Martha turned up, living in what June called “that crack house in Woodway” like it’s a famous attraction. The place we’d picked up Swap-Out that time. June wanted me to go over there and collect her. I said Maggot was friends with those fine folk, so he was her man. Failing that, she should call the law. June said no dice. She’d gotten the tip from Juicy Wills, the sheriff’s deputy that she’d dated in high school. Juicy had been coming over for debriefings ever since Emmy ran off, as full of himself as ever. June only tolerated him on the chance of a decent lead. Now that she had one, she was not blowing it by going over there with a damn peacock in a squad car. Her one goal was to find Emmy, and for that she had to get Martha to trust her enough to talk. Maggot had agreed to help, but only if I did too.
June was persuasive. She knew Martha wouldn’t be glad to see her, even after all she’d done to help her. That was the reason, really. So it was decided Maggot and I should go over. If we could somehow fetch Martha back to June’s, she’d take it from there.
We drove to Woodway in broad daylight, with Maggot too stoned even to remark on my crap transmission. Pulled up to the house and sat in the car, admiring the porch that was its own twisted universe. Old rotten mattress, drawerless dressers, propane canisters, sawhorse, refrigerator on its side with four connected plastic chairs on top. Crutches. Fake palm tree. Little Tikes Cozy Coupe. Huge stack of firewood split by some man in his prime that surely was not around anymore to burn it. This was the dregs of three or more disappeared generations. It took me a minute to see the wisp of cigarette smoke, and Martha at the bottom of it, sitting on a Shop-Vac. We asked if she wanted to come ride around with us. Where to, she didn’t even ask.
You never saw a more wrecked person. Hair, teeth, everything on her unwashed or coming apart. Old striped jeans with a busted zipper. Skeleton arms bare, in that cold. Maggot got in back so she could ride shotgun, and I got the full smell of her, like kyarn. Rotten meat. I made myself ask if she needed to eat, and she said yeah, but then dipped out before we got to a drive-through. I got her a burger, but Maggot ate it, saying there would be more food at June’s. Then he went to sleep too. We drove through the creepy stretch where the kudzu vines are hanging off the trees and reaching over the guardrails like they’re wanting to get at you.
About a mile out from June’s, Martha woke up, saw where we were, and tried to throw herself out of the car. Forgetting she was belted in. I pulled over and let her go, because there was no escaping out there, just the banks of the Powell River where Mr. Peg used to take us fishing. A beautiful place, hemlock trees standing around like bored giants. She stumbled down the bank. I only then noticed she had one bare foot. Probably she’d shot up, dipped out, and forgot. I’d seen Dori do it many times. Having Dori and Martha both inside my skull at the same time scared the hell out of me. I left Maggot asleep in the car and went after her. I squatted on the riverbank, watching her shiver. All hunched, her face pressed to her knees, both hands in her stringy hair.
“I can’t have her seeing me,” Martha finally said. “She hates my guts.”
“June? She doesn’t either.”
“She’s the one made you come after me, ain’t she?”
I said all June wanted was to take care of her. Martha shook so hard, I was afraid something in her might break. She said she wasn’t taking any more of June’s money because it made her more of a bad person and she couldn’t go any lower. She’d tried to kill herself already a couple of times. “June thinks I’m the one that corrupted Emmy.”
I told her nobody thought that. What struck me though was how Emmy had said this too, I’m a terrible person. Fast Forward was out there so cocksure he could do no wrong, with these women run over in the road behind him. I made myself touch Martha’s back, rubbing my hand in a circle on her thin summer shirt, feeling the hard knobs of her spine. Dori’s were like that now.
I told her June was not one to give up on people, ever. And if Martha had any way of getting in touch with Emmy, she needed to tell her that June still loved the heck out of her and wanted her home. Martha sat wiping her nose with the back of her hand, taking this in. I was trying to give her some usefulness, to keep herself going. But it wore me out. By the time I got her and Maggot dropped off at June’s, it was dark and I was one more casualty of the day.
The whole drive home I thought of Dori, where she was headed. God help me if I’d just seen it. Dori was never going to get clean, she had no reason. I couldn’t picture living without her, but neither could I go on being this lonely forever, waiting for Dori to wake up wanting to share my burdens. The only words we had left between us now were the foreplay to fighting.
She was asleep on the couch, on her back, with one hand on the floor like a storybook girl trailing fingers in the water from her boat. Jip on her stomach, beady-eyed watchman. He growled as I shook her gently. “Baby, I’m going to get you something. Did you eat today at all?”
She rolled over on her side without opening her eyes.
“I need you to wake up. Sit up, okay? We have to talk.”
Where to go, if I left, I had no idea. No place seemed possible. Maybe it would only be for a little while. I pushed Jip off her belly and helped her sit up. She blinked, focusing her eyes.
“What do you feel like eating?”
She put her hand on her stomach, shook her head. I said she had to eat. Her eyes opened wider, like my being there was dawning
on her a step at a time. Then she looked at me like I was going to hurt her, and I felt like a terrible person. “Baby, baby,”
I said, stroking her hair. It had grown out every which way, finally her true color of blond. I said I loved her and would
never, ever want to hurt her. And she said, The thing is, Demon. I’m pregnant.
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I thought of it every minute of every day. This would get us clean. Now Dori had reason. It’s simple, I said, think of the baby. It was not simple. Dori had never troubled to hide any part of her using. To her mind, it was all about love: sucking an oxy to crush and split exactly in half with me. Saving every patch she shot, for me to lick the leftovers. Now she got wily on me, only ever shooting up after I’d left the house. Sweet thing, that was Dori trying to be good. I might have been doing some version of the same.
Stupid is all the word I’ve had to cover much of my time on God’s grass. But it’s not stupid that makes a bird fly, or a grasshopper rub its knees together and sing. It’s nature. A junkie catches his flight. That sugar on your brain cells sucks away any other purpose. You can think you’re in charge. Walk around thinking this for hours at a time, or a day, till the clock winds down and the human person you were gets yanked out through whatever hole the devil can find. Learn your lesson, get your feet up under you. You will be knocked down again.
For Dori’s sake, I went to talk to June. I knew she needed to be seen to. They have things they do for the pregnant now, heartbeat and such. Vitamins, I remembered Mom getting those. And just by the way, maybe also some help getting her off the junk.
What I didn’t expect was to find June so pumped up on her own news, she wasn’t all that excited over mine. Martha had a bead on Emmy’s whereabouts in Atlanta. June actually had a street address, and was going down there. Some hellhole, no doubt. She was peeling potatoes while she told me all this, long slips of skin flying fast into the sink. The people I know are seldom idle with their hands. Men smoke or fix things, usually both at once. I once watched a man take down a dead poplar from the top down, working high in its limbs with a chain saw in one hand and a Camel in the other. Women fix a kid’s hair or wipe a nose or sew on a button or peel potatoes. And smoke, though not June of course. I sat on a stool at her kitchen counter, wishing I could draw her hands. I asked, “What makes you think she wants to come home?”
No answer for half a potato. Brown and white peels mounding in the sink. And then: “Emmy is in no position right now to know what she wants.”
“People get tired of hearing that,” I said. “She’s eighteen.”
June’s eyes flared, but she kept peeling, talking without looking up. “These aren’t adult choices we’re talking about. She’s stuck down there with no means, getting used by terrible people keeping her strung out, whatever, raped. There’s parts I can’t even think about.”
“Embarrassed,” I said. “There’s that part. She’d sooner die than have you know.”
June’s hands went still. “You need to come with us.”
I almost laughed, for how doable it all seemed to June Peggot. Like she’s Lara Croft, and we’re going to go raid the tomb. I said no, I couldn’t leave Dori for that long.
She narrowed her eyes at me, still working away, the slip-slip of the peeler sounding mad now. “Listen to yourself. Dori’s a grown woman, soon to be a mother. What do you think she’ll do if you leave her unsupervised, wet the bed? Burn down the house?”
I didn’t want to admit that both were possible. I had other excuses, my job at the store, a strip I had to finish by Saturday. June said she was going on Sunday. Slip-slip-slip. I told her these were scary people, and she should go with somebody that packs heat, like Juicy Wills.
Hell no on Juicy, she said, multiple reasons. But damn straight on scary. She’d been getting threats from some Rose person that claimed Emmy had stolen her man, and if the bitch ever turned up back here she was asking to get her pretty face scarred up. June had no intention of going to look for Emmy without a sidearm. Her brother Everett had an open carry permit that he swore was good in Georgia, and he’d agreed to go with her.
I tried to picture this brother as Terminator 2. Everett. All the good looks and kindness that came with the Peggot package, a linebacker in high school. He and his wife owned the fitness club and tanning salon in Big Stone, so. He was pretty ripped, but still. June was batshit.
“Fine then, you don’t need me,” I said.
“But a friend, somebody her age. Like you said, she’s humiliated. She trusts you.”
That aggravated me, getting invited as the boy, not the man. “Take Hammer, then,” I said. “Last of the nice guys. Deer rifle, pre-engagement garmin ring or whatever the hell.”
June flew off the handle at me then, saying that would be cruel, pulling Hammer into this. All he’d ever wanted was to love that girl and keep her safe. If only they’d stayed together. She dropped her naked potatoes in the water to boil, wiped her hands on her apron, and used them to push her hair back from her forehead, one of those little habits that ran right down the Peggot generations. Those hands, that split second of babyish wide forehead laid bare, exact same look in their eyes. For one second I was seven years old playing Standoff with Maggot, our bare feet planted, trying to push each other over into the mud. Me winning, Maggot refusing to lose.
It was all doable. Myself in June’s car headed south at an ungodly hour of Sunday. Atlanta was almost six hours each way, and she meant to get down there and do our business by daylight, before the vampires came out. Everett was napping in the passenger seat, his big head nodding forward, his Kel-Tec PMR-30 on the console between them. Concealed carry didn’t cross state lines, and June did things by the book. I rode in back with the supplies she seemed to think necessary: old soft quilts, cooler of sodas, boxes of crackers, and such. So we’ve got two different movies running here, front seat tricked out for Blade II, back seat is Lassie Come Home.
