Page 16 of Demon Copperhead

It’s fair to say I was halfway in love or some damn thing with Miss Barks.

And the other half of me was like, Lady, you are the ass-burn of my life, and I wish me and you had been born on different planets.

I know, guy life. Get used to it. I got called to the office, and there she was for our first appointment.

Easier than driving around to check on us out in the sticks.

We used the attendance officer’s office, with that lady’s kids’ pictures all over the desk, which made Miss Barks seem like she was playing dress-up.

But she’s all, Hey! Looking good, Damon!

So was she, in this white sweater that seriously put the lady parts on notice.

Her news was not great. Things were not so simple as me going back home after three weeks.

I would get supervised visits with Mom, but after rehab she’d have to go back to her regular life and get drug tests.

Once she was on solid ground, we could discuss me moving back home.

What about Stoner? That was a challenge, said Miss Barks.

We would have to learn to get along better.

Wonderful, I thought. Teach Satan some cute puppy tricks while you’re at it.

She asked me about Creaky Farm, and I told her.

The old man was brutal to Tommy, and Swap-Out should be in some other kind of situation.

(Some other universe, honestly.) Had Crickson ever hit me, she asked.

Answer: no, I myself had not been struck.

And that was that. Miss Barks was sorry, but Tommy and Swap-Out weren’t on her.

Usually all kids in a home are from one foster company, but Crickson was an emergency-type place, and Tommy and Swap-Out belonged to a different foster company that Miss Barks didn’t work with.

So fostering was done by companies, and we, as Stoner would say, were Product.

Rotating and merchandising foster boys at more than fifty customer accounts. Live and learn.

She said nobody was allowed to come visit me out there, but she could pick me up after school and take me to meet Mom someplace like McDonald’s where we could talk.

Then she’d drive me back to the farm. Creaky would be pissed at me for visiting Mom instead of barn chores.

He never let us use homework for an excuse either.

These were not things I went into with Miss Barks.

She had a big stack of papers and was getting ants in her cute pants to move on.

I wondered if other kids I knew of might be fosters, boys with Hillbilly Squadron secret names among us in math and gym.

Miss Barks couldn’t comment on that, except to say she had other kids to meet with, the most of them younger than me.

She said she was super proud of how well I was handling everything, and that I seemed like a boy that could take care of himself.

No shit. As I was about to leave, she looked up and said, Oh, wait!

She’d just remembered about trying to go by my house, to get clothes and things for me.

She asked if I’d made a list, like she told me to.

And I thought, Damn. This trying-hard angel with her eyebrows pinched in deep concern. What if I was depending on the Miss Barkses of this world, instead of my own bad self? I’d be a sockless little piss, still in the same reeking underwear I was wearing the night of Mom’s OD.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “I don’t need anything.”

The house at Creaky Farm had its own life to live.

Loose gutters banging, boards creaking, leaks dripping.

At night I would lie in my bunk listening to the kind of shit that gives no comfort.

Mice rustling around. Or else the WWE of cockroach wrestling, maybe both.

We knew that critter fiestas were had in the kitchen after hours because we found mouse poop all over, like they’d dropped turd trails to find their way back home.

Obviously, a kitchen that’s kept like a pigsty is going to attract the wrong crowd.

What did we know? We’re juveniles. Every day a fresh surprise.

Many were the mornings I opened a new loaf of Wonder Bread, only to find something had tunneled through it from one end to the other.

A mouse-size hole in every slice. Do you think Creaky let us throw that bread away?

This man that saved every rubber band off the newspapers and called you a pussy if you didn’t eat your apple whole, the core and all?

Mouse sloppy seconds, no exception. He said the toaster would kill the germs. Maybe so, because here I am telling the tale.

So, digging and scritching was heard in the walls at night.

Water moving around for no good reason in the pipes.

Snoring. Long, sorrowful farts. Swap-Out oftentimes sounded like he was itching bad over there in his bed.

I mean. Scratching himself half to death.

It dawned on me that if this kid had done more than one year in every grade, he could have considerable age on him by now.

He smoked like a fiend, among other signs of being older than Tommy and me, the tiny size deceiving on all counts.

I’d have to be older myself before I got the full picture on what a boy does in his bed at night, to sound like he’s itching himself to death.

We were our own messed-up little tribe. A squadron.

We looked forward to inspections, filling up our hungers on Fast Forward attention.

If he played favorites with me, which he did, that was the bread and butter in my otherwise butterless day-to-day.

He found out I had every superhero that ever existed on tap in my brain, and would get me to reel out their full life histories.

He looked at my drawings like they were true comic books, studying them over, asking why I put in this or that.

He wanted me to draw him as a superhero.

I said I needed to think about it, because a person’s superpower wasn’t always that obvious.

His was. I was playing for time. I practiced and threw away quite a few before I nailed it: Force Fastward, aka Fast Man, all hard-muscled in his tights and cape and football helmet.

His superpower was the force of his will, that could make anybody do anything and feel glad of it because they all wanted to be on Fast Man’s team.

The first one I showed him, he picked up and looked over for a long time.

Terrifying. My drawing was stupid. But no, finally he said I had the gift.

“You all see this here?” he said to the others, flipping the page with the back of his hand.

“This shit can not be taught. It’s a talent.

” Which made my entire dogshit life up to that point worth living.

After that I just went to town. I drew Creaky as the supervillain Creak Evil.

He had a light-bulb head, with a comb-over, that lit up whenever he thought of how to torture a boy.

I did cartoons with three panels. Bing! goes the light-bulb head, and he’s pulling a file out of his pocket, saying “C’mere and I’ll file down your teeth.

” Or, “I’m here to fatten up steers, not boys,” handing a plate to Tommy with just bones on it.

Then Fast Man swoops in to trounce the dastardly Creak Evil and save the boys.

I put my all into Fast Man. His Fastmobile was a Lariat pickup with gun turrets that could fly.

He started wanting me to draw a cartoon every night.

Some of my best ones, he would take to keep.

Some got tacked up in his room. The other guys lived for my cartoons also, it was an event of our day.

I drew WildMan that could climb the highest anything, and SuperBones with the power of fixing people instantly if their bones got broken.

I just made that up. Tommy’s actual power was niceness, but it’s hard to make that pay off in the superhero universe.

We’d sit around the table in our room where no homework was ever done. I drew, they watched. Sometimes I was tired and wished I could get a pass. But I did it anyway. Drawing was something Fast Forward couldn’t do and I could. I’d have done anything to be on his team.

A supervised visit is some weird shit. Usually in McDonald’s, me and Mom eating our burger and fries.

Four or five tables away, Miss Barks, drinking her Diet Coke and acting like she’s reading, but keeping an eye on us.

What do they think is going to happen here, Mom will haul off and shank me with a plastic knife?

Put meth in my Dr Pepper? How screwed-up is it that the DSS can’t be bothered about Creaky being hateful as a snake, but they’re all high-beams and every step you take, as regards the druggie mother?

Recovering druggie mother, excuse me. Mom was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, telling me how great she was doing at rehab, how everything was going to be different this time.

I know this was not nice of me, but I asked her, How is it going to be different?

Just saying. Oh, she had answers. She’d only ever before done the freebie rehabs, a long weekend in the tank, courtesy of DSS.

This was a whole different level, with therapy sessions and so on.

It cost money, and Stoner was paying. She said she never even realized before that the moral inventory meant taking stock of your entire life.

Wishes for the future included. She said her future was me.

That I was one hundred percent of her reason for getting sober.