She also gave me a model ship, with tiny sails, tiny ropes, an entire seafaring vessel made of painted wood and toothpicks and here’s the killer part: inside a bottle. Not even big like a deuce, just the regular beer size. How in the holy heck somebody got it in there, she had no idea. She’d found it that way, at the antiques mall. She said it was me all over, my ocean thing, and also the thing of beating impossible odds, because someday I was going to go wherever the hell I wanted.
“If you say so,” I told her. “But will I always still be in a bottle?”
She laughed. “The world’s a bottle, Demon. Gravity and shit. Don’t expect miracles.”
I was more excited over my presents for her than getting mine. Also nervous, because let’s face it, she was one rock-hard peanut to crack. Coach’s credit card wasn’t my money and felt like cheating, so I used my cash I earned from drawings, and went to pawnshops. I did wonder if the guy at Here Today Loan and Pawn in Jonesville would remember the street brawl, boy on a man’s errand, etc. He never looked up from his magazine. I checked for McCobb booty, but it was long gone. They do a quick turnaround at those places, mostly guns and jewelry unless it’s nonsense items or weird antiques, which is what I was looking for. I found an awesome hat, black velvet, with a veil that came down over the face part. More femmy than typical Angus, but I had a hunch, and was right. She vamped around in that hat, saying she would be the funeral fox of Lee County. I also got her some old-time books including this advice one we read aloud, on what to do in every emergency: shipwreck, nightclub fire, plummeting elevator. What is a nightclub? She said it’s like a bar, only in the city, so you’re jam-packed in there with your face against the armpits of others. So in case of a fire, you’re toast. I can’t remember the advice.
My main thing, though, was her portrait. I put it in a serious pawnshop frame, glass and everything. I’d known for a long time what superhero she’d be: Black Leather Angel. A badass one, black leather angel wings. It took quite a few tries to make it not look like any form of Batgirl. But I got it. The main aspect of Angus being those gray eyes that look straight into what’s eating you. The superpower of reading your mind and making you talk. She was floored. She carried it around with her all day, cuddling that big square frame like a freaking teddy bear.
Mattie Kate took off to be with her kid, but left the refrigerator full of things for us to pull off the tin foil and heat up, like unwrapping more presents. Green bean potato chip casserole, blackeye peas with pork rind. Apple dumplings. We ate whatever we felt like, whenever. I put on my new clothes and she put on her veil hat and we said “Darling” like we were the rich Howells on Gilligan or “Dope” like Fresh Prince, and ate and watched TV for three days straight. At some point I realized it was actual Christmas, the day of. And thought, maybe there is a God after all in his heaven. On the slow bus ride of my dogshit life, for some while I got to stop off here.
The best part of it all was getting our tree. No question. I’d convinced Angus it wasn’t larceny to steal something that farmers spend half the year piling up and burning. We could have just asked. But taking from Creaky felt righteous. Sneaking out there with Angus, cutting a cedar by dark of night, one of the higher points of my young life. I was just sorry we had to get U-Haul involved for transportation, since he might rat us out, which would sully the perfect crime.
I made him cut the headlights before we got to the house. The place looked worse than ever, with no slave boys for the upkeep. Lights were on in one downstairs room, so he was in there, all by his deaf, butt-ugly self, I hoped. No sign of the Lariat.
Why did I want that so much, to go back to the place where my childhood got crushed? After we went, I knew. The reason was power. To face down Amityville and yell at whatever still crept or clawed inside, “Fuck you. Fuck your thrashings and starving us and making all of us but mostly Tommy wish we were dead. Fuck you for making me glad it was him and not me.” To hocker and spit on the frozen grass. Turn my back on evil and walk away.
I had one surprise left, and it was from Coach, a few days after Christmas. He said to come on back to his office. He had to clear off a chair, his office being worse than the living room. He had a small TV in there to play VHS tapes. Teams we were fixing to play, to find their holes. Or games already played, but only the losses, to learn from. Coach was not one to dwell on the wins. I knew what tape would play today, because I’d been seeing it all my life. The clock had run out on us here, we gave it our best but it’s a loss, good luck and all that. Sorry.
He said nothing, I said nothing. What you noticed on Coach, after the teeth bulging behind his shut lips, was the eyebrows and hard, blue-eyed squint. He wore his red Generals cap at all times, so it was a shock to see him that day without it. An old man’s white hair sticking up uncombed, like I’d caught him in bed. I felt like I’d messed up already.
“How long you been here now?” The cap was on his desk. He put it on. I half expected him to do the jacket and sunglasses too. Coach’s angle was to not be seen. “Two, three months?”
“Yes sir,” I said.
He picked up his silver whistle and spun it on its long lanyard, winding it around his pointer finger all the way to the end. Then spun it the other direction, winding it all the way up again. One of his habits. He did this on the field while pissed off or thinking, aka always. I felt like that lanyard was winding around my neck. I wanted to run out of there and not hear what was coming. U-Haul told him about the stolen tree, or Mattie Kate found my weed stash. There’s a million roads a person like me can take to ruin, and none I’d found so far led anywhere else.
“You liked helping out at practice, did you?” he finally asked.
“Yes sir.” I didn’t look at him. I balled up my heart or whatever you want to call it and threw it out the window behind him. Hills, bare trees. The weak piss-yellow light of winter.
“You’ve got something,” he said.
“Sir?” My pockets were empty. I didn’t steal. All right, I had. Never from Coach, but my mind skittered helpless over the Oreos and Slim Jims I’d pilfered from my keepers.
“I saw that right away. Size, for sure. Speed, and a decent talent for finding a pass. I had you for a linebacker. But I believe what you are is a tight end.”
I came back inside the window.
“What I didn’t know was, will this kid show up.” He wound the lanyard again. Unwound it. “I’ll be honest, I see boys like you all the time, pissing away what God gave them. They’ve come from the trash of the trash. We all know it. The bad homes, the incarcerated parents. These boys just go looking for more trouble because it’s what they know.”
I stopped breathing again. No parent of mine was incarcerated. The trashier homes I’d lived in weren’t really mine. But he’d said what he said. Not needing any answer.
“I don’t care how much talent a kid has, if he’s too proud to do as he’s told, he’s a waste of my time. Proud, stubborn, you tell me. They come in here wanting to be stars, wanting their glory. And think they’ll get it by acting like the biggest thugs on the hill.”
I looked at his freckled hands on the desk. His Generals hat. I looked at the big black hairs of his eyebrows that sprang out in all directions, some of them way too long. Terrible, wrongful eyebrows. I wasn’t meeting his eyes, man to man, but it was my best effort.
He leaned forward on his hands. “I’m going to tell you something, and I want you to hear it. A successful team is not made of leaders. It is made of followers.”
“Yes sir.”
“I don’t care if it’s picking up the damn garbage,” he said. “If that’s the job I give a member of my squad, I want to see it done.”
He had no idea. As regards me and garbage. But he’d seen enough. My ears were ringing, but I got the gist. He said I would go on living there, and we’d see how it went. He would talk to Coach Briggs about putting me in JV practices next fall. Seventh graders could go up for practice, if they had the size. Football camp ran most of the summer. Technically they shouldn’t play me before eighth, but that rule was not hard and fast.
The blood thrashing on my eardrums drowned out everything else. Summer and fall were forever away. Months. I would be here,
for all of them. In this house. Going out for football.
33
What I said before about having some golden time of life where it’s all good, your people have got your back, and you don’t notice? That’s how the cruel world bites you. I have bad days galore to look back on, the shamings and hard fists, and I’ll tell you what. It’s the golden times that kill me. I had two. And like a son of a bitch, I missed them both.
The first, childhood in general. Running wild on my bare feet, tramping the mud of the creek into Mrs. Peggot’s kitchen, those places being two versions of boy heaven. A kid couldn’t ask for better. Too bad though, because the kid was full-time fixated on asking for better, mostly in the way of unaffordable shoes and Game Boy.
The second time was seventh and eighth. Regardless Jonesville Middle being baby-town, it grew on me. Not a soul there knew that one mere grade previous, I’d been a worthless piece of shit. Born again. Now I could speak to anybody and had friends in all the kinds: laid-back ones you score weed from, brainy ones to drag you from the death swamp of pre-algebra. Full friend gamut. Teammates you could grab in the locker room and lift off the ground in a reverse chinlock, all slippery with sweat, laughing your naked asses off. Girls ditto, minus the chinlock.
These kids did seem young. Outside of the dummy classes, you’d be hard pressed to find a kid in Jonesville Middle that had even held down a job. Being friends with such people entailed listening to made-up problems to some degree. I could tolerate that, much more so than Angus. Girls can surprise you by knowing more than they’re letting on. Also for a guy it’s different. If you sit still and let your ears take all that girl business, other body parts may get their turn.
So the impossible happened. In due time, a school would be owned by Demon Copperhead in his Members Only jacket. He should have been the happiest damn fool ever. But no, he’s waiting for the shit to hit the fan, looking behind whoever is being nice to him that day to see what’s coming. Still your jack-shit homeless orphan, just faking it in nice clothes. I’d done nothing to deserve good luck, and I knew what people are made of. Sooner or later they will turn on you. Or die.
Also, there was this thing that happened with U-Haul. This was in late January. Awkward as fuck. After Coach went to bed U-Haul would spend hours in his office. Putting receipts into the books, jerking off, who knew what he did. And he scooted around the house in his white socks, for reasons of stealth. U-Haul never came into a room, he materialized. In the doorway of our beanbag TV lounge that night. There he was, crooking a skeleton finger at me.
“Hey! What’s up?” I said. Playing dumb as to the meaning of the “come here” finger.
“The playbook is messed up. Coach must have dropped it. The binder is busted.” He rolled his head to the side, heaving stringy hair out of his eyes. “I thought you’d help me put it back in order. You and him are so tight, I’d say you’ve got it memorized.”
I looked at Angus but she was like, Your funeral, pal. On the football front she’d made herself clear from day one. Not interested. I followed him downstairs wondering how a human could look that much like a reptile while walking down stairs. He slithered.
