Page 114 of Demon Copperhead

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.