Viking and Gizmo both worked in a warehouse, where they shouldered the yoke of labor like good-natured mules. No questions to ask or answer, and at least one of them was unbothered by the all-day whine of the forklifts. They were allowed to smoke on the job. It’s the one addiction they let us keep, don’t ask me why. Maybe because it won’t inspire you to rob a liquor store or wrap your vehicle around foreign objects.
I wouldn’t have minded the warehouse, but lacked a mule’s good knees. I had been looked at now by more doctors than existed in Lee County, and advised that at such time as I ever found myself in a job with good health insurance, I’d be a candidate for knee replacement. Meantime, I followed my mother’s footsteps and got hired as a stocker at Walmart Supercenter. Unlike Mom, I was probably the soberest cracker in the whole big box, and quickly worked my way up the career ladder to produce. I avoided the employee smoking room aka drug-exchange HQ, and found no real downside to the job. People buying apples and green beans usually have some degree of joy in their hearts. I counted down the fifteen-minute intervals and watched them flinch and shudder like wet dogs every time the machine came on with the fake thunder and spray to mist down the goods. I told myself I was laughing with them, not at them. But really, I was sad. It was the closest they probably got to real rain on a vegetable.
I’m going to tell you something, there’s country poor, and there’s city poor. As much of my life as I’d spent in front of a TV thinking Oh, man, city’s where the money trees grow, I was seeing more to the picture now. I mean yes, that is where they all grow, but plenty of people are sitting in that shade with nothing falling on them. Chartrain was always discussing “hustle,” and it took me awhile to understand he grew up hungry for money like it was food. Because for him, they’re one and the same. Not to run the man down, but he wouldn’t know a cow from a steer, or which of them gave milk. No desperate men Chartrain ever knew went out and shot venison if they were hungry. They shot liquor store cashiers. Living in the big woods made of steel and cement, without cash, is a hungrier life than I knew how to think about.
I made my peace with the place, but never went a day without feeling around for things that weren’t there, the way your tongue pushes into the holes where you’ve lost teeth. I don’t just mean cows, or apple trees, it runs deeper. Weather, for instance. Air, the way it smells from having live things breathing into it, grass and trees and I don’t know what, creatures of the soil. Sounds, I missed most of all. There was noise, but nothing behind it. I couldn’t get used to the blankness where there should have been bird gossip morning and evening, crickets at night, the buzz saw of cicadas in August. A rooster always sounding off somewhere, even dead in the middle of Jonesville. It’s like the movie background music. Notice it or don’t, but if the volume goes out, the movie has no heart. I’d oftentimes have to stop and ask myself what season it was. I never realized what was holding me to my place on the planet of earth: that soundtrack. That, and leaf colors and what’s blooming in the roadside ditches this week, wild sweet peas or purple ironweed or goldenrod. And stars. A sky as dark as sleep, not this hazy pinkish business, I’m saying blind man’s black. For a lot of us, that’s medicine. Required for the daily reboot.
I understand this is meant to be a small price to pay for the many things you do get to have in a city. Employment. Better entertainments, probably, if you’re not living in a recovery house with a curfew. City buses, library and grocery stores in walking distance, check, check, check. Here’s another one: house keys. I’d never lived any place where people locked the front door at all times, whether inside of it or gone from it. Usually, we never even knew where the door key was. Chartrain did not believe this. We tried to explain, after the sixth or tenth time Viking or Gizmo or I left for work and forgot to lock up. He just thought we were idiots. He called us hillbillies and yokels and all the names, unfit to live in the real world. We knew Chartrain loved us. We’d all had turns at carrying him and helping with bathroom business, the legs being not the only part of him messed up down there. The names we could have called him back are not approved, so we didn’t. But never did get what he thought would happen to an unlocked house like ours, so plainly short on things to steal. We weren’t allowed drugs, couldn’t afford electronics, and our only jewelry was hardwired onto Chartrain. Regardless, we learned that much about living in the so-called real world. How to lock up a house.
I’ve tried in this telling, time and again, to pinpoint the moment where everything starts to fall apart. Everything, meaning me. But there’s also the opposite, where some little nut cracks open inside you and a tree starts to grow. Even harder to nail. Because that thing’s going to be growing a long time before you notice. Years maybe. Then one day you say, Huh, that little crack between my ears has turned into this whole damn tree of wonderful.
It had mainly fallen to Angus over the years to crack some of the harder nuts of Demon, due to her always being around and putting up with me. Also Mr. Armstrong, notorious serial-nutcracker of Jonesville Middle brains. But the one you’re never going to guess: Tommy. Going all the way back to woeful Tommy in the paper office pulling his hair, crushed by the news of us hill folk being the kicked dogs of America. Leading to the shocking demise of Stumpy Fiddles, the pencil thrust in challenge: Let’s see you do better. We were just a couple of time-hardened foster boys shooting the shit. What good could ever come of that? You wait.
Tommy was lonely at the paper office now, that much I knew, based on how much he was emailing. Still reading books, and emailing me about the books and ideas he got from the books, just like he used to tell me the entire plot of his latest Boxcar Children, down to the last detail I heard before conking off. Now he was all into the history of Appalachian everything. This Dog of America thing being a major sticking point, Tommy was not moving on. But we were good, like old times, discussing his girl Sophie, my new rehab pals, both of us in the same boat now as regards girlfriend action. Our Red Neck strip went on ice for a time. We got some grace from Pinkie, as long as we promised to come back eventually and finish the twelve-month agreement. This option was written into our contract by Annie. Evidently she saw my downfall coming.
As far as the books he wanted to discuss, I can’t even tell you what they were about. I honestly wished for a good Boxcar with a beginning and end, because these went nowhere. Theories. I told him about the hard and surprising knocks of city life, and he explained it all back to me in book words. He said up home we are land economy people, and city is money economy. I told him not everybody here has money, there are guys with a piece of cardboard for their prize possession, so pitiful you want to give them the shirt off your back. (Which Tommy would.) And he was like, Exactly. In your cities, money is the whole basis. Have it, or don’t have it, it’s still the one and only way to get what all you need: food, clothes, house, music, fun times.
Maybe that sounds like the normal to you. Up home, it’s different. I mean yes, you want money and a job, but there’s a hundred other things you do for getting by, especially older people and farmers with the crops, tomato gardens and such. Hunting and fishing, plus all the woman things, making quilts and clothes. Whether big or small, you’ve always got the place you’re living on. I’ve known people to raise a beef in the yard behind their rented trailer. I was getting the picture now on why June’s doom castle had freaked me out. Having some ground to stand on, that’s our whole basis. It’s the bags of summer squash and shelly beans everybody gives you from their gardens, and on from there. The porch rockers where the mammaws get together and knit baby clothes for the pregnant high school girls. Sandwiches the church ladies pack for the hungrier kids to take home on weekends. Honestly, I would call us the juice economy. Or I guess used to be, up until everybody started getting wrecked on the newer product. We did not save our juice, we would give it to each and all we meet, because we’re going to need some of that back before long, along with the free advice and power tools. Covered dishes for a funeral, porch music for a wedding, extra hands for getting the tobacco in. Just talking about it made me homesick for the life of unlocked doors that Chartrain called Not the Real World. You couldn’t see him sticking around one day in Lee County. We all want what we’re used to.
Tommy and I discussed this nonsense way too much, with all my emailing at the library involving some degree of shenanigans with a hot librarian named Lyra, more on her later. I expected nothing to come of it. Mostly, it was Tommy being aggravated. He pointed out how a lot of our land-people things we do for getting by, like farmer, fishing, hunting, making our own liquor, are the exact things that get turned into hateful jokes on us. He wasn’t wrong, cartoonwise that shit refuses to die. Straw hat, fishing pole, XXX jug. Kill Stumpy Fiddles, along will come Jiggle Billy on adult swim. But all I could say was, Tommy, you know and I know, neither way is really better. In the long run it’s all just hustle. So our hustle is different. So what?
And he said, I’m still figuring that part out.
62
Thanks to my orphan jackpot, I didn’t work full-time like most of my housemates. June had offered to help if I needed it, and she was keeping tabs on me. But I was well used to paying my own way. The monthly house fees came out of my social security account, and part-time at Walmart covered the rest. The entertainments of sober living are all those best things in life that are said to be free. Breathing, sleeping, enjoying your newly regularized bowels. Eating your own bad cooking. Bumming Camels and playing penny poker, listening to two Kentucky boys tell Tennessee jokes that you grew up telling as Kentucky jokes. Listening to hair-raising tales of the hood, in a language you wish had subtitles. I spent a lot of time at the library.
The main librarian at our branch was Lyra. Not your father’s Oldsmobile. She had cherry-red hair with short, straight bangs, and a full sleeve tattoo representing the book of Moby-Dick. Sinking schooner, curling waves, wrathful whale. She wore shorts, spiderweb tights and motorcycle boots in all weather. Deadpan flirt. I hadn’t been laid since Dori, not even once. It’s a level of death, knowing another body that well, that’s touched every part of yours, thinking about it now cold in the ground. Some days, that killed me. Others, I felt nothing. Sex was just a vague and troublesome part of the feverish life I’d put on the other side of a glass wall. The counselors warn you this may be the case, and advise against romantic involvements till you’re on solid ground with your recovery. Triple underlined, if you’re a young man with multiple mommy issues and a thing for hot-mess rescue cases that are doomed to suck you under. Lyra seemed pretty solid, but I knew me and involvements. I couldn’t poke a stick at that beast without getting swallowed alive. This one came to work with weed on her breath and seemed in every sense a party girl. I opted not to find out.
We found other ways to share. She liked books obviously and pointed quite a few my way, some that made me smarter, some just weird. She helped me study for my GED, which turned out to be a hell of a lot easier than being physically present to two more years of disgrace and overpriced drugs cut with sheep wormer. Which would have been my lot, as a fallen General. I think most of humankind would agree, the hard part of high school is the people.
Lyra’s secret love was computers. She set me up with email, and showed me how to use the library’s scanner to upload my drawings. Red Neck as mentioned had to sleep it off for six months, but as soon as I had two sticks to rub together in my brainbox, I got right back on the job. Tommy had what he needed at the paper office so we could trade sketches. He pitched story ideas, I drew them, he shaded and inked. With both operatives sober, our efficiency was first class. Pinkie wanted to renew us for another year.
With some sadness, we decided against. We were both moving on. Tommy finally met his girlfriend, and it was the real thing. Sophie was crazy about Tommy, and so was her mom’s family, that threw a big dinner for all the relatives to check him out. Tommy came back home, gave Pinkie two weeks’ notice, untangled himself from the McCobb utility space, and moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania. He and Sophie got married at the Polish-American Citizens Club, followed by a huge reception with a polka band. Get me a hankie, somebody, and I’m not kidding. Tommy had a family. Before I saw him next, he would be a father.
On my end, I’d outgrown superheroes, even the much-needed hillbilly kind. The Fleischer style of Red Neck was hemming me in, those bulbous eyes and noodle limbs felt babyish. I wanted to try something harder-core. Lyra was educating me, and not in the ways my idle mind had toyed with. After turning me on to the adult comics and graphic novels section of the library, she showed me what was going on in the world of online comics, which rocked my marbles. She walked me through building my own website. Mainly this involved me getting out of her way so she could click furiously at the keys while I lost myself in the dramatic oceanscape of her left arm. I could upload my drawings to the site, and in this fashion I started my enterprise. Like most of Mr. McCobb’s, it made no money whatsoever for the first year. Unlike him, I stuck to it. It was my own little universe, created under my alias, Demon Copperhead. I was far from the football field and Lee County lore now, and had gotten used to my mom’s name again. Most people called me Fields. But I had this whole other part I didn’t want to lose. My dad.
It started with my long-ago idea of Neckbones. With Tommy’s permission, I did some of our famous local histories through the eyes of skeletons. Knox Mine disaster, Natural Tunnel train wreck. I also messed around with the idea I’d had in my saddest days with Dori: The Incapables, a strip about a junkie couple trying to keep house. The guy was Crash and the girl was Bernie, two teenagers trying to raise themselves. They grilled hot dogs on their car engine while driving around to find their connect, and did household repairs with bongs and roach clips. To the best of my abilities, I made it sad and true to the laughable mess of addicted youth. Also bitter. In one of my strips, Crash is filling his pill-mill scrip and the pharmacy lady leans over to warn him, “This one’s strong, hon. The Purdue rep takes it so he can sleep nights.”
I’m not saying there was a market for any of this. But the days of the big village were just starting. If there’s a shoe out there for every foot, the lonely and oddball foot by means of the internet had a vastly improved chance of finding it. My weird cartoons got a little following that grew, and after a year I sold subscriptions. Not very many. Luckily, I wasn’t in it for the money. One thing I learned from Mr. Armstrong while striving heartily to remain uneducated: a good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it. It’s why guys like Chartrain wear their clothes too big and their teeth edged with gold, why Mr. Dick puts words on kites and sends them to the sun. It’s why I draw what I draw.
Angus stayed in touch. She followed my comics, which she liked, and sent updates from the Nashville front: college was hard, college kids were a bunch of spoiled brats, and everybody including professors made fun of her mountain accent. She was there on scholarship, and hadn’t understood she was going to be fraternizing with, as she put it, cake eaters and princes of capitalism. Good to see Angus holding on to her winning personality.
She told me what classes she liked, and what nonsense the rich sorority girls were up to, so needy of attention they would pretend it was too hot and take off their jewelry in class. And how certain skeezy teaching assistants were stealth-undressing those girls with their eyes. Nashville she liked, as a town. Dive bars, bookstores, amazing food from countries you’ve not even heard of. Both of us were in Tennessee theoretically, but a half-day’s drive and a couple universes apart. She said in Nashville you could see anybody famous on a given day, Brooks or Dunn, Carrie Underwood etc., because even if not living there, they’re hanging around town waiting to make their albums. She saw Dolly goddamn Parton one time in the grocery store buying head lettuce. I told her the celebrity I saw buying vegetables was Crazy Marv from the “At these prices you’ll know I’ve lost my marbles” used-car commercials.
With Tommy finally living his life, his emails petered out. You had to reckon Sophie was the one getting her ears full now, theorywise. Apart from meetings and my counselors doing their jobs, Angus was the only person anymore to ask what I was going through. How much did I still think about using, how did I keep it together. How’s that wild ride going, was I ready to trust it yet. I told her about the inspirations of black coffee and the deep black bottom I was terrified to hit again. And the pink pill I put under my tongue every morning to keep all the other ones out of there for the rest of my days, so far, so good. I confessed my secret itch to do a comics version of the AA Big Book. I told her about Viking, Gizmo, and Chartrain. On her end, she’d comment on somebody she studied with or partied with, this cat named Jacko she took a trip with over spring break. But no one name ever came to the fore. More often than not, she went home on her school vacations, sometimes going down to stay with Miss Betsy and Mr. Dick. That surprised me, her going back. I thought for sure in a place like Nashville with everybody working their angles hell for leather, Angus would find her people. But it didn’t seem so.
Maggot meanwhile was back in touch, finally ready to forgive me for my brief fit of high school popularity. He thought The Incapables was dead hilarious, and was always sending me ideas that were too third-grade or too adult-raunchy to use. No in-betweens with that guy. He and his mom both had jobs at PetSmart, of all places. He had a boyfriend he met at work. I said congratulations, was he one of those smash-faced bulldogs or what. He said no, skunk breath, he’s the reptiles manager. We were still Demon and Maggot.
My number-one fan though turned out to be Ms. Annie, that now wanted me to call her just Annie. Mr. Armstrong I was supposed to call Lewis. They both put a lot of fan raves on my site, which I could always tell were theirs even though under multiple fake names. They used words like “innovative” and “visionary,” dead giveaway this was teachers, not kids and junkies. Regardless Ms. Annie’s prediction, I was nothing but the lowest level of potato, but you’d think I was the most dazzling success they’d ever had as a student. Lewis was in big trouble with the school board as usual, so the honor you could say was dubious.
What changed everything was Tommy calling me up, out of the blue. The History of our People thing, he hadn’t let go. Maybe homesick. Or having trouble explaining us rednecks to his new family, as you do. Anyway, so excited on the phone he doesn’t start with hello. Demon! I know why we’re the dogshit of America, it’s a war, and it’s been going on the whole time, and nobody gets it, not even us. You have to do a graphic novel about it. This, at three motherfucking o’clock in the goddamn morning. I said I couldn’t wait to hear all about it tomorrow.
Oh, I did. He claimed he was on the right track as far as the two kinds of economy people, land versus money. But not city people against us personally. It’s the ones in charge, like government or what have you. They were always on the side of the money-earning people, and down on the land people, due to various factors Tommy mentioned, monetize this, international banking that. The main one I could understand was that money-earning ones pay taxes. Whereas you can’t collect shit on what people grow and eat on the spot, or the work they swap with their neighbors. That’s like a percent of blood from a turnip. So, the ones in charge started cooking it into everybody’s brains to look down on the land people, saying we are an earlier stage of human, like junior varsity or cavemen. Weird-shaped heads.
Tommy was watching TV these days, and seeing finally how this shit is everywhere you look. Dissing the country bumpkins, trying to bring us up to par, the long-termed war of trying to shame the land people into joining America. Meaning their version, city. TV being the slam book of all times, maybe everybody in the city was just going along with it, not really noticing the rudeness factors. Possibly to the extent of not getting why we are so fucking mad out here.
It took a lot of emails of Tommy telling me how far back it went, this offensive to wedge people off their own holy ground and turn them into wage labor. Before the redneck miner wars, the coal land grabs, the timber land grabs. Whiskey Rebellion: an actual war. George Washington marched the US Army on our people for refusing to pay tax on corn liquor. Which they weren’t even selling for money, mainly just making for neighborly entertainment. How do you get tax money out of moonshine? Answer: You and what army. It goes a ways to explaining people’s feelings about taxes and guns.
Tommy said the world was waiting for a graphic novel about the history of these wars. I told him the world could hold its horses then, because I didn’t have the foggiest idea how to do that. Then went to bed, woke up, and started drawing it. He fed me story lines like kindling on a fire. I wanted to call it Hillbilly Wars, but he said no, people would think the usual cornball nonsense, hill folk shooting each other. Plus he pointed out there were other land-type people in the boat with us. The Cherokees that got kicked off their land. All the other tribes, same. Black people after they were freed up, wanting their own farms but getting no end of grief for it, till they gave up and went to the city.
Surprisingly, Angus was all over this. I’d been trying to get her interested in comics for an age. Then in college she discovers graphic novels like she invented them. Always sending me the latest one she’s crazy about. Not your run-of-the-mill sci-fi and crime, this girl was into dark. Jewish mice in the Nazi concentration camps. Kids growing up in a funeral home. The Incapables, she called fierce. I’d been telling her this forever, adult comics are all over the map. But not a single one out there has us in it, she said. Not wrong.
I ended up calling it High Ground. The two-hundred-years war to keep body and soul together on our mountains. I started putting up chapters on my site as I finished them, earning a weird and intense fan club, part history professors, part good ol’ boys. Then a guy emailed to say his company published graphic novels and might be interested in mine, could I send him all the material I had. This guy was in New York. Did he seriously think I was handing over my goods?
I talked to Annie on the phone pretty regularly, but after this news she wanted to see me in person. A book deal, Christ on a bike, quote unquote. She would look at everything I had, and help me put together a proposal. She offered to come to Knoxville. At this point Annie is something like eight months pregnant, if I didn’t mention that. You turn your back, shit happens. The sensible thing was for me to go to her.
Technically there was no reason I couldn’t. In three and a half years as a sober living resident, month by month, I’d earned a life without curfew, driving my own wheels, weekends away. The house managers were actually dropping hints. Viking was back in Bell County now, and Gizmo was lining up his options. There was literally no end to the line of guys waiting to get in here. But I couldn’t imagine going anywhere. Especially back there.
Driving wasn’t the problem, I still had an active license, which the other guys in the house regarded as magical. They’d all DUI’ed out, many times over, and here’s me without even a moving violation. I tried to explain Lee County, where all the cops are your relatives or dope boys or both. I did not have the Impala. My last act before leaving Lee County was to talk Turp Trussell into giving me two hundred dollars for the car and any pills he could find in there. In less than a month he ran it through a guardrail on that stretch of 421 people call “the hateful section.” Turp was shockingly intact, the Impala, RIP. Getting this news was like hearing that a childhood dog had to be put down. But there would be other cars in my life. From a friend of Chartrain’s mom, I scored an abused but affordable rescue Chevy Beretta, robin’s-egg blue, to celebrate one year sober. A month or so after that, I got up the nerve to drive it downtown. A year is a long time away from the wheel. Straight into city driving, quite the plunge. I tried to keep my eyes open and channel June Peggot parallel parking outside the Atlanta Starbucks. I’m in awe of that maneuver to this day. Men have married women for less reason.
So I had a car. I had Annie’s invitation, and my freedom. Means, motive, and opportunity, as they say on CSI. Nothing holding me back now but sheer terror. It’s hard to explain how you can miss a place and want it with all your heart, and be utterly sure it will obliterate you the instant you touch down. I said this to the counselor I still saw every week, Dr. Andresen, that was part of the house arrangement along with water and utilities. As far from Miss Barks as they get. Older lady, gray sweaters buttoned to the top, black clog shoes, professional and educated and decently paid I assume. She was from Denmark, first name of Milka, and for all that, a very likable human. She’d talked me through a boatload of crap, and honestly it was less distracting to do this with a counselor that you couldn’t remotely imagine doing anything else with. Dr. Andresen weighed in on the side of me going to Lee County. Or at least examining my fears. I asked her, what part of obliterate do you not understand?
