The rest of that winter is hazy, like there’s a cloud lying over me and tenth grade. All I can say for sure is that my home was with Dori, more and more.
I kept my clothes over there and my meds. Having my night sweats in
sheets that would not be Mattie Kate’s secret to keep. I was trying to dial down the oxy but not too regular about it, with Dori’s little add-ons throwing me off schedule. She couldn’t help herself, just a caring person.
She sang to Vester while she fed him, little kid songs like Twinkle Star. The care nurses came three mornings a week on rotation, and Dori passed me off as a cousin instead of a live-in boyfriend. Still worried about DSS. But it wasn’t the nurses’ job to keep tabs on us. They warned her to keep his pills and patches locked up in a safe place, probably thinking she was older, not a seventeen-year-old in charge of the man’s narcotics. Just another case of everybody trying to do the jobs they’re given.
Christmas came and went, with Dori of course loving the presents I gave her, and Angus making a good show of not sulking over the ones I didn’t.
After all, Angus was the one that swore to Christmas being no big deal. So I kept telling myself. That house was returning to its natural state. I was nothing more over there than a brief disturbance of the peace.
I missed her though, Angus. The easiness of her. I mean, sex is great and everything, as anybody will tell you. But there’s much to be said also for lying around with a person on beanbags, firing popcorn penalties at each other for offside fart violations.
I had my driver’s license, but no place to go. If I went to school from Dori’s, she’d go with me to bring back the car, and pick me up later.
Marooned on our island. My guy friends of recent years were my
teammates, and after the knee injury I fell off their map. That’s high school for you, a bevy of people unfit for adult life encounters in any form. And my old standbys the Peggots were in disarray. So my whole life was Dori now, idling while she microwaved stuff to feed Vester or patted him down
with a washrag. Other than that, she napped. I slid into my old lonely ways, drawing again in my notebooks, not superhero kid nonsense but things I
saw while out and about. I did a three-panel cartoon of Walgreens Spy Girl passing secrets encoded in anus diagrams to undercover agent Galoshes, so. Whole different category of nonsense.
I was in Ms. Annie’s art class again, if I bothered to go to school, but my former success had been largely crush-motivated. The repeat of last year
was a letdown. Seeing her explain these amazing things of contrast and proportion the first time around was like watching a magical genius. Second time, she was just a teacher. She still thought I had talent but probably was all the more disappointed in me for zoning out. Fine. Special for Dori was all I needed to be.
Other than the useful parts like driver’s ed leading automatically to the license, school faded from importance as is natural for a boy becoming a man. Civics, I actually cannot tell you what those are. Math I got to take from Mr. Cleveland that had his deal with Coach, football players got a
grade that kept us eligible. I had to do the harder English, which was a time suck, reading books. Some of them though, I finished without meaning to. That Holden guy held my interest. Hating school, going to the city to chase whores and watch rich people’s nonsense, and then you come to find out, all he wants in his heart is to stand at the edge of a field catching little boys
before they go over the cliff like he did. I could see that. I mean, see it, I drew it, with those white cliffs on the Kentucky border where Miss Barks took me that time. I’ve not ever seen rye growing, so I made him the
catcher in the tobacco. Likewise the Charles Dickens one, seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and
orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.
The main event of that winter was Demon’s big stupid adventure. The plan itself, what little there was of it, came from Angus putting it to me as a dare. Of the put-up or shut-up kind. I was spending enough evenings at Coach’s to convince all parties that I still lived there. He was watching my limp,
making noises about surgery, and I was doing my best impressions of a drug-free once-and-future tight end. Angus and I one evening were up in
our den watching some nature planet show on the amazing leopard seal. I was in one of my moods. This being really the only major thing I’d wanted out of life, and I was never going to get any closer to the damn ocean than a damn Japanese-made TV. I said words to that effect. And I still remember her big gray ocean eyes, looking at me like, What is wrong with you? If
Angus wanted to do something, she fucking did it. So maybe it was spite or pride. I told her: Fine, you know what? I’m going.
I started talking it up to Dori, which was just cruel. Of course she’d want to go, the beach would amaze her because everything amazed her. It wasn’t so long ago she’d been this whole fun, popular girl at school, before her dad and his five-hour doctor drives ate her life. Now she was hard pressed to talk her neighbor into watching Vester so the two of us could go out parking. But she saw how bad I wanted it, and begged me to go without her. Take pictures, she said. This was before camera phones were in everybody’s pockets. I borrowed a Polaroid from Angus.
Without Dori I would need transportation. Fast Forward wouldn’t have been first choice, but he had wheels, and was generally up for adventure if the booze was adequate. On the phone he said he was covered up at the farm, tied up with his horses, which I’d been told were not his horses, but kept that to myself. I asked him to think about it. He said maybe. Next I brought it up to Maggot, knowing he’d be game for anything that got him out of the house. June was two inches from kicking him out, setting certain conditions he was not able to live with. She was pretty tolerant of his grooming, so it had to be more than that, and I didn’t ask. Even a minor weed incident could really blow up over there, she was on some drug
warpath ever since World War Kent, to the extent of Maggot coming over to Dori’s just to roll a reefer.
In less than a minute, Emmy found out from Maggot and announced she was coming too. Which then got Fast Forward on board. I was never sure about the chicken or the egg on that one, but understood we were getting into some kind of love-hate triangle with June Peggot involved, which is not a geometry problem you want to be in. But damn. All that mattered to me was the ocean. I was going to Virginia Beach, Virginia. A town we
chose solely for its name, having no idea where we would rest our heads after planting our asses on its grass. Or hopefully, sand. We had no money,
no game plan, not enough supplies to get us five miles down the road, let alone the five hundred it was. Fast Forward had connections in a city he
said was on the way, somebody that could hook him up with easy cash, and that was enough for four people high on youth and extreme inexperience.
I have to admit, another thing factored in. Some kids at school were peacocking around with their plan to hit the beach over spring break. This is the Bettina Cook crowd with their Abercrombies and Daddy Express cards and sixteenth-birthday cars with the big yellow bows from CarMax. Kids that only need to say the words, “Hey! Let’s all get shitfaced at Myrtle
Beach,” and presto it happens. Half of them probably didn’t care about the ocean, and the other half wouldn’t notice it if they passed out tits-up on the fucking dunes. Not bitter or anything, me.
But to lose my mind that way, thinking I was in the league of those kids, wanting and getting? Dori had never been over a state line except to take her dad to heart-lung specialists, and lately was lucky to see the back side of Walmart. I was an asshole to dangle this trip in front of her, and then go, knowing she couldn’t. I have no good excuse. Maybe all kids are like this, wanting too much. Like Maggot, working every angle too far, to blow the
gaskets of his poor grandparents that married at fifteen with no bigger hope in the world than to have kids and not watch them die. Us though, give us
the fucking world. We pretended we were as good as the Bettina Cook kids, while Bettina pretended to be a Kardashian. We’d all cut our teeth on TV
shows where parents had jobs, and kids lived out big-city dreams in their wardrobe choices and rivers of cash. Even doing drugs, these forgivable schoolboys, and it’s a comedy because they’re not poor. In their universe, nobody shuts you down for being different and wanting the moon.
In ours, you live on a tether: to family, parents if you’re lucky, older
people raising you if less so, that you yourself will end up looking after by and by. Odds are about a hundred to one, you are not destined for greatness.
Your people will appreciate you all the same. On the other hand, if you
poundcake someone or push them too far in the shame or shock direction, you will run into their people at Hardee’s or the Dollar General parking lot, in all probability within the day. There will be aftermaths. Same goes for raising your head too high on your neck, the tall weed gets cut. So. You wind up meeting in the middle on this follow-your-heart thing, at a place everybody can live with. Show me that universe on TV or the movies.
Mountain people, country and farm people, we are nowhere the hell. It’s a
situation, being invisible. You can get to a point of needing to make the loudest possible noise just to see if you are still alive.
The first night we made it as far as a place called Hungry Mother. Not kidding. We’d got off to a woefully messy start with everybody excited, needing their calm-down of choice. Then needing to sleep that off. And leaving Dori called for I’m-sorry-baby sex, which takes more time than the regular. So now we were only a few counties down the road, it was getting dark, and here was this highway sign. Hungry Mother turned out to be not a restaurant or sad female human but a park, with picnic tables and such. A lake. It was February, we didn’t wait for spring break, being way out ahead of those rich kids plus more willing to ditch school. The park was empty, its picnic area and lake all ours. At the water’s edge, a big patch of sand.
“Gol dang, children. It’s the motherfucking beach,” Maggot said, getting out of the truck, unfolding himself like a jackknife. He stretched his long
arms wide and bounced on his toes.
“Let’s not rush to judgment,” I said. The sand was dark brown, like a worn-out welcome mat to the drab pavement of lake. But Emmy was singing “Beach, Beach, Baby!” and skipping sideways across the parking lot, a leggy colt in her skinny jeans and tall leather boots. The three of us climbed over a small fence onto the sand. The entrance was a locked gate beside a little block of rest rooms and vending machines, all deserted. Fast Forward lit a cigarette and leaned on his truck, watching us in his usual way, head tilted back, eyes narrowed.
This sand patch was no more than fifty or sixty yards wide, with log
pilings holding a rope fence on both sides. Beyond that, the normal dirt and woods resumed. Somebody had just scooped up truckloads of sand and dumped it here, thinking no one would be the wiser. This fake beach moreover was pretty gross due to what all people had left there: flattened drink cups with red straws poking out of the lids, the black remains of a campfire. A torn white bra, half buried in sand. Maggot lit a joint and started singing about Margaritaville. Emmy formed big balls of wet sand
one after another that fell apart as she threw them at us. Both those two were laughing like kids. I got a bad feeling as regards their interest in reaching the real ocean.
“You all, this is not the beach. You know that, right?”
“Stepped on a cow flop! Blew out my tip-top,” yodeled Maggot, swaying his hips and tiptoeing across the sand in his weird boots.
Just to prove the entire world was against me, a seagull curved in and landed near us. Big, white, we’ve all seen the pictures. It stepped along the brown scum at the water’s edge, keeping a mean eye on me. “Hell-o-o, this isn’t the sea!” I yelled. The seagull paid no heed.
Our curly-headed Marlboro Man was still over there in his cowboy boots and tight white T-shirt tucked in his jeans. I didn’t really trust him, but
maybe never did. A kid in my shoes takes what power he can find. As far as him and Emmy, no guess. She’d been flirty all day, wearing a soft blue sweater that buttoned all the way up the back, seemingly designed to make you think about taking it off of her. How would she even get that on by
herself? Fast Forward had driven left-handed with his arm draped around her, but seemed his usual self, like he’s just waiting for a better offer. From time to time asking her to crack open another tallboy from the case at our feet.
Now we watched him flick away his cigarette butt and stroll towards us, getting over the fence in one motion like clearing a hurdle. No bad knees. Quarterbacks let others take the fall. “Me oh my,” he said, taking it in. “What have we here? Ask and you shall receive.”
“Not the ocean. Not the beach,” I said.
He walked towards the water. I stared at his pointy-toed footprints in the sand. He leaned over and scooped up a squashed yellow Styrofoam clamshell stained with ketchup and held it up to his ear. “Shhhh.” Finger to his lips. Eyes wide. “I can hear the ocean.”
I picked up a crushed beer can and fired it at the seagull. The bird flew away.
Emmy laughed her starry laugh. Fast Forward grabbed her hand, twirling her around, and just like that they were doing a two-step: his left hand holding hers and his right spread wide on her shoulder blade, pushing her backward with little steps. Like they’re hearing LeAnn Rimes singing “Can’t Fight the Moonlight,” and too bad for the rest of us if we’re not.
Maggot crouched on his long legs, elbows on knees like a praying mantis, looking pouty. They’d obviously done this, gone out dancing. Emmy would place her demands. They looked like a movie couple, Emmy matching his steps, her back arched, smiling up at him. The outline of a thick wallet was worn into his back pocket. They twirled around the beach and then he lifted
her by the waist and set her on one of the posts of the rope fence. Emmy raised her pressed-together hands above her head and stood balanced with the bright moon rising through black pines behind her. She looked perfect up there. A church steeple.
Then Fast Forward grabbed her around the waist, flinging her over his shoulder like a grain bag, Emmy laughing and kicking her legs, and the beauty was over.
Hungry Mother was a joke on us. We’d not eaten all day. It was decided Fast Forward and Emmy would go into the town and pick up Pizza Hut or something. We pulled money out of our pockets to give Fast Forward, and Maggot and I were left behind like additional trash on the fake beach. We dragged a log to the water’s edge to sit on. The moon was more egg-shaped than round, but seemed proud of itself regardless, laying out a shiny silver road across the water to our feet. Come on up, said the moon. Our faces and bodies were painted with silver. Looking at Maggot from the side, his nose and chin outlined in light, it dawned on me he wasn’t a kid. He’d grown into his square, shaved chin and Adam’s apple. And seemed to be dialing back the makeup. Maybe that was all just him now, the long, black
eyelashes his cousins used to want to kill him for. I wondered if he was in love with Fast Forward. Like all of us.
Maggot and I sat like bumps on our log, letting the moon make us pretty.
The whole place was, honestly, apart from me hating it for not being the place I wanted. On the other side of the sparkly water, a cone-shaped
mountain with a pelt of pine trees rose halfway up the sky. The moon had a fuzzy ring around it. It was cold, and getting colder.
Maggot yelled across the lake at the mountain: “Who goes there?”
Like in our olden days, playing king of the hill. I yelled, “Nobody here but us hungry motherfuckers.” For a long while after that, we yelled across the lake at the dark mountain to hear our echoes. “I am one HUNGRY MOTHER,” we shouted.
Hungry hungry hungry. Mother mother mother.
The echoes were just in our minds, with the aid of a reefer. The truth is, it didn’t matter what or how hard we yelled. Nothing was coming back to us.
Emmy and Fast were gone for an age and came back with a large cold pizza and their faces rubbed raw, like they’d been making out. Some dishevelment. I noticed the buttons up the back of Emmy’s sweater were
askew. We ate our pizza on the beach, which I don’t recommend as a tourist
option because, sand. We’d brought a pile of blankets on this trip with the plan of camping out, and now got them all out to wrap around us while we sat on the beach. Maggot and Emmy both had their quilts that Mrs. Peggot made for all the grandkids out of cut-up squares of their outgrown clothes. I used to lie on Maggot’s bed staring at his, picking out all our good times.
The green corduroys for instance that he’d wrecked playing on the Ruelynn coal tips.
After we ate, we cased a picnic shelter as a possible sleeping location, considering it for all of about ten seconds. The temperature was dropping
like a rock. There was nobody around this park. We found some cabins and broke into one, which in our defense was not locked. The bunks had bare mattresses that smelled like mouse pee. A person can do worse.
The others were out like lights. Maggot’s snore I noticed had changed with his voice. Fast and Emmy had claimed the loft and it was quiet up there, so the hankypank evidently had been gotten out of the way. All I could think of was Dori. What kind of day did she have with Vester, what kind of jerk was I to leave her. I was getting bad sweats also, even as cold as it was, so I got up and took a smidge of oxy to stave off midnight shits. I only had a few with me. Fast Forward was serious about us not getting busted on the road, and had ordered us to bring minor items only, weed and beer. Once we got to Richmond we’d be taking on valuable cargo, meaning his business arrangement, and he said he’d take care of it. Hubcaps I assumed, or duct-taped to body parts, he was worldly-wise. I wondered if
the other end of this deal was Mouse, his tiny, bossy friend that had sold her goods from the Pringles can at the Fourth of July party. She’d said she was from Philly, but a Mouse nest relocation was possible.
Right away I felt the oxy quieting down my aching guts, but not my brain. I couldn’t sleep. Too far from home, too much smell of mouse pee. I wrapped up in my blankets and went out on the porch. It was exactly the
same cold, inside or out. They had rocking chairs and I sat in one, letting my eyes get friendly with the dark. I was surprised to see the door open and another blanket-cocoon slip outside, quiet as a cat. Emmy. I thought of
those nights in June’s apartment, her sneaking out to lie down with me on my pillow fort bed. Water under a long bridge. She sat in the other rocker. I couldn’t see any part of her, just the burrito of her childhood quilt.
“Hey,” I said. “The moon went to bed already. So what’s wrong with us?” She was quiet a long time. Then said, “Some guy threatened Mom’s life.”
“Christ. Who?”
“Some pillhead. He’s not the first. But this was just a few days ago. Then Maggot and I take off without even telling her, so right now she’s up at the house worried about us while some maniac off his nut could be creeping around with his Mac-10 fixing to blow her face off.”
Her surprising knowledge of firearms made that sentence way too disturbing. “Why would anybody want to hurt June? She’s Miss Popularity of the county.”
The tube of quilt shifted down a little and Emmy’s head came out of it. “You have no idea what she’s dealing with. People come in every day just wanting her to write them. They’ll say anything to get their painkillers.
Kidney stones. They take the cup in the bathroom and prick their finger to put blood in the urine sample. She knows they’re shopping doctors, but if
she says no, some of them get really ugly. Screaming, calling her a ruthless cunt.”
I couldn’t imagine that. Or could, but didn’t want to. The desperation was not unknown.
“That’s the men,” she said. “The women play it smart, they’ll go into their exam room and duck out with her prescription pad before Mom can get in there to see them.”
Emmy had one hand up to her mouth. I remembered how she used to bite her fingernails till they bled. June painted them with iodine to get her to stop. I had nothing to offer her now.
“Mom says half these people don’t know they’re addicted. They took what some doctor told them to, and now they’re fiending and don’t really know what it is. All they know is, Mom cut off their drugs and now they feel like they’re dying. So why won’t she help them?”
All this was making me hanker to go take more pills. Sick as that is. I wondered if Emmy knew how deep I was in. But she was wrapped up in her own shit. She said in Knoxville, June could refer these patients someplace for help, but here their insurance only covered the pills.
“You all never should have moved back. If things are so much better in Knoxville.”
“No, she was miserable in that hospital. Their head physician was this city guy from Johns Hopkins that treated the local nursing staff like they were half-wits.”
I’d forgotten about that. He called her Loretta Lynn. Emmy’s chair stopped rocking.
“Anyway, Mom says home is home. If people are in trouble, it’s where she needs to be.” Emmy put her face to the blanket, wiping her nose. I hadn’t known she was crying.
“Sucks, though,” I said. “She doesn’t deserve people going off at her like that.”
“Probably she’s called Hammer to come over again. To protect her from getting murdered. He’s probably there right now.” She started crying then with no bother to hide it.
“What happened? With Hammer. You two were almost engaged there for a minute.”
Bad move, Emmy went full waterworks. I said I was sorry, but she kept saying she was a terrible person. Over and over. I told her to stop it, she was a queen bee. Same as June.
“No, I’m not.” She was doing that gasping thing that happens after crying. Mrs. Peggot used to call it getting the snubs. After a minute she asked if I knew Martha Coldiron.
“You mean Hot Topic?” Even in the dark, I could tell I’d said the wrong thing. “Sorry, I forgot her name. Yeah, I know her. Maggot’s barber.”
“Martha got pregnant.”
“Jesus. Maggot wasn’t any party to that, was he?” Emmy blew air out her lips.
“Okay, not Maggot. So what’s she going to do? Marry the guy?”
“She despises the guy. She wouldn’t tell me who, just that he’s a bastard and now she had evil inside her like Rosemary’s baby. She said if she couldn’t get rid of it, she’d kill herself.”
“Man alive. How’d you get mixed up with this?”
“She’s at the house a lot. Maggot might be her only friend. I told her Mom could refer her to a free clinic and not be judgmental because it’s her job. But Martha thinks if one adult knows something, they all will. Her dad finding out would be the end of her life.”
“Damn. She’s up a creek.”
“It’s called getting an abortion. I drove her to Knoxville so nobody would find out.” Her chair started rocking again, in an agitated way. “Demon, I’m a horrible person. The sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be.”
“Why? Because of Martha’s baby?”
“No. That was probably the nicest thing I’ve done for anybody in ages.” “So?” Weirdly, I thought of my snake bracelet. Wondered if she still had
it on her ankle.
“So, I lied to Mom. She thought we went to Knoxville for a Kathy
Mattea concert. I lie to Mom all the time. Me being here right now is lying to Mom. She hates Fast Forward.”
“That’s just June being June. She’s always treated you like a china doll.” “No. It’s him. It’s not like she hates all guys, Demon. She likes you. She
loves Hammer Kelly. I broke up with him because he’s too good for me. I didn’t deserve him.”
I knew Emmy’s moods. She would just have to talk herself out of this one. She told me June was worried to death about Maggot, no news there. But Emmy knew more than I did about where he was getting his crank. He was more into meth than oxy. We still talked like that, at the time, about what we were “into.” Like it was a hobby. She told me things I didn’t want to know, like who he was having sex with, to procure. My brain slammed
the door on that one. Jesus. Maggot. This overgrown kid that barely had outgrown Legos and Avengers.
Eventually she went back to bed. I stayed outside until the sky started going white around the edges. Winter nights are too quiet, with all the little lives frozen or hiding out. My heart hurt for them. I thought of Mrs. Peggot making those quilts for all her kids and grandkids. The best people you could ever know. Save for the unlucky two, Humvee and Mariah. And among all the cousins, the only bad seeds turned out to be theirs, Emmy and Maggot, even though they were taken in by others and raised up right. I’d had some of the same kindness, the Peggots, Miss Betsy, Coach. And Fast Forward’s story, the same. Many had tried their best with us, but we came out of too-hungry mothers. Four demons spawned by four different starving hearts.
