“Jesus. Seriously?”
“Oh, yeah. We would do anything he said. We idolized him. My youngest brother Ronnie, he liked to of hung himself. Sterling had him up on a chair and the rope around his neck, wanting him to jump off. Tells little Ronnie this is going to be fun, like a swing.”
“Jesus,” I said. Not at my original best.
“He’s the one that gave me this.” She jutted her face at me. “Claw hammer. He threw it at me on purpose and caught me plumb across the mouth. Let me tell you something, cut-open faces bleed like a motherfucker.”
So much madness crowded my brain. Maggot’s mom slicing into Romeo Blevins. Good people, bad people, what does that even mean? Get down to the rock and the hard place, and we’re all just soft flesh and the weapon at hand.
“Sorry,” I said. “But that’s between you and him. He’s still my friend.”
“His new toy, is what you are. And he does not take care of his toys.” She licked her fingers and pinched out what was left of her joint. Pocketed the roach. I couldn’t see much in the dark, but something told me she was pleased with herself for dropping all this on me. And that I would not be getting any change back here.
“Here’s what should scare you,” she said. “After he laid open my face? I told Mama I fell and cut myself on the corner of my Barbie house. Thirty stitches worth of Barbie fucking dream house. He flashes that high-beam smile, and nothing’s going to be his fault. If you asked him right now, I bet you money that’s what he’d say happened to me. Barbie house.”
And you’re still here, wanting first position. She had to be lying. Maybe jealous. Even if he did game her family some way, he would have his side of the story. Fast Forward always outsmarted the people that made it their job to throw kids like me in the trash. That was truth. He’d showed me how to make good on places with no good in them, like Creaky Farm. How to survive. For some of us, that’s everything.
“Yo! Eighty-Eight,” somebody was calling through the woods. Big Bear. I heard him fall down, curse, get up again. “Come out come out wherever you are.”
“Over here,” I said, practically running towards him. That keen to get away.
I did not drive anybody home. I got back to the Lariat, the guys passed me Rose’s brown-bag delivery, and I did my best to drown what she’d told me in a deep well of tequila and PBR chasers. Nobody seemed to remember about Fast Forward’s change, and in due time I forgot about it too. That and more. I don’t recall leaving the drive-in or getting into the house. On my own steam I must have made it halfway up the stairs, because that’s where Angus found me in the morning.
I wanted to die. She used an entire roll of paper towels to mop up piss and vomit. I was no help, due to how bad it hurt to open my eyes. She got me out of my nastier clothes and into bed and went downstairs to get me a Coke. Some remedy thing she swore by, you shake up the bottle to make it go flat. She came back and put the cold glass in my hand. I felt her sit on the bottom of the bed, and even that hurt. “I didn’t see Coach, so he’s not up yet,” she said.
“Thank God.”
“Yeah, God and all his elves. Your ass otherwise would be grass.”
Breaking curfew and rowdy drinking, at all, let alone in public, were grounds for getting benched or even thrown off the team. It was not just about our ability to perform, Coach said. We were Generals. Kids looked up to us. “I can’t drink this,” I said. “I’ll puke it right back up.”
“No, it’s flat. It’ll stay down. I told Mattie Kate you’ve got the flu. But I think she’s onto you. Her kid told her you and some other guys pissed in their fire at the drive-in last night.”
Did we? Oh, Jesus.
“She’s none too pleased, but she won’t rat you out. And U-Haul knows nothing.”
U-Haul was practically at the house 24/7 now. Coach had finally promoted him to a real assistant, salaried, for unknown reasons. Even Coach seemed unhappy about it. Something liquid rolled over in my gut. I groaned and took careful stock of my bowels. “What time is it?”
“I don’t know. Morning. It’s okay, you’re covered. Find your flu vibe.”
If it had been anybody but Angus seeing me like that, with my puke-stiff hair and dumpster breath, I would have had to die. “You rock,” I told her. “My guarding angel.”
She was quiet a minute. The grasshoppers whining outside sounded like chain saws.
“Listen, Demon? I know you’re in no mood. But can I just say, you’re fucking up here?”
“Called it. Not in the mood.”
“Okay. But some of your angels out there are not guarding. All I’m saying.”
The disaster of me was not on Fast Forward. I was in charge of myself. If I had too many worries right then, pressure of the game, of being first string, of dying if I couldn’t get Dori—it was my own shit to handle. U-Haul being out to get me, that also. It was a lot. I tried opening my eyes a tiny slit, and the brightness hit me loud. Like light itself was making a sound. I saw the bleary angel of Angus at the bottom of my bed in her white pj’s, and behind her on my desk, that ship she gave me. Just like me, she’d said. A long way to go, and stuck in the bottle.
I ended up promising her I wouldn’t touch alcohol for the rest of the season. Given my condition, an easy vow to make. For
tequila at least, the promise was kept. To this day.
41
Where does the road to ruin start? That’s the point of getting all this down, I’m told. To get the handle on some choice you made. Or was made for you. By the bullies that curdled your heart’s milk and honey, or the ones that went before and curdled theirs. Hell, let’s blame the coal guys, or whoever wrote the book of Lee County commandments: Thou shalt forsake all things you might love or study on, books, numbers, a boy’s life made livable in pictures he drew. Leave these ye redneck faithful, to chase the one star left shining on this place: manly bloodthirst. The smell of mauled sod and sweat and pent-up lust and popcorn. The Friday-night lights.
In my time I’ve learned surprising things about the powers stacked against us before we’re born. But the way of my people is to go on using the words they’ve always given us: Ignorant bastard. Shit happens.
This is how. Late October, deep into the season, we’re up six against Powell Valley at home, running a sweep, our third or fourth of the night. I’ve got eyes in the back of my helmet for the defensive end, Ninety-Six, one of those assfists you can spot in the lineup before you ever go head-to-head. It’s in how he stands, his whole resentful body bent around what he’s missing. Anything you might have in the way of luck or love was stolen from his share, and he aims to get it back by drilling into the best man he sees. He’s had his eye on me all first quarter.
In this sweep I’m blocking for the tailback, to let him come around me between the outside hash marks, looking for daylight. Ninety-Six gets a full head of steam and hits me low, taking me down from the side, legs first. The first thing I feel is breathless, no wind, with him and others on top of me, nothing unusual. Legs pinned. A normal tackle with some extra hate for me to remember him by. He takes his time getting up, an elbow in my kidney, pissing me off.
Pain doesn’t get to your brain as fast as other things. Like being mad, and a little shamed, that you’re down with other men still on their feet. The third or fourth thing I know is my knee is bent the wrong direction. I see it. Fuck the devil’s red ass, does that son of a bitch hurt. Getting my legs under me is the plan, but the knee won’t execute. The knee is roaring. My teammates are yelling, Coach is yelling at somebody offsides, and I’m not liking how they’re looking at me. I’m hurt, okay, but in this game, pain is not the enemy. Failure is your enemy. Being too slow, missing an opening, miscalculating a pass, these things you control. Doing it right is your only friend, messing up is your foe, and the distance between them is all you are here to care about. The rest is landscape. Pain is the turf under your cleats. Pain is weather. You pull your legs under you and heave up thinking: Rainy day. Walk it off. Don’t pull me out, Coach, I’m good to go.
That’s not how it went.
Pain can scramble you. If it is weather, it can be a storm tearing off the roof of your mind. The hours and days after that tackle are like a deck of shuffled cards. Maybe they’re all still here in my brain, but damned if I could tell you which way they came about. I know the game ended in a loss. I was toted off the field to let that happen. Me telling Coach it’s not that bad, put me back in the game: that’s probably half the cards in that deck. Pleading, while I sat under my five-pound icepack. U-Haul’s red eyes on me. He’s eating this up, that this happened to me. I recall his use of unnecessary force while icing and wrapping my leg. No doubt thinking salaried men don’t tend the injuries of pissants.
I recall trying to watch the game, losing focus. The ringing in my ears. Pain is a sound, a pull. It’s fire. Then I’m at the house, at the bottom of the stairs looking up. Coach bracing me up on one side, Angus the other. Those stairs. Me bottoming out in a helpless bawl. Coach almost falling apart too, saying not to worry, Dr. Watts would come in the morning and he’d get me right. Angus quietly making up Mr. Dick’s downstairs sofa bed for me. The cripple bed.
I wasn’t awake all night but didn’t exactly sleep. I kept looking under the sheet, feeling a pool of blood that wasn’t there. At some point I turned on the light to be sure. It had turned black and was deformed, like a leg with a basketball stuffed inside. I was in my underwear. Somebody must have cut off my uniform pants, that card was gone from my deck, good riddance. If I dozed off I had nightmares. Going at my leg with a hacksaw, trying to get rid of it. Biting different body parts till they bled. A weird sound would snap me out of it, and it would take a minute to understand the sound was coming out of me. Pain is water, of a drowning kind. You waterboard awhile, come up for air, go back down. You’re afraid you’ll die, and then you’re afraid you won’t. That’s where I was, at the time of Doc Watts showing up in the morning.
Watts was team doctor. He didn’t make it to many games, but was friends with Coach since they played together at UT. He and Coach said things I wasn’t really hearing, ACL this, meniscus that. To rule out a fracture I needed to go to the hospital in Norton to get x-rayed. I thought: You and what goddamn army are moving me out of this bed. Possibly I said this out loud. Angus was hovering in the doorway big-eyed, listening. He said I also needed an MRI, for that we’d have to go to Tennessee, and they’re slammed down there so a three-week wait. He’d get me in to see an ortho, which is a bone specialist, again a two-week wait. The prescription would hold me till then. I stopped caring around this point because the little white submarine-shaped pill he’d given me to swallow was starting to sing its pretty song in my head. Cool relief, baby, let’s you and me go cruising Main. Just hold my hand. Lortab was her name. Blessed, blessed lady.
