One look at her and I was gone. This is the truth, it was first sight. I fell down a well into some shiny dream, and if somebody had thrown me a rope, which some few eventually did, you couldn’t have paid me to climb it. Some call that addiction. Some say love. Fine line.
I wasn’t looking, either. After the Linda Larkins cockup I was ready to sign on to the Angus theory on love, i.e. save yourself the trouble. Just minding my business, making my bucks at the farm store. It was their summer’s end blowout, everything lawn and garden half off, plus free
snacks and soda. The cashier Donnamarie lived for this shindig and organized the hell out of it, like the wedding she never got to have. Employee-zilla. Door prizes, balloons, sunflowers from her dad’s farm set all around in buckets. She bought pink Solo cups and drew pig nostrils on the bottoms with a marker, so that holding the cup up to your face to take a
drink made you look like a pig. I know how that sounds. But you get twenty people in a big circle talking and chugging, and the effect is pretty good.
We were slammed, people stocking up on their pesticides while the kids tanked enough free Dew to keep them wide-eyed for the week. Tearing around knocking tools off the racks, trying to bite the dog chews. I was busy as heck. Restocking, keeping track of the discount stickers that people were known to switch around. Mainly kids, you have to think. A three- hundred-dollar hand tiller marked fifty cents, this is not a criminal mastermind. Anyway for whatever reason I never saw her come in.
Donnamarie had mentioned that heart attack store-owner guy, Vester Spencer, would be coming in with his daughter, and I didn’t give it a thought. Until I looked across an aisle of irrigation supplies and there she
was. Small, slender, long in the waist like a mermaid. Silvery purple hair cut short on one side and long on the other. Face of an angel. I wanted to draw her. Sandals with crisscross laces running up her perfect legs. I watched her talking to Donnamarie, threading her hands around, touching
her dad on the shoulder. He was in a wheelchair, and that’s all I saw because his girl had me hypnotized. I doubt I could have stood up without passing out.
Then Donnamarie yelled, “Demon, come here and meet Vester and
Dori!” Her glittery dark eyes latched on to me, and I staggered over. “Dori,” I said. “Hey. Mr. Spencer.” Hell, I don’t know what I said. Donnamarie couldn’t believe we didn’t know each other, with just the one high school.
Dori’s voice was like a low-running creek, deeper than you’d expect. She said she’d had to lay out of school most of last year to take care of her dad, driving him to his doctor visits and everything. And with him being still so peaked, she probably wouldn’t be able to go back. They had to drive to
Tennessee for the heart specialist, there wasn’t one closer.
What small part of my brain hadn’t turned into Jell-O worked out: no mom in her picture, like me. And she was sixteen at minimum, driving, not like me. Not good. I’d done the older woman thing, God help me. I did have my permit. I’d learned to clutch and shift years ago on Creaky’s ancient International with little to no guidance, but now I had to take the wheel of
U-Haul’s Mustang with him saying blinker this or check my mirrors that, and me ignoring him. No license, so still a kid for practical purposes. I had no chance here. But her eyes. They were not just dark but shiny black like deep water. I wanted to go skinny-dipping in there. I felt the minutes sliding away towards the part where she wheels her dad out the automatic doors, and I die.
I went frantic trying to pop out some reason to get her to myself, far from these shoppers and pigface cups. An old lady wearing what looked like pajamas, I swear, came over asking did we carry Snake-B-Gon. I tried to play dumb but Donnamarie gave me the mom stare, so I went to show her. With my heart banging, for fear of never seeing the fairy girl again. A nymph, I knew those from anime. Heaven’s lost angel. I never took my eyes off her, while PJ Mammaw ran on about the snake she seen in her tater hole and her boy that didn’t believe her. Yes ma’am, I kept saying. Watching
those pretty arms and legs that were begging to be touched.
I got back in time to say a few things, all stupid. If she needed anything, she should let me know. Too bad the chicks were sold out, those little guys were cute as buttons.
“August is late in the year to be counting your eggs,” Dori said. Which seemed like something a nymph would say. I said true, but you never know what a customer will want.
She gave me this amazing smile, black eyes glittering, raised eyebrows that were the same silver lavender as her hair, and said, “Snake, begone!”
Then the dad had a coughing spell and they left. For the rest of the day I wondered if she knew the name I went by, Demon Copperhead. Was she vanishing me? I might never know.
I was a fool to tell Angus, but so afraid Dori would disappear. Like the
dreams you wake up from with your heart on fire because some dead person you cared about was alive, and then by noon it’s just vague nonsense. I couldn’t stand for that to happen. I told Angus I was in love.
“Hold the phone,” she said, not even taking her eyes off the TV. We were splayed on our beanbags in not much more than our underwear. The AC had gone out, and we were pretty shameless with each other, litter pups. Or what Mouse said, eggs in a nest. At the commercial she picked up one of my notebooks and pretended to page through it. Licked her make-believe pencil. “Okay, number five hundred. What’s her name? I’ll enter it before you forget.”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“Oh no, sir, not me. Let’s keep this focused on the object of your momentary affection.”
“Go to hell. Forget it.”
We bickered like this every day. It was not a real fight. We’d only had one of those, and it was over. Angus was thinking now she’d go to community college, not applying to her go-away universities. For all her boss talk, we didn’t know one person that really did that, so probably she
got cold feet about jumping off the end of the world. Coach was her excuse, that he would fall apart if she moved out. So we were good again, at that moment watching Survivor, with me thinking how on an island with Dori I could outshine the city guys as far as making her a house, spearing fish.
Idiotic thoughts, in other words.
After a while Angus piped up. “So who is she?”
“Nobody you know, and I don’t want to talk about it.”
“No problem. I’ll find out next week when she’s crying in the bathroom.
Another victim fallen to the fleeting crushes of Demon.”
I had no more to say, because she was wrong about everything: school bathroom, fleeting crush. Too bad for you, Angus, is what I thought. You’re never going to hear how this is the real deal, a whole new feeling. Not another full day would pass though before I spilled my guts. Angus being
the only human on the planet that could calm down my wild stupid heart.
A few weeks later, I would see her again. Crazy. I live fifteen years in the same county with this magical girl, never to cross tracks, and now she’s the air I’m breathing.
Maybe because I was finally ready for something that good to happen for me. To trust the wild woolly universe, as Angus was always saying I ought. Tenth grade had started righteously, two shut-out games in a row. I played every minute of both, ran four TD’s. Cush Polk was as solid a QB as the
Generals had seen in years, and a solid friend. Maggot, sadly, not so much. High school has its razor-wire walls between these and those. I don’t make these rules, they just are. My teammates were my guys. Horsing around
pantsless in the locker room, to the point of naked feeling normal. Or eating in the lunchroom with covetous eyes on our wide-receiving shoulders. We cruised the top waters. Girls swam in our wake, eyeing us as the direct route to female power. Again, just the rules, ask anybody. (Other than Angus.)
It wasn’t that I believed myself to be hot shit particularly, the opposite in fact. I was the same worthless turd as ever, just a turd as it happened that could catch a thirty-yard pass. I did speak to Maggot if I saw him in the hall with his dark people, but he’d just roll an eye at me through the hair
curtains like, Don’t do me any favors. Until I quit trying. I faked my cred, expecting every day to be busted and sent back to orphan class, but they let me stay, until I started feeling like, Fine, this is me. I deserve this.
Did that make me an asshole? Probably yes.
After hours, I was flying the Fastmobile. Coach knew nothing about it, being dead strict once the season started. Training was not just weight room and practices. Training was clean living. Getting our sleep. Fast Forward would swing by and pick me up after Coach was in bed.
That night, we’d pulled in at the drive-in just ahead of the second feature, as you do. First is always a Disney thing, second is the slasher. The idea
being let the kiddies have theirs, then put them to sleep in the back seat before the real movie starts. Fair enough, where else can a family go for
fun, but trust me, those kids are not sleeping. Mom and Stoner used to put me down like that, and the nail-head guy from Hellraiser got burned on my tiny brain for life.
But you can see the screen from all over, so why not hop from this to that tailgate to be sociable. Fast always came well supplied, just like in the days of our pharm parties. Or on this night, that I will remember to my grave, it was tequila shots and PBR chasers. I took a stroll around on my own and found a couple of teammates, Clay Colwell and Turp Trussell. Clay had a kid brother in a wheelchair, and drugs of choice coming out Clay’s deadlift- ripped ass. They were breaking curfew like me. I felt restless. We found another crew that were second string, not guys we hung out with a lot, but they offered their bong and I took a few hits, to be Christian about it, before moving on. The weed smoke throughout the establishment was sufficient for a modest buzz. It was cold for September. Some kids had built a fire at
the back end of the gravel lot, where they let you do pretty much anything you can think of. Past that was the woods, where people brought blankets and did the rest of what you can think of. I stood shivering in the dark, letting the weed hit, watching the movie, which was Demon Island.
Memorable name, but this movie was dead idiotic. These rich teenagers on some island vacation, handcuffed together in couples, running around for unknown reasons trying to find underpants hidden in the jungle. Told you.
And there she was, swanning her way between the cars. I swear she glowed in the dark.
“Dori?” Saying her name was like begging, pleasegodplease. She stopped and turned, the longer side of the silvery hair turning towards me, then away. Fairy nymph deer fox, if I moved closer she might run away. “It’s me, Demon,” I said, so quietly, like a baby might be asleep between us. “We met at your dad’s store. That day you brought him in for the party.”
She didn’t move.
“Is he doing okay?”
She moved closer, and I could see the little heart shape of her face. The silver eyebrows and pointed chin, the mouth I wanted to suck on. I smelled menthol, or maybe imagined it.
“He’s not ever going to be okay. I left him alone tonight. I shouldn’t be here.”
“Isn’t there anybody else that can help you all out?”
No answer. Her whispery creek had stopped running. Maybe she had no idea who I was. “Sucks,” I said. “I grew up just me and my mom. I had to take care of her a lot.”
“How is she now?”
I wanted to lie. And I didn’t. “Dead. They both are, her and my dad.”
“Shi-it,” she said. “And here I thought the football heroes came from the nicer homes.”
“Even a lowly orphan can be a mighty General,” I said, and God forgive me for what I thought: She knows I’m Eighty-Eight. Girls give it up for that. She shifted her weight, a bird fixing to fly away. I nearly blacked out from how bad I wanted to hold her.
Finally she spoke. “No lie, you’re state property? DSS guardianship and everything.”
I felt more stoned than I was, swimming around in my head for a place to land. I asked how she knew about that, and she said the DSS had their
doubts on her dad raising a girl alone. He never lost custody, but it was touch-and-go. She actually knew Old Baggy. I’d forgotten the lady’s name, but she said it. She knew things I kept locked up. My eyes had made friends with the dark and I could see all of her now: the little white dress and lace- up sandals, the bag of popcorn. I wanted her to throw it on the ground and run off with me. Not to the woods. Some better place.
“So. I better go find my people,” she said. If people meant person, like a boyfriend, I needed to vaporize him. She stretched her head to one side. “They’ll be wondering.”
“Me though,” I said. “I could be your people. If you want. Like, next time, or whatever.” I was not normally this terrible at asking a girl out. Never, honestly. This was epic.
She laughed. “What in the world is scaring you so bad?” “That I won’t see you again.”
“Oh, my goodness, Demon. You don’t have any idea, do you?”
I asked her, idea of what. Even in the dark I could see her black eyes finding me out.
“You’re the one all the girls will be writing to in prison. Oh, my Lord.
They’ll roll on the ground pulling each other’s hair out to get on your visiting list.”
Then she was gone. And I was a mess. She knows my name. That’s what I was thinking. Not, that was weird, what a righteously fucked-up thing to say, that I’m going to end up in prison. What can I say. Love. It’s an
unexcusable train wreck.
For the next while I had weight and occupied space, too shocked to think. I watched the handcuffed movie couples having their bad day. This squatty monster thing beat one of the guys with a shovel till his head came off.
Another guy tried to fight, and it ripped off his nuts. I’m not making any of this up. For about fifteen minutes I’d wanted this night never to end, now I was ready for it to be over. And then. Here comes Tommy Waddles.
Walking along all fretful, balancing a flimsy box of tall cups. My first thought: Who buys drinks from the concessions, cheaper to bring your own, and my second thought: Damn. It’s Tommy. How did I know it was him?
The hair. Still too much for his head, standing straight up. I hollered and he said who’s that, and I told him. I told him I still had his T-shirt he gave me to sleep in at Creaky’s.
He almost dropped his concessions box. We hadn’t seen each other in close to five years. The Lee County drive-in evidently is a portal to other dimensions.
Tommy was still the best of men. He wanted to know everything. I told him my living situation now was the type of fosters we never believed existed: good food, nice people, not in it for the money. He himself was eighteen so out of foster care. He never did get adopted, but that’s okay, he was living in an apartment with friends. He had a job and a girlfriend.
Tommy goddamn Waddles. I came with him to meet his roommates, eight in number, all in one Camaro. At the drive-in you paid per vehicle, which led to any number of pile-in shenanigans. The concession drinks were
because they’d forgotten mixers. These guys were discussing their plan of buying old horses from farmers and selling them for dog food in Canada. After my first Jack and Coke I remembered to tell Tommy I was hanging out with Fast Forward now. I invited him to come say hello, but he said that’s okay, he’d better stay and look after his ever-more-shitfaced roommates.
After my second Jack and Coke I spilled my guts about Dori, that I was in love and everything. Just talking about her made me want to run off and find her, to settle this people question. Tommy got it. He’d fallen for his girlfriend over the computer. His job was at the newspaper, emptying
wastepaper baskets and cleaning their coffee room, but they let him have his own account on a computer and that’s how he found this girl. She was awesome and in Pennsylvania. It sounded like the sex potential was pretty limited there, but probably Tommy was more of a gentleman and not as fixated on that aspect of the girlfriend enterprise.
The movie was winding down, the squatty demon had done about all the damage one movie allows, and I didn’t want to miss my ride home. The Lariat was easy to spot because of this battery camping lantern he always set up on the tailgate, kind of festive. Bugs bombing around the light. Fast Forward had his arm around a tall, skinny girl that guys called Car Wash, not to her face. She had on a silky type dress with her hipbones jutting out like furniture under a sheet. Fast Forward was ignoring her, arguing with Big Bear and some other ex-Generals over who had the better offensive
game, Riverheads or Surry. Nobody making very good points. To be honest, the tequila shots had won the day, but neither was any man giving an inch.
They were going to die on their hill of Riverheads or Surry. Fast Forward tried repeatedly to say “onside kick recoveries,” and for the first time ever, I wondered if he was okay to drive. I could get us to my house, no problem, but getting the keys would be the trick. Unless he passed out first.
And then who should appear but Rose Dartell. Like I said, a portal. She stomped out of the nowhere darkness into our little circle of light. Fast Forward with deep feeling was saying words like sourced overtime and legal lorward flateral so he didn’t notice Rose until she chucked down something heavy in a paper bag, on the tailgate. I felt the clank of the metal in my teeth.
Fast looked at her, wide-eyed, a notch more sober.
She glared back. “I had to drive halfway to fucking Kentucky. BJ’s closed at eleven.”
He shook his head fast, like he’d caught a shiver. “What?” “You’re welcome.”
“Oh, where are my manners.” He ashed his cigarette too close to the silky hip of Car Wash. She edged away from him. “I am so thankful, I’ll tolerate your mess of a face and let you ride around in my truck. But just so you
know, less hideous girls have done more to get there.”
We all went dead quiet. Rose turned towards the rest of us, her pointy teeth glittering. “Just so you all know? Sterling Ford is the worst mistake his dead whore mother ever made.”
And off she went into the dark. I couldn’t believe what just happened. We all have our secret stores of poison, but to strike outright, calling a girl
hideous to her face? The other guys seemed to give no shit, they were pulling out round two of Jose Cuervo and poking into the empty bag, with somebody saying “Didn’t you give her a fifty, man?” Fast Forward saying “That bitch.” And me saying “I’ll go get your change.” It just came out of me. I went after her.
She was moving fast, headed for the back of the lot, but her frizzed-out hair was catching the light some way. And then the red glow of whatever it was that she lit up. She bypassed the campfire circle, a bunch of kids that looked too young to be out here, and disappeared into the trees. It was a joint she’d lit. I tracked her by the smell of it. I didn’t want to scare her, so I called out hey.
“Fuck you,” she said. “Who is that?”
“Me, Demon.” I came closer. She held out the joint, but I passed, feeling the need for a clear head. Some bargaining was called for. “Nobody should talk to a girl that way. I’m sorry.”
“Wasn’t you that said it.” She inhaled and blew out, mad, ragged puffs.
“Has he been telling you he owns his own place now? Over by Cedar Hill?”
I didn’t answer. I wanted to ask her a lot of things. Her face was a scribble of rage.
“Well, he doesn’t own squat. He feeds the horses and cleans their barn over there. Some dude ranchers that moved here from New York. He lives in what they call their guest house, and you know what? It’s a fucking barn. He is exactly equal to a horse’s ass.”
Then why keep coming around? Rushing the scrimmage, bringing him whatever he wants? I settled on one question I could ask. “Did you know his mom, for real?”
She shook her head, holding her smoke. Then blew out. “Before my time.
My mother took her on as a rescue. She died whenever he was real little, and we adopted him.”
I tried to square this with everything else I knew about him. “He’s your adopted brother?”
“Was,” she said. “Until he was nine. They feel guilty over it to this day, but my parents had to unadopt him. Can you believe that?”
“Jesus,” I said. “How come?”
“The safety of their other kids. Sterling tried to kill us, any number of times.”
“Jesus. Seriously?”
“Oh, yeah. We would do anything he said. We idolized him. My youngest brother Ronnie, he liked to of hung himself. Sterling had him up on a chair and the rope around his neck, wanting him to jump off. Tells little Ronnie
this is going to be fun, like a swing.”
“Jesus,” I said. Not at my original best.
“He’s the one that gave me this.” She jutted her face at me. “Claw hammer. He threw it at me on purpose and caught me plumb across the mouth. Let me tell you something, cut-open faces bleed like a motherfucker.”
So much madness crowded my brain. Maggot’s mom slicing into Romeo Blevins. Good people, bad people, what does that even mean? Get down to the rock and the hard place, and we’re all just soft flesh and the weapon at hand.
“Sorry,” I said. “But that’s between you and him. He’s still my friend.”
“His new toy, is what you are. And he does not take care of his toys.” She licked her fingers and pinched out what was left of her joint. Pocketed the roach. I couldn’t see much in the dark, but something told me she was pleased with herself for dropping all this on me. And that I would not be getting any change back here.
“Here’s what should scare you,” she said. “After he laid open my face? I told Mama I fell and cut myself on the corner of my Barbie house. Thirty
stitches worth of Barbie fucking dream house. He flashes that high-beam smile, and nothing’s going to be his fault. If you asked him right now, I bet you money that’s what he’d say happened to me. Barbie house.”
And you’re still here, wanting first position. She had to be lying. Maybe jealous. Even if he did game her family some way, he would have his side of the story. Fast Forward always outsmarted the people that made it their job to throw kids like me in the trash. That was truth. He’d showed me how to make good on places with no good in them, like Creaky Farm. How to survive. For some of us, that’s everything.
“Yo! Eighty-Eight,” somebody was calling through the woods. Big Bear.
I heard him fall down, curse, get up again. “Come out come out wherever you are.”
“Over here,” I said, practically running towards him. That keen to get away.
I did not drive anybody home. I got back to the Lariat, the guys passed me Rose’s brown-bag delivery, and I did my best to drown what she’d told me in a deep well of tequila and PBR chasers. Nobody seemed to remember about Fast Forward’s change, and in due time I forgot about it too. That and more. I don’t recall leaving the drive-in or getting into the house. On my own steam I must have made it halfway up the stairs, because that’s where Angus found me in the morning.
I wanted to die. She used an entire roll of paper towels to mop up piss and vomit. I was no help, due to how bad it hurt to open my eyes. She got me out of my nastier clothes and into bed and went downstairs to get me a Coke. Some remedy thing she swore by, you shake up the bottle to make it go flat. She came back and put the cold glass in my hand. I felt her sit on
the bottom of the bed, and even that hurt. “I didn’t see Coach, so he’s not up yet,” she said.
“Thank God.”
“Yeah, God and all his elves. Your ass otherwise would be grass.”
Breaking curfew and rowdy drinking, at all, let alone in public, were grounds for getting benched or even thrown off the team. It was not just
about our ability to perform, Coach said. We were Generals. Kids looked up to us. “I can’t drink this,” I said. “I’ll puke it right back up.”
“No, it’s flat. It’ll stay down. I told Mattie Kate you’ve got the flu. But I think she’s onto you. Her kid told her you and some other guys pissed in their fire at the drive-in last night.”
Did we? Oh, Jesus.
“She’s none too pleased, but she won’t rat you out. And U-Haul knows nothing.”
U-Haul was practically at the house 24/7 now. Coach had finally promoted him to a real assistant, salaried, for unknown reasons. Even Coach seemed unhappy about it. Something liquid rolled over in my gut. I groaned and took careful stock of my bowels. “What time is it?”
“I don’t know. Morning. It’s okay, you’re covered. Find your flu vibe.”
If it had been anybody but Angus seeing me like that, with my puke-stiff hair and dumpster breath, I would have had to die. “You rock,” I told her. “My guarding angel.”
She was quiet a minute. The grasshoppers whining outside sounded like chain saws.
“Listen, Demon? I know you’re in no mood. But can I just say, you’re fucking up here?”
“Called it. Not in the mood.”
“Okay. But some of your angels out there are not guarding. All I’m saying.”
The disaster of me was not on Fast Forward. I was in charge of myself. If I had too many worries right then, pressure of the game, of being first string, of dying if I couldn’t get Dori—it was my own shit to handle. U- Haul being out to get me, that also. It was a lot. I tried opening my eyes a tiny slit, and the brightness hit me loud. Like light itself was making a sound. I saw the bleary angel of Angus at the bottom of my bed in her white pj’s, and behind her on my desk, that ship she gave me. Just like me, she’d said. A long way to go, and stuck in the bottle.
I ended up promising her I wouldn’t touch alcohol for the rest of the season. Given my condition, an easy vow to make. For tequila at least, the promise was kept. To this day.
