All the way up, or all the way down. That was me now, getting beat with both ends of that stick before any day’s end, never both at once, and not much in between. Nobody but Dori knew what I was going through. Coach had told me to cut back on the percs, get off the oxys altogether, and stay off that knee as much as possible. If pain wasn’t an issue, he said, I could taper out on the meds, get healed up, and he’d get me back in playing form in time for next fall.
I did what he said, or tried. Every day. Until I was hiding puke in my balled-up jacket and swamp-sacking my bed sheets. Then I’d give in, take a couple of pills and start again. Usually some percs and half an oxy in the morning would get me through school as a functioning being, and then afternoon and evening were just so many hours to get through until, until.
Until the next hour that’s not completely horrible, bought and paid for with another pill. Pain was not the issue. Pain is just this thing, like a noise or a really bad smell. Here’s you, there’s the pain, you bump fists and make your deal. What I’m discussing is a feeling up inside your blood and lungs, like
you’ve been snakebit from the inside. Shivering, loose-boweled, a body you want nobody to get anywhere close to until you can get it fixed. The issue is: how soon will this bottle run out.
Late December, was the answer. Dr. Watts had renewed me a few times over, and I’d taken exactly what he and Coach told me to, right up to our sad defeat at Richlands. I won’t pretend I’ve always been the obedient boy, but now I had people counting on me, and not just my teammates, this was a countywide situation. For the first time in my life I had a man’s job to do, and the guts to hold my bargain. We didn’t make it to semifinals, thanks to
one mean motherfucker of a defensive end and God taking his regular dump on Demon. But even after I got hurt, I did everything in my power to be the man Coach thought I was. Now Coach was looking to seasons ahead, me getting off the meds and on my feet, so I’d die before I asked for another prescription. But dying felt like an actual option here. Day by day the
orange bottle rattled its sadness at me, going down for the count.
Salvation was Dori. Everything was Dori.
I wanted a second first time with her, even if it was really our fifth or sixth. We were clocking them up pretty fast. But I wanted Dori to know I felt about her the way adult or married people do, if not better. To be together like that. Not in a car. It was a goal I set my mind to.
We spent most of our time looking after her dad, Vester, in their
farmhouse that smelled of gas-stove pilot and adult diapers. Not sexy. Jip went berserk every single time I walked in the door, flattening himself to the linoleum like a rat-skin rug, his black beady eyes shooting murder.
Vester’s hospital bed was in the front room so he could watch the comings and goings, which were sadly few. They had home-care nurses a few times a week to do stuff Dori couldn’t handle, catheters and such, and Dori would chat them up like crazy, being lonely. She was on her own for the most of it, even cutting the man’s hair. She said all her friends dropped her like a hot rock after Vester got sick. Staying in school wasn’t an option, it took all-day drives to get him to his different specialist doctors. At this point, those
drives were probably the best part of her life. Beeping the horn whenever they crossed the state line, having their big adventure.
If she had to run out for groceries, she’d let me babysit him, which mainly involved making sure his oxygen tubes didn’t fall out of his nose. He’d want me to come sit close and hear the story of his life. The heart attack being least of the man’s woes. I’d wondered about his age, this
grandpa type of guy being Dori’s father, and it turns out he did marry a wife ten years younger. But neither was he as old as he looked. Fifty-one. He’d worked for the mines prior to the layoffs, not as a miner proper but
maintenance in the prep plant, longwall, I didn’t really know what that meant. It put him in the way of coal dust and asbestos. He said he would
come home with little white hairs of that all over him, like after you’ve had a haircut. Throw off his coverall on the kitchen floor by the washer and think no more of it, because nobody told him to. After he got bad lungs, they got a settlement from the asbestos, which was how he and his brother
started the farm store. But now his brother was dead and he was as good as, so don’t look for money to buy your life back, was his advice to me. And not that I said so, but I didn’t think I’d mind giving it a shot. I’d buy a new knee, because one of mine was shot to hell. I just did my best with Vester to change the subject onto car engines or football plays, and try not to stare at the skull behind his face and the arm bones under the spotty skin.
One noticeable feature of their house was a horse on the roof. Plastic, semi-life-size. It used to be on top of the store, but little-girl Dori begged to have it on their house, so there it stood. This was after her mom died and
various aspects of family life took a header. The whole upstairs was a dead Mom museum, dusty closed window blinds, closets crammed with dresses they never threw out. Dori’s room was a different type of weird, rival to
Haillie McCobb’s as far as stuffed animals go, but with Christina Aguilera Dirrty posters and a Sims Deluxe Edition box where she hid her condoms. She said she got those free from one of the home-care nurses. We would make out on her bed because we couldn’t help ourselves, but only to a point. Her dad was pretty much always asleep, so, not a problem. Jip was the problem. Adorable Jipsy Wipsy. If he wasn’t barking his brains out at me, he was making a low chainsaw rumble and eyeing me with a view to clean castration. No way was I taking my pants off in that house.
My first choice would have been outside in the woods, on a blanket, with lightning bugs dancing around. Total Disney fuck, she’d go wild for that.
But this was the dead of winter. I had to be creative. The special place I thought of was on Creaky Farm, which was foreclosed and sold now to
some out-of-towner that never showed up to farm it. We heard of city guys buying and selling Lee County land they had no need of, just because it was dirt cheap and one more place to hide their cash. Creaky’s tobacco bottom had been fallow for two seasons, the cattle pastures all grown up in thistles, and none of these problems mine to fix. With the old man gone, the snake had no fangs. I’d enjoyed the place, on the few occasions I’d gone back to plunder it.
The spot I had in mind was the stripping house, that used to be my boy cave. It was built into the ground like a cold cellar, with stone walls cool at all times of year and damp to the touch. The cool would keep the cured
stalks soft so you could work through the winter, stripping the leaves from the stalks by hand. But I used to go there just to be off by myself, safe.
Nobody ever found me there. The soft dirt floor and sweet tobacco smell in
the dark always put a spell on me, like starting life over in the belly of some mom that was getting it right this time.
I took Dori there. With a bottle of Thunderbird and some candles I’d pocketed at Mr. Peg’s funeral, which is how long I’d been planning this. I told her I had a surprise in store and she was all like, birthday girl. With anybody else it might have been a downer, driving out there on lonely roads, walking through dead weeds, no sound except some crows in a bald tree griping about the weather. Dori though. She’d get so excited for any small thing, it made you happy to be alive. I shoved open the heavy door
like a castle keep. We spread out our quilt, and didn’t even get the bottle cap twisted off before we were out of our clothes and on each other. Her cold
lips and little teeth biting my ears, the shock of her breasts with their brown eyes staring. The slipperiness of putting myself inside her, the pull of that. No force on earth could stop it, once we’d gotten that far. I’d spent so much of my life hungry, and these days were no different. Every minute I craved that feeling with another person, being that close. I couldn’t get air until I had Dori up against me again. Only then would the begging go quiet and let other good, strange things pass through my head. The beautiful slickness of all life, babies sucking tit, a calf getting born, pouring out of its mother the way they do, like blood from a pitcher.
Afterwards I lay looking up at the tobacco hanging above us like somebody’s laundry left on the line. Well cured now, for sure. I thought of taking some to roll in Zig-Zag papers and pass around to my friends for a change, instead of being the broke-ass that bums. Random, peaceful thoughts. I only ever felt like this after Dori and I banged our brains out.
She liked to stay on me, balanced on my slippery chest and stomach and sloppy wet dick. Sometimes she’d take a nap. At first I’d worried every
time about doing things right, but she said I did. How she knew, what other guys had or hadn’t touched her the right way, I had no wish to know. We
were perfect together. She said before we were us, we weren’t anything. That’s why she could fall asleep on me, the perfectness of our fit. Or if not to sleep, she’d go all drifty, asking random things.
That day in the stripping house she asked if I ever noticed how those thousand-legger bugs, if you squash them, smell like cherry soda. Moving nothing but her mouth, this was her question. It shrank me up some. I mean, we’re naked. I asked why, did she see one? And she said no, just wondering. She also asked if animals knew they were going to die someday.
She had to be thinking of Jip, she was senseless over that creature, so I said no. “Maybe sometimes, right beforehand, if it’s a situation,” I said. “But for the most part I’d say your normal animal day is a happy little bubble, like being always stoned.”
I felt her smile against my chest. She took my word on anything. She asked what did I think our baby chicken would be whenever he grew up. I said a rooster, if I had to guess. He was making sounds in that direction.
Angus had started calling it Lovechild to aggravate me, and I took up the name to spite her. Even though he was living in the tool shed now and getting no love to speak of, unless Mattie Kate remembered to go out there and throw grain at him.
Finally Dori slid off me. Her teeth were chattering, so I gave her my flannel shirt. She scooted against the wall, drew her legs up to her chest, and buttoned my shirt around her whole body, knees and all. She looked
like a plaid pillow with her head on top and the little pink peas of her toes poking out the bottom. I wanted to take her in my arms and hide her someplace. Her shiny black eyes watched while I lit Mr. Peg’s funeral
candles and opened the bottle and poured the Thunderbird into paper cups. It felt like church, the part where they say, Remember who died for your sins. For Dori and me, all our best people died on us early, before we had any good shot at sin. So we had catching up to do. Maybe that’s why nothing we ever did felt wrong.
We needed no more than the wine to get ourselves rosy. She’d already given me the smallest hit of something before we went out, so I’d be happy and not fiending. My stomach was always my downfall, running ragged
these days on the daily ride of oxy-not-oxy, and I’m just going to tell you, nothing kills the buzz like bringing up Chick Fil-A all over the girlfriend’s bralette. That only happened once, and she was so sweet about mopping me up, using her shirt to wipe scum off my chin. But all I could think of was her feeding Vester his babyfied meals, his gnarly hands gripping the
bedrails as he strained towards the spoon, and I got in a mood. Walking like an old man with a bum knee already, I refused to be another mess for Dori to clean up. So after that, she always had something to tide me over. This or that, Xanax, Klonopin, a dab from one of her Dad’s morphine patches if nothing else was on hand. But usually something was.
I thought I knew it all in those days. I’d seen people at school, in the locker room, even at Mr. Peg’s funeral, with stains on their shirttails.
Greenish grass stains, or pinkish brown like dirt. How could those people
be so prideless, I thought, showing up in dirty shirts. I didn’t know that was the coating of a pill that keeps this safer-than-safe drug from dissolving in your stomach all at one time. Coppery pink on the 80 milligrams, green on the 40s. Melts in your mouth like an M&M. Hold it there a minute, then
take it out and rub it on your shirttail, and you’re looking at a shiny white pearl of pure oxy. More opioid than any pill ever before invented. One buck gets you a whole bottle of these on Medicaid, to be crushed and snorted one by one, or dissolved and injected with sheep-vax syringes from Farm Supply, in the crook of an arm or the webbing of your toes. People find
more ways to shut up their monsters than a Bible has verses.
You have to understand the rhyme and reasons of Dori. Why she was radical and fun like a little girl, even after all her friends left her flat. How she stayed patient with a wheezing, crying man gone old before his time. Why her foot kept bouncing. Her sparkly eyes were not really black, but blue. Bending down to kiss her, I’d see the thinnest crescent of sky blue around the huge black center. Living a life like hers, most people would
have lost it a thousand times over.
Coach probably thought I was off the pills by now, headed for the gym to dead-lift my ass back onto the gravy train. Angus was getting pesky over Christmas, let’s go steal a tree. I tried to steer clear of them both. I would make a hit-and-run for one of Mattie Kate’s meals or a night’s sleep, both badly needed, but mostly made excuses. Angus rolled her eyes at me.
Which pissed me off. A guy does not need a reason to go screw his girlfriend, it’s just a given. Dori was sweet to them, bringing over presents to the house from her dad’s farm store like socks, chicken mash for Lovechild of course, Carhartt overalls, which Angus really liked, XL-size thermal shirts for Coach. Once, this little stool with a tractor seat.
Somewhat random, but more sensible anyway than a chicken in a Tampax box. And none of it earned me a pass on blowing off family life and Christmas, even though I’d invented the whole concept for all Angus knew.
Too bad. My sole concern over Christmas was what to give Dori. I kept thinking of that first amazing Christmas with Angus, how I’d scoured the pawns high and low for exactly her kind of thing, and felt like a million
bucks for finding it. I wanted that feeling again of really seeing a person and being seen. And wouldn’t get it with Dori, she was too easy. If I
wrapped a box of Trojans in Christmas paper, she’d say it was the best present anybody ever gave her. Which is kind of a letdown. You don’t get points for hitting the side of the barn. But thinking of old times and the fun I’d had with Angus wasn’t fair. I loved Dori with all my heart.
The femmy direction seemed like a safe bet, nail polish or makeup, which I knew zero about except that you won’t find them at the flea market. Angus would be no help. I did know what CDs Dori liked, Christina, Avril Lavigne. Pink, that was Dori’s hair idol. These were the things rattling around my skullbox the week before Christmas while I ran errands in town for Dori. Christmas shopping on the sly. She was particular about being the one to get Vester’s meds, but I needed the car for my mission, so talked her into letting me pick up their mail and checks at the PO, then Walgreens to get the prescriptions. Last stop, groceries. They only ever ate frozen things:
Vester lived on Bob Evans mashed potatoes and Dori on Mrs. Smith
meringue pies. I argued for chicken nuggets and such, to level out the food groups. But either way, you don’t let this shit sit in your car on a sunny day, even if it’s December.
So that’s where I was, waiting in a long line at the pharmacy pickup
while gum-chewing counter girl with troll-doll hair had a discussion with a customer about her husband’s anus surgery aftercare. The old lady had on
those clear rubber rain boots that button over your shoes. Mr. Peg called them galoshes, a word Maggot and I used as a stand-in cussword. You galosher, I will so galosh you. I owed Mrs. Peggot a visit. The pharmacy consult dragged on. The girl tore a coupon off a booklet on her counter and started drawing a rendition of an anus on the back with a ballpoint pen.
Behind her was an entire wall of cubbies exactly like the PO I’d just come from. Those PO boxes were all stuffed with disability checks, and these with the white paper bags of drugs that the checks paid for. What if you combined the two and cut out the hassle, I thought. One-stop shopping.
Across the top of the Walgreens wall of cubbies, they’d stashed the boxes of every cold medicine ever known to man that has Sudafed in it: Maxiflu CD, Drixoral, Sinutab, Flu Maximum Strength, etc. There must have been five hundred boxes up there. Not on the shelves anymore. Thanks to Maggot and his smurfer pals.
While I was staring at the Sudafed motherlode, somebody tapped me on the shoulder. Heavyset guy, small goat-type beard, glasses, too much hair for his head.
“Tommy,” I said. “What are you in for, man?”
Not drugs, he said, just a Dew and Doritos for his lunch. He caught me up on the months since we met at the drive-in. Still in his newspaper job, promoted from trash cans to doing stuff on the actual newspaper. Layout is what he said, setting out ads on the page to catch the reader’s eye. Making enough to move out from the disaster roommates into his own place. I had to hand it to Tommy, coming out of the foster factory as a decent human. I said the new beard suited him, even though actually it added to the whole effect of what was standing up on his head, but you know. Old friends. I brought him up to speed on Dori, and asked if he still had the girlfriend.
Surprise answer: yes. Sophie was her name, sweet girl, still in Pennsylvania so they hadn’t met yet. Maybe next year.
The line started moving and Tommy had his ads to get back to, but told me to come visit. He wrote down his address and apologized that it wasn’t the house per se, it was the garage. No bath or kitchen yet, but they were
planning to put those in. He rented from a really nice couple that let him use their bathroom. With four kids, that he kept an eye on sometimes. I could
see this meant the world to Tommy, being part of a family. He said he read them Magic Treehouse. The little girl liked books, not so much the little boy that was into Grand Theft Auto, and the other two just small. Twins. The girl was named Haillie. Not believable. It was the McCobbs.
The first thing I asked him was: Is your room really a garage, or is it a dog room with a washer-dryer combo? I had quite a few more questions after that. Yes, a garage. Yes, they worried all the time about money but Mr. McCobb had started a business selling weight-loss products called Wate-O- Way, mainly signing up other people for a three-hundred-dollar fee so they could also be part of the Wate-O-Way sales team. Tommy believed with his whole heart that Mr. McCobb would soon be a rich man. He hadn’t seen any products yet, but they were supposed to be a whole new game in weight loss. Oh, Tommy.
He couldn’t get over me knowing these people. My long-lost fosters. I wanted to say, Tommy, go pack your shit, walk out of that garage and never look back. But he was all over this family. I couldn’t burst his bubble. I said I would come over sometime with Dori and we’d take him and the
McCobbs out to Applebee’s or something, my treat. Which is insane. No idea why I said that. I wouldn’t have minded to see those kids, Haillie especially, to see how she was holding up in that FUBAR family. But the
main reason probably was me wanting to eat as much as I could in front of them. I’d stuff my face, two burgers. Some form of weird revenge.
I had to warn him, though, before he went on his way. About Mr.
McCobb’s enterprises. All fine and good on the Wate-O-Way, I said, but don’t even think about putting your own money into that. Oh, Tommy. It turned out he already had.
