“Shine,” she said.

  The shine I knew of was clear, in mason jars. Drinkable.

  No, not that. Painkiller patch, she said, the extra-special kind. Fentanyl.

  The next surprise won’t ever leave my brain. The kit she took out of her purse. The spoon she used first, to scrape the patch. The lighter she held underneath. The cotton ball, the syringe, pulling the cap off the needle and holding it in her mouth like a nurse giving booster shots. I don’t know what I said but she could tell I was scared, and she was sweet with me, the same voice she used with Jip. She’d been saving this, because the first time you do it with somebody, they say it’s the best you’ll ever feel in your life. Like having Jesus all up in your blood.

  Jesus or not, I admitted to despising needles. She took the syringe cap out of her mouth and kissed me a long time. Then pushed the tip of the needle into the patch with such tender care. The way her tongue pressed the middle of her top lip, she looked like somebody concentrating on the best present a person could ever give. She drew something out of the patch, squeezed the clear drop of gel onto her finger, then put her fingertip in my mouth, under my tongue.

  I stopped watching after she pulled her little foot up onto the seat and took off her shoe, to shoot herself up. We probably slept awhile afterward. I know enough now to say for sure, we would have. Curled together like two babies in a womb equipped with a steering wheel. Maybe her teeth chattered and she begged me to hold her tight, as would happen later, time and again. But I don’t remember.

  The back seat of that Impala was as good as any couch you’d want to have sex on. And we did, I’m guessing. I mean yes we did, but damn. You want to remember the pilot drill, but I only have this or that small view of it, like a peeping tom to my own event. I was pantsless at some point, I recall her being shocked by my poor busted knee, fussing over it. And for my part, the shock of seeing that dress come over her head in one sweep, balled up in her hand and dropped, no bigger than a pair of gym socks. The surprise of seeing her body all at once, the pale bikini of untanned skin like invisible clothes over the peaches of breasts and her cooch.

  The rest is picture postcards. Her riding me, God yes, that laugh bubbling up out of her. Skin on skin, the electric shock of that. Touching her. My face up between her legs, her hands in my hair pulling hard. Finding her clit with my tongue, the surprise of something really being in there, a slick little peanut. The phone-sex voice of Linda Larkins in my head being the reason I knew how to do any of this. Linda was a capable coach.

  Maybe that’s too much said. Wanting to protect Dori, that fire in me for saving her, will never go out, however late the day. But even if I were the bragging type, there’s little to tell. Just that it was my first time for the whole thing, start to finish, if we did finish. I felt pretty sorry the next day, that I couldn’t say for sure. But Dori was my girl, so. Nothing could hurt me now.

  43

  I got one week. To be the happiest man alive, my only care being how to get myself with that beautiful body again. We had it planned. Not Friday. That was the last game of the season, and I didn’t want to be doing Dori on game-level dosage this time. Plus we’d be three hours on the bus getting back from Richlands, and I wasn’t starting at midnight. I respected this girl. I’d take her out Saturday, starting at the drive-in. Early, because she actually liked the kid movies. We’d get in and out before all the socializing and booze. I’d buy her popcorn, we’d cuddle up to watch some Disney princess or other, then go park. Dori had a sitter again for Daddy, the same neighbor lady that was none too willing, hinting about getting paid if this turned regular.

  The shit fell on Saturday afternoon, delivered by Maggot. I knew something serious had to be up, for him to call. We barely talked anymore. He said Mr. Peg was poorly, no news I thought, but Maggot said June was going over there and would swing by to pick me up.

  “Not tonight,” I said. “I’ll go tomorrow, after they’re home from church.”

  “Listen, Demon. He’s not getting out of bed.” Maggot’s voice cracked. A late bloomer, finally coming hard into manhood, he’d gotten a wrathful stubble and that long-neck look with the big Adam’s apple. All the more freakish for the eye makeup. Anyway, Maggot let me know I wasn’t getting a choice, June had the bull by the horns as usual. So I called Dori to say I’d meet her at the drive-in. I’d make June drop me there afterward. How long could this take?

  I was not in the best of moods on the way over. June was still in her doctor gear, stethoscope, no-fun shoes, the better to buckle me into her front seat and grill me: was I scheduled for the knee surgery, was I off those painkillers yet. I said Coach would be looking into it, now that the season was over. I didn’t tell her to check with the devil about his establishment freezing over, because that’s the day I’d let that bone doctor cut into me. She asked how long since I’d seen the Peggots, another sore subject. I’d passed on dinner invitations until Mrs. Peggot quit asking. You know, busy. Tomorrow is always another day.

  I was surprised Emmy was not in the car with us. And that Maggot was, in the back seat, shrunk into his black hoodie like a mad turtle. I asked if Emmy was meeting us over there, and it was June’s turn to go moody, saying Miss Emmy was now under the impression certain rules did not apply to her. And that Maggot had been staying at her house for a few weeks. She glanced over her shoulder like he might have something to add, which he did not. Fun outing.

  The Peggot place was crowded with parked cars and an occupying Peggot invasion. Some I’d not seen since back in the day, cousins I’d crushed on Warcraft, now turned into their dads, same face hair and Buckmark tattoos. Hammer Kelly caught me off guard with a bear hug halfway between tackle and drowning man. I’d not seen him since the day of Emmy’s not-engagement ring and all that. He looked wrecked. I told him cheer up, the world’s not ended yet.

  Which it hadn’t, as far as I knew. But this was no normal Peggot hootenanny. Men out in the yard with their volume turned down, shuffling their work boots, blowing smoke at the trees. Aunts with faces like old pocketbooks, rolling the foil off covered dishes that nobody was eating. Maggot wouldn’t come inside. His aunt Ruby nabbed me and said if I’d not been upstairs to see Mr. Peg yet, I could take my turn whenever somebody else came down. Which made no sense. I said we’d already spoken, and she eyed me with her tongue bulging out the side of her cheek, the exact thing her mom Mrs. Peggot did if she caught you lying. There we stood, Ruby with her dyed-to-death black hair coming in white at the roots, me wondering if some law says we all turn into our parents. If so, here’s me signed up for death at an early age. And Maggot, damn. With a fucked-up snake like Romeo Blevins for a dad, you actually hoped the mom’s jailbird genes would win out. I promised Ruby I’d hunt up Maggot and we’d both go upstairs to see Mr. Peg.

  I found him down by the creek, playground of our mighty boyhoods. Squatting in the dark, side-arming rocks towards the water. “Yo, Storm,” I called out. “What’s the forecast?”

  He craned his long neck around. “Wolverine. Get a fucking manicure.”

  I sat down, gave him a fake punch in the shoulder, and even that small violence made him shrink deeper into his hoodie. He tossed another rock at the invisible creek. “We were some pitiful Avengers,” he said. “You know that, right? Vengeance was never ours.”

  “Speak for yourself. You’re the one that always picked the lame-ass superpower.”

  “Okay. So even back then, me being Stormlady insulted your manhood.”

  “I’m just saying. You can pick anything, and you go for the power to make bad shit happen in terms of weather? It’s like you’re purposefully limiting your range.”

  “Or to make good weather happen. Always look on the sunny side!” He made a smiley leer at me that was terrifying, even in the dark.

  “Right. Convince me that ‘Have a nice day, for real’ is that useful as a power.”

  “Like you’d know, big chief jockstrap. I’ve been waiting to have one of those nice days for, what. Eight or nine years?” He picked up a rock and threw it with such shocking force, we heard it connect with a sycamore on the other bank. Thwock, a random dead strike.

  And then, shit. Maggot was crying. Breath racking out hard, like screaming with the sound off. I was scared to touch him. I just sat there wishing I could get something back for him, from our childhood days of people cutting us so much slack. Mr. Peg, my God. He had the patience of Job. Taking us fishing, setting down his own pole over and over again to rescue Maggot and me from our lines cast into the trees overhead or snagged on the bottom. Mr. Peg baiting our hooks with the worms Maggot wouldn’t touch. It’s possible Maggot hated fishing. If I knew, I wouldn’t have let him say, for fear Mr. Peg would stop taking us. Now I watched him wring himself out like a rag, with no idea what powers existed to save him.

  Mr. Peg passed away that night. The old man went out on the tide, while underneath his body and bed and oxygen machine and the floor, the wake of covered dishes and yard smoking flowed for most of the night. In the morning Mrs. Peggot and her sister washed him and clipped his hair. Then they called the funeral home to come fetch him out.

  Maggot never did go tell him goodbye. We stayed out there by the creek till after the damn moon went to bed. The reason he was living over at June’s now was the blowout they’d had, himself and Mr. Peg. Their last words amounted to inviting one another to go to hell. He said half of him was sorry over it, and the other half wasn’t, so now he would stay cut in two forever. I might have gotten him up those stairs, if I’d known it was the last chance. I could have tried harder. Mr. Peg was the best part of Maggot’s piss-poor lot in life. Both our lives.

  So my second date with Dori was a few days late, and a funeral. She picked me up in her dad’s Impala, nervous. She said she hadn’t been to many funerals, not even her mom’s, being too young. All she’d ever told me was that it was a wreck that killed her, kids drag racing on a Sunday evening, doing over a hundred in a commercial zone. Dori’s mom had popped into Kwikmart to get a pack of AAAs for the TV remote, and pulled out at the wrong time.

  My own mom’s funeral was stuck in my craw that day. It hit me hard, how different this one was. In the Peggots’ church, with the butt-polished wood benches and the colored glass windows like jigsaw puzzles of Jesus and sheep. Not one of these in-town churches with the fake steeple and signboard out front with God jokes, just your regular country church, small. But my Lord what a crowd. At the viewing, the line ran out the door and around the little graveyard, with people of all walks of life shivering in their overcoats waiting to say goodbye to a dead man. Not just Peggots and the Peggot-related, but people I’d not have guessed knew him. Donnamarie from the farm store. Coach Briggs. Even Stoner showed his ugly face, playing the good ex-neighbor, with his underage waitress now pregnant-child-bride. Her dad was the owner of Pro’s Pizza, so Stoner probably knocked her up for the free refills. I didn’t speak to him. I walked around the graves and checked out the square hole they’d opened up for Mr. Peg, with a pile of dirt beside it that seemed twice too much to go back in. That church cemetery was so small, I’d say you had to be a lifetime member to get a spot in there. I was surprised to find Hammer Kelly standing off to himself at the edge of the woods. I introduced Dori and he was polite as always, all bad haircut and freckles and pleased-to-meet you, but he looked wrecked, like he had the other night. I felt like shit for what I’d said to him, that it was not the end of the world. Mr. Peg was the closest he had to a father.

  Dori was too cold to stand in the line so we went inside and found June and Maggot. June had used her Wonder Woman powers to get Maggot into a coat and tie, so he looked like a nice young man slash zombie. Emmy, still AWOL. June knew everybody there to speak to, including old guys Mr. Peg had worked with in his mining days. Men he’d hunted and fished with whenever he was younger, not yet overrun with us brats crowding out the better company. I’d say half the county was there. Mr. Peg was a person. I felt proud to have some claim on him, but it took me down a notch to see all these other people that had the same claim, if not better. Dori and I got to sit in the family section of seats though. June put us up there with the kids and grandkids, and this is stupid I know, but it swelled me up. Similar to how I’d felt running onto the field in my jersey with all eyes on me. Like somebody of worth.

  The service was so different from Mom’s. This minister knew Mr. Peg. He told all these stories on him, and everybody was right there. Not slamming their heart doors on the misfortunate dead, but laughing and crying over a life. Boyhood shenanigans, like sneaking a calf into the schoolhouse, shutting it up in the principal’s office overnight. Being ringleader of boys that fired pokeberries with their slingshots at the back side of this very church, making red splats on the white clapboards that looked like bullet holes. Then, ringleader of boys that had to repaint the whole church. Adult shenanigans also, like Mr. Peg and this minister’s dad turning over in a boat on Carr Fork Lake, each of them claiming ever after that he’d saved the other man from drowning. Another time though, Mr. Peg did save a man’s life, no question, while the two of them were castrating bulls. I never knew any of this. The person he saved was Donnamarie’s grandfather. The whole idea of the sermon was how people connect up in various ways, seen and unseen, and that Mr. Peg had tied a lot of knots in the big minnow seine that keeps us all together. Dead but still here, in other words. That’s what killed me the worst. At Mom’s funeral, the casket closed on her and she was just over and out. Whatever good was still known about her, if any, was all on me, and I was too pissed off to do anything with it. I had even made fun of her dancing. Which was probably Mom at her best.

  Dori held my hand the whole time. Her hand felt like a baby bird inside my fist, something I could protect if I tried hard enough. Something turned over, telling me to start my proper manhood there and then. Here’s a knot I can tie, I was thinking. I will never let it unravel.

  Normally after the burial comes dinner on the ground, meaning a church picnic. But this was winter, and way too many people for inside the church, so they had it at the basement fellowship hall of the funeral home. They were having a funeral upstairs that same day for somebody else I knew. Collins, that I’d replaced as first-string tight end. Not yet eighteen, with a girlfriend and a baby, that big strapping body: dead. Jesus. I’d never known his first name till I saw it on the sign in the hallway to the funeral chapel. Aidan.

  Downstairs, Mr. Peg’s people straggled in like a trail of ants carrying their casserole dishes, their sheet cakes, their green Jell-O rings with wrinkled Saran Wrap skin. Nothing brings on the food like a person that’s already had his last meal. Ruby was bossing her younger sisters over the setup, getting in a tiff with June. Too many hens in that coop. I wasn’t keen to stay, but couldn’t leave without speaking to Mrs. Peggot. She’d been sweet to me back whenever Mom died. I owed her for a lot of things, but especially that.

  It took me awhile to find her, sitting quiet in her rumpled white hair and a black dress with shoulders way bigger than hers. Waving away all the people fussing over her. She’d been looking after people every minute since she was fifteen and married Mr. Peg, with all those kids and then Maggot. Now they were all saying she could finally get some rest, but if nobody was letting her lift a finger, she was as good as gone. That’s how she looked to me, like the orphan of the world. If you think a person that’s lost everything knows what to say to another one, I didn’t. But I pulled a chair over and sat, and she gripped my hand so hard it hurt. Not even looking at me, just holding on. I meant to introduce her to Dori but she got whisked away, fresh cousin bait, all the younger girls asking her questions and coveting her pretty hair. That was Dori. Magical. I spotted her across the room talking with her hands the way she did, always in motion, pointing at me to show everybody I was the one she belonged to. If you want to discuss having Jesus up in your veins. For me, that was it.

  It was a temptation to stay and eat, given all that food, so we did. Then midway through everything, Emmy showed up. A buzz ran through the place, plastic forks and chicken legs frozen midair. I’d not seen her earlier at the church, but she must have been there. She had one of those flowers they let you take off the casket. June shot her the get-over-here look, but Emmy turned on her heel and walked off, with that long-legged rose on her shoulder like a rifle.

  I ate fast, and Maggot and I went outside for a toke. Dori was having a big time, but I’d had enough of this party, and Maggot needed a furlough from the war in his brain, with Mr. Peg now dead on his battlefield. I’m not saying Maggot’s and my problems stacked up equal, but the same remedy applied. Weed is versatile. We were out there having an ignorant dispute over why a funeral home would need an entire row of dumpsters lined up at the back of the building (his view: excess bodies), and out of nowhere we heard a catfight. Major bad-bitch business, you could just about hear the fingernails sinking up to their hilts. We walked around the corner in our friendly fog, and were shocked to see Rose Dartell with a fistful of hair, and Emmy on the other end of it. Emmy screaming so hard, some of that pretty brunette had to be coming out.

  My reflexes weren’t top notch, but I managed to get around behind Rose and pull her away. The hair thing though, I had no skills with that. I shifted to a choke hold while Emmy worked both hands up over her head trying to untangle herself from Rose’s fists. Finally Emmy staggered back, bloody nose, little flouncy skirt skewed sideways, stockings shredded, little gravels stuck in her knees. Eyes like flamethrowers. Rose twisted out of my hold with such force, I got a flash of her growing up with murder-boy Fast Forward, holding her own. She stomped across the lot, threw herself into a pickup, and tore out with a squeal that froze the black-dressed huddle coming out the front door. Emmy was gone in the same instant, down the alley in all her wrecked glory. Maggot and I watched her cut between the dumpsters, stomping off towards the laundromat and points west.