Page 35 of Demon Copperhead

Summer was coming, and I was counting the days down.

Not that moving to full-time hours on the garbage mountain enterprise was any great shakes, vacationwise.

But still, for a kid it’s just ironed into you that summer is freedom.

For three whole months, no more sitting in a too small desk trying to be not the biggest shit-eater in the room.

For the record, I didn’t always hate school.

I was once known to put in a decent effort.

One of the better readers, as far as the boys at least. Maybe I thought Mom would be proud, or maybe I wanted to show her I wasn’t going to be a dropout like her.

Either way, it no longer pertained. Now I watched other kids raise their hands, get their answers right, and good for them.

Topic sentences, Appomattox Courthouse, life cycle of a plant, what is all that?

If all your brain wants to know is, where’s the door out of here and wherever it goes, will you still be starving.

The teachers, principal, and Miss Barks all gave me the same lecture on how I was not working hard or living up to my potential.

I had no fight with them. You get to a point of not giving a damn over people thinking you’re worthless.

Mainly by getting there first yourself. I wanted to tell them: This right here that you’re looking at is my potential.

What the fuck would you call it? Do you seriously think this is the person I wanted to end up living inside of?

But hard work? Let me tell you what that is: trying to get through every day without the gangling ugly menace of you being stared at, shamed by a teacher, laughed at by girls, or sucker punched.

Again, if you’ve been there, you know. If you have to guess, you might not even be close.

All these people had to keep on asking and asking: Why was I flunking out?

What could I do but look at the wall and say nothing, just sorry.

I was learning to love the brutal burnt screw-you taste of that word I’d been given to eat forever. Sorry.

But I still yet had a small fire in my belly for the first day of summer.

Picture me with my big smile, turning up at Golly’s at nine a.m. on a weekday, dropped off by Mr. McCobb on his way to wherever he hadn’t quit from lately.

I can see Mr. Golly inside the store putting his two-for-one Corn Dogs sign in the window.

Over at the far side of the dump lot, I see Swap-Out lighting a cigarette one-handed while pissing against a tree in full view of the passing cars.

And I think, Jesus. This is all there is.

Walk around back to bang on Ghost’s door and clock in.

The thing about school you don’t realize is, everybody’s moving towards something.

Even if you’re one of the screwups, you still participate.

Okay kids, let’s get through this lesson, this unit, this grade.

In May we’ll take our Standards of Learning tests, maybe our sorry-ass school will do better on the scores this year, the teachers will keep their jobs, and everybody moves on to the next grade.

Every kid wants to be older anyway, so there you go, automatic improvement.

It’s like the escalator thing at the Knoxville mall.

Step on, take your ride. There’s always the chance you might run across something shiny and new on your way up.

Now I’d fallen off. At Golly’s we didn’t have any units or even weeks, we measured time in roll-offs.

Which is a giant metal bin, like a railroad car, that you fill up with trash.

Then a semi comes and hauls it off to the landfill.

After we’d sorted people’s dropped-off trash into what could be sold for scrap, recycled, pawned, smashed, drained, whatever, the leftovers were the trash of the trash.

Also pretty toxic, but not the point. That’s what we threw in the thirty-yard roll-off.

It was nothing so easy as just tossing it in, either.

The company charged four hundred dollars to haul it off and bring in an empty, so we had to be economical about it and get over a hundred ten-buck loads of people’s trash leftovers crammed in that dumpster.

This meant using all our superpowers of stomping, flattening, breaking, rebreaking, then piling it higher than the canopy over the gas pumps.

Towards the end of a load, it took a serious pitching arm to get anything up there on top.

Plenty would fall off too, as they hauled it away, leaving a trail of crap from Golly’s to the landfill. Not our problem.

Here was our summer: filling that roll-off to the max, be it a month, six weeks, doesn’t matter.

Because it goes away, the empty comes back, and you’re back where you started.

Here was the real world where nobody and nothing gets better.

Biding my time till I turned sixteen and could drop out of school, with a whole life ahead for applying myself to full-time shit work.

Maybe I was Ghost’s trainee, someday to graduate from battery-acid drainage assistant to the show he had going inside.

Meanwhile the McCobbs were in some serious shit.

Their car got repossessed. It was a late-model Dodge Spirit, leased, sky blue, none of that I guess being the point.

Mr. McCobb couldn’t get to work anymore, so he lost his job, was the point.

You tell me why it makes sense for guys wanting money from you to come and take your car, so you can’t earn another dime.

That’s the grown-up version I guess of teachers yelling at you for hating school.

First the McCobbs didn’t know what the hell they were going to do, other than possibly be homeless, because of already being behind on their rent.

Next they fired up a full-time marital spat between (1) starting a couple of new in-home businesses with Mr. McCobb doing telephone surveys and Mrs. McCobb doing dog grooming, or (2) taking the kids and going to Ohio to live with Mrs. McCobb’s parents, dog grooming my ass.

I myself was banking on Mr. McCobb winning, because he definitely wore the pants.

It mattered to me which way this went, obviously.

Since I would not be moving my personal ass to any Ohio.

Or grooming any dogs, either. I was working full time at Golly’s.

It turned out Ghost lived over towards Fleenortown and drove right past, so he could pick me up on his way in.

I wasn’t crazy about the hours he kept, or being alone in a Chevy pickup with Ghost and the thoughts in my head.

Christ. But I got to work most days, other than the weeks he’d disappear on some kind of bender.

I had to stay longer in the evenings, due to Ghost doing a lot of his business in the after-dark hours.

But I got used to it. Swap-Out had a reliable source of weed and a generous heart.

Definitely it helped the time go faster.

Or maybe slower actually, but you didn’t care.

Once in a great while he’d show up with a Glock 19 that belonged to one of the guys he lived with, and we’d set up a row of bottles on the edge of the roll-off for target practice.

It was years since Mr. Peg had showed me how to shoot, so I wasn’t that great, but my aim got better over time.

Swap-Out’s aim was scary as hell, permanently, improvement being not a Swap-Out thing.

We kept an eye out for the aerosols, which over and above the huffing potentials made excellent targets.

Big bang, for real. But we could get ourselves just as thoroughly entertained over some childish shit like stomping the bubbles of bubble wrap.

Also you wouldn’t believe the number of hot dogs two deeply baked boys could put away.

Mr. Golly had to be making extras on purpose.

After Swap-Out went home of an evening, I’d be on my own to hang out in the store and help Mr. Golly.

He liked talking about his childhood in India, where evidently a lot of people lived in the dump itself.

In houses they built out of actual trash.

If that sounds like some wack fairy tale, I’m just going to say he was not a guy to lie to you.

He acted like this was no big deal really, getting born and raised in a dump.

He had all these great stories about what boys did to mess with each other, like traps, stink bombs, etc.

For their holidays (and we’re talking some whole other Christianity) they built giant statues of their goddesses and elephants and such, out of—wait for it—stuff they found in the dump!

God made out of garbage, you can’t make that up.

It seemed like the old man had been saving up these stories his whole life, waiting for somebody to listen.

He’d had a wife in there somewhere, but at this point in time I’m pretty sure I was it for Mr. Golly.

Technically it turned out that he was Mr. Ghali this whole time.

I saw him write that on the thing you sign for deliveries.

I was surprised, but he said I was not the lone ranger, everybody in the county thought it was Golly’s Market.

According to him, “Golly” meant “Gee, that is really great,” so the name was okay by him. Part of his advertising scheme.