I told Tommy all right, let’s do this as a team. Ms. Annie hardballed Pinkie and got us fifty dollars per strip, with a bonus for every paper that picks it up. We’d deliver weekly, on a one-year contract. Tommy and I would split the money down the middle. These thousand books he’d read had to pay off at some point, he could help with story ideas. And the art itself. Going over it all in pen is the last step, and takes a steady hand. I told him we’d be mules in harness.
The truth is, I was scared blind to make a promise like that on my own. I’d been playing head games on how heavy I was using. Look at me, getting my ass up and out. Nothing out of control here. Tiptoeing around the morphine. I’d still never injected anything, for the sole reason of needles making my skin crawl, but I told myself that was a line between pastime and hard-core that I was refusing to cross. Pretending I could still show up on time as a human, even if I’d been fired from Sonic and more places after that. Not for slacking, I mashed orders double time. But you’d not have wanted to share space with me and a deep fryer, let’s leave it at that.
Now, though, with Tommy backing me up, I would quit screwing around. The day we signed those contract things in Pinkie Mayhew’s rat’s-nest office, that’s what I believed. What I wanted more than anything was to grow up. Hard to explain, given how I got short-sheeted on the childhood. Carefree, what is that? If I’d ever known at all, I couldn’t remember. But I was still stuck outside of full adulthood, blowing smoke under its door, eyeing the windows with a cement block. It’s all we want, we ragged boys of the world. To live as men.
By the time that contract expired, I’d be close to turning eighteen. I would get the money that was put away for me from Mom’s social security, and start my life of freedom. As a man of work and talents, getting paid for my labors. I would marry Dori. I would get clean.
I went to bed thinking, Okay, Angus. I’ll trust the wild ride, it is looking up. A few hours later my phone woke me up and it was the last person I wanted to hear from, Rose Dartell. I had no feelings for this strange girl, and assumed that was mutual. Wrong, she had feelings. She despised me. Because of Emmy and Fast Forward. Everybody put this on me, those two hooking up. Rose said to meet her at the little park above Ewing because she had something to give me, from Emmy. I told her I could probably get over there tomorrow afternoon. She said nope. Now.
The things you do to be decent. I put on my pants at three fucking a.m. and drove out to a no-name highway pullout to get what was sure to be bad news. It wasn’t far from the park where Miss Barks took me years ago, the day she dumped me. Looking up at those white rock cliffs, weird thoughts took over my mind. Jumping off, flying or falling. Now the moon was hitting the jagged ridge up there. I sat on a cold cement piling waiting for headlights to come up the road.
Rose got out and stayed by her car, talking low. I couldn’t really see her. She said Fast Forward had been living in Georgia. He’d decided to cut out Mouse and deal directly with Mexican traffickers in Atlanta. She mentioned various technical things, making it sound like Fast Forward was a businessman to be admired, making his smart moves to get promoted. Part of his business sense involved using Emmy for his lure. I was tired and shaky, and not hearing every word. I asked what did she mean, lure. All I could think of was Mr. Peg’s tackle box.
That is what she meant. Bait. Having sex with guys, to attract them into dealing with Fast Forward. I told Rose that was impossible. If you knew Emmy, you could never picture that.
“I’m sure you can’t,” she said. Rose had lit a cigarette, and I watched the orange glow rise and fall. “She could walk up to you tomorrow and you’d not know her.”
“I would know her.”
“Not the mess she is at the moment, no sir you wouldn’t. I did, and I can tell you, she’s what they call ruint. Fast Forward got disgusted and left her down there.” I saw the cigarette drop to the ground. “So that’s two lives you wrecked, hers and mine. I would have stuck with him. I’ve got a good head on me.”
I told Rose she could go to hell. I didn’t believe a word she was telling me.
I heard steps on the gravel and then she was close enough to smell. Pushing a fist at me. Something dropped into my hand that felt slight and wet, like spit.
I watched her truck until it was gone in the dark, then got in my car. I was blinded for one second by the dome light. Opened my hand and looked. Snake bracelet.
52
I dreaded calling June, but I’d promised. I held back certain details. What killed me was how glad she sounded just to hear that Emmy was alive. Atlanta, not so much. June swore a blue streak, saying Atlanta was too much goddamn metropolis to go start knocking on doors, she was hoping Emmy had gone back to Knoxville. Which if you asked me was about on par, in the goddamn metropolis department.
What we had to do now, she said, was find Martha. June knew about the abortion and a good deal more, it turned out, and had taken Martha in her wings, getting her signed into a methadone clinic. But the nearest one was Knoxville, and Martha didn’t know anybody there, and it was a mess. Martha would start getting on her feet, come back here to be with people she knew, then she’d relapse and disappear again. Maybe she was going to Atlanta. June had the idea that connecting with Martha’s orbit would lead to Emmy. She was just thinking out loud at that point, not wanting to get off the phone, even though she was at work, with people waiting. I said call if she needed me.
I drove around a while to get June’s worries out of my head, and look for a strip to draw. The best ideas usually came that way. My plan then was to go home to a quiet house, and get something done while Dori was at work. But that day I found her in bed eating one of those ice cream drumstick things with the crumbles that she bought in family packs. She’d finally blown off one too many hair appointments or stolen something obvious, and Thelma asked her not to come back.
“She said she was asking me as a friend,” Dori clarified.
“Wonderful,” I said. “You’re bringing no money in, you screwed over your best friend, but it’s all fine because she’s not yelling at you.”
Dori said I was a mean bastard with no understanding. Then she made kissing sounds at Jip and held out her ice cream for him to lick. White cream smeared in his old man whiskers, and the way his furry head moved up and down made me think of porn. I was a fully comprehending bastard. Thelma didn’t yell at Dori because you’d get just exactly as far yelling at a box of rocks.
After that, Dori stopped having reason to get out of bed, so I took her TV away. There was a time she could have dragged it back up the stairs, in her scrappy days of moving Daddy’s oxygen and his wheelchair around, but now on her strict dope and ice cream diet, her weight was down to nothing. She and Jip stomped downstairs, not speaking to me, and from then on whiled away their days on the couch watching View and Price Is Right and That’s So Raven. I’d stopped paying for cable, so we weren’t getting anything but the channels that come in naturally. It made no difference, I’d come home and it might be Mutant Ninja Turtles. Her eyes like sparkly glass.
Then one day I hit the breaking point. I’d gotten a ridiculous estimate for the transmission job, came home to the bare fridge reeking from the last power outage, and I put an empty vodka handle into the screen. From across the room, I still had a good arm. Nothing really shattered, the surface just rumpled and the colors bled down the screen in lines. Idiot. I could have gotten a bottle of Xanax at least for that TV set. Not thinking like a head of household.
She stayed there, wrapped in her blanket, staring at a dead TV. Waiting for me to bring home the junk. I had crazy thoughts of just staying away for a while, cutting her off. Let her start fiending, she’d appreciate me then. But I would never. She was my doll. I wasn’t heartless.