Coming from a position of solid shitfaced, that was a pretty good one I thought.

  Fast Forward was watching us from across the bonfire. I didn’t wave or anything stupid, just wished. Until he stood up, flicked his cigarette butt into the fire, and came over.

  “Gentlemen.” He stood between us, an arm around each. I grew a couple inches, Maggot pushed hair out of his eyes. I asked if he got the chance to meet June, that was giving this party.

  “The gracious hostess that invited us to use her Band-Aids?”

  I laughed. He dropped his arms from our shoulders, seeing people noticing us. He did talk to June, he said, and she seemed like a nice lady. But he hadn’t met the daughter.

  “She’s the one that was passing out the cake.” I knew they’d spoken. I’d seen it.

  “With the giant snuggly boyfriend attached,” Maggot added.

  Fast ignored him. “I know which one she is. Just didn’t get a proper introduction.”

  That was on me, I’d screwed up. “We can go find her now,” I said, but he didn’t seem keen. “Or some other time. We’re over here a lot. She and Maggot are like brother and sister.”

  Fast Forward was watching people around the fire that were all watching him back. Like at any moment he was going to bust an astounding move. Feels so empty without Fast Man. Maggot piped up that if he wanted to meet the hotcake cousin, he’d have to clear it with the boyfriend and his deer rifle. Of all the times in my life I wanted to punch Maggot, that one was memorable. I could feel the energy of Fast Forward pulling away from us.

  Then Rose intercepted out of nowhere, worming through the crowd to bring him a beer. I was buzzed enough to watch it as a football play: Rose finds her gap, assesses the depth of coverage. Turns her numbers to the receiver and makes a quick slant for a run/pass combination.

  He took the bottle from her and drained it. Rose watched him without kindness. If she was a football player, she’d be the one that gets you on the bottom of the pile and spits in your helmet. He handed the bottle back and told her it was time we hit the road. She dropped the bottle and walked away. Yikes. Maggot had decided to stay the night at June’s. I went to hunt up Mouse.

  I found her sitting in lawn chairs with June and Ruby, explaining something that involved a lot of pointing to their chins and cheeks.

  “Fast Forward says it’s time to go.”

  She looked up, her head cocked like a bird’s. June and Ruby too. They all three gave me that look women get, Who died and left you boss, mister?

  “So, what should I tell him? Do you want a ride?”

  “When I am finished talking with these ladies about foundation contouring, yes.”

  “I’m not sure I like the sound of this Fast person,” June said. “Is he drinking?”

  “No ma’am,” I said, glancing at Mouse. “You’d like him. Everybody does.”

  Mouse pushed herself off the lawn chair, which was actually a drop for her short legs. We found Fast Forward and made our way out to the road. Most of the parked cars were still there, even with the party dying out. June’s house would be wall-to-wall carpeted with drunks tonight. We walked in the middle of the road, hearing people in the woods. The saggy skin of pup tents glowed in the moonlight. A waste of a starry night I thought, to sleep in one of those. Then I heard a couple going at it hard, so privacy was the reason. Sorry to say, their secret was out. Mouse and Fast were talking, too quiet for me to hear. He seemed to be asking for some kind of intel. She was louder, so I caught answers without the questions: “High school, I’m positive,” and “It better be, because I am going to be seeing bad spray tans in my nightmares.”

  I caught up, and asked Fast Forward didn’t he think the Peggots were a good bunch.

  “Bunch.” Mouse said. “What comes in bunches, let me think. Grapes. Bananas.”

  “Honey bunches,” Fast Forward said.

  “Of oats! That’s it. Oat party! Watch out for the horses.” She slapped his ass.

  I told Fast Forward I was sorry he didn’t get to talk to June or Emmy.

  Mouse asked if we were discussing Mrs. Robinson and Elaine, and I told her I didn’t know them. “Are they Lee County Robinsons?”

  She snorted.

  Fast said the lady had her shit together, and the daughter was attractive. But the boyfriend was a knuckle dragger. “Chucklehead,” he said. “Serious bumpkin seed.”

  “Ohhh yes,” Mouse agreed.

  I wasn’t thrilled with the new situation, but Hammer was good people and I said as much.

  “He’s screwing his own cousin,” Mouse said. “I guess that’s normal for you people.”

  I tried to explain how they were divorce cousins and not blood kin, but I was exactly the wrong degree of sober. Which is just enough to hear how stupid you’re sounding.

  “Still gross,” she said. “Like Woody Allen and his adopted kid. Eggs in the same nest.”

  I said it wasn’t that kind of eggs. Mouse clearly thought I was an idiot. Up ahead of us was some commotion, guys yelling “Go, go, go!” Tearing towards us, and then a blast. A rain of something fell around us in the dark.

  “What in the holy mother fucking hell,” Mouse inquired.

  “A kyarn blow,” I said.

  “A cornblow. Of course,” she said.

  “Not corn, kyarn, like roadkill. It’s this thing where you bury an M-80. They used to put a dead animal in the hole, but now mostly it’s just gravel and sticks. So it throws shrapnel.”

  I couldn’t see her face in the dark, and didn’t need to. Burying M-80s was ignorant. Fast Forward yelled at the guys to ask if the coast was clear, and they said yes, they’d only lit the one. Mouse walked fast, grabbing his arm. “A do-over of the fucking Civil War. Charming.”

  “Or practice for the next one,” he said. Which was true, a lot of these guys would sign on to go blow up Afghanistan the day they were old enough. Their shot at seeing the world.

  “Oh, my, gawd. Don’t they have anything better to do?”

  “Not really, no,” is what I told her. “Welcome to Dixie.”

  I hate that I said that. Looking back. As hacked off as I was at her, I still just took it. There will always be those that look down on your station in life and call it a sty, but if you get in there and wallow, that’s on you. Plus, to hear Mr. Armstrong tell it, this is not even Dixie. Our ancestors here had to save their hides from Confederate gangs that rounded them up and drove them shackled to the lines, to shoot Yanks and save somebody else’s fat-ass plantations. There’s north and there’s south, and then there is Lee County, world capital of the lose-lose situation.

  Nobody rides you like you ride yourself, they say. But we get more than our share of help. These people and vegetarians and so forth that are all about being fair to the races and the gays, I am down with that. I agree. But would it cross any mind to be fair to us? No, it would not. How do I know? TV. The comedy channel is so funny it can make you want to go unlock the gun cabinet and kill yourself. Do they really think that along with being brainless and having sex with animals, we don’t even have cable?

  There’s this thing that happens, let’s say at school where a bunch of guys are in the bathroom, at the urinal, laughing about some dork that made an anus of himself in gym. You’re all basically nice guys, right? You know right from wrong, and would not in a million years be brutal to the poor guy’s face. And then it happens: the dork was in the shitter. He comes out of the stall with this look. He heard everything. And you realize you’re not really that nice of a guy.

  This is what I would say if I could, to all smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes: We are right here in the stall. We can actually hear you.

  40

  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.”