Page 88 of Demon Copperhead

Our housekeeping, oh my Lord. We were kids playing house.

The frozen food boxes piled up, bags overflowed, trash doesn’t leave a house by itself.

The mice though will give it a shot. Due to the washing machine situation, Dori would leave dirty clothes piles to molder, and ransack the Dead Mom closets.

Gypsy skirts, big-shoulder blouses, movie of the week was our girl Dori.

I did my washing in the sink, till the plumbing went to hell.

She had no sense about what could or couldn’t be flushed.

Let’s say if Jip were to squeeze out his little circle of turds on my underwear left on the floor, true example. Dori would try to flush the evidence.

If I scolded her, it wouldn’t go well. I’d yell, she’d get all pitiful.

If I brought up looking for work, she didn’t want me leaving her alone.

We were storybook orphans on drugs. A big old apple tree stood out in the yard, and that summer we ate wormy apples off the ground.

I can still see her, so hungry, dirt on her knees, kneeling on the ground in a dead person’s housedress.

After we failed to pay the light bill, things got dire.

I tried KFC, no luck. I’d have taken any shit job at all, other than a cashier.

I wasn’t entirely out of my mind. The oxy will put your hands in that till.

I kept looking. I loved Dori and I adored her and sometimes I needed to get away from her.

After another eventful day of feeling useless and unemployable, I’d go smoke a bowl with Turp, to hear about football camp and other guys living my childhood dreams. Or I’d go see Maggot, that had moved back in with Mrs. Peggot.

Big pot on the stove, kitchen all spick-and-span, just like old times except with the guts scooped out.

Mrs. Peggot was thin as a twig and walking in her sleep.

Sometimes wearing her dress inside out. She’d ask me how I’d been keeping, set down her stirring spoon, walk in the living room, and stand by his empty chair.

Then come back and ask how I’d been keeping.

Maggot was no better, seriously strung out.

I had orders from June to interrogate him as to the whereabouts of Martha or news of Emmy, but he knew nothing.

It’s like he and Mrs. Peggot both missed the train.

Their only news was that Maggot’s mom was getting out of prison.

No date set, but the hearing was coming up.

The one person to cheer me up reliably was Tommy.

One evening I went and found him in Pennington Gap, sure enough renting a garage from the McCobbs.

Rack of garden tools on the wall, stained cement floor.

He had a hose running from outside rigged up to a bucket for his washing.

Hot plate, microwave. He put Dori and me to shame as far as tidiness, his books in shelves and his clothes folded in milk crates.

A bed that was made. Bathroomwise, he had to use the one in the house.

Weren’t they supposed to be putting one in out here?

He said well, the McCobbs didn’t own that house, they rented.

And their landlord wasn’t aware he was paying them to live in the garage.

There you go, the McCobbs. But Tommy threw his hands wide to indicate his hose-bucket sink, his bed beside a hand tiller with sod dangling from the tines, and asked if I could believe how far we’d come in life.

“My own place!” he said. A man among men.

I was lucky to find him home, most evenings he was at the newspaper office.

They had him come in at day’s end to janitor up everybody’s unholy mess.

Then the ad lady quit and they gave Tommy her duties of laying out the paper and making up the ads.

His boss was Pinkie Mayhew that wore men’s trousers and drank on the job.

People said the Mayhews had run the Courier since God was writing his news on stone tablets.

Pinkie and two other people did all the photos and stories.

Then Tommy came in nights and put the whole thing together.

He said I could hang out over there any time, he could stand the company. So I did.

Tommy was carrying a lot of weight down there.

Most of that paper was ads. The front page obviously would be your crucial factors, Strawberry Festival, new sewage line, etc.

Then sports and crimes. They had other articles coming in over a machine, from the national aspect, and Pinkie would pick some few of those to run.

All the rest was ads. Classifieds were laid out in columns, but the ones for car lots, furniture outlet, and so forth would be large in size, and Tommy had the artistic license of designing them.

He had border tapes to dress up the edges, and what he called clip-art books that were like giant coloring books, on different subjects.

Automotive, Hunting and Fishing, Women’s Wear.

He’d find what picture he wanted, cut it out, and paste it up on the ad.

A sofa for the furniture store, or he’d get creative, like a pirate ship for Popeye chicken.

It depended on what pictures he could find in those books, which got picked over and cut to shreds.

They didn’t buy him new ones very often.

So he’d end up looking for the needle in the haystack, turning these pages of basically paper spaghetti.

Tommy was like a new person, a man in charge.

He had clothes now that fit him, not the outgrown sausage-arm jackets of old.

Plaid flannel shirts mostly, with the sleeves rolled up.

He still had the girlfriend Sophie that worked at her newspaper in Pennsylvania, a much bigger operation than the Lee Courier, Tommy said.

But he was proud of this one, showing me around: machines, computers, Pinkie Mayhew’s office with a stale ashtray smell that could knock a man flat.

If you’ve ever opened a drawer where mice have ripped up toilet paper to make a nest in there, the entire space filled with white fluff? Pinkie’s office.

Tommy showed me how to feed print columns through the hot wax rollers and help him stick them on the pages.

It was all done on a big slanted table with light inside.

They had blue pencil marks showing where to line things up.

The whole place smelled like hot wax. Little cut ends of waxy paper ended up all over everywhere, sticking to your shoes or the backs of your hands, like a baby eating Cheerios.

This was the unholy mess that Tommy had to clean up.

Honestly, he was holding that outfit together.

I’d started coming in due to boredom, but he needed the help.

He offered to pay me out of his check, but I said Jesus, Tommy, you have to quit being so nice to people. I still had his T-shirt.

One night I found Tommy pulling on his hair, looking for clip art he wasn’t going to find.

He had a Chevy dealer ad, with nothing left in the automotive book but tow trucks, Fords, and fucking Herbie the Love Bug.

I said, Look, let me just draw you a damn Silverado.

And knocked it out. Gave it extra shine, one of those star-gleams on the bumper.

That’s how it all started: clip-art Demon.

I could do about anything. The Lee Courier started having a whole new aspect to its ads that probably was getting noticed.

Tommy said I was a miracle art machine. I told him if there was ever a sale on skeletons, he’d have to take the wheel.