Page 44 of Demon Copperhead

“I’ve been looking after children longer than you’ve been alive,” she said, looking at me through the top of her glasses. The glass part was divided, like an F-150 two-tone.

“Yes ma’am,” I said.

She turned a roller-wheel thing with cards in it that was her list of people. Names, phone numbers, but we’re talking maybe a hundred cards in that thing. Imagine knowing that many people. She was an old person of course, fifties or sixties. Time enough to round up a posse.

“My girls don’t usually end up staying in Unicoi,” she said.

“They have bigger fish to fry.” I thought of what Mr. Dick said about them marrying, so maybe it was their husbands that had the bigger fish.

But I was not about to pick any fights with the spider lady that had me in her web, deciding my fate.

Because that’s what this was about. One of her girls was going to take me in.

We went over the different ones, what they did, if they had kids now.

They lived all over. Two in Knoxville, one in Johnson City.

Most had gone to college, she was proud of that.

So naturally they’d end up in the city. I said I’d be real glad and amazed if anybody wanted to take me in, but please not the city.

And my grandmother said okay, she understood.

Whatever we came up with, she said she would have to square it with Social Services on the legal stuff.

I knew they wouldn’t argue with her. They’d been beating the weeds for anybody to take me.

Probably if she called and said, Hey, Demon is moving in with this nice ex-con child porn dealer I know, Old Baggy would say, Okay, tell me where to send the man his check.

She asked about social security, being wise to the business of me getting money for Mom being dead.

I told her about the account they set up, which got me wondering about my dad as far as cash possibilities.

She frowned at the wall, tapping her chin with the eraser of her pencil.

She had a little bit of a mustache, if I didn’t mention it.

Maybe thinking the same. I liked the idea of her son owing me.

It made me not so pathetic. We were all of us in this spiderweb.

But all she said finally was that I needed to stay in the state of Virginia. Legalwise.

I told her if I was going that far, I’d take Lee County or thereabouts.

I didn’t know I thought that, it just came out.

Because of Maggot and a million other things I’d known all my life.

The Corn Dog, where I swallowed a tooth.

Five Star Stadium, the Generals. The mountain everybody says looks like a face, which it doesn’t.

Not seeing any of that again just made no sense.

As far as Tazewell or other Virginia counties, all I knew about them was I wanted to see their asses kicked at the football games. Living there would make me a traitor.

My grandmother said Okay, she’d see what she could do.

She had girls living over that direction, one in Big Stone Gap, one in Norton.

Another one in Jonesville but sadly she was dead of the breast cancer.

My grandmother got kind of woeful talking about her, tough old bat that she was.

This girl Patsy was taken young, a little baby left behind.

Patsy being one of the first girls my grandmother raised, so that was a while ago.

She still kept in touch with the husband.

She could call him up to see how he’d feel about a boy around the house.

Mind you, she said, even if he says yes, this deal comes with rules.

A trial run, for starters. She always paid the family something to help out, but I would be expected to be a decent young man and do my part.

Oh crap, I thought, here I go paying the rent.

I did not like the sound of this house with the dead wife.

Who’s taking care of the baby? A husband ruling the roost on his own?

There’d be nobody to remind him kids need shoes and haircuts and the shit they don’t really want but you still have to qualify as a person, like toothpaste.

New ring binders for school. Not to say I’d caught my grandmother’s disease, but let’s face it, guys can be dicks.

“He’s a schoolteacher, so that’s good,” she said.

“I think he’s civics, or health. Land, it’s been an age.

” She was flipping through her wheel of people, looking for his card.

“And something with the sports. I don’t know about that, but he’d not let it get in the way of your lessons.

He’s a pretty good one. Here he is, Winfield. ”

Dear Lord in Heaven. Sorry about the million times I took your name in vain because I didn’t think you were actually there. Holy God. My grandmother was picking up the phone to call the coach of the Lee High Generals.

I was leaving them. Mr. Dick, my grandmother, and whatever was left of my dad in the graveyard she took me to see.

There wasn’t but a flat, shiny marker on the ground with his real name and how long he lived, start to finish.

It spooked me to see my first name on a grave.

It could have been all me, first and last, if Mom had forgiven him.

The graveyard was behind a church that looked abandoned, down the road past her house.

The weeds were a sight. She put on her gloves, got down on her knees, and put it all straight.

She’d brought a jar of flowers from her yard to set down on him, and collected up jars that were left there before.

I’d say she cared about my father more than she let on.

It was that fall type of day where the world feels like it’s about to change its mind on everything.

Cicadas going why-why-why, the air lying still, all the fight gone out of summer.

My head kept telling me Run! Go now! But I didn’t know from where, to what.

She got up from her weeding, settled her hat on her head, and we walked back to the house on the gravel shoulder.

She took big steps like a person crossing plowed ground, and I followed behind.

It felt like she was mad at me. I still didn’t know what to call her.

After all my years wishing for a mammaw, I finally had one and the shoe didn’t fit.

I called her yes-ma’am. The sun was behind us.

I shifted so my shadow touched her, falling across her skirt and fast, lumpy legs. No good reason.

Back at the house I put the clothes, toothbrush, and other things my grandmother gave me in the suitcase she gave me, wondering if this stuff was Demon now, and if so, was I erased.

It’s not that I didn’t like the clothes or the suitcase.

They were fine. The next day Jane Ellen was driving me to Kingsport, where Mr. Winfield would meet us at noon in the Walmart parking lot.

After all those days and nights that about had killed me getting here, the trip home wouldn’t take but an hour and a half.

Crazy. That’s Lee County for you. It pulls you back hard.

I went downstairs to Mr. Dick’s room. He didn’t like to start a new book till he finished his kite on the last one, but he wasn’t doing that.

Just looking out the window. I said I’d miss hanging out with him, and he said the same.

I wondered if I would ever see him again.

The Coach Winfield deal could fall through, of course, but one way or another it looked like I was Virginia bound.

Would they come see me? Given her whole cars-equal-death thing, not likely.

I told him I’d call on the phone or write, even though I had no idea how to buy a stamp or any of that.

We sat quiet a minute. I wasn’t one for hugging, or else I would have.

The clouds had bellied up since morning and a stout wind was kicking up outside, turning the leaves upside down and silvery.

Mr. Peg always said that meant rain on the way.

I asked Mr. Dick if his kite was ready to fly, and he said it was.

Then let’s do it, I said. I got a shiver in my spine.

Maybe that’s what my brain had been telling me all day: Run. Go fly a kite.

He looked pretty shocked, but he said okay, he just had one more thing to write on it. I tried to be patient, with him being the slowest writer. He said this one was from a different book, some words he wanted to put up there for me. He wrote them at the very top:

Never be mean in anything. Never be false. Never be cruel.

I can always be hopeful of you.

If that was from him to me, it was more man-to-man talk than I’d ever had in life so far. It beat the two-cents-equals-happiness thing, all to hell. I said, Okay, let’s do this thing.

I didn’t ask how he usually did it, who helped him or what, because I had my own plan.

He wheeled outside, down the porch ramp and onto the flagstones of the front sidewalk, this being all the farther his wheelchair could go.

But still in the yard. No running room. He motioned me to take the kite and go on with it, but I said, My man!

We can do better. I wheeled him off the sidewalk onto the grass, which wasn’t hard with him weighing probably not much more than a bale of hay.

Out over the bumpy grass we went, Mr. Dick working his mouth until what came out was “Heee, heeee!” Which I took to mean Hell yes!

I unlatched the back gate and wheeled him plumb out into the stubble of the hayfield behind the house.

Then the going got pretty rough, wheelchairwise, so we didn’t go far, just to where I could get the runny-go I needed to send that sucker to the moon.

The clouds were scooting by, throwing shadows like a herd of wild monsters rumpusing over the field, and I was right there with them.

I hefted the kite and let out the string, more and more till it was not but a speck in the sky.

I could feel rain starting to spit on us, and who cared. Let it thunder.

The string was pulling hard in the wind, but I towed it back to Mr. Dick and put it in his hand.

“Hang on tight,” I said, and flopped on the ground beside him, panting like a dog.

He was quiet, holding that string and kite with everything he had.

The way he looked. Eyes raised up, body tethered by one long thread to the big stormy sky, the whole of him up there with his words, talking to whoever was listening.

I’ve not seen a sight to match it. No bones of his had ever been shoved in a feed bag. The man was a giant.