“What the hell kind of sick madness is that?” I felt like puking. My ears were ringing.

  “Blackmail.” She got weirdly quiet. I watched her walking herself back from frantic to that place where she could go. Like this was happening to some other Angus. U-Haul had told her he could go to the school board and get Coach fired for drunkenness and worse. Embezzlement of school and booster funds. That would happen, unless she had sex with him.

  He’d stopped banging on the car. We didn’t see him, and it was too quiet. My brain was having trouble turning over, like the fluids were cold. “Shit. He’s gone to get another key.”

  “There’s no other key. He’s been pissed over that, he lost the other set.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yeah. But the tire iron is still in the running.”

  “This is all bark and no bite,” I said. “He’s just making shit up. Jesus. Stealing from the boosters? That’s like taking out of the church collection plate, Coach would never.”

  Wouldn’t, she said, but did. Without knowing it. U-Haul kept all the books. He’d been moving football funds into his mother’s bank account, for years evidently. I said if that was true, they’d have burned down their damn rat trap in Heeltown and gotten a life.

  He was just waiting for the iron to strike, is what he’d told her. She’d been calling me for an hour, Jesus. How long was he chasing her around that table? She said not that long, it took a while to get to that point. She’d gone in Coach’s office that afternoon and found out he’d forged Coach’s signature all over a ton of things, power of attorney and such. Stealing from Miss Betsy also, altering her checks. U-Haul came into the office then, she shoved this stuff in his face and one thing led to another, the blackmail and such, before it blew up into him trying to back her into the bedroom.

  It was a lot to follow. Why would she go poking in Coach’s office? Craziest thing. Some man had called the house saying U-Haul was putting a lot of Coach’s money in his so-called enterprise, and he needed to check this out with Coach himself. Angus had taken the call. And that’s how it came down. Damn. Mr. McCobb blows open another guy’s con.

  We sat in the car forever, waiting for the next moves of a crazed mind. Tire iron to the Impala being among my concerns. The coward must have walked home. Around midnight we called the coast clear. Checked on Coach, who’d slept through the show. I offered to take Angus someplace, but she was pulling it together. We went in the office and unlocked the drawer where Coach kept his Smith & Wesson 40 to take to bed with her. I made sure it was loaded and showed her the safety, which is a little tricky, a grip safety that has to be palmed. She knew.

  I sat with her a while in her room, even though I’d have hell to pay later on many fronts. I asked if Coach might have known this stealing was going on. She said no. He’d trusted U-Haul, then stayed too drunk for too long. “That part’s killing me,” she said. “U-Haul says I asked for this. I knew about Dad and didn’t speak up. That’s true, Demon. We knew.”

  “You asked for nothing,” I said. “Jesus. You can’t think that.”

  “I know.”

  “This was done to you. To you and Coach both.” Words I’d been hearing.

  “I know.”

  She got a little wobbly, and I thought she might fall apart but she didn’t. She sat on the bed talking through what she’d have to do, starting tomorrow. Money to repay, shit to sort out. Lawyers. She looked like a kid, curled against the headboard in her white stretch pj’s, twirling a strand of her hair around one finger, talking like the head of the house. All I could think of was little Angus bearing those Hellboy eyes on her, all her life. Growing her skin of leather.

  I told her to push the heavy chest of drawers against the door after I left. And waited to be sure she did.

  56

  It was April, not quite a year after Vester, and it happened the way I knew it would. I came home and found her. Early evening, not yet dark. Damn April to hell, I could be done with that one. November also. Birthdays, Christmas, dogwoods and redbuds, even football season. Live long enough, and all things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.

  I almost didn’t feel anything at first, cleaning her up like I’d done so many times, getting her decent. And then the house, cleaning up her mess and her kit. Hiding stuff, before I made any calls. There were few to make. Thelma had run out of reasons to know her. Like everybody else. I had no wish to see the aunt again, but the EMTs said they had to get hold of next of kin, so I turned over Dori’s phone. Aunt Fred was in the contacts. I’d erased some other numbers first, but nobody cared to track down any mysteries. Another OD in Lee County. There’d been hundreds.

  And just like that, I was “the boy that went in there and found her.” People were saying I’d broken into the house, various things. Stories grow on the backs of others. Regardless my clothes and everything being all over the house. Aunt Fred didn’t remember me at all. I watched her pick up a pair of my jeans off the floor like she’s scrubbing a toilet, saying something to the mini-me daughter about Dori having a lot of men friends. I should have screamed the bitch to hell, but my throat had closed up. My baby girl. No words of mine were called for, because just like before, the aunt chose everything. Church, music, one funeral fits all. They buried her beside Vester and her mother. The only thing they got right.

  I just felt like a rock through the service, or a hunk of ice. Not coldhearted against the handful that came out to show respects, it wasn’t their fault. Mostly they were the care nurses that had helped with Vester. Also Donnamarie and them, from the store, and a few girls that might have been friends with Dori in school before they got bored of her. Guilty, curious, who knows what brings people out to view the dead. The funeral was so wrong, I couldn’t see how it mattered. I’d already done everything in the world I could for Dori, and it added up to nothing.

  Seeing Angus, that was a surprise. She came up behind me as I was going into the church, and pretty much steered me like a blind man through the day.

  At the graveside, we all stood around waiting for over an hour, because Aunt Fred and Tonto got lost. Four or five miles, church to cemetery, and they’re lost. They’d been up there the year before for Vester, but I drove. This time they were on their own, and couldn’t be bothered with the directions I gave them, saying they had the navigator thing in their phones. But you get on these back roads, and that business goes off the rails.

  The day itself was cruel, a blue sky to rip your damn heart from your lungs. Trees in bud, yellow jonquils exploding out of the ground, dogwoods standing around in their petticoats. Vester’s people were in one of these little graveyards way back up the side of a mountain, where you look out across the valley to all the other ranges rising one behind the other in so many different shades of blue, it’s like they’re bragging. You have to reckon in the old days people had a more optimistic outlook on the death thing, and picked these places for the view.

  People got chatty and impatient from waiting around, regardless the scenic overlook, but the minister was getting paid by Aunt Fred, so he wasn’t having her miss any part of the show. Quite a few walked back to their cars and left. I had no wish myself to throw a handful of dirt on Dori’s little white coffin. She’d had enough of that in life. Angus and I took a walk up the road past the cemetery into a little stand of pines. We sat on some boulders and watched birds hopping around on the ground looking for bugs, throwing the duff aside with their jerky heads. Angus asked if I was going to be okay, and I finally fell apart to some degree. She let me snivel.

  I eventually found my manners to ask about Coach, the scandal and everything. She said she and Coach went together to the school board to explain things, and he might get suspended, but not till after the fall season. The Generals without Coach, there would be rioting in the streets. Angus said he was okay with whatever got decided, he was wanting to pay the piper. I asked what they would do for money if he lost his job. She was on top of it, aiming to sell or rent out that big house. She was looking at apartments in Norton where she could go to her community college classes and Coach could get dried out. They had AA meetings over there. She was putting him on the clock. She’d stay and help him for another year, and then it was sink or swim because she was going away to the other type of college. I asked her wasn’t that a little harsh. She said no. She was not in the business of throwing her life away so other people can stay shitfaced.

  She stopped herself. “I don’t mean you, Demon. You understand that, right?”

  I said I knew I was not their problem. She argued with me, saying Coach was still my guardian. How was it fair, me getting assigned to a shitfaced guardian? I said add it to the list. But I could see she was getting upset. She’d made all new life plans over the last couple weeks, while there was still a me and Dori. Now she’d have to rethink. Not necessary, I said. She asked where I was going to live. I said I’d figure it out. I wasn’t mad at her. I wasn’t anything. I heard what she was trying to say, that we were still family. I just wasn’t feeling it.

  She was wearing the little black hat with the veil that I’d given her our first Christmas. She’d joked at the time about how she was going to get known countywide as the funeral fox. Thanks, God. Nice one. We walked back to the burial in time to see it through. Thelma was one of the few that stayed. She was sweet and gave me a hug. But all told, other than Angus, not too many of the attendees gave me the time of day. Some few asked if I had known the deceased.

  I had to move fast to get my things out of the house, because the Fred team came back after the funeral, pulled on yellow rubber gloves, and moved through like Haz-Mat with their Lysol and trash bags, clearing the place out. Furniture, pictures, precious Mom clothes Dori had kept for all time, all bagged and thrown outside. A guy was coming in two days’ time to haul everything to the dump. Not even a yard sale. To their mind, our life was entirely trash.

  Luckily they ignored the Impala, seeming to think it was mine. All my stuff fit inside it. The two days they were cleaning, I would drive a ways and then circle back, sleeping in the vehicle, watching the heap of black trash bags grow to a mountain. They were scrubbing this branch off their tree. It turns out, Newport News is in Virginia. Same state, different planet.

  The other mystery nobody cared to solve was Jip. I’d found him, too, not lying on top of her as usual but under the sheet, curled up against her cold belly. Did he have the same junk in his veins she did, I’ll never know. Accident or no accident, the question of my life. As part of my cleanup before calling 911, I’d picked up his hard little body that was curled like a cinnamon roll and wrapped it in the ratty striped towel he always dragged around the house. Pretending that rag was me, I assumed. Then later, with so much else going on, I forgot about him.

  The little towel bundle turned up outside, on the black-bagged trash pile. This fierce tiny being that never stopped loving her, nor wanting me for dinner. I took him around to the back and buried him behind the tool shed. The one goodbye that was left up to me.

  57

  I’m not sure how many days I lived in my car before Maggot tracked me down. He was back living with Mrs. Peggot now. The kid had been bounced around in his time, but never homeless, because blood is thicker than water. I ought to know, born in the bag of water. No relatives, homeless, but at least I would never drown, yay! The gospel according to Mrs. Peggot.

  She’d turned me out once, and I had my pride. I was not going back there begging. But now she actually wanted me to move in, and it took some convincing. Maybe she was hoping for the good influence on Maggot after all, or for somebody to fix busted hinges and everything else that was going undone with Mr. Peg sick for so long, then dead. Maggot’s talents ran in other directions.

  I didn’t end up fixing much. There’s not a lot to say about those days I was there, mainly because I don’t remember them. Maggot and I went on a bender that obliterated the weekend and ran to the end of the month. Then we thought, who needs May?

  All previous statements as regards junkies not really trying to get high, just trying not to get dopesick? Scratch that. After Dori was gone, I was chasing the big zero. With fair success. My job at the co-op finally joined the tits-up work history of Demon. And poor Mrs. Peggot, I did nothing around that house except to surface on rare occasions to drive her to the grocery. We’d have starved otherwise, since she didn’t drive, and Maggot was useless on Mr. Peg’s truck. One more strike on his blighted manhood: Maggot never learned to drive a manual.

  I had the vague idea that if money became essential, tobacco season was around the corner and I’d make some then. People were hard up for labor. With most every kid in the county hammered, what few farmers were still on their land were having to scout high and low to get decent hands for the hard work. Mainly these were coming to us across the Mexican border. Along with all the heroin. No connection, as far as I know.

  The one thing I was still holding together, by a thread, was Red Neck. I couldn’t let Tommy crash and burn, he of all people deserved better. He was more than pulling his weight at this point. In the beginning we’d brainstormed a lot of ideas, and now he was sketching those into panel strips. Skeleton versions. At least once a week I’d get myself sober enough to go over and put flesh on the bones. My style was required by the fan base. But Tommy’s rough drafts had their own weirdly terrifying vision, more truthful than any we ever put in the paper. Our people, our mountains, all our worries: a universe of ghosts. I called his drawings Neckbones, and asked if I could save them. Tommy said this was a dark inclination on my part, but he let me.

  The day everything happened, the hitting bottom as it’s known in our circles, came in June. One of those hot, rainy days where you feel like you’re breathing your own breath out of a paper bag. But weather was not the worst of that day’s evils. I’m pointing my finger now at Rose Dartell. Running into her that day would put the nail in the coffin. I’d give anything to have stayed home. If wishes were horses, like they say. We’d all have different shit to shovel.

  Maggot and I were at the famous Woodway crack house where Swap-Out was still living with some other guys. People came and went through there like barn cats, you didn’t always bother with names. Maggot needed to get hooked up. For my own part I was okay, I’d scored a pity bottle of oxy off of Thelma at the funeral and had multiplied the investment. Pain clinic, first Friday of the month: loaves and fishes. But I drove Maggot over to Woodway and made the effort to be social. Had a chat with Swap-Out, asked if he still had any doings with Mr. Golly, which he didn’t, too bad. That man had a place in my heart. Then Maggot and the other crackheads got to the part of ring-around-the-rosy where they all fall down, and I went and sat outside, deeply cooked and making the best of it. Breathing the halitosis of summer, basking in the sick glory of that porch. The rotten mattress, the dresser with no drawers, the refrigerator on its side with its mouth hanging open, harboring a tiny waiting room on top of four black plastic chairs joined together. I remembered rescuing Martha from this very porch, a lifetime ago, and wondered what became of her. June would be getting her straightened out, for sure. Maggot and I weren’t crossing our path with June if we could help it.

  Half the porch was taken up by stacked firewood that had been there so long, it was covered with a shredded sheet of white dusty cobwebs. I watched a mother rat run in and out of the logs, carrying her babies by their napes from one part of the stack to another. She’d appear with them one by one, all business, like she’s on the clock here, relocating her office space. How she decided one part of this wreck was less dangerous than any other, no guess.

  A dirt-brown Chevy pickup came down the road, the first vehicle of any kind in over an hour, and surprised me by pulling up to the house. More surprise, Rose Dartell flung herself out of it, slamming the door and moving fast, carrying a pizza box.

  “Damn, Rose. Did you bake me a pie?”

  She pulled up hard to a stop. Her hair was different some way, less frizzed out, but the face was unchanged. That scarred-up sneer. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same.”

  “I work for Pro’s. That and the phone company, for a couple of years now.”

  “Pro’s Pizza delivers all the way out here to fucking Woodway?”

  “Regular customers. They pay cash. Any more questions, or can I do my job?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  I wondered if they’d be paying her more than cash in there. She stayed long enough. Mr. Pro probably had no idea where all she was driving on his dime. I couldn’t help thinking of our last meetup, the dark highway pullout where Rose gave me the news of Emmy like a drink she’d spit in. I was just about to go in and advise Maggot that it was time to say grace and blow this dump, but she came back out. Sat down on the edge of the woodpile. Mother rat, look out.

  “Did Fast Forward call you yet?” She mumbled it, lighting a cigarette.

  “Why would he do that?”

  She shrugged, wiped her runny nose with the back of her wrist. They’d tipped her in there, all right. “I don’t know why he wouldn’t. He’s always needing something from somebody. He’s back in Lee County, maybe you didn’t know.”

  “Oh yeah? Whereabouts is he living?”

  “This big old house belonging to some lady. They call it Spurlock around there, but it’s not really a town, more or less by Duffield. It’s a hard place to find.”

  Rose flicked at something on the knee of her jeans, adjusted the strap of her sandal. Thunder was rolling around between the mountains to the east of us. Then the sky got a lot darker, in that sudden way that feels like a power outage of God. I lit a smoke of my own, since Rose hadn’t offered. We sat looking at the collection of vehicles that seemed to belong to the Woodway crack house. Some living, some dead, some fallen prey to target practice.