Hungry hungry hungry. Mother mother mother.

  The echoes were just in our minds, with the aid of a reefer. The truth is, it didn’t matter what or how hard we yelled. Nothing was coming back to us.

  Emmy and Fast were gone for an age and came back with a large cold pizza and their faces rubbed raw, like they’d been making out. Some dishevelment. I noticed the buttons up the back of Emmy’s sweater were askew. We ate our pizza on the beach, which I don’t recommend as a tourist option because, sand. We’d brought a pile of blankets on this trip with the plan of camping out, and now got them all out to wrap around us while we sat on the beach. Maggot and Emmy both had their quilts that Mrs. Peggot made for all the grandkids out of cut-up squares of their outgrown clothes. I used to lie on Maggot’s bed staring at his, picking out all our good times. The green corduroys for instance that he’d wrecked playing on the Ruelynn coal tips.

  After we ate, we cased a picnic shelter as a possible sleeping location, considering it for all of about ten seconds. The temperature was dropping like a rock. There was nobody around this park. We found some cabins and broke into one, which in our defense was not locked. The bunks had bare mattresses that smelled like mouse pee. A person can do worse.

  The others were out like lights. Maggot’s snore I noticed had changed with his voice. Fast and Emmy had claimed the loft and it was quiet up there, so the hankypank evidently had been gotten out of the way. All I could think of was Dori. What kind of day did she have with Vester, what kind of jerk was I to leave her. I was getting bad sweats also, even as cold as it was, so I got up and took a smidge of oxy to stave off midnight shits. I only had a few with me. Fast Forward was serious about us not getting busted on the road, and had ordered us to bring minor items only, weed and beer. Once we got to Richmond we’d be taking on valuable cargo, meaning his business arrangement, and he said he’d take care of it. Hubcaps I assumed, or duct-taped to body parts, he was worldly-wise. I wondered if the other end of this deal was Mouse, his tiny, bossy friend that had sold her goods from the Pringles can at the Fourth of July party. She’d said she was from Philly, but a Mouse nest relocation was possible.

  Right away I felt the oxy quieting down my aching guts, but not my brain. I couldn’t sleep. Too far from home, too much smell of mouse pee. I wrapped up in my blankets and went out on the porch. It was exactly the same cold, inside or out. They had rocking chairs and I sat in one, letting my eyes get friendly with the dark. I was surprised to see the door open and another blanket-cocoon slip outside, quiet as a cat. Emmy. I thought of those nights in June’s apartment, her sneaking out to lie down with me on my pillow fort bed. Water under a long bridge. She sat in the other rocker. I couldn’t see any part of her, just the burrito of her childhood quilt.

  “Hey,” I said. “The moon went to bed already. So what’s wrong with us?”

  She was quiet a long time. Then said, “Some guy threatened Mom’s life.”

  “Christ. Who?”

  “Some pillhead. He’s not the first. But this was just a few days ago. Then Maggot and I take off without even telling her, so right now she’s up at the house worried about us while some maniac off his nut could be creeping around with his Mac-10 fixing to blow her face off.”

  Her surprising knowledge of firearms made that sentence way too disturbing. “Why would anybody want to hurt June? She’s Miss Popularity of the county.”

  The tube of quilt shifted down a little and Emmy’s head came out of it. “You have no idea what she’s dealing with. People come in every day just wanting her to write them. They’ll say anything to get their painkillers. Kidney stones. They take the cup in the bathroom and prick their finger to put blood in the urine sample. She knows they’re shopping doctors, but if she says no, some of them get really ugly. Screaming, calling her a ruthless cunt.”

  I couldn’t imagine that. Or could, but didn’t want to. The desperation was not unknown.

  “That’s the men,” she said. “The women play it smart, they’ll go into their exam room and duck out with her prescription pad before Mom can get in there to see them.”

  Emmy had one hand up to her mouth. I remembered how she used to bite her fingernails till they bled. June painted them with iodine to get her to stop. I had nothing to offer her now.

  “Mom says half these people don’t know they’re addicted. They took what some doctor told them to, and now they’re fiending and don’t really know what it is. All they know is, Mom cut off their drugs and now they feel like they’re dying. So why won’t she help them?”

  All this was making me hanker to go take more pills. Sick as that is. I wondered if Emmy knew how deep I was in. But she was wrapped up in her own shit. She said in Knoxville, June could refer these patients someplace for help, but here their insurance only covered the pills.

  “You all never should have moved back. If things are so much better in Knoxville.”

  “No, she was miserable in that hospital. Their head physician was this city guy from Johns Hopkins that treated the local nursing staff like they were half-wits.”

  I’d forgotten about that. He called her Loretta Lynn. Emmy’s chair stopped rocking.

  “Anyway, Mom says home is home. If people are in trouble, it’s where she needs to be.” Emmy put her face to the blanket, wiping her nose. I hadn’t known she was crying.

  “Sucks, though,” I said. “She doesn’t deserve people going off at her like that.”

  “Probably she’s called Hammer to come over again. To protect her from getting murdered. He’s probably there right now.” She started crying then with no bother to hide it.

  “What happened? With Hammer. You two were almost engaged there for a minute.”

  Bad move, Emmy went full waterworks. I said I was sorry, but she kept saying she was a terrible person. Over and over. I told her to stop it, she was a queen bee. Same as June.

  “No, I’m not.” She was doing that gasping thing that happens after crying. Mrs. Peggot used to call it getting the snubs. After a minute she asked if I knew Martha Coldiron.

  “You mean Hot Topic?” Even in the dark, I could tell I’d said the wrong thing. “Sorry, I forgot her name. Yeah, I know her. Maggot’s barber.”

  “Martha got pregnant.”

  “Jesus. Maggot wasn’t any party to that, was he?”

  Emmy blew air out her lips.

  “Okay, not Maggot. So what’s she going to do? Marry the guy?”

  “She despises the guy. She wouldn’t tell me who, just that he’s a bastard and now she had evil inside her like Rosemary’s baby. She said if she couldn’t get rid of it, she’d kill herself.”

  “Man alive. How’d you get mixed up with this?”

  “She’s at the house a lot. Maggot might be her only friend. I told her Mom could refer her to a free clinic and not be judgmental because it’s her job. But Martha thinks if one adult knows something, they all will. Her dad finding out would be the end of her life.”

  “Damn. She’s up a creek.”

  “It’s called getting an abortion. I drove her to Knoxville so nobody would find out.” Her chair started rocking again, in an agitated way. “Demon, I’m a horrible person. The sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be.”

  “Why? Because of Martha’s baby?”

  “No. That was probably the nicest thing I’ve done for anybody in ages.”

  “So?” Weirdly, I thought of my snake bracelet. Wondered if she still had it on her ankle.

  “So, I lied to Mom. She thought we went to Knoxville for a Kathy Mattea concert. I lie to Mom all the time. Me being here right now is lying to Mom. She hates Fast Forward.”

  “That’s just June being June. She’s always treated you like a china doll.”

  “No. It’s him. It’s not like she hates all guys, Demon. She likes you. She loves Hammer Kelly. I broke up with him because he’s too good for me. I didn’t deserve him.”

  I knew Emmy’s moods. She would just have to talk herself out of this one. She told me June was worried to death about Maggot, no news there. But Emmy knew more than I did about where he was getting his crank. He was more into meth than oxy. We still talked like that, at the time, about what we were “into.” Like it was a hobby. She told me things I didn’t want to know, like who he was having sex with, to procure. My brain slammed the door on that one. Jesus. Maggot. This overgrown kid that barely had outgrown Legos and Avengers.

  Eventually she went back to bed. I stayed outside until the sky started going white around the edges. Winter nights are too quiet, with all the little lives frozen or hiding out. My heart hurt for them. I thought of Mrs. Peggot making those quilts for all her kids and grandkids. The best people you could ever know. Save for the unlucky two, Humvee and Mariah. And among all the cousins, the only bad seeds turned out to be theirs, Emmy and Maggot, even though they were taken in by others and raised up right. I’d had some of the same kindness, the Peggots, Miss Betsy, Coach. And Fast Forward’s story, the same. Many had tried their best with us, but we came out of too-hungry mothers. Four demons spawned by four different starving hearts.

  46

  Four of us in the cab were a crowd. Dragging Main for entertainment purposes, fine, but this was the entire state of Virginia we had to get across with legs going to sleep, breathing the stale beer breath of others. Emmy complained the most, even though cozied up by choice. It was decided that after our next gas-up, one of us would ride in the truck bed.

  I was dead set on no more stops till we passed Christiansburg. I explained how my previous shot at seeing the ocean went down there in flames of Jesus songs and puke. They all said I was superstitious, and empty is empty. We took an exit with signs for the usual things, gas, food. And colleges. Two. You’d not think they would put two of them so close together. I thought of Angus. She was dead set on moving out after her two years at Mountain Empire, to go to so-called real college. Maybe she’d end up someplace this close, not the far side of the moon. Still though, who would her people be? College would change her. In due time she wouldn’t come back.

  Fast Forward told me to fill it up while he went inside to pay. Maggot and I rearranged the mess in the truck bed to make room for a passenger. We’d just thrown all our shit back there, since none of us had any suitcase. Well, probably Emmy did, but it would have looked suspicious. The Marathon station was bustling. At the pump behind us a guy in a suit and tie, blue hanky sticking out of his pocket like he’s the president of something, tanked up his BMW. On the other side of the pumps, a Mercedes SUV pulled up with a bright green plastic boat of some small kind strapped on top. A tall, skinny kid with a man-bun sprang out of it like gassing vehicles is a sport event, bouncing on his toes as he fed in his credit card. He had on athletic shorts over black long johns, and these rubber shoes with individual toes. Seriously. He looked like he’d been genetically born with black rubber feet.

  I helped Maggot make a nest in our blankets and grocery bags of clothes and cases of beer. He was riding in back. I’d have flipped a coin, but he volunteered. Trying to impress Fast Forward was bringing out a previously unseen side to Maggot: unselfish and agreeable. Also, he must have given himself a little bump of something to get through the day, because he was raring to get on with it. While I filled the tank, Maggot bounced on his pile of crap like he was bronco busting up there, pounding the back of the cab, yelling “Giddyup, let’s get these dogies on the road! Yeehaw children,” etc. Emmy told him repeatedly to shut up, and after that failed, went inside to use the ladies. I ignored him. President Hanky behind us snapped his gas cap shut and rolled his eyes as he got in his car. Man Bun stuck his head between the pumps and peered at us.

  “What’s this, guys, some deeply committed episode of Jackass?”

  The kid is standing there in rubber feet, gassing up his eighty-thousand-dollar SUV for the purpose of hauling around his fucking kiddie boat, and we are the freaks.

  Fast Forward and Emmy got back and we continued east. Atlantic Ocean, dead ahead.

  But first, Richmond. Fast Forward had some written directions that led to confusion. We passed through the skyscraper and doom castle portion of the city, across a big river, through areas of houses, then back over the bridge. Fast Forward was pissed. Another slow start, then five hours of driving, now it was getting dark. He pulled over and made a call on his cell phone. Fast Forward was first of us to have one of those, him and Emmy. It was Mouse we were trying to locate. After the call we circled around through a whole other type of doom castle, rows of exactly-alike brick apartment buildings and more Black people than I’d ever known to see. Street lights were popping on. Fast Forward pulled over again, this time next to a paved square with benches and kid equipment and a tall chain-link fence around it. No guess as to what the fence was meant to keep in or out. There were kids inside, the older ones playing basketball, Black each and all, as entirely as we up home were white, and from the looks of that street, just about as broke. All of us living where we got born. Maybe you have to pay extra to mingle.

  Fast Forward must have thought we couldn’t hear him outside the truck cursing Mouse. A little girl let her yellow hula hoop drop to the ground, and stared at him through the chain link. Braids stuck out all over her head like a cartoon surprised kid. We watched the basketball boys in the fading light, admiring their interesting hair and superior tennis shoes.

  The upshot of all this was arriving not in the best of moods at the Mouse abode. If it was even her house. Two other guys were there, one being some form of giant, as tall as she was small. The other one, who knows, he never got off the couch. The house had a front porch, driveway, regular type place if you overlooked the fact of other houses standing just inches on either side of it. These people could lean out their bedroom windows and shake hands. The Bible says love your neighbor and you have to think city people have their ways of it, but in the two days we were there I saw no evidence. Closed blinds, the sound of dogs barking.

  Mouse was unthrilled that Fast Forward had turned up with his underage fan club in tow, quote-unquote. She stood in the middle of her living room squinting up at us through her cigarette smoke, waiting for further explanation. Nobody on the planet talked down to Fast Forward, except for this four-foot-tall woman in her long pink claws and rhinestoned jeans. She was barefoot whenever we got there but hustled into her tall shoes, so. Four foot four.

  “How do I know they’re not going to narc me out to their mommies?” she asked.

  Fast Forward suggested he would put a bullet in our heads if that happened. Emmy blew out a sharp laugh like she’d been socked in the gut.

  “Our mothers are dead,” I clarified.

  Maggot bugged his eyes at me.

  “Oh wait. One of them is in Goochland Women’s. Sorry, man. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  Fast Forward located his manhood and told Mouse he had lucrative connections in an untapped part of the state, and could certainly take them elsewhere. Mouse said if he was thinking we could all crash here, good luck finding a place to do it in this turdbone house. Which it was. The couch was broken in the middle and there were white kitchen trash bags, filled and lumpy, piled against one wall. A floor lamp stood bald and forlorn with no lampshade.

  The giant guy was named Leon and not completely right in his head. He came out of the kitchen carrying a yellow cat and put it down on the glass table in front of the couch. “Here you go,” he said, and smiled at us. He was in a hoodie and boxers and had the physique you come to recognize: bad teeth, caved-in chest, skinniest legs imaginable. After Leon broke the ice, Mouse rolled her eyes and said “Whatever.” She threw the cat off the table and spread some powder for us all to get down there to snort lines. All except Couch Guy that was leaning over at an angle with his eyes closed and one hand over his face. I’d not seen Fast Forward do drugs before, only beer and weed. Emmy was hesitant, but Maggot got on it like a pro. Then I felt the peer pressure of Fast Forward glaring at me, and understood it was a politeness issue. Like Mrs. Peggot cooking you one of her hams: you better stay and eat or you’re not one of her people. So I went ahead and got coked out of my brain box. I was already kind of awake-dreaming due to no sleep since we left home, and now it took on a nightmare aspect, with prospects of future sleep slim to none. For the record, I do not and never will relish the feeling of the engine outrunning the chassis.

  I don’t think much sleeping was done by anybody that night. Maggot and I were assigned to a room with no furniture in it other than a bicycle. We fetched our blankets and plastic bags of clothes to use as pillows, but the room smelled like gasoline and I kept seeing explosions in my mind’s eye. Explosion, explosion. Maggot told me to chill out, it was just the smell of ass combined with bike tire. He could fall asleep on any amount of uppers, one of his superpowers. That and snoring. I had no idea what Fast might be up to. Part of me thought I should go rescue Emmy, and the rest of me felt like, Who did I think I was? Emmy had the world by the balls.

  There were comings and goings all hours, car lights in the driveway. Music pounding through the wall. Somebody had a Ja Rule fixation, to the extent of “Always on Time” becoming the permanent brain soundtrack of my bad nights, probably until I’m dead. Voices were raised. Maggot roused after a while and went out to investigate. Came back and said it was nothing, just some guys in a fight over somebody shorting somebody, and Couch Guy screaming. I asked why was he screaming, and Maggot said they were moving a lot of furniture out in the yard and his couch was in the running. I understood this to be the type of place you hear about, where people get knifed and so forth as a routine. The longer I went without sleeping, the more visions I had of gasoline explosions and people getting knifed. Minutes were like hours, and hours were like large bags of shit delivered to my skull box. I got kind of beside myself and ended up taking all the rest of what I’d brought with me to calm down, plus a 1-milligram Xanax that Dori slipped in as a treat. Getting ahead of schedule. I’d be fresh out by the time we got to the beach, so. Puking and cold sweats down the road, waiting to crap on my golden moment.