I dreaded calling June, but I’d promised. I held back certain details. What killed me was how glad she sounded just to hear that Emmy was alive.
Atlanta, not so much. June swore a blue streak, saying Atlanta was too much goddamn metropolis to go start knocking on doors, she was hoping Emmy had gone back to Knoxville. Which if you asked me was about on par, in the goddamn metropolis department.
What we had to do now, she said, was find Martha. June knew about the abortion and a good deal more, it turned out, and had taken Martha in her wings, getting her signed into a methadone clinic. But the nearest one was Knoxville, and Martha didn’t know anybody there, and it was a mess.
Martha would start getting on her feet, come back here to be with people
she knew, then she’d relapse and disappear again. Maybe she was going to Atlanta. June had the idea that connecting with Martha’s orbit would lead to Emmy. She was just thinking out loud at that point, not wanting to get off
the phone, even though she was at work, with people waiting. I said call if she needed me.
I drove around a while to get June’s worries out of my head, and look for a strip to draw. The best ideas usually came that way. My plan then was to go home to a quiet house, and get something done while Dori was at work.
But that day I found her in bed eating one of those ice cream drumstick things with the crumbles that she bought in family packs. She’d finally
blown off one too many hair appointments or stolen something obvious, and Thelma asked her not to come back.
“She said she was asking me as a friend,” Dori clarified.
“Wonderful,” I said. “You’re bringing no money in, you screwed over your best friend, but it’s all fine because she’s not yelling at you.”
Dori said I was a mean bastard with no understanding. Then she made kissing sounds at Jip and held out her ice cream for him to lick. White cream smeared in his old man whiskers, and the way his furry head moved up and down made me think of porn. I was a fully comprehending bastard. Thelma didn’t yell at Dori because you’d get just exactly as far yelling at a box of rocks.
After that, Dori stopped having reason to get out of bed, so I took her TV away. There was a time she could have dragged it back up the stairs, in her scrappy days of moving Daddy’s oxygen and his wheelchair around, but
now on her strict dope and ice cream diet, her weight was down to nothing. She and Jip stomped downstairs, not speaking to me, and from then on whiled away their days on the couch watching View and Price Is Right and That’s So Raven. I’d stopped paying for cable, so we weren’t getting anything but the channels that come in naturally. It made no difference, I’d come home and it might be Mutant Ninja Turtles. Her eyes like sparkly glass.
Then one day I hit the breaking point. I’d gotten a ridiculous estimate for the transmission job, came home to the bare fridge reeking from the last power outage, and I put an empty vodka handle into the screen. From across the room, I still had a good arm. Nothing really shattered, the surface just rumpled and the colors bled down the screen in lines. Idiot. I could have gotten a bottle of Xanax at least for that TV set. Not thinking like a head of household.
She stayed there, wrapped in her blanket, staring at a dead TV. Waiting for me to bring home the junk. I had crazy thoughts of just staying away for a while, cutting her off. Let her start fiending, she’d appreciate me then. But I would never. She was my doll. I wasn’t heartless.
Lonely, is what I was. Tommy saved me in those days, being the most interesting guy you’d ever want to talk to. He still read like it’s an all-you- can eat buffet. Not kid stuff, now it was the news stories coming in. The
Courier would run their toxic local items, much to Tommy’s misery, but all the rest were going to waste, he felt, unless somebody got them printed out and read. Name it, he was up on it: tornado in Alabama, war in Iraq, Toyota moving into the number-three spot for American car buyers. Space, he was
all over that. He said they’re building a four-hundred-million-dollar vehicle to go up and crawl around Mars. I didn’t believe him, but yet I did. You see what people do with money if they have it, it’s two different universes.
Theirs and ours.
At that time I was hanging on to a job at the farm co-op in Norton.
Workwise, much the same as at Vester’s old store, shelving, pricing, hauling feed. But the people, Lord have mercy. The manager Rita was not all that old but had already put away two kinds of cancer, double-ectomy this or that, and she’s talking about bladder leakage before I’ve got my coffee down. While the cashier Les, former miner, had something wrong with every body part, including some I’m sure he made the hell up. Their contest never ended. If I had to referee, I’d go with Les, he used one of those sit-on walkers and his hands shook so bad, the customers always rushed to bag their own purchases before he could break a bottle of Ivermec. You wanted to ask, why not stay home, old man? Get your disability, let somebody else have the paying job. Probably his wife told him to get the damn organ recital out of the house or she’d finish it off.
It was a great comfort at the end of a day to drive over to the paper office and hear Tommy’s national disasters.
He had suggestions galore for Red Neck. We did a whole series of doctor-theme ones. Red Neck rigging broken-down coal chutes into a giant roller coaster for wheelchair people getting to their doctors in Tennessee. A bunch on the free RAM clinics, with the volunteer doctors that fly in every year. I’d seen those tent camps myself, the craziness of it. Mom used to try to get me in, but we never did. People wait weeks for their place in line. I had Red Neck saving kids from the stampede. Red Neck stripping windows and rods from an old coal plant, bending them into glasses for kids that needed them. Red Neck making an old man a new set of teeth out of hard, shiny coal.
Regardless Tommy’s worst fears, Sophie still yet hadn’t dumped him for hillbilly reasons. They had plans to meet up in person if they ever saved up enough vacation time, and meanwhile sent computer letters to each other
like two houses on fire. I’m saying, he could spend hours on that terminal, reading or writing either one. I asked how they came up with so much to say. He said they told each other everything they cared about, everything that got them sad, and what all made them happiest. That was about it. He
said between those three, they could probably keep going till the end of time. If not, they’d come up with another category.
He couldn’t have known he was putting a fist in my chest, telling me that.
Poor Tommy, I’d been thinking, with his imaginary girl, while Dori and I had our fuck-fests. Then Dori and I had moved on to the fuck-yous, with no more categories out there that I could foresee. Tommy had something I never would.
And I had Tommy. We talked about most things under the sun, but I avoided certain topics, Dori, for one. Our not-so-happy love nest. Our extracurriculars, for another. But he was no fool. One night, and this was after we’d been hanging out for months, he told me he wasn’t really supposed to have visitors at the paper office. So we should work on our strips someplace else. I figured this came from Pinkie, thinking I was a
dopehead casing her premises. I said I was hurt at him, not standing up for me. Did he think I would steal shit from their office?
He was hunched over his slanted light table and kept his eyes down, one hand pulling on the little beard that I was finally getting used to. My guts went queasy. Tommy was a stand-up guy, the last one I probably knew, good to his bones. If he’d given up on me, I was a lost person.
“Not a lot here worth stealing,” he finally said, shrugging at the pegboard on the wall, the giant mess of border tape rolls and X-Acto knives.
“Meaning what? If you did have, I would?”
He looked me in the eye. “I signed on to partner with you. I have to trust you, Demon.”
“Okay,” I said. “And?”
Tommy looked as sad as I’d ever seen him. And we’d seen some sad shit, we two. He told me it was about my capacity to function. He had to think about me possibly getting hurt, with all the machines in there, razor knives and such. I knew it was killing him to say this, and even still I said mean things. I was damn well functioning enough to live in a real house with my real girlfriend and not a garage with pitchforks and gas cans. Then I apologized and fell apart and admitted I was a little strung out on the junk. But was fully intending to clean up my act.
“How are you going to do it?” he asked. Elbow on the light table, chin on his hand.
“I’ll just do it. Quit the dope. It’s just, my knee. It still hurts like hell.” The sad hound-dog eyes, the chin propped on the fist.
“But I can cowboy up,” I said. “It’s time. I’ve been thinking that lately. I’ve been through worse, I mean, Jesus, Tommy. We got through Creaky’s S&M camp.”
“I don’t think it’s all that simple. I think it’s better to have help.” I laughed. “Help. Where’s that at.”
“There’s an AA in the church basement two doors down from here. A lot of nights of the week. If you started going, we’d probably be okay with you coming here after.”
“So you’re fucking bribing me to go to AA.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. Sorry. I know, it’s supposed to be anonymous.” “What the hell do you know about it?”
He got up from his light table and walked around, hands shoved in his pockets. “Sophie,” he said. “Both her parents were drinkers. But her mother got sober.”
“Good for Sophie’s mother. All mine got from A fucking A was the hard sell on giving it all up to a higher power. Which was the sum total of her life, Tommy. Never thinking she had any power herself. Just taking the shit life threw at her, till the last round of bumps took her out.”
Tommy sat back down at the light table with his head in his hands. I told him I wasn’t going to live like my mom did, letting everybody tell her she was worthless. I’d stayed alive so far by standing on my own feet, and wasn’t about to give that up now.
“Another thing,” Tommy said very quietly. “Sophie’s mother had to leave her dad, to get sober. She says as long as you’re living with an addict,
you’re addicted.”
I punched my fist into my hand a couple of times and walked out of there before I did worse. Why didn’t he just say it? Didn’t matter. I wasn’t leaving her.
Tommy was as good a man as I was not. That’s all I can say. We had a contract. I went back over there the next evening, and we made our peace. Tommy gave me a key to his garage house, to prove he trusted me. I started working over there, just me and the pitchforks and gas cans, until he finished up his layouts, then he’d come home and we’d work together.
Being alone there was much like being back in the McCobb dog room.
Complete with surprise appearances of Haillie, popping in to scare the bejesus out of me. Thirteen-year-old version, picture the sparkle-Barbie
vibe and hit fast-forward. She showed me the Howliie Fairie drawing she’d kept all this time. I was trying to work, but what can you do. I asked her what the squaller twins were up to, and she said kindergarten. The next night, came back with those brats on each hip like she’s the little mama. I tried to ask the normal questions, how was Ohio, did she have a boyfriend.
She said she had four. Toting those kids half as big as herself, giving me this sultry eye like I just might be number five. Shew-ee missy, I thought, you’ll get there soon, no help from me. Eventually Mrs. McCobb would come shoo Haillie back to the house. Then she would stand there in her
triple-XL sweatpants and mom hair and talk my ears off. Her husband is a genius, his Wate-o-Way enterprise is about to take off, same old same old. I wasn’t depending any more on this nutbar family for my calorie intake or anything else, so I tuned it all out.
Except for this one crazy thing. She said she was scared Mr. McCobb had got into something over his head. Some deal he had with a man she didn’t
know, but he had come over and she did not like his looks. Given my football connections, she wondered if I might know this individual. U-Haul Pyles. Fuck me. I told her to steer clear by all means. But couldn’t stop wondering. Was it real, was she trying to yank my chain. Was U-Haul trying to find me here.
Martha turned up, living in what June called “that crack house in
Woodway” like it’s a famous attraction. The place we’d picked up Swap- Out that time. June wanted me to go over there and collect her. I said Maggot was friends with those fine folk, so he was her man. Failing that, she should call the law. June said no dice. She’d gotten the tip from Juicy Wills, the sheriff’s deputy that she’d dated in high school. Juicy had been coming over for debriefings ever since Emmy ran off, as full of himself as ever. June only tolerated him on the chance of a decent lead. Now that she
had one, she was not blowing it by going over there with a damn peacock in a squad car. Her one goal was to find Emmy, and for that she had to get
Martha to trust her enough to talk. Maggot had agreed to help, but only if I did too.
June was persuasive. She knew Martha wouldn’t be glad to see her, even after all she’d done to help her. That was the reason, really. So it was decided Maggot and I should go over. If we could somehow fetch Martha back to June’s, she’d take it from there.
We drove to Woodway in broad daylight, with Maggot too stoned even to remark on my crap transmission. Pulled up to the house and sat in the car, admiring the porch that was its own twisted universe. Old rotten mattress,
drawerless dressers, propane canisters, sawhorse, refrigerator on its side with four connected plastic chairs on top. Crutches. Fake palm tree. Little Tikes Cozy Coupe. Huge stack of firewood split by some man in his prime that surely was not around anymore to burn it. This was the dregs of three or more disappeared generations. It took me a minute to see the wisp of
Cigarette smoke filled the air, with Martha sitting at the bottom of it, perched on a Shop-Vac. We asked if she wanted to ride around with us. She didn’t even bother asking where.
She was a wreck—her hair a tangled mess, teeth barely hanging in there, everything on her either unwashed or falling apart. She wore old, striped jeans with a busted zipper and had bare skeleton arms, even in the cold. Maggot got in the back so she could ride shotgun, and that’s when I got the full stench—like something rotting, roadkill. I forced myself to ask if she needed food, and she said yes. But before we hit the drive-through, she bailed. I still bought her a burger, but Maggot ate it, saying there’d be more food at June’s. Then he passed out. We drove through that eerie stretch of road where the kudzu vines hang off the trees like they’re reaching for you.
About a mile from June’s place, Martha woke up, realized where we were, and tried to throw herself out of the car, forgetting she was buckled in. I pulled over and let her go, though there wasn’t anywhere to run, just the banks of the Powell River where Mr. Peg used to take us fishing. It was a beautiful spot, hemlock trees standing tall like disinterested giants. She stumbled down the bank, and that’s when I noticed she had one bare foot. She probably shot up and forgot. I’d seen Dori do it more times than I could count. The thought of both Dori and Martha occupying space in my head at the same time scared me. I left Maggot asleep in the car and followed her down to the riverbank, squatting beside her as she shivered. She was hunched over, her face buried in her knees, both hands tangled in her stringy hair.
“I can’t have her seeing me,” Martha finally said. “She hates my guts.”
“June? No, she doesn’t.”
“She’s the one who sent you after me, isn’t she?”
I told her June just wanted to help, but Martha was shaking so badly, I thought she might break. She said she wasn’t taking any more of June’s money because it made her feel worse, like it confirmed she was a bad person. She couldn’t sink any lower, she’d already tried to kill herself a couple of times.
“June thinks I’m the one who corrupted Emmy,” she added.
I told her nobody thought that. What struck me though was how Emmy had said this too, I’m a terrible person. Fast Forward was out there so
cocksure he could do no wrong, with these women run over in the road behind him. I made myself touch Martha’s back, rubbing my hand in a
circle on her thin summer shirt, feeling the hard knobs of her spine. Dori’s were like that now.
I told her June was not one to give up on people, ever. And if Martha had any way of getting in touch with Emmy, she needed to tell her that June still loved the heck out of her and wanted her home. Martha sat wiping her nose with the back of her hand, taking this in. I was trying to give her some usefulness, to keep herself going. But it wore me out. By the time I got her and Maggot dropped off at June’s, it was dark and I was one more casualty of the day.
The whole drive home I thought of Dori, where she was headed. God help me if I’d just seen it. Dori was never going to get clean, she had no reason. I couldn’t picture living without her, but neither could I go on being this lonely forever, waiting for Dori to wake up wanting to share my burdens. The only words we had left between us now were the foreplay to fighting.
She was asleep on the couch, on her back, with one hand on the floor like a storybook girl trailing fingers in the water from her boat. Jip on her stomach, beady-eyed watchman. He growled as I shook her gently. “Baby, I’m going to get you something. Did you eat today at all?”
She rolled over on her side without opening her eyes. “I need you to wake up. Sit up, okay? We have to talk.”
Where to go, if I left, I had no idea. No place seemed possible. Maybe it would only be for a little while. I pushed Jip off her belly and helped her sit up. She blinked, focusing her eyes.
“What do you feel like eating?”
She put her hand on her stomach, shook her head. I said she had to eat. Her eyes opened wider, like my being there was dawning on her a step at a time. Then she looked at me like I was going to hurt her, and I felt like a
terrible person. “Baby, baby,” I said, stroking her hair. It had grown out every which way, finally her true color of blond. I said I loved her and
would never, ever want to hurt her. And she said, The thing is, Demon. I’m pregnant.
