The one person to cheer me up reliably was Tommy. One evening I went and found him in Pennington Gap, sure enough renting a garage from the McCobbs. Rack of garden tools on the wall, stained cement floor. He had a hose running from outside rigged up to a bucket for his washing. Hot plate, microwave. He put Dori and me to shame as far as tidiness, his books in shelves and his clothes folded in milk crates. A bed that was made. Bathroomwise, he had to use the one in the house. Weren’t they supposed to be putting one in out here? He said well, the McCobbs didn’t own that house, they rented. And their landlord wasn’t aware he was paying them to live in the garage. There you go, the McCobbs. But Tommy threw his hands wide to indicate his hose-bucket sink, his bed beside a hand tiller with sod dangling from the tines, and asked if I could believe how far we’d come in life. “My own place!” he said. A man among men.
I was lucky to find him home, most evenings he was at the newspaper office. They had him come in at day’s end to janitor up everybody’s unholy mess. Then the ad lady quit and they gave Tommy her duties of laying out the paper and making up the ads. His boss was Pinkie Mayhew that wore men’s trousers and drank on the job. People said the Mayhews had run the Courier since God was writing his news on stone tablets. Pinkie and two other people did all the photos and stories. Then Tommy came in nights and put the whole thing together. He said I could hang out over there any time, he could stand the company. So I did.
Tommy was carrying a lot of weight down there. Most of that paper was ads. The front page obviously would be your crucial factors, Strawberry Festival, new sewage line, etc. Then sports and crimes. They had other articles coming in over a machine, from the national aspect, and Pinkie would pick some few of those to run. All the rest was ads. Classifieds were laid out in columns, but the ones for car lots, furniture outlet, and so forth would be large in size, and Tommy had the artistic license of designing them. He had border tapes to dress up the edges, and what he called clip-art books that were like giant coloring books, on different subjects. Automotive, Hunting and Fishing, Women’s Wear. He’d find what picture he wanted, cut it out, and paste it up on the ad. A sofa for the furniture store, or he’d get creative, like a pirate ship for Popeye chicken. It depended on what pictures he could find in those books, which got picked over and cut to shreds. They didn’t buy him new ones very often. So he’d end up looking for the needle in the haystack, turning these pages of basically paper spaghetti.
Tommy was like a new person, a man in charge. He had clothes now that fit him, not the outgrown sausage-arm jackets of old. Plaid flannel shirts mostly, with the sleeves rolled up. He still had the girlfriend Sophie that worked at her newspaper in Pennsylvania, a much bigger operation than the Lee Courier, Tommy said. But he was proud of this one, showing me around: machines, computers, Pinkie Mayhew’s office with a stale ashtray smell that could knock a man flat. If you’ve ever opened a drawer where mice have ripped up toilet paper to make a nest in there, the entire space filled with white fluff? Pinkie’s office.
Tommy showed me how to feed print columns through the hot wax rollers and help him stick them on the pages. It was all done on a big slanted table with light inside. They had blue pencil marks showing where to line things up. The whole place smelled like hot wax. Little cut ends of waxy paper ended up all over everywhere, sticking to your shoes or the backs of your hands, like a baby eating Cheerios. This was the unholy mess that Tommy had to clean up. Honestly, he was holding that outfit together. I’d started coming in due to boredom, but he needed the help. He offered to pay me out of his check, but I said Jesus, Tommy, you have to quit being so nice to people. I still had his T-shirt.
One night I found Tommy pulling on his hair, looking for clip art he wasn’t going to find. He had a Chevy dealer ad, with
nothing left in the automotive book but tow trucks, Fords, and fucking Herbie the Love Bug. I said, Look, let me just draw
you a damn Silverado. And knocked it out. Gave it extra shine, one of those star-gleams on the bumper. That’s how it all started:
clip-art Demon. I could do about anything. The Lee Courier started having a whole new aspect to its ads that probably was getting noticed. Tommy said I was a miracle art machine. I
told him if there was ever a sale on skeletons, he’d have to take the wheel.
49
June wanted to see me. Emmy was two months AWOL, and she was at her wits ends. The scene of the crime was Fast Forward, everybody knew. But Emmy was well past the age of consent, and had gotten the message back to June that she was in no need of rescue.
I wasn’t sure what dog I had in this fight if any, but June was never anything but good to me, so I drove over there. At a distance she looked the homecoming queen as ever, bare legs propped on the porch railing. I had to get close to see how two months had made her old. Lines by her mouth, tiny wires of white hair. She threw her arms around me, rocking like some sad last dance, her head on my shoulder. The women that loomed large in my life were all getting small.
“Sorry,” she said, after she let me go. Wiping the corner of one eye.
“Lord, June, don’t be. I spent the better part of middle school wishing for that.”
“I believe it was Emmy you were after.”
“I was not one to shut any doors. You pick that up in foster care.”
She sized me up. “Look at you, all grown. After everything they put you through. An upstanding young man, living on your own. Where’s Dori? I told you I’d feed you both.”
“I already ate. She was tired. She said thanks.”
I felt less than upstanding, and Dori was out for the count. I’d finally gotten a shift at Sonic, and Dori was cutting hair at some bootleg beauty parlor in Thelma’s basement. We had our prescriptions. I’d snaked the drains and replaced the fill hose in the washer. Life was back on its keel somewhat, but we had different schedules. I aimed at functional for much of each day, whereas Dori set her sights on a couple hours of not poking out any eyes with her scissors.
“I’ve got a whole baked chicken I’m sending home with you, then.”
My stomach did a little dance of hope. “You don’t have to.”
“I do, or it’ll go to waste. Most of everything I cook, I end up taking in for the girls at the clinic. I cannot get the hang of living alone.”
“I’m sorry.” I hadn’t thought of that. She never had. She’d started looking after Emmy at nineteen, while she was in nursing school. Living in the Peggots’ trailer.
She put her hands in her back pockets. “You know I’d lay down my life for that girl.”
“I know. I think she wants you not to, though. Anymore.”
She looked at me, surprised. “That’s just how it works, Demon. You should be as mad at her as I am. We give these kids all the advantages, and they won’t stoop to pick them up. Emmy’s acting like a child, and Maggot, good night. I don’t know where to start.”
“He’ll be all right. He just needs more time than most to find his way out of the weeds.”
“What he needs,” she said, “is a boyfriend.”
I might have blinked. “You’d be okay with that?”
“Of course I would. Even Mama would, I think. In time. If he could just find some nice boy to talk him out of his night of the living dead.”
“I’m not sure he’d choose that wisely.”
She spit out a bitter laugh. “We don’t any of us, do we? Here, let’s walk. There’s a spot up the road where you can see the sun hit the ridge on its way down.”
We walked out on the gravel road I’d once walked with Fast Forward and Mouse, letting her trash-talk all I knew. I’d let summer get by me without notice. Here it was. The sun coming down through tall trees in long waterfalls of light, the birds starting up their evening songs. There’s one like water trilling over rocks, pretty enough to make you cry. Wood robin. I thought about the night in Knoxville June told us she was moving back. Screw those doctors looking down on her, calling her Loretta Lynn. She could have crushed it there. But she wanted this.
As far as Emmy and Fast Forward, June knew as much as I did about where they were living, someplace in Roanoke. She said she woke up every day wanting to drive over there and bring the girl home. But this was Emmy. You’d want a SWAT team. June was desperate for anything I could tell her. I picked my words, but I didn’t lie. I told her Fast Forward was one of these that has pull over people, like a magnet. And Emmy being a magnet-type person also, they probably couldn’t help getting attracted. June asked if he was dangerous. I said the world is dangerous. She asked what drugs he was involved with, and I said to the best of my knowledge he himself wasn’t doing a whole lot. That he was more into the money side of things.
“That is not going to help me sleep tonight,” she said.
I told her I was sorry, but she was putting me between the rock and the hard place. We walked to where we could see the sun hit the ridge, and the dark start to pour down the valley. On the way back she asked about my knee. I said I didn’t think about it anymore, which was a lie. I thought about it every single time I took a step. My own business.
“Just tell me this,” June said. “Is she taking pills?”
“You want to sleep tonight? Or the truth.”
“I’m asking.”
“Then I’ll tell you. I don’t know a single person my age that’s not taking pills.”
June was quiet. I tried to decide if this really was true. Angus was the exception. Even Tommy popped NoDoz, due to the hours he kept. Late nights at work, and then the McCobbs had him up early taking the kids to school. We were halfway back before she spoke again.
“They did this to us. You understand that, right?”
I did not. Neither the who, nor the what.
