Mom sat out there with me waiting for the Peggots to shine, and the sun to come up over the mountains that threw their shade on us. Living in a holler, the sun gets around to you late in the day, and leaves you early. Like much else you might want. In my years since, I’ve been amazed to see how much more daylight gets flung around in the flatter places. This and more still yet to be learned by an excited kid watching his pretty mom chain-smoke and listen to the birds sing. She tried to pass the time by asking the bird names, which I’d told her before. I only knew some few, Mr. Peg knew them all. Jenny wren, field canary, joree bird. If we’d splash our armpits and faces in the sink instead of a real shower, he’d say we were taking a joree bath. Which is what I did that morning, in my big hurry to leave Mom. It’s all burned in my brain. How she kept thinking of things to remind me about: act decent, remember please and thank you, especially whenever they pay for stuff, and don’t go poking around June’s apartment. Things you’d need to tell a kid before he goes out of state. I told her to set the damn alarm clock. Which made her laugh because I’d already stuck a note on the refrigerator: set the dam alarm clock. She said she loved me a whole lot and not to forget about her, which was weird. Mom was not usually all that emotional.

  Finally Mr. Peg down at the road hollered “All right then, we’re fixing to go.” I started down the steps, but Mom tackled me with all of them watching, kissing on my neck until I was pretty much dead of embarrassment.

  And that was it, we left her. Mr. Peg waved, but Mrs. Peggot just stared at her, making a long kind of face. I could still see it any time she turned around to ask us if we were buckled up and did we want any cookies yet. She wore that face well over the state line.

  4

  Knoxville had a surprise in store: a girl named Emmy Peggot that lived with Aunt June in her apartment, the daughter of Maggot’s dead uncle Humvee. Of the birdhouse. She was a skinny sixth grader with long brown hair and this look to her, cold-blooded. Carrying around at all times a Hello Kitty backpack that she looked ready to bludgeon you with, then tote around your head inside. Getting to the bottom of all that was going to take some time.

  Right away we piled into Aunt June’s Honda to take us all to lunch at Denny’s, except Mr. Peg that needed to put up his bum leg after the drive. Aunt June made us belt up, which was the first I’d seen of three functioning belts in a back seat. Emmy sat in the middle not talking to us, fishing hair scrunchies and whatever out of her backpack, making a show of not letting us see what else was in there, like it might be something too shocking for our young minds.

  Aunt June let us order anything we wanted, so it was like a birthday. We sat by the window and it was hard to concentrate, with everything going on out there. I might have been the only kid at school that hadn’t been to a city before, other than a girl with no parents and epileptic by the name of Gola Ham. Other kids my age had mostly been to Knoxville because people have kin there. Now I was getting my eyes full. If something went by like a cop cruiser with a dog in back, or a tow truck pulling a crushed Mustang, I’d yell, Oh man, look at that! And Emmy would cut her eyes over at me like, So? People don’t total their fucking cars where you come from? Aunt June was busy talking to Mrs. Peggot about her job. She had to go in to work after lunch until the next morning: day and night shifts back-to-back. She talked about the long hours and what she saw in the ER, like a pregnant lady that came in gut-stabbed with her baby still inside. Which if you think about it, would make a crushed Mustang not that big a deal.

  More ER stories were still to come, told to Maggot and me by Emmy after she got over herself and started speaking to us. It turns out, the worst shit people can think of to do to each other up home is also thought of and done in Knoxville. Probably more so. The thing about a city is, it’s huge. Obviously I’d seen city on TV because that’s all they ever show (other than Animal Planet), so I was expecting something like Knoxville. Only I had the idea you’d go around a corner and you’d be out of it. Back to where you’d see mountains, cattle pastures, and things of that kind, alive. No dice. Whenever Aunt June took us out, we’d drive down twenty or thirty streets with buildings only. You couldn’t see the end of it in any form. If you are one of the few that still hasn’t been, let me tell you what a city is. A hot mess not easily escaped.

  Did Maggot already know about Emmy, before we came? Yes. Everybody in his family knew, and so did my mom, which freaked me out. For some reason the subject of dead Humvee having a daughter living with Aunt June was not to be mentioned back home, ever. Maggot said I could talk to Mom since she already knew, but not Stoner. I said I was pretty sure he and Mom would break up by the time we got back, so. Not a problem. This conversation was on our first night, with Emmy asleep. We’d stayed up watching Outer Limits and finally she conked. Maggot crawled over and took her backpack out of her hands to make sure she was really asleep.

  So Aunt June’s spare room was actually home to the Ice Maiden. She had to move out of it for her grandparents to use for our two weeks visit. We kids slept in a giant nest we made in the living room out of pillows and sheets. We called it a fort, but Emmy corrected us that it was our “ship.” The SS Blow It Out Your Anus, Maggot suggested, which got him demoted. She had all these tiny stupid dolls in tiny stupid suitcases, and in Emmy’s world they had ranks: lieutenant, private, etc. Maggot usually ended up below the entire suitcase-doll militia as something like dishwasher, whereas I was in the middle. We tried involving her dolls in robberies and murders, which she surprised us by being totally into. She said there was a place outside Knoxville called Body Farm where they buried dead bodies and then dug them up after they’d rotted, to study the scientific aspect of crimes. Fine, we played by her rules and slept in a pillow ship. I asked if she’d ever seen the ocean. Never and no thanks, was her answer. She’d been to Undersea Wonders Aquarium in Gatlinburg, and the sharks terrified her.

  If you asked me, her building was scarier than any sharks. Like being trapped in a Duke Nukem doom castle. A thousand other families living there, every front door opening into one hallway. Stairs going down past other hallways. Outside the main front door, a street full of cars and cars, people and people. There was no outside anywhere. I asked Emmy who all these other people were, and she said she had no idea but you couldn’t talk to them due to stranger danger. Doom castle was normal to her. Supposedly she had school friends with Nike Air Maxes, Furbys, etc., meaning cooler than us grimy fourth graders, but where were they? Nowhere. She couldn’t see them all summer. They lived in other doom castles. There was no running wild here like we did at home, adults around or not, ideally not. Emmy was not on her own for one second, due to all the unknown people and murder potential. After school she went to a lame place where they did crafts until the moms showed up, with kids that were not at her level. Her words. On Aunt June’s night shifts, because they kept that ER going around the clock, there was an old lady downstairs with two stink-eye cats where Emmy went for sleep, breakfast, and TV watching, meaning one neighbor at least was not a criminal mind. Her cats, possibly. That was the life of Emmy: school, making crap out of Popsicle sticks, sleep.

  Aunt June had days off coming, and said we’d do stuff then. In the meantime, Mr. and Mrs. Peggot sat at the table with the lights shut off, not wanting to use up their daughter’s electricity. Mr. Peg didn’t know the streets, and there wasn’t any yard. I mean, none, because I asked. I didn’t believe the world would even have a place like this. Not just from the kid viewpoint of no place to mess around. Where would these people grow their tomatoes?

  The apartment itself was nice, if you overlooked where it was. Classy, like Aunt June, with her shiny fingernails and short brown hair like Posh of the Spice Girls. Little freckles. Definitely hot, or so I’d have thought if I wasn’t calling her Aunt June. Her furniture was a cut above what people usually have, matching. A fridge where ice and cold water came out the front, and a kitchen counter with stools. Bookshelves with books. One bathroom for everybody and another one for Aunt June only, in her bedroom, with a tub. I was still scared of those somewhat but didn’t let on. She also had a closet with a shoe rack on the door, twenty-one pairs of shoes, actual count. On our first day Emmy made a point of showing us all these special features of the place, which took maybe an hour. Then we were pretty much lost for stuff to do. Mrs. Peggot poked into June’s closet and got to mending. She could mend anything at all to where you couldn’t tell it was ever ripped, and made all Maggot’s clothes, one of her powers. Mr. Peg read the Knoxville News Sentinel, including obituaries of a thousand people he didn’t know, and griped about having no place to go smoke. Then figured out to go downstairs on the sidewalk in front of the building with more people he didn’t know, all smoking hard in a friendly way. Maggot and I took turns on his Game Boy while we waited for Aunt June to finish up saving people from their code blues and their GSWs. Or I drew in my notebook. I made one drawing of Aunt June in the bra-type outfit like she was Wonder Woman, with the superpower of what Aunt June actually did in real life. It would get so quiet we could hear people in the other apartments, or their TVs. A city is the weirdest, loneliest thing.

  Aunt June’s bedroom closet was carpeted, the inside of a closet if you can believe, and big enough for the three of us. We’d sit in the dark with stripes of light coming sideways through slits in the door, me and Maggot and the twenty-one pairs of shoes, hearing Emmy’s ER stories. Some guy’s cut-off leg that got buried with the wrong body. Also Aunt June stories. Guys at Jonesville High that had wanted to screw her but got kicked to the curb, even after one or more of them begged her to marry him. Same thing, different guys, in nursing school. We kept waiting for the part about what happened to Emmy’s parents and why she’s living with Aunt June, if the lady was so hot to get away from the would-be husbands and babies. No mention. Emmy had other concerns, like her secret stash under some loose carpet. The first time she went digging around, I saw the light-striped face of Maggot looking at me like, What the hell? And up she comes with flattened packs of cigarettes and gum. Asking did we want gum. We said okay.

  She said, “How does it feel to want?”

  We watched her peel the foil off one stick of gum, very slowly. Watched her put it in her mouth, hypnotized by the weirdness of this chick. Drooling, even if we didn’t want any in the first place. She pushed her hair back over her skinny shoulders. We smelled the fruity smell.

  “Rude,” Maggot said after a minute.

  She said, “Talk to the hand.”

  Aunt June was the opposite of Emmy. She gave us our own special bowls for snacks we could eat any time we wanted. She finally got her days off, and took us all over: a trampoline park, putt-putt golf, the hospital. The zoo, where we spent a whole day. Tigers, giraffes, and all like that. Monkeys, which Maggot and I figured out how to get all riled up until Aunt June said knock it off or we were going straight home. She was extra nice, but the lady took no shit. It was a stinking hot day, which probably the animals were liking no more than us. The only happy campers were these small-size penguins that slid down rocks into their not-so-clean pool, over and over. I was like, Hey, the life! I’d take it, penguin shit and all. I asked Aunt June if there was an ocean part of the zoo, which there wasn’t. I might have asked a few times.

  Then she got this idea. She took hold of my ears and stood looking at me, like she had me by the handles. “I know what you’d love,” she said. In Gatlinburg they had a giant aquarium place that was full-on ocean. Sharks and everything. I didn’t mention Emmy already telling me about this place, that she was definitely not a fan of. Aunt June let go of my ear-handles and said just as soon as she had more days off, we’d drive over there. And Emmy gave me this look like, You were warned, so don’t cry when you wake up with your nuts ripped off.

  But we were going, sharks and all, even if Emmy was afraid. Every dog gets his day.

  Aunt June was working all hours, plus taking us places, and being a kid I gave it no real thought until one night she came in late, or early morning maybe. I was awake but didn’t want to spook her by saying anything. Then after a while it was too weird for her to know I was lying in the pillow pile watching her. She poured herself a glass of water and took off her white shoes and sat down at the table and just stared at the glass. Pulled both hands through her hair like she was combing it, exactly a thing Maggot did sometimes. She had his same eyes, the blue and the dark lashes that his girl cousins wanted to kill him over. I’d never seen Maggot’s mom, but now I thought about her being Aunt June’s little sister. Those two playing together. Now here was one of them trying with all her might to put people back together, and the other in Goochland serving ten to twelve for trying to cut a person to pieces, damn near with success.

  Aunt June stretched her legs out under the table and leaned back in the chair and stayed that way for so long I thought she must have fallen asleep, but she hadn’t. After a while I could hear her letting her breath out, long and quiet like an air mattress with a slow leak. It was unbelievable, how much she had to let out. It went on forever.

  The aquarium turned out to be the best day of my life. If I ever get to see the real ocean and it turns out better than Undersea Wonders in Gatlinburg, I’ll be amazed. You name it, they had it: seahorses, octopus, jellyfish that swam upside down. Shallow tanks you could reach in and touch stuff. The main attraction was the Shark Tunnel, where you walked under a giant tank with the bigger individuals: sharks, rays, turtles. But turtles the size of a Honda. A Saw Fish, which is like a shark except sticking out of its face is something like a chain saw. I kid you not.

  Mrs. Peggot came with us that day. One or the other always had to stay behind so the rest of us could fit in the car. If Mr. Peg stayed, he’d fix something. Or Mrs. Peggot would stay and have supper ready for us, which made Aunt June homesick. On the Gatlinburg day Mrs. Peggot and Aunt June never stopped talking, even though there was amazing shit they should have been paying attention to, such as a Saw Fish. Also she’d paid some crazy amount of money like a hundred dollars to get us in. But we were leaving soon, and I guess mom and daughter still had ground to cover. Such as how hard June worked, which Mrs. Peggot was opposed to, and something about her rotation or moving to a different hospital. A guy named Kent she was thinking of going out with, that she called a drug rep, which I figured must not be the same as a dealer, Aunt June being all on the up and up. None of it of course any of my business.

  We saved the Shark Tunnel for last because it was best, and because Aunt June and Emmy were in mortal combat all week over whether Emmy was going in there. She started out refusing to go to Gatlinburg, period. Her next failed plan was to stay in the car while we all went in. Aunt June had this way of being dead calm, but it’s her way or the highway. You could see her in the ER saying, “I’m sorry about the bullet holes in you sir but I’ve got a job to do here.” Long story short, Emmy was going in the damn Shark Tunnel. Aunt June said she’d been too young that first time, but she needed to get back on the horse and see there was nothing to fear.

  So in we went, Aunt June ignoring Emmy, while Maggot and I got our minds blown by a million tons of water over us with huge things swimming in it. The floor itself moved. I was not expecting that. Pulled by our own shoes into the briny deep. I turned around to see what Emmy thought, and holy Moses. The girl was dead frozen. People with their strollers and drinks jostling around her to get into this thing they paid good money for, and Emmy, scared out of her mind.

  I didn’t really think, just headed back. But the floor was moving, so I was going nowhere, somewhat like a dream in how it felt like time was not time. Her scared eyes watching me. I shoved through the people all looking up at sea creatures, basically Aquaman in the Lagoon of Atlantis, until I was on solid ground with Emmy hanging on me like a true drowning person.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “We weren’t going to go off and leave you.”

  “She did, though. She didn’t even look back.”

  “She wouldn’t have left the building. She was coming back for you after the tunnel.”

  Emmy was shivering. “She didn’t act like it.”

  “She was,” I said. “Aunt June is perfect like that. She keeps track.”

  I figured on having to wait with her till the others came back, then hearing about the Gatlinburg fucking Shark Tunnel from Maggot for the rest of my natural life. But for whatever reason Emmy said okay, let’s do it. I had to hold her hand. She kept her eyes closed.

  It was true about Aunt June keeping track. Which was not true of my mom in any way, shape, or form. So that was me promising Emmy that life is to be trusted. I knew better. I should have let her go with her gut: Never get back on the horse, because it’s going to throw you every damn chance it gets. Then maybe she’d have been wise to the shit that came for her later on, and maybe it would have turned out better. Which is me saying too much, for now. Sorry.

  Aunt June gave us all five dollars to spend in the gift shop. Maggot bought a plastic hammerhead shark, Emmy got rock candy, and everybody was waiting. On snap decision I bought this thing for Emmy, a little silver bracelet with a snake as part of it. The package said moray eel, whatever. I gave it to her while we were walking to the car. I said probably she hated snakes, but it was like her bravery badge. She just said thanks. Then on the drive home she mentioned she was in love with me and we would get married whenever we got old enough. Okay, I said. I was pretty much used to the chain of command by then. But to tell the truth, kind of shocked. I asked her, Why me? Why not Maggot? And she said, Duh. Matty’s my cousin.

  That gave me the usual sting of not having my own cousins. But I hadn’t considered there being a plus side, like Emmy eligible to be in love with me. I told her I didn’t know how. She said no worries, it was easy, she did it all the time with boys at school and the Popsicle stick place.