Page 81 of Demon Copperhead

In ours, you live on a tether: to family, parents if you’re lucky, older people raising you if less so, that you yourself will end up looking after by and by.

Odds are about a hundred to one, you are not destined for greatness.

Your people will appreciate you all the same.

On the other hand, if you poundcake someone or push them too far in the shame or shock direction, you will run into their people at Hardee’s or the Dollar General parking lot, in all probability within the day.

There will be aftermaths. Same goes for raising your head too high on your neck, the tall weed gets cut.

So. You wind up meeting in the middle on this follow-your-heart thing, at a place everybody can live with.

Show me that universe on TV or the movies.

Mountain people, country and farm people, we are nowhere the hell.

It’s a situation, being invisible. You can get to a point of needing to make the loudest possible noise just to see if you are still alive.

The first night we made it as far as a place called Hungry Mother.

Not kidding. We’d got off to a woefully messy start with everybody excited, needing their calm-down of choice.

Then needing to sleep that off. And leaving Dori called for I’m-sorry-baby sex, which takes more time than the regular.

So now we were only a few counties down the road, it was getting dark, and here was this highway sign.

Hungry Mother turned out to be not a restaurant or sad female human but a park, with picnic tables and such.

A lake. It was February, we didn’t wait for spring break, being way out ahead of those rich kids plus more willing to ditch school.

The park was empty, its picnic area and lake all ours.

At the water’s edge, a big patch of sand.

“Gol dang, children. It’s the motherfucking beach,” Maggot said, getting out of the truck, unfolding himself like a jackknife. He stretched his long arms wide and bounced on his toes.

“Let’s not rush to judgment,” I said. The sand was dark brown, like a worn-out welcome mat to the drab pavement of lake.

But Emmy was singing “Beach, Beach, Baby!” and skipping sideways across the parking lot, a leggy colt in her skinny jeans and tall leather boots.

The three of us climbed over a small fence onto the sand.

The entrance was a locked gate beside a little block of rest rooms and vending machines, all deserted.

Fast Forward lit a cigarette and leaned on his truck, watching us in his usual way, head tilted back, eyes narrowed.

This sand patch was no more than fifty or sixty yards wide, with log pilings holding a rope fence on both sides.

Beyond that, the normal dirt and woods resumed.

Somebody had just scooped up truckloads of sand and dumped it here, thinking no one would be the wiser.

This fake beach moreover was pretty gross due to what all people had left there: flattened drink cups with red straws poking out of the lids, the black remains of a campfire.

A torn white bra, half buried in sand. Maggot lit a joint and started singing about Margaritaville.

Emmy formed big balls of wet sand one after another that fell apart as she threw them at us.

Both those two were laughing like kids. I got a bad feeling as regards their interest in reaching the real ocean.

“You all, this is not the beach. You know that, right?”

“Stepped on a cow flop! Blew out my tip-top,” yodeled Maggot, swaying his hips and tiptoeing across the sand in his weird boots.

Just to prove the entire world was against me, a seagull curved in and landed near us. Big, white, we’ve all seen the pictures. It stepped along the brown scum at the water’s edge, keeping a mean eye on me. “Hell-o-o, this isn’t the sea!” I yelled. The seagull paid no heed.

Our curly-headed Marlboro Man was still over there in his cowboy boots and tight white T-shirt tucked in his jeans.

I didn’t really trust him, but maybe never did.

A kid in my shoes takes what power he can find.

As far as him and Emmy, no guess. She’d been flirty all day, wearing a soft blue sweater that buttoned all the way up the back, seemingly designed to make you think about taking it off of her.

How would she even get that on by herself?

Fast Forward had driven left-handed with his arm draped around her, but seemed his usual self, like he’s just waiting for a better offer.

From time to time asking her to crack open another tallboy from the case at our feet.

Now we watched him flick away his cigarette butt and stroll towards us, getting over the fence in one motion like clearing a hurdle. No bad knees. Quarterbacks let others take the fall. “Me oh my,” he said, taking it in. “What have we here? Ask and you shall receive.”

“Not the ocean. Not the beach,” I said.

He walked towards the water. I stared at his pointy-toed footprints in the sand. He leaned over and scooped up a squashed yellow Styrofoam clamshell stained with ketchup and held it up to his ear. “Shhhh.” Finger to his lips. Eyes wide. “I can hear the ocean.”

I picked up a crushed beer can and fired it at the seagull. The bird flew away.

Emmy laughed her starry laugh. Fast Forward grabbed her hand, twirling her around, and just like that they were doing a two-step: his left hand holding hers and his right spread wide on her shoulder blade, pushing her backward with little steps.

Like they’re hearing LeAnn Rimes singing “Can’t Fight the Moonlight,” and too bad for the rest of us if we’re not.

Maggot crouched on his long legs, elbows on knees like a praying mantis, looking pouty.

They’d obviously done this, gone out dancing.

Emmy would place her demands. They looked like a movie couple, Emmy matching his steps, her back arched, smiling up at him.

The outline of a thick wallet was worn into his back pocket.

They twirled around the beach and then he lifted her by the waist and set her on one of the posts of the rope fence.

Emmy raised her pressed-together hands above her head and stood balanced with the bright moon rising through black pines behind her.

She looked perfect up there. A church steeple.

Then Fast Forward grabbed her around the waist, flinging her over his shoulder like a grain bag, Emmy laughing and kicking her legs, and the beauty was over.

Hungry Mother was a joke on us. We’d not eaten all day.

It was decided Fast Forward and Emmy would go into the town and pick up Pizza Hut or something.

We pulled money out of our pockets to give Fast Forward, and Maggot and I were left behind like additional trash on the fake beach.

We dragged a log to the water’s edge to sit on.

The moon was more egg-shaped than round, but seemed proud of itself regardless, laying out a shiny silver road across the water to our feet.

Come on up, said the moon. Our faces and bodies were painted with silver.

Looking at Maggot from the side, his nose and chin outlined in light, it dawned on me he wasn’t a kid.

He’d grown into his square, shaved chin and Adam’s apple.

And seemed to be dialing back the makeup.

Maybe that was all just him now, the long, black eyelashes his cousins used to want to kill him for.

I wondered if he was in love with Fast Forward. Like all of us.

Maggot and I sat like bumps on our log, letting the moon make us pretty.

The whole place was, honestly, apart from me hating it for not being the place I wanted.

On the other side of the sparkly water, a cone-shaped mountain with a pelt of pine trees rose halfway up the sky.

The moon had a fuzzy ring around it. It was cold, and getting colder.

Maggot yelled across the lake at the mountain: “Who goes there?”

Like in our olden days, playing king of the hill. I yelled, “Nobody here but us hungry motherfuckers.” For a long while after that, we yelled across the lake at the dark mountain to hear our echoes. “I am one HUNGRY MOTHER,” we shouted.

Hungry hungry hungry. Mother mother mother.

The echoes were just in our minds, with the aid of a reefer. The truth is, it didn’t matter what or how hard we yelled. Nothing was coming back to us.

Emmy and Fast were gone for an age and came back with a large cold pizza and their faces rubbed raw, like they’d been making out.

Some dishevelment. I noticed the buttons up the back of Emmy’s sweater were askew.

We ate our pizza on the beach, which I don’t recommend as a tourist option because, sand.

We’d brought a pile of blankets on this trip with the plan of camping out, and now got them all out to wrap around us while we sat on the beach.

Maggot and Emmy both had their quilts that Mrs. Peggot made for all the grandkids out of cut-up squares of their outgrown clothes.

I used to lie on Maggot’s bed staring at his, picking out all our good times.

The green corduroys for instance that he’d wrecked playing on the Ruelynn coal tips.

After we ate, we cased a picnic shelter as a possible sleeping location, considering it for all of about ten seconds.

The temperature was dropping like a rock.

There was nobody around this park. We found some cabins and broke into one, which in our defense was not locked.

The bunks had bare mattresses that smelled like mouse pee. A person can do worse.