I’d dreaded middle school for the reason of running up against bigger guys that might pound me. Up to that point in fourth and fifth being the tallest, I was the type of loser that people could hate on but were scared to mess with. The world turns though. School dumps you out from top drawer to the bottom again. It’s true Jonesville Middle was a litter of pups, but not without its big dogs. In time I sniffed them out, hunkered around the smoking barrel, lazing in back of class with their big untied shoes propped up on empty desks. Guys that repeated enough grades to roll into eighth with respectable sideburns and pack-a-day habits. They could break my ass.
But sixth grade had tricked me out as a new Demon. I was still me but with sixty-dollar shoes, so. A loser in disguise. Living with Coach was like packing heat. I walked down the hall and the crowd parted. Not like pee-
yew, I smell foster-boy ass, but like, Wow. There he goes.
Nobody at first knew what I was to Coach exactly. Me included. Not his kid, but he was the one to sign my permission forms, like was I allowed to watch the Family Life film. Not that he knew. We’d bring our forms to supper and he’d sign off with his eyes under those woolly eyebrows watching a replay in his mind, jaw grinding his dinner like a cow on grass. He’d have given the okay on me watching porn in study hall. Not saying I did. But if I was anybody’s to claim, I was Coach’s.
And then I was more so, because he let me help out at Saturday practice.
Only as errand boy of the errand boy, but even still, freaking amazing. To be chalking hash marks and dragging sleds and body shields, me, Demon. On the grass of the Five Star Stadium where Creaky took us for Friday-
night prayer meetings and we screamed for a Generals bloodbath. Inside the
Red Rage field house, in the presence of greatness. Or the wet towels and jockstraps of greatness.
I only did Saturdays, not after school, with Coach having homework
rules and Angus being the enforcer. She didn’t like me being at practices, but Coach said a boy can’t stay cooped up, so. I couldn’t put my own
clothes in the washer at the house, but I bagged up dirty team laundry like my life depended on it, and watched varsity guys running drills. Figuring out plays if I was able. Fast Forward was long gone, but these guys had good hands, hard hitters. Coach at practice was a different human. Knees bent in a crouch, eyes sharp, he’d watch guys run a drill or complete a pass, and I’m saying he saw them. Memorized them. Picking out a fumble or even the risk of one, yelling at them to run it again and not screw up this time. Run it again, they did. Twenty times if need be. Where was sleepwalker dad? That guy we had to step out of the way of so he wouldn’t walk through us like doors? Not in the Five Star Stadium. There he fired on all cylinders, riding his Generals till they gave him the shine he wanted, then telling them they were the best of men. Clapping them on the back as he sent them off the field to go shower up.
And one of the men was me. I was three years from any shot at Generalhood, and miles from knowing my ass from any hole in the ground. But one day after he dismissed the team and we’re loading up equipment, Coach yells, “Damon, heads up!” and here comes a ball at my face. I catch it, goddamn miracle, and go to put it with the other balls but no, Coach says let’s throw some passes. Him throwing, running me down the field to see what kind of legs I have. What kind of wind. Now let’s see your arm. I’m shitting myself trying to remember anything Fast Forward ever showed me about holding the ball, using my field of vision. Giving my all.
My all was no great shakes, but Coach made me want to die trying. The big teeth finally fit his mouth, and busted out shining like sun through clouds. Unforgettable. The way he looked past my arms and legs into the soul of the General I might be, totally tuned in on me and the ball between us, curve of a wrist, turn of a head. And I saw the General he’d been on this field once, pumping a crowd, flashing those teeth at some girl in the stands that would steam up his truck in the postgame ceremony. Angus’s mom, I thought. Wondering, was she a cheerleader or what.
But no. Being one of Miss Betsy’s girls, no window steamer. Angus said they’d met at UT Knoxville where he went on a football scholarship.
Running back, one year, then tore up his shoulder and had to major in education. I wondered if Angus even knew this other person her dad woke up to being at practice. I hoped she did. Then I thought about it, and hoped she didn’t.
School took a wild turn, thanks to this one teacher Mr. Armstrong. He was seventh- and eighth-grade English, so not my teacher, but also guidance counselor, meaning he’s looking out for the bigger picture on kids that are headed for trouble.
At Jonesville Middle they’d just dropped me into classes, and it took me one hot minute to go down like the Titanic. Math, pop quiz: “Simplify the expression using order of operations blah blah rational numbers.” A page of numbers and stuff not even numbers, like freaking code. “Here’s your simplified expression,” I wrote on my blank answer sheet: “Fuck me.”
I scratched that out before the teacher collected them up, so I didn’t get sent to the principal. Just straight directly to the dummy class, where I got acquainted with the gentlemen in the sideburns and unlaced size thirteens. We all moved together, a big slow herd, from Howdy Doody math to remedial everything and a lot of study halls where our reading material was Hot Rod Magazine, Muscle Machines, Car & Driver. Or Allure and Cosmo if girls, because we had females among us. Instead of sideburns, some
serious racks. Our destiny was the Vo-Ag track in high school where we’d shuffle to the vocational center for auto mechanic classes or if girls, beauty school. So who cared if we read magazines all day? Getting a jump on our career ladders.
Being new though, I was supposed to check in with Mr. Armstrong. It took him some weeks to work me in, due to other kids needing him to testify for them in juvie court. Busy man. I’d settled in with my new crowd of Jonesville dogs that were not pups but hot bitches and guys that could
pass for beer-buying age. Friends with potential. And the freedom to draw in my notebooks all day, unpestered by education. Then comes Mr.
Armstrong to rock my boat.
This much I’ll give the man: he didn’t lecture me about not living up to my potential. He’d got hold of my DSS records going back to the hospital interviews of Mom’s OD, or before. I’d had one foot in the custody- removal shitpile since birth. I told Mr. Armstrong if he’d read all that, he
knew more about me than I did. He said no, he didn’t, that nobody ought to
pretend to know how I felt. “Here’s what I do know,” he said. “You are resilient.”
I’d heard quite a few fifty-dollar words for the problem of Demon. I asked Mr. Armstrong if he was wanting to put me on meds for that.
“It’s not something to fix,” he said. “It means strong. Outside of all expectation.”
I looked at him. He looked at me. His hands were on his desk with the fingers touching, a tiny cage with air inside. Black hands. The knuckles almost blue-black. Silver wedding ring. He said, “You know, sometimes you hear about these miracles, where a car gets completely mangled in a wreck. But then the driver walks out of it alive? I’m saying you are that driver.”
He was not from here, he had the northern accent. Draee-ver walks out a-
laeeve. I could still understand him though. “You’re saying I’m lucky.” “Are you lucky, if a drunk comes at you through a stop sign and totals
your vehicle?” “No.”
“No, you are not. You got the wreck you didn’t ask for. And you walked out of it.”
I kind of shrugged him off.
“Well, that’s how it looks to me. I see you here in my office. Showing up. Not out there someplace else trying to smash something or put a bullet in it or set it on fire.”
I smiled, recalling Swap-Out and myself doing those exact three things to a deer head trophy in the garbage pile one time. Ten-point buck, in perfect condition before we had our way with it. Because Jesus, those glass eyes.
But Mr. Armstrong was not smiling. He said he’d been advised of my classroom performance. But that people often know more than the teachers are able to measure with their tests. His job was to figure out what those
things are, using other methods.
I said if he was aiming to torture me, I’d just confess right off the top: I hated school.
He nodded. “Understandably. Can you tell me what you like?” Helping with football practice, but I wasn’t giving that up to this guy.
He’d probably take it away. I said I couldn’t think of anything I liked doing that was legal for twelve-year-olds.
“So you’re thinking life will get better in the years ahead.”
“Well yeah.”
He nodded. “I hear that.”
Did he mean he heard me, or just that all kids say this, I couldn’t guess.
He was soft and hard at the same time, eyes like melted chocolate. No
meanness to him. But he’s not giving you a damn thing here if you won’t go first. Heavy glasses, button shirt, more spiffed out than the usual for teachers. Or else a white collar looks that way on black skin. Not something you see much in Lee County. We were used to NBA or rappers on TV, rich guys with gold in their teeth.
Just by waiting me out, he got a few things off me. That I liked to draw. He asked if he could see some of my so-called work, and I said not at this time. Lately I’d been studying on the human form, aka this girl in all my classes they called Hot Sauce that sat in a chair the way ice cream melts.
Soft porn basically. He gave me a pass, but said he would need to see some drawings by the end of the week, no excuses. Like it was an assignment.
That freaked me out. I went through all the notebooks I still had, going back as far as Creaky Farm and the every-night comics of Fast Man saving the kids. Nothing for a teacher to see. I got nervous, then pissed off, and then thought fine, the man wants to get in my skullbox, here you go. I brought him superhero shit. Kids getting saved. He studied over my
drawings like he’s reading the damn paper, then said he had some
assessments for me to do. I thought, Good, we’re almost done here: more tests, more Titanic of Demon going down in a shit ocean.
Wrong. The ones he gave me were all picture tests. Example: here’s some connected squares that are an unfolded box, pick which box it would be after you put it back together. Pages and pages of this crap, so easy it’s like a game. It was the only test I’d finished in forever. I thought it was a warmup for the real tests. Wrong again. Mr. Armstrong tricked me. These
were the special ones they use for Gifted and Talented, which he said I was. Which is ridiculous. All the sudden he’s talking about what catching up I’ll have to do, and if I move into this track in middle school, I can take art
class in high school instead of making birdhouses in shop.
I was pretty upset about it. Getting used to all new everything was screwing with my head. Clothes, people, house. The one thing I could still count on was being an idiot. Now I was supposed to trash what little there was left of Demon and be smart. Would I still be me? And the main question: Can a Gifted and Talented play football? Doubtful. But Mr.
Armstrong moved me into the better English class and signed me up for math tutoring, which turned out to be just me and six righteously hot girls, so I decided what the hell. Next year I’d be on down the road in some other placement and school, where nobody would know how smart I ever was or wasn’t.
My gifts and talents were discovered by others. The first was this guy Fish Head, that had perfected the exact combination of BO and Axe spray to fend off attackers. It was a normal day in math, with me covering notebook pages with drawings because we did smoke-all in that class. Mrs. Jackson would pass out her worksheets and then read a paperback or paint her nails for the rest of the period. To this day, adding up numbers puts that sharp polish smell in my head. This is still the dummy class obviously. I was doing the math tutoring, but it had yet to take.
“Hey Demon, drawl me some different kind of pussies right quick!” Fish Head whispered, and by “whisper,” I mean the entire back of the class laughed.
I was not that acquainted with pussies to know there were different kinds.
I asked did he mean like shaved or not shaved, but no. He had names for different types. “Like tits,” he said. “You know how they’s as many kinds of tits as they is kinds of cars?”
I’d never really thought about it. Not that I was admitting to that.
“Like your long low ones.” Fish Head, not being great with words, was trying to explain with his hands. Other guys jumped in to help. “Slab sides, pontoons,” they said. “Vans.”
Somebody had a Playboy, worth a thousand words like they say. I only got to keep it till the end of class, but I can study a thing and keep it in my mind’s eye. I started charging guys for these drawings, fifty cents for parts, a dollar a whole body. Minus the face. For faces and hands I would have to charge extra because they take the most time, and there was no interest.
Then I told these guys I needed to keep their magazines overnight, to get better familiar on the different makes and models. My chassis fixation took a new turn.
The one thing I could count on, surprisingly, turned out to be Angus. I’d not had any friend since Maggot, and that had been awhile. You don’t just
hang out with a girl normally, but in no way shape or form did Angus seem like one. It wasn’t even the kick-ass boots or knowing cars. It was the zero bullshit. If you ever met a middle school girl, you know what they are: volcano eruptions of bullshit. Every minute a new emergency, the best friend turned enemy. Some guy that was flirting yesterday, now talking to
some other girl. Every body part too big or too small and oh I hate this dress and Lord what if I’m pregnant. My own girl experience didn’t run that deep, I mainly knew this from Angus. She had no tolerance, and needed to gripe. A lot.
“So I told Michaela, look, your ass is your ass. Simple fact. It’s going to look that way whether you’re wearing those particular jeans or not, so why keep asking me?”
“ ‘Or not,’ ” I said, “is something to picture.” “Don’t go there, young friend.”
Too late, I already had. Artist’s rendition. Angus wouldn’t know this, being no part of the Fish Head crowd, but the Ass of Michaela was a legend in its time.
Angus paused her gripe to hand me a leaf bag, Mattie Kate being on a tear that fall about raking up the yard. Maybe just wanting us out of her hair while she vacuumed, or not in Angus’s room on PlayStation all hours.
Raking leaves though. There’s always more going to fall. I shoved leaves in those bags till they were dead packed, like bags of bricks. My disposal
experience was vast. “Okay,” I said. “You preached. Check Michaela off your ass-pain list.”
“Oh, no. This is not Mario where you blast the Goomba and it’s gone.
Michaela is the undead of Monkey Island. She keeps coming back.”
My choice for those leaves would have been arson, but the county had outdoor burning laws, and Angus as far as legal shit was a freaking cop. It made no sense, given the whole thugged-outedness of her, but her worry was Coach. He could lose his job in a heartbeat.
“So we’re in PE, I’m minding my own beeswax, and here comes Donna.” (Cue the Minnie Mouse voice.) “ ‘Elizabeth told me Michaela said to tell you she’s not talking to you.’ And I’m like, I’m sorry, was Michaela under
the impression I wanted conversation? I was assigned to her as partners on our Antarctica project because Mr. Norwood gives me the charity cases, and Michaela thinks penguins live at the North Pole with Santa’s motherfucking elves.”
You had to be amazed any girl would try, but some did. Maybe because of Coach, anything in his orbit being godlike. Or maybe it was Angus they wanted a piece of, the attitude, clothes, whatever. Doomed efforts. She did have guy friends, nerds and gamers, this Sax individual that played drums.
Most guys though were terrified of Angus. Me included. But with Coach permanently checked out, it left a gap. The deeper we went into fall, the less we saw of him at home. The Generals were undefeated, opponents falling
one by one, and every soul in Lee County dead proud. At practice, the smallest screwup would mean an extra half hour of suicides up the
bleachers and Coach shitting his mood all over the grass. One man’s fail is every man’s punishment, a team is a body, etc. At home he lived in his
office watching replays. He never even knew about the Mr. Armstrong business, he just signed the forms without looking.
I admitted it to Angus, and it turned out she was a Gifted and Talented. No surprise, she was a reader like Tommy but more adult ones like sci-fi and female-type shit that could scare the hair off your balls, titles alone. Her scariness pertained to taking apart everything she looked at. Not just
amateurs like Michaela, I mean people on TV. Like if we’re watching some show and a girl is ugly, glasses, etc., Angus would say, Okay, watch.
They’ll make her the smart one. If a foreigner, possibly the villain. Angus could wreck a show like nobody’s business. If a character ever turned up that talked like us, country-type person, he was there for one reason only, stupidness. Wait for it . . . joke! He’s a dumbass! If a girl, worse. She thinks condoms are party balloons and the guy trying to get in her pants is just the sweetest li’l ol’ gentleman. Angus couldn’t believe I’d never noticed this before. You get so used to not even being anything on TV, I guess I was just like, Yay, country kid gets invited to the party!
She gave me the advice of not freaking out over Gifted and Talented. No big deal, they pull you out of class to do stuff that’s interesting. At Easter break you go on a trip. The ocean? She said possibly. One time it was to
Stone Mountain, Georgia, which is practically as far. So the ocean was not out of the running. That would be something. If I was still around next spring, and got my math shit together, and pulled out of the bonehead zone. A lot of ifs.
In the meantime I had to figure out how to live in that big house with Angus, because Coach only came out like a bear from his cave to chew up dinner and crunch his PBR can in his fist and leave it on the table. The big
square teeth looked to be hurting his mouth at all times. Angus told me they weren’t his teeth, by the way. He’d worn dentures since high school after he lost his whole front row biting off more end-zone turf one time than he could chew.
Another by-the-way she told me was her real name. Agnes. Some kids in first grade turned it around to tease her, and to shut them up she said she liked Angus better. Then decided she really did. Likewise, her daddy used to take her to every practice and game, sitting her up on his shoulders.
Coach’s girl, in her tiny Generals jersey some lady made for her, riding high for all to see. Then in fifth grade he stopped letting her come to practices
because it was no place for a young lady. She said fine, she hated football. Then decided she really did. And that’s the story on a motherless girl named Angus. Unbeatable. Coach was a big guy with big hands holding the world by its neck, with every game a win or else the world ends. Storm in a shot
glass type of thing. And Angus was the opposite. A whole ocean, dark and chill.
