Page 73 of Demon Copperhead

Her eyes changed color, I swear. Light gray to darker.

Didn’t say a word, but I knew what she thought.

Coach was trying to give me things I refused to take.

Maybe family was one of them. That and the silver money card she flew around on.

I leaned over and grabbed the little orange pill bottle I’d hardly taken my eyes off of in the last half hour.

Press-screwed the cap, gulped down my Lortabs and Gatorade.

Closed my eyes, breathed. The pill itself tasted of rescue.

I opened my eyes to the stare of Angus. She was weirdly patient, in a manner that could wreck you.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said. “Coach is great and everything. Because I’m the best tight end he’s had coming up in a lot of seasons. That’s the reason I’m here.”

“You really think that’s all.”

“Christ, Angus. He put me through tryouts, right after I came here. He checked me for speed and ball handling and I did pretty good, or I guess more than pretty good, and he told me I could stay. You didn’t know that? It was right after Christmas, down in his office. Deal struck.”

She didn’t know that, it was plain to see.

“Don’t act shocked. The man’s got his job to do. And right now, my speed and ball handling are for shit. Not a great position to be in.”

She started picking a loose thread in the sheet, really pulling at it.

She would maim the sheet if she kept that up.

The type of thing that kids get smacked for in certain homes, starved for in others.

Punishments vary widely among households.

“I’ve always expected to pull my weight here,” I told her.

“That’s all I want. I’m not one to ask for handouts.

” Maybe I sounded like an old man. Mr. Peg, former miner, hillbilly pure. Why wouldn’t I.

“For God’s sake, Demon. You’re a kid.”

“Am I, though?”

She shook her head, small and fast again. I wasn’t trying to be difficult, just straight. It’s all I knew how to be, with Angus. “He’s not going to kick you out because you got injured, playing his game,” she said. “Give my father some credit.”

I’d not known her to call him “my father” before, ever.

He was Coach. I told her I didn’t think he’d give up on me, because I was important to the team.

I planned on finishing out the season, with two years left to make my name as a General.

I didn’t spell out to Angus what she couldn’t understand: that without football I’d be nobody again.

That the loser Demon was still right there under the surface, and if I lost the shine, I was nothing. I’d never get Dori.

Somehow Angus decided she’d cheered me up. She went back to her list of my rumored sorry fates. “On the good side, you’re rocking the vote for homecoming court.”

“Bullshit, I’m only a sophomore.”

“I’m just the messenger here. You, sire, are headed for coronation.”

“Not happening. Anyway, I don’t want the pity vote. If I win, it’s got to be for my ripped physique and shallow personality.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “I see that. But you’d better take what you can get. It’s not a pity vote if you’re injured in the line of duty. Like that soldier thing. Purple cross.”

“Purple heart,” I said. “Shit for brains.”

She smacked the flat bib of her overalls. “Dope!”

Her clowning was known to pull me out of a mood, but in this case it was the Lortabs.

I was nodding off to happyland. Should take a piss first. Bedwetting was an ever-present danger on this regimen.

You aim for that brief window where the pain is tamped down to bearable, but you’re not yet too dopeshit to haul ass out of bed.

She watched me tilt and lever myself off the mattress, knifing in loud breaths until I was upright.

“Aw jeez, Demon. You gotta update the under wardrobe.”

She wasn’t wrong. The old cottonbottoms had lost all hope of whitey or tighty.

June must have got it through the school pipeline via Emmy, so there’s no telling what injury she thought I had.

But I woke up and there she was, staring at my pill bottle.

Straight from work, in her white coat with the plastic name tag.

Under the coat, a black sweater and pants.

The sexy way she bent forward straight-backed, like a hinge from her narrow waist, put Dori into my head.

If not for the pain I could have pitched a tent right there.

“Hey!” I said, sounding hoarse and groggy. I might have double-doubled up the Lortabs. Doing the same thing day in, day out, you can forget if something happened an hour ago or yesterday.

“How long have you been taking these?”

I thought about it. “What day is today?”

She blew out a puff of air and swiveled around. Coach was in the doorway, red hat, lanyard and whistle around his neck, looking like any minute here he might make June run suicides. “Who put him on these?”

“I think the boy’s in good hands,” Coach said. “Watts has been a doctor since you were cheerleadin’ in your little skirt and bobby socks.”

She turned back to me. “Demon. Would you like me to have a look at that leg?”

I said okay, and she sat down on the bed. I could smell her soap, the same fruity sweetness that followed Emmy around, and again I thought of Dori, wishing I knew what she smelled like. “How much you going charge me?” I asked, vaguely realizing I was slurring.

She gave me a wink. “Friend of the family discount. After you’re all better, you can come clean out my gutters.”

Upside-down boat houses have no gutters.

I had to claw through some brain cotton to get the joke.

She pulled the sheet down and whistled, long and low, like calling a dog.

She was supposed to have a dog by now. What happened to Rufus?

What does it mean if a doctor sees your injury and whistles?

Not good. She touched and pressed on different parts of my leg, feeling the pulse at my ankle.

If I’d ever imagined June feeling me up, not saying I did, this wasn’t it.

She was all business. I was glad Angus had talked me into some decent gym shorts.

She covered me up and rested both hands on her lap, looked at me. Biting her lip. I wished I was asleep. Waiting to wake up from this assfucked turn of events.

“I saw your radiology report,” she said, “and I’m not very happy with it.

I know you’re still waiting for your MRI, but I don’t think it’s going to be good news.

I’m sorry, I hate this for you. But the only thing that will help this injury is a diagnosis and the right course of treatment.

Not wishful thinking. Trust me. I’ve seen too many patients try. ”

“There’s no fracture.” This was Coach.

She twisted around to face him. “I’m not happy with the X-ray because there could be trouble in the growth plate that got overlooked.

It wasn’t a perfect angle, and there was no lateral mediolateral.

If Watts or whoever’s supposed to be looking after Damon has neglected to order a follow-up, I can call that in for you right now. ”

Coach said nothing. Twirling the lanyard around and around his finger. June turned back to me. “What would you like?”

To stop hurting like hell. I shrugged. “To be good enough to play by next Friday?”

“Oh, hon.” She put her hand on top of my hand, and something rushed my chest so hard I held my breath to stop from tearing up. She was shaking her head. I focused on the shiny mink pelt of her hair, and let the words turn to bubbles over her head. Out for the rest. Of the season.

Coach’s orbiting lanyard dropped dead. He said something.

She said something. He dropped the nice and told her whose house this was.

She grabbed up my pill bottle and shook it at him.

“Playing with fire,” she said. And so on.

I was the little kid wishing Mom and Dad would quit fighting.

At one point she came back over and asked me, close to my face, did I know what I was taking.

She said it was hydrocodone and something.

Not oxy then, I said, and she said it was really no better than that.

I was struggling for words and possibly catching the asshole bug from Coach because I asked her whatever happened to Kent’s “pain is a vital sign” and all that.

She hissed at me: “Kent Holt is a fucking hired killer for his company.”

Those words, from her mouth, stopped my clock.

She and Coach left the room, but I heard them out in the hall.

Coach using his fifty-yard-line voice, and she was also plenty loud enough, telling him she used to see two or three narcotic patients a year and now that many every day.

Then she gave up on him and came back to work on me.

Telling me how pain is a body’s way of taking care of you, letting you know when to stop.

Telling me to think of my future. She had no clue.

My future was football. Playing through the pain is what you do.

She left, I slept. Woke up confused, then ticked off. I wasn’t some child, having my little pharm party. I was going by the book, doctor’s orders. Being a General was serious work. Coach knew. She didn’t.

By the time I got in to see the bone doctor, the basketball-size knee was down to a softball. All week it had been parading its bruise rainbow: black-green-yellow-brown. Coach found me some crutches and I was getting around. It felt good to move. Except for hurting like hell.

The bone doctor turned out to be a long-jawed man with skeleton hands and no time to spare.

He checked me over in the hospital waiting room, on his way to a day of cutting people up.

All I could think of in those plastic chairs was the night Mom OD’d and I got thrown in the deep end of the foster shitpool.

I’d been swimming ever since. I wished I was five and could hold Coach’s hand while I dropped my sweatpants and let Dr. Bones poke my leg.

He said the same as June about not trusting the first X-ray.

Even without the MRI he could see surgery was indicated.

Meniscus this, ACL that, the leg needed to be stabilized, my PCP should get me into a cast and PT.

More letters than you want to hear. He reupped my Lortabs and said to come back after I got the MRI.

I thought Coach would ask him how soon I could get back to playing, but he didn’t.

After we got out to the car, I told Coach I didn’t want those skeleton hands cutting me open. He looked over at me, the square teeth behind his lips, freckled hands gripping the wheel. Rarely had I told him, flat-out, what I did or didn’t want. Any foster kid can tell you why.

“I hear you, son,” he said. Then he called Watts on his car phone and we went straight to the pharmacy to pick up my new prescription.

Coach was going to run in, but I said I’d go.

Wanting to prove something. I got out and crutched across the lot, all stupid proud.

I got this, I’m thinking, as the doors swoosh open.

I got this, down the aisle to Pharmacy. They said fifteen minutes.

I browsed magazines and condoms and found a place to sit down on a crate of Ensures.

Finally they yelled my name. I paid with Coach’s card. The white paper bag had a thing stapled to the outside, pretty obvious, that said OxyContin. That shook me. I was still trying hard, playing I got this, but on my way out I stumbled, running smack into a homeless guy.

“Whoah, you blind?” he said, in such a pitiful way that I sorried myself all over him: sorry, careless, my bad, sorry.

Coach was watching from his car. I gave the guy another look and almost lost my breakfast. He must have said I’m blind.

He had no eyes, just two caves in his wrinkled face.

A big nursey dog on a harness. Not homeless, just a person going into Walgreens for whatever drug they give a guy so he can stand his life in the hopeless fucking darkness.

I got in the car feeling rattled. Those empty caves. Blind, blind, blind.