Page 78 of Demon Copperhead

All the way up, or all the way down. That was me now, getting beat with both ends of that stick before any day’s end, never both at once, and not much in between.

Nobody but Dori knew what I was going through.

Coach had told me to cut back on the percs, get off the oxys altogether, and stay off that knee as much as possible.

If pain wasn’t an issue, he said, I could taper out on the meds, get healed up, and he’d get me back in playing form in time for next fall.

I did what he said, or tried. Every day.

Until I was hiding puke in my balled-up jacket and swamp-sacking my bed sheets.

Then I’d give in, take a couple of pills and start again.

Usually some percs and half an oxy in the morning would get me through school as a functioning being, and then afternoon and evening were just so many hours to get through until, until.

Until the next hour that’s not completely horrible, bought and paid for with another pill.

Pain was not the issue. Pain is just this thing, like a noise or a really bad smell.

Here’s you, there’s the pain, you bump fists and make your deal.

What I’m discussing is a feeling up inside your blood and lungs, like you’ve been snakebit from the inside.

Shivering, loose-boweled, a body you want nobody to get anywhere close to until you can get it fixed.

The issue is: how soon will this bottle run out.

Late December, was the answer. Dr. Watts had renewed me a few times over, and I’d taken exactly what he and Coach told me to, right up to our sad defeat at Richlands.

I won’t pretend I’ve always been the obedient boy, but now I had people counting on me, and not just my teammates, this was a countywide situation.

For the first time in my life I had a man’s job to do, and the guts to hold my bargain.

We didn’t make it to semifinals, thanks to one mean motherfucker of a defensive end and God taking his regular dump on Demon.

But even after I got hurt, I did everything in my power to be the man Coach thought I was.

Now Coach was looking to seasons ahead, me getting off the meds and on my feet, so I’d die before I asked for another prescription.

But dying felt like an actual option here.

Day by day the orange bottle rattled its sadness at me, going down for the count.

Salvation was Dori. Everything was Dori.

I wanted a second first time with her, even if it was really our fifth or sixth. We were clocking them up pretty fast. But I wanted Dori to know I felt about her the way adult or married people do, if not better. To be together like that. Not in a car. It was a goal I set my mind to.

We spent most of our time looking after her dad, Vester, in their farmhouse that smelled of gas-stove pilot and adult diapers.

Not sexy. Jip went berserk every single time I walked in the door, flattening himself to the linoleum like a rat-skin rug, his black beady eyes shooting murder.

Vester’s hospital bed was in the front room so he could watch the comings and goings, which were sadly few.

They had home-care nurses a few times a week to do stuff Dori couldn’t handle, catheters and such, and Dori would chat them up like crazy, being lonely.

She was on her own for the most of it, even cutting the man’s hair.

She said all her friends dropped her like a hot rock after Vester got sick.

Staying in school wasn’t an option, it took all-day drives to get him to his different specialist doctors.

At this point, those drives were probably the best part of her life.

Beeping the horn whenever they crossed the state line, having their big adventure.

If she had to run out for groceries, she’d let me babysit him, which mainly involved making sure his oxygen tubes didn’t fall out of his nose.

He’d want me to come sit close and hear the story of his life.

The heart attack being least of the man’s woes.

I’d wondered about his age, this grandpa type of guy being Dori’s father, and it turns out he did marry a wife ten years younger.

But neither was he as old as he looked. Fifty-one.

He’d worked for the mines prior to the layoffs, not as a miner proper but maintenance in the prep plant, longwall, I didn’t really know what that meant.

It put him in the way of coal dust and asbestos.

He said he would come home with little white hairs of that all over him, like after you’ve had a haircut.

Throw off his coverall on the kitchen floor by the washer and think no more of it, because nobody told him to.

After he got bad lungs, they got a settlement from the asbestos, which was how he and his brother started the farm store.

But now his brother was dead and he was as good as, so don’t look for money to buy your life back, was his advice to me.

And not that I said so, but I didn’t think I’d mind giving it a shot.

I’d buy a new knee, because one of mine was shot to hell.

I just did my best with Vester to change the subject onto car engines or football plays, and try not to stare at the skull behind his face and the arm bones under the spotty skin.

One noticeable feature of their house was a horse on the roof.

Plastic, semi-life-size. It used to be on top of the store, but little-girl Dori begged to have it on their house, so there it stood.

This was after her mom died and various aspects of family life took a header.

The whole upstairs was a dead Mom museum, dusty closed window blinds, closets crammed with dresses they never threw out.

Dori’s room was a different type of weird, rival to Haillie McCobb’s as far as stuffed animals go, but with Christina Aguilera Dirrty posters and a Sims Deluxe Edition box where she hid her condoms. She said she got those free from one of the home-care nurses.

We would make out on her bed because we couldn’t help ourselves, but only to a point.

Her dad was pretty much always asleep, so, not a problem.

Jip was the problem. Adorable Jipsy Wipsy.

If he wasn’t barking his brains out at me, he was making a low chainsaw rumble and eyeing me with a view to clean castration.

No way was I taking my pants off in that house.

My first choice would have been outside in the woods, on a blanket, with lightning bugs dancing around.

Total Disney fuck, she’d go wild for that.

But this was the dead of winter. I had to be creative.

The special place I thought of was on Creaky Farm, which was foreclosed and sold now to some out-of-towner that never showed up to farm it.

We heard of city guys buying and selling Lee County land they had no need of, just because it was dirt cheap and one more place to hide their cash.

Creaky’s tobacco bottom had been fallow for two seasons, the cattle pastures all grown up in thistles, and none of these problems mine to fix.

With the old man gone, the snake had no fangs.

I’d enjoyed the place, on the few occasions I’d gone back to plunder it.

The spot I had in mind was the stripping house, that used to be my boy cave.

It was built into the ground like a cold cellar, with stone walls cool at all times of year and damp to the touch.

The cool would keep the cured stalks soft so you could work through the winter, stripping the leaves from the stalks by hand.

But I used to go there just to be off by myself, safe.

Nobody ever found me there. The soft dirt floor and sweet tobacco smell in the dark always put a spell on me, like starting life over in the belly of some mom that was getting it right this time.

I took Dori there. With a bottle of Thunderbird and some candles I’d pocketed at Mr. Peg’s funeral, which is how long I’d been planning this.

I told her I had a surprise in store and she was all like, birthday girl.

With anybody else it might have been a downer, driving out there on lonely roads, walking through dead weeds, no sound except some crows in a bald tree griping about the weather.

Dori though. She’d get so excited for any small thing, it made you happy to be alive.

I shoved open the heavy door like a castle keep.

We spread out our quilt, and didn’t even get the bottle cap twisted off before we were out of our clothes and on each other.

Her cold lips and little teeth biting my ears, the shock of her breasts with their brown eyes staring.

The slipperiness of putting myself inside her, the pull of that.

No force on earth could stop it, once we’d gotten that far.

I’d spent so much of my life hungry, and these days were no different.

Every minute I craved that feeling with another person, being that close.

I couldn’t get air until I had Dori up against me again.

Only then would the begging go quiet and let other good, strange things pass through my head.

The beautiful slickness of all life, babies sucking tit, a calf getting born, pouring out of its mother the way they do, like blood from a pitcher.