Page 80 of Demon Copperhead
June’s eyes flared, but she kept peeling, talking without looking up. “These aren’t adult choices we’re talking about. She’s stuck down there with no means, getting used by terrible people keeping her strung out, whatever, raped. There’s parts I can’t even think about.”
“Embarrassed,” I said. “There’s that part. She’d sooner die than have you know.”
June’s hands went still. “You need to come with us.”
I almost laughed, for how doable it all seemed to June Peggot. Like she’s Lara Croft, and we’re going to go raid the tomb. I said no, I couldn’t leave Dori for that long.
She narrowed her eyes at me, still working away, theslip-slipof the peeler sounding mad now. “Listen to yourself. Dori’s a grown woman, soon to be a mother. What do you think she’ll do if you leave her unsupervised, wet the bed? Burn down the house?”
I didn’t want to admit that both were possible. I had other excuses, my job at the store, a strip I had to finish by Saturday. June said she was going on Sunday.Slip-slip-slip.I told her these were scary people, and she should go with somebody that packs heat, like Juicy Wills.
Hell no on Juicy, she said, multiple reasons. But damn straight on scary. She’d been getting threats from some Rose person that claimed Emmy had stolen her man, and if the bitch ever turned up back here she was asking to get her pretty face scarred up. June had no intention of going to look for Emmy without a sidearm. Her brother Everett had anopen carry permit that he swore was good in Georgia, and he’d agreed to go with her.
I tried to picture this brother as Terminator 2. Everett. All the good looks and kindness that came with the Peggot package, a linebacker in high school. He and his wife owned the fitness club and tanning salon in Big Stone, so. He was pretty ripped, but still. June was batshit.
“Fine then, you don’t need me,” I said.
“But a friend, somebody her age. Like you said, she’s humiliated. She trusts you.”
That aggravated me, getting invited as the boy, not the man. “Take Hammer, then,” I said. “Last of the nice guys. Deer rifle, pre-engagement garmin ring or whatever the hell.”
June flew off the handle at me then, saying that would be cruel, pulling Hammer into this. All he’d ever wanted was to love that girl and keep her safe. If only they’d stayed together. She dropped her naked potatoes in the water to boil, wiped her hands on her apron, and used them to push her hair back from her forehead, one of those little habits that ran right down the Peggot generations. Those hands, that split second of babyish wide forehead laid bare, exact same look in their eyes. For one second I was seven years old playing Standoff with Maggot, our bare feet planted, trying to push each other over into the mud. Me winning, Maggot refusing to lose.
It was all doable. Myself in June’s car headed south at an ungodly hour of Sunday. Atlanta was almost six hours each way, and she meant to get down there and do our business by daylight, before the vampires came out. Everett was napping in the passenger seat, his big head nodding forward, his Kel-Tec PMR-30 on the console between them. Concealed carry didn’t cross state lines, and June did things by the book. I rode in back with the supplies she seemed to think necessary: old soft quilts, cooler of sodas, boxes of crackers, and such. So we’ve got two different movies running here, front seat tricked out forBlade II, back seat isLassie Come Home.
I felt bad that I’d lied to Dori, or really just told her nothing, but she’d have gone to pieces to hear I was leaving the state. My bigger worry was getting through this whole day without a bump. I’d fueled up on the front end obviously, but with nothing additional for the road. Laws were laid down. We were taking I-75, the oxy expressway from Florida. June was so clean and prepared on all fronts, she probablywantedus to get pulled over.
June and Everett spent a full five hours bickering. Which way was faster out of town, Veterans Highway or 58. Whether the car was too warm or just right. Whether Easy Cheese was God’s gift or a disgusting waste of a good metal can. June would put the radio on an eighties station, and Everett would drive us nuts singing in a ridiculous high voice with Eddie Rabbitt or Rosanne Cash, until she’d let him change it. Then June would grunt out her own made-up words to Beastie Boys and Jay-Z. “Ooh ooh bitch, gotta big dick for ya here.”
“You are so far out of it, Junie. ‘Song Cry,’ it’s this beautiful love story.”
“Just playing it how it lays, brother. That’s what it sounds like to me.”
“Heartbreak of old age. Hearing’s the first thing to go.”
Everett and June were five years apart, and took no time at all getting back to seven and twelve. They argued over whether Everett peed on his shoes at the Peggot reunion one time, and whose fault it was the dog got run over, and an entire year of the older kids supposedly stealing Everett’s lunches and convincing him their mom wasn’t packing one for him.
“Oh my God Everett, are you never giving that up? That did not happen.”
“Uh-huh, sad. I reckon it’s the memory that goes first.”
The surprise to me was Mrs. Peggot packing lunches at all. Maggot always bought school lunch. You could see how those seven would have worn her down before he ever got there.
By noon, we were looking at Atlanta. Cloud-high buildings spiking up in the distance, pointy or square on top, the colors of steel and sky. So much like a movie, your eye couldn’t accept it was real. June’s carwas pretty sweet, I should mention, Jeep Cherokee, white leather upholstery. All of this briefly being cool enough to forget the FUBAR aspects of this road trip and pass around the snacks. I was still in the good part of my day, before fine and dandy edges over to sad and irritable. Then come sweats, yawning, itching, goose bumps, shaking and puking. These phases I could read like a watch. I was optimistic on getting home before fucked o’clock.
June had her maps and her battle plan. City driving didn’t faze her, due to the Knoxville years. She was all center lane this, right on red that, arm-over-elbow turns through these hectic parts of town where there were more people in the intersections than cars. Peachtree Street, she announced, steering us down this video-game canyon of sky-high towers with few trees in sight, peach or otherwise. “Stopping for coffee,” she announced, and parallel parked like no driver I’ve seen before or since. Slick as a rabbit finding its hole. I added it to the list of June’s superpowers. We went in a tiny restaurant where she knew the rules, pay first, order off the long list of items that in no way shape or form sound like coffee, but are coffee. Tall flat frappo nonsense. She said this was to fortify our nerves, and bought me a blueberry muffin.
We sat at a tiny table and finally those two went quiet. I thought of the day I met June, the Knoxville restaurant where I couldn’t eat due to everything going on outside. I’d felt like I did now, jumpy. Anxious in the back of my mind for a doorway out of all this, back to the green true world. But I wasn’t a kid now, I knew things. For one, that Xanax would put much of that feeling to rights. A couple near us drank their coffee and had a whisper fight. Hundreds of people passed by outside hugging their coats around them, looking at their feet, walking fast. I wondered what they were taking for the brain alarm bell that goes off in a place like this, where not one thing you see is alive, except more people. Everything else being dead: bricks, cement, engine-driven steel, no morning or evening songs but car horns and jackhammers. All the mountains of steel-beam construction. And this, June informed us, was thegoodpart of town.
After we got back in the car, she realized Everett had hidden hispistol in the glove compartment and said technically that was a conceal. He said technically he was not getting his five-hundred-dollar Kel-Tec stolen while she drank her fucking latte. I was about an inch fromYou kids quit fighting or that piece goes out the window. Irritable phase possibly under way.
The directions she’d written down got us to a neighborhood that was less crowded, in fact the opposite. Not a soul walking around. It looked somewhat like various parts of Lee County thrown together at close range. Bluffs, she called it. This is February so it’s still pretty bleak, but you could see how it might green up in the right circumstance. Sad-looking trees, embankments, tall dead weeds standing up between the small houses. Junked-out porches to rival the Woodway crack house, other houses abandoned, boarded up, or burned out. About one in ten, though, were tidy and painted up nice. Old people like the Peggots, you had to reckon, that stood their ground while the youth went to hell. But everything was jammed together, a lot of houses with no space between. Tires lying on the sidewalks, trash blown up against chain link.
“Where the mothafuck are we?”
“Everett,” June said. “You need to shut up.”
The first human we saw was an old guy lying in the street on his side, slowly moving his legs like riding a bike. A few blocks later, some young guys in big clothes, carrying black plastic bags that pulled down with heavy weight, like full udders on a cow. Then another old guy in a hat and mittens parked on the street corner in a wheelchair, watching nothing go by. Here and there, a little store would have people hanging around, but mostly the streets were deserted. Maybe because it was Sunday, with the Godly in church and the rest sleeping off their sins.
