Even though I was the target, I could see Coach was taking it in the gut. In previous times she’d get on her jag about school, and Coach would wink at me behind her back. Now he was not looking me in the eye. Mr. Dick hung his head. Angus had her gray manga eyes boring into me, sending some instructions in code that I was failing to pick up on. My stomach felt like I’d been eating rusty nails. I was short on focus.

  My grandmother though was loud and clear: no more support checks. “My reversed fortune,” she called it. She said I shouldn’t let it scare me, I’d just have to live it down. Some good was known to come out of bad luck, if you met it head-on. I said thanks for the advice.

  Dori’s position for some while had been: Screw them. They didn’t love me like she did, so I should move in with her and be done with them all. I won’t deny I’d considered it, to live with Dori for real, as a couple. But that was with Vester still alive, just idle thoughts. I had even asked questions testing her out on the practical side. Like, what if we wanted to cook a real dinner, not just microwave or frozen. She said what do you mean cook, and I said, you know, on the stove. Like a roast or something. Grill cheese. She said if I was hungry we had Slim Jims, and some of those juice packets. I told her it was more of a theoretical. She made her little frown that ran a line between her eyebrows and said the burners on the range were hard to light and she’d never tried out the oven, so I should probably go take it up with Mattie Kate.

  But Dori was eighteen, and that’s an adult, whether you know how to work the range or not. People come at it from any number of angles. Some have buried both parents, some have their own kids. Some few probably get to that age without ever having worked any job or gone a day hungry or seen anybody die. Nobody gives you a test, is the thing. The day comes, they hand you a new rule book. Dori was living in her own house with a plastic fucking horse on the roof and her name on the deed, and I could live there too if I wanted. Miss Betsy was all gloom and doom about me going over the adulthood cliff with nobody’s support checks to save me now. Like that was so scary. Ain’t no hill for a climber, I said. I’ve been doing this all my life.

  I came back right away to tell Dori. We microwaved some Xtreme butter flavor to celebrate and put the radio on, and she shut Jip in the kitchen so we could sit on the floor of the empty living room of the big house that was all ours now. I had some stellar weed from Maggot, and she’d saved back one of Vester’s fentanyl patches for a rainy day, which this was, still yet and always. We leaned together with our foreheads touching and arms around each other and dipped off like that, listening to Tammy Cochran sing “Life Happened.”

  I still had to go back to Coach’s house and get all my stuff out of there. Angus helped. She was peeved as hell, not at me. At my grandmother. “That bitch, lecturing you of all people about bad luck.” She was emptying out the bureau drawers, throwing my T-shirts and balled socks into Jim Beam boxes. They had suitcases in that house, but it seemed like a complication.

  “That’s just old people shit,” I told her. “The cost of doing business with them. They’ve got their rock-hard stools and dried-up old poon, what else are they going to wave in your face? They press the know-it-all thing as their sole advantage.”

  Angus worked through the bureau from bottom to top and slammed the drawers, bam bam bam, in a practiced way. Like she moved people out of her house for a living, and got paid by the job. “She was asking you to stick up for yourself. And you didn’t even try.”

  “Try what?”

  “Self-defense! What’s happened to you, Demon? Somebody cut your balls off?”

  “She had my report card in hand. I could have bled honey out of my balls, it wasn’t going to change the permanent record.”

  Angus sat down on my sheetless bed, now former bed. I can still picture her there, in her khakis and white sleeveless T-shirt and one of those old-fashioned paper-boy caps. Watching me. She tucked one foot up under her. She had really high arches, like a person born with leaf springs. “You’ve had a serious injury. You’re still limping around like Quasimodo.”

  “I don’t really know what that is. But thanks.”

  “You need surgery. She’s giving you no grace. Cutting you off in your time of need.”

  “I don’t need any surgery.”

  I had almost nothing left to pack. I went over to the tall triple windows, the views I knew so well. Two dead wasps lay on the sill with their heads close together like a tiny murder-suicide.

  “Your girlfriend’s father just died. People miss school for a death in the family. Goddamned stuck-up old fart-breath bitch, where is the motherfucking compassion?”

  Angus cursing somebody out was not casual. She applied herself. She became a creature of fierce beauty, like a thoroughbred running the Kentucky Derby of cursing. You just had to get out of the way. I let her run my grandmother up the devil’s flagpole while I sorted out the weirder CDs she’d loaned or given me from the ones I wanted to keep. She wanted me to promise I would go back to school in the fall, but I couldn’t see the point. She said it was only two more years, and would make all the difference in my future, etc. I asked her to name one great job I could do around here with a high school diploma, that I couldn’t do now.

  I watched her press both thumbs into the sole of her bare foot, thinking. Finally she admitted she couldn’t come up with anything off the bat, but that didn’t prove she was wrong.

  Her eyes darted to the doorway. Coach was there, leaning on the doorframe with one outstretched arm, looking at the floor. He wanted me to know the money my grandmother had been sending was of no consequence, this was still my home if I wanted to stay. I said nobody was holding any gun to my head, it just seemed like it was time I moved out.

  A gun would have been kinder than the truth, that I was too messed up for football. He knew it. I’d kept myself thoroughly trashed of late, but occasionally I caught sight of it myself, lying out there in the weeds: what small greatness I’d had, I was not getting back. No further success lay ahead for me, and if I stayed here pretending it did, I’d be lying to Coach. Taking advantage of his free ride. I wanted to be a better man than that.

  He said he wished things could have turned out different, but he accepted that I wanted to move in with my girlfriend. He wished me well, and ducked out.

  Angus was roaming around the room now, touching the few things of mine still left. She picked up the bottle-ship she’d given me. Then set it back on the desk. “How deep are you into the junk?” she asked. Prissy but trying to sound cool, the way a child would say “dog-doo.”

  I told her I was still on the painkillers Dr. Watts had prescribed, and that I still felt a lot of pain if I stopped taking them, so. I took them.

  She just stared. “You don’t have to bullshit me, Demon. I’ve got no power here.”

  I’d never perfected lying to Angus, so I went ahead and told her I was in a little deeper than that. It wasn’t about my knee anymore. She asked, were we talking about meth or heroin. This may have been just DARE officer info, rather than real life, but she wasn’t completely ignorant. I told her I was kind of all over the place, but not meth. And that I wasn’t shooting anything because needles made me want to puke. She didn’t seem surprised. She suggested maybe I could start backing out of this mess the way I got in, step by step. Maybe if I talked to an adult, they could give me advice. Not Coach obviously. Maybe June. Or Ms. Annie.

  “Adult,” I said. Ticked off, all the sudden.

  She shrugged. Picked up the bottle again, turning it slowly, looking at the little sails and everything inside there. Oh, I was going places, she’d said. She did warn me though, about gravity and shit. Not to ask for miracles. She looked up. “You taking this?”

  “Yes. I’m taking all the presents you gave me. I’m moving six miles away. I’ll probably be over here for dinner twice a week because Dori lives on air and Reddi-wip and our stove doesn’t work.” I said that with pride: our stove. Regardless the rest of the sentence. I told Angus the adult in my life was me. A man, living with my lady. And something to the effect of childhood being a four-star shit show as far as I’d ever seen, so I was glad to be done with it. Angus took one of my shirts out of a box, rolled up the bottle-ship in the shirt, and set it into the box, gently. Like a baby in a cradle.

  I asked her straight. “You don’t like Dori, do you?”

  She pulled out the desk chair and sat in it backward. Stoner used to do that, his arms draped over the back of the chair and his vile brain set on Demon-control. No two humans could be more different. Angus was sticking out her chin, tapping it with the flat of her hand, like there were words she was trying to get into her mouth, but they’d have to be just right. Not hurtful.

  “I do like her,” she said finally. “Remember how you were laid up in bed and she came over with presents all the time? That was great. The happy little Christmas elf. I loved that.”

  “You were not a fan of the chicken.” Sad history of Lovechild: he got out of the tool shed and tangled with the neighbor’s German shepherd.

  “Okay, fair enough. Hate the gift, love the giver.”

  “Why, though,” I asked. “Why do you like her?”

  I’m not sure what I was fishing for. Angus folded her hands together. “I’ve known you how long, four years, going on five? And I never saw you happy, in all that time. Here and there maybe, but not for a whole day. And now you are. With Dori. I can see that.”

  If anybody else had ever wanted me happy, they could have fooled me. Possibly Mom, as long as it didn’t cross tracks with her own maneuvers. That’s all people really want, for you to fit into their maneuvers. Angus though, Jesus. Angus was a freaking wonder.

  48

  Emmy ran off with Fast Forward. All graduated and scholarshipped to UT Knoxville, then drops the bomb that she’s not going. June was floored: so smart, so beautiful, Emmy could be anything. Except the girlfriend of that grass snake. June laid down the law, Emmy stopped coming home. Age-old story.

  But in this version, new to me, the mom doesn’t rest until she’s turned over every rock on the planet. We heard it all from Maggot, after he took up residence on our couch. Emmy got three days’ head start on her getaway, supposedly hanging out with Martha Coldiron. June finally called over there and learned Martha had been kicked out of her parents’ house some weeks prior. Now June was fit to be tied. She called the cops. She called our house at all hours, in case Emmy showed up there. June distrusted Maggot and would only speak to me. If I lied, she’d have my balls on the barbecue. I said yes ma’am. I gave her Fast Forward’s cell phone number, which he wasn’t answering lately. He’d left the Cedar Hill place. Rose was right, he was just a shit shoveler there.

  I said all the things you say: Emmy will turn up, she’s no fool. But had a bad feeling. Whatever Fast Forward had been to me, I could see he was bad medicine for Emmy.

  “Don’t be so sure,” was Maggot’s opinion. “I bet she’s got him eating out of her hand.”

  This was around three in the morning, which seemed a safe hour to go on about our lives. We were sitting on the floor of Dori’s bedroom. “Eating what?” Dori wanted to know.

  “It’s just a saying,” I told her. Sometimes she would trip up on the smallest things.

  “Eating vajayjay,” Maggot clarified.

  “Out of her hand?” Dori often got a little giddy at these times. Maggot put the 80 on the aluminum foil and Dori flicked the lighter underneath. The brown blob bubbled and melted and gave off its happy little smell of metal and burnt tires, sliding around on the shiny foil. I went first, then handed the metal straw to Dori and took over handling the foil. I might have been crap from the knee down, but still had my reflexes. You have to tip it this way and that, to keep it swimming around. Chasing the dragon, breathing its fire. We sucked smoke until nothing was left but a snail trail of melted rubber. And all I could think was: Eighty dollars.

  Not a productive mindset, I know. But that pill was two days’ work at the farm store, a week at Mr. Golly’s. And I was doing neither. I had some money saved back, but it was going fast. I relied on Turp and my other guys for tips on who I could buy from that wouldn’t take the car and leave me in some ditch bleeding from the ears. Dori argued in favor of the heroin that was all over the place now, just bam, overnight, it’s smackland. Pretty cheap. We were buying our own now, not filling Vester’s prescriptions on Vester’s Medicare, so Dori was like, Why not get the best, baby? And I’m trying to keep us on the straight and narrow, pointing out what a beautiful thing it is to have no fear of the cops. They’d not bother you over oxy. You could have a hundred pills on you, no problem. If you had a prescription, they couldn’t touch you.

  Also, there was the problem of me and needles. Dori was so sweet and tolerant with me. Chasing the dragon was our happy medium.

  Mostly it fell to me to call around, make a plan and execute. Dori tried to help, she’d stayed friends with one of the home-care nurses named Thelma that had morphine patches to tide us over. Those were common as litter. Dori would shoot the gel, but it’s mixed in there, with the drug not totally dissolved in the jello part. Thelma warned her about that. It’s easy to OD. She and Dori cut and dyed each other’s hair. Thelma being this older lady, divorced, big talker, with nobody to go home to so she would outstay her welcome, but what can you do. We owed her. Procurement is wearying, you’re running circles to get where you started. I did think of going back to school in the fall, getting my head and body back in the game. Some part of me believed that would happen. September would come around, my knee would feel better. I would quit the dope. But for now we needed our own prescriptions. We had to go deal with the pain clinic.

  Due to it being Dr. Watts, we agreed on me not going in. I waited in the car. Dori went nowhere without Jip, so he was sitting on the spot she’d just left, giving me a nasty eye. Gray whiskers around his mouth all yellowed, like an old man that chews tobacco. This was going to be a day. Heat waves over the pavement. It was the end of the month, so not a long line, but some. With the windows down I was getting that whiff of three days, no showers, too many cigarettes. Mostly men. I hated Dori going in there alone, in her little shorts.

  She flew back out the glass doors looking slapped. Got in the car and fell to pieces. “Baby, baby,” I said, trying to hold her and not panic while Jip growled. She had her hands pressed up to her face hard, like she’s trying to hide lost teeth. “I miss Daddy,” she said, which killed me. I wanted to be man enough. I pulled her hands away and kissed her wet cheeks and wide, scared eyes. She looked like she’d seen the dead. Told me that man in there was a piece of shit.

  “I know he is, baby. We’re just here to get a job done. Did he write you?”

  She shook her head, holding Jip, not looking at me. “That motherfucker is gaming this whole county.” Said Dori, that until last year probably put out the cookies for Santa.

  An office visit was two hundred and fifty. Plus another hundred and fifty for so-called staff fees, to reduce waiting time. Dori said he spent thirty seconds explaining this to her, then thumped his pen on his prescription pad and stared at her tits, waiting for her to pay up or get out.

  I told her we just needed a plan. After we got our first prescription, we’d game the man right back, like she’d done before. Count out what we needed, then come back at the first of the month with the long lines and sell to people out here in the parking lot. I got her to stop crying and see the reason of my ways. Four hundred dollars up front, though. That was our problem.

  “He said he could overlook the fees. If,” she said. Staring out the windshield, stone cold.

  “If what?”

  “If he gave me an exam.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She looked at me. “Fucking me, Demon. That’s what I’m talking about.”

  Two traffic lights and numerous stop signs stood between that pain clinic and the house, and I ran them all, a reckless driver crazed with rage, thinking life couldn’t treat him worse.

  A week or so later we got really hard up, and Dori said maybe she ought to go back there, go through with it. She loved me that much. She couldn’t bear seeing me so sick.

  I tried not to hate her for saying that. But ended up hating myself, for want of better options. I promised Dori I would get work and take care of her. She was all I had.

  If you’ve not known the dragon we were chasing, words may not help. People talk of getting high, this blast you get, not so much what you feel as what you don’t: the sadness and dread in your gut, all the people that have judged you useless. The pain of an exploded leg. This tether that’s meant to attach you to something all your life, be it home or parents or safety, has been flailing around unfastened all this time, tearing at your brain’s roots, whipping around so hard it might take out an eye. All at once, that tether goes still on the floor, and you’re at rest.

  You start out trying to get back there, and pretty soon you’re just trying to get out of bed.

  It becomes your job, staving off the dopesickness for another day. Then it becomes your God. Nobody ever wanted to join that church. A bad day is waking up with nothing, no God, no means. Lying in your stinking sheets, smelling what you hope is yourself and not your girlfriend. Someone has beat the tar out of you, it seems, and crushed some bones. Possibly a person, this comes with the lifestyle, but more likely it was the junk putting its fists through all your personal drywall on its way out of the building. Empty, you are a monster. The person you love is monstrous. You watch her eyes roll back in her head and her pretty legs racking, like the epileptic girl we all knew in grade school, Gola Ham. We were terrified of Gola.