Page 6 of Demon Copperhead
“The little queer’s whore mother that is in thepenfor shanking her goddamnboyfriend.” Stoner leaned over close to Mom and yelled, “Am. I. Fucking. Wrong?”
She nodded, then shook her head. Confused, due to being terrified. He turned to me.
“Is that your plan, Demon? To grow up and be a fag?”
“I don’t have a plan,” I said. I couldn’t even believe this conversation was happening.
“No? You’re not thinking you’ll find yourself a boyfriend, and then shank him and wind up getting gangbanged in prison? Is that the kind of people we are in this family?”
I wondered how Stoner would feel about getting vomit for an answer, because that’s where I was headed. But he didn’t care, he turned back to yell at Mom. I was starting to run low on sorry for Mom by that point. Marrying the asshole was not my idea.
“Tell him,” Stoner yelled at her. “Right now, so we can all hear it. He’s not going back over there to play with the queer. Not tomorrow and not ever. Or there will be consequences.”
She said it, and I didn’t see forgiving her for it.
I hardly went outside again until school started. It rained the whole week, which made it feel that much more like detention. I watched a thousand reruns ofX-Men,Iron Man,Exosquad,Spawn, andHulk. Whenever Stoner wanted the TV, I went in my room and read them in the comics versions. I drew pictures in my notebook of Stoner as a supervillain getting crushed in various ways. At some point the shows, comic books, drawings, and my dreams all got mashed up so it was like there wasn’t any me anymore. Just a quiet boy that looked like me with a beast inside, waiting to burst in a gamma warrior rage explosion.
What I said about people, that if they care, they can tell one kind of a thing from another? Bigif.Possibly the biggestifon the planet of earth. Why notice zero on snakes, and a thousand percent on certain things about people?
You don’t know me or Maggot. If you saw the two of us let’s say insecond grade, you’d see two of a kind. Two white boys more or less. My dead father being Melungeon, which passes generally for white, mixed with my little blondie mom. So I’m not as white as some, but enough to say so. Two little rascals then, in Walmart tennis shoes and dirty fingernails: if you’re from the city, I guess you’d say a couple of little hillbillies. Matched pair.
Now I’m going to jump ahead, which is breaking my promise, but just for a minute. Ninth grade. I’ve got a lot of growth on me and a tiny red mustache. Maggot has grown his hair to his shoulders and started stealing eyeliner and nail polish from his cousins, worse case Walgreens. He’s got spending cash, but a boy can’t walk in and buy those things. Because he aims to use them. To switch out the tennis shoes also. Mrs. Peggot’s homemade clothes we had turned against hard, no-thank-you on the fringe cowboy shirts. But now Maggot’s tastes have started circling back around to the eye-catching.
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. Even though I’m exactly the same kid I was, and so is Maggot. He was always the same Maggot.
It was me that started calling him that. We were little, and it was hilarious. And it was me that kept it up. Because Matty Peggot goes to school, and what is he going to be there but Matty Faggot? I tried to make an end run around that one. I can’t say the other names never got called, they did. But apart from that night with Stoner, they weren’t said where I could hear them.
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.
Up to then, I was a casual collector of reasons to hate Stoner. That night a fire got lit. For what he’d done to my head, I would burn the man down.
Chapter6
How Maggot’s mother got to prison. How much of that story did I even know, at this point in time where Maggot and I are still running around with our little pink brains and buzz-cut pencil-eraser heads? Mrs. Peggot tried to keep the worst of it from both of us. But if a story has all the elements, it will be legend around here, where we love our neighbors so much we can’t stop talking about them. It gets to be known to anybody with ears. Those we had.
It starts the usual way, a girl falling hard for the wrong guy. That was Mariah Peggot. According to everybody, she’s got no business running around with the likes of Romeo Blevins. He’s way too old for her and also, let’s be honest, too good-looking. There’s nothing wrong with Mariah, but she’s not the beauty of the family. The Peggots had four girls, with the older three tying up the homecoming and everything-festival-queen side of things in Lee County for most or all of the eighties. Cheerleaders, sweethearts. June the straight-A student, and still popular enough to date any guy she wanted, which is unheard of. The Peggot girls slayed. Then comes little Mariah, flat-chested, raw-boned, stubborn as dirt. Not ugly, but she’s not going to be crowned queen of anything, due to that look she had. Like: Don’t even ask if I’m one of the fucking Peggot girls.
Whereas this Romeo is a stud menace. Magazine-model looks, like the dudes in the J. C. Penney’s ads that would not in a million years be wearing those dad clothes if not getting paid the big bucks for it. He’s dead fit, killer smile, lion-king mane, the whole picture. Who knows what turned Romeo’s eyes her way, but Mariah felt like she’d won the lottery, and Romeo acted that way too: like she’d won the lottery. If shewished to hang on to her luck, she could be on the fortunate receiving end of his golden dick at his personal convenience, and at all other times run his errands without complaint. A date with Romeo might involve going over to his house to do his laundry. He has a two-bedroom A-frame home in the woods, up on the mountain outside of Duffield, and a successful business as an auto mechanic with his own gear in a panel truck. Not standard grease-monkey shit, we’re talking electronics. Diagnostic capabilities. This is the era of cars beginning to get the fancy circuitry in everything from power windows to brakes, just so they can lose their complete minds at the drop of a hat. And Romeo brings this auto shop to you, is the thing. So handy in times of a breakdown, he can charge what he wants. Because you won the lottery, just by letting his pretty face show up.
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 thewall, 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 askingwhymommywhy?
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 throughhell, 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 herbutt, 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.
