Page 60 of Demon Copperhead

I was born to wish for more than I can have.

No little fishing hole for Demon, he wants the whole ocean.

And on from there, as regards the man-overboard.

I came late to getting my brain around the problem of me, and still yet might not have.

The telling of this tale is supposed to make it come clear.

It’s a disease, a lot of people tell you that now, be they the crushed souls under repair at NA meetings or the doctors in buttoned-up sweaters.

Fair enough. But where did it come from, this wanting disease?

From how I got born, or the ones that made me, or the crowd I ran with later?

Everybody warns about bad influences, but it’s these things already inside you that are going to take you down.

The restlessness in your gut, like tomcats gone stupid with their blood feuds, prowling around in the moon-dead dark.

The hopeless wishes that won’t quit stalking you: some perfect words you think you could say to somebody to make them see you, and love you, and stay.

Or could say to your mirror, same reason.

Some people never want like that, no reaching for the bottle, the needle, the dangerous pretty face, all the wrong stars.

What words can I write here for those eyes to see and believe?

For the lucky, it’s simple. Like the song says, this little light of mine.

Don’t let Satan blow it out. Look farther down the pipe, see what’s coming. Ignore the damn tomcats. Quit the dope.

Learning the plays by heart and then making them on the field, there are no words to describe.

It’s an act of magic to take an idea and turn it into bodies on bodies, a full-participation thing for all to see.

Like what’s said about the Bible, the word made flesh.

Learning to read the QB’s mind, knowing what he’ll do almost before he does.

The Generals were always a running team, but now the Demon was changing their game.

Passes fired and completed, you’d hear the stands go dead for one heartbeat before they roared.

Excuse me for saying, but damn, it’s like an orgasm.

To blow up a crowd by doing what nobody expected.

Coach Winfield was like a father. Just guessing on that obviously, but he was the first and only man that ever saw what I could do.

Not just do for him, there were those, many in number.

This kid can cut my tobacco, make me a buck, eat my shit.

With Coach, everything we did, we did for God and country but specifically Lee County.

More than once I got mentioned by name in the Courier, because who doesn’t love the shooting star, “From Foster Homes to Football Fame.” I got a tiny bit full of myself over that, but Coach was more so.

If he had his eye on me at all times, driving me hardest, that was his patriotism.

I knew he’d lost a lot in his life. The young wife, and before that, his career, getting hurt and messed up as a kid not much older than I was now.

I knew he went to bed too early, that he drank to shut himself down.

And I also knew that whatever good a man like that could still feel for another person, he felt for me.

So I had more than I deserved. Ms. Annie, for another example.

In high school art was a real class, for juniors and seniors, but she gave me special permission.

I could take her class all four years if I wanted.

Assuming I stuck around that long. Lee High is where kids like us come to our crossroads of life: walk up the steps of the big brick box and turn right, through the front door into the classrooms. Or left, down the long chain-link tunnel, past a thousand army and navy recruitment posters, into Lee Career and Tech. Nothing arty down there, trust me.

Thanks to the September 11 thing that happened that fall, the posters now were stapled on top of each other, and the recruiters likewise.

Let’s go kick terrorist ass, they all said, and many answered the call.

Why not. Lured by the promise of one paying job at least, between high school and death.

Because the attack itself didn’t seem quite real.

To us, skyscrapers are just TV, so watching two of them fall down, over and over, looked like the same movie effects of any other we’d seen.

We knew people died. We had our assembly, flags down, sad and everything.

I’d had nightmares of falling like that from on high.

I know it was real buildings. And they still have lots more standing in those cities, so I guess that’s a worry.

Here, if any terrorists came flying over, they’d look down on trashed-out mine craters and blown-up mountains and say, “Keep going. This place already got taken out.” It was hard to see how September 11 was my fight.

As far as doing good for my fellow man, my better option was football.

Lee Career and Tech looked like a path to freedom, definitely.

A shot at working in an auto shop, no more to be held prisoner at a desk?

Yes please. But Mr. Armstrong had nailed my destiny to the classrooms. Spanish, Geometry, Personal Finance, like I would have need for any of that.

I stuck it out for one reason only, my daily hour of Ms. Annie.

That was the plus side of being in her art class.

Downside: having to share. She was sweet to everybody, it turned out, walking around the room saying “Nice composition,” or “I like your use of color there,” or at the least, “I can see you worked really hard on that, Aidan.” I had to do the same assignments as everybody else, elements of design, linear and grid drawing, value shading.

Life drawing. She had us take turns sitting as the model, but clothes stayed on, so.

Not like my earlier art enterprise. This was about proportions and such, tension versus a body at rest. I won’t say I didn’t learn things.

Oil paints, all these pigment colors with automotive names: titanium, cadmium, cobalt.

For homework we did still lifes. Angus helped me think of excellent ones, like False Teeth in Salad Bowl.

If I did cartoons now, they had to be on my own clock.

All the middle schools fed into Lee High, which meant I was back in school with my own people.

A Maggot-Demon reunion. And Emmy, a junior like Angus.

But all going our different ways, as you do.

I was a jock. Maggot mainly hung with the Goth girl Martha that cut his hair.

Emmy sang in the choir that Ms. Annie was director of, and ran with the popular end of the arty kids, Drama and them.

What Angus had to say about the Drama girls, you can guess.

But even still, I was sharing those halls with people that knew me.

Some were my wingmen, some had put ice down my back.

One of them still remembered my mom. It felt like I existed.

What I didn’t have was the thing I thought about night and day.

In high school now, a General, and I’d still not been laid.

Not the full thing. For various reasons, it hadn’t happened.

My number-one crush being twenty-some years and a marriage outside of bounds.

And a teacher. I knew they had laws, thanks to that home ec teacher scandal in Gate City that people won’t stop talking about until the sun goes cold.

No way. But girls my age seemed young, more heavily into showcasing the goods than backing up the inventory. Angus had tainted my judgment.

And then I fell face-first into Linda Larkins.

Long-legged homework club flirt, older sister of May Ann.

She was out of high school now, nobody I would run into, but out of the blue sky one day she calls me up.

I’m waiting for “Sorry, wrong number,” but she’s discussing Friday’s game, how great I looked.

And then without even a warmup stretch, she’s talking about my tight end like that’s a sight she’d like more of, she’d bet my ass is all muscle and hers is pretty tight as well, had I ever had my tongue up a pussy like hers.

With Mattie Kate and Angus not six feet away pouring Cokes over their ice cream.

This is the kitchen phone we’re on, and me shitting bricks, saying I appreciate that, okay I’ll think about that, thank you.

I kept my front to the wall and made a break for privacy.

This was to become a regular thing. I would mumble something and run to take the call upstairs.

We had a phone up there on a long cord we could drag into our rooms. I was a good liar.

But Jesus. This girl. I’d have her breathing in my ear, I’m about to come, and Mattie Kate is outside the door hollering, “Do y’all kids have anything to put in a dark load?

” Linda would not stop until we both got ourselves off.

Full-color descriptions. Sometimes I’d have to fake the big finish for safety reasons, like if I had people waiting on me and needed a hasty exit.

But holy crap. For a young male, a blueball shutdown like that I’m pretty sure could be fatal.

I kept expecting her to give me the coordinates for a meetup, but no.

Linda Larkins was phone-sex only. My entire freshman year.

It never crossed my mind that I could just, you know, hang up on her.

This older person had singled me out, and it felt like the NFL draft, you go where you’re called.

I spent a lot of time trying to think of things I could say to sound more adult.

That year I also did the regular things with other girls, homecoming dance etc.

But it put a weird spin on normal dates and conversations and the making out, if that happened, to know that this chick that could probably suck the enamel off a phone receiver was waiting to polish off my night.