Page 104 of Demon Copperhead

I’m not sure how many days I lived in my car before Maggot tracked me down.

He was back living with Mrs. Peggot now.

The kid had been bounced around in his time, but never homeless, because blood is thicker than water.

I ought to know, born in the bag of water.

No relatives, homeless, but at least I would never drown, yay! The gospel according to Mrs. Peggot.

She’d turned me out once, and I had my pride.

I was not going back there begging. But now she actually wanted me to move in, and it took some convincing.

Maybe she was hoping for the good influence on Maggot after all, or for somebody to fix busted hinges and everything else that was going undone with Mr. Peg sick for so long, then dead.

Maggot’s talents ran in other directions.

I didn’t end up fixing much. There’s not a lot to say about those days I was there, mainly because I don’t remember them. Maggot and I went on a bender that obliterated the weekend and ran to the end of the month. Then we thought, who needs May?

All previous statements as regards junkies not really trying to get high, just trying not to get dopesick?

Scratch that. After Dori was gone, I was chasing the big zero.

With fair success. My job at the co-op finally joined the tits-up work history of Demon.

And poor Mrs. Peggot, I did nothing around that house except to surface on rare occasions to drive her to the grocery.

We’d have starved otherwise, since she didn’t drive, and Maggot was useless on Mr. Peg’s truck.

One more strike on his blighted manhood: Maggot never learned to drive a manual.

I had the vague idea that if money became essential, tobacco season was around the corner and I’d make some then.

People were hard up for labor. With most every kid in the county hammered, what few farmers were still on their land were having to scout high and low to get decent hands for the hard work.

Mainly these were coming to us across the Mexican border.

Along with all the heroin. No connection, as far as I know.

The one thing I was still holding together, by a thread, was Red Neck.

I couldn’t let Tommy crash and burn, he of all people deserved better.

He was more than pulling his weight at this point.

In the beginning we’d brainstormed a lot of ideas, and now he was sketching those into panel strips.

Skeleton versions. At least once a week I’d get myself sober enough to go over and put flesh on the bones.

My style was required by the fan base. But Tommy’s rough drafts had their own weirdly terrifying vision, more truthful than any we ever put in the paper.

Our people, our mountains, all our worries: a universe of ghosts.

I called his drawings Neckbones, and asked if I could save them.

Tommy said this was a dark inclination on my part, but he let me.

The day everything happened, the hitting bottom as it’s known in our circles, came in June.

One of those hot, rainy days where you feel like you’re breathing your own breath out of a paper bag.

But weather was not the worst of that day’s evils.

I’m pointing my finger now at Rose Dartell.

Running into her that day would put the nail in the coffin.

I’d give anything to have stayed home. If wishes were horses, like they say. We’d all have different shit to shovel.

Maggot and I were at the famous Woodway crack house where Swap-Out was still living with some other guys.

People came and went through there like barn cats, you didn’t always bother with names.

Maggot needed to get hooked up. For my own part I was okay, I’d scored a pity bottle of oxy off of Thelma at the funeral and had multiplied the investment.

Pain clinic, first Friday of the month: loaves and fishes.

But I drove Maggot over to Woodway and made the effort to be social.

Had a chat with Swap-Out, asked if he still had any doings with Mr. Golly, which he didn’t, too bad.

That man had a place in my heart. Then Maggot and the other crackheads got to the part of ring-around-the-rosy where they all fall down, and I went and sat outside, deeply cooked and making the best of it.

Breathing the halitosis of summer, basking in the sick glory of that porch.

The rotten mattress, the dresser with no drawers, the refrigerator on its side with its mouth hanging open, harboring a tiny waiting room on top of four black plastic chairs joined together.

I remembered rescuing Martha from this very porch, a lifetime ago, and wondered what became of her.

June would be getting her straightened out, for sure.

Maggot and I weren’t crossing our path with June if we could help it.

Half the porch was taken up by stacked firewood that had been there so long, it was covered with a shredded sheet of white dusty cobwebs.

I watched a mother rat run in and out of the logs, carrying her babies by their napes from one part of the stack to another.

She’d appear with them one by one, all business, like she’s on the clock here, relocating her office space.

How she decided one part of this wreck was less dangerous than any other, no guess.

A dirt-brown Chevy pickup came down the road, the first vehicle of any kind in over an hour, and surprised me by pulling up to the house. More surprise, Rose Dartell flung herself out of it, slamming the door and moving fast, carrying a pizza box.

“Damn, Rose. Did you bake me a pie?”

She pulled up hard to a stop. Her hair was different some way, less frizzed out, but the face was unchanged. That scarred-up sneer. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same.”

“I work for Pro’s. That and the phone company, for a couple of years now.”

“Pro’s Pizza delivers all the way out here to fucking Woodway?”

“Regular customers. They pay cash. Any more questions, or can I do my job?”

“Knock yourself out.”

I wondered if they’d be paying her more than cash in there.

She stayed long enough. Mr. Pro probably had no idea where all she was driving on his dime.

I couldn’t help thinking of our last meetup, the dark highway pullout where Rose gave me the news of Emmy like a drink she’d spit in.

I was just about to go in and advise Maggot that it was time to say grace and blow this dump, but she came back out.

Sat down on the edge of the woodpile. Mother rat, look out.

“Did Fast Forward call you yet?” She mumbled it, lighting a cigarette.

“Why would he do that?”

She shrugged, wiped her runny nose with the back of her wrist. They’d tipped her in there, all right. “I don’t know why he wouldn’t. He’s always needing something from somebody. He’s back in Lee County, maybe you didn’t know.”

“Oh yeah? Whereabouts is he living?”

“This big old house belonging to some lady. They call it Spurlock around there, but it’s not really a town, more or less by Duffield. It’s a hard place to find.”

Rose flicked at something on the knee of her jeans, adjusted the strap of her sandal.

Thunder was rolling around between the mountains to the east of us.

Then the sky got a lot darker, in that sudden way that feels like a power outage of God.

I lit a smoke of my own, since Rose hadn’t offered.

We sat looking at the collection of vehicles that seemed to belong to the Woodway crack house.

Some living, some dead, some fallen prey to target practice.

Rose blew out the last of her smoke and ground out the butt with her heel. “You know what, this is my last delivery and I’m going over there now.”

“To where?” My mind had wandered.

“To Fast Forward’s. If you want to follow me over there. Come by and say hello.”

I told her not to do me any favors.

“I’m not,” she said. “Actually, I’m thinking the next time he needs somebody to come scratch his balls, maybe he could whistle for you instead of me.”

Maybe, if I still bowed to the pull of the Fast Forward magnet.

But I’d decided some while ago, if I spoke to the bastard again, it would not be in kindness.

A fallen hero shatters into more sharp pieces than you’d believe.

Emmy was the one that finally stuck in my throat.

I tasted bile in my gullet. Then surprised myself by going inside to collect Maggot. We tailed Rose’s pickup out of Woodway.

Before we were back out to 58, rain started slapping the windshield in big fat drops.

The Impala needed new wiper blades, but that was far down the list of what that Impala needed.

The title transferred out of a dead man’s name, for a start.

I squinted through the blur, wishing I were a hair more sober, and tried to keep a bead on the red taillights ahead.

She turned off the highway sooner than I expected, on Dry Creek Road, which went no place you’d want to be.

Not a sensible way to Duffield, but maybe it was like she’d said, his place wasn’t there exactly.

About a mile in, we came on a stranded pickup halfway blocking the road.

She edged around it, but I stopped, because I’d come across that vehicle stalled once before.

This time I knew the owner and the damage was repairable. Hammer Kelly, left rear flat.