She told me more of what I’d heard from Emmy, what she was seeing at the clinic. I asked if anybody was wanting to kill her lately, but she waved that off. “I’m not the one you need to worry about. It’s not just people your age. You know what I’m saying? If they’re old, sick, on disability? They need their scrip. If they’re employed, they get zero sick leave and can’t see me more than once a year, so there’s no follow-up. They need their scrip. That bastard.”
I shouldn’t have asked what bastard. Kent. And his vampire associates, quote unquote. Coming here prospecting. She said Purdue looked at data and everything with their computers, and hand-picked targets like Lee County that were gold mines. They actually looked up which doctors had the most pain patients on disability, and sent out their drug reps for the full offensive. June kept looking at me like she knew the parts of my business I wasn’t telling her. But Kent was nothing to me. If I had problems, they were my doing.
Back at the house, she wrapped up a lot of food for me to take, and walked me to the car. Instead of saying goodbye, she stood with her arms crossed, looking at me. Weirdly, I thought of that time at the Knoxville zoo, how she took hold of me by the ears and said she knew what I needed. And was exactly right. Of all the good people I knew, she was probably the best one.
Tommy let me draw a comic strip for the paper. How that came about, long story. Starting with Tommy in a newspaper office. This was basically his first-ever contact sport, Tommy vs. the great big world. Where had he been, up till then? Magic Treehouse. Having a job suited him, not a problem. But the big world itself? It was whipping Tommy’s ass.
These national type articles that came in over their machine were a grab bag, as mentioned. Election, Olympics, earthquake, Lance Armstrong, what have you. But it was a Pinkie requirement to run any of them with mention of Southwest Virginia or anything close, like Tennessee or Kentucky. Which they mostly never did. But if so, dead guaranteed to be about poverty, short life expectance, etc. The idea being, we are a blight on the nation. Tommy showed me one with the actual headline “Blight On the Nation.” Another one said “smudge on the map,” that he’d highlighted with yellow marker. He was saving these articles in a folder. Seriously. Where was the Tommy of old, that took other people’s lickings and kept on ticking? Over there on his spin-around stool was where, tugging on his stand-up hair, getting worked into a lather. I was like, Tommy. You didn’t know this? Evidently not. He couldn’t stop reading me headlines. “Rural Dropout Rates On the Rise.” “Big Tom Emerges as Survivor.”
“Technically that’s one for our side,” I said. “Our guy wins Survivor.”
Tommy held up the photo they ran of Big Tom. Okay, not good.
I tried to explain the whole human-being aspect of everybody needing to dump on somebody. Stepdad smacks mom, mom yells at the kid, kid finds the dog and kicks it. (Not that we had one. I wrecked some havoc on my Transformers though.) We’re the dog of America. Every make of person now has their proper nouns, except for some reason, us. Hicks, rednecks, not capitalized. I couldn’t believe this was news to Tommy. But I guess I’d seen the world somewhat, with our division games where they called us trailer trash and threw garbage at us. And TV, obviously. The month I moved out of Coach’s, Chiller TV was running this entire hillbilly-hater marathon: Hunter’s Blood, Lunch Meat, Redneck Zombies. And the comedy shows, even worse, with these guys acting like we’re all on the same side, but just wait. I dated a Kentucky girl once, but she was always lying through her tooth. Ha ha ha ha. Turns out, Tommy had squandered his youth on library books and had zero experience with cable TV.
He kept wanting to know why. Like I knew. “It’s nothing personal,” I said.
He was fidgeting with his shirtsleeves, unrolling and rolling them to his elbows. Finally he looked up. With tears in his eyes, honest to God. “It is, though. I’m afraid Sophie won’t ever want to come here. She says her mom keeps asking why she couldn’t date somebody closer to hand. What if her whole family thinks I’m just some big, toothless dumbass?”
Damn. I hoped Sophie’s family wasn’t watching Redneck Zombies. Or Deliverance. You try to tune this crap out till it sneaks up and socks you, like the sad day of Demon’s slam-book education. It’s everybody out there. Reading about us being shit-eater loser trash jerkoffs.
“Your teeth are A-okay,” I said. “She probably thinks you’re the exception to the rule.”
He looked defeated, shaking his head. “People want somebody to kick around, I get that. But why is it us? Why couldn’t it be, I don’t know, a Dakota or something? Why not Florida?”
“Just bad luck, I reckon. God made us the butt of the joke universe.” At that point I knew it probably wasn’t God. But I had nothing better on offer.
Where Tommy used to draw skeletons, now he collected proof of getting scorned. I told him to quit torturing himself, but he was as hooked on his poison as I was on mine. Even the comic strips were against him. Those came in a packet every week, and he had to pick out four to lay out on the last page. All lame, unfunny four-panels of kids acting rated-G naughty, talking dogs, yuk-yuk. Tommy could choose any three, but the fourth always had to be Stumpy Fiddles that they’d been running forever: lazy corn pones with hairy ears, big noses, patched clothes worse than any I wore as a foster. Old Maw nags, old Paw skips out on any threat of work to hide behind the outhouse with his shine jug. It wrecked Tommy to run this strip. I offered to draw in palm trees to make it Florida, which we both knew would not fool anybody. It was the same deal. This was the one comic strip of existence with so-called local interest.
“Local my ass,” I said. “Whoever draws this has never been here. He’s blowing his wad on us every week, everybody out there laughs, and we swallow the jizz. Stumpy fucking Fiddles is garbage.” To prove it, I wadded him up and threw him away.
“Oh Lord,” Tommy said to the trash can. “Pinkie’s going to tan my hide.”
“It’s not even good drawing.” I got it out, unwadded it, and flattened it on the light table. “Look how he puts the same face on every character. Men, women, babies. That’s just lazy.”
Tommy got this wild look. “Okay, let’s see you do better. Superhero needed here. I’ll watch.” And he did. Just like in our Creaky Farm days of old.
I’d been thinking of this guy my whole life. And his universe. Not Batman’s Gotham City or Superman’s Metropolis or Captain America’s New York or Green Lantern’s Coast City or Antman’s LA. I’m discussing Smallville, where Superman’s nice fosters looked after him till the day he got his wings and tore out of there. I recall some ripping up of pages, as a kid reading that. Not even understanding really why it broke my heart. But Jesus, even a kid knows the basics. Why wouldn’t any of them want to look after us?
I made him a miner, with a pick, overalls, the hard hat with the light on the front. I gave him a red bandanna like the old badass strikers that had their war. No cape, he doesn’t fly, just super strong and fast, running over the mountaintops in leaps and bounds. This guy is old-school. I drew it in the vintage direction where the characters are somewhat roundheaded with long noodle limbs, in constant motion. Fleischer style is the name of that, part Mickey Mouse, part manga. It was a style I could do, and it felt like getting back to the roots.
First panel: my guy spots an old lady crying in her little home up in the woods, because she can’t pay her bill and the electric’s gone off. Dark, stormy night. Second panel: the hero grabs a lightning bolt out of the sky and shoves it into the wires. You see it running all the way into her trailer home, the lights and stove all coming back on. In the last panel I made music notes coming out of her radio and lights shining out the windows into the night. The lady and her little old man are dancing outside on their porch.
Just kid stuff, obviously. That’s all comics were, as far as we knew. I’d started with a different version where he swaps
out lines at the pole, so instead of lightning he’s stealing the power of a mansion house up on a hill. You see it all fizzle
out up there, satellite TV, outdoor security lights, while the little trailer goes bright. But Tommy said that might get him
in trouble with Pinkie, so I went with the natural forces. I put a lot of emotion and contrast shading in the last panel,
where you see the miner hero out in the dark woods, watching the happy old couple on their lit-up porch. I named my strip
Red Neck. Signed, Anonymous.
50
I got our light bill paid. Now we had a leaky gas stove and a furnace going to the dark side. I turned on the blowers to test it, churning up some bad business in there with the smell of burnt cat. Dori said the gas had always leaked, and it wasn’t cold yet. We had a fight over why you’d turn on the furnace if it’s not cold. My position being: It’s freaking September. The world turns. Hers being: Why did I have to make everything so hard. Another day in our happy home.
In my first days of knowing Dori, I’d put in so much effort thinking of her around the clock, being amazed, planning how to get with her. I was high on wanting. Now I had her, and all the air hissed out. I was living life as a flat tire.
Generally speaking, I kept it together, dosing myself to the sweet spot that gets you out of bed without knocking you ass-flat stupid. Making my fortune down at Sonic, one Red Bull slush at a time. Then going over to help Tommy. Some people must have noticed my comic in the Courier, because one wrote in to say it was the first they’d ever run that wasn’t toilet paper. Tommy said why not do some more. Which I did, now and then. It took a lot of time to get one perfect though, and Dori wanted me home of an evening. Mornings also. Ideally all times of day. I tried mentioning how handy it was to have money, and that the hours might fly by if she tried doing something around the house. Huge fight. Why did I move in with her if I was going to be gone all the time? She threw a pout, shot half a morphine patch, and that’s Dori over and out.
I’d made this bed of thorns, and needed to talk to the type of friend that doesn’t tell you to shut up and lie in it. Angus had started community college, headed for the big leagues, so our friend days were numbered. I decided to cash in my credits before they expired. She said sure, let’s meet at Hoboland, which was our name for the little park in Jonesville. It had the usual things of vet memorial, picnic shelter, steps up a hill leading to nowhere. A pine grove. One time we surprised a guy sleeping up there with all his worldly shit tied up in a Walmart bag, so. Hoboland. Our small imaginations ran wild in those days. We’d roused him from a safe distance.
I found her up there under the pines, wearing a leather hat like Abe Lincoln only not as tall, sitting on a blanket with a pile of Saran-wrapped triangles. I sat down on the other side like it was our campfire, and we stuffed sandwiches into our faces. Mattie Kate’s BLT’s are the sober man’s smack. We asked questions with our mouths full, how was my knee, how was college. She said it was nice to swim in a bigger pond, she was meeting people with a lot in common. I looked at this girl in bike shorts and a top hat, and wondered how that worked exactly.
She said Coach was worried about me. I brushed it off, but she pressed the point. He was still my legal guardian for another year. Things were not great at the house. U-Haul was pushing ugly rumors at school. I recalled our standoff where he’d hinted about dark things he was holding over Coach, not to mention the heinous air-fuck. But Angus said these rumors pertained to Ms. Annie screwing somebody behind her husband’s back. Mr. Maldo.
Christ’s sakes, poor shy Mr. Maldo. You could sooner see him making a hit country single. But certain parents were jumping all over this, wanting people fired for their ethics. I said it was just the usual round of farts and the stink would pass. Angus said sorry, but there’s worse. U-Haul was saying I was a party to the scandal and had witnessed the lovers together at June Peggot’s house on the Fourth of July. If people didn’t believe U-Haul, they were to ask me.
U-Haul’s front teeth needed to make a date with the back of his skull. I asked Angus if he had ever made any moves on her, and she got a little wide-eyed. But didn’t say yes or no.
In time I got around to telling her about my life with Dori turning into a shit show, as far as her keeping house or putting in any effort. I made the suggestion of Angus talking to her woman-to-woman, to get Dori to shape up. Angus laughed so hard she spit tomato, and said right there I just wrote the dictionary definition of what “woman-to-woman” is not.
I tried to make my case. Dori had looked after her daddy hand and foot, but now had no interest in the bigger picture. What picture, Angus asked. I said cleaning up the house, making decent food. Which admittedly Dori never did before. Also, as far as never wanting to be left alone at the house, not new. So, I had pantsed myself here. Angus leaned back on her elbows and watched with that smirky grin she had, where her mouth pulled completely over to one side.
“You chose her, Demon. This was the real deal. Remember? What was that about?”
I remembered. Watching Dori’s face and body, feeling her hit my veins like a drug. Such a killing beauty. She still was. And sex was still great. Not the string of firecrackers it once was, due to us running on a half cylinder apiece. But sometimes we hit it right, and those were the Aerial Dragon Egg Salutes in the vast wasteland of our otherwise fruitless and constipated days. I spared Angus the details. She sat up and started packing up our picnic mess.
“Whatever you love about her, you get to live with. And the other stuff, you live with that too.” Angus was this Yoda individual. It was probably good you talked to her, even if it wasn’t.
I passed the high school on my way home, and without overthinking it, pulled in the lot. It was almost three. I found Ms. Annie’s car. Stalky, but how else would I talk to her? A dropout, going in the building? Probably some part of your brain gets repo’d, like the Dead Zone movies.
