Page 76 of Demon Copperhead
I told her if it was any help, Mr. Armstrong was the MVP of grade seven. I told her how kids were always trying to get his goat, but then they ended up on his team.
She knew that. “Kids aren’t the problem. It’s parents. There’s this whole little Armstrong haters’ club that’s practically a task force of the PTA. They won’t admit to being bigots, so they want him fired for being a communist. Like they even know what a communistis!”
I said probably they were just scared he was going to put ideas in our heads.
She smiled. “Imagine that. A teacher, putting ideas in kids’ heads.”
She said the only person I needed to worry about was me. She knew I had pressures on me, and if I ever needed backup, I should talk to her and Mr. Armstrong. Whether I was in school or not, their door was still open. She started to get out of the car, but then looked back at me with a kind of twinkle. “Say hi to Red Neck for me. Tell him I like his perspective.”
I felt my ears burning. “What makes you think I know him?”
She laughed in my face. “Damon. I know your drawing the way other teachers know your handwriting. Why in the world are you not signing your name to those strips?”
I needed her to go on about her day, get out of my Impala. But she stayed, half in and half out, waiting. “It’s in thepaper,” I finally said. “Out there all over the place. If it’s terrible, I don’t want them all saying it was me. And if it’s not terrible, I’d be bragging.”
“For crying out loud. It’s yourwork. Is it bragging if the guy at the garage does a good job fixing your engine and then bills you for it?”
I told her I didn’t see the connection. She pulled her butt fully back in the car.
“Nobody else is going to tell you this. But art is work. People get paid to do exactly what you’re doing. Guys a lot older than you, with less skill and very tired narratives.”
I told her thanks, but my little strip was small potatoes. Who outside of here would give a rat’s ass about the superhero that stayed in Smallville? She said, Don’t be so sure. There’s us, there’s West Virginia and Kentucky. And Tennessee. We aren’t any potatoes at all, small or large. She said if I was so keen to be a grown man, I should quit thinking like a potato.
I did what Angus said: went home to Dori and lived with it. I lived with dishes growing mold beards in the sink, trash bags sliding down in the cans, garbage mounting high. Jip running his victory laps around the house after every McMuffin wrapper or Jimmy Dean’s box he found to tear in a million pieces. As far as living in a garbage dump, Dori and I were on the par with Mr. Golly’s childhood. I was too busy to do much about it, between my Sonic job and the other shit that swallows you whole. Going into the clinic for our scrips. That man was not laying eyes on Dori again, and the sad part is, Watts didn’t even recognize me. The bastard that got me started down this drain. After scoring our scrips, I’d have the phone calls and drives at all stupid hours to meet this or that lowlife to get our shit bought or sold, bills paid, the beast fed.
Sometimes I thought of Miss Betsy and Mr. Dick, what they’d think to see me now. The words he’d sent up on a kite, wanting to be hopeful of me. 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.
Probably that’s why I got so mad at Dori for stealing from Thelma. I had my own warped honor. She started with nonsense things, scissors and conditioning products. Then she came home with some gold jewelry and a Vitamix. I had to scold her like a child. Not just the morals of stiffing your friend, morphine supplier, and quasi-employer, but the whole getting-caught aspect of things. Part of being a mature person is knowing your skill set, and neither of us had talents for larceny. Maggot, another story. Ace shoplifter, mastermind of which pharmacies hadhidden cameras and where, he’d leave you in awe. Whereas Dori and I were incapables. I started a cartoon strip in my mind, calledThe Incapables. Yelling at her would only lead to disaster. Dori crying, saying I hated her. It broke me to pieces. All she wanted in the world was to be loved. I had to think of her as my baby doll. You don’t blame a doll for slacking. You watch the pretty eyes open and shut. You tuck it under the covers at night.
She remembered my birthday was coming, and asked what I wanted. I could name a few things. The Impala’s transmission was grinding like nails in a bucket. But I said I only wanted my girl. Pretty as a picture and forever mine. She wanted to know did that mean getting married. I said why not. We were never getting married, we could barely pull our act together to buy a phone plan. But Dori wouldn’t remember this conversation. She’d shot a patch and was lying on the bed with her feet over the edge. I got down on my knees and kissed the little rings on her toes. A dot of blood stood like a jewel on the top of her pale foot. I touched it, thinking of Maggot and me in another age, pricking ourselves, sharing our blood to promise brotherhood. As if it’s only by hurting yourself that you can be true.
She was dipping out fast, all dreamy over our make-believe wedding. I was going out later, so I’d done a 40 and was letting the jangly ups and downs even out while I sat on the floor listening to her. Tommy would be my best man. Sweet. She wasn’t always kind about Tommy, due to all the time I spent over there. But with the juice in her veins, she was all love. Jip would be our ring burier. Thelma and Angus, bridemaids. Or Angus could be my best man, she said. Kind of confused about where Angus came into it. My best girl-man, she said. She described the dress she’d wear and how everybody would say what a beautiful bride. How young we were.
Once she was out completely, I took care to turn her on her side and prop her with pillows before I left the house.
Chapter51
Another week, another shit show. Monday night. Maggot wants me to pick him up from Mrs. Peggot’s and drive around. Fine, we’re two guys getting away from women, as far as I know. He gives directions to this sketchy house in Woodway to pick up a friend, and who should that turn out to be but Swap-Out. News to me, that they know each other. Next thing I know we’re behind Walgreens, they’ve put a cement block through the drive-through window and we’re watching Swap-Out crawl in that tiny hole. He climbs up and clears the top-shelf boxes and we’re out of there in under three minutes. I have to pull over on Duff Patt Highway to put my head between my knees. Maggot is skunked out of his skull, yelling that he’s the fucking Robin Hood of Sudafed. I drop them both back at Woodway and fly out of there.
Tuesday. Fast Forward calls, wanting to know if I’d like to take a ride for old time’s sake. Where to? He says Richmond. I tell him not on your life, give my regards to the Mousehole, and by the way, how is Emmy? He says he and Emmy have parted company. I hang up and call June to find out if she’s back home, which she isn’t. June wants to know why. Shit. This is bad.
Wednesday. Not technically terrible, but as far as throwing me off my keel, yes, bad. Tommy tells me people are writing to the paper about Red Neck. He calls it an upswell of public opinion. Nobody ever writes the paper unless over something major, like after they took the soft serve machine out of Dana’s Quickmart. Pinkie orders Tommy to keep running that strip every week, by all means and no matter what, forcing Tommy to confess it’s not out of the regular package. “Contributed by a local talent,” he says. Pinkie takes this to mean Tommy himself, andoffers him a ten-dollar-a-week bonus. Tommy says he’ll have a discussion with Anonymous as to where ten bucks per strip might get them. Every week would be a lot of pressure. Half of me says I’m already living on the knife edge between functional and dead meat blackhole junked, and this is the thing that’s going to shunt me in. And half of me says, Ask her for twenty.
People in need of a hero, there’s no shortage in the local supply. Ideas came at me from everywhere. It was fall now, topping and cutting time, so I did a series on tobacco. I drew little kids working to top the tall plants, girls in hair bows and short socks, boys in ball caps. All of them start seeing stars, reeling around dizzy with the green tobacco sickness. Red Neck swoops in and tears through the field, holding out a blade in each hand to top all the flowers at once. Then he piles the kids in the back of his pickup and takes them out for corn dogs. In the last panel you can see they’ve made a stop on the way: with the truck bouncing off into the distance, it’s a close-up on tobacco flowers they’ve left on two graves. One is Pappaw, one is Little Brother.
I gave him a DeSoto truck, 1950s model with the fins. Just so you know. Not a Lariat.
That strip started a whole thing of people leaving tobacco flowers at their cemetery plots. Pinkie sent her photographer Guy Greeley out there to take pictures, so that was crazy. The newspaper making the newspaper. Tobacco flowers also got left on the front stoop of the paper office. Pinkie got calls from the Russell County weekly and the daily over in Bristol, asking how they could run this strip, so she marched in to talk to Tommy. Pinkie coming in after-hours was such a rare event, it scared the living piss out of him, hearing that locked front door open. Half the storefronts in Pennington had been broken into lately, including ones you’d not expect to be all that rewarding. Extension office, H&R Block. This happened on an evening I wasn’t there, due to a small bender after getting fired from Sonic. I’d never met Pinkie. Tommy said picture a pit bull with Dutch boy hair, lighting one cigarette off the last, staring you down like she’s CIA special ops. Good with words, Tommy.She said it was time to formalize the Red Neck arrangement. There was money involved, so they needed a contract signed, a real person with a name. Still thinking it was him.
So he outed me. He blamed it on Pinkie being on the verge of getting physical, but I knew better. I’d seen Tommy take many a hard leathering back at Creaky’s without squealing. Finally he admitted it was his decision to name me, and I ought to be glad of it, not mad. He said if the shoe had been on my foot, I’d have done the same.
Ms. Annie had given me her home number. The door is always open, etc. I wouldn’t expect people really to mean that, they just feel guilty walking away from your mess, back to their lucky lives. But I called, and she said come over now, why not. For dinner.
There was no missing the house. The front was painted like a quilt. A dog barked inside but hushed after Mr. Armstrong told it to, not like Jip. He let me in and said they were getting supper on, so feel free to have a look around, which I did because there was a lot. Quilts on the walls. And these cloth pictures of mountain scenery, fall-colored trees and such, that Ms. Annie made on her loom, this contraption that took up half the living room. Paint I understood, but realistic pictures made of nothing but colored string, this was another level. I wanted to touch them, feel the grass and the bumpy rocks. One had a waterfall. She said it was Devil’s Bathtub, had I been there? I went ice-cold in my belly and said no ma’am and didn’t look at that one again. Their dog was named Hazel Dickens. Black, small, long hair, short legs. She followed me all around quietly, like she meant to pick up after me. The place was clean but not overly tidy, with music items all over, amps and such. I’d never heard their band. Not a young people kind of thing.
All over everywhere on the bookshelves and windowsills they had painted statues carved out of wood, almost like done by kids, but much better: smiling bear, Adam and Eve, IRS guy getting swallowed by a whale. Mr. Armstrong said he was a collector of those. People called it folk art, hillbilly art, self-taught, he called it just art. One was a hillbilly-art Superman that was Black, with his regular cape and insignia andeverything. Big work shoes, fist in the air. And I thought, Huh, I am not the first to think of this.
It was trippy, seeing these teachers in their sock feet, being married. She had on the exercise type pants and her hair in a ponytail, this whole sporty Jane Fonda side to Ms. Annie you’d never guess. I saw him give her a sneaky pat on the ass while he was reaching behind her for the stirring spoon. Dinner was soup beans, salad, cornbread. I ate seconds of everything.
