Crickson was a big, meaty guy with a red face and a greasy comb-over like fingers palming a basketball. Little eyes set deep in his head, pointy nose, your basic dog type of face. But a meaner breed than the two old hounds lying on the floor under the cold wood stove in his kitchen. They looked
like whenever frost came around, they’d be right there ready.
The old man’s voice came out in a Freddy Krueger whisper, like it hurt him to talk so you’d damn best listen. Yes I had seen that movie, at the drive-in, from the back seat with Mom and Stoner thinking I’m asleep.
Education of many a Lee County kid. Scary guy says sit, we sit.
Miss Barks meanwhile was working down her checklist, nervous as heck.
Would I sleep in the same bedroom as his other fosters, was it inspected, was he briefed on me by phone that morning. He was like, Get this over
with, lady. The other boys had left for school and he needed to be out seeing to his cattle. Miss Barks wasn’t disagreeing on any of that. I sat tight, getting my gander at the inside of Amityville: nasty curled-up linoleum,
yellow grease on the wall over the stove, open jars of peanut butter and crap all over the counter. A crust of scum on everything. I recalled her saying
this man’s wife had passed away. I wondered if her body was still lying
somewhere back in that house, because I’d say there’d been zero tidying up around here since she kicked off.
Miss Barks finished up and handed over a big yellow envelope. He asked was his check in there. She said he could look for it in the mail like always. I couldn’t believe she was going to leave me with Freddy Krueger, but she gave me those same eyes I’d seen on Mom a million times: Sorry. And off
she went in her little boots, click-click. I wondered if DSS had anything like
Step 9, where you eventually have to apologize to all the kids you’ve screwed over.
Once she was out the door, I thought the old man would run off to his everloving cattle, but he was in no big hurry, pouring coffee out of a dirty- looking pot into a dirty-looking cup. Under his flannel shirt he had on a long-sleeved waffle undershirt with the cuffs all frayed and grimy, like he lived in that one shirt day and night. Regardless Mom and her sloppy ways, she did not raise me to be unclean. I couldn’t stomach watching the old man slurp his coffee.
He looked over at me like, questioning, so I said no thanks, I didn’t drink coffee all that much. He said something in his creepy strangled voice, so quiet I couldn’t make it out.
I asked him, “Sir?”
“I said, the other boys ain’t liking a biter. I done told them. Ain’t nobody likes a biter.”
I looked at the dogs under the stove, trying to work out what he meant. They looked dead actually. Or so old, they would have trouble gumming down cat food out of a can. But this seemed like something I would need to know. I asked him, “Which one bites?”
He looked at me like I was an idiot. “You.”
He watched out the window while the DSS car drove away. I noticed his fly was undone, or maybe the pants were so old the zipper had given up the ghost. After a minute he whispered, “A wonder nobody’s yet filed off your teeth.”
I had the day to get sick to my stomach, waiting to find out how much the other boys hated a biter. Stoner must have gone on the record. So I might as well have a sign on my back saying: Druggie Mom, Queer Best Friend, Hand Biter. Whatever Crickson told his fosters that morning, everybody at school was hearing now. I never wanted to go back there. Or be here. I was running on dead empty, but Crickson didn’t ask if I’d had breakfast. The kitchen had this rank cooking smell, a cross between feet and bacon, and even that was making me hungry. But he just downed his coffee and said, “Let’s go.” And outside we went, for a day’s work.
We started with haying the cattle. The barn smelled like cow shit, no surprise, but I mean this smell is a freaking storm front. Enough to make your eyes water. The cattle were muddy and black and pushy and of a size
to kill you if you weren’t quick on your feet, and that’s about all I can tell you about haying cattle. A pitchfork was used, hay was thrown around. He said he had around two hundred head, most of them out on pastures. You don’t hay your cattle in August except the pregnant heifers, which these were. He asked what I knew about cattle, which was nothing, and could I drive a tractor, ditto. I could see he was pissed about how worthless I was.
He asked if I’d ever put up hay, because that needed doing if the damn rain ever stopped. Had I topped or cut tobacco, that was also coming. He said he kept the boys home from school for tobacco cutting because it was God’s own goddamn piece of work to get it all in, so he hoped I wasn’t keen on school or anything. I said yes sir, no sir, trying to ride it out.
I followed him around, carrying whatever he handed me. It rained on us off and on. All I could think of was home: Mrs. Peggot that would be worried sick about where I was. Our creek and its excellent mud. On the bright side, this guy would not be making me scrub any floor with Clorox. But I might at some point decide on doing that anyway. We moved cattle through gates. We walked for hours checking a ratty old fence for barb wire that had come loose off the palings. He had a giant staple gun that looked and sounded like a weapon of war, and he used that to attach the barb wire. He said pay attention because tomorrow I’d do fence lines on my own.
Seriously. Putting that weapon in the hands of me, a known menace.
I was too hungry to think straight. Finally it was time to go have lunch, which he called dinner but who cared. It was bacon-tomato sandwiches. He fried up the bacon and tomatoes both, in a pan looked like it had lived its
life without a wash, no fresh grease needed. I could see bacon was the gas for the engine of this house of boys. Big packages in the fridge. Loaves of bread still in the wrappers, stacked up like bricks on the counter. So, some good news.
After lunch we walked more fences and changed the spark plugs in a tractor engine. It was long in the afternoon before I spotted two boys walking up the lane from where the bus must have dropped them out by the highway. They went in the house to dump their backpacks, then came running out to the barn where Mr. Crickson had left me with a hose and a scrub brush, spraying out a bunch of slimy grain buckets, ready at this point to puke from nervousness. Sure enough, the littler one bared his teeth at me, let out a wolfman howl, and laughed like a kook.
I said Hey, I’m Demon. Trying my best to look like just, whatever. Not a person that bites. The bigger one said he was Tommy and this here was Swap-Out, and he grabbed the buckets I’d cleaned and started stacking them. The smaller kid went in the tool room for a shovel and went to work shoveling shit in the far end of the barn. This kid Swap-Out, everybody
knew. He’d been in second grade with me, not his first time at it, and probably was still stalled out in the lower grades due to something going on with him that affected his mind and his growth. He was small in a freakish way, weird face, the eyes and everything not quite where they should be.
People said it was from his mom drinking too much while he was in the oven. I always thought, And mine didn’t? But Mom claimed she’d stayed on the wagon for the most part with me, at least in the early months, due to every single thing she looked at making her want to puke. My good luck.
“We knew you’d be coming,” Tommy said. Which I said was interesting because I sure didn’t. He said he didn’t mean me exactly. Some tax bill
comes due on the farm in April and September that the old man needs the money for, so usually there’d be an extra boy coming then. I had no idea what to make of that. I asked Tommy how long he’d been living here and he said a couple of years, off and on. Sometimes he was the April and
sometimes the September. He said Creaky’s wife had always liked him
before she died, but Creaky hated him, so now Tommy came and went as needed. I just said, Huh, and left it at that.
This Tommy individual I’d also seen at Elk Knob Elementary, but he was some older than me, at middle school now. Last name of Waddell, so people called him Tommy Waddles, which he did. He was a chubby teddy-bear
type of kid with big round eyes and brown hair that looked like it was too much for his head. It stood straight up. Some guys in those days were trying for the Luke Perry hair thing from 90210, but in the case of Tommy you could tell that wasn’t gel or trying, that was just all Tommy. Also too much Tommy for his clothes: sausage arms in his jacket sleeves, jeans straining at the belt. Now I knew why. Foster care. I don’t reckon they look at you all that often and say Hey kid, you’re busting out a little bit, let’s go shopping.
But after all my fears over getting judged as a biter, Tommy was so nice.
He showed me where to stack the buckets, how to go in the corn crib and get the corn for graining the heifers and calves, and various things we had to do before going in. The corn crib was a small barn type of thing, so full of rats you had to look where you stepped. Seriously, they ran over your
feet. If something was hard to lift, like a grain bag, Tommy tried to do it. He explained things without acting like I was an idiot. He said the cattle were Angus, boy or girl either one, all called Angus. The cows got bred to have calves, and the boy ones would get castrated into steers and raised up in the pastures to about half grown. Before winter came on hard, they’d be sold to the stockyards and go out west someplace to get fattened up the rest of the way. From there, hamburgers.
Tommy talked sweet to the cattle whenever we were graining them and putting them up for the night, even though they were just dumb giant monsters. He was the same with me. Like he was trying to make up for all the bad things in our lives. At least I wasn’t looking to get castrated and turned into hamburger, that I knew of. Tommy said you got used to it here. He called it the Creaky Farm, a name made up by Fast Forward because he was a genius at thinking up names. Fast Forward was the other foster kid here, not home yet because in high school and at football practice, a major star on the Lee High team, which are the Generals as everybody knows. To hear Tommy tell it, Fast Forward was the best-liked person of everybody alive, even by Mr. and especially the dead Mrs. Crickson. I would like him too, just wait and see. He’d been at this farm forever and was kind of like their real son, even though he hated Mr. Crickson. Or Creaky rather, which we were all supposed to call the old man, except to his face.
Tommy showed me where to wash up before we went in. By the porch with the screens hanging off, they had a spigot for hosing off your hands, shoes, whatever you could without getting too wet. I was already wet from getting rained on all day. But excited about getting to eat something. I wanted it to be true what Tommy said, that I could get used to this or at least lie low and get through it. Maybe at school not too much trash-talk about me would be going around, if it was only up to Swap-Out, a kid that was respected by nobody. I’d last out Mom’s three weeks in rehab and go back home with nobody the wiser. Stoner, I had no plan for. Maybe the DSS did. Maybe there was a God in his heaven after all, and we would all fart perfume.
Tommy Waddles let me hang on him while I stood on one foot trying to hose the shit off my shoes. My shoelaces were all knotted up. I realized I hadn’t had my shoes off since I put them on last night in the ambulance. No socks, same reason. Everything I was wearing was wet and smelled like
cow shit. All the clothes I had. Tomorrow at school, I’d smell like cow shit.
Fast Forward got home as we were sitting down to dinner, and everybody acted like it was Captain America out there in a Ford pickup. “He’s here!” and all like that. This kid has done no chores whatsoever, plus he’s driving a Lariat F-150, two-tone red and silver with the square headlights. Sweet. I wondered if the vehicle was his, or borrowed from the farm, or what. I wondered if fosters were allowed to have anything belonging to them. I had much to know.
He came in the kitchen and even the damn dogs looked up. First they’d moved all day. He’s long and lean with a look to him like somebody famous, all clean teeth and dark eyebrows and a head of hair not to be believed, like an explosion. Mad curly, like Mariah Carey in her mop-hair days, only not that long obviously. They’d not let you on a football team with long hair back then. “Hey Fast,” all the other boys said, and “This here’s Demon.”
Fast Forward stops dead in his tracks like he’s a comedy act, looking from the other kids to me, me to them, working out what to make of me. I’m ready for the biter remarks, bared teeth and snarl. But he smiles his rock star smile and says, “New blood! About time we upgraded the stock around here.” And Mr. Crickson smiles and nods like he thinks so too, and I’d been all his idea. Nutso. A grubby little bunch of boys looking up to an older kid, that’s the normal. But he’s even got the old bastard under his powers. Demon, I’m thinking, watch and learn.
Dinner was hamburger meat with cans of Manwich poured on it plus macaroni and melted cheese, awesome. I would tell Mom about this. She never could think of a thing to make for dinner. Mr. Crickson asked Fast Forward how was practice and who was on defense and did he still think
the Generals would go undefeated this year. So many words out of the old man’s janked throat. He’d been saving it up all day for Fast Forward. After supper Mr. Crickson went in the other room and watched TV, aka fell asleep in his recliner chair, and Fast Forward scooted out. Leaving the rest of us to clean up in the half-assed way you would expect from three boys, one of them being quite a few bricks shy of his full load. Why that kitchen looked
like it did.
Tommy showed me the rest of the house, our room upstairs, the bathroom we’d use, with Fast Forward getting first dibs obviously. He had more to do, like shaving. Our bedroom had two bunk beds, not much else. A closet for your stuff, if you were lucky enough to have any. A table for doing your
homework if you felt like it. Tommy and Swap-Out shared one of the bunk beds and had a discussion of whether I should take top or bottom on the other one. Swap-Out didn’t vote, with him being let’s just say not a talker. But he liked climbing. I remembered from second grade, Swap-Out always getting up on the radiators like a freaking monkey, our teacher always yelling at him to get down, because one of these days the heat would come on and he’d get burned. And one of those days, yes he did. Such howling, you never heard. Whereas Tommy liked the bottom bunk so he could stash his library books underneath. He had piles down there: Boxcar Children,
Goosebumps, who even knew they’d let you check out that many? He said
the library at Pennington Middle was bigger, which was the only good thing about middle school.
I assumed all four of us boys would bunk together, but wrong, Fast Forward had his own room down the hall. He’d lived here a long time. Mrs. Crickson while alive had started the procedures for adopting him, but she never got it finished up. So Crickson was still drawing the five-hundred- dollar check every month for keeping him as a foster. I didn’t learn all of
this right away. It’s a complicated business to figure out, especially with the way Crickson and Fast Forward did it, having some kind of secret agreement to split the check between them.
We were not allowed in Fast Forward’s room without permission, so I looked from the doorway. He had free weights of a different kind from Stoner’s. Football trophies, newspaper photos of famous Generals moments taped on the wall over the desk (he had furniture). Pinned along one wall, a slew of ribbons he’d won for his 4-H calf projects, Tommy said, but that
was history. Now Fast Forward had quarterbacking and a pickup truck and hot girls, everybody and her sister wanting a piece of this guy. I’d known him two hours and could already see how it was.
His real name was Sterling Ford. Who could want better? Something to do with silver, the best engines ever built. But he said the name Fast Forward came to him early, and it did fit.
He had the run of the house and keys to the gun cabinet where the old man kept his rifles and the medicines Swap-Out was supposed to take every night if anybody remembered. DSS made him lock up the medicines evidently after some past event where his other foster kids were selling them. Uppers or downers, God only knows what Swap-Out was on, possibly both, the usual, half the kids at school had to line up for their pills
from the nurse every day before recess. Fast Forward anyway had full privileges, whereas we three lower-life boys kept to our room of an evening. Nobody cared what time we went to bed, if we got ourselves up in the morning. That first night I was dead tired but worried about going to bed in my cow-shit clothes, and out of the blue Tommy asked did they bring me here without anything. Knowing the foster drill. He let me borrow one of his T-shirts to sleep in. This Tommy was not your usual type of kid.
He said Fast Forward would come in before lights out for drill. Sure enough, he came in saying: “Atten-tion!” Tommy and Swap-Out saluted and stuck out their chests and Fast Forward did inspection. I guess we’ve all seen that movie. It seemed dumb but I couldn’t see not doing it, so I did. He gave me a good looking-over, saying, “Me oh my. Check out this green- eyed boy.” He asked was I a Melungeon or a red-haired beaner or what. I told him my dad was Melungeon.
Next, Fast Forward asked what we had. Tommy dug in his pockets and came out with a pack of Chiclets, which Fast Forward took. Then he stood waiting in front of Swap-Out. Bent down and got in the little guy’s face.
Swap-Out says he’s got nothing. Fast Forward pulls a fist and Swap-Out
shrinks back in his skin. No punching was done, but you could see this kid knows what punched is. I’m looking over at Tommy like, Is this normal? And he’s like, Yeah it is.
“Creaky gave you lunch money this morning,” Fast Forward says in a
slow way because of Swap-Out lacking on his mental side. “You had lunch money, and you took the nutbutter.”
“I never,” Swap-Out says.
“You did. I’ve got eyes in your school, not just in my head. If you lie to Fast Forward, you’re letting down your brothers. You’ve got the cash Creaky gave you. Hand it over.”
Taking the peanut butter sandwich for a normal kid meant they’d let their lunch money run out, or for a free lunch kid their mom forgot to sign the forms. Either way, the lunch ladies would lay that nutbutter on you like,
Here’s your fuck-up badge. Swap-Out had taken the sandwich of shame to pocket the money. His close-set eyes jumped around like a trapped rabbit’s. Fast Forward snapped his fingers in the scrambled little face, held out his hand. Swap-Out shelled out the bills.
I was next. Fast Forward stared. I said, “Dude, I don’t even have any fucking socks!”
I wasn’t sure if this was an f-bomb household, nor if Fast Forward to me was a Dude or a Sir, but I risked it and the guys laughed. I told him I’d gotten dumped off with nothing.
Fast Forward got this look. “Nothing. You’re sure.” “Positive.”
“Holding out on Fast Forward is not how we do things here, Demon. I’m giving you another chance. Come clean, and all will be forgiven. Check your pockets.”
I did, and pulled out some squashed nabs, which shocked me. Last night at the hospital seemed like a movie about somebody’s sad mess of a life.
But that was me, in possession of nabs, ten bucks, and phone change. If I’d remembered, I’d have eaten the nabs for sure. I felt my ears burning. One, because I hadn’t had that much money in quite a while if ever, and two, I’d just lost it. Three, it looked like I got caught lying. Plus, how did he even
know?
Fast Forward said he was proud of me for contributing to our goals and objectives. So that was good, him liking me. He said he held on to the
valuables here to keep them safe. We’d celebrate by having a party as soon as he could get supplies. A farm party, he said. The others said, Yay, farm party! He explained we were the Hillbilly Squadron, which was like the Boy Scouts except not ass-kissers. He was our Squad Master and made the rules for our own good. He said don’t let Creaky get us down. Then he said, “At ease!” and we were at ease. He left, and Tommy and Swap-Out climbed into their bunks. I put on Tommy’s big T-shirt and climbed into mine. I
chose the top. I was still thinking of the rats all over the corn barn and Creaky lurking around in the dark, maybe wanting to file off my teeth. The top bunk seemed advisable.
Hillbilly is a word everybody knows. Except they don’t. Mr. Peg at one time had a sticker on his truck bumper, “Hillbilly Cadillac,” but I was a small kid with no comprehension of anything. I mainly knew it from this one rerun that came on Nick at Nite, Beverly Hillbillies, which was this family running around a city wearing ropes for a belt, packing antique
rifles, and driving a junkass truck. Dead hilarious. More so than most of the old black-and-whites they ran, Gunsmoke, Munsters. Then one time Maggot’s high school cousin Bonnie saw us watching it and said we were
clueless little turds. Bonnie was in Drama, Gifted and Talented, your basic
all-around ass pain. She said be careful who we laughed at, that family was supposedly us.
Meaning what? There’s not a person here that carries on like that or
drives such crap, I assure you. Not even the Antique Tractor Club guys that tuck their shirts in their underpants and drive their ancient machines in the Christmas parade. Those guys are just old. But shooting the lights out, yodeling, keeping pigs in the house? Maggot told Bonnie to go screw her stuck-up boyfriend she met in Governor’s School and leave us be. Which
she did. But I did wonder.
For, like, years. Until one time Mr. Peg was smoking by his truck and I was out there messing around, and thought to ask him why he had that on there, Hillbilly Cadillac. I asked did it mean something bad, and his answer shocked me: hillbilly is like the n-word. And of course I said what
everybody knows, n- is not a word to be used unless by assholes. He said all right, but some do, that aren’t white guys being assholes. Which is true, Ice Cube, Jay-Z, Tupac. Mr. Peg was not a fan of those guys, in fact the opposite, but they still got heard in the house thanks to Maggot and me, so he would know. The n-word is preferred by those guys. Mr. Peg said other
people made up the n-word, not Ice Cube. And other people made up
hillbilly to use on us, for the purpose of being assholes. But they gave us a superpower on accident. Not Mr. Peg’s words, but that’s how I understood it. Saying that word back at people proves they can’t ever be us, or get us, and we are untouchable by their shit.
The world is not at all short on this type of thing, it turns out. All down the years, words have been flung like pieces of shit, only to get stuck on a truck bumper with up-yours pride. Rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks. Deplorables.
