“Stepped on a cow flop! Blew out my tip-top,” yodeled Maggot, swaying his hips and tiptoeing across the sand in his weird boots.
Just to prove the entire world was against me, a seagull curved in and landed near us. Big, white, we’ve all seen the pictures. It stepped along the brown scum at the water’s edge, keeping a mean eye on me. “Hell-o-o, this isn’t the sea!” I yelled. The seagull paid no heed.
Our curly-headed Marlboro Man was still over there in his cowboy boots and tight white T-shirt tucked in his jeans. I didn’t really trust him, but maybe never did. A kid in my shoes takes what power he can find. As far as him and Emmy, no guess. She’d been flirty all day, wearing a soft blue sweater that buttoned all the way up the back, seemingly designed to make you think about taking it off of her. How would she even get that on by herself? Fast Forward had driven left-handed with his arm draped around her, but seemed his usual self, like he’s just waiting for a better offer. From time to time asking her to crack open another tallboy from the case at our feet.
Now we watched him flick away his cigarette butt and stroll towards us, getting over the fence in one motion like clearing a hurdle. No bad knees. Quarterbacks let others take the fall. “Me oh my,” he said, taking it in. “What have we here? Ask and you shall receive.”
“Not the ocean. Not the beach,” I said.
He walked towards the water. I stared at his pointy-toed footprints in the sand. He leaned over and scooped up a squashed yellow Styrofoam clamshell stained with ketchup and held it up to his ear. “Shhhh.” Finger to his lips. Eyes wide. “I can hear the ocean.”
I picked up a crushed beer can and fired it at the seagull. The bird flew away.
Emmy laughed her starry laugh. Fast Forward grabbed her hand, twirling her around, and just like that they were doing a two-step: his left hand holding hers and his right spread wide on her shoulder blade, pushing her backward with little steps. Like they’re hearing LeAnn Rimes singing “Can’t Fight the Moonlight,” and too bad for the rest of us if we’re not. Maggot crouched on his long legs, elbows on knees like a praying mantis, looking pouty. They’d obviously done this, gone out dancing. Emmy would place her demands. They looked like a movie couple, Emmy matching his steps, her back arched, smiling up at him. The outline of a thick wallet was worn into his back pocket. They twirled around the beach and then he lifted her by the waist and set her on one of the posts of the rope fence. Emmy raised her pressed-together hands above her head and stood balanced with the bright moon rising through black pines behind her. She looked perfect up there. A church steeple.
Then Fast Forward grabbed her around the waist, flinging her over his shoulder like a grain bag, Emmy laughing and kicking her legs, and the beauty was over.
Hungry Mother was a joke on us. We’d not eaten all day. It was decided Fast Forward and Emmy would go into the town and pick up Pizza Hut or something. We pulled money out of our pockets to give Fast Forward, and Maggot and I were left behind like additional trash on the fake beach. We dragged a log to the water’s edge to sit on. The moon was more egg-shaped than round, but seemed proud of itself regardless, laying out a shiny silver road across the water to our feet. Come on up, said the moon. Our faces and bodies were painted with silver. Looking at Maggot from the side, his nose and chin outlined in light, it dawned on me he wasn’t a kid. He’d grown into his square, shaved chin and Adam’s apple. And seemed to be dialing back the makeup. Maybe that was all just him now, the long, black eyelashes his cousins used to want to kill him for. I wondered if he was in love with Fast Forward. Like all of us.
Maggot and I sat like bumps on our log, letting the moon make us pretty. The whole place was, honestly, apart from me hating it for not being the place I wanted. On the other side of the sparkly water, a cone-shaped mountain with a pelt of pine trees rose halfway up the sky. The moon had a fuzzy ring around it. It was cold, and getting colder.
Maggot yelled across the lake at the mountain: “Who goes there?”
Like in our olden days, playing king of the hill. I yelled, “Nobody here but us hungry motherfuckers.” For a long while after that, we yelled across the lake at the dark mountain to hear our echoes. “I am one HUNGRY MOTHER,” we shouted.
Hungry hungry hungry. Mother mother mother.
The echoes were just in our minds, with the aid of a reefer. The truth is, it didn’t matter what or how hard we yelled. Nothing was coming back to us.
Emmy and Fast were gone for an age and came back with a large cold pizza and their faces rubbed raw, like they’d been making out. Some dishevelment. I noticed the buttons up the back of Emmy’s sweater were askew. We ate our pizza on the beach, which I don’t recommend as a tourist option because, sand. We’d brought a pile of blankets on this trip with the plan of camping out, and now got them all out to wrap around us while we sat on the beach. Maggot and Emmy both had their quilts that Mrs. Peggot made for all the grandkids out of cut-up squares of their outgrown clothes. I used to lie on Maggot’s bed staring at his, picking out all our good times. The green corduroys for instance that he’d wrecked playing on the Ruelynn coal tips.
After we ate, we cased a picnic shelter as a possible sleeping location, considering it for all of about ten seconds. The temperature was dropping like a rock. There was nobody around this park. We found some cabins and broke into one, which in our defense was not locked. The bunks had bare mattresses that smelled like mouse pee. A person can do worse.
The others were out like lights. Maggot’s snore I noticed had changed with his voice. Fast and Emmy had claimed the loft and it was quiet up there, so the hankypank evidently had been gotten out of the way. All I could think of was Dori. What kind of day did she have with Vester, what kind of jerk was I to leave her. I was getting bad sweats also, even as cold as it was, so I got up and took a smidge of oxy to stave off midnight shits. I only had a few with me. Fast Forward was serious about us not getting busted on the road, and had ordered us to bring minor items only, weed and beer. Once we got to Richmond we’d be taking on valuable cargo, meaning his business arrangement, and he said he’d take care of it. Hubcaps I assumed, or duct-taped to body parts, he was worldly-wise. I wondered if the other end of this deal was Mouse, his tiny, bossy friend that had sold her goods from the Pringles can at the Fourth of July party. She’d said she was from Philly, but a Mouse nest relocation was possible.
Right away I felt the oxy quieting down my aching guts, but not my brain. I couldn’t sleep. Too far from home, too much smell of mouse pee. I wrapped up in my blankets and went out on the porch. It was exactly the same cold, inside or out. They had rocking chairs and I sat in one, letting my eyes get friendly with the dark. I was surprised to see the door open and another blanket-cocoon slip outside, quiet as a cat. Emmy. I thought of those nights in June’s apartment, her sneaking out to lie down with me on my pillow fort bed. Water under a long bridge. She sat in the other rocker. I couldn’t see any part of her, just the burrito of her childhood quilt.
“Hey,” I said. “The moon went to bed already. So what’s wrong with us?”
She was quiet a long time. Then said, “Some guy threatened Mom’s life.”
“Christ. Who?”
“Some pillhead. He’s not the first. But this was just a few days ago. Then Maggot and I take off without even telling her, so right now she’s up at the house worried about us while some maniac off his nut could be creeping around with his Mac-10 fixing to blow her face off.”
Her surprising knowledge of firearms made that sentence way too disturbing. “Why would anybody want to hurt June? She’s Miss Popularity of the county.”
The tube of quilt shifted down a little and Emmy’s head came out of it. “You have no idea what she’s dealing with. People come in every day just wanting her to write them. They’ll say anything to get their painkillers. Kidney stones. They take the cup in the bathroom and prick their finger to put blood in the urine sample. She knows they’re shopping doctors, but if she says no, some of them get really ugly. Screaming, calling her a ruthless cunt.”
I couldn’t imagine that. Or could, but didn’t want to. The desperation was not unknown.
“That’s the men,” she said. “The women play it smart, they’ll go into their exam room and duck out with her prescription pad before Mom can get in there to see them.”
Emmy had one hand up to her mouth. I remembered how she used to bite her fingernails till they bled. June painted them with iodine to get her to stop. I had nothing to offer her now.
“Mom says half these people don’t know they’re addicted. They took what some doctor told them to, and now they’re fiending and don’t really know what it is. All they know is, Mom cut off their drugs and now they feel like they’re dying. So why won’t she help them?”
All this was making me hanker to go take more pills. Sick as that is. I wondered if Emmy knew how deep I was in. But she was wrapped up in her own shit. She said in Knoxville, June could refer these patients someplace for help, but here their insurance only covered the pills.
“You all never should have moved back. If things are so much better in Knoxville.”
“No, she was miserable in that hospital. Their head physician was this city guy from Johns Hopkins that treated the local nursing staff like they were half-wits.”
I’d forgotten about that. He called her Loretta Lynn. Emmy’s chair stopped rocking.
“Anyway, Mom says home is home. If people are in trouble, it’s where she needs to be.” Emmy put her face to the blanket, wiping her nose. I hadn’t known she was crying.
“Sucks, though,” I said. “She doesn’t deserve people going off at her like that.”
“Probably she’s called Hammer to come over again. To protect her from getting murdered. He’s probably there right now.” She started crying then with no bother to hide it.
“What happened? With Hammer. You two were almost engaged there for a minute.”
Bad move, Emmy went full waterworks. I said I was sorry, but she kept saying she was a terrible person. Over and over. I told her to stop it, she was a queen bee. Same as June.
“No, I’m not.” She was doing that gasping thing that happens after crying. Mrs. Peggot used to call it getting the snubs. After a minute she asked if I knew Martha Coldiron.
“You mean Hot Topic?” Even in the dark, I could tell I’d said the wrong thing. “Sorry, I forgot her name. Yeah, I know her. Maggot’s barber.”
