Vester died in dogwood winter. April, the month of the whole sorry world praying for deliverance, with dogwoods and redbuds all pretty on the
roadsides and new green leaves lighting up the mountains. Then comes a
late freeze to turn it all black, every fruit of the year killed in the bud. It’s a fitting time to die, I reckon. If you’re past believing in deliverance.
Dead people I had known, and so had Dori. But she showed no sign of getting over this one. She couldn’t stop crying or worrying she’d OD’d him on accident. The nurses had left her in charge of so much, the morphine and fentanyl patches and pills she had to crush and give him in a dropper.
Nothing was her fault, least of all the ice storm that took the power out. She was bleary and frantic on the phone, saying she’d been asleep and woke up with the house freezing and his oxygen had quit and she couldn’t get the
lights to come on. I told her to hang up and call the ambulance, but he was already gone. I should have been there.
The funeral was like Mom’s, in all the bad ways. This Aunt Fred person with her L.L.Beans and mini-me daughter drove in from Newport News to take charge. Newport News what state, we had no idea, it sounds like a brand of cigarettes. Dori barely knew these people. They took one look
around the house with their matching pulled-up noses and checked into Best Western’s. The church, hymns, clothes he wore to the casket, all decided by Aunt Fred. The daughter that gave up her entire life to drive him to his
appointments and spoon-feed him got no say. She sobbed through the whole service. They closed the coffin and put him in the ground, and I had to hold tight to stop her from crawling in there with him. In weeks to come, she’d
go every day to sit on his muddy grave. I hate to say this. I got jealous of a dead man.
Once Aunt Fred got him buried, she called a meeting of the store
employees and a lawyer to discuss the finances, not good. The store would be sold to level out the debts. The house was paid off, from the asbestos settlement years ago, and Dori could stay there if she chose, but was on her own as far as utilities. She could draw his social security till she turned eighteen, which was five weeks away. Not even time enough to file the paperwork. And that’s Aunt Fred back to Newport News, over and out.
Taking care of Vester was Dori’s whole life. The home health people
came to take out the hospital bed and his sickness equipment, and she just howled. His oxygen machine was like a heartbeat at all hours pounding through the walls, you don’t even realize. Now it was a dead house. She didn’t know what to do with herself, and couldn’t sleep without a lot of help. I tried mentioning the cheerful aspects, that we could be like other
people now and go out partying or to the drive-in. She got hurt at me and said I was dancing on Vester’s grave. All the party she wanted was to take another round of 80s and Xanax and ride that Cadillac back to dreamland.
In other bad news, our medical situation fell apart pretty fast. All these legit things that had been in steady supply, the patches, morphine pills, 80- and 40-milligram oxys, his different nerve pills of Xanax, Klonopin, and so forth: gone overnight. I’m not saying Dori took the man’s medicine out of his mouth, good Lord no. But the way these doctors prescribe for a dying person, there’s plenty to go around. And Dori was a smart little
housekeeper, in that one regard. The oxys alone, he got a bottle of 80s every month that cost him one dollar on Medicare. If you know where to go, those pills sell for a dollar a milligram. Eighty times thirty, a person could about
live on that for a month, till the next scrip rolls around. Could and did, come to find out.
Not that I was completely ignorant. She’d always been particular about picking up his prescriptions herself, other than the one time mentioned
where I ran into Tommy at Walgreens. I knew she had to be going
somewhere to trade some meds for other ones, according to what was needed. How else is an old man going to come by Mollys, I mean. You put two and two together. But I still had surprises in store, the first time I went along with her. She rounded up everything we could find in the house and said she was making a run. But she was in no condition. I told her I was
driving and didn’t back down, so. Our first date after Vester died: the pain clinic.
The one she used was out west of Pennington Gap in a strip mall that looked bombed out, as far as any other stores operating. Even still, there were probably two hundred cars parked in the lot. Seven o’clock on a
Sunday evening, people lined up waiting to get in the door. Ladies and kids asleep in cars, men lying on the pavement. It was a rainy night and most
were huddled under the awning but some of them were just out in the rain, like they no longer found it in their hearts to give a damn. I told Dori I didn’t like the looks of this.
She was resting against the door, eyes closed, the seat belt running across her neck in a way that scared me. My little nymph. These vehicles are made for taller people. I leaned over and pulled the belt away from her throat so
she wouldn’t choke, kissed her and nudged her a little till she came around. She looked through the blur of rain and said, Oh. She said this was busier than normal. It was May, the first of the month, the entire county had just gotten their benefit checks. I told her I couldn’t see waiting in that line, we’d be here till midnight, and she said, Don’t be silly, we’re not going in. All those people are waiting to see the doctor and get their prescriptions.
Our scrips come from Daddy’s doctors, we’re just here to sell.
I stared at her, trying to work this out. She still had the mark across her neck from the seat belt, and looked about twelve. She’d quit wearing makeup since Vester died, because the crying just wrecked it anyway. I told her I should have been coming down here with her all this time, because I didn’t think it looked very savory. We had an argument about keeping secrets, which she said she wasn’t. She just knew I wouldn’t like it, and
now I was telling her I didn’t, so that was the reason. Also, supposedly the person running this clinic was somebody I knew.
Then she dipped out again, and I watched the comings and goings, trying to figure it out. There were the ones waiting to go inside, and the ones that pulled up in their old Chevies and got out with their white paper sacks and went away with money. Peddling the wares. You think of dealing as a young man’s game, but a lot of these were older. I’m saying old, bum legs, walkers. A wad of chew in the cheek, flaps down on their hunting hats. Mr.
Peg would have fit right in here. I thought of that night Kent gave Mr. Peg the coupon for free samples, and Mrs. Peggot said she would flush them down the toilet. The little did she know, they could have come over here
and scored a month of groceries. These old hillbillies were using their resources, the same way Mr. Peg, back in the day with all his mouths to feed, used to sell venison roasts after he’d shot a buck, or tomatoes out of their garden. He’d made moonshine. You use what you’ve got.
It took me awhile to get up my nerve and go out there in the rain. I was thinking how Dori was a pro at this and I’m chickenshit, and then a guy
came over pecking on the car window and I sold him half a bottle of oxy, lickety-split. Dori told me what to charge him for it. So that was good and we called it a day, headed out to Food Lion because she’d run completely out of everything at the house, t.p. and food. Planningwise, Dori was on the par with Mom.
I asked her what happens if you actually get inside that clinic. She said you just pay the money and he writes you. Everybody gets the exact same thing, holy trinity. Oxy, Soma, Xanax. But a lot of them end up having to wait so long, they’re having their DTs in the waiting room. She always would fill Vester’s prescriptions at Walgreens, count out what was needed for the coming days, then come straight over here to sell the rest. She said she made almost two thousand bucks one time in that parking lot. You look for the ones that are seizing or puking.
Technically I wasn’t shocked, these pill millers were known about. Real doctors running their enterprises, the new philosophy of pain management as seen on Kent TV. They all would have started out as regular doctors,
pediatricians or what have you. Sports medicine. That was the surprise. She said the guy running that clinic was Dr. Watts.
The hardest part of my day was leaving Dori and going back to Coach’s house. But rules were in place, with U-Haul looking for any excuse to take me down, so for most of March and April I’d been sleeping over there to keep the appearances. But after Vester died, I didn’t have the heart anymore to leave Dori. She’d never been alone in her life. Here she was this saint
type person taking care of a sick man, and you’d never guess underneath it all was a child. A bedroom full of plush toys and a daddy that never said no. This was from a young age, starting after her mom died. Roller skates,
Princess Di dress, horse on the roof, the occasional calm-down pill, what Dori wanted, Dori would have. It turns out, Jip started off as some old lady’s puppy that she was carrying around in her crocodile purse one time at the 4-H haunted corn maze. Dori was eight or nine at the time. She saw that
fuzzy little head poking out and started crying to have them both, the dog and the purse. Would not let up her caterwauling until Daddy laid out two hundred bucks to this lady, and they went home with a pup in a crocodile purse. I was starting to get to the bottom of Dori. I’d tried explaining to her about my responsibilities as far as Coach and my grandmother and all that I stood to lose if I went AWOL from over there. My future, etc. Dori would just blink her sad, sad eyes and ask why didn’t I love her anymore.
Then my grandmother showed up. These were dark times. We’d had that late freeze that killed everything, including Vester technically, since ice took down the power lines and shut off his air. Then it warmed up a little and the rain set in. Now it was going on June, and nobody could remember a day
where it wasn’t raining. The day Miss Betsy came up, we all sat around the king table with thunder rolling overhead while she went down the list of my various fails, and Coach’s face sagged, and it felt like the same black cloud had followed me all my life.
The problem was me and me alone, as far as Miss Betsy was concerned. Promises unkept. I’d flunked out of school past the point of all reason. She was stopping the monthly payments to Coach for my upkeep. As regards my staying there, playing ball or whatever, that was between Coach and me. Her interest was my education. She said you can lead the horse to water but the horse is not drinking. No need to waste more money. I was welcome to find my own way now, uneducated, and would soon find out there is more to life than kicking a ball. My grandmother never did get the mechanics of it, bless her heart. Thinking football is just the feet.
Even though I was the target, I could see Coach was taking it in the gut. In previous times she’d get on her jag about school, and Coach would wink at me behind her back. Now he was not looking me in the eye. Mr. Dick hung his head. Angus had her gray manga eyes boring into me, sending
some instructions in code that I was failing to pick up on. My stomach felt like I’d been eating rusty nails. I was short on focus.
My grandmother though was loud and clear: no more support checks. “My reversed fortune,” she called it. She said I shouldn’t let it scare me, I’d just have to live it down. Some good was known to come out of bad luck, if you met it head-on. I said thanks for the advice.
Dori’s position for some while had been: Screw them. They didn’t love me like she did, so I should move in with her and be done with them all. I
won’t deny I’d considered it, to live with Dori for real, as a couple. But that was with Vester still alive, just idle thoughts. I had even asked questions testing her out on the practical side. Like, what if we wanted to cook a real dinner, not just microwave or frozen. She said what do you mean cook, and I said, you know, on the stove. Like a roast or something. Grill cheese. She said if I was hungry we had Slim Jims, and some of those juice packets. I told her it was more of a theoretical. She made her little frown that ran a
line between her eyebrows and said the burners on the range were hard to light and she’d never tried out the oven, so I should probably go take it up with Mattie Kate.
But Dori was eighteen, and that’s an adult, whether you know how to work the range or not. People come at it from any number of angles. Some have buried both parents, some have their own kids. Some few probably get to that age without ever having worked any job or gone a day hungry or seen anybody die. Nobody gives you a test, is the thing. The day comes, they hand you a new rule book. Dori was living in her own house with a
plastic fucking horse on the roof and her name on the deed, and I could live there too if I wanted. Miss Betsy was all gloom and doom about me going over the adulthood cliff with nobody’s support checks to save me now. Like that was so scary. Ain’t no hill for a climber, I said. I’ve been doing this all my life.
I came back right away to tell Dori. We microwaved some Xtreme butter flavor to celebrate and put the radio on, and she shut Jip in the kitchen so
we could sit on the floor of the empty living room of the big house that was all ours now. I had some stellar weed from Maggot, and she’d saved back
one of Vester’s fentanyl patches for a rainy day, which this was, still yet and always. We leaned together with our foreheads touching and arms around each other and dipped off like that, listening to Tammy Cochran sing “Life Happened.”
I still had to go back to Coach’s house and get all my stuff out of there. Angus helped. She was peeved as hell, not at me. At my grandmother.
“That bitch, lecturing you of all people about bad luck.” She was emptying out the bureau drawers, throwing my T-shirts and balled socks into Jim Beam boxes. They had suitcases in that house, but it seemed like a complication.
“That’s just old people shit,” I told her. “The cost of doing business with them. They’ve got their rock-hard stools and dried-up old poon, what else are they going to wave in your face? They press the know-it-all thing as their sole advantage.”
Angus worked through the bureau from bottom to top and slammed the drawers, bam bam bam, in a practiced way. Like she moved people out of her house for a living, and got paid by the job. “She was asking you to stick up for yourself. And you didn’t even try.”
“Try what?”
“Self-defense! What’s happened to you, Demon? Somebody cut your balls off?”
“She had my report card in hand. I could have bled honey out of my balls, it wasn’t going to change the permanent record.”
Angus sat down on my sheetless bed, now former bed. I can still picture her there, in her khakis and white sleeveless T-shirt and one of those old- fashioned paper-boy caps. Watching me. She tucked one foot up under her. She had really high arches, like a person born with leaf springs. “You’ve had a serious injury. You’re still limping around like Quasimodo.”
“I don’t really know what that is. But thanks.”
“You need surgery. She’s giving you no grace. Cutting you off in your time of need.”
“I don’t need any surgery.”
I had almost nothing left to pack. I went over to the tall triple windows, the views I knew so well. Two dead wasps lay on the sill with their heads close together like a tiny murder-suicide.
“Your girlfriend’s father just died. People miss school for a death in the family. Goddamned stuck-up old fart-breath bitch, where is the motherfucking compassion?”
Angus cursing somebody out was not casual. She applied herself. She became a creature of fierce beauty, like a thoroughbred running the
Kentucky Derby of cursing. You just had to get out of the way. I let her run my grandmother up the devil’s flagpole while I sorted out the weirder CDs she’d loaned or given me from the ones I wanted to keep. She wanted me to promise I would go back to school in the fall, but I couldn’t see the point.
She said it was only two more years, and would make all the difference in my future, etc. I asked her to name one great job I could do around here with a high school diploma, that I couldn’t do now.
I watched her press both thumbs into the sole of her bare foot, thinking.
Finally she admitted she couldn’t come up with anything off the bat, but that didn’t prove she was wrong.
Her eyes darted to the doorway. Coach was there, leaning on the
doorframe with one outstretched arm, looking at the floor. He wanted me to know the money my grandmother had been sending was of no consequence, this was still my home if I wanted to stay. I said nobody was holding any gun to my head, it just seemed like it was time I moved out.
A gun would have been kinder than the truth, that I was too messed up for football. He knew it. I’d kept myself thoroughly trashed of late, but occasionally I caught sight of it myself, lying out there in the weeds: what small greatness I’d had, I was not getting back. No further success lay ahead for me, and if I stayed here pretending it did, I’d be lying to Coach. Taking advantage of his free ride. I wanted to be a better man than that.
He said he wished things could have turned out different, but he accepted that I wanted to move in with my girlfriend. He wished me well, and ducked out.
Angus was roaming around the room now, touching the few things of mine still left. She picked up the bottle-ship she’d given me. Then set it back on the desk. “How deep are you into the junk?” she asked. Prissy but trying to sound cool, the way a child would say “dog-doo.”
I told her I was still on the painkillers Dr. Watts had prescribed, and that I still felt a lot of pain if I stopped taking them, so. I took them.
She just stared. “You don’t have to bullshit me, Demon. I’ve got no power here.”
I’d never perfected lying to Angus, so I went ahead and told her I was in a little deeper than that. It wasn’t about my knee anymore. She asked, were we talking about meth or heroin. This may have been just DARE officer info, rather than real life, but she wasn’t completely ignorant. I told her I
was kind of all over the place, but not meth. And that I wasn’t shooting anything because needles made me want to puke. She didn’t seem surprised. She suggested maybe I could start backing out of this mess the way I got in, step by step. Maybe if I talked to an adult, they could give me advice. Not Coach obviously. Maybe June. Or Ms. Annie.
“Adult,” I said. Ticked off, all the sudden.
She shrugged. Picked up the bottle again, turning it slowly, looking at the little sails and everything inside there. Oh, I was going places, she’d said.
She did warn me though, about gravity and shit. Not to ask for miracles. She looked up. “You taking this?”
“Yes. I’m taking all the presents you gave me. I’m moving six miles away. I’ll probably be over here for dinner twice a week because Dori lives on air and Reddi-wip and our stove doesn’t work.” I said that with pride:
our stove. Regardless the rest of the sentence. I told Angus the adult in my life was me. A man, living with my lady. And something to the effect of childhood being a four-star shit show as far as I’d ever seen, so I was glad to be done with it. Angus took one of my shirts out of a box, rolled up the bottle-ship in the shirt, and set it into the box, gently. Like a baby in a cradle.
I asked her straight. “You don’t like Dori, do you?”
She pulled out the desk chair and sat in it backward. Stoner used to do that, his arms draped over the back of the chair and his vile brain set on Demon-control. No two humans could be more different. Angus was sticking out her chin, tapping it with the flat of her hand, like there were
words she was trying to get into her mouth, but they’d have to be just right. Not hurtful.
“I do like her,” she said finally. “Remember how you were laid up in bed and she came over with presents all the time? That was great. The happy
little Christmas elf. I loved that.”
“You were not a fan of the chicken.” Sad history of Lovechild: he got out of the tool shed and tangled with the neighbor’s German shepherd.
“Okay, fair enough. Hate the gift, love the giver.” “Why, though,” I asked. “Why do you like her?”
I’m not sure what I was fishing for. Angus folded her hands together.
“I’ve known you how long, four years, going on five? And I never saw you happy, in all that time. Here and there maybe, but not for a whole day. And now you are. With Dori. I can see that.”
If anybody else had ever wanted me happy, they could have fooled me. Possibly Mom, as long as it didn’t cross tracks with her own maneuvers. That’s all people really want, for you to fit into their maneuvers. Angus though, Jesus. Angus was a freaking wonder.
