Page 45 of Demon Copperhead

We sat in the parking lot waiting. Me with my gut full of rocks, Jane Ellen with her workbook opened out on the steering wheel, doing math problems. What is the deal with women, somebody tell me.

A day can be going to hell in a hornet’s nest, you’re fixing to lose your breakfast, but she’s still going to get her homework done.

“What if Coach Winfield doesn’t show?” I asked.

“What if he doesn’t?”

She erased something, then turned over her wrist to look at her watch. “He’s not that late yet. We got here early.”

I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it’s a feeling you keep having, even after that’s no place anymore. Probably if they dropped a bomb and there wasn’t any food left on the planet, you’d still keep feeling hungry too.

“Je-sus,” I said. A car had pulled in, and the guy getting out of it was the weirdest-looking human I ever saw, not counting comic books.

Stick legs, long white arms, long busy fingers that twined all over him.

Running through his hair, wrapping around his elbows while he stood looking around the parking lot.

A redhead, but not my tribe. He was the deathly white type with the pinkish hair and no eyebrows.

That skin that looks like it will burn if you stare at it.

“Great day in the morning.” Jane Ellen shut her workbook.

“Snake Man to the rescue,” I said.

She couldn’t help herself smiling, with that tongue stuck in the gap of her teeth.

We both stared, rude as you please. His car was a late-model Mustang with a big trailer hitch, normal.

But this guy, my Lord. He stood there hugging himself with those arms, looking around.

Then looking at us. He walked around to the side of us, checking out Jane Ellen’s car.

“What’s he looking for?” I whispered.

“I don’t know,” she whispered back. “What does a snake eat?”

She had her hand on the key, ready to start the engine. But then he came straight at us and we froze. Stuck his hand in the open window on my side. We both reared back.

“I reckon you all are Betsy Woodall’s.” Creepy voice. Too quiet.

“Who wants to know?” I asked.

“Coach Winfield got tied up this morning. Saturday practice can run real long.”

“Then who are you?” Jane Ellen was getting back on her game. Not about to turn me over to some random freak outside Walmart.

He waved a long hand in front of him, like shooing flies. “I’m nobody. Assistant coach.” He leaned farther in and reached his hand across to Jane Ellen, causing her to rear back again. “Ryan Pyles,” he said. “They call me U-Haul.”

She stared at the freckle-zombie hand. “Why is that?”

He pulled back his hand, ran it through his stringy pink hair. We waited.

“I move equipment for the team. Your pads, helmets, Igloo coolers. Coach wants it hauled, I’m the one gets it there.” He moved his head backward on his neck like he had extra bones in there. The man was a reptile. “I didn’t hitch up the trailer. You got a lot of gear, son?”

Being no son of his, I said nothing. He stuck his head in the window, checking out my one suitcase on the back seat. “Okay, let’s get ’er done.”

I looked over at Jane Ellen like, Don’t feed me to Snake Man! And she was like, What am I supposed to do? She couldn’t go back to Murder Valley with the boy-cargo still in tow, I knew that. Probably she’d get her education extended by twenty years.

I went, but not without a fight. Jane Ellen marched him over to a pay phone and made him call somebody to vouch. They didn’t get Coach Winfield, but some secretary at the school evidently said, Yes, that sounded right. U-Haul Pyles will get the boy where he needs to go.

That turned out to be a mansion, sitting on a big hill overlooking downtown Jonesville.

This place had a lot more going on than a normal house, extra parts jutting out with their own separate roofs and windows.

Not a castle but headed that direction. Which stood to reason.

If Lee County had a king, he’d be the Generals coach.

U-Haul geared down to take the steep driveway, and all I could think was, No way am I going in. A mansion. I wouldn’t know how to act.

“Home sweet home,” he said, in this eat-me tone.

He cut the engine and turned a glare on me that scorched.

His brown eyes were almost red, like little round windows out of hell, no eyelashes for curtains.

How did he look in the mirror with those eyes?

He grabbed my suitcase, and with me thinking, Shitshitshit no escape plan as usual, I followed him in the front door.

Inside was a shock. It looked like a regular house, with junk all over the place.

Boxes of cleats, resistance bands, rolls of athletic tape, dumbbells, a busted car mirror.

An exercise bike in the middle of the room with clothes draped on it.

There were certain castle aspects for sure, a gigantic fireplace chimney with the mantel made of a sawed log.

And a gigantic dangling light over the gigantic dinner table, where nobody had eaten I’m going to guess since the invention of forks.

Amongst the piled-up papers and magazines I counted three pairs of sunglasses, more dip cans than you want to know about, and one Nike Air Max. On the table. It made me miss Mom.

U-Haul said Coach would be down in a minute and to excuse him because he had things to do in Coach’s office.

He shook my hand in a sneak attack, then slithered off towards the back of the house.

I felt slimed. I wished for a bathroom where I could wash my hands.

There was a big staircase with the curved railing like in a movie.

I wondered if it was the same pigsty all over, or just concentrated here in the end zone around the front door.

The one tidy spot was the mantel with a photo of a girl, or lady actually.

Young. Sad-looking, apart from having the hair explosion thing from the eighties going on, which no girl would be caught dead in now.

So, she probably was. Dead. The tragic wife raised up by my grandmother and taken young. Just a guess.

I turned around and freaked out, due to a kid looking at me with the exact same face, the photo come to life.

Scrawny though, almost my height but skinnier, wearing one of those dweeb flat caps that would instantly get a guy poundcaked at school, if not for the badass leather jacket and Doc Martins.

Those things cost, meaning there’s backup somewhere, so watch who you’re punching.

This kid looked sad, a little soft, a little scary. All of those, at the same time.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m Angus.”

“Angus like the cattle?”

His eyes shot sideways, and back. “Exactly like that.”

“So, I guess I’m supposed to be staying here a while. With Coach Winfield.”

“Yeah, I know. He’s my dad.”

Oh, the little orphan baby. Reset. I asked him what grade he was, and he said eighth.

“So you’re on the JV squad?”

He looked me over with his big gray eyes like he’s reading the instruction manual of me. With the plan of taking me apart or putting me back together, I had no idea. I started thinking over my options on who to call if they kicked me out of here before dark.

“No,” he said finally. “Tragedy of tragedies. Not on the JV team.”

Coach Winfield came down the stairway like something dumped out of a bucket, making a big man’s racket, talking before he’s even in the room.

“Hey buddy, great to see you, sorry, practice ran long, we’ve got the Vikings Friday so you know what that means, Betsy said you’re a Lee County boy, is that right? So you know the territory . . .”

He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, checking me out.

He was big and broad, paunchy in that certain way of guys that start out all muscle before the beer takes over.

Red cap, big black eyebrows. I couldn’t honestly say if I recognized him from the games, or just recognized the red windbreaker. “How old are you, young man?”

I was so used to lying, I actually had to think. “Twelve next month.”

He let out a long whistle.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Not a problem. That’s what she told me, starting middle school. I was expecting a different make and model. You look like a linebacker, son.”

“Yes sir,” I said, with my stomach doing a little hell-yes dance. God in his heaven kicking a field goal and the angels doing cartwheels in their twirly skirts. Home sweet home.

We didn’t eat at the giant table piled with crap, thanks to the Winfields having another table in the kitchen where it was a lot tidier on the whole.

A lady named Mattie Kate set out the meat loaf and coleslaw and finished wiping down everything in sight with the tail of her apron, then said good night and left the three of us to eat our supper.

They didn’t say any blessing, just dug in.

With Angus still wearing that hat at the table, and Coach in his, so this was not going to be one of those houses with rules.

Maybe different ones, though. Too soon to relax.

I fed my face, probably too much, too fast. The windows were open and I could hear a tractor and smell the hay that somebody was cutting outside.

I was glad it wouldn’t be me putting it up in the barn.

I wondered if I’d get sent to a farm again, after here.

Probably yes. I’d started to see how being big for your age is a trap.

They send you to wherever they need a grown-up body that can’t fight back.