Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

“Damon,” she said, and then nothing. It was utterly weird. She did not look so good. “I know,” I finally told her, starting to get it. “It’s okay.” She stared at me. “What’s okay?” “That Mom forgot my birthday.” Her blue eyes went big and round. “Oh my God. Damon. When’s your birthday?” “Today. But that’s fine, that you didn’t know. I’m used to it.” Miss Barks looked horrified and started crying. I mean, boo-hoo, grabbing Kleenexes out of the box next to the pictures of the attendance officers’ kids. Nose blowing, black makeup running off her eyes. This was batshit. “It’s really okay,” I told her. “I don’t even care. Okay?” She kept shaking her head, blowing her nose. “No, Damon, I’m sorry. It’s not okay. I’m so, so sorry. It’s your mom.” “What’s my mom?” “It’s bad news.” Of course this is the point where I just lose it, saying Goddamn it, I knew it, you don’t even have to tell me, she got drunk again or took pills and I won’t get to go home for Christmas because she is such a goddamn fucking fuckup! I’m dropping f-bombs on Miss Barks left and right and she’s putting out her hand saying No, no. That I really don’t know. Listen. Mom is dead. No way to that, just, no. I’ve got no more to say here, I’m getting up out of the chair to leave, like maybe I could go to the office and call Mom at work or I don’t know what, while Miss Barks keeps saying yes, she’s sorry but it’s true. She is so, so sorry. I told her I didn’t believe her, but if it was true, then what did she die of,...

Maybe life, or destiny, or Jesus if you really need to put somebody in charge of things, had finally flung down one too many rocks in Mom’s road and she called it a day. That’s option one. Or two, maybe she didn’t aim to die but miscalculated, to cap off her twenty-nine-year pileup of miscalculations, one of those of course being me. I could spend the rest of my life asking which it was, suicide or accident. No answer on that line. I’ll grant it did not look random, her clocking in as my mom and then out again on the same date. To hit the mark like that would take some looking at the calendar and getting stuff together, you would think. And that’s the thing, Mom was not a planner. Plus I can’t be sure she even remembered it was my birthday. Anybody that knew her would agree on that. But now they were all sure she’d mapped it out. The wake and funeral being throwdowns of shame for this girl that had gone and abandoned her child. Bring on the fake nose blows, the eye-rolling towards me and shutting up if I came close. The child mustn’t hear. Like I didn’t know whose fault this was. Mom had promised to stay clean as long as I was a good enough son to make it worth her while. Nobody was hiding that from me, I knew shit. I was eleven now. Everything about the funeral was wrong. First of all being in a church, which I guess is required, but church and Mom were not friends. This went back to her earliest foster home with a preacher that mixed Bible verses with thrashings and wors...

Some cousins came in from Norton for the funeral, and normally with a full house there would be yelling over TV channels and the last chicken wing, a certain amount of soft objects thrown around. But they were weirdly quiet. Eyeing me like I’d turned into a strange being that might break if you made any noise. Mrs. Peggot for her part kept feeding me and telling me how Mom loved me more than anything in this world, which was nice of her to say, even if I was thinking at the time: Not really. She loved her dope buzz more. I had roads to travel before I would know it’s not that simple, the dope versus the person you love. That a craving can ratchet itself up and up inside a body and mind, at the same time that body’s strength for tolerating its favorite drug goes down and down. That the longer you’ve gone hurting between fixes, the higher the odds that you’ll reach too hard for the stars next time. That first big rush of relief could be your last. In the long run, that’s how I’ve come to picture Mom at the end: reaching as hard as her little body would stretch, trying to touch the blue sky, reaching for some peace. And getting it. If the grown-up version of me could have one chance at walking backwards into this story, part of me wishes I could sit down on the back pew with that pissed-off kid in his overly tight church clothes and Darkhawk attitude, and tell him: You think you’re giant but you are such a small speck in the screwed-up world. This is not about you. But I woul...

The people in the church looked like strangers. Some or most I’m sure I’d met before, but I wasn’t seeing faces, just the rock-hard hearts. All of them thinking Mom brought this on herself, and was getting the last ride she deserved in that cheap white casket. A mean side to people comes out at such times, where their only concern is what did the misfortunate person do to put themselves in their sorry fix. They’re building a wall to keep out the bad luck. I watched them do it. If that’s all the better they could do for Mom, they were nothing at all to me. What I had felt at the Peggot house with the too-quiet cousins wasn’t wrong: I was a strange new being, turned overnight. Creaky liked to call us orphan boys, and I always felt proud inside for not actually being one. So that was me doing the same, building the wall with me still on the lucky side. Now I’d gone over to the side of pitiful, and you never saw a kid so wrecked. At the start of the service they did that song about Amazing God, and I felt exactly the opposite: I once could see but now I’m blind, was found but now I’m lost. The preacher and his sermon, the sin and the flesh, all that I won’t go into. I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about my little brother being in that casket with her. That part hadn’t dawned on me until I’d gone up to view her with Mrs. Peggot. She patted Mom on her dead hand and said, “Poor little Mama, you tried your best,” and that’s where it hit me: my brother was in that casket. I was ...

But she should have been buried with my dad. It looked like I’d lost all chances now for seeing that grave, wherever it was, and I’d be damned if I was ever coming back to Russell County to hang around dead Stoner kin, so that was that. I was in the same boat with Tommy. If I wanted to visit my parents, I would have to make little fake graves to leave behind me on my road to nowhere.

What’s an oxy, I’d asked. That November it was still a shiny new thing. OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance. The tree was shaken and yes, we did eat of the apple. The doctor that prescribed it to Louise Lamie, customer service manager at Walmart, told her this pill was safer than safe. Louise had his word on that. It would keep her on her feet for her whole evening shift, varicose veins and all, and if that wasn’t one of God’s miracles then you tell me what is. And if a coworker on Aisle 19 needs some of the same, whether she borrows them legit or maybe on the sly from out of your purse in the break room, what is a miracle that gets spread around, if not more miracle? The first to fall in any war are forgotten. No love gets lost over one person’s reckless mistake. Only after it’s a mountain of bodies bagged do we think to raise a flag and call the mistake by a different name, because one downfall times a thousand has got to mean something. It needs its own brand, some point to all the sacrifice. Mom was the unknown soldier. Walmart would have a new stock girl trained in time for the Christmas shoppers, to knock herself out with the in...

Stoner and I ran out of steam on our supervised visit halfway through lunch. He’d take a bite, chew, stare at the foil wrapper, repeat, like he’d found religion in a combo meal. I kept picking up my extra-large beverage cup and looking down its throat like whatever I’d lost might be in there. Rattling ice. Your basic two guys that would like to be not looking at each other. I’d never at any time had much to say to the man, but we did have the Demon improvement program to keep us entertained. It used to get him worked up in a pretty good lather. Not today. I kept looking over at Miss Barks, hoping she’d come bail us out, but she was reading a book. She’d made it clear Mom wanted this, Stoner and me patching it up. If you think a mother is a hard rock to run up against, try pushing back on a dead one. She and Stoner had gone to the counseling, and he’d agreed to starting over from the top, family of four and all that. But with two of the four now scratched from the lineup, heels were dragged. Miss Barks had badgered him into this visit. Now here we were, duty done. She was keeping her nose in her damn book.

I pictured Stoner walking backward to where he’d met Mom, which was in Walmart, on his way to sporting goods. He could rewind his life to that spot, turn down a different aisle, and start new. Find some other girlfriend to jump on the back of his Harley with her hair flying. Off they go. I had to quit this line of thinking for fear of what might happen, crying in front of people or a punch thrown at Stoner. He was getting a complete do-over, and I was stuck with the leftovers of him and Mom, like paper torn off a package. Here, now, nothing. Stoner took off his reflector sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. The funeral shirt and tie had gone back to whoever he borrowed them from, but the sunglasses indoors he seemed to be keeping as his new look. The grieving husband thing. Given the shaved head and leather jacket, though, the shades just leaned it all in more of the criminal direction. “She could of been real happy,” he said, out of nowhere. “Her and me. If things were different. Gal was a spitfire, all said and done.” Why I needed to hear my own mother called any name at all, by a guy that had mostly pissed on her flame, was a question. If things were different. The existence of me having screwed up his wonderful marriage: there it sat. Same pile of crap waiting to be stepped in. I looked over at Miss Barks again and was shocked to see her looking straight at me. I rolled my eyes towards the door like, Please? But she ratcheted her eyebrows together, that thing she did, meani...

Which was not a complete lie, Fast Forward was psyched about me and football and was letting me use his free weights, teaching me the body parts lingo some guys had: quads, triceps, lats. Those words did get the tiniest spark of attention from Stoner. For about ten seconds, before he went back to opening up the layers of his Quarter Pounder and separating out all the pickles. I decided to let Stoner make the next move. A boring game, since he didn’t seem to notice I’d stopped talking. He ran out of anything fascinating to eat, and was looking around like maybe somebody better had showed up. It was mostly just parents with kids eating their value meals in what you had to assume were happier situations.

I said nothing, Stoner said nothing. I turned up my Coke and drank it down. I needed more ice in me right then like a hole in the head. Now my whole chest hurt. A couple came in with a kid, one of those good-looking families you just want to believe in, like a commercial. The little guy was in a puffy jacket and boots and looked like a tiny moon man, walking on his toes. The mom had on a purple coat and tall boots, cheeks red from the cold, young looking. Like Mom whenever she first had me. The husband or boyfriend went to order and she squatted down on her boot heels to unzip the kid out of his coat, flicking her shiny hair over her shoulders, talking to this kid, smiling in his face like there was no place else she wanted to be. I wondered if Mom was ever that thrilled with me. She’d fought tooth and nail with her fosters about not giving up the baby, and ended up having to move out on her own, pregnant, broke, and boyfriendless as she was. She always said I was the first good thing that ever happened to her. And seemed that thrilled about baby number two, even if Stoner wasn’t. He was running his fingers around the inside of the paper sleeve that his fries came in, and licking the salt off his fingers. I could see little grains in his black beard. I wondered if he ever thought about the baby he was going to be the dad of, or if he’d forgotten it completely, as part of his total reset. At the funeral no mention was made about this being a two-in-one, meaning probably nob...

I folded the dead-meat mess of my lunch back into its foil, laying it to rest. Or on second thought, to save for later because I’d be starving in an hour. “So, report cards are coming next week and I’m looking good,” I said. “Possibly honor roll.” Even for a Hail Mary, this was dumb, Stoner giving no particular shit about school. Plus not true. But not totally false, either. I told him I’d busted my butt trying to make up a ton of work, due to missing a month of school. He looked up at me from his little salt project, with no exact expression. “October,” I said. “I was cutting tobacco.” “Huh,” he said. “So the foster parents don’t care if you lay out of school?” “Jesus fuck, Stoner.” He sat up like I’d kicked him, and looked all around for whatever Sunday school teachers might be present. “There’s no call for language.” I glared at him. “There’s no parents. It’s one old guy running a slave farm for homeless boys. You know where I’m living. Miss Barks told you about it, and so did Mom. What were you, unconscious? I hate it there.” “Fine, sorry.” He spread his hands. “Anyway, I won’t be there much longer because the work is pretty much done for now. He doesn’t keep boys on the farm through the winter months.” Stoner just nodded, like I was explaining how my sock drawer was full and I needed some place to stash my extras. Not at his place, was a good guess. I was wishing so hard for him to give a damn, and also for him to disappear from the planet of Earth. I wished both thos...

So I lied. On the last day of school, before the bus came for the Lee Lady Leaders Christmas party they give for the poor kids. Which is shaming in and of itself. Some of the kids at this thing are old enough to be boning each other, but still the Lady Leaders have one of their husbands coming out all fake-fat jolly in his cotton beard and we’re supposed be like, Yay, Santa! One of these situations in life where you suck it up and eat your turkey and gravy. I did wonder how we got picked. Did the Leader Ladies ask our teachers to name the three topmost skanks and food-stamp kids of each grade? Okay yes, there are the Gola Hams of this world, and the Houserman kids that all six turn up with lice every year, rain or shine. But most of us do a fair job of passing. Then comes the day they call your name over the intercom to go get on the Christmas party loser bus, lucky you. That’s what I was waiting on while we ran out the clock in homeroom. Me and Maggot were playing hangman. He asked where I would be on Christmas, did they do presents in fosters, and the story just rolled out. I said I’d be at the Salvation Army shelter or some church that takes in homeless. To be honest I had no idea, homeless church basement not likely. I just wanted that passed along to Maggot’s higher-ups. He was totally on board with me coming to Knoxville. Who was not was Mrs. Peggot. On the day we drove down there, I could tell something was changed. At Mom’s funeral she’d been as much family to me a...

Emmy Peggot, Christ Jesus. In the months since summer she’d gone full Disney channel. Neon windbreaker jacket, bouncy ponytail, boy-band posters taped up all over her room with their pretty hair and pouty faces, to the point where Mrs. Peggot said she didn’t feel right changing her clothes in there. Which confused Mr. Peg because of him thinking they were girls. The evening we got there, Aunt June was still at work, so Emmy met us in front of the building. Shocking new development: Emmy stays home by herself now. I couldn’t believe this girl, all hands-on-her-hips, telling Mr. Peg where to park his truck. Helping to carry up all our stuff in the elevator, saying “Make yourselves at home,” and “Mom is thrilled to death you all could come.” Aunt June now going by a new name, which was Mom. So that was Knoxville again, more surprises. On the drive in, we’d passed this park with people skating on solid ice, even though they’re having a warm snap. Sun blazing, people running around in track jackets and shorts. In any normal place, just try walking out on an iced-over pond on such a day: sorry friend, you’re dead. But in a city, the rules do not apply. It’s like everybody is bored of all the normal things, out looking for the weirder option. This extended to people doing things that ended them up in the ER, and Aunt June had had enough. She was moving back home. Big shock. We’d waited up for her to get home because Emmy said she had something to tell us. Did she ever. We sat at ...

Emmy would be moving back too. They’d finished up the paperwork and she was adopted, Aunt June said, so the secret was out. She put her elbow around Emmy’s neck and pulled her close, both of them just beaming, and damn if they didn’t look it. Like blood. I kept quiet, eating wings and getting my mind blown. To think life could turn around so. Being a dead person’s child, then in seventh grade start calling somebody Mom. It gave me the strangest feeling. I just kept reaching in the box and taking more without a please or thank-you, forgetting for that short while to feel like the person nobody wanted.

A murder was all over the news that Christmas, and Emmy was possessed. She’d park herself on the floor in front of the TV and wait for the latest. It was a whole family dead. Their neighbors got interviewed and said what neighbors always say on TV after a shocking crime, about the victim or murderer either one: totally unexpected, you never saw a nicer person. In other words, they’re paying zero attention to their neighbors. Not so where I come from, considering just for example how the Peggots had their eye out for me on numerous bad occasions of my life, starting day one. What tore Emmy up was this baby that survived the ordeal. The killers left him for dead along with the rest of the family, on the shoulder of a highway where they got carjacked in the worst way. The police found him crying in the arms of dead Mommy, next to shot-to-hell dead Daddy and dead big sister. Every night on TV they showed the same photo of this family, all smiles, matching outfits, taken obviously prior to the shit road trip. You could tell they were something over the top, religionwise, like Jehovah Witness. But that little blond baby. You’d think he was Emmy’s own. She’d asked Aunt June to find out what hospital had him so she could call about his condition. Answer: No ma’am, that was not happening, and Emmy needed to find something more appropriate to occupy her mind.

I’m going to say though, the news was bad all around, murders being only one aspect. From TV, I’d always thought people in cities have it made. Not true. The cold snap finally hit while we were there, and the news showed all these hard-luck cases trying to get in the library, bus station etc. To sleep. Like they didn’t have relatives. I mean, it sucks to barge in on people that don’t really want you. But you’ve not seen the like of these sad individuals with nobody to barge in on, and nothing to eat. Because where are you even going to steal an apple off a tree? In the city if you’re out of money you are screwed, no two ways about it. Giving rise to mayhem, such as carjackings.

After Aunt June put her foot down on the murder-baby talk, Emmy needed somebody else to talk to. She picked me. It started a couple of nights after we got there. All the shit I had to think about had turned me into not the greatest sleeper, so I was awake, flopped on the sofa cushions with Maggot sawing logs. He slept like a dead person, only louder. Emmy, being too grown up now for sleeping with boy cousins, was bunking with Aunt June, while Mr. and Mrs. Peggot shacked up in her room with the Backstreet Boys. Quiet as a cat, she slipped into the living room. Came and stood over me in the dark, little skinny thing in her white gown, like she’d crumple and leave dust on your fingers if you touched her. Where was Miss Salute-My-Shorts now? Was daytime Emmy a fake, I wondered, and this little moth-wing girl the real person? Was I supposed to say something? She sat down on the floor and started crying. Really quiet except for little gasps, like getting surprised over and over.

I can’t quit thinking about him. I know I should.” “It’s not your fault. You can’t really help what’s in your brain.” She turned around and looked at me. I sat up. “I know everybody says that. Clean out your juvenile little head and put something nice in there. I get that all the time, and I’m like, Seriously? Just spray around brain-Lysol and get over it? How’s that work?”

“Heck yes you are. I wouldn’t wish foster care on anybody.” “It’s really bad?” “So far, yeah. I hate it pretty much every minute of the day. It’s like a cross between prison and dodgeball. And there’s not enough food.” “Dodgeball, like whenever you play with older kids that want to laugh at you?” “Yeah. Hurt you, and then laugh at you.” She seemed to be thinking about this. I mean really turning it over. She whispered, “Do the kids get abused? I’ve heard that.” “My mom definitely had molester type shit done to her whenever she was little. In a supposedly Christian home. I just basically watch my back, night and day.” She blinked a couple of times. I was surprised how well I could see her in the dark. I knew I shouldn’t shock Emmy, given she was already upset. But she’d asked. Nobody ever did. I told her I was sure there were good fosters out there that are God’s angels, like everybody says. But I had yet to meet them because they didn’t take kids like me. “What do you mean, kids like you?” I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You were okay,” I said. “At times.” She smiled. “Yeah. After you saved me from the sharks.” She pulled up her knees and showed me the silver bracelet I gave her that day. She was wearing it around her ankle. Leave it to somebody like her, to think of something like that. I couldn’t believe she still had it. “It’s not like they were going to take you down. I never got why you were so scared.” “Because they’re evil creatures with dagger-like teeth? Why were you not?” “No reason. I’m just not. I like thinking about the ocean, and what all is living in there. It’s like my brain-Lysol. It calms me down or something.” “Seriously. Sharks calm you down.” I could see pieces of the everyday Emmy sneaking back into the conversation, but I didn’t mind. Maybe it meant this thing we were doing now, whatever it was, might not just go poof in the morning. “Not sharks specifically,” I said. “The whole being-underwater thing. I put myself there and float. Just, you know. Inside my skull movie.” “You have a skull movie? You could see yourself drowning. That’s relaxing.” “I don’t, though. That’s the one bad thing that for sure won’t ever happen to me.” “Because what? You took Junior Red Cross swimming?” I laughed. “No. To tell you the truth, I haven’t ever been swimming that much. In water that was deeper than like, an inch.” “And still you’re drown-proof, because?” I’d never told anybody the weird way I got born. But being awake in the dark with a girl was outside my normal. The whole world...

I was the person not invited at June’s house. That feeling hangs on you like a smell. I had put showers between myself and Creaky’s barn, but this is not something that washes off. You get used to it, not in the good way, to the extent of the entire world oftentimes feeling like a place where you weren’t invited. If you’ve been here, you know. If not, must be nice. June didn’t mind me though, or was good at being sweet whether she felt like it or not. Which they probably do teach you in nurse school. She read my mind, same as she had with going to the ocean place. Again she took us places I liked. The skateboard park, even though Maggot and Emmy weren’t into it because all we did was watch. But Jesus God. For kids with zero sidewalks in our lives, watching skateboarders on TV is just cartoons or sci-fi, you don’t buy in. But seeing them in real life? Shit. I about died of happiness. Like boys could fly. So that was June, seeing my little moments. Putting extra food on my plate at every meal. Not in the Lady Leaders way of “watch me being nice,” just on the quiet. I tried to use manners and not act like a person that’s been wanting seconds ever since around August. What I dreaded was Christmas morning. The Peggots had brought presents they piled under Aunt June’s tree, but weirdly nobody discussed them, no shaking or checking tags to see who got the biggest. Because of me, the kid not supposed to be there. Awkward. I planned on making myself scarce Christmas morning. I’d fa...

Mr. Peg got him started on deer hunting. Emmy asked if Hammerhead still came around or had moved away with his dad in the split-up. I said he was still with the stepmom Ruby, June’s sister, and Mr. Peg’s favorite. I didn’t bring up hunting, given Emmy’s bad-luck dad, plus not knowing where she stood with the whole city-person outlook on shooting Bambi, but I knew Hammer and Mr. Peg still hunted together. Many a time in the fall I’d see Hammer dressing a buck in their driveway. It would kill you how big and gentle he looked, drawing his long knife up the middle of the carcass, easing the gut and lungs to slither out in a pile. Like he’s being sweet to that deer, even though dead.

I told her I was basically one too, raised by them as far as the more solid parts. I admitted that for the longest time I’d thought Mrs. Peggot was my real mammaw. Emmy put her eyes square on mine. It scared me almost, getting looked at like that. “You’re wishing she really was, aren’t you?” she said. “Then they’d have to adopt you.” She kissed her finger and touched my cheek. “They probably wouldn’t, though.” I wanted her to say I was wrong, but she rolled on her back, looking at the ceiling. I watched her thinking it over. I’d never had that close a look at another person’s face before. She had brown-sugar freckles and a little silver line through one eyebrow where she said a cat scratched her. The tiniest furrow plowed through her eyebrow hairs, never to grow back.

“Having both of us was too much,” she said. “Think about it, he’s a newborn and I’m a toddler. Poor Mammaw. She really needed Aunt June to take over with me. I never gave it much thought till lately, but I mean, who does that? Take over raising your dead brother’s two-year-old, while you’re still in nursing school.”

Emmy’s bad-news real mom still would turn up at the Peggots’ every so often, threatening to go to court and get Emmy back. She was in no position now as an IV drug user, homeless etc., but that didn’t stop her from showing up in the middle of the night, banging on the door, raising Cain to see her kid. The Peggots kept quiet about Emmy being in Tennessee so she wouldn’t go after June and try to steal Emmy back. That’s why the big secret. But Skank Mom had finally agreed to sign Emmy over for good. Amen and hallelujah on Aunt June finally winning the mom war. I asked how that felt, given away by her real mother. Emmy said she had all the mom a person could want. She didn’t care if she ever laid eyes on the other one again.

The upshot of all this talking was me getting pretty much in love with Emmy. She was beautiful and like a grown person. In the daytime we didn’t let on. Hanging out with her and Maggot, I tried to be normal, but sometimes said things to impress her. Like how the other foster boys thought my cartoons were good. And the football hero Fast Forward that was my friend. She just said something polite, but Maggot chimed in on how awesome this guy was. I’d forgotten Maggot knew him from that time they came to the farm. This got Emmy interested to the extent of saying she’d like to meet this famous Fast Forward. So we played it cool, and I wondered if the other was real or just some after-hours game she was playing. But then she would let me sit on the couch with her while she was reading, and under the blanket her feet would touch my feet. She’d look up from her book and smile at me and, oh man. Utterly wrecked. Back in the summer she’d announced the one time about us getting married, which was kid shit. Like somebody giving you Monopoly money and saying “Here, go buy a house.” But now all I had to do was think of Emmy, her face or her toothpaste smell, and it would give me these waking-up feelings as regards the guy downstairs. Not kid shit. At night we’d be talking and I’d get obsessed on kissing her, even though not having the nerve. It was her finally that did it. She asked if I wanted to go to second base, which of course I did, except for not knowing exactly where that base ...

But Aunt June got me something amazing: a set of colored markers for making comics, fine-tip on one end and thick on the other, in more colors than you’d think there would be. Eight entire flesh tones. Also a real book for making comic strips, with the panel dividers printed in. I couldn’t believe my eyes. After Mom died I’d not wanted to draw any more at all, but now I couldn’t wait to run off someplace and get started. I would make one of Aunt June as Wonder Nurse, putting a new heart back inside a boy that had his own torn out.

Crying was the sickest part, in how shamefaced I felt. Even at Mom’s funeral I never shed a tear, because of hating everybody. Hard as a rock. But with Aunt June being so nice and Emmy in love with me, I’d let myself get soft. Thinking the Peggots were not like everybody else, but special, as regards the Jesus thing of loving your neighbor as much as you love yourself. For fuck’s sake, hadn’t I learned that lesson? Sunday school stories are just another type of superhero comic. Counting on Jesus to save the day is no more real than sending up the Batman signal.

I licked some more stamps for his enterprise. This one had to do with blue-green algae pills that supposedly could cure anything but a broken heart. (Which is what Mr. Peg always said about duct tape.)

Mr. McCobb found me a job at Golly’s Market, which is the little gas-and-go out on Route 58. The sign says “Mary’s Mini Mart” left over from ages ago, before Mary McClary got her divorce and lit out to Nashville to try to make it as a singer. Another story. My first day, Mr. McCobb drove me over and introduced me to the owner, Mr. Golly that was from overseas, with an accent. I was to ride the school bus out there every day after school, and Mrs. McCobb would pick me up. The place had snacks and food so I could eat my dinner there free as part of my pay, which turned out to be the one good thing about working at Golly’s Market. Mr. Golly said it was a shame how much he always had to throw out in the way of hot dogs and such that he’d put under the heat lamp for the day. So I got to be his trash can, yes! Other than food and gas, Golly’s sold the usual things you’d want to pick up on your way home: Hostess cakes, beer, Tylenol, Nicorette gum, etc. The more expensive items like medicine and cigarettes he kept on a shelf behind the checkout. Mr. McCobb chatted with Mr. Golly, and I got nervous. Having no idea how to work a cash register, plus was I going to sell cigarettes and beer? Would I go to prison? Reaching the cigarette cartons was not the problem, I was some taller than Mr. Golly, that looked like a little brown tree somebody forgot to water. People were always mistaking me for older. Probably he didn’t know I was eleven, and maybe Mr. McCobb was banking on that. But ...

Not that there is anything wrong on principles with a trash pile. Like any boy, I liked them. Maggot and I always begged to go with Mr. Peg whenever he took the week’s garbage to the county landfill. There was so much to see. People carting off more than they came with in the way of furniture, appliances that might have potential, etc. Actual fact: you could make an entire second world out of what people throw away. The landfill is where I figured out one of my main philosophies, that everybody alive is basically in the process of trading out their old stuff for different stuff, day in day out. The idea though is to be moving up the ladder, not down, like the McCobbs were. Landfill, pawnshops, Walmart. All places for moving things one way or the other along that road. I had this nonsense idea of a comic strip with no superhero, just some item of earthly goods like a chair that gets passed downhill from one family to another until it’s a chair-shaped dirt pile. I would call it Earthly Bads. I’d always thought every good American took his garbage to a landfill every week, but it turns out if you live in town, like the McCobbs did, there are people that come and take it for you. I was amazed. An entire truck existing for the sole purpose of garbage. Men working their way down the street, emptying people’s cans. A town thing. Out in the county, obviously we’re on our own. Mom and I toted ours next door for Mr. Peggot to haul away. At Creaky Farm we burned it, or if it wasn’t b...

The boss guy wasn’t there right now, and his name was Ghose. Gose? I asked. No. Goes? No. “Whoooo,” Swap-Out said, flapping his hands, scary. “Ghose like a dead guy!” Ghost. That was my new boss. We watched his truck pull in around front, but I couldn’t see him go into the store, nor from there into the back room that Mr. Golly had told me was the headquarters of the recycling business, which I was not ever to go into because it was private. I didn’t get a look at my boss till he came out the back door and gave me surprise number three. Ghost was the pale, white-haired guy with the crazy ink, Stoner’s friend that I’d met one time in Pro’s Pizza. With the other one, Hell Reeker, that had come over and teased Stoner about foxes whelping their pups, Mr. Grin and Bear it, all that. Ghost was Extra Eye.

Rinsing bottles and squashing cans was Swap-Out’s department, and Ghost put me on the jobs that took any brains whatsoever. He said finally the damn gook had hired him some help that was playing with a full deck. Evidently the kid he’d just fired, Rotten Potatoes, was missing the cards in his deck that tell you not to eat food that’s been in the trash too long before you find it. One of the first jobs Ghost showed me was how to drain the acid out of old car batteries. You hammer a nail through the bottom to puncture it. Most batteries have several compartments so you figure them out, punch a hole in each one, then turn it up and drain out the acid into something glass, like a jar. (Not plastic. Never plastic. Rotten Potatoes evidently was missing those cards too.) Ghost collected up all the acid into metal cans where he wrote “acid” on them, lined up alongside of his paint thinner cans outside the back door of his HQ, by the propane tanks. He said he didn’t want all that shit inside stinking up the place. Which is a joke because he’d come out of there stinking to high heaven, sometimes like rotten eggs, usually cat piss. He had window fans running all hours, even on cold days, and the cat piss smell coming out of there hung over the place worse than the stink of garbage. What Ghost was up to, anybody’s guess. He’d have frying pans and bottles for us to hose out, and bottles he said to put straight directly in the landfill pile, do not mess around. We’re talking things that...

There weren’t any houses around that area. People stopped on their way to someplace better. Sometimes it would be a mom with kids, obviously unfamiliar with the layout and only there to get somebody into the bathroom ASAP. They’d buy a Coke or some little thing for a cover story, but you knew. Then there were the respectable types that would pay Mr. Golly their ten bucks, drive around back to drop off their month’s worth of trash bags, maybe purchase a chili dog to celebrate. Other than that, it was a rough crowd. Some, and I’m saying more than one, did not use trash bags. The back of their pickup was the trash can, and after it got piled high, they’d drive over, pay their fee, open the tailgate, and rake it out. I’m discussing bathroom trash and all. You tried your best not to picture the homestead. Worst were the regulars with no involvement in the trash enterprise. They’d get their beer and beans up front, then slip around back to do their business with Ghost. I was getting the picture. Golly’s Market catered to lowlifes, and I was working there. So I was a lowlife too. Some are going to say I was never anything better. Not even born in a hospital to a mom fixing to take me back to her mobile home, but born in the mobile home, so that’s like the Eagle Scout of trailer trash. Kids like me with our teen moms putting whiskey on our gums to shut us up, Coke in the baby bottle, we’re the pity of the world. But I started out as decent as any kid, saying please and thank you, ...

But in fifth, we weren’t children. Loser boys got fists. Girls had their girl shit of no interest to me, like their slam books that got passed around. Skinny spiral notebooks like you’d have for a subject, but with SLAM BOOK and PROPERTY OF on the front to let you know it’s not for a teacher’s eyes. Some girl would poke me in the back with one, to pass on up the row. These were the enterprise of the popular girls with plucked-to-the-bone eyebrows and hair parted in the shape of a lightning bolt. Look, you’re sitting behind some girl all day looking down on her head, you notice the hair. The notebooks though, I didn’t, even after they were getting pushed at me. Even with girls writing in them and looking at me like something’s dead hilarious. Then came the day of Demon’s education. Everybody was set for recess, unless on detention which I usually was, for fidgeting or drawing on my desk. We had the one-piece type with the tiny chair attached, pretty much hell for a kid my size, and the wooden desk tops all gray around the edges with the ground-in dirt of our forefathers. Our parents and grandparents used these desks, and had some of the same teachers, including the mummified individual Miss Huddles we had in fifth. Miss Huddles famously had leathered my mom in front of the entire school for faking a striptease in Christian Music Assembly. (Mom and God, it just never worked.) To look at the old bat now, though, a shrunken head in a dress, I had no fear. These desks had so ma...

It happened after one of these shit-most days of school, and more of the same on my shitpile job, that I kind of blacked out and threw some punches at the dash of Mrs. McCobb’s car. Scaring the living piss out of her. All she’d done was ask if I had a nice day. I don’t know why that set me off, but I landed my punches and she got quiet. Finally she said she was worried about me. I said maybe she should worry a hell of a lot more. It was dark, and I couldn’t see her face, which helped. “You’re so scared of Haillie and Brayley getting tormented at school,” I said. She said “Yeah.” Sounding scared. Like she knew what was up. “Well, take a look at me.” I let her have it then, told her about the slam books, the getting shunned, all of it. Kids pretending to sniff around me, asking did somebody shit himself. “And guess what,” I said. “They know who I’m living with. It’s getting around.” I felt her going stiff over there behind the wheel, the McCobb family name going down. On Sunday she took me to Walmart. I got new jeans, T-shirts, belt, shoes, and also a new toothbrush, which I hadn’t had in a while, ever since Brayley launched mine into the toilet on accident. Those kids loved to goof around in the downstairs bathroom. I thanked her, and she told me not to tell Mr. McCobb we’d spent almost everything I earned at Golly’s that month. But at school the next day in my new clothes I still felt horrible. Not even proud. Embarrassed honestly, because nothing would change. Now they’d ...

It’s hard to believe I could look back on Creaky Farm in any wishful way, but I missed having Fast Forward on my team. Fast Man that had made me feel hard and shiny as a diamond. I knew there was a dark side, he let others take his lickings, but that was him teaching us: a person can keep his head up and rise high, even if he wasn’t lucky enough to get born up there. In all the years of no adult ever taking my side, he showed me it was possible to work them at their own game and win. That summer I started getting the faintest red shine of hair on my upper lip, one more embarrassment. If I still lived with Fast Forward, he could have taught me how to shave. I’d have one person to talk to that actually knew what a kid like me was dealing with. He would have told me straight up whether it was true, what I’d started to think. That I was working for a meth lab.

Ghost was not a guy you wanted mad at you. That tattoo eye staring at you from his throat, Jesus. I never forgot how I’d drawn him in my mind that first time at Pro’s Pizza, as supervillain Extra Eye that could see your thoughts. Now I was like, What if that’s real? What if he can even see this thought? I didn’t discuss any of this with Miss Barks due to her not knowing about my job at Golly’s Market. After I first started working there, I’d asked enough questions to figure out this was a what-DSS-doesn’t-know-won’t-hurt-me type situation. But now it was just me and Miss Barks in the car having ourselves the biggest time, and I quit caring about Ghost. I was ready for a good day. We took the little winding roads through coal camps where the big blue coal chutes come down the mountainside over the treetops, like waterslides for giants. All the way out to those high white cliffs that run along the Kentucky line. It was one of your April days where you can smell the plowed fields and see the mountains greening up, like it’s the world saying, Hey everybody, I’m not dead yet! We put on the radio and sang all the ones we knew. And I mean loud, windows rolled down, the two of us singing “You’re Still the One” like we’re wanting Shania to hear us over in Nashville.

Two months had got me some T-shirts, the cheapest brand tennis shoes they carried at Walmart, and if anything more, I wouldn’t know. The McCobbs were keeping my money for so-called safety reasons. Like Fast Forward did at Creaky’s. Miss Barks said I was looking handsome in my new haircut, so technically that’s two nice things said to me that year. But then she erased it by trying to take credit. Didn’t she say I just needed to speak up? Ask the McCobbs for anything I needed, ask and ye shall receive, the usual nonsense. Smash your fist into somebody’s dashboard and ye shall get noticed, is more like it. But I didn’t want to kill the mood, so I let her think what she thought.

That’s where Miss Barks told me her news. Big shock. I had money I never knew about. After Mom died, the DSS filed the paperwork for me to get social security checks, which is the bright side of being an orphan: they pay you for it. Who knew? It wasn’t a ton, some percentage of what Mom was making at Walmart, which is an insult according to Mr. McCobb. But it was still a check, and I would get it every month till I turned eighteen. Miss Barks said they’d set up for it to go into an account that I could use after I graduated from foster care. She said this tended to work out better than putting the foster parents in charge of the account. And I said something to the effect of, Lady, you got that one fucking right. She wanted me to promise I would use the money to go to college. Like, away someplace, not auto mechanics at Mountain Empire. Which meant promising to do better with my grades. You don’t get to college without passing elementary school, she said, like this was new information. I told her at Elk Knob you get promoted to middle school just for showing up, especially a kid of my size. They need us in the higher grades for the sports teams. She said that was not the attitude she was looking for. I tried changing the subject, but she was real stuck on that point: Just showing up doesn’t get you anywhere in life. It was not too late to turn myself around, etc. I asked if it was required for me to use this money account for college, and she said technically no. But I wou...

started worrying about Mrs. McCobb driving out to pick me up at Golly’s, me not being there, her being mad over the wasted gas, Mr. McCobb being mad I’d skipped out. And so on. I told Miss Barks I needed to be back before eight o’clock to have plenty of time for homework. There’s always some lie that will make everybody happy, if you work at it. She was all smiles about the homework, and pretty like always. Pink sweater, tight slacks, that angel hair. I wasn’t cheating on Emmy in thinking Miss Barks was hot, because (1) Emmy was popular, so if she ever saw me again would break up with me instantly, and (2) Miss Barks was a different category from girlfriend, i.e. legal guardian.

Towards the end of dinner she told me she had more news. Not good, this time. Terrible in fact, but it took me a minute to work that out. She was so excited she was bouncing in her chair. She’d saved up enough to take summer classes full time and finish out her teacher degree. In the fall she would start her student teaching. After that, pretty much guaranteed of getting a job as an elementary or kindergarten teacher, and finally would start making some decent money. Miss Barks was quitting her job at DSS so she could go have her wonderful new career. Quitting me. And all her other precious orphans, screw us. For the money. She dropped me back at the McCobbs’ before eight, like I’d asked, so they wouldn’t drive out to get me from Golly’s. I came in the kitchen and told Mr. McCobb some lie about how I’d had an appointment with my caseworker and she’d cleared it with Mr. Golly so I’d get paid anyway. Then I went to my stinking dog room and punched the washing machine. Wiped off the smear of blood with somebody’s black T-shirt that was in the pile, shut off the lights, and planted myself face down on my motherfucking child-size air-mattress bed. On second thought, I got back up and rummaged around the shelf over the washer, got the baby monitor, and put it in the mop bucket. I didn’t need anybody watching me cry.

Maybe some kids are told from an early age what’s what, as regards money. But most are ignorant I would think, and that was me too, till I was eleven and started pulling down a paycheck. Before that, my thinking was vague. If you had a job, you had money. If you didn’t have a job, you had your food stamps or EBT card and basically, not money. I didn’t really get that there were gray areas. Okay, I did know about rich people, that some few made the big bucks from being movie stars, pro football, the president, etc. These types of people living one hundred percent not in Lee County. Except for this one NASCAR driver that supposedly bought a farm near Ewing in the seventies. Also, the coal miners back in union times. Thirty or forty bucks an hour, old men still talked like those were the days Jesus walked among us throwing around hundred-dollar bills. But for the most part I thought a paycheck was a paycheck, whether from Walmart or Food Country or Lee Bank and Trust or Hair Affair or the Eastman plant over in Kingsport. Obviously, you live and learn. Now I know, if you finish high school that’s supposed to be a step up, moneywise. College is another step up, but with a major downside: for the type of job college gets you, most likely you’ll end up having to live far away from home, and in a city. My point though is the totem pole of paychecks, with school as one thing that gets you up there, and another one being where you live, country or city. But the main thing is, whatev...

Either way, it no longer pertained. Now I watched other kids raise their hands, get their answers right, and good for them. Topic sentences, Appomattox Courthouse, life cycle of a plant, what is all that? If all your brain wants to know is, where’s the door out of here and wherever it goes, will you still be starving. The teachers, principal, and Miss Barks all gave me the same lecture on how I was not working hard or living up to my potential. I had no fight with them. You get to a point of not giving a damn over people thinking you’re worthless. Mainly by getting there first yourself. I wanted to tell them: This right here that you’re looking at is my potential. What the fuck would you call it? Do you seriously think this is the person I wanted to end up living inside of? But hard work? Let me tell you what that is: trying to get through every day without the gangling ugly menace of you being stared at, shamed by a teacher, laughed at by girls, or sucker punched. Again, if you’ve been there, you know. If you have to guess, you might not even be close. All these people had to keep on asking and asking: Why was I flunking out? What could I do but look at the wall and say nothing, just sorry. I was learning to love the brutal burnt screw-you taste of that word I’d been given to eat forever. Sorry.

Here was our summer: filling that roll-off to the max, be it a month, six weeks, doesn’t matter. Because it goes away, the empty comes back, and you’re back where you started. Here was the real world where nobody and nothing gets better. Biding my time till I turned sixteen and could drop out of school, with a whole life ahead for applying myself to full-time shit work. Maybe I was Ghost’s trainee, someday to graduate from battery-acid drainage assistant to the show he had going inside.

Meanwhile the McCobbs were in some serious shit. Their car got repossessed. It was a late-model Dodge Spirit, leased, sky blue, none of that I guess being the point. Mr. McCobb couldn’t get to work anymore, so he lost his job, was the point. You tell me why it makes sense for guys wanting money from you to come and take your car, so you can’t earn another dime. That’s the grown-up version I guess of teachers yelling at you for hating school. First the McCobbs didn’t know what the hell they were going to do, other than possibly be homeless, because of already being behind on their rent. Next they fired up a full-time marital spat between (1) starting a couple of new in-home businesses with Mr. McCobb doing telephone surveys and Mrs. McCobb doing dog grooming, or (2) taking the kids and going to Ohio to live with Mrs. McCobb’s parents, dog grooming my ass. I myself was banking on Mr. McCobb winning, because he definitely wore the pants. It mattered to me which way this went, obviously. Since I would not be moving my personal ass to any Ohio.

I wasn’t crazy about the hours he kept, or being alone in a Chevy pickup with Ghost and the thoughts in my head. Christ. But I got to work most days, other than the weeks he’d disappear on some kind of bender. I had to stay longer in the evenings, due to Ghost doing a lot of his business in the after-dark hours. But I got used to it. Swap-Out had a reliable source of weed and a generous heart. Definitely it helped the time go faster. Or maybe slower actually, but you didn’t care. Once in a great while he’d show up with a Glock 19 that belonged to one of the guys he lived with, and we’d set up a row of bottles on the edge of the roll-off for target practice. It was years since Mr. Peg had showed me how to shoot, so I wasn’t that great, but my aim got better over time. Swap-Out’s aim was scary as hell, permanently, improvement being not a Swap-Out thing. We kept an eye out for the aerosols, which over and above the huffing potentials made excellent targets. Big bang, for real. But we could get ourselves just as thoroughly entertained over some childish shit like stomping the bubbles of bubble wrap. Also you wouldn’t believe the number of hot dogs two deeply baked boys could put away. Mr. Golly had to be making extras on purpose.

In July the landlord threatened to kick them out unless they paid their back rent. Which they did, by dipping into the cash I’d earned at Golly’s. No confusion now about me chipping in. Did they plan to tell me? No. I found out from Haillie that heard her parents discuss it, taking my cash out of the drawer where they kept it. I went postal. The poor kid pissing herself, to see the level of catfuck she’d let out of the bag. I stormed upstairs, yelling how I was going to turn them in to DSS. How would I do that, without going into various not-legal things I’d done to make this money they’d taken? No idea, I just went with my gut. Some items in their bedroom got busted, including a lamp. The babies went off like a car alarm. Not a good scene. I took what was left of my cash, put it in a peanut butter jar, and said if they wanted my help they could fucking well ask. What else were they going to use, though? Honestly, once I got over my Hulk moment I was more worried than mad. Without any car they were in pitiful shape. Sending their grocery list for me to bring home from Golly’s, then freaking out over paying double for a can of beans, etc. But they couldn’t very well walk the five miles to Food Lion. Mr. McCobb was getting whittled down to size. He still talked down to the wife and kids, but me he started treating like one of his buds. He was drinking a good deal of beer in the afternoons now, so I’d get home of an evening to find him in the kitchen wanting to share his tale...

They were looking for somebody else to take the hardship cases. “Our kids that resist permanent placement,” was how she put it, and of course I thought of Tommy. He would not resist but throw his arms around a permanent placement. Never to draw a skeleton again.

The other thing she kept asking about was relatives. Did I have any. Had we not been through this? Lady, look it up. Mom: orphan, foster care, no living relatives she knew of, plus dead. Dad: skip straight to the dead part. Also not existent, according to my birth certificate. But he did exist. Mom was very clear on that. Her story about the day I was born and some old biddy coming for me, okay, questionable. But the older I got, the more people said I looked like him. That I came from somewhere, in other words. From somebody.