“Or to make good weather happen. Always look on the sunny side!” He made a smiley leer at me that was terrifying, even in the dark.
“Right. Convince me that ‘Have a nice day, for real’ is that useful as a power.”
“Like you’d know, big chief jockstrap. I’ve been waiting to have one of those nice days for, what. Eight or nine years?” He picked up a rock and threw it with such shocking force, we heard it connect with a sycamore on the other bank. Thwock, a random dead strike.
And then, shit. Maggot was crying. Breath racking out hard, like screaming with the sound off. I was scared to touch him. I just sat there wishing I could get something back for him, from our childhood days of people cutting us so much slack. Mr. Peg, my God. He had the patience of Job. Taking us fishing, setting down his own pole over and over again to rescue Maggot and me from our lines cast into the trees overhead or snagged on the bottom. Mr. Peg baiting our hooks with the worms Maggot wouldn’t touch. It’s possible Maggot hated fishing. If I knew, I wouldn’t have let him say, for fear Mr. Peg would stop taking us. Now I watched him wring himself out like a rag, with no idea what powers existed to save him.
Mr. Peg passed away that night. The old man went out on the tide, while underneath his body and bed and oxygen machine and the floor, the wake of covered dishes and yard smoking flowed for most of the night. In the morning Mrs. Peggot and her sister washed him and clipped his hair. Then they called the funeral home to come fetch him out.
Maggot never did go tell him goodbye. We stayed out there by the creek till after the damn moon went to bed. The reason he was living over at June’s now was the blowout they’d had, himself and Mr. Peg. Their last words amounted to inviting one another to go to hell. He said half of him was sorry over it, and the other half wasn’t, so now he would stay cut in two forever. I might have gotten him up those stairs, if I’d known it was the last chance. I could have tried harder. Mr. Peg was the best part of Maggot’s piss-poor lot in life. Both our lives.
So my second date with Dori was a few days late, and a funeral. She picked me up in her dad’s Impala, nervous. She said she hadn’t been to many funerals, not even her mom’s, being too young. All she’d ever told me was that it was a wreck that killed her, kids drag racing on a Sunday evening, doing over a hundred in a commercial zone. Dori’s mom had popped into Kwikmart to get a pack of AAAs for the TV remote, and pulled out at the wrong time.
My own mom’s funeral was stuck in my craw that day. It hit me hard, how different this one was. In the Peggots’ church, with the butt-polished wood benches and the colored glass windows like jigsaw puzzles of Jesus and sheep. Not one of these in-town churches with the fake steeple and signboard out front with God jokes, just your regular country church, small. But my Lord what a crowd. At the viewing, the line ran out the door and around the little graveyard, with people of all walks of life shivering in their overcoats waiting to say goodbye to a dead man. Not just Peggots and the Peggot-related, but people I’d not have guessed knew him. Donnamarie from the farm store. Coach Briggs. Even Stoner showed his ugly face, playing the good ex-neighbor, with his underage waitress now pregnant-child-bride. Her dad was the owner of Pro’s Pizza, so Stoner probably knocked her up for the free refills. I didn’t speak to him. I walked around the graves and checked out the square hole they’d opened up for Mr. Peg, with a pile of dirt beside it that seemed twice too much to go back in. That church cemetery was so small, I’d say you had to be a lifetime member to get a spot in there. I was surprised to find Hammer Kelly standing off to himself at the edge of the woods. I introduced Dori and he was polite as always, all bad haircut and freckles and pleased-to-meet you, but he looked wrecked, like he had the other night. I felt like shit for what I’d said to him, that it was not the end of the world. Mr. Peg was the closest he had to a father.
Dori was too cold to stand in the line so we went inside and found June and Maggot. June had used her Wonder Woman powers to get Maggot into a coat and tie, so he looked like a nice young man slash zombie. Emmy, still AWOL. June knew everybody there to speak to, including old guys Mr. Peg had worked with in his mining days. Men he’d hunted and fished with whenever he was younger, not yet overrun with us brats crowding out the better company. I’d say half the county was there. Mr. Peg was a person. I felt proud to have some claim on him, but it took me down a notch to see all these other people that had the same claim, if not better. Dori and I got to sit in the family section of seats though. June put us up there with the kids and grandkids, and this is stupid I know, but it swelled me up. Similar to how I’d felt running onto the field in my jersey with all eyes on me. Like somebody of worth.
The service was so different from Mom’s. This minister knew Mr. Peg. He told all these stories on him, and everybody was right there. Not slamming their heart doors on the misfortunate dead, but laughing and crying over a life. Boyhood shenanigans, like sneaking a calf into the schoolhouse, shutting it up in the principal’s office overnight. Being ringleader of boys that fired pokeberries with their slingshots at the back side of this very church, making red splats on the white clapboards that looked like bullet holes. Then, ringleader of boys that had to repaint the whole church. Adult shenanigans also, like Mr. Peg and this minister’s dad turning over in a boat on Carr Fork Lake, each of them claiming ever after that he’d saved the other man from drowning. Another time though, Mr. Peg did save a man’s life, no question, while the two of them were castrating bulls. I never knew any of this. The person he saved was Donnamarie’s grandfather. The whole idea of the sermon was how people connect up in various ways, seen and unseen, and that Mr. Peg had tied a lot of knots in the big minnow seine that keeps us all together. Dead but still here, in other words. That’s what killed me the worst. At Mom’s funeral, the casket closed on her and she was just over and out. Whatever good was still known about her, if any, was all on me, and I was too pissed off to do anything with it. I had even made fun of her dancing. Which was probably Mom at her best.
Dori held my hand the whole time. Her hand felt like a baby bird inside my fist, something I could protect if I tried hard enough. Something turned over, telling me to start my proper manhood there and then. Here’s a knot I can tie, I was thinking. I will never let it unravel.
Normally after the burial comes dinner on the ground, meaning a church picnic. But this was winter, and way too many people for inside the church, so they had it at the basement fellowship hall of the funeral home. They were having a funeral upstairs that same day for somebody else I knew. Collins, that I’d replaced as first-string tight end. Not yet eighteen, with a girlfriend and a baby, that big strapping body: dead. Jesus. I’d never known his first name till I saw it on the sign in the hallway to the funeral chapel. Aidan.
Downstairs, Mr. Peg’s people straggled in like a trail of ants carrying their casserole dishes, their sheet cakes, their green Jell-O rings with wrinkled Saran Wrap skin. Nothing brings on the food like a person that’s already had his last meal. Ruby was bossing her younger sisters over the setup, getting in a tiff with June. Too many hens in that coop. I wasn’t keen to stay, but couldn’t leave without speaking to Mrs. Peggot. She’d been sweet to me back whenever Mom died. I owed her for a lot of things, but especially that.
It took me awhile to find her, sitting quiet in her rumpled white hair and a black dress with shoulders way bigger than hers. Waving away all the people fussing over her. She’d been looking after people every minute since she was fifteen and married Mr. Peg, with all those kids and then Maggot. Now they were all saying she could finally get some rest, but if nobody was letting her lift a finger, she was as good as gone. That’s how she looked to me, like the orphan of the world. If you think a person that’s lost everything knows what to say to another one, I didn’t. But I pulled a chair over and sat, and she gripped my hand so hard it hurt. Not even looking at me, just holding on. I meant to introduce her to Dori but she got whisked away, fresh cousin bait, all the younger girls asking her questions and coveting her pretty hair. That was Dori. Magical. I spotted her across the room talking with her hands the way she did, always in motion, pointing at me to show everybody I was the one she belonged to. If you want to discuss having Jesus up in your veins. For me, that was it.
It was a temptation to stay and eat, given all that food, so we did. Then midway through everything, Emmy showed up. A buzz ran through the place, plastic forks and chicken legs frozen midair. I’d not seen her earlier at the church, but she must have been there. She had one of those flowers they let you take off the casket. June shot her the get-over-here look, but Emmy turned on her heel and walked off, with that long-legged rose on her shoulder like a rifle.
I ate fast, and Maggot and I went outside for a toke. Dori was having a big time, but I’d had enough of this party, and Maggot needed a furlough from the war in his brain, with Mr. Peg now dead on his battlefield. I’m not saying Maggot’s and my problems stacked up equal, but the same remedy applied. Weed is versatile. We were out there having an ignorant dispute over why a funeral home would need an entire row of dumpsters lined up at the back of the building (his view: excess bodies), and out of nowhere we heard a catfight. Major bad-bitch business, you could just about hear the fingernails sinking up to their hilts. We walked around the corner in our friendly fog, and were shocked to see Rose Dartell with a fistful of hair, and Emmy on the other end of it. Emmy screaming so hard, some of that pretty brunette had to be coming out.
My reflexes weren’t top notch, but I managed to get around behind Rose and pull her away. The hair thing though, I had no skills with that. I shifted to a choke hold while Emmy worked both hands up over her head trying to untangle herself from Rose’s fists. Finally Emmy staggered back, bloody nose, little flouncy skirt skewed sideways, stockings shredded, little gravels stuck in her knees. Eyes like flamethrowers. Rose twisted out of my hold with such force, I got a flash of her growing up with murder-boy Fast Forward, holding her own. She stomped across the lot, threw herself into a pickup, and tore out with a squeal that froze the black-dressed huddle coming out the front door. Emmy was gone in the same instant, down the alley in all her wrecked glory. Maggot and I watched her cut between the dumpsters, stomping off towards the laundromat and points west.
“What in the everloving hell?” I asked Maggot.
More of the upstairs funeral people started coming out, barely missing the brawl. Family of Collins, that thought about destroyed me. I saw which one of them had to be the girlfriend, with the baby and the wrung-out face, gripping that child like her last ten cents. Her hair was done in an old-style way, teased in the fat bump behind the headband. I remembered her now from school, one of the countrier girls. I knew I should go say something to her, but God alone knows what.
“Did you talk to Hammer?” Maggot asked.
“Just to tell him I was sorry. About Mr. Peg and everything.”
“He’s a sorrier fuck than that. Emmy broke up with him.”
“Already? Well, hell. That was a flashbang.”
“Thanks to you, man.”
“I never touched the girl.” I felt myself going red in the ears. “Since fourth grade.”
“Not you, asshole. Your high-flying friend. Looks like his sidekick is pissed.”
I was confused enough, he had to spell it out. They’d been seen. Emmy and Fast Forward. I got a squelched feeling in my chest, like a rotten apple in there. “Demon’s friend, that Fast person,” June called him, and had been asking if this young man I’d introduced to Emmy was decent. I told Maggot I didn’t know him
well enough to say. I wished it was the truth.
44
All the way up, or all the way down. That was me now, getting beat with both ends of that stick before any day’s end, never both at once, and not much in between. Nobody but Dori knew what I was going through. Coach had told me to cut back on the percs, get off the oxys altogether, and stay off that knee as much as possible. If pain wasn’t an issue, he said, I could taper out on the meds, get healed up, and he’d get me back in playing form in time for next fall.
I did what he said, or tried. Every day. Until I was hiding puke in my balled-up jacket and swamp-sacking my bed sheets. Then I’d give in, take a couple of pills and start again. Usually some percs and half an oxy in the morning would get me through school as a functioning being, and then afternoon and evening were just so many hours to get through until, until. Until the next hour that’s not completely horrible, bought and paid for with another pill. Pain was not the issue. Pain is just this thing, like a noise or a really bad smell. Here’s you, there’s the pain, you bump fists and make your deal. What I’m discussing is a feeling up inside your blood and lungs, like you’ve been snakebit from the inside. Shivering, loose-boweled, a body you want nobody to get anywhere close to until you can get it fixed. The issue is: how soon will this bottle run out.
Late December, was the answer. Dr. Watts had renewed me a few times over, and I’d taken exactly what he and Coach told me to, right up to our sad defeat at Richlands. I won’t pretend I’ve always been the obedient boy, but now I had people counting on me, and not just my teammates, this was a countywide situation. For the first time in my life I had a man’s job to do, and the guts to hold my bargain. We didn’t make it to semifinals, thanks to one mean motherfucker of a defensive end and God taking his regular dump on Demon. But even after I got hurt, I did everything in my power to be the man Coach thought I was. Now Coach was looking to seasons ahead, me getting off the meds and on my feet, so I’d die before I asked for another prescription. But dying felt like an actual option here. Day by day the orange bottle rattled its sadness at me, going down for the count.
Salvation was Dori. Everything was Dori.
I wanted a second first time with her, even if it was really our fifth or sixth. We were clocking them up pretty fast. But I wanted Dori to know I felt about her the way adult or married people do, if not better. To be together like that. Not in a car. It was a goal I set my mind to.
We spent most of our time looking after her dad, Vester, in their farmhouse that smelled of gas-stove pilot and adult diapers. Not sexy. Jip went berserk every single time I walked in the door, flattening himself to the linoleum like a rat-skin rug, his black beady eyes shooting murder. Vester’s hospital bed was in the front room so he could watch the comings and goings, which were sadly few. They had home-care nurses a few times a week to do stuff Dori couldn’t handle, catheters and such, and Dori would chat them up like crazy, being lonely. She was on her own for the most of it, even cutting the man’s hair. She said all her friends dropped her like a hot rock after Vester got sick. Staying in school wasn’t an option, it took all-day drives to get him to his different specialist doctors. At this point, those drives were probably the best part of her life. Beeping the horn whenever they crossed the state line, having their big adventure.
If she had to run out for groceries, she’d let me babysit him, which mainly involved making sure his oxygen tubes didn’t fall out of his nose. He’d want me to come sit close and hear the story of his life. The heart attack being least of the man’s woes. I’d wondered about his age, this grandpa type of guy being Dori’s father, and it turns out he did marry a wife ten years younger. But neither was he as old as he looked. Fifty-one. He’d worked for the mines prior to the layoffs, not as a miner proper but maintenance in the prep plant, longwall, I didn’t really know what that meant. It put him in the way of coal dust and asbestos. He said he would come home with little white hairs of that all over him, like after you’ve had a haircut. Throw off his coverall on the kitchen floor by the washer and think no more of it, because nobody told him to. After he got bad lungs, they got a settlement from the asbestos, which was how he and his brother started the farm store. But now his brother was dead and he was as good as, so don’t look for money to buy your life back, was his advice to me. And not that I said so, but I didn’t think I’d mind giving it a shot. I’d buy a new knee, because one of mine was shot to hell. I just did my best with Vester to change the subject onto car engines or football plays, and try not to stare at the skull behind his face and the arm bones under the spotty skin.
One noticeable feature of their house was a horse on the roof. Plastic, semi-life-size. It used to be on top of the store, but little-girl Dori begged to have it on their house, so there it stood. This was after her mom died and various aspects of family life took a header. The whole upstairs was a dead Mom museum, dusty closed window blinds, closets crammed with dresses they never threw out. Dori’s room was a different type of weird, rival to Haillie McCobb’s as far as stuffed animals go, but with Christina Aguilera Dirrty posters and a Sims Deluxe Edition box where she hid her condoms. She said she got those free from one of the home-care nurses. We would make out on her bed because we couldn’t help ourselves, but only to a point. Her dad was pretty much always asleep, so, not a problem. Jip was the problem. Adorable Jipsy Wipsy. If he wasn’t barking his brains out at me, he was making a low chainsaw rumble and eyeing me with a view to clean castration. No way was I taking my pants off in that house.
My first choice would have been outside in the woods, on a blanket, with lightning bugs dancing around. Total Disney fuck, she’d go wild for that. But this was the dead of winter. I had to be creative. The special place I thought of was on Creaky Farm, which was foreclosed and sold now to some out-of-towner that never showed up to farm it. We heard of city guys buying and selling Lee County land they had no need of, just because it was dirt cheap and one more place to hide their cash. Creaky’s tobacco bottom had been fallow for two seasons, the cattle pastures all grown up in thistles, and none of these problems mine to fix. With the old man gone, the snake had no fangs. I’d enjoyed the place, on the few occasions I’d gone back to plunder it.
The spot I had in mind was the stripping house, that used to be my boy cave. It was built into the ground like a cold cellar, with stone walls cool at all times of year and damp to the touch. The cool would keep the cured stalks soft so you could work through the winter, stripping the leaves from the stalks by hand. But I used to go there just to be off by myself, safe. Nobody ever found me there. The soft dirt floor and sweet tobacco smell in the dark always put a spell on me, like starting life over in the belly of some mom that was getting it right this time.
I took Dori there. With a bottle of Thunderbird and some candles I’d pocketed at Mr. Peg’s funeral, which is how long I’d been planning this. I told her I had a surprise in store and she was all like, birthday girl. With anybody else it might have been a downer, driving out there on lonely roads, walking through dead weeds, no sound except some crows in a bald tree griping about the weather. Dori though. She’d get so excited for any small thing, it made you happy to be alive. I shoved open the heavy door like a castle keep. We spread out our quilt, and didn’t even get the bottle cap twisted off before we were out of our clothes and on each other. Her cold lips and little teeth biting my ears, the shock of her breasts with their brown eyes staring. The slipperiness of putting myself inside her, the pull of that. No force on earth could stop it, once we’d gotten that far. I’d spent so much of my life hungry, and these days were no different. Every minute I craved that feeling with another person, being that close. I couldn’t get air until I had Dori up against me again. Only then would the begging go quiet and let other good, strange things pass through my head. The beautiful slickness of all life, babies sucking tit, a calf getting born, pouring out of its mother the way they do, like blood from a pitcher.
