred years old and had its dicey aspects. Imagine if some handyman screwed up Coach’s house? He’d have to leave the county. But the gutters had gotten so clogged with leaves, the roof was leaking in our TV den. I told Angus I was going up. I asked her
not to tell Coach if I screwed something up or, like, fell. She said she was coming too, if we screwed it up, he couldn’t fire us. And I thought, Speak for yourself. Coach was out of town that weekend for the playoffs. I’d thought he might ask me to go with them to help out, but he didn’t, only U- Haul. It was December. My days in that house were numbered. Which is what got me on the subject of Christmas and death.
“That makes two of us,” I said. “As far as holidays wrecked by dead parents. Not that the Fourth of July is comparable, but that was Mom’s downer. She’d always get moody over my dad being dead, to where she’d put the shuthole on fireworks.”
Angus gave me a look. Maybe Coach had fireworks rules. That family was hard to figure.
“I’m saying not even sparklers. Let alone your better class of explosives.”
“Are you telling me your dad died by exploding?”
“No, it was water. I never got the particulars, just the place. And the day.” “And then she died on your birthday. Fuck a duck, bro. You win.”
I thought about my last birthday I’d had at Aunt June’s. Mom didn’t really enter into it. I told Angus my mom being dead wasn’t something I pinned exactly on my birthday. “It’s more like this bag of gravel I’m hauling around every day of the year. If somebody else brings it up, honestly, I’m glad of it. Like just for that minute they can help me drag the gravel.”
“Huh,” she said, raking brown glops of leaves out of the gutter with her bare hands, which was brave. I mean, things could dwell in that shit.
Primordial life. My job was holding up the bucket until it got full. Then down the ladder I’d go to dump it on this swamp-stinking pile we’d started, far from the house. What implements Happy used for this job, we had no idea.
Angus said it was different for her, because she didn’t remember her mom. Not a bag of gravel. “It’s more like this shiny little thing I wear around my neck. Once in a while some lady will lean over and say, ‘Honey, she was so pretty’ or ‘She was a jewel.’ And I just say, ‘Okay, great.
Thanks.’ ” Angus slopped more glop in the bucket. “Ignorance is bliss.”
I’d suggested that smoking pot could make this enterprise more enjoyable. I’d scored some respectable weed from a guy at school as payment for body-part drawings. Angus almost never took my suggestions,
especially anything that could bring scandal to the house of Coach, but this time she was extreme. Was I crazy, did I want to fall off my ladder and end up like broke-back Happy? Etc. Turns out she’d never smoked pot in her life. That’s how her innocent mind could fall prey to the whole weed-
makes-you-go-insane theory the DARE cops promote at school, and I had to set her straight, explaining how it could make you pay more attention to your work, while not minding the shittier sides. No dice. She couldn’t
smoke anything whatsoever, due to asthma. I’d seen her use her inhaler, but never knew that’s why her dad quit smoking and went over to using dip.
She said it put her in the hospital a few times as a kid. Any time she got too emotional, good or bad, she’d break out in hives. I’d not seen that in Angus, the hives. Or the emotional.
So she’d missed out on all the best things in life: pot, having a mom,
Christmas. Unbelievable. I told her I couldn’t argue with bad luck as
regards death and asthma, but that Christmas was still on the table. She said she didn’t see the point.
“That’s because you don’t know what you’re missing.” I went to dump our bucket, and she sat up there shivering, knees to her chest, hands in her coat pockets, stocking cap pulled over her ears. Gray manga eyes looking out at the world like a small kid abandoned on a rooftop.
The point, I told her after I got back, is presents. Totally different from shopping. People give you stuff you didn’t know you wanted. Or were scared to ask for because too expensive.
She said that sounded wasteful.
I told her surprised is the point. Waiting is the point. Watching wrapped- up secrets pile up under the tree, that you shake and poke till you feel like the cat that’s going to die of being curious. So what if Mom never had two bucks to her name and got all my presents on employee discount, we fucking did Christmas. As far as being too excited to sleep, listening with all my ignorant little might for reindeer hooves on top of our chimneyless single-wide? Totally.
Angus didn’t think Coach would go for it.
I was shocked. Generally speaking, Angus could be a giant ass-pain as far as looking on the bright side. “Demon,” she was always saying, “life is a wild, impetuous ride. There could be good shit up ahead, don’t rule it out.” Which I mostly did, rule it out. But Christmas? I was not giving up that one. I told her we didn’t have to get Coach involved that much, we’d just give
presents to each other. She admitted there was maybe a point in time where she’d been jealous of kids that got to do Santa. But if she’d asked him, it would have been like betraying her dad. I listened while she talked herself through this. Maybe he was past that now. Maybe he didn’t actually care
one way or the other.
“Fine,” I said. “I know where we’re getting our tree.”
We stole one.
Never mind realizing after we got it home that we had nothing to
decorate it with. We hung whatever the hell we felt like on that tree: spoons, mint Life Savers, CDs, some earrings and shit that Mattie Kate had given
Angus over the years in a futile attempt to mold her fashion sense. Pretzels. It was our tree of utter ridiculousness. Epic.
We got so psyched over our presents, we couldn’t wait. The round-the- clock Christmas movie reruns start playing well before, which makes you think it has to be already Christmas somewhere. Around midnight of maybe the twenty-third, halfway through our second or third Chevy Chase, we called it. Ran downstairs like kids, tore everything apart while Coach was asleep. Angus got me amazing comics including a manga series of a kid named Gon Freecss on a journey to find his dad that left whenever he was a baby, and was said to have superpowers. Obviously a hit. Also clothes, which sounds boring but this being Angus, was not. Not the badass stuff she liked, either. She thought out the angle of Demon, Popular Kid, from head to toe: a Members Only jacket, parachute silver, just for example. I would own the school in that jacket.
The thing about Angus. We both had our crap to live with, and her way was to give no shit whether you liked how she was doing it, or not. But if I wanted to be a different type person and try for popular, she wasn’t going to stand in my way. She was going to help. Not very usual.
She also gave me a model ship, with tiny sails, tiny ropes, an entire seafaring vessel made of painted wood and toothpicks and here’s the killer part: inside a bottle. Not even big like a deuce, just the regular beer size.
How in the holy heck somebody got it in there, she had no idea. She’d found it that way, at the antiques mall. She said it was me all over, my ocean thing, and also the thing of beating impossible odds, because someday I was going to go wherever the hell I wanted.
“If you say so,” I told her. “But will I always still be in a bottle?”
She laughed. “The world’s a bottle, Demon. Gravity and shit. Don’t expect miracles.”
I was more excited over my presents for her than getting mine. Also nervous, because let’s face it, she was one rock-hard peanut to crack.
Coach’s credit card wasn’t my money and felt like cheating, so I used my cash I earned from drawings, and went to pawnshops. I did wonder if the guy at Here Today Loan and Pawn in Jonesville would remember the street brawl, boy on a man’s errand, etc. He never looked up from his magazine. I checked for McCobb booty, but it was long gone. They do a quick turnaround at those places, mostly guns and jewelry unless it’s nonsense
items or weird antiques, which is what I was looking for. I found an
awesome hat, black velvet, with a veil that came down over the face part. More femmy than typical Angus, but I had a hunch, and was right. She vamped around in that hat, saying she would be the funeral fox of Lee County. I also got her some old-time books including this advice one we read aloud, on what to do in every emergency: shipwreck, nightclub fire, plummeting elevator. What is a nightclub? She said it’s like a bar, only in
the city, so you’re jam-packed in there with your face against the armpits of others. So in case of a fire, you’re toast. I can’t remember the advice.
My main thing, though, was her portrait. I put it in a serious pawnshop frame, glass and everything. I’d known for a long time what superhero she’d be: Black Leather Angel. A badass one, black leather angel wings. It took quite a few tries to make it not look like any form of Batgirl. But I got it. The main aspect of Angus being those gray eyes that look straight into what’s eating you. The superpower of reading your mind and making you talk. She was floored. She carried it around with her all day, cuddling that big square frame like a freaking teddy bear.
Mattie Kate took off to be with her kid, but left the refrigerator full of things for us to pull off the tin foil and heat up, like unwrapping more presents. Green bean potato chip casserole, blackeye peas with pork rind.
Apple dumplings. We ate whatever we felt like, whenever. I put on my new clothes and she put on her veil hat and we said “Darling” like we were the rich Howells on Gilligan or “Dope” like Fresh Prince, and ate and watched TV for three days straight. At some point I realized it was actual Christmas, the day of. And thought, maybe there is a God after all in his heaven. On
the slow bus ride of my dogshit life, for some while I got to stop off here.
The best part of it all was getting our tree. No question. I’d convinced
Angus it wasn’t larceny to steal something that farmers spend half the year piling up and burning. We could have just asked. But taking from Creaky felt righteous. Sneaking out there with Angus, cutting a cedar by dark of night, one of the higher points of my young life. I was just sorry we had to get U-Haul involved for transportation, since he might rat us out, which would sully the perfect crime.
I made him cut the headlights before we got to the house. The place looked worse than ever, with no slave boys for the upkeep. Lights were on in one downstairs room, so he was in there, all by his deaf, butt-ugly self, I hoped. No sign of the Lariat.
Why did I want that so much, to go back to the place where my childhood got crushed? After we went, I knew. The reason was power. To face down Amityville and yell at whatever still crept or clawed inside, “Fuck you. Fuck your thrashings and starving us and making all of us but mostly Tommy wish we were dead. Fuck you for making me glad it was him and not me.” To hocker and spit on the frozen grass. Turn my back on evil and walk away.
I had one surprise left, and it was from Coach, a few days after Christmas. He said to come on back to his office. He had to clear off a chair, his office being worse than the living room. He had a small TV in there to play VHS tapes. Teams we were fixing to play, to find their holes. Or games already played, but only the losses, to learn from. Coach was not one to dwell on
the wins. I knew what tape would play today, because I’d been seeing it all my life. The clock had run out on us here, we gave it our best but it’s a loss, good luck and all that. Sorry.
He said nothing, I said nothing. What you noticed on Coach, after the teeth bulging behind his shut lips, was the eyebrows and hard, blue-eyed squint. He wore his red Generals cap at all times, so it was a shock to see him that day without it. An old man’s white hair sticking up uncombed, like I’d caught him in bed. I felt like I’d messed up already.
“How long you been here now?” The cap was on his desk. He put it on. I half expected him to do the jacket and sunglasses too. Coach’s angle was to not be seen. “Two, three months?”
“Yes sir,” I said.
He picked up his silver whistle and spun it on its long lanyard, winding it around his pointer finger all the way to the end. Then spun it the other direction, winding it all the way up again. One of his habits. He did this on
the field while pissed off or thinking, aka always. I felt like that lanyard was winding around my neck. I wanted to run out of there and not hear what
was coming. U-Haul told him about the stolen tree, or Mattie Kate found my weed stash. There’s a million roads a person like me can take to ruin, and none I’d found so far led anywhere else.
“You liked helping out at practice, did you?” he finally asked.
“Yes sir.” I didn’t look at him. I balled up my heart or whatever you want to call it and threw it out the window behind him. Hills, bare trees. The weak piss-yellow light of winter.
“You’ve got something,” he said.
“Sir?” My pockets were empty. I didn’t steal. All right, I had. Never from Coach, but my mind skittered helpless over the Oreos and Slim Jims I’d pilfered from my keepers.
“I saw that right away. Size, for sure. Speed, and a decent talent for finding a pass. I had you for a linebacker. But I believe what you are is a tight end.”
I came back inside the window.
“What I didn’t know was, will this kid show up.” He wound the lanyard again. Unwound it. “I’ll be honest, I see boys like you all the time, pissing away what God gave them. They’ve come from the trash of the trash. We all know it. The bad homes, the incarcerated parents. These boys just go looking for more trouble because it’s what they know.”
I stopped breathing again. No parent of mine was incarcerated. The trashier homes I’d lived in weren’t really mine. But he’d said what he said. Not needing any answer.
“I don’t care how much talent a kid has, if he’s too proud to do as he’s told, he’s a waste of my time. Proud, stubborn, you tell me. They come in here wanting to be stars, wanting their glory. And think they’ll get it by acting like the biggest thugs on the hill.”
I looked at his freckled hands on the desk. His Generals hat. I looked at
the big black hairs of his eyebrows that sprang out in all directions, some of them way too long. Terrible, wrongful eyebrows. I wasn’t meeting his eyes, man to man, but it was my best effort.
He leaned forward on his hands. “I’m going to tell you something, and I want you to hear it. A successful team is not made of leaders. It is made of followers.”
“Yes sir.”
“I don’t care if it’s picking up the damn garbage,” he said. “If that’s the job I give a member of my squad, I want to see it done.”
He had no idea. As regards me and garbage. But he’d seen enough. My ears were ringing, but I got the gist. He said I would go on living there, and we’d see how it went. He would talk to Coach Briggs about putting me in
JV practices next fall. Seventh graders could go up for practice, if they had the size. Football camp ran most of the summer. Technically they shouldn’t play me before eighth, but that rule was not hard and fast.
The blood thrashing on my eardrums drowned out everything else.
Summer and fall were forever away. Months. I would be here, for all of them. In this house. Going out for football.
