I thought of it every minute of every day. This would get us clean. Now Dori had reason. It’s simple, I said, think of the baby. It was not simple. Dori had never troubled to hide any part of her using. To her mind, it was all about love: sucking an oxy to crush and split exactly in half with me. Saving every patch she shot, for me to lick the leftovers. Now she got wily on me, only ever shooting up after I’d left the house. Sweet thing, that was Dori trying to be good. I might have been doing some version of the same.
Stupid is all the word I’ve had to cover much of my time on God’s grass. But it’s not stupid that makes a bird fly, or a grasshopper rub its knees together and sing. It’s nature. A junkie catches his flight. That sugar on your brain cells sucks away any other purpose. You can think you’re in charge. Walk around thinking this for hours at a time, or a day, till the clock winds down and the human person you were gets yanked out through whatever hole the devil can find. Learn your lesson, get your feet up under you. You will be knocked down again.
For Dori’s sake, I went to talk to June. I knew she needed to be seen to. They have things they do for the pregnant now, heartbeat and such. Vitamins, I remembered Mom getting those. And just by the way, maybe also some help getting her off the junk.
What I didn’t expect was to find June so pumped up on her own news, she wasn’t all that excited over mine. Martha had a bead on Emmy’s whereabouts in Atlanta. June actually had a street address, and was going down there. Some hellhole, no doubt. She was peeling potatoes while she told me all this, long slips of skin flying fast into the sink. The people I know are seldom idle with their hands. Men smoke or fix things, usually both at once. I once watched a man take down a dead poplar from the top down, working high in its limbs with a chain saw in one hand and a Camel in the other. Women fix a kid’s hair or wipe a nose or sew on a button or peel potatoes. And smoke, though not June of course. I sat on a stool at her kitchen counter, wishing I could draw her hands. I asked, “What makes you think she wants to come home?”
No answer for half a potato. Brown and white peels mounding in the sink. And then: “Emmy is in no position right now to know what she wants.”
“People get tired of hearing that,” I said. “She’s eighteen.”
June’s eyes flared, but she kept peeling, talking without looking up. “These aren’t adult choices we’re talking about. She’s stuck down there with no means, getting used by terrible people keeping her strung out, whatever, raped. There’s parts I can’t even think about.”
“Embarrassed,” I said. “There’s that part. She’d sooner die than have you know.”
June’s hands went still. “You need to come with us.”
I almost laughed, for how doable it all seemed to June Peggot. Like she’s Lara Croft, and we’re going to go raid the tomb. I said no, I couldn’t leave Dori for that long.
She narrowed her eyes at me, still working away, the slip-slip of the peeler sounding mad now. “Listen to yourself. Dori’s a grown woman, soon to be a mother. What do you think she’ll do if you leave her unsupervised, wet the bed? Burn down the house?”
I didn’t want to admit that both were possible. I had other excuses, my job at the store, a strip I had to finish by Saturday. June said she was going on Sunday. Slip-slip-slip. I told her these were scary people, and she should go with somebody that packs heat, like Juicy Wills.
Hell no on Juicy, she said, multiple reasons. But damn straight on scary. She’d been getting threats from some Rose person that claimed Emmy had stolen her man, and if the bitch ever turned up back here she was asking to get her pretty face scarred up. June had no intention of going to look for Emmy without a sidearm. Her brother Everett had an open carry permit that he swore was good in Georgia, and he’d agreed to go with her.
I tried to picture this brother as Terminator 2. Everett. All the good looks and kindness that came with the Peggot package, a linebacker in high school. He and his wife owned the fitness club and tanning salon in Big Stone, so. He was pretty ripped, but still. June was batshit.
“Fine then, you don’t need me,” I said.
“But a friend, somebody her age. Like you said, she’s humiliated. She trusts you.”
That aggravated me, getting invited as the boy, not the man. “Take Hammer, then,” I said. “Last of the nice guys. Deer rifle, pre-engagement garmin ring or whatever the hell.”
June flew off the handle at me then, saying that would be cruel, pulling Hammer into this. All he’d ever wanted was to love that girl and keep her safe. If only they’d stayed together. She dropped her naked potatoes in the water to boil, wiped her hands on her apron, and used them to push her hair back from her forehead, one of those little habits that ran right down the Peggot generations. Those hands, that split second of babyish wide forehead laid bare, exact same look in their eyes. For one second I was seven years old playing Standoff with Maggot, our bare feet planted, trying to push each other over into the mud. Me winning, Maggot refusing to lose.
It was all doable. Myself in June’s car headed south at an ungodly hour of Sunday. Atlanta was almost six hours each way, and she meant to get down there and do our business by daylight, before the vampires came out. Everett was napping in the passenger seat, his big head nodding forward, his Kel-Tec PMR-30 on the console between them. Concealed carry didn’t cross state lines, and June did things by the book. I rode in back with the supplies she seemed to think necessary: old soft quilts, cooler of sodas, boxes of crackers, and such. So we’ve got two different movies running here, front seat tricked out for Blade II, back seat is Lassie Come Home.
I felt bad that I’d lied to Dori, or really just told her nothing, but she’d have gone to pieces to hear I was leaving the state. My bigger worry was getting through this whole day without a bump. I’d fueled up on the front end obviously, but with nothing additional for the road. Laws were laid down. We were taking I-75, the oxy expressway from Florida. June was so clean and prepared on all fronts, she probably wanted us to get pulled over.
June and Everett spent a full five hours bickering. Which way was faster out of town, Veterans Highway or 58. Whether the car was too warm or just right. Whether Easy Cheese was God’s gift or a disgusting waste of a good metal can. June would put the radio on an eighties station, and Everett would drive us nuts singing in a ridiculous high voice with Eddie Rabbitt or Rosanne Cash, until she’d let him change it. Then June would grunt out her own made-up words to Beastie Boys and Jay-Z. “Ooh ooh bitch, gotta big dick for ya here.”
“You are so far out of it, Junie. ‘Song Cry,’ it’s this beautiful love story.”
“Just playing it how it lays, brother. That’s what it sounds like to me.”
“Heartbreak of old age. Hearing’s the first thing to go.”
Everett and June were five years apart, and took no time at all getting back to seven and twelve. They argued over whether Everett peed on his shoes at the Peggot reunion one time, and whose fault it was the dog got run over, and an entire year of the older kids supposedly stealing Everett’s lunches and convincing him their mom wasn’t packing one for him.
“Oh my God Everett, are you never giving that up? That did not happen.”
“Uh-huh, sad. I reckon it’s the memory that goes first.”