Page 93 of Demon Copperhead
My number-one fan though turned out to be Ms. Annie, that now wanted me to call her just Annie. Mr. Armstrong I was supposed to call Lewis. They both put a lot of fan raves on my site, which I could always tell were theirs even though under multiple fake names. They used words like “innovative” and “visionary,” dead giveaway this was teachers, not kids and junkies. Regardless Ms. Annie’s prediction, I was nothing but the lowest level of potato, but you’d think I was the most dazzling success they’d ever had as a student. Lewis was in big trouble with the school board as usual, so the honor you could say was dubious.
What changed everything was Tommy calling me up, out of the blue. The History of our People thing, he hadn’t let go. Maybe homesick. Or having trouble explaining us rednecks to his new family, as you do. Anyway, so excited on the phone he doesn’t start with hello.Demon! I know why we’re the dogshit of America, it’s a war, and it’s been going on the whole time, and nobody gets it, not even us. You have to do a graphic novel about it.This, at three motherfucking o’clock in the goddamn morning. I said I couldn’t wait to hear all about it tomorrow.
Oh, I did. He claimed he was on the right track as far as the two kinds of economy people, land versus money. But not city people against us personally. It’s the ones in charge, like government or what have you. They were always on the side of the money-earning people, and down on the land people, due to various factors Tommy mentioned, monetize this, international banking that. The main one I could understand wasthat money-earning ones pay taxes. Whereas you can’t collect shit on what people grow and eat on the spot, or the work they swap with their neighbors. That’s like a percent of blood from a turnip. So, the ones in charge started cooking it into everybody’s brains to look down on the land people, saying we are an earlier stage of human, like junior varsity or cavemen. Weird-shaped heads.
Tommy was watching TV these days, and seeing finally how this shit is everywhere you look. Dissing the country bumpkins, trying to bring us up to par, the long-termed war of trying to shame the land people into joining America. Meaning their version, city. TV being the slam book of all times, maybe everybody in the city was just going along with it, not really noticing the rudeness factors. Possibly to the extent of not getting why we are so fucking mad out here.
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.
Tommy said the world was waiting for a graphic novel about the history of these wars. I told him the world could hold its horses then, because I didn’t have the foggiest idea how to do that. Then went to bed, woke up, and started drawing it. He fed me story lines like kindling on a fire. I wanted to call itHillbilly Wars, but he said no, people would think the usual cornball nonsense, hill folk shooting each other. Plus he pointed out there were other land-type people in the boat with us. The Cherokees that got kicked off their land. All the other tribes, same. Black people after they were freed up, wanting their own farms but getting no end of grief for it, till they gave up and went to the city.
Surprisingly, Angus was all over this. I’d been trying to get her interested in comics for an age. Then in college she discovers graphic novelslike she invented them. Always sending me the latest one she’s crazy about. Not your run-of-the-mill sci-fi and crime, this girl was into dark. Jewish mice in the Nazi concentration camps. Kids growing up in a funeral home.The Incapables, she called fierce. I’d been telling her this forever, adult comics are all over the map. But not a single one out there hasusin it, she said. Not wrong.
I ended up calling itHigh Ground. The two-hundred-years war to keep body and soul together on our mountains. I started putting up chapters on my site as I finished them, earning a weird and intense fan club, part history professors, part good ol’ boys. Then a guy emailed to say his company published graphic novels and might be interested in mine, could I send him all the material I had. This guy was in New York. Did he seriously think I was handing over my goods?
I talked to Annie on the phone pretty regularly, but after this news she wanted to see me in person. A book deal, Christ on a bike, quote unquote. She would look at everything I had, and help me put together a proposal. She offered to come to Knoxville. At this point Annie is something like eight months pregnant, if I didn’t mention that. You turn your back, shit happens. The sensible thing was for me to go to her.
Technically there was no reason I couldn’t. In three and a half years as a sober living resident, month by month, I’d earned a life without curfew, driving my own wheels, weekends away. The house managers were actually dropping hints. Viking was back in Bell County now, and Gizmo was lining up his options. There was literally no end to the line of guys waiting to get in here. But I couldn’t imagine going anywhere. Especially back there.
Driving wasn’t the problem, I still had an active license, which the other guys in the house regarded as magical. They’d all DUI’ed out, many times over, and here’s me without even a moving violation. I tried to explain Lee County, where all the cops are your relatives or dope boys or both. I did not have the Impala. My last act before leaving Lee County was to talk Turp Trussell into giving me two hundred dollars for the car and any pills he could find in there. In less than a month he ran it through a guardrail on that stretch of 421 people call “thehateful section.” Turp was shockingly intact, the Impala, RIP. Getting this news was like hearing that a childhood dog had to be put down. But there would be other cars in my life. From a friend of Chartrain’s mom, I scored an abused but affordable rescue Chevy Beretta, robin’s-egg blue, to celebrate one year sober. A month or so after that, I got up the nerve to drive it downtown. A year is a long time away from the wheel. Straight into city driving, quite the plunge. I tried to keep my eyes open and channel June Peggot parallel parking outside the Atlanta Starbucks. I’m in awe of that maneuver to this day. Men have married women for less reason.
So I had a car. I had Annie’s invitation, and my freedom. Means, motive, and opportunity, as they say onCSI. Nothing holding me back now but sheer terror. It’s hard to explain how you can miss a place and want it with all your heart, and be utterly sure it will obliterate you the instant you touch down. I said this to the counselor I still saw every week, Dr. Andresen, that was part of the house arrangement along with water and utilities. As far from Miss Barks as they get. Older lady, gray sweaters buttoned to the top, black clog shoes, professional and educated and decently paid I assume. She was from Denmark, first name of Milka, and for all that, a very likable human. She’d talked me through a boatload of crap, and honestly it was less distracting to do this with a counselor that you couldn’t remotely imagine doing anything else with. Dr. Andresen weighed in on the side of me going to Lee County. Or at least examining my fears. I asked her, what part ofobliteratedo you not understand?
She gave me the assignment of writing a story, in which Demon goes to Lee County and sees friends who support his sobriety. What I turned in: “On a planet that exists only in Dr. Andresen’s mind, a good time was had by all, and nobody got shitfaced.” She gave me her tiny lopsided smile, being used to my attitude on assignments. Didn’t stop her from giving them to me. Practically from our first meeting, she’d been after me to write a recovery journal. I told her I don’t write, I draw. She said this would be for myself only. I could share it, but only if I chose to do so. The idea being to get clarity and process some of my traumas. Onthat particular ball of yarn I didn’t know where to start. She suggested pinpointing where my struggles had started with substance abuse, abandonment, and so forth. She said many people find this is a helpful tool for reclaiming their narratives, and in fact wasn’t this what I was doing with my comics?
Whatever. I’ve made any number of false starts with this mess. You think you know where your own troubles lie, only to stare down the page and realize, no. Not there. It started earlier. Like these wars going back to George Washington and whiskey. Or in my case, chapter 1. First, I got myself born. The worst of the job was up to me. Here we are.
Chapter63
In December Annie emailed to tell me the baby was skewed in some fashion and she might have to schedule the delivery soon. I needed to get my carcass over there pronto. I called her and said to forget about my nonsense, just worry about the baby.
“We’re notworried,” she said. “He’s just defying the rules, trying to come into the world back-asswards. Whose child do you think this is?”
She sounded so much like herself, I couldn’t picture the watermelon aspects. The baby of her and Mr. Armstrong would be a knockout, no way around it. Hardheaded, great beauty, high-octane fuel for the Lee County gossip engines. “Pleasecome,” she said. “I’ve started my leave already, but I’m too fat to sit at my loom, and I don’t feel like cooking because eating one saltine gives me heartburn. I’m just wallowing around here like a landlocked walrus.”
She needed distraction. She wanted to see drawings. Weirdly, I wanted to see the walrus version of Annie. I said I’d think about it overnight. Before we hung up, she mentioned the high school was having a big thing on Friday to honor Coach Winfield. Not just football players, this was the town. 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.”
She said she understood if I had hard feelings against Winfield. I’m sure June would second that. Undue pressures and pharmaceutical missteps, not deniable. But she never saw me sleeping behind dumpsters,looking for something steadier than the DSS greatest-hits box set. Coach took me in. I blamed Watts for the worst of what happened. For the best of it, I needed to lay eyes on Coach and tell him it mattered.
If I went, I might also run into Angus. She’d gone back after graduation to take care of some of Coach’s loose ends, but was pretty clear on this being just a stopover. Bigger fish to fry, no doubt. I didn’t email her. I told almost nobody, since my friends were all dead now or waiting on deck for their turn. Just Annie. And June, that would kill me if I was in town and didn’t see her. I told Dr. Andresen I was going for it, and she did the rare thing of smiling with her whole mouth. “I think you are unlikely to obliterate,” she said. And I said, You watch.
The drive alone threatened to defeat me. I should have taken some other random route, even if it took longer. To trick my body into believing we were headed someplace else. Every few miles a memory broke like an egg on my face. Cumberland Gap, our bathroom stop on the trip to Aunt June’s where I was uninvited and smelled bad. Gibson Station, where Mrs. McCobb made me try to pawn dirty Barbies and a used toaster with black crumbs in it. Cedar Hill, where I believed my childhood hero had bought his own farm, prior to learning he was a liar. Prior to seeing his skull broken open. I was processing my traumas, like they say. Lately I’d cut my smoking back to negligible, just poker nights and blue rainy days. The occasional walk home from the library after Lyra was overly frisky. Okay but now I was chain-smoking in the car.
On the outskirts of Pennington I passed the dead strip mall and former pill mill of Watts that I knew was shut down. June had told me the soulless pervert got his due, federal charges pending. This was the year of trials starting to go to the top, the oxy tides turning. Angus said even people in Nashville were talking about oxy now, but in comic-book terms only, evil corporate villains. No mention of all the little people scorched but staving off their living death thanks to places like that pill mill, buying and selling in the parking lot. I thought of my old reliable buyers. The guy with his walker and fur-flap hunting hat, the sad fat lady with her Chihuahua. How the hell were they getting by now? According to June, the recovery enterprise of Lee County was still limited mainly to church life groups,Grapevinemagazine, and basement twelve-step meetings. It was best not to get her started on the subject. These megabuck settlements against Purdue, and not a dime of it ever getting back here.
Annie was set on me staying over with them, so she could lay out all myHigh Grounddrawings on her kitchen table. I had a breakfast date with June the next morning. Otherwise, no strategy. I’d had vague thoughts of meeting up with friends, but turning that into a plan moved in the direction of what Dr. Andresen called suicidal ideation. Going to the Five Star Stadium on Friday for Coach’s thing, seriously? Every person there would try to sell me dope, unless they loved me and gave it to me for free. Everything about that place was a trigger. Yard lines, goalposts, the chutes that were my superpower. The place where I’d made and lost my fortune.
I passed kudzu valley and the Powell River and the mountain that doesn’t really look like a face. All of it a little homely in the dead of winter, but in that ugly-duckling way that you knew would turn around. The caboose in front of the middle school, the bric-a-brac mammaw yards. I saw people on porches, but my eyes shied away as they’d learned to do. Saving my juice. If it had been July, my heart already would have cracked for the beauty. As it was, I might die of loneliness. How could I be here with all these familiar things but not the people that looked me in the eye and called me brother, or God love ya, or You’rethatone, or Honey I remember you from the feed store. To be here was to be known. If Lee County isn’t that, it’s nothing.
Annie’s house was no trouble to find. I was a little surprised every time the Beretta took a turn the right way, like it was the Impala and not me that had known these roads blindfolded. I knocked on the blue front door, and heard Hazel Dickens running around in there yapping. Nobody came. I opened the door and yelled hello. Hazel Dickens satdown and looked at me. I closed the door and knocked again. All this before I saw the note stuck to the doorbell:Gone to the hospital, sorry. Might be a false alarm. Lewis will call you. Make yourself at home.
And it sank in: they were having a freaking baby. I thought of the McCobb twins, the all-night wailing, the casual flopping out of tits. I seriously doubted Annie knew what she was in for. These people did not need me or my box of drawings in their hair at this time. I called June. She had patients and a staff meeting and after that some meeting at the health department, but said I was welcome. Take Emmy’s old room. She’d see me, if not tonight then in the morning.
So I was cut loose without a safety net. I had no intention of sitting all day at June’s. I gave the Beretta free rein and we wandered aimlessly. It was an in-your-face winter’s day, so bright. I drove to the river bridge where I used to fish with Mr. Peg. Watched the glittery water till I had to drive on. Went to Hoboland and sat looking up the skirts of those hemlocks, thinking of Angus lying back on her elbows, seeing straight into me. I had to get up and leave. The sun shellacked a shine on the houses and mailboxes. Everything I looked at made my eyes water. It felt like being in love with somebody that’s married. I could never have this. Staying here, alone and sober, was beyond my powers. And I still wanted it with all my hungry parts.
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.
