Page 11 of Demon Copperhead

Crickson was a big, meaty guy with a red face and a greasy comb-over like fingers palming a basketball.

Little eyes set deep in his head, pointy nose, your basic dog type of face.

But a meaner breed than the two old hounds lying on the floor under the cold wood stove in his kitchen.

They looked like whenever frost came around, they’d be right there ready.

The old man’s voice came out in a Freddy Krueger whisper, like it hurt him to talk so you’d damn best listen. Yes I had seen that movie, at the drive-in, from the back seat with Mom and Stoner thinking I’m asleep. Education of many a Lee County kid. Scary guy says sit, we sit.

Miss Barks meanwhile was working down her checklist, nervous as heck.

Would I sleep in the same bedroom as his other fosters, was it inspected, was he briefed on me by phone that morning.

He was like, Get this over with, lady. The other boys had left for school and he needed to be out seeing to his cattle.

Miss Barks wasn’t disagreeing on any of that.

I sat tight, getting my gander at the inside of Amityville: nasty curled-up linoleum, yellow grease on the wall over the stove, open jars of peanut butter and crap all over the counter.

A crust of scum on everything. I recalled her saying this man’s wife had passed away.

I wondered if her body was still lying somewhere back in that house, because I’d say there’d been zero tidying up around here since she kicked off.

Once she was out the door, I thought the old man would run off to his everloving cattle, but he was in no big hurry, pouring coffee out of a dirty-looking pot into a dirty-looking cup.

Under his flannel shirt he had on a long-sleeved waffle undershirt with the cuffs all frayed and grimy, like he lived in that one shirt day and night.

Regardless Mom and her sloppy ways, she did not raise me to be unclean.

I couldn’t stomach watching the old man slurp his coffee.

He looked over at me like, questioning, so I said no thanks, I didn’t drink coffee all that much. He said something in his creepy strangled voice, so quiet I couldn’t make it out.

I asked him, “Sir?”

“I said, the other boys ain’t liking a biter. I done told them. Ain’t nobody likes a biter.”

I looked at the dogs under the stove, trying to work out what he meant. They looked dead actually. Or so old, they would have trouble gumming down cat food out of a can. But this seemed like something I would need to know. I asked him, “Which one bites?”

He looked at me like I was an idiot. “You.”

He watched out the window while the DSS car drove away. I noticed his fly was undone, or maybe the pants were so old the zipper had given up the ghost. After a minute he whispered, “A wonder nobody’s yet filed off your teeth.”

I had the day to get sick to my stomach, waiting to find out how much the other boys hated a biter.

Stoner must have gone on the record. So I might as well have a sign on my back saying: Druggie Mom, Queer Best Friend, Hand Biter.

Whatever Crickson told his fosters that morning, everybody at school was hearing now.

I never wanted to go back there. Or be here.

I was running on dead empty, but Crickson didn’t ask if I’d had breakfast. The kitchen had this rank cooking smell, a cross between feet and bacon, and even that was making me hungry.

But he just downed his coffee and said, “Let’s go.

” And outside we went, for a day’s work.

We started with haying the cattle. The barn smelled like cow shit, no surprise, but I mean this smell is a freaking storm front.

Enough to make your eyes water. The cattle were muddy and black and pushy and of a size to kill you if you weren’t quick on your feet, and that’s about all I can tell you about haying cattle.

A pitchfork was used, hay was thrown around.

He said he had around two hundred head, most of them out on pastures.

You don’t hay your cattle in August except the pregnant heifers, which these were.

He asked what I knew about cattle, which was nothing, and could I drive a tractor, ditto.

I could see he was pissed about how worthless I was.

He asked if I’d ever put up hay, because that needed doing if the damn rain ever stopped.

Had I topped or cut tobacco, that was also coming.

He said he kept the boys home from school for tobacco cutting because it was God’s own goddamn piece of work to get it all in, so he hoped I wasn’t keen on school or anything.

I said yes sir, no sir, trying to ride it out.

I followed him around, carrying whatever he handed me.

It rained on us off and on. All I could think of was home: Mrs. Peggot that would be worried sick about where I was.

Our creek and its excellent mud. On the bright side, this guy would not be making me scrub any floor with Clorox.

But I might at some point decide on doing that anyway.

We moved cattle through gates. We walked for hours checking a ratty old fence for barb wire that had come loose off the palings.

He had a giant staple gun that looked and sounded like a weapon of war, and he used that to attach the barb wire.

He said pay attention because tomorrow I’d do fence lines on my own.

Seriously. Putting that weapon in the hands of me, a known menace.

I was too hungry to think straight. Finally it was time to go have lunch, which he called dinner but who cared.

It was bacon-tomato sandwiches. He fried up the bacon and tomatoes both, in a pan looked like it had lived its life without a wash, no fresh grease needed.

I could see bacon was the gas for the engine of this house of boys.

Big packages in the fridge. Loaves of bread still in the wrappers, stacked up like bricks on the counter. So, some good news.

After lunch we walked more fences and changed the spark plugs in a tractor engine.

It was long in the afternoon before I spotted two boys walking up the lane from where the bus must have dropped them out by the highway.

They went in the house to dump their backpacks, then came running out to the barn where Mr. Crickson had left me with a hose and a scrub brush, spraying out a bunch of slimy grain buckets, ready at this point to puke from nervousness.

Sure enough, the littler one bared his teeth at me, let out a wolfman howl, and laughed like a kook.

I said Hey, I’m Demon. Trying my best to look like just, whatever.

Not a person that bites. The bigger one said he was Tommy and this here was Swap-Out, and he grabbed the buckets I’d cleaned and started stacking them.

The smaller kid went in the tool room for a shovel and went to work shoveling shit in the far end of the barn.

This kid Swap-Out, everybody knew. He’d been in second grade with me, not his first time at it, and probably was still stalled out in the lower grades due to something going on with him that affected his mind and his growth.

He was small in a freakish way, weird face, the eyes and everything not quite where they should be.

People said it was from his mom drinking too much while he was in the oven.

I always thought, And mine didn’t? But Mom claimed she’d stayed on the wagon for the most part with me, at least in the early months, due to every single thing she looked at making her want to puke. My good luck.

“We knew you’d be coming,” Tommy said. Which I said was interesting because I sure didn’t.

He said he didn’t mean me exactly. Some tax bill comes due on the farm in April and September that the old man needs the money for, so usually there’d be an extra boy coming then.

I had no idea what to make of that. I asked Tommy how long he’d been living here and he said a couple of years, off and on.

Sometimes he was the April and sometimes the September.

He said Creaky’s wife had always liked him before she died, but Creaky hated him, so now Tommy came and went as needed. I just said, Huh, and left it at that.

This Tommy individual I’d also seen at Elk Knob Elementary, but he was some older than me, at middle school now.

Last name of Waddell, so people called him Tommy Waddles, which he did.

He was a chubby teddy-bear type of kid with big round eyes and brown hair that looked like it was too much for his head.

It stood straight up. Some guys in those days were trying for the Luke Perry hair thing from 90210, but in the case of Tommy you could tell that wasn’t gel or trying, that was just all Tommy.

Also too much Tommy for his clothes: sausage arms in his jacket sleeves, jeans straining at the belt.

Now I knew why. Foster care. I don’t reckon they look at you all that often and say Hey kid, you’re busting out a little bit, let’s go shopping.

But after all my fears over getting judged as a biter, Tommy was so nice.

He showed me where to stack the buckets, how to go in the corn crib and get the corn for graining the heifers and calves, and various things we had to do before going in.

The corn crib was a small barn type of thing, so full of rats you had to look where you stepped.

Seriously, they ran over your feet. If something was hard to lift, like a grain bag, Tommy tried to do it.

He explained things without acting like I was an idiot.

He said the cattle were Angus, boy or girl either one, all called Angus.

The cows got bred to have calves, and the boy ones would get castrated into steers and raised up in the pastures to about half grown.

Before winter came on hard, they’d be sold to the stockyards and go out west someplace to get fattened up the rest of the way. From there, hamburgers.