Mrs. Peggot being no fool says “Glitter ain’t gold, hon,” and puts her foot down. Mariah being still in high school sees no choice but to sneak around. Maybe little sister needs to be queen for a day after all, or maybe she really loves him. Doesn’t matter, she’s not quitting him. If she even thinks about it, he lays that smile on her and she melts. Her junior year is one long argument in the Peggot house of “You don’t know him, he’s real sweet,” and “Real sweet my hind foot, he’s a fox in the henhouse,” and “He’s different whenever it’s just him and me,” always ending in the same place: “I’ve warned you, girl, so don’t come crying to me.” Until chapter 2, Mariah is pregnant and moves into his A-frame in the woods outside of Duffield.

  This turns out to be not at all what Romeo had in mind. Before she’s even had the baby, he’s out running around in front of God and everybody with other girls. And suggesting Mariah is lucky to be carrying his seed. She’s the one that went and got pregnant, was she not. Next comes baby, and Mariah is feeling not so much the lottery winner now, tired to death, nagging her man to stay home and help out or at the very least, quit chasing tail. For this kind of lip, she gets to be on the receiving end of quite a lot more than the golden dick and killer smile. One night after a blowout, she’s threatening to call her sister June to come help her pack up the baby and get out of there. He rips the phone out of the wall, knocks her flat, and ties her hands behind her back with the phone cord. Drags her outside screaming, binds her good and well to the deck railing. Gets his Ruger and rolls it around in her mouth, asking how that smart piehole of hers likes sucking cold metal cock. Takes the barrel tip that’s wet with her spit and draws a big smile across her face. Says she ought to try it sometime, it might make her less unsightly. Then rips her shirt open and with his cold spit pencil he draws a big heart on her chest, says she ought to try loving her man too. Wear something decently sexy instead of the ugly-ass nursing bras. Why is she still being a cow for that kid anyway, he’s practically walking, it’s disgusting. Goddamn Mariah Peggot finally grows a pair of tits and they’re the property of a goddamn infant.

  Eventually Romeo gets bored, shoves the piece in his pocket, and drives off. Not in his panel truck either, Mariah’s Chevy Monza being the better getaway car. This is not the end of Mariah’s bad day. It’s the beginning. The front door he’s left standing open so she can see Matty in his playpen in the living room. She has to watch him getting hungry and scared out of his mind. He’s far from walking yet, barely sitting-up age, always-empty age, crying out his heart and looking through the white mesh of the playpen, his little sad eyes asking whymommywhy?

  The first time, it’s two hours. Then Romeo comes back with his pretty smile and asks her if she’s sorry. She says yes, she runs to calm down and feed poor Matty, and that’s what passes for making up in this love nest.

  Mariah can’t go begging her parents to let her come home, because she was warned. Plus stubborn as the day is long. She begs her sister for help. June is still living at home but in community college now, and a genius. The whole Peggot family in fact is a shed of sharp tools, all these gifteds and talenteds. The exception being Humvee, of the birdhouse, that recently brought disaster on the family by getting himself killed. Dark clouds over the Peggot house.

  Things get worse. Romeo leaves for days at a time, only to come home demanding his dinner and sex if he feels like it, but generally so toasted he passes out facedown on the bed where he’ll sleep through hell, high water, and any number of pager beeps. Mariah looks forward to these times. Because he’s threatened her with all manner of shit by now, knocked out a tooth, and the tying-up thing gets to be a habit. Again one evening he leaves her outside where she can see Matty in his playpen crying himself apart. It’s winter now, cold, the door’s standing open, and Mariah is sure this time her child is going to die. She can yell for help all she wants, with nobody up there but the owls in the trees to answer. She’s yanked her wrists around till they’re cut and bleeding, but Romeo is a careful man and knows how to tie a knot.

  The first hour, the baby cries till he’s lacquered his little red face with snot, eyelashes all stuck together, chin quavering. Second hour he goes quiet, lying still, looking at her with those eyes. Third hour, the eyes close and his little body’s shaking. She’s guessing on the time, it could have been three hours or thirty minutes, but once it starts to get dark, she knows, and this is the point where Mariah remembers how to pray. Something she’d forgotten how to do some while ago, around middle school where life gets mean and a girl starts to see how mad is better than sorry, and telling better than asking. Even where God is concerned.

  Mariah is thrown back on her ass. Back to asking. Please God don’t let my baby die. Her boobs are rock hard and burning, she’s crying tears, crying milk, lowing like a cow. Matty starts to wail again in the dark, the special howl a baby keeps on reserve if the need should arise for exploding a mother’s heart. Mariah feels it like a knife in her rib cage, lifting skin from bone, but she’s thanking God her baby hasn’t died yet of hunger or cold or the bad luck of getting born in this shit family in their shit two-bedroom A-frame outside of Duffield. Romeo will not be back before morning. This is the night that will break and make Mariah.

  She’s going to act real sorry, yes, to see him come back home with his big smile. She’ll put on a show, let this man believe he’s the answer to her prayers. But this night she remembers the other thing she was fool enough to forget: that mad is better than sorry.

  Mariah will sneak a blade out of Romeo’s truck, one of those X-Actos, and duct-tape it to her body where she can reach it the next time she finds herself backhanded, in need of a cutting edge. Taped to her butt, below the butterflies-are-free tramp stamp that her parents still don’t know about. One more secret, this sweet blade she takes to wearing at all times. If she finds herself tied up again, this butterfly will get herself free.

  It’s the edge she will use on him too. The day Romeo finally deals out one too many shitfaced fuck-you-alls to herself and the baby prior to passing out cold, deep enough that she can flip him faceup and go to work. Slicing into his cheek from the corner of his mouth till she hits jawbone, both sides, for a shit-eating smile he can wear the rest of his life. And a big heart carved into the skin of his chest. She lets no gushing blood stop her, nor the sight of yellow cheek fat falling in little chunks out of cut-open flesh, nor the screaming as he comes around. She stops short of Lorena Bobbiting him (which was maybe not invented yet), but she does enough. She can grab little Matty and light out of there knowing Daddy will not be modeling any khakis for any J. C. Penney’s.

  It doesn’t cross her mind that he would press charges. She’s young, of course, raised around good people that aren’t perfect but always own up. Mariah was taught that you lie in the bed you’ve made. She’s sure this man knew what was coming to him, and will finally be sorry. After everything. But the wicked have a different head for numbers than most. Any bad they do will end up on the side of never-mind. What’s done to them weighs double.

  Romeo Blevins lawyered up and gaslighted the jury like he’d gaslighted Mariah and every other soul ever to know him. Making himself out the good Samaritan, Mariah the crazy jealous bitch. That baby is not even his, says the lawyer in the alligator boots and the gold watch. Mr. Blevins was minding his own business till she came around stalking him. This is not the first time he’s had such trouble, young girls get notions and will try to pin down a man with means. These are other times, it’s the eighties, where they haven’t invented DNA all that much, and take a man on his word. And his means. Word was, Romeo took pity on a little single mother thrown out by her parents, with no place else to go. And then she got clingy. If he so much as went out at night to help some old lady with her Camry broken down on the interstate, Mariah would throw a fit. Too unstable herself to take decent care of a child, as the baby’s doctor testified. For on two occasions she’d brought the little fellow in all weak and sick from dehydration.

  The more Mariah wept and wailed on the stand about tortured and tied to a deck railing overnight with the baby in the house, these far-fetched things, the crazier she was. He had ten witnesses to her none. The Peggots did their best for Mariah, but not to the extent of alligator-boot lawyers, such men walking a different cut of grass from the Peggots. They didn’t know what to think. All they’d ever heard was how Romeo hung up the moon and every damn star, Mariah being too proud to complain to anybody but her sister, and not even June knew the worst of it. Nobody ever saw her tied up. By the time Mariah got to the courtroom her scars were healed. Not his. If you’ve noticed, it’s the prettiest people that everybody wants to believe, and next after that, the most wrecked. Romeo was both. The jury decided Mariah disfigured him and ruined his life to keep other women away, so she’d have this prize all to herself.

  This is a story that came to me in pieces, over years. People’s doubts and regrets flavored the stew along the way. They made much of how the assault with the deadly weapon occurred so soon after Mariah’s eighteenth birthday. No wishes were made on candles, you can bet. Romeo was not one for romance, and the shape Mariah was in, she probably forgot it herself. Still, a girl comes of age. If her pride had cracked sooner, the shacking-up-with-a-minor business would have played louder, and Mariah might not have been tried as an adult. She could have done some time in juvie and grown up into a whole other life, as Maggot’s mother. It’s all she wanted to be.

  For the start of her twelve-year sentence she got sent to Marion, an extra-special prison for the deeply disturbed. Which you have to reckon she was.

  Nobody believed a word out of this girl’s mouth at the time of her need. And today, her side of the story stands as gospel. The world turns. It would take no time at all for people to start fussing over little Matty, telling Mrs. Peggot what a pretty baby, he didn’t suck those good looks out of his thumb, did he? The apple falls straight from the tree. Everybody’s got their cross to bear. Mrs. Peggot would have to serve her own time with what she’d told Mariah, about making a bed and lying in it. And with what the whole town heard: a mother turning out her own daughter. Mrs. Peggot bore her cross, changed his diapers, and taught him to tie his shoes.

  How all this fits with the story of me, hard to say. Romeo drove away in his panel truck to parts unknown, where he and his new face could tell whatever story suited. I never saw that scary smile except in my nightmares. And sometimes also wide awake, in my mind. Wondering how it would look pumpkin-carved on Stoner. You lie down with snakes, you get up with the urge to bite back. All I’m saying.

  7

  School started, and I was ready to bust out of home lockdown. The first day we had to catch the bus down at the highway due to our road getting washed out from all the rain. It didn’t look that bad honestly, but bus drivers took no chances, being mostly older ladies and the school having no money to fix a busted axle. Anyway it was not a bad walk, maybe a mile from the top where we lived. There were nine of us for our bus stop, including these first-grade twins, and two sad high school guys of different families that we understood to be marked for life. Bus riders. Even at my young age I knew if you were sixteen and could get your ass to a fast-food job or bagging groceries after school, there were vehicles to be had. We all waited in a little gang watching adults drive out to wherever, work if they were the lucky few. Maggot and me grinning like pups, trying not to paw each other’s shoulders because of all the pent-up shit we had to tell each other. Or not tell, in my case, with Stoner’s words hulking around in my head.

  School though was still school. Math class was like, Hey kids, welcome back! Remember math? No, Mr. Goins, we do not. And history as everybody knows is State of Virginia in fifth grade, so it’s Jamestown of the Doomed and all on from there. It took no time for Maggot and me to get back in our groove: shooting rubber bands at a suicidal wasp that flung itself at the window all through English. Scouting the lunchroom for girls that would give up their fries. Little-known fact: Maggot was almost a year older than me, but due to the bad business he had to deal with infant-wise, it took him the extra time to grow up to kindergarten size. How we ended up in the same grade. Our good luck. Now, at school with Maggot, I was a thousand miles from Stoner. If his plan was to make my home life suck so bad I wouldn’t want to lay out of school, it worked like a charm.

  At the end of the day, first-grade-twin-mom was waiting at the bus stop with her ATV to take all the tiny tots up the hill, blue-ribbon mommy that one. The rest of us, left to our own device. It was unthinkable now to go back to the full ban on Maggot-association. We weren’t even clear on where the ban zone started. In eyeshot of my house, you had to think. To play it safe we took a few hours screwing around before making it all the way up there. I poked my head in the door and hollered but nobody was home. I went in, got a Snickers out of the fridge, and went to my room. End of story. I wish.

  Mom gets home from work, yells how she hopes I had a good first day, I yell back it was okay. Then Stoner gets home: “What in the goddamn motherfuck, Demon. Get in here now.”

  I had tracked in some mud on the kitchen floor, and Stoner was losing his shit. It was mud, okay? I am a kid, and we live in a place that is made out of mud. Fine, I took off my shoes and put them outside, then got the mop and bucket. I’d cleaned up worse. Mom in her times of lapse was a drinker of the toilet-hugging kind. Maybe where I got my weak stomach from. She’s standing by the sink saying nothing, with her hand over her mouth in case it was to get any ideas. Stoner is in the doorway, hands on hips like he’s the badass warden in Escape from Alcatraz.

  I start mopping the floor, and Stoner asks what I think I’m doing. I tell him I am mopping the floor, spelled with a silent As you can plainly see, dumbass. He says he doesn’t think that’s going to do the job. Honey, he says, do you think that mop is going to do it?

  Mom looks at him. Shakes her head, no.

  Stoner agrees that it is not. What he wants, I eventually figure out, is to see me down on my knees with a rag scrubbing the damn linoleum. With a bucket of water and Clorox, in case somebody wants to eat off that floor or maybe open a fucking tattoo parlor.

  Fine, scrub the floor I did. Mind you, I’m still of an age where most moms don’t want their kids messing with Clorox at all, my own included, as far as I knew. The fumes were getting me kind of high. I finished up and washed out the rags in the sink. Mom still right there with nothing to say about it. I looked at Stoner, needing to be done before I puked or passed out.

  “Your boy says this is clean. Does that look clean to you?”

  Mom looked over at him, surprised.

  “Or does it look like his usual half-assed effort? Because I can still see his damn tracks on that floor. Can you not see the goddamn shit your son tracked in?”

  Mom looked weird. I mean, she was in her regular work clothes, slacks and button blouse, Croc flats for standing in all day, hair in the ponytail she wore to look professional. But she had a glazed look, doped. Which she couldn’t have been, I thought. Did I want her to whip out a blade and slice him up? No. But something. For her to wake up in there for godsakes and see how mad is better than sorry. But all the mad Mom ever could muster just leaked right back out of her in tears and puke. Finally she said, “Demon, you better go on and clean it again.”

  Bullshit. There was nothing to see. Mom’s eyes were excellent. They were about the only part of her head that always worked right. Whatever, I scrubbed the floor again, and as much rage as I put into it, they’d be lucky if there was any linoleum left. I dumped the bucket again, rinsed the rags again, threw them into the bucket like a ball I was firing home from the outfield. Pushed past Stoner to get myself out the door. He caught me by the collar of my T-shirt and dragged me back inside.

  Where the hell did I think I was going, was his question, because I wasn’t done yet. Let’s all take a look at the living room, he said. More muddy tracks on the living-room carpet. Mind you, that carpet was nasty and old to begin with, stained since the dawn of time. Me and Mom were far from the first to live in this trailer. Stoner asked me what I saw and I said, A shitty-looking carpet. He said, That’s right. And he needed it clean. Because how was a man supposed to do his weight training on a floor that looked like that?

  I had some suggestions that I kept to myself. Mom got out scrub brushes and the StainZaway, handed them over, and went off to hide in the kitchen. Stoner stood over me while I scrubbed at the stains with the Clorox rags and sprayed them with the carpet cleaner and by the way was getting krunked as a kite. Maggot and I had tried out StainZaway for this exact purpose one time, and got educated. There are better and worse things to huff, and StainZaway is a fast train to pukeville. Especially if there’s bleach in the mix.

  So now all I can think of is puking, and Stoner making me clean up puke, then the stains of that, and I’m going to be on my knees here huffing StainZaway till somebody kills somebody. It shouldn’t take long. I’ve got snot pouring out of my nose and this insane ringing in my ears, the theme of the X-Men show in my head. That one tune over and over, soundtrack to me scrubbing fury holes in the goddamn carpet: Da-na-na-na NA na na! Da-na-na-na NA na na!! It’s so loud in my head, I honestly can’t tell if it’s coming out of my mouth or not, but it must be because Stoner starts yelling at me to shut the hell up. And I’m screaming back at him Da-na-na-na NA na na! because by this point I’ve pretty thoroughly lost my mind.

  All I remember after that is me throwing shit around and him grabbing both arms behind me in a hammerlock. His hand covering my mouth so I can’t breathe. With nothing else to fight with, I bite down on his hand. Sweet Jesus how that feels to sink my teeth in the meat of his hand and taste blood. Like I’m Satan, and all of life has trained me to this achievement.