"Demon Copperhead"

[fiefoe]

With one shitty thing after another, this is a very hard book to get through. I appreciate the vivid voice of Demon Barbara Kingsolver created, and once I looked up parallel characters in "David Copperfield" some crucial character choices made more sense, but most of Demon's story is just so grim (in an overly preordained way.)

• good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trouble as they will. All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall,
• Anybody will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose. <> Me though, I was a born sucker for the superhero rescue. Did that line of work even exist, in our trailer-home universe? Had they all quit Smallville and gone looking for bigger action? Save or be saved, these are questions. You want to think it’s not over till the last page.
• Even now I probably think more than the normal about water, floating in it, just the color blue itself and how for the fish, that blue is the whole deal. Air and noise and people and our all-important hectic nonsense, a minor irritant if even that.
• Where, if a copperhead gets you, that’s the end of whatever you planned on doing that day, and maybe with that part of your hand or foot, period.
• People love to believe in danger, as long as it’s you in harm’s way, and them saying bless your heart.
• My messed-up birthday surprised enough people to get the ambulance called and then the monster-truck mud rally of child services.
• I took Mom’s word on that because you hear of such things, folks so godly as to pass around snakes, also passing around black eyes.
• Maggot calmed me down by explaining Bible stories were a category of superhero comic. Not to be confused with real life. <> As a kid you just accept different worlds with different rules, even between some houses and others. The Peggot home being a place where things got put where they went.
• Water with its own ideas, moving around under all those rocks. And underneath the water, a kind of mud that made you feel rich—leaf smelling, thick, of a color that you wanted to eat. Peggot’s Branch, it was called,
• As far as the Damon part, leave it to her to pop out a candy-ass boy-band singer name like that. Did she think she’d even get me off her tits before people turned that into Demon?
• If you’re surprised a mom would discuss boyfriend hotness with a kid still learning not to pick his nose, you’ve not seen the far end of lonely.
• Living in a holler, the sun gets around to you late in the day, and leaves you early. Like much else you might want. In my years since, I’ve been amazed to see how much more daylight gets flung around in the flatter places.
• It would get so quiet we could hear people in the other apartments, or their TVs. A city is the weirdest, loneliest thing.
• I said probably she hated snakes, but it was like her bravery badge. She just said thanks. Then on the drive home she mentioned she was in love with me and we would get married whenever we got old enough. Okay, I said. I was pretty much used to the chain of command by then.
• “No, nobody’s dead. It’s good news,” Mrs. Peggot said. “You’ve got a daddy.”
  “And he’s dead,” I said. Even though trying to be respectful.
  “Well, no, he isn’t. Not the one I’m telling you about.”
  I thought about the grave where he was buried, which had been much discussed as regards my seeing it, and I blurted out, “Lazarus isn’t real!”
• Then I pick up my spoon off the floor and eat my cereal. That’s the win I get, if there is one. Filling up like a bowl under a dripping faucet. Filling with hate while I wait the man out.
• What I said about people, that if they care, they can tell one kind of a thing from another? Big if. Possibly the biggest if on the planet of earth. Why notice zero on snakes, and a thousand percent on certain things about people?... Now take a look at us: a straight boy and a queer. No matter who you are, whatever else you might say—“Good for him,” or “I want to kick his face in,” or even “I don’t give a damn”—you still saw what you saw. A boy and a queer. The eye sees what it cares enough to see... I wasn’t clueless to people’s thinking. But a thing grows teeth once it’s put into words. Now I felt that worm digging, spitting poison in my brain, trying to change how I saw Maggot. How I felt about people seeing the two of us together.
• he leaves her outside where she can see Matty in his playpen crying himself apart.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• I tried to blot them out by drawing in my notebook, inventing various genius ways to crush the Stone Villain. Eyeballs and gauges flying out of him with action lines and little cloud bubbles—Pop! Pop!
• looked like she needed to go to sleep for a hundred years to get over what was eating her. Baggy eyes for real, like you could stash spare change under each eye.
• I’d run through caseworkers galore, you don’t get attached nor would you want to.
• The barn smelled like cow shit, no surprise, but I mean this smell is a freaking storm front. Enough to make your eyes water.
• These were the square bales a person can carry, not the giant round bales most farms went over to at that time, where tractors and forklifts do the work. No sir, Creaky had his slave boys, and we were a shit show.
• She stayed late for band practice, which was convenient, and she played the flute. Also convenient, he said. We didn’t get his meaning till he made his mouth in an O. That made Swap-Out go crazy, just screeching like an animal. I guess for all the misfortunate scramble of the little guy’s brains, somewhere deep in there dwelled the concept of the blow job.
• A ten-year-old getting high on pills. Foolish children. This is what we’re meant to say: Look at their choices, leading to a life of ruin. But lives are getting lived right now, this hour, down in the dirty cracks between the toothbrushed nighty-nights and the full grocery carts, where those words don’t pertain. Children, choices. Ruin, that was the labor and materials we were given to work with. An older boy that never knew safety himself, trying to make us feel safe. We had the moon in the window to smile on us for a minute and tell us the world was ours. Because all the adults had gone off somewhere and left everything in our hands.
• And I thought, Damn. This trying-hard angel with her eyebrows pinched in deep concern. What if I was depending on the Miss Barkses of this world, instead of my own bad self? I’d be a sockless little piss, still in the same reeking underwear I was wearing the night of Mom’s OD.
• “This shit can not be taught. It’s a talent.” Which made my entire dogshit life up to that point worth living.
• I could see how this was supposed to make me feel great, but honestly it hit me as one more thing to worry about. What if she turns around in a month and gets shitfaced again or starts using? What does that tell you? That I wasn’t a strong enough reason. Stoner would be pissed off about the wasted cash and take it out on me. Mom was assigning me the superpower of getting and keeping her clean, and our family on track. It’s a lot of pressure.
• It’s not that I wanted to be mean. But any time I started feeling sorry for her, something in my brain said Don’t go there, it’s a trap. I’d tried all the options with Mom and had only one place left to go on her. Cold.
• Where in some universes you get reward chips for going X many days without drinking, in ours you got chips for getting through a day unhated. Creaky hating you was just background noise. But Fast Forward hating you would actually mean something. Anyway, the deal was done, with Tommy now going for the Guinness record of most skeletons ever drawn on a grain bag.
• The first day I came to that farm, passing that field, maybe I thought, there’s some nice tobacco. More likely I gave no notice at all. Never will that happen again, any more than I’d fail to notice an alligator by the side of the road, or a bear. What a pretty sight, you’d say, if you’re an ignorant son of a bitch. Instead of: There lies a field that eats men and children alive... But the real dog days if you are a kid on a farm are in September and October. Tobacco work: suckering, topping, cutting, hanging, stripping... Topping starts in August. You have to break off the tops of all the thousands of plants that are head high or higher to a fifth grader. Walk down the rows reaching up, snapping off the big stalk of pink flowers on top, freeing up the plant for its last growth spurt.
• I had a list going in my head that fall, of what all I would tell my little brother one day. But time passed and eventually my mind had only one thought in it as regards childhood. For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it’s going to fucking leave you and not come back.
• I would never have thought to do what Tommy did, though. He just made them up. Eight different homes he’d been in so far, that he could remember. In every one of them he’d left behind a little set of graves.
• Cutting tobacco: You come along after him and pick up the first stick, stab it in the ground so it’s standing up. Jam a sharp metal cap called a spear on the end of it. If you fall, that thing will run you through, so don’t. Next, with a hatchet you chop a tobacco plant off at the base. It’s like cutting down a six-foot-tall tobacco tree. Pick it up and slam its trunk down on the stick so it gets speared. Chop another plant, slam it on. You’ll get six plants pierced on that stick so it looks like a pole holding up a leaf tent. Then pull off the little metal spear point and move on. Jam the next stick in the ground, do it all again.
• For some, a lousy day’s work will get you yelled at. For farmers, it’s live or die. A tour of tobacco duty can feel like a season in hell, and you come back from it feeling like an army vet: proud, used up, messed up, wishing to be appreciated. And invisible.
• In the little piece of hell that God made special for growing burley tobacco, farmers always got seven thousand an acre. A three-acre field is no fortune, but it kept him alive. No other crop known to man that’s legal will give him that kind of return on these croplands, precious and small that they are. The rules are made by soil and rain and slope. Leaving your family’s land would be like moving out of your own body. That land is alive, a body itself, with its own talents and, I guess you could say, addictions. If you farm on the back of these mountains, your choice is to grow tobacco, or try something else—anything else, it turns out—and lose everything.
• In the long run, that’s how I’ve come to picture Mom at the end: reaching as hard as her little body would stretch, trying to touch the blue sky, reaching for some peace. And getting it. If the grown-up version of me could have one chance at walking backwards into this story, part of me wishes I could sit down on the back pew with that pissed-off kid in his overly tight church clothes and Darkhawk attitude, and tell him: You think you’re giant but you are such a small speck in the screwed-up world. This is not about you. <> But I would be wasting my shot, because the kid was in no mood to hear it. I can still feel in my bones how being mad was the one thing holding me together... Instead, I get to remember every single thing about the funeral. That day sits big and hard in my brain like this monster rock in the ocean, waiting to wreck me.
• Every kid dreams of riding in a limo at some point, prom or whatever, but count me out because I had my shot and it was the saddest ride of my life... It hit me pretty hard, how there’s no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning. People will keep on wanting what they want, and you’re on your own.
• She’d only ever called me Damon before, like Mrs. Peggot and Aunt June, to show she was taking their side. I didn’t want to be poor anybody. But I felt like kissing Emmy. Or throwing up, from how mixed up I was. Possibly both. You’d want to do it in the right order, though.
• For kids with zero sidewalks in our lives, watching skateboarders on TV is just cartoons or sci-fi, you don’t buy in. But seeing them in real life? Shit. I about died of happiness. Like boys could fly.
• Many a time in the fall I’d see Hammer dressing a buck in their driveway. It would kill you how big and gentle he looked, drawing his long knife up the middle of the carcass, easing the gut and lungs to slither out in a pile. Like he’s being sweet to that deer, even though dead.
• Back in the summer she’d announced the one time about us getting married, which was kid shit. Like somebody giving you Monopoly money and saying “Here, go buy a house.”
• But Aunt June got me something amazing: a set of colored markers for making comics, fine-tip on one end and thick on the other, in more colors than you’d think there would be...  I would make one of Aunt June as Wonder Nurse, putting a new heart back inside a boy that had his own torn out.
• Mr. McCobb was big on ideas for making that little bit extra to turn things around, and had tried most of them: selling Amway, breeding AKC pups with fake papers, human advertisement, sperm donor, etc. Plus buying lotto tickets, obviously. His newest idea was taking in a foster.
• I’d always thought every good American took his garbage to a landfill every week, but it turns out if you live in town, like the McCobbs did, there are people that come and take it for you. I was amazed. An entire truck existing for the sole purpose of garbage.
• Swap-Out’s way of telling you anything was like his sentences got dropped and broken all to pieces. You had to take whatever you could pick up, and work backwards.
• Trash job: If I say there were rats, I don’t mean we saw one or two. Rats were part of how we got through our day. Target practice, company, whatever you want to call it. Some we named.
• But at school the next day in my new clothes I still felt horrible. Not even proud. Embarrassed honestly, because nothing would change. Now they’d all think I was just that much more pitiful, because of trying. Loser is a cliff. Once you’ve gone over, you’re over.
• They said they would be glad to have me on the Generals because I looked like I would make a good tackle or tight end. I remember which one of them said that, and the day. Due to that being the one nice thing anybody said to me that year.
• She wanted me to draw a cartoon of her, so I invented the Howliiie Fairy that left Oreos under your pillow. If bad guys showed up, she screamed them off the planet. So that’s what I had to work with: some gangbangers, a second grader, a foreign hundred-year-old man, and a guy with scrambled eggs for brains.
• Show me your paycheck, I’ll make a guess which floor. If you are making a rich person happy, or a regular person feel rich, aka better than other people, the money rolls. If it’s lowlifes you’re looking after, not so much. And if it’s kids, good luck, because anything to do with improving the life of a child is on the bottom.
• Here was our summer: filling that roll-off to the max, be it a month, six weeks, doesn’t matter. Because it goes away, the empty comes back, and you’re back where you started. Here was the real world where nobody and nothing gets better.
• while everything came out of me. Fighting with Stoner, Mom dying on me, getting sent to Creaky Farm, right up to two nights ago where I’d cursed a junkie hooker to die for stealing my money. He listened, now and again rubbing that hand back over his head like sweeping off the tears of heaven falling on us.
• “My own boy come back from the dead, is what I thought, come to me as a boy instead of a man to get back on my good side. But it won’t work. Boys aren’t a thing but just little men still learning what to aim at.”
• I got the idea they’d both done time in the spite house. My grandmother with her snake-handling husband, and as far as Jane Ellen went, who knew. I wanted to tell them it’s not just girls that end up inside four walls of hate and knuckles for breakfast, it can be anybody. Hate comes along and lays out the damn doormat and there you are.
• He had the neatest, littlest writing ever to come out of a human person. To be so crooked in his body, his lines of writing were straighter than straight. Also, slow as Christmas.
• My eye picked out: Dispute not with her: she is a lunatic. Uh-oh, I thought, trouble with sister dear. But another one said: I am determined to prove a villain, and hate the idle pleasures of these days. I couldn’t make heads or tails. No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. And in the center, in bigger print: And if I die no soul will pity me. / And why should they since I myself / find in myself no pity to myself.
• It was that fall type of day where the world feels like it’s about to change its mind on everything. Cicadas going why-why-why, the air lying still, all the fight gone out of summer.
• He said this one was from a different book, some words he wanted to put up there for me. He wrote them at the very top:
  Never be mean in anything. Never be false. Never be cruel.
  I can always be hopeful of you.
  If that was from him to me, it was more man-to-man talk than I’d ever had in life so far. It beat the two-cents-equals-happiness thing, all to hell. I said, Okay, let’s do this thing.
• so we didn’t go far, just to where I could get the runny-go I needed to send that sucker to the moon. The clouds were scooting by, throwing shadows like a herd of wild monsters rumpusing over the field, and I was right there with them. I hefted the kite and let out the string, more and more till it was not but a speck in the sky. I could feel rain starting to spit on us, and who cared. Let it thunder.
• I wondered if I’d get sent to a farm again, after here. Probably yes. I’d started to see how being big for your age is a trap. They send you to wherever they need a grown-up body that can’t fight back.
• Again the big sad eyes, puddles on a sidewalk.
• As far as I’d seen, the basis of friendship for guys past the age of bedwetting is trash talk. Throw “fuck” into any sentence and you’re dead hilarious.
• But the weirdness wasn’t in what I didn’t know. It’s what I did know. How to watch your back at all times. What a hooker means by “fun” and an asshole means by “discipline” and a caseworker means by “We’re working on it.” And money... What stood between this pack of blind puppies and me was the education of how many batteries drained, bags of garbage hauled, hours clocked in and out, makes the difference between a oner and a ten. I was inked with the shit-prints of life: thrashings, lies told, days of getting peaced out on weed, months of going hungry.
• What stood between this pack of blind puppies and me was the education of how many batteries drained, bags of garbage hauled, hours clocked in and out, makes the difference between a oner and a ten. I was inked with the shit-prints of life: thrashings, lies told, days of getting peaced out on weed, months of going hungry.
• My all was no great shakes, but Coach made me want to die trying. The big teeth finally fit his mouth, and busted out shining like sun through clouds. Unforgettable. The way he looked past my arms and legs into the soul of the General I might be, totally tuned in on me and the ball between us, curve of a wrist, turn of a head.
• Lately I’d been studying on the human form, aka this girl in all my classes they called Hot Sauce that sat in a chair the way ice cream melts.
• this guy Fish Head, that had perfected the exact combination of BO and Axe spray to fend off attackers.
• And that’s the story on a motherless girl named Angus. Unbeatable. Coach was a big guy with big hands holding the world by its neck, with every game a win or else the world ends. Storm in a shot glass type of thing. And Angus was the opposite. A whole ocean, dark and chill.
• Pharm rep: No surprise on Kent being a loud one, even upstairs with the door closed we could hear him talking to the Peggots in a TV voice, like they’re watching Home Shopping Channel and he’s the product.
• This hurtful side to him made no sense, the old Maggot wouldn’t have hurt a fly. Except obviously to pull its wings off, which is just kid crap.
• Looking down on him, I could see a pink shine on top of his head with the dark hair pulled across it. Not a full Homer Simpson like Creaky’s, just a little beginner’s hamburger helper up there. But do you trust a guy that cheats on his own head? Aunt June was bottom-feeding.
• Christmas was coming, and I was nervous of Coach getting done with me. This being the time of year people start noticing who’s family and who’s not.
• I told Angus my mom being dead wasn’t something I pinned exactly on my birthday. “It’s more like this bag of gravel I’m hauling around every day of the year. If somebody else brings it up, honestly, I’m glad of it. Like just for that minute they can help me drag the gravel.”
• She also gave me a model ship, with tiny sails, tiny ropes, an entire seafaring vessel made of painted wood and toothpicks and here’s the killer part: inside a bottle... She said it was me all over, my ocean thing, and also the thing of beating impossible odds, because someday I was going to go wherever the hell I wanted.
• for a guy it’s different. If you sit still and let your ears take all that girl business, other body parts may get their turn.
• They played in a bluegrass band called Fire in the Hole, him banjo, her fiddle. I thought of Mr. Peg. He’d be glad his type music hadn’t totally died of old age. Mr. Armstrong never heard of bluegrass music before he came here, but he fell in love with everything about the mountains and stayed on. <> I knew about the wife. If people don’t approve of something, it is discussed, and this was. She was white.
• The chutes were my superpower. On other drills I held my own, but on the chutes I amazed. Tall as I was, I could still make myself small. And then at the end, throw all my might against whatever stood in my way. Everybody saying, Jesus look at him go, turbo-Demon. To me it felt normal. Keep your head down, don’t get seen, assail. My life was one long chute leading me there. By fall I was dressing out, wearing my jersey to school on Fridays, getting the full quotient of pep rally love.
• He read us these things in history that were written about the mountaineers: shiftless, degenerate. Weird-shaped heads... Mr. Armstrong saying, “Not funny.” He said they made us out to be animals so they wouldn’t feel bad about taking everything we had and leaving us up the creek. But Mr. Armstrong wasn’t from here, so we didn’t believe him. We said if that’s true, what all did they take? And he’s like, Oh, let me think. All the timber and coal that fired up the industrial revolution and made America rich? Look at the railroads, he said. Built to move out the goods, one way only, leave the people behind.
• “Are you following me here? A war. Opposite sides. Flying both those flags at once makes no sense. It’s like rooting for the Generals and the Abingdon Falcons in the same game.”... We were actually glad of what he told us, that the mountain people of Virginia rounded up their own militias to try and fight on the other team, Union. He said we should feel free to pass on this info to certain guys, and we shook our heads like, Those assholes, regardless some of those assholes being brothers or friends or dads. Because that was Mr. Armstrong. Even if you didn’t necessarily want to, you would end up on his side.
• she said art, was I kidding? If I wanted to discuss unfairness, let’s talk about football. Uniforms, equipment, buses to away games, state championships. The school board threw money at all that like water on a house fire. And I was like, Angus. It’s football. Take that out of high school, it’s church with no Jesus. Who would even go?
• Men calling a strike, the company calling in the army to force them back to work, the miners saying guess what, we’ve got guns too. Serious shit. Battle of Blair Mountain, that turned into the biggest war in America ever, other than the civil one. Twenty thousand guys from all over these mountains, fighting in regiments. They wore red bandannas on their necks to show they were all on the same side, working men. Mr. Armstrong said people calling us rednecks, that goes back to the red bandannas. Redneck is badass.
• I knew he’d lost a lot in his life. The young wife, and before that, his career, getting hurt and messed up as a kid not much older than I was now. I knew he went to bed too early, that he drank to shut himself down. And I also knew that whatever good a man like that could still feel for another person, he felt for me.
• A dead parent is a tricky kind of ghost. If you can make it into more like a doll, putting it in the real house and clothes and such that they had, it helps you to picture them as a person instead of just a person-shaped hole in the air. Which helps you feel less like a person-shaped invisible kid.
• Big Bear Howe that played all four years with him as left tackle, so you know what that means. No tighter pair than a QB and the defender of his blind side.
• Technically Emmy was like me: dead dad, messed-up mom. But damned if you’d ever guess. She seemed like a person born to have sidewalks under her feet.
• The fireworks had started. Not Roman candle shit but the real deals that shriek up and burst. Fire flowers. I found a gap in the woods and sat on the ground to watch them crack open. Flowers making other flowers, taking turns with the colors. I wondered how you’d go about that, painting the sky. It’s Chinese people that do it. Their writing is on the boxes, with only the names in English: Waterfall Mountain, Peony Diadem Comet, Aerial Dragon Egg Salute. Maybe in Chinese they’re all called Orgasm with Lots of People Around. Because that’s the sum of it.
• I couldn’t believe what just happened. We all have our secret stores of poison, but to strike outright, calling a girl hideous to her face?
• “He’s the one that gave me this.” She jutted her face at me. “Claw hammer. He threw it at me on purpose and caught me plumb across the mouth. Let me tell you something, cut-open faces bleed like a motherfucker.” <> So much madness crowded my brain. Maggot’s mom slicing into Romeo Blevins. Good people, bad people, what does that even mean? Get down to the rock and the hard place, and we’re all just soft flesh and the weapon at hand.
• Where does the road to ruin start? That’s the point of getting all this down, I’m told. To get the handle on some choice you made. Or was made for you. By the bullies that curdled your heart’s milk and honey, or the ones that went before and curdled theirs. Hell, let’s blame the coal guys, or whoever wrote the book of Lee County commandments: Thou shalt forsake all things you might love or study on, books, numbers, a boy’s life made livable in pictures he drew. Leave these ye redneck faithful, to chase the one star left shining on this place: manly bloodthirst. The smell of mauled sod and sweat and pent-up lust and popcorn. The Friday-night lights.
• Pain doesn’t get to your brain as fast as other things. Like being mad, and a little shamed, that you’re down with other men still on their feet. The third or fourth thing I know is my knee is bent the wrong direction. I see it. Fuck the devil’s red ass, does that son of a bitch hurt.
• Being too slow, missing an opening, miscalculating a pass, these things you control. Doing it right is your only friend, messing up is your foe, and the distance between them is all you are here to care about. The rest is landscape. Pain is the turf under your cleats. Pain is weather... Pain can scramble you. If it is weather, it can be a storm tearing off the roof of your mind. The hours and days after that tackle are like a deck of shuffled cards.
• “That’s all I want. I’m not one to ask for handouts.” Maybe I sounded like an old man. Mr. Peg, former miner, hillbilly pure. Why wouldn’t I.
• Pain is just this thing, like a noise or a really bad smell. Here’s you, there’s the pain, you bump fists and make your deal. What I’m discussing is a feeling up inside your blood and lungs, like you’ve been snakebit from the inside. Shivering, loose-boweled, a body you want nobody to get anywhere close to until you can get it fixed. The issue is: how soon will this bottle run out.
• My stomach was always my downfall, running ragged these days on the daily ride of oxy-not-oxy, and I’m just going to tell you, nothing kills the buzz like bringing up Chick Fil-A all over the girlfriend’s bralette. That only happened once, and she was so sweet about mopping me up, using her shirt to wipe scum off my chin. But all I could think of was her feeding Vester his babyfied meals, his gnarly hands gripping the bedrails as he strained towards the spoon, and I got in a mood. Walking like an old man with a bum knee already, I refused to be another mess for Dori to clean up. So after that, she always had something to tide me over. This or that, Xanax, Klonopin, a dab from one of her Dad’s morphine patches if nothing else was on hand. But usually something was.
• winding up someplace between sleep, not sleep, Dori dream lap dance. Not that it was all sexual thoughts, you don’t just bang a fairy nymph. Or if yes, I’d not seen that particular manga.
• She grinned at me. Lord, that face, like scoops of vanilla, all rounded cheeks and creamy skin. Little pixie nose. Shiny eyes, like the black middle had swallowed the rest... with a low, round neck smiling at me above the double scoop of her tits.
• The back seat of that Impala was as good as any couch you’d want to have sex on. And we did, I’m guessing. I mean yes we did, but damn. You want to remember the pilot drill, but I only have this or that small view of it, like a peeping tom to my own event.
• Family of Collins, that thought about destroyed me. I saw which one of them had to be the girlfriend, with the baby and the wrung-out face, gripping that child like her last ten cents.
• Tommy believed with his whole heart that Mr. McCobb would soon be a rich man. He hadn’t seen any products yet, but they were supposed to be a whole new game in weight loss. Oh, Tommy. <> He couldn’t get over me knowing these people. My long-lost fosters. I wanted to say, Tommy, go pack your shit, walk out of that garage and never look back. But he was all over this family. I couldn’t burst his bubble.
• But it wasn’t the nurses’ job to keep tabs on us. They warned her to keep his pills and patches locked up in a safe place, probably thinking she was older, not a seventeen-year-old in charge of the man’s narcotics. Just another case of everybody trying to do the jobs they’re given.
• Likewise the Charles Dickens one, seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.
• They twirled around the beach and then he lifted her by the waist and set her on one of the posts of the rope fence. Emmy raised her pressed-together hands above her head and stood balanced with the bright moon rising through black pines behind her. She looked perfect up there. A church steeple. <> Then Fast Forward grabbed her around the waist, flinging her over his shoulder like a grain bag, Emmy laughing and kicking her legs, and the beauty was over.
• 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.
• 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.
• I thought of that night Kent gave Mr. Peg the coupon for free samples, and Mrs. Peggot said she would flush them down the toilet. The little did she know, they could have come over here and scored a month of groceries. These old hillbillies were using their resources, the same way Mr. Peg, back in the day with all his mouths to feed, used to sell venison roasts after he’d shot a buck, or tomatoes out of their garden. He’d made moonshine. You use what you’ve got.
• grandmother lecture: “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 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... I let her run my grandmother up the devil’s flagpole
• 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... 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.
• 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.
• This guy is old-school. I drew it in the vintage direction where the characters are somewhat roundheaded with long noodle limbs, in constant motion. Fleischer style is the name of that, part Mickey Mouse, part manga. It was a style I could do, and it felt like getting back to the roots.
• U-Haul’s front teeth needed to make a date with the back of his skull.
• “Okay, I like helping kids learn to see what they’re looking at. But really and truly? I always hoped one day a spark would come along, that I could fan into a flame. Some whole new vision that the world actually needs.” Supposedly, I was that spark. She said teachers spend years of their lives hiding out in the coffee room, trying not to give up hope on the likes of me being out there somewhere. It seemed like she might cry. Or if not her, me.
• She said there used to be laws against the Black and white type of marriage, up till the 1960s. So, before any of us were born including her and Mr. Armstrong, but attitudes hang on. “Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn’t been totaled or repossessed.”
• Sad case that I was, false or cruel I wasn’t, if I could help it. And if hard work counts for anything, I was crushing it. Addiction is not for the lazy. The life has no ends of hazards, deadly ambushes lying in wait, and that’s just the drugs, not even discussing the people. If I was a fuckhead, I was one that knew how to apply himself. It’s what Coach had seen in me. He said discipline, I would use other words. Surviving. Giving it all up, day in, day out, from the very beginning. Keeping Mom in one piece, then outhating Stoner, then being fastest at whatever crap job was thrown at me, draining battery acid or topping tobacco. Football. I’d only ever lived one way, by devoting myself completely.
• This teacher couple with their sly jokes and butt slaps and house full of beautiful things made by steady hands, who wouldn’t want that. But how do you even get there from the normal place of business?
• What I wanted more than anything was to grow up. Hard to explain, given how I got short-sheeted on the childhood. Carefree, what is that? If I’d ever known at all, I couldn’t remember. But I was still stuck outside of full adulthood, blowing smoke under its door, eyeing the windows with a cement block. It’s all we want, we ragged boys of the world. To live as men.
• Some hellhole, no doubt. She was peeling potatoes while she told me all this, long slips of skin flying fast into the sink. The people I know are seldom idle with their hands. Men smoke or fix things, usually both at once.
• Nothing for the shakes and sweats. She put a blanket around me and laid me on the dogpile so Emmy and I were dominoed onto June, our little back-seat rehab ward. June sat up straight with this look on her face like she wants to kill us both, but she’s not going to let us die.
• she landed in Lee County High with the full pedigree. Daughter of Peggots, homecoming royalty. In Asheville she might just be a pale, conceited girl with an air of broken beauty.
• 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.
• 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.
• Maybe, if I still bowed to the pull of the Fast Forward magnet. But I’d decided some while ago, if I spoke to the bastard again, it would not be in kindness. A fallen hero shatters into more sharp pieces than you’d believe. Emmy was the one that finally stuck in my throat.
• I was unthrilled to be out there by myself changing Hammer’s tire in a frog-strangling rain,
• The terror in that voice is what did it. Coming from Big Bear, steadfast guard of his blind side. Nothing we could have done would have rattled Fast Forward, not words or even gunfire, but that voice warning him from offsides jolted the naked QB a quarter turn, enough to lose his footing and start to slide. The coordinated body going for its longest shot, center of gravity automatically dropping, arms close in, knees in a half crouch, Jesus, the terrible beauty of it, and then he lost control. As a rolling ball of limbs he could have saved himself, bones and flesh flailing down that slope of rock onto more rock, maybe a branch to break the fall, it would have been ugly and might have worked, but pride in the end made the call. He opened and pushed off in a dive, piked, head down, arms open, a reach for the water, fumbled. The contact sounded not very different from a watermelon on pavement.
• And then, after the shortest romance of all times, were never forgiving her for walking away and busting the guy’s heart. They wanted payback. I thought about what Rose said, wanting to see the rest of us hurt, because she was hurting. You have to wonder how much of the whole world’s turning is fueled by that very fire.
• My car found the park where Miss Barks brought me, on that fateful day where my brain ran away with itself, thinking of being up there and jumping off to see if I’d fall or fly. And I mean really seeing it in my mind, because that’s the troublesome brain I have, it’s got excellent eyes. Look at him up there. The boy on the edge of the cliff, the widespread arms and piked legs, the crash-dive or the sail. Even before I watched the end of Fast Forward, I don’t know how many times my brain had put me up there on those white cliffs, easily a thousand.
• I chewed on my age-old grudges. The body is the original asshole, it can put you on detention away from all pleasures, but still makes you write out the list of its needs, one hundred times. I will piss and shit. I will go hungry. Thirsty was the one killing me at the moment. That parch like a bandanna pulled tight around your throat.
• I found a good rock and watched the sun melt into the Cumberlands. Layers of orange like a buttermilk pie cooling on the horizon. Clouds scooting past, throwing spots of light and dark over the moun-tainheads. The light looked drinkable. It poured on a mountain so I saw the curve of every treetop edged in gold, like the scales of a fish. Then poured off, easing them back into shadow. I got all caught up in the show, waking up from my long cold swim underwater. Breaking the surface is a shock, the white is so white, the blue so blue. The air that’s your breath.
• Is it the hardest thing I’ve ever done? No. Just the hardest one I had any choice about. Getting clean is like taking care of a sick person, versus being the sick person. They get all the points for bravery, but they’re locked in. You have to get up every morning and decide again, in the cold lonely light of day, am I brave enough to stick this out? <> Rehab is like being married to sickness in a lot of ways, really. Disgust comes into it. You try to deny that, swapping it out for a kindness you may not feel. You fake it till you make it.
• Unlike Mom, I was probably the soberest cracker in the whole big box, and quickly worked my way up the career ladder to produce. I avoided the employee smoking room aka drug-exchange HQ, and found no real downside to the job. People buying apples and green beans usually have some degree of joy in their hearts. I counted down the fifteen-minute intervals and watched them flinch and shudder like wet dogs every time the machine came on with the fake thunder and spray to mist down the goods. I told myself I was laughing with them, not at them. But really, I was sad. It was the closest they probably got to real rain on a vegetable. <> I’m going to tell you something, there’s country poor, and there’s city poor.
• I never realized what was holding me to my place on the planet of earth: that soundtrack. That, and leaf colors and what’s blooming in the roadside ditches this week, wild sweet peas or purple ironweed or goldenrod. And stars. A sky as dark as sleep, not this hazy pinkish business, I’m saying blind man’s black. For a lot of us, that’s medicine. Required for the daily reboot.
• I’ve tried in this telling, time and again, to pinpoint the moment where everything starts to fall apart. Everything, meaning me. But there’s also the opposite, where some little nut cracks open inside you and a tree starts to grow. Even harder to nail. Because that thing’s going to be growing a long time before you notice. Years maybe. Then one day you say, Huh, that little crack between my ears has turned into this whole damn tree of wonderful.
• Sandwiches the church ladies pack for the hungrier kids to take home on weekends. Honestly, I would call us the juice economy. Or I guess used to be, up until everybody started getting wrecked on the newer product. We did not save our juice, we would give it to each and all we meet, because we’re going to need some of that back before long, along with the free advice and power tools. Covered dishes for a funeral, porch music for a wedding, extra hands for getting the tobacco in.
• It took a lot of emails of Tommy telling me how far back it went, this offensive to wedge people off their own holy ground and turn them into wage labor. Before the redneck miner wars, the coal land grabs, the timber land grabs. Whiskey Rebellion: an actual war. George Washington marched the US Army on our people for refusing to pay tax on corn liquor. Which they weren’t even selling for money, mainly just making for neighborly entertainment. How do you get tax money out of moonshine? Answer: You and what army. It goes a ways to explaining people’s feelings about taxes and guns.
• Coach had retired after the scandal to get his life together, and the guy they hired to replace him steered the Generals to something previously unimaginable: a 4–6 losing season. <> “Winfield is a damn fallen hero,” she said. “I think they’re having this blowout for him because burning the new coach at the stake would be illegal.”
• I stuck to the lonelier roads, and really couldn’t tell you my thought processes, if any, but I ended up at the trail to Devil’s Bathtub. Was it a Step 4 type thing, courage and moral inventory? I doubt it sincerely. More like picking a fight with a person you’re ready to break up with. I needed to find the place that would make me hate it here and not come back.
• The falls were a tame trickle and the pool itself a deep, easy blue. Taking art classes on repeat, you learn a lot about color, but I can’t explain that blue. You see it in photos of icy lands. Peacock blue in the deep center, shading out to clear on the pebbly edges. The water was dimply and alive on top, perfectly still underneath. My eye kept going back to the turquoise middle. You so rarely see that, but children will color water that way every time, given the right choice of crayons. Like they were born knowing there’s better out there than what we’re getting.