“Forget it,” I said. “Can we just get out of here?”
“No. I’m saying, sorry for not getting straight with you. My bad.” She whipped a slice of silver out of her pocket and tilted it up and down in the light, like a mirror flashing code. “Meet the Master,” she said. Kissed it, put it back in her pocket, and said yes, we were getting out of there. I would be kicking no ass in Walmart Nike knock-offs.
We flew that credit card all over the damn county. From Walmart Supercenter to Shoe Show to T.J.Maxx, ferried around by Snake Man. No cash needed, the Master did the talking, or in some cases just Coach’s existence. Like at Hardee’s for lunch. We walked in the door with a freaking force field of worship around us. Guy at the counter didn’t even ring us up, just said on the house as usual, say hi to Coach. The manager came out to say the same, and asked if Coach was putting in some person to sub for QB1 with the elbow injury. U-Haul told him he was not really in a position to say, being only assistant coach, but don’t be surprised if that substitution happened. Everybody in the place kept watching us while we ate. Like, if we dropped a fry on the floor, they might grab it up for a souvenir. Did I like all the attention? Maybe, if nobody knew the real me and I could pass for some person that just normally wore Air Maxes without a speck of dirt on them. U-Haul, definitely yes, on liking the attention. Angus was so chill, you couldn’t guess.
Angus shocked me up one side and down the other. By being into cars, for one thing. It started with seeing a ’57 Nomad, and after that we had a contest of naming anything cool we saw. U-Haul knew a lot, but damned if Angus didn’t know her share. This chick was not your average. You’ll say sure, being raised with a dead mom, but guess what, I grew up with a dead dad and you won’t see me doing girl shit. Plus they had this Mattie Kate individual around the house at all times. Not just for chores, she’d sit with you in the kitchen after school and drink Cokes and talk if you had questions, which I had a few. Should I be doing my laundry, making my lunches? Answer: No. She did all that. I told her I was pretty used to doing everything for myself like laundry and worst case, paying the rent. She laughed and said not to be putting her out of her job. She said mine was just to be a little boy. Weird. I’d not had that job before.
She knew I was no tiny tot, though, because she asked if I needed her to get me an electric shaver. (Embarrassing, but yes.) And got me a thing of Old Spice deodorant without asking did I want it. (More embarrassing.) She was just this extra-nice lady with no husband and a little boy that played Pop Warner football. She had wrinkles around her mouth and wore the elastic-type pants like an older lady but not totally over the hill, you could tell. Her eye makeup she did like bird wings. The point being, if Angus had questions about girl-type things, vacuuming or eye makeup, she had somebody to ask. Pretty sure that didn’t happen. Angus seeming more like the type to go get inked with some me-not-pretty thing like a barbwire necklace. But she picked no fights with Mattie Kate or her dad. Nor even U-Haul, which was a concern. The man oozed slime. He was always touching and petting his face and grimy red hair and other things that were just wrong, like the seat of the booth where Angus had been sitting, after she got up to refill her drink. Creepster. But he’d been working for her dad forever, and people get used to things.
She did know he was a liar. That much she told me. The real assistant coach was Mr. Briggs, a paid teacher that taught history at Jonesville Middle and was JV coach, plus helping out with the high school team. In practices he coached defense, where Coach worked mainly with offense. U-Haul was just an errand boy, paid part-time out of the booster funds. Angus said he acted more important than he was, and got away with it by saying he was “nobody” while pretending he’s assistant coach. Like bowing down and sweeping his lies behind him.
We got on okay, myself and Angus. After our tricky start. Fashion advice, no thanks, but she told me what to look out for at school, being two grades ahead, and I told her some of the history of me. How was I related to Betsy Woodall, where all had I lived. This would be after her dad went to bed at seven p.m., seriously. We’d do homework and watch TV in this upstairs bedroom with no bed in it that she called the den. Just beanbag chairs and the TV she rescued from the sports tornado downstairs. She had an absolute rule of no athletic equipment allowed in her den, penalty of death. As far as other entertainments, popcorn fights, throwing M&M’s at each other’s mouths, pretty much anything went in the Den of Angus. I felt bad for Mattie Kate having to clean up, but Angus said the same thing, she needed her job so don’t take it away.
It was hard to get used to being tended to like that. And to rules. Homework gets done, period. No running around on school
nights. Pharm parties, not on your life. I didn’t even bring up the idea of getting into her dad’s liquor. Angus had her whole
tough act and called a lot of shots in the house, helping to make the grocery list, calling to get the heater fixed, that
type of thing. Coach wouldn’t notice till the fridge went empty and the pipes froze, the man was just all football. But Angus
had no big worries that I could see. Everything in that house got taken care of, me included. If I stayed here, would I turn
into one of these Jonesville Middle School babies? Not something to worry about, I knew. Nobody ever kept me that long.
30
I’d dreaded middle school for the reason of running up against bigger guys that might pound me. Up to that point in fourth and fifth being the tallest, I was the type of loser that people could hate on but were scared to mess with. The world turns though. School dumps you out from top drawer to the bottom again. It’s true Jonesville Middle was a litter of pups, but not without its big dogs. In time I sniffed them out, hunkered around the smoking barrel, lazing in back of class with their big untied shoes propped up on empty desks. Guys that repeated enough grades to roll into eighth with respectable sideburns and pack-a-day habits. They could break my ass.
But sixth grade had tricked me out as a new Demon. I was still me but with sixty-dollar shoes, so. A loser in disguise. Living with Coach was like packing heat. I walked down the hall and the crowd parted. Not like pee-yew, I smell foster-boy ass, but like, Wow. There he goes.
Nobody at first knew what I was to Coach exactly. Me included. Not his kid, but he was the one to sign my permission forms, like was I allowed to watch the Family Life film. Not that he knew. We’d bring our forms to supper and he’d sign off with his eyes under those woolly eyebrows watching a replay in his mind, jaw grinding his dinner like a cow on grass. He’d have given the okay on me watching porn in study hall. Not saying I did. But if I was anybody’s to claim, I was Coach’s.
And then I was more so, because he let me help out at Saturday practice. Only as errand boy of the errand boy, but even still, freaking amazing. To be chalking hash marks and dragging sleds and body shields, me, Demon. On the grass of the Five Star Stadium where Creaky took us for Friday-night prayer meetings and we screamed for a Generals bloodbath. Inside the Red Rage field house, in the presence of greatness. Or the wet towels and jockstraps of greatness.
I only did Saturdays, not after school, with Coach having homework rules and Angus being the enforcer. She didn’t like me being at practices, but Coach said a boy can’t stay cooped up, so. I couldn’t put my own clothes in the washer at the house, but I bagged up dirty team laundry like my life depended on it, and watched varsity guys running drills. Figuring out plays if I was able. Fast Forward was long gone, but these guys had good hands, hard hitters. Coach at practice was a different human. Knees bent in a crouch, eyes sharp, he’d watch guys run a drill or complete a pass, and I’m saying he saw them. Memorized them. Picking out a fumble or even the risk of one, yelling at them to run it again and not screw up this time. Run it again, they did. Twenty times if need be. Where was sleepwalker dad? That guy we had to step out of the way of so he wouldn’t walk through us like doors? Not in the Five Star Stadium. There he fired on all cylinders, riding his Generals till they gave him the shine he wanted, then telling them they were the best of men. Clapping them on the back as he sent them off the field to go shower up.
And one of the men was me. I was three years from any shot at Generalhood, and miles from knowing my ass from any hole in the ground. But one day after he dismissed the team and we’re loading up equipment, Coach yells, “Damon, heads up!” and here comes a ball at my face. I catch it, goddamn miracle, and go to put it with the other balls but no, Coach says let’s throw some passes. Him throwing, running me down the field to see what kind of legs I have. What kind of wind. Now let’s see your arm. I’m shitting myself trying to remember anything Fast Forward ever showed me about holding the ball, using my field of vision. Giving my all.
My all was no great shakes, but Coach made me want to die trying. The big teeth finally fit his mouth, and busted out shining like sun through clouds. Unforgettable. The way he looked past my arms and legs into the soul of the General I might be, totally tuned in on me and the ball between us, curve of a wrist, turn of a head. And I saw the General he’d been on this field once, pumping a crowd, flashing those teeth at some girl in the stands that would steam up his truck in the postgame ceremony. Angus’s mom, I thought. Wondering, was she a cheerleader or what.
But no. Being one of Miss Betsy’s girls, no window steamer. Angus said they’d met at UT Knoxville where he went on a football scholarship. Running back, one year, then tore up his shoulder and had to major in education. I wondered if Angus even knew this other person her dad woke up to being at practice. I hoped she did. Then I thought about it, and hoped she didn’t.
School took a wild turn, thanks to this one teacher Mr. Armstrong. He was seventh- and eighth-grade English, so not my teacher, but also guidance counselor, meaning he’s looking out for the bigger picture on kids that are headed for trouble.
At Jonesville Middle they’d just dropped me into classes, and it took me one hot minute to go down like the Titanic. Math, pop quiz: “Simplify the expression using order of operations blah blah rational numbers.” A page of numbers and stuff not even numbers, like freaking code. “Here’s your simplified expression,” I wrote on my blank answer sheet: “Fuck me.”
I scratched that out before the teacher collected them up, so I didn’t get sent to the principal. Just straight directly to the dummy class, where I got acquainted with the gentlemen in the sideburns and unlaced size thirteens. We all moved together, a big slow herd, from Howdy Doody math to remedial everything and a lot of study halls where our reading material was Hot Rod Magazine, Muscle Machines, Car & Driver. Or Allure and Cosmo if girls, because we had females among us. Instead of sideburns, some serious racks. Our destiny was the Vo-Ag track in high school where we’d shuffle to the vocational center for auto mechanic classes or if girls, beauty school. So who cared if we read magazines all day? Getting a jump on our career ladders.
Being new though, I was supposed to check in with Mr. Armstrong. It took him some weeks to work me in, due to other kids needing him to testify for them in juvie court. Busy man. I’d settled in with my new crowd of Jonesville dogs that were not pups but hot bitches and guys that could pass for beer-buying age. Friends with potential. And the freedom to draw in my notebooks all day, unpestered by education. Then comes Mr. Armstrong to rock my boat.
This much I’ll give the man: he didn’t lecture me about not living up to my potential. He’d got hold of my DSS records going back to the hospital interviews of Mom’s OD, or before. I’d had one foot in the custody-removal shitpile since birth. I told Mr. Armstrong if he’d read all that, he knew more about me than I did. He said no, he didn’t, that nobody ought to pretend to know how I felt. “Here’s what I do know,” he said. “You are resilient.”
I’d heard quite a few fifty-dollar words for the problem of Demon. I asked Mr. Armstrong if he was wanting to put me on meds for that.
“It’s not something to fix,” he said. “It means strong. Outside of all expectation.”
I looked at him. He looked at me. His hands were on his desk with the fingers touching, a tiny cage with air inside. Black hands. The knuckles almost blue-black. Silver wedding ring. He said, “You know, sometimes you hear about these miracles, where a car gets completely mangled in a wreck. But then the driver walks out of it alive? I’m saying you are that driver.”
He was not from here, he had the northern accent. Draee-ver walks out a-laeeve. I could still understand him though. “You’re saying I’m lucky.”
“Are you lucky, if a drunk comes at you through a stop sign and totals your vehicle?”
“No.”
“No, you are not. You got the wreck you didn’t ask for. And you walked out of it.”
I kind of shrugged him off.
“Well, that’s how it looks to me. I see you here in my office. Showing up. Not out there someplace else trying to smash something or put a bullet in it or set it on fire.”
I smiled, recalling Swap-Out and myself doing those exact three things to a deer head trophy in the garbage pile one time. Ten-point buck, in perfect condition before we had our way with it. Because Jesus, those glass eyes. But Mr. Armstrong was not smiling. He said he’d been advised of my classroom performance. But that people often know more than the teachers are able to measure with their tests. His job was to figure out what those things are, using other methods.
I said if he was aiming to torture me, I’d just confess right off the top: I hated school.
He nodded. “Understandably. Can you tell me what you like?”
Helping with football practice, but I wasn’t giving that up to this guy. He’d probably take it away. I said I couldn’t think of anything I liked doing that was legal for twelve-year-olds.
“So you’re thinking life will get better in the years ahead.”
“Well yeah.”
He nodded. “I hear that.”
Did he mean he heard me, or just that all kids say this, I couldn’t guess. He was soft and hard at the same time, eyes like melted chocolate. No meanness to him. But he’s not giving you a damn thing here if you won’t go first. Heavy glasses, button shirt, more spiffed out than the usual for teachers. Or else a white collar looks that way on black skin. Not something you see much in Lee County. We were used to NBA or rappers on TV, rich guys with gold in their teeth.
