Miss Barks had some big news. She was pumped. Picked me up from school to go for a long drive out in the country, which we both liked. Then dinner at a restaurant of Mexican food called Rancho something that didn’t even have a drive-through.
Great all that, but you don’t just run off with your caseworker and not
show up for work. Ghost was not a guy you wanted mad at you. That tattoo eye staring at you from his throat, Jesus. I never forgot how I’d drawn him in my mind that first time at Pro’s Pizza, as supervillain Extra Eye that could see your thoughts. Now I was like, What if that’s real? What if he can even see this thought? I didn’t discuss any of this with Miss Barks due to her not knowing about my job at Golly’s Market. After I first started working there, I’d asked enough questions to figure out this was a what- DSS-doesn’t-know-won’t-hurt-me type situation.
But now it was just me and Miss Barks in the car having ourselves the biggest time, and I quit caring about Ghost. I was ready for a good day. We took the little winding roads through coal camps where the big blue coal
chutes come down the mountainside over the treetops, like waterslides for giants. All the way out to those high white cliffs that run along the Kentucky line. It was one of your April days where you can smell the plowed fields and see the mountains greening up, like it’s the world saying, Hey everybody, I’m not dead yet! We put on the radio and sang all the ones we knew. And I mean loud, windows rolled down, the two of us singing
“You’re Still the One” like we’re wanting Shania to hear us over in Nashville.
Miss Barks said she never felt so free as she did behind the wheel of a car. I wondered how many years I’d have to work at Golly’s before I could score some wheels. Probably a hundred, given how things were going. Two months had got me some T-shirts, the cheapest brand tennis shoes they carried at Walmart, and if anything more, I wouldn’t know. The McCobbs were keeping my money for so-called safety reasons. Like Fast Forward did at Creaky’s.
Miss Barks said I was looking handsome in my new haircut, so technically that’s two nice things said to me that year. But then she erased it by trying to take credit. Didn’t she say I just needed to speak up? Ask the McCobbs for anything I needed, ask and ye shall receive, the usual nonsense. Smash your fist into somebody’s dashboard and ye shall get noticed, is more like it. But I didn’t want to kill the mood, so I let her think what she thought.
Out by the Cumberland bluffs we got out of the car to walk around that park they have, and stood looking up at the cliffs that go on and on, for the last hundred miles of Virginia. I wondered how it would feel to be way up there on top, looking down. My brain kept going back to that, over and over, wondering how it would feel to jump off. Not to die necessarily, just to see how it felt to be a boy flying through the air. Not that I would. Jump. Or fly either. You can’t help what goes through your head.
That’s where Miss Barks told me her news. Big shock. I had money I never knew about. After Mom died, the DSS filed the paperwork for me to get social security checks, which is the bright side of being an orphan: they pay you for it. Who knew? It wasn’t a ton, some percentage of what Mom was making at Walmart, which is an insult according to Mr. McCobb. But it was still a check, and I would get it every month till I turned eighteen. Miss Barks said they’d set up for it to go into an account that I could use after I graduated from foster care. She said this tended to work out better than putting the foster parents in charge of the account. And I said something to the effect of, Lady, you got that one fucking right.
She wanted me to promise I would use the money to go to college. Like, away someplace, not auto mechanics at Mountain Empire. Which meant promising to do better with my grades. You don’t get to college without passing elementary school, she said, like this was new information. I told her at Elk Knob you get promoted to middle school just for showing up, especially a kid of my size. They need us in the higher grades for the sports
teams. She said that was not the attitude she was looking for. I tried changing the subject, but she was real stuck on that point: Just showing up doesn’t get you anywhere in life. It was not too late to turn myself around, etc. I asked if it was required for me to use this money account for college, and she said technically no. But I would be a fool not to, because that would give me the same chances in life as other kids had.
She was just bitter about not getting to go herself. She’d been taking her night classes, but it wasn’t the same as the away-type colleges where evidently you get to live on your own as a grown-up without even going to work, just reading and studying on whatever you feel like finding out about.
I didn’t know anybody that had done that. It didn’t seem real, honestly. I was just trying to get my head around the orphan bonus. I wondered about
Tommy Waddles. Was he getting paid double for having both parents dead? She said probably. Then I wondered about something else, which was my dad, that died before I was born. Had I been racking up the dough all these years, only to find out on my eighteenth birthday I’d won the freaking
lottery?
Sadly, no. She said they’d looked into that, hoping to track down some line on child support, but there was no father on my birth certificate. I told her I did have one, though, and knew his name. I even knew where he was
buried, due to Mrs. Peggot and Mom having their arguments over taking me to see his grave. The cemetery was in Murder Valley, Tennessee. I only heard them say it a few times, an age ago. But a name like that is not too forgettable.
Miss Barks said none of this was any use. It was my mom’s mistake for not putting him on my birth certificate. And with him being dead especially, an expensive mistake. I said “Damn,” even though I wasn’t supposed to use language with Miss Barks, and for just that once she made a face and said, “Yeah, double damn.” That was Mom and mistakes. She was a pro.
We got back to town before dark, to eat at the restaurant, but I started worrying about Mrs. McCobb driving out to pick me up at Golly’s, me not being there, her being mad over the wasted gas, Mr. McCobb being mad I’d skipped out. And so on. I told Miss Barks I needed to be back before eight o’clock to have plenty of time for homework. There’s always some lie that will make everybody happy, if you work at it. She was all smiles about the homework, and pretty like always. Pink sweater, tight slacks, that angel
hair. I wasn’t cheating on Emmy in thinking Miss Barks was hot, because
(1) Emmy was popular, so if she ever saw me again would break up with me instantly, and (2) Miss Barks was a different category from girlfriend,
i.e. legal guardian.
The restaurant was a trip. They had it decorated up like a different country and even had a couple of Mexican people in there bringing your food. Plus cooking it, you would have to think. I couldn’t tell you the name of one single thing I ate, except rice and some lettuce, but it was all great and there was a ton of it and I stuffed my face like a pig.
Towards the end of dinner she told me she had more news. Not good, this time. Terrible in fact, but it took me a minute to work that out. She was so excited she was bouncing in her chair. She’d saved up enough to take summer classes full time and finish out her teacher degree. In the fall she would start her student teaching. After that, pretty much guaranteed of getting a job as an elementary or kindergarten teacher, and finally would start making some decent money.
Miss Barks was quitting her job at DSS so she could go have her wonderful new career. Quitting me. And all her other precious orphans, screw us. For the money.
She dropped me back at the McCobbs’ before eight, like I’d asked, so they wouldn’t drive out to get me from Golly’s. I came in the kitchen and told Mr. McCobb some lie about how I’d had an appointment with my caseworker and she’d cleared it with Mr. Golly so I’d get paid anyway.
Then I went to my stinking dog room and punched the washing machine. Wiped off the smear of blood with somebody’s black T-shirt that was in the pile, shut off the lights, and planted myself face down on my motherfucking child-size air-mattress bed.
On second thought, I got back up and rummaged around the shelf over
the washer, got the baby monitor, and put it in the mop bucket. I didn’t need anybody watching me cry.
Maybe some kids are told from an early age what’s what, as regards money. But most are ignorant I would think, and that was me too, till I was eleven and started pulling down a paycheck. Before that, my thinking was vague. If you had a job, you had money. If you didn’t have a job, you had your food stamps or EBT card and basically, not money. I didn’t really get that there were gray areas. Okay, I did know about rich people, that some
few made the big bucks from being movie stars, pro football, the president, etc. These types of people living one hundred percent not in Lee County.
Except for this one NASCAR driver that supposedly bought a farm near Ewing in the seventies. Also, the coal miners back in union times. Thirty or forty bucks an hour, old men still talked like those were the days Jesus walked among us throwing around hundred-dollar bills. But for the most part I thought a paycheck was a paycheck, whether from Walmart or Food Country or Lee Bank and Trust or Hair Affair or the Eastman plant over in Kingsport.
Obviously, you live and learn. Now I know, if you finish high school that’s supposed to be a step up, moneywise. College is another step up, but with a major downside: for the type of job college gets you, most likely you’ll end up having to live far away from home, and in a city. My point though is the totem pole of paychecks, with school as one thing that gets you up there, and another one being where you live, country or city. But the main thing is, whatever you’re doing, who is it making happy? Are you selling the cheapest-ass shoes imaginable to Walmart shoppers, or high-
class suits to business guys? Even the same exact work, like sanding floors, could be at the Dollar General or a movie star mansion. Show me your paycheck, I’ll make a guess which floor. If you are making a rich person happy, or a regular person feel rich, aka better than other people, the money rolls. If it’s lowlifes you’re looking after, not so much. And if it’s kids, good luck, because anything to do with improving the life of a child is on the bottom. Schoolteacher pay is for the most part in the toilet. I gather this is common knowledge, but I had no idea, the day Miss Barks said, So long sucker, I’m chasing the big bucks now. Schoolteacher!
I’ve had friends in places high and low since then, and some of the best were people that taught school. The ones that showed up for me. Outside of school hours they were delivery drivers or moonlighting at a gas station or, this is a true example, playing in a band and driving the ice cream truck in summer. They need the extra job. Honestly need it, just to get by.
So here is Miss Barks in her first real job, twenty-two years old, working her little heart out for the DSS. And hitting the books at all hours because
she pretty desperately wants to live in her own tiny apartment instead of sharing with a slob, and for that she needs to climb up the paycheck pole to first-grade teacher. That’s how they pay you at DSS. Old Baggy has been at it so long she’s got no more reason to live, working two shifts a day, going
home to her crap duplex in Duffield owned by her cousin that gives her a break on the rent. If you are the kid sitting across from her in your caseworker meeting, wearing your two black eyes and the hoodie reeking of cat piss, sorry dude but she’s thinking about what TV show she’ll watch that night. Any human person with gumption would have moved on to something else by now, the military or selling insurance or being a cop or even a teacher. Because DSS pay is basically the fuck-you peanut butter sandwich type of paycheck. That’s what the big world thinks it’s worth, to
save the white-trash orphans.
And if these kids grow up to throw punches at washing machines or each other or even let’s say smash a drugstore drive-through window. Crawl in and take what’s there. Tell me how you’re going to be surprised. There’s your peanut butter sandwich back. Every dog gets his day.
