I thought of it every minute of every day. This would get us clean. Now Dori had reason. It’s simple, I said, think of the baby. It was not simple. Dori had never troubled to hide any part of her using. To her mind, it was all about love: sucking an oxy to crush and split exactly in half with me. Saving every patch she shot, for me to lick the leftovers. Now she got wily on me, only ever shooting up after I’d left the house. Sweet thing, that was Dori trying to be good. I might have been doing some version of the same.
Stupid is all the word I’ve had to cover much of my time on God’s grass.
But it’s not stupid that makes a bird fly, or a grasshopper rub its knees together and sing. It’s nature. A junkie catches his flight. That sugar on your brain cells sucks away any other purpose. You can think you’re in charge.
Walk around thinking this for hours at a time, or a day, till the clock winds down and the human person you were gets yanked out through whatever
hole the devil can find. Learn your lesson, get your feet up under you. You will be knocked down again.
For Dori’s sake, I went to talk to June. I knew she needed to be seen to.
They have things they do for the pregnant now, heartbeat and such. Vitamins, I remembered Mom getting those. And just by the way, maybe also some help getting her off the junk.
What I didn’t expect was to find June so pumped up on her own news, she wasn’t all that excited over mine. Martha had a bead on Emmy’s
whereabouts in Atlanta. June actually had a street address, and was going down there. Some hellhole, no doubt. She was peeling potatoes while she told me all this, long slips of skin flying fast into the sink. The people I
know are seldom idle with their hands. Men smoke or fix things, usually
both at once. I once watched a man take down a dead poplar from the top down, working high in its limbs with a chain saw in one hand and a Camel in the other. Women fix a kid’s hair or wipe a nose or sew on a button or peel potatoes. And smoke, though not June of course. I sat on a stool at her kitchen counter, wishing I could draw her hands. I asked, “What makes you think she wants to come home?”
No answer for half a potato. Brown and white peels mounding in the sink. And then: “Emmy is in no position right now to know what she wants.”
“People get tired of hearing that,” I said. “She’s eighteen.”
June’s eyes flared, but she kept peeling, talking without looking up. “These aren’t adult choices we’re talking about. She’s stuck down there with no means, getting used by terrible people keeping her strung out, whatever, raped. There’s parts I can’t even think about.”
“Embarrassed,” I said. “There’s that part. She’d sooner die than have you know.”
June’s hands went still. “You need to come with us.”
I almost laughed, for how doable it all seemed to June Peggot. Like she’s Lara Croft, and we’re going to go raid the tomb. I said no, I couldn’t leave Dori for that long.
She narrowed her eyes at me, still working away, the slip-slip of the peeler sounding mad now. “Listen to yourself. Dori’s a grown woman, soon to be a mother. What do you think she’ll do if you leave her unsupervised, wet the bed? Burn down the house?”
I didn’t want to admit that both were possible. I had other excuses, my job at the store, a strip I had to finish by Saturday. June said she was going on Sunday. Slip-slip-slip. I told her these were scary people, and she should go with somebody that packs heat, like Juicy Wills.
Hell no on Juicy, she said, multiple reasons. But damn straight on scary. She’d been getting threats from some Rose person that claimed Emmy had stolen her man, and if the bitch ever turned up back here she was asking to get her pretty face scarred up. June had no intention of going to look for Emmy without a sidearm. Her brother Everett had an open carry permit that he swore was good in Georgia, and he’d agreed to go with her.
I tried to picture this brother as Terminator 2. Everett. All the good looks and kindness that came with the Peggot package, a linebacker in high
school. He and his wife owned the fitness club and tanning salon in Big Stone, so. He was pretty ripped, but still. June was batshit.
“Fine then, you don’t need me,” I said.
“But a friend, somebody her age. Like you said, she’s humiliated. She trusts you.”
That aggravated me, getting invited as the boy, not the man. “Take Hammer, then,” I said. “Last of the nice guys. Deer rifle, pre-engagement garmin ring or whatever the hell.”
June flew off the handle at me then, saying that would be cruel, pulling Hammer into this. All he’d ever wanted was to love that girl and keep her safe. If only they’d stayed together. She dropped her naked potatoes in the water to boil, wiped her hands on her apron, and used them to push her hair back from her forehead, one of those little habits that ran right down the Peggot generations. Those hands, that split second of babyish wide forehead laid bare, exact same look in their eyes. For one second I was seven years old playing Standoff with Maggot, our bare feet planted, trying to push each other over into the mud. Me winning, Maggot refusing to lose.
It was all doable. Myself in June’s car headed south at an ungodly hour of Sunday. Atlanta was almost six hours each way, and she meant to get down there and do our business by daylight, before the vampires came out.
Everett was napping in the passenger seat, his big head nodding forward, his Kel-Tec PMR-30 on the console between them. Concealed carry didn’t cross state lines, and June did things by the book. I rode in back with the
supplies she seemed to think necessary: old soft quilts, cooler of sodas, boxes of crackers, and such. So we’ve got two different movies running here, front seat tricked out for Blade II, back seat is Lassie Come Home.
I felt bad that I’d lied to Dori, or really just told her nothing, but she’d have gone to pieces to hear I was leaving the state. My bigger worry was getting through this whole day without a bump. I’d fueled up on the front end obviously, but with nothing additional for the road. Laws were laid
down. We were taking I-75, the oxy expressway from Florida. June was so clean and prepared on all fronts, she probably wanted us to get pulled over.
June and Everett spent a full five hours bickering. Which way was faster out of town, Veterans Highway or 58. Whether the car was too warm or just right. Whether Easy Cheese was God’s gift or a disgusting waste of a good metal can. June would put the radio on an eighties station, and Everett
would drive us nuts singing in a ridiculous high voice with Eddie Rabbitt or Rosanne Cash, until she’d let him change it. Then June would grunt out her own made-up words to Beastie Boys and Jay-Z. “Ooh ooh bitch, gotta big dick for ya here.”
“You are so far out of it, Junie. ‘Song Cry,’ it’s this beautiful love story.” “Just playing it how it lays, brother. That’s what it sounds like to me.” “Heartbreak of old age. Hearing’s the first thing to go.”
Everett and June were five years apart, and took no time at all getting back to seven and twelve. They argued over whether Everett peed on his
shoes at the Peggot reunion one time, and whose fault it was the dog got run over, and an entire year of the older kids supposedly stealing Everett’s
lunches and convincing him their mom wasn’t packing one for him.
“Oh my God Everett, are you never giving that up? That did not happen.” “Uh-huh, sad. I reckon it’s the memory that goes first.”
The surprise to me was Mrs. Peggot packing lunches at all. Maggot
always bought school lunch. You could see how those seven would have worn her down before he ever got there.
By noon, we were looking at Atlanta. Cloud-high buildings spiking up in the distance, pointy or square on top, the colors of steel and sky. So much
like a movie, your eye couldn’t accept it was real. June’s car was pretty sweet, I should mention, Jeep Cherokee, white leather upholstery. All of
this briefly being cool enough to forget the FUBAR aspects of this road trip and pass around the snacks. I was still in the good part of my day, before
fine and dandy edges over to sad and irritable. Then come sweats, yawning, itching, goose bumps, shaking and puking. These phases I could read like a watch. I was optimistic on getting home before fucked o’clock.
June had her maps and her battle plan. City driving didn’t faze her, due to the Knoxville years. She was all center lane this, right on red that, arm- over-elbow turns through these hectic parts of town where there were more people in the intersections than cars. Peachtree Street, she announced, steering us down this video-game canyon of sky-high towers with few trees in sight, peach or otherwise. “Stopping for coffee,” she announced, and parallel parked like no driver I’ve seen before or since. Slick as a rabbit finding its hole. I added it to the list of June’s superpowers. We went in a tiny restaurant where she knew the rules, pay first, order off the long list of items that in no way shape or form sound like coffee, but are coffee. Tall
flat frappo nonsense. She said this was to fortify our nerves, and bought me a blueberry muffin.
We sat at a tiny table and finally those two went quiet. I thought of the day I met June, the Knoxville restaurant where I couldn’t eat due to everything going on outside. I’d felt like I did now, jumpy. Anxious in the back of my mind for a doorway out of all this, back to the green true world. But I wasn’t a kid now, I knew things. For one, that Xanax would put much of that feeling to rights. A couple near us drank their coffee and had a whisper fight. Hundreds of people passed by outside hugging their coats around them, looking at their feet, walking fast. I wondered what they were taking for the brain alarm bell that goes off in a place like this, where not
one thing you see is alive, except more people. Everything else being dead: bricks, cement, engine-driven steel, no morning or evening songs but car
horns and jackhammers. All the mountains of steel-beam construction. And this, June informed us, was the good part of town.
After we got back in the car, she realized Everett had hidden his pistol in the glove compartment and said technically that was a conceal. He said technically he was not getting his five-hundred-dollar Kel-Tec stolen while she drank her fucking latte. I was about an inch from You kids quit fighting or that piece goes out the window. Irritable phase possibly under way.
The directions she’d written down got us to a neighborhood that was less crowded, in fact the opposite. Not a soul walking around. It looked somewhat like various parts of Lee County thrown together at close range. Bluffs, she called it. This is February so it’s still pretty bleak, but you could see how it might green up in the right circumstance. Sad-looking trees, embankments, tall dead weeds standing up between the small houses.
Junked-out porches to rival the Woodway crack house, other houses abandoned, boarded up, or burned out. About one in ten, though, were tidy and painted up nice. Old people like the Peggots, you had to reckon, that stood their ground while the youth went to hell. But everything was jammed together, a lot of houses with no space between. Tires lying on the sidewalks, trash blown up against chain link.
“Where the mothafuck are we?”
“Everett,” June said. “You need to shut up.”
The first human we saw was an old guy lying in the street on his side, slowly moving his legs like riding a bike. A few blocks later, some young
guys in big clothes, carrying black plastic bags that pulled down with heavy
weight, like full udders on a cow. Then another old guy in a hat and mittens parked on the street corner in a wheelchair, watching nothing go by. Here and there, a little store would have people hanging around, but mostly the
streets were deserted. Maybe because it was Sunday, with the Godly in church and the rest sleeping off their sins.
“Damn, mothafuckers,” Everett said now and again, until June blew up. “Everett. You’re one of about twelve men I know that aren’t in any kind of trouble. Definitely not a thug. Could we just agree on that being a good
thing?”
The address turned out to be a rough-looking place. We pulled up in front, killed the engine, and sat looking at this house. Low and wide, flat roof, moldy white paint, a lot of the windowpanes covered with cardboard. It looked like a brutal smile with missing teeth. Everett picked up his Kel- Tec and checked the safety. “You two stay in the car, I’ll bake the cake.”
June made this explosion, like a crying laugh. “I really am going to kill you with that.”
Everett put the piece on his lap.
“I’m just going to knock on the door,” June said. “If it turns out she’s here, I’ll ask if we can all come in and talk to her. For God’s sake, Everett, behave yourself.”
To get to the door she had to step over a pile of what looked like Pampers and blue plastic. In her jeans and red winter coat, she looked like a kid waiting outside for somebody to let her in. Normally she’d have her doctor outfit, with the whole authority aspect. She waited a long time. We had the car windows down, listening, ready to leap into action. I could hear Everett breathing. If I had to guess, I’d say he was terrified. More knocking, more waiting.
Anybody else would have given up. After about ten minutes she went around and started knocking on windows, calling Emmy’s name. I never fully believed we were going to find her, but watching June duck under hanging gutters, banging her knuckles on broken casement windows, I saw it was the opposite for her. No other option would fit in her brain. I got a full-body memory of the Undersea Wonders Aquarium, Emmy and June’s standoff over the shark tank, nobody backing down. I’d helped Emmy into the tunnel that day, but I also lied to her. If something scares you, get your ass out of there, I should have said. Everything will not be okay.
The house next door was one of the nicer ones. Painted shutters, one of those whirligig garden things in the dead flowers. A guy was standing on the porch watching June. We hadn’t noticed him until he yelled something
like “Hey, lady,” and both Everett and I jumped, and then we saw him. Old guy in a coat and cloth slippers. White ring of hair around his mostly bald brown head. June walked over to his porch and shook his hand. We watched them talk, June nodding, looking back at the grimace house. Touching her eye, asking questions, nodding.
She came back to the car, belted up, didn’t start the engine.
“He said there were some people living there, and they were evicted.
Including some young women. One was white. Evicted is not exactly what he said.” She shook her head fast, like trying to clear it. “There was a shooting. And they left.”
“June. We should just go home,” Everett said.
“He thinks they went to a house not too far from here. He doesn’t know the address, but he said it’s a brand-new place. Like maybe just built, with nobody technically living there yet.”
“He’s making shit up to get rid of you,” Everett suggested. “Who’d build a house here?”
“I told him I was looking for my daughter, and he said he understood. He said this new house is a place they’re using right now, I don’t know for what. But she could be there.”
“This is crazy, June. It’s too dangerous.”
“Damn you, Everett. Where’s the gangland tough shit now?” No answer to that.
She banged her open hands on the steering wheel. “There’s not a damn thing messing people up around here that I’m not seeing in my office ten
times a day.” She threw the car into drive, and we drove. Up and down the blocks. The same old man still in his wheelchair, the other one still lying in the road. The leg-pumping had ceased. We didn’t know what we were looking for. Nothing looked remotely new. I was hungry and itchy, moving towards the sweats. Everett kept picking up his piece and putting it down, until June smacked his hand.
Then we saw the house. Like it had dropped out of the freaking sky of newness.
We all three got out of the car. A front yard of fresh bulldozed dirt, factory stickers on the windows. The front door was the modern type with
an oval-shaped fake church window in it. June knocked, no answer. A little metal box type thing hung on the doorknob, sprung open, with a key sitting there in plain view. June tried the key in the lock, and then we were in.
It was all new everything: nice wood floors, strong smell of paint, no real furniture. Just a card table with bags and a scale, a white dust of coke. In the corner a guy was slumped on the floor with his back against the wall, head flopped forward. We held our breath, watching. The bill of his oversize black ball cap covered his face, so it was pure guess as to sleeping, dead, or dipped out. I thought number three, based on the splayed legs and open hands.
June touched Everett’s shoulder, then his pistol, and pointed to the guy. Held up her flat hand: Keep him there. She and I moved through the house. A hallway, bedrooms. We made almost no sound, but the place was so empty it echoed anyway. I pushed open a half-closed door and almost pissed myself. Little kids, two of them, on a pile of opened-out cardboard pizza boxes. One was asleep and the other one sitting up, playing with the plastic rings of a six-pack. The awake one looked up at us wide-eyed, like June and I might be just the ticket. June stood with her hand over her mouth. I had to pull her back out the door.
We didn’t check all the rooms, because the next one was where we found Emmy. She and another girl were passed out on a mattress, both half naked. I mean exactly half. Emmy had on a short skirt and snagged black tights and nothing at all on top, while the other girl had a blouse and jewelry, a shiny yellow jacket, and from there down just legs and pussy. Like they’d had to split one outfit, underwear and all. June still had her hand on her mouth and was looking at me, like I knew what the hell to do. Run, I thought. The room smelled ripe, like sex, and the sight of Emmy’s bruised
face and pasty skin made me sick. I walked over and scooped her up, more heft to her than Dori but not by much, she was maybe ninety pounds. I’d
once been a man to deadlift three times that, easy. The man I was now got us out of there before any eyes opened.
June waved the two of us up front, got in the back seat with Emmy, and rolled her up in all the blankets. Everett drove too fast, yelling “Fuck, fuck, fuck, I don’t know where I’m going.”
“My God. Those babies,” June said. “What if one of them is hers?” And then in another minute, “What am I thinking? She’s only been gone six
months.”
“We can call Georgia DSS,” I said. All of us pretty far out of our minds.
Everett found his way onto a city freeway and pulled over. June gave him her map to figure out how to get back to I-75, then got out, opened the back, and fetched her medical bag. We sat on the shoulder with cars whizzing past, rattling us, while June crouched over Emmy in the back seat, listening to her heart, feeling her bones and organs. Emmy’s hair was cut weirdly short in a scary way, with parts of it missing. Her eyes were open now, jumping around at all of us, but she didn’t talk. Maybe in her opinion we
were a dream. I took off my zipper hoodie and gave it to June to put on her. Then she wrapped Emmy up again and said, “Let’s go home.”
Too much adrenaline will age you before your time. I’ve heard that said.
What I know for sure is, it will push you too fast through your day. I was into the sweats and beyond before we got out of Georgia. I had to ask Everett to pull over to save June’s white leather seats. She made me get in the back, gave me a 7 Up and a pill to chew to settle my stomach, that she said would make me sleepy. Nothing for the shakes and sweats. She put a blanket around me and laid me on the dogpile so Emmy and I were dominoed onto June, our little back-seat rehab ward. June sat up straight with this look on her face like she wants to kill us both, but she’s not going to let us die.
Everett was free at last to control the radio, and for a long time nobody said a word. I drifted in and out. Then somewhere around the Tennessee line, June started talking. Low, quiet. I was going to have my own child to think about, soon. She said she’d had this same talk with my mom before I was born. They were friends. I never knew that. June was the reason the
Peggots took her into their trailer. They actually lived there together for a short while, before June moved away with Emmy and I got born. June had known my dad, too. She said you couldn’t know one without the other,
those two were joined at the hip. I asked what he was like. She said exactly like me. In looks, word, and deed. A beautiful man with too much heart for the raw deal he got.
That didn’t sound like me. So probably none of it was true. I asked her how he died.
She frowned at me. “Are you testing me? Or do you really not know?”
I was too far gone to fake anything. I told her I knew it was on the Fourth of July, at Devil’s Bathtub, and that was all. June told me he drowned or
broke his neck. Probably both at once, because he dived from up high on
the bank. I asked her why did it happen. She said there was talk that he was drunk or showing off, but Mom swore it was her fault, he was in so much hurry to get to her. She’d gone in the water without knowing it was deep.
Mom couldn’t swim.
June was in a place I’d never seen her go. Relieved, wrecked, talkative. Telling me things nobody else ever had. She said every time she saw me, it made her wish she’d tried harder with Mom, back in the time they were friends. But after the accident and everything, seeing my dad killed, Mom never wanted fully to be in the world. June said it was different for me, I had so many good reasons. She looked at me hard, like trying to read something written inside my skull. “Think of that baby coming. I know how hard it is, but you’ll get clean.”
I had my doubts on what June knew. But I was polite enough not to say: Get back to me after you’ve done time with your racking bones in your sweat-swamped sheets, crying for the lights to go out on your whole damn being.
June kept talking. As far as what lay up the road for me and Emmy, she knew some things I didn’t, and that part killed her, she said. She felt cruel every time she set somebody up with the methadone clinic in Knoxville.
Martha being not the only one, far from it. She had patients getting up at three a.m. to get down there and back before work, with their kids in the
car. No closer options. But something new was coming out, that she hoped she could prescribe right out of her clinic. A lot of paperwork involved.
Suboxone. A word none of us knew yet.
The first thing we had to do, she said, was quit thinking this mess was our fault. “They did this to you,” she kept repeating, like that was our key to salvation. Like there was even a door.
We got back after dark. Emmy had come around some by then, drinking a Coke, saying not much. June got some promises out of me before turning me loose. But I was so far gone by that point. I’m not proud of it. I had
some stuff in the glove box of the Impala, and for the last many hours had been thinking of nothing else. Sitting in June’s driveway, I did an 80 before I drove home to Dori.
