I tried to quit, more times than Dori did. Thinking I was the stronger of us. That was me being stupid, she just knew more. One of the times we tried, we both saw guys in camo with assault rifles coming in the windows, where there couldn’t have been any guys or windows. We came to despise our bed, for how little we managed to sleep in it. Day and night run together. You finally start to doze out of the misery and then your legs jerk, kicking you back to your wakeful hell. You might go twenty-four hours, thirty, countdown to the end of the world. At some point you’ll look at this person that’s your whole world and offer to go get something, the little hit that so easily brings her back. You do it as an act of love. I’ve known no greater.

  Our housekeeping, oh my Lord. We were kids playing house. The frozen food boxes piled up, bags overflowed, trash doesn’t leave a house by itself. The mice though will give it a shot. Due to the washing machine situation, Dori would leave dirty clothes piles to molder, and ransack the Dead Mom closets. Gypsy skirts, big-shoulder blouses, movie of the week was our girl Dori. I did my washing in the sink, till the plumbing went to hell. She had no sense about what could or couldn’t be flushed. Let’s say if Jip were to squeeze out his little circle of turds on my underwear left on the floor, true example. Dori would try to flush the evidence.

  If I scolded her, it wouldn’t go well. I’d yell, she’d get all pitiful. If I brought up looking for work, she didn’t want me leaving her alone. We were storybook orphans on drugs. A big old apple tree stood out in the yard, and that summer we ate wormy apples off the ground. I can still see her, so hungry, dirt on her knees, kneeling on the ground in a dead person’s housedress.

  After we failed to pay the light bill, things got dire. I tried KFC, no luck. I’d have taken any shit job at all, other than a cashier. I wasn’t entirely out of my mind. The oxy will put your hands in that till. I kept looking. I loved Dori and I adored her and sometimes I needed to get away from her. After another eventful day of feeling useless and unemployable, I’d go smoke a bowl with Turp, to hear about football camp and other guys living my childhood dreams. Or I’d go see Maggot, that had moved back in with Mrs. Peggot. Big pot on the stove, kitchen all spick-and-span, just like old times except with the guts scooped out. Mrs. Peggot was thin as a twig and walking in her sleep. Sometimes wearing her dress inside out. She’d ask me how I’d been keeping, set down her stirring spoon, walk in the living room, and stand by his empty chair. Then come back and ask how I’d been keeping. Maggot was no better, seriously strung out. I had orders from June to interrogate him as to the whereabouts of Martha or news of Emmy, but he knew nothing. It’s like he and Mrs. Peggot both missed the train. Their only news was that Maggot’s mom was getting out of prison. No date set, but the hearing was coming up.

  The one person to cheer me up reliably was Tommy. One evening I went and found him in Pennington Gap, sure enough renting a garage from the McCobbs. Rack of garden tools on the wall, stained cement floor. He had a hose running from outside rigged up to a bucket for his washing. Hot plate, microwave. He put Dori and me to shame as far as tidiness, his books in shelves and his clothes folded in milk crates. A bed that was made. Bathroomwise, he had to use the one in the house. Weren’t they supposed to be putting one in out here? He said well, the McCobbs didn’t own that house, they rented. And their landlord wasn’t aware he was paying them to live in the garage. There you go, the McCobbs. But Tommy threw his hands wide to indicate his hose-bucket sink, his bed beside a hand tiller with sod dangling from the tines, and asked if I could believe how far we’d come in life. “My own place!” he said. A man among men.

  I was lucky to find him home, most evenings he was at the newspaper office. They had him come in at day’s end to janitor up everybody’s unholy mess. Then the ad lady quit and they gave Tommy her duties of laying out the paper and making up the ads. His boss was Pinkie Mayhew that wore men’s trousers and drank on the job. People said the Mayhews had run the Courier since God was writing his news on stone tablets. Pinkie and two other people did all the photos and stories. Then Tommy came in nights and put the whole thing together. He said I could hang out over there any time, he could stand the company. So I did.

  Tommy was carrying a lot of weight down there. Most of that paper was ads. The front page obviously would be your crucial factors, Strawberry Festival, new sewage line, etc. Then sports and crimes. They had other articles coming in over a machine, from the national aspect, and Pinkie would pick some few of those to run. All the rest was ads. Classifieds were laid out in columns, but the ones for car lots, furniture outlet, and so forth would be large in size, and Tommy had the artistic license of designing them. He had border tapes to dress up the edges, and what he called clip-art books that were like giant coloring books, on different subjects. Automotive, Hunting and Fishing, Women’s Wear. He’d find what picture he wanted, cut it out, and paste it up on the ad. A sofa for the furniture store, or he’d get creative, like a pirate ship for Popeye chicken. It depended on what pictures he could find in those books, which got picked over and cut to shreds. They didn’t buy him new ones very often. So he’d end up looking for the needle in the haystack, turning these pages of basically paper spaghetti.

  Tommy was like a new person, a man in charge. He had clothes now that fit him, not the outgrown sausage-arm jackets of old. Plaid flannel shirts mostly, with the sleeves rolled up. He still had the girlfriend Sophie that worked at her newspaper in Pennsylvania, a much bigger operation than the Lee Courier, Tommy said. But he was proud of this one, showing me around: machines, computers, Pinkie Mayhew’s office with a stale ashtray smell that could knock a man flat. If you’ve ever opened a drawer where mice have ripped up toilet paper to make a nest in there, the entire space filled with white fluff? Pinkie’s office.

  Tommy showed me how to feed print columns through the hot wax rollers and help him stick them on the pages. It was all done on a big slanted table with light inside. They had blue pencil marks showing where to line things up. The whole place smelled like hot wax. Little cut ends of waxy paper ended up all over everywhere, sticking to your shoes or the backs of your hands, like a baby eating Cheerios. This was the unholy mess that Tommy had to clean up. Honestly, he was holding that outfit together. I’d started coming in due to boredom, but he needed the help. He offered to pay me out of his check, but I said Jesus, Tommy, you have to quit being so nice to people. I still had his T-shirt.

  One night I found Tommy pulling on his hair, looking for clip art he wasn’t going to find. He had a Chevy dealer ad, with nothing left in the automotive book but tow trucks, Fords, and fucking Herbie the Love Bug. I said, Look, let me just draw you a damn Silverado. And knocked it out. Gave it extra shine, one of those star-gleams on the bumper. That’s how it all started: clip-art Demon. I could do about anything. The Lee Courier started having a whole new aspect to its ads that probably was getting noticed. Tommy said I was a miracle art machine. I told him if there was ever a sale on skeletons, he’d have to take the wheel.

  49

  June wanted to see me. Emmy was two months AWOL, and she was at her wits ends. The scene of the crime was Fast Forward, everybody knew. But Emmy was well past the age of consent, and had gotten the message back to June that she was in no need of rescue.

  I wasn’t sure what dog I had in this fight if any, but June was never anything but good to me, so I drove over there. At a distance she looked the homecoming queen as ever, bare legs propped on the porch railing. I had to get close to see how two months had made her old. Lines by her mouth, tiny wires of white hair. She threw her arms around me, rocking like some sad last dance, her head on my shoulder. The women that loomed large in my life were all getting small.

  “Sorry,” she said, after she let me go. Wiping the corner of one eye.

  “Lord, June, don’t be. I spent the better part of middle school wishing for that.”

  “I believe it was Emmy you were after.”

  “I was not one to shut any doors. You pick that up in foster care.”

  She sized me up. “Look at you, all grown. After everything they put you through. An upstanding young man, living on your own. Where’s Dori? I told you I’d feed you both.”

  “I already ate. She was tired. She said thanks.”

  I felt less than upstanding, and Dori was out for the count. I’d finally gotten a shift at Sonic, and Dori was cutting hair at some bootleg beauty parlor in Thelma’s basement. We had our prescriptions. I’d snaked the drains and replaced the fill hose in the washer. Life was back on its keel somewhat, but we had different schedules. I aimed at functional for much of each day, whereas Dori set her sights on a couple hours of not poking out any eyes with her scissors.

  “I’ve got a whole baked chicken I’m sending home with you, then.”

  My stomach did a little dance of hope. “You don’t have to.”

  “I do, or it’ll go to waste. Most of everything I cook, I end up taking in for the girls at the clinic. I cannot get the hang of living alone.”

  “I’m sorry.” I hadn’t thought of that. She never had. She’d started looking after Emmy at nineteen, while she was in nursing school. Living in the Peggots’ trailer.

  She put her hands in her back pockets. “You know I’d lay down my life for that girl.”

  “I know. I think she wants you not to, though. Anymore.”

  She looked at me, surprised. “That’s just how it works, Demon. You should be as mad at her as I am. We give these kids all the advantages, and they won’t stoop to pick them up. Emmy’s acting like a child, and Maggot, good night. I don’t know where to start.”

  “He’ll be all right. He just needs more time than most to find his way out of the weeds.”

  “What he needs,” she said, “is a boyfriend.”

  I might have blinked. “You’d be okay with that?”

  “Of course I would. Even Mama would, I think. In time. If he could just find some nice boy to talk him out of his night of the living dead.”

  “I’m not sure he’d choose that wisely.”

  She spit out a bitter laugh. “We don’t any of us, do we? Here, let’s walk. There’s a spot up the road where you can see the sun hit the ridge on its way down.”

  We walked out on the gravel road I’d once walked with Fast Forward and Mouse, letting her trash-talk all I knew. I’d let summer get by me without notice. Here it was. The sun coming down through tall trees in long waterfalls of light, the birds starting up their evening songs. There’s one like water trilling over rocks, pretty enough to make you cry. Wood robin. I thought about the night in Knoxville June told us she was moving back. Screw those doctors looking down on her, calling her Loretta Lynn. She could have crushed it there. But she wanted this.

  As far as Emmy and Fast Forward, June knew as much as I did about where they were living, someplace in Roanoke. She said she woke up every day wanting to drive over there and bring the girl home. But this was Emmy. You’d want a SWAT team. June was desperate for anything I could tell her. I picked my words, but I didn’t lie. I told her Fast Forward was one of these that has pull over people, like a magnet. And Emmy being a magnet-type person also, they probably couldn’t help getting attracted. June asked if he was dangerous. I said the world is dangerous. She asked what drugs he was involved with, and I said to the best of my knowledge he himself wasn’t doing a whole lot. That he was more into the money side of things.

  “That is not going to help me sleep tonight,” she said.

  I told her I was sorry, but she was putting me between the rock and the hard place. We walked to where we could see the sun hit the ridge, and the dark start to pour down the valley. On the way back she asked about my knee. I said I didn’t think about it anymore, which was a lie. I thought about it every single time I took a step. My own business.

  “Just tell me this,” June said. “Is she taking pills?”

  “You want to sleep tonight? Or the truth.”

  “I’m asking.”

  “Then I’ll tell you. I don’t know a single person my age that’s not taking pills.”

  June was quiet. I tried to decide if this really was true. Angus was the exception. Even Tommy popped NoDoz, due to the hours he kept. Late nights at work, and then the McCobbs had him up early taking the kids to school. We were halfway back before she spoke again.

  “They did this to us. You understand that, right?”

  I did not. Neither the who, nor the what.

  She told me more of what I’d heard from Emmy, what she was seeing at the clinic. I asked if anybody was wanting to kill her lately, but she waved that off. “I’m not the one you need to worry about. It’s not just people your age. You know what I’m saying? If they’re old, sick, on disability? They need their scrip. If they’re employed, they get zero sick leave and can’t see me more than once a year, so there’s no follow-up. They need their scrip. That bastard.”

  I shouldn’t have asked what bastard. Kent. And his vampire associates, quote unquote. Coming here prospecting. She said Purdue looked at data and everything with their computers, and hand-picked targets like Lee County that were gold mines. They actually looked up which doctors had the most pain patients on disability, and sent out their drug reps for the full offensive. June kept looking at me like she knew the parts of my business I wasn’t telling her. But Kent was nothing to me. If I had problems, they were my doing.

  Back at the house, she wrapped up a lot of food for me to take, and walked me to the car. Instead of saying goodbye, she stood with her arms crossed, looking at me. Weirdly, I thought of that time at the Knoxville zoo, how she took hold of me by the ears and said she knew what I needed. And was exactly right. Of all the good people I knew, she was probably the best one.

  Tommy let me draw a comic strip for the paper. How that came about, long story. Starting with Tommy in a newspaper office. This was basically his first-ever contact sport, Tommy vs. the great big world. Where had he been, up till then? Magic Treehouse. Having a job suited him, not a problem. But the big world itself? It was whipping Tommy’s ass.

  These national type articles that came in over their machine were a grab bag, as mentioned. Election, Olympics, earthquake, Lance Armstrong, what have you. But it was a Pinkie requirement to run any of them with mention of Southwest Virginia or anything close, like Tennessee or Kentucky. Which they mostly never did. But if so, dead guaranteed to be about poverty, short life expectance, etc. The idea being, we are a blight on the nation. Tommy showed me one with the actual headline “Blight On the Nation.” Another one said “smudge on the map,” that he’d highlighted with yellow marker. He was saving these articles in a folder. Seriously. Where was the Tommy of old, that took other people’s lickings and kept on ticking? Over there on his spin-around stool was where, tugging on his stand-up hair, getting worked into a lather. I was like, Tommy. You didn’t know this? Evidently not. He couldn’t stop reading me headlines. “Rural Dropout Rates On the Rise.” “Big Tom Emerges as Survivor.”

  “Technically that’s one for our side,” I said. “Our guy wins Survivor.”

  Tommy held up the photo they ran of Big Tom. Okay, not good.

  I tried to explain the whole human-being aspect of everybody needing to dump on somebody. Stepdad smacks mom, mom yells at the kid, kid finds the dog and kicks it. (Not that we had one. I wrecked some havoc on my Transformers though.) We’re the dog of America. Every make of person now has their proper nouns, except for some reason, us. Hicks, rednecks, not capitalized. I couldn’t believe this was news to Tommy. But I guess I’d seen the world somewhat, with our division games where they called us trailer trash and threw garbage at us. And TV, obviously. The month I moved out of Coach’s, Chiller TV was running this entire hillbilly-hater marathon: Hunter’s Blood, Lunch Meat, Redneck Zombies. And the comedy shows, even worse, with these guys acting like we’re all on the same side, but just wait. I dated a Kentucky girl once, but she was always lying through her tooth. Ha ha ha ha. Turns out, Tommy had squandered his youth on library books and had zero experience with cable TV.

  He kept wanting to know why. Like I knew. “It’s nothing personal,” I said.

  He was fidgeting with his shirtsleeves, unrolling and rolling them to his elbows. Finally he looked up. With tears in his eyes, honest to God. “It is, though. I’m afraid Sophie won’t ever want to come here. She says her mom keeps asking why she couldn’t date somebody closer to hand. What if her whole family thinks I’m just some big, toothless dumbass?”

  Damn. I hoped Sophie’s family wasn’t watching Redneck Zombies. Or Deliverance. You try to tune this crap out till it sneaks up and socks you, like the sad day of Demon’s slam-book education. It’s everybody out there. Reading about us being shit-eater loser trash jerkoffs.

  “Your teeth are A-okay,” I said. “She probably thinks you’re the exception to the rule.”

  He looked defeated, shaking his head. “People want somebody to kick around, I get that. But why is it us? Why couldn’t it be, I don’t know, a Dakota or something? Why not Florida?”

  “Just bad luck, I reckon. God made us the butt of the joke universe.” At that point I knew it probably wasn’t God. But I had nothing better on offer.

  Where Tommy used to draw skeletons, now he collected proof of getting scorned. I told him to quit torturing himself, but he was as hooked on his poison as I was on mine. Even the comic strips were against him. Those came in a packet every week, and he had to pick out four to lay out on the last page. All lame, unfunny four-panels of kids acting rated-G naughty, talking dogs, yuk-yuk. Tommy could choose any three, but the fourth always had to be Stumpy Fiddles that they’d been running forever: lazy corn pones with hairy ears, big noses, patched clothes worse than any I wore as a foster. Old Maw nags, old Paw skips out on any threat of work to hide behind the outhouse with his shine jug. It wrecked Tommy to run this strip. I offered to draw in palm trees to make it Florida, which we both knew would not fool anybody. It was the same deal. This was the one comic strip of existence with so-called local interest.