Page 47 of Demon Copperhead
Miss Shoulder Pads wasn’t sold. “I heard her say it involved having meets at other schools. You can’t tell me you’re not going to want a budget allocation for this activity.”
Mr. Armstrong said yes, probably. Shoulder Pads asked what the school board said about it. The principal woke up and said they’d already made their decision, so we really had no say. He said it’s not like we have any new information here, that those men don’t know.
We kids had zoned out, waiting for something to happen, which finally it was. Mr. Armstrong was getting ticked off. We could always tell by his accent getting stronger. He said with all due respect to our school board, we all know who those gentlemen are. Which honestly, we kids did not. Miss Shoulder Pads probably did. She was in the back of the room, and Mr. Armstrong in front, with all the kids turning back to front, watching. You could actually hear the action. She asked him what he was implying. (Turn, shuffle.) Mr. Armstrong said, Only that most of the men on the school board were experienced in the corporate world and coal business. (Turn back.)
She said, And is there something wrong with business experience.
He said, All he meant was that these men weren’t trained in education per se. They came up in another era when mining labor was the end game, and college was not on anybody’s radar.
Angus meanwhile is looking at me like,Help!But what did any of us kids know? As far as school board, college, radar, our general thinking on that topic was: So what and who cares.
Mr. Armstrong made a point of asking who among us kids had participated in any school activity other than football that brought us into competition with other schools. Which was ridiculous. We had Science Fair once that some few kids had wanted to do, girls and nerds. But not in state competitions obviously. We saidduh, no. We’d get creamed. Everybody knows this.
And he said that’s right, we would. Because every school district to the east of us in this state has AP classes and science labs and other things our students have never had here.
That’s where the bell rang, fight over. The principal had already slipped out with nobody noticing, Shoulder Pads packed up her business and left, but some few kids stuck around to disagree with Mr. Armstrong, remembering the fun times of seventh-grade Language Arts. No, they told him. Wrong. We’d get creamed because the kids in Northern Virginia and those places just have more brains. But outside of a schoolroom, we could whip their asses.
And Mr. Armstrong rubbed his eyes and shook his head and said, “Oh, my effing God.” Which we felt was walking a fine line, languagewise.
I was sorry for the crushed dream of Angus, but art time with Ms. Annie was all the extra I needed. Other than it being another thing to want more of, Demon and his cravings: for food, for love and touch, and now her lit-up face seeing something I’d done right. I didn’t really care about the main gifted thing, the spring trip over school break. All year we had to study on this certain place and write our papers so we’d be all wised up whenever we got there. Which makes no sense. I mean, why not justgo? Whatever. Sixth-grade trip I couldn’t, being not yet upto par on my grades. It was just science museum in Charlotte, no overnighter due to budget cuts, so. Rip-off. The teachers promised they’d make it up to us the next year, which I didn’t believe for one minute. Angus said wait and see. Her failed victory of smartness thing was a setback, but in better days she was always one to tell me I should start trusting the wild ride, meaning life or whatever. Because it’s not one hundred percent fucked up, once in a while it delivers.
And in seventh grade, holy God, it did. They said we were going to Colonial Williamsburg, plus an afternoon at Busch Gardens amusement park, and one entire day at Virginia everloving goddamn Beach. The ocean. For my paper I didn’t even know where to start, but I narrowed it down eventually. Currents. They travel around the earth in gigantic circles, you seriously would not believe it. Then March rolled around and the school said there wasn’t money after all for a bus. No trip. And I was the idiot for listening to Angus, trusting the damn ride.
But then came a last-minute save: some volunteer moms would drive us. Hot damn. The car I got assigned to was a Plymouth Eagle wagon of me, driver-mom, her daughter Lacey, and her two bffs Gleanna and Pristene. All being mad Christian from the same church, so they knew all these Jesus songs they sang back-to-back from the minute of pulling out of the school parking lot. Hand motions.This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine(hold up a finger like a candle),don’t let Satan blow it out(PHWOOF!). I thought of Mr. Peg saying a man can get used to anything except hanging by the neck. Fine. I was going to see the motherfucking ocean.
Then Gleanna said she didn’t feel so hot, and without further ado puked all over herself and the two of us in the back seat. Sudden death on the songs of praise. We pulled off at a truck stop where Gleanna was issued a ginger ale and her victims took our overnight bags to the rest rooms to get cleaned up and changed. Then we headed out again, one carload of worse-for-wear Christians with Gleanna up front now, where she supposedly wouldn’t get carsick. I had my hunches though on it being some other kind of sick, because this is I-81 we’re on. The one straight highway between Jonesville and anywhere.
Sure enough, halfway through “I Have Joy Like a Fountain in My Soul,” Gleanna hurls again, nailing Driver Mom. Who by now is disgusted with the whole business, and tells us at the next exit she’s going to go find a pay phone and call the Super 8 Motel where we were supposed to stay. To let the others know our carload was turning around and going home.
My ocean quest ended in a rout, at Exit 114. Christiansburg.Irony.
Chapter35
Ms. Annie had a tattoo nobody knew about, on her shoulder. I could draw it for you right now. A goldfish, with its long fins and tail flowing and twisting like it was swimming on her skin. All the perfect scales, with each little curve edged in gold. In class she always wore big paint-stained shirts that were her smocks, probably Mr. Armstrong’s that got too ratty for him. I tried not to think about him and her doing husband-wife type things. I saw her tattoo because after the weather warmed up, we’d go outside to eat our lunch. She’d do that in just her tank top.
We ate lunch together because of how nice she was, plain and simple. She saw that I never finished up in an hour, so one day she said instead of riding the Vo-Ag bus over from the middle school, I could come earlier during lunch period to spend extra time. Meaning, after Mr. Armstrong’s class, straight over to Lee High and Ms. Annie’s art room. That was trippy, sitting there watching him comment on somebody’s Backgrounds presentation, thinking how the man would be unthrilled that I was crushing on his lady. He had no idea. She didn’t either.
To get the earlier ride, she organized for me to come with the janitor Mr. Maldo that cleaned the Jonesville Middle bathrooms in the mornings, Lee High in the afternoons. He’d get me there before lunchtime, so. Two whole hours of art. Afterward, I’d walk over to Lee Career and Tech and wait with Fish Head and those kids for our bus back to the middle school. One thing about Tech, that place was crawling with recruiters. Army, navy, these guys with their accents and complicated uniforms that made them seem not quite real. They had tables set up, wanting us to come sit down and chat, probably not realizing we weren’t yet of age, just bussed-over seventh graders. And I’m going totell you something, these military guys could look you in the eye and shame your ass: Is your dad at home right now in his boxers watching Spike TV? Did your mom get you diagnosed ADHD so you could get your Medicaid and see a doctor for the first time? Did you know less than half the people in this county have jobs? Evidently we take the prize of America, as regards unemployment. Answer to these problems: Let’s get you signed up. Probably Fish Head and them were counting the days.
As far as my janitor ride, Mr. Maldo, he was quieter than anybody you ever saw. He would talk some to Ms. Annie and eat his lunch in her art room before getting on with his bathrooms. But he never said one word to me, all the mornings I rode in his truck. Otherwise a regular guy, with something going on with his left hand that was small and no muscle tone, but he still could do everything as far as driving and janitor. Ms. Annie told me he was always alone so she’d started taking coffee breaks with him, and from there the lunch thing came about. The other teachers wouldn’t give him the time of day, even though their pay was not much better. Ms. Annie said all God’s children have to take a shit, but you’d never know it from the way they treat the ones that clean it up. She actually said shit. You can see why I was so gone on her.
In Mr. Armstrong’s Backgrounds project we learned one thing: if you throw a rock in Lee County, you will hit somebody with a family that’s worked coal. Almost everybody in our class had great-grandparents that came over from some country to work in the mines. Or they were here already, and worked in the mines. They told stories of all the kids in a family ending up working in a mine underneath the same land that was bought from them. The coal guys came in here buying up land without mentioning the buried treasure under it. And then all that was left was to work. Even little kids, pushing tubs of ore from the coal face to the tracks. “Low coal” was working thirty-six-inch-tall seams, stooping under a mountain. The Pappaw stories were mostly along the lines of: How awesome was that, us busting our asses. Whereas the Mammaw stories leaned more towards, not awesome. Getting your paycheck in fakemoney that you had to use in the coal company’s stores that charged you double. Breathing black dust all day, coughing up black hunks of lung all night. Husband and sons all dying in one day in a shaft that blew up.
One girl’s presentation she called “The Other Side of the Coin.” This is flippy-hair Bettina Cook with her posse of gal pals and her dad that owned the Foodland grocery chain, seven stores in the tristate area. Packed-lunch sandwiches with the cut-off crusts that flabbergasted me back in third grade, yep, same Bettina. Her family on her mom’s side were major shareholds of the Bluebonnet Mine. She passed out brochures on all the good the company has done for Lee County in the way of town park benches, etc. Her great-grandfather won an award from the governor for buying one of the biggest coal veins under Kentucky and figuring out how to pull it out of the ground on the Virginia side so they didn’t have to pay some certain tax. She had a slew of relatives that were senators and such in the State House, that she showed us pictures of on her computer. Yes, her own computer, brought from home. Also a Motorola phone. Queen Bettina, we all knew she operated at her own level. But Mr. Armstrong said okay, everybody gets a turn, just listen.
For the most part though we listened to the crushed-leg, dynamite-explosion type of stories. This was the oldsters’ chance to complain to their grandkids that usually have no time for old-people shit. If a miner didn’t get buried alive, the question was what part of him would give out first: lungs, back, or knees. I thought of Mr. Peg that was giving out all over, on disability ever since he got hurt. Another old-guy topic: how they didn’t want handouts. They grew up hardworking men and that’s what they believed in, working. Even if they were on disability now, goddammit to hell. They’re not that person. Theyhatethat person. They also talked about Union. But I mean, this word. Like it was a handshake deal between them and God. We had the general idea of workers wanting their pay, safety, and such. But where did that go, and what was theor else?
Or elsethey’d all walk off the job and let the coal bosses suck their own dicks, Mr. Armstrong said. Not his words, but he got it across. Heshowed us films. Obviously we loved teachers showing films: nap time, makeout time if applicable. But this one, Jesus, you needed to see how it came out. 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.
Anyway, it was all in the past, nobody in class had parents working in the mines now. We’d heard all our lives about the layoffs. The companies swapped out humans for machines in every job: deep-hole mines went to strip mines, then to blowing the heads off whole mountains, with machines to pick up the pieces. Bettina was like, Get real, you all, companies are in business to make money, that’s just a fact. The facts being, there’s hardly any coal jobs left around here. Bettina also said there’s no such thing as unemployed, just not trying. Her posse all stuck up for her side, and other kids said city people were the problem, for bad-mouthing coal.
I wasn’t from mining people that I knew of, so it wasn’t my fight. I drew a lot of pictures and kept quiet. I dreamed up the idea of a comic strip about an old time red-bandanna miner that’s a superhero, busting the company guys’ nuts. I could ask Ms. Annie for tips on how to make him look old-time, because she was amazing like that. She’d know exactly how to do it.
Mr. Armstrong as usual let the argument go rogue for a long while.But, he finally said. Didn’t we wonder why there’s nothing else doing around here, in the way of paying work?
Our general thinking was that God had made Lee County the butthole of the job universe.
“It wasn’t God,” he said. Just ticked off enough for his accent to give him away. I remember that day like a picture. Mr. Armstrong in his light-green shirt, breaking a sweat. We all were. It’s May, there’s no AC, andeven the two cement bulldogs out front probably have their tongues hanging out. Every soul in the long brick box of Jonesville Middle wishing they could be someplace else. Except for Mr. Armstrong, determined to hold us there in our seats.
