Page 119 of Demon Copperhead

The road from Murder Valley back to Lee County made me uneasy.

Again, too many IEDs. This drive was where Angus and I had our only real fight, because she’d confessed to wanting to skip out on us all, to go to college, and I was counting up the hardships nailing me to the cross I’d dragged down this road: Here I got robbed by a truck-stop whore.

Here I slept in a haystack. Shaking my mean little piggy bank of wrath.

It set my teeth on edge, that memory, along with the sound of the wiper blades scraping a rime of hard frost on the windshield. The temperature had dropped overnight.

I was so lucky, I realized then. That Angus put up with me as long as she did.

The apartment building in Norton where Coach lived was the nicest place around, to the extent it almost didn’t belong here.

Fancy paint job, gray with white trim on the outside stairs and porches.

New planted trees and mowed grass all around the parking areas.

Sidewalks. I saw kids out there tipping skateboards, like pavement was a normal thing. No clue.

I’d called ahead, so Coach wasn’t surprised.

The shock was on my side. Out with the red cap and whistle, in with the leather slippers and sad old man smell.

The bushy eyebrows were white. He clapped me on the back and sat me in his living room on furniture I recognized from the old house.

But the apartment looked as new inside as out.

Carpet with vacuum marks, never-used fireplace.

Coach was a whole new man in a tidy room.

That’s the deal of sober life: celebrate the fresh start, suck up your sadness for all that was left behind.

In Coach’s case, a shit ton of random sports equipment.

Angus had told me about her hasty bulldoze of the big house, shoving the crap into back rooms before turning it over to some NASCAR group for office space.

It rented for twice what they paid for this apartment.

So they got by, after he stepped down from his job to focus on pulling it together.

He’d been here the whole time Angus was away, and still looked like a bird perched in the wrong tree.

He told me they’d decided to sell the house.

The renters had cleared out, and Angus was trying to get it fit to show. She was over there now.

I told him I was sorry I didn’t get to his party last night.

Oh, man. He lit up, naming names of who all was there.

Generations of Generals. Father-and-son linebackers on the field.

It was something, he kept saying, I should have been there.

I didn’t tell him I would only have seen the missing teeth in that smile.

QB1 Fast Forward. Cornerback Hammer Kelly.

Big Bear, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot.

My predecessor Collins. Cush Polk, a cruelty to make you tear your hair.

He had OD’d on what must have been his very first step off the narrow path.

That good family, that preacher father, facing a coffin in wonder at God’s failed mercy.

But Coach seemed content to dwell on another plane.

He didn’t bring up the new coach or the losing season.

Nor did we talk about U-Haul. He’d faced embezzlement charges, but it got complicated and he wiggled out with fines and probation.

I got this news from Annie and Mr. Armstrong, that had tolerated U-Haul and his skank mother sliming them on rinse-and-repeat for years on end.

Nobody was sorry to see those two slither away through the grass with no forwarding address.

I helped Coach drink a pot of coffee and make small talk around all the bigger things I wanted to say.

That I was thankful for what he’d seen in me, sorry for the parts I screwed up.

His mistakes were no more than the common failing to see the worth of boys like me, beyond what work can be wrung out of us by a week’s end.

Farm field, battlefield, football field.

I have no words for that mess. But Coach and I were twelve-step brothers, there’s a code. I’d showed up.

I pulled up to the mansion with knots in my gut. Which made no sense, it was just Angus. Hello goodbye. The sight of her Wrangler settled me some. Old four-wheel friend, the worse for wear. She’d mentioned putting over two hundred thousand on it, back and forth from Nashville.

I stuck my head in the door just as she walked into the living room carrying a box, which she almost dropped, doing a surprised little two-step. “Jee-sus on a Popsicle stick.”

“Back at you,” I said. It was freezing in there, they must have already cut off the utilities.

She had on a red turtleneck and fleece type boots that looked like they’d come from the sheep to her feet with minimal processing.

One of those overly colorful knitted hats with the earflaps and yarn braids hanging down.

“Your pipes could freeze,” I said. “Want me to build you a fire?”

She set down the box and frowned at the castle-size fireplace. We’d tried roasting marshmallows in there as kids, and it never ended well. “Nah. Let’s not burn the place down till I’ve got the cash in hand.”

She stood there sizing me up, as people did now. I looked taller than I would ever feel.

“On the other hand,” she said, “I’d better get some free labor out of you. Before you sell your book and get too famous for me to talk to. How’s Annie, by the way?”

“Oh crap.” I’d learned from Mr. Armstrong that it was not a false alarm, and I should stay tuned. A call had come in while I was driving, that rolled over to messages. I read it now, aloud: Woodie Guthrie Amato Armstrong. Seven pounds, one ounce, twenty-two inches.

“Seriously.” Her mouth shifted completely to one side, my favorite of all her smirks. I’d borrowed it for my character Bernie. If Angus noticed, she never said. “Are they too old to know what that’s going to be like, a little boy going to school with the name Woodie?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said. “By age five he’ll be going by something else.”

“Like Hard-On.”

“Exactly.”

Another pause. We were a cold engine, not perfectly hitting.

“Nice hat.”

She pulled it off and looked at it. “Right? I bought it off a guy on the street in Nashville.” Set free, her hair sprang into action, somehow girlier than it used to be. We were standing in the exact places where we’d first met. I felt reckless, like setting something on fire for real.

“Remember the first day I came here? And thought you were a boy?”

The smirk shifted. “Angus, ‘like the cattle.’ ”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you let me go on like that, the whole day? You could have just said.”

She stopped smiling. “Late in the day to start asking now.”

I sensed myself picking a fight. The kind that helps you break up with somebody, evidently. “Right. I forget these things. How you always have to be queen of all the bees.”

The gray eyes went through several changes of weather before they settled. “Can you not think at all about how that was for me? I had no say in the matter. Some kid I’ve never met is moving in with us. Coach is finally getting his boy.”

“So you’re going to roll out the idiot carpet.”

She shrugged. “It wasn’t planned, it just happened. I remember thinking, maybe this is my chance. Like we’d get along better as brothers or something.” She stared, waiting for me to catch up. “Being a girl in this house never got me anyplace great, you know?”

And I’d missed it all. The evil red eyes of U-Haul on her little girl body, her dad’s neglect, one root cause. And then came me, regaling her with my conquests. “Damn,” I said. “I’m sorry for all that. You were the brother of all brothers. Or sister, you pick. A-team.”

She smiled, but it was empty. “We missed you at the hootenanny last night.”

“You didn’t even know I was in town.”

“I did actually. June Peggot told me. And then you didn’t show up. I figured you’d blow in and out of town without saying hello.” She bent over to pick up her box. But I caught the thing in her eyes she was trying to hide.

“I wouldn’t do that.” I almost had.

I asked her if I could take a last look around the house.

Really just to calm down. I went upstairs to the beanbag lounge, now a blank space with a stained ceiling.

Came back downstairs and found her in Coach’s old office, sitting on the floor with paper piles spread in a complete circle around her, trying to figure out once and for all what needed to be saved.

I asked about her job and she told me some about it, in-school services for kids that were wound too tight.

“Miss Betsy said you’re lighting out again for more school. For doctor or something.”

“Social worker. I’ve already lit out, technically. It’s a nonresidency thing, you do a lot of the coursework online. I’ll only have to be there in person a few months at a time.”

“In Nashville?”

“Kentucky.”

I thought with a full heart of Viking and Gizmo. I took files she handed me and put them in a trash box. Getting up my nerve. “So. Miss Betsy tells me you’ve set your cap for some guy.”

She gave me the longest, strangest look.

So I changed the subject, trying to think of respectful questions to ask her about social work.

Would it be in mental hospitals or what.

She said her main interest was kids. Abusive situations, incarcerated parents.

I said no shortage in the supply around here, and she said that’s what she was thinking. Job security.

“You mean you’re planning on staying. Here.”

She nodded. “And it sounds like you’re not. You could be a famous cartoonist from anyplace, you know. We got us some real broadband in these parts now.”

“That’s all I’ve been thinking about for the last day and a half. It’s all I want, but I can’t picture it. Staying here as, you know. Who I am now. How do you even do it?”

“I don’t know. Day at a time? You just do what needs to be done.”