For the start of her twelve-year sentence she got sent to Marion, an extra-special prison for the deeply disturbed. Which you have to reckon she was.
Nobody believed a word out of this girl’s mouth at the time of her need. And today, her side of the story stands as gospel. The world turns. It would take no time at all for people to start fussing over little Matty, telling Mrs. Peggot what a pretty baby, he didn’t suck those good looks out of his thumb, did he? The apple falls straight from the tree. Everybody’s got their cross to bear. Mrs. Peggot would have to serve her own time with what she’d told Mariah, about making a bed and lying in it. And with what the whole town heard: a mother turning out her own daughter. Mrs. Peggot bore her cross, changed his diapers, and taught him to tie his shoes.
How all this fits with the story of me, hard to say. Romeo drove away in his panel truck to parts unknown, where he and his new face could tell whatever story suited. I never saw that scary smile except in my nightmares. And sometimes also wide awake, in my mind. Wondering how it would look pumpkin-carved on Stoner. You lie down with snakes, you get up with the urge to bite back. All I’m saying.
7
School started, and I was ready to bust out of home lockdown. The first day we had to catch the bus down at the highway due to our road getting washed out from all the rain. It didn’t look that bad honestly, but bus drivers took no chances, being mostly older ladies and the school having no money to fix a busted axle. Anyway it was not a bad walk, maybe a mile from the top where we lived. There were nine of us for our bus stop, including these first-grade twins, and two sad high school guys of different families that we understood to be marked for life. Bus riders. Even at my young age I knew if you were sixteen and could get your ass to a fast-food job or bagging groceries after school, there were vehicles to be had. We all waited in a little gang watching adults drive out to wherever, work if they were the lucky few. Maggot and me grinning like pups, trying not to paw each other’s shoulders because of all the pent-up shit we had to tell each other. Or not tell, in my case, with Stoner’s words hulking around in my head.
School though was still school. Math class was like, Hey kids, welcome back! Remember math? No, Mr. Goins, we do not. And history as everybody knows is State of Virginia in fifth grade, so it’s Jamestown of the Doomed and all on from there. It took no time for Maggot and me to get back in our groove: shooting rubber bands at a suicidal wasp that flung itself at the window all through English. Scouting the lunchroom for girls that would give up their fries. Little-known fact: Maggot was almost a year older than me, but due to the bad business he had to deal with infant-wise, it took him the extra time to grow up to kindergarten size. How we ended up in the same grade. Our good luck. Now, at school with Maggot, I was a thousand miles from Stoner. If his plan was to make my home life suck so bad I wouldn’t want to lay out of school, it worked like a charm.
At the end of the day, first-grade-twin-mom was waiting at the bus stop with her ATV to take all the tiny tots up the hill, blue-ribbon mommy that one. The rest of us, left to our own device. It was unthinkable now to go back to the full ban on Maggot-association. We weren’t even clear on where the ban zone started. In eyeshot of my house, you had to think. To play it safe we took a few hours screwing around before making it all the way up there. I poked my head in the door and hollered but nobody was home. I went in, got a Snickers out of the fridge, and went to my room. End of story. I wish.
Mom gets home from work, yells how she hopes I had a good first day, I yell back it was okay. Then Stoner gets home: “What in the goddamn motherfuck, Demon. Get in here now.”
I had tracked in some mud on the kitchen floor, and Stoner was losing his shit. It was mud, okay? I am a kid, and we live in a place that is made out of mud. Fine, I took off my shoes and put them outside, then got the mop and bucket. I’d cleaned up worse. Mom in her times of lapse was a drinker of the toilet-hugging kind. Maybe where I got my weak stomach from. She’s standing by the sink saying nothing, with her hand over her mouth in case it was to get any ideas. Stoner is in the doorway, hands on hips like he’s the badass warden in Escape from Alcatraz.
I start mopping the floor, and Stoner asks what I think I’m doing. I tell him I am mopping the floor, spelled with a silent As you can plainly see, dumbass. He says he doesn’t think that’s going to do the job. Honey, he says, do you think that mop is going to do it?
Mom looks at him. Shakes her head, no.
Stoner agrees that it is not. What he wants, I eventually figure out, is to see me down on my knees with a rag scrubbing the damn linoleum. With a bucket of water and Clorox, in case somebody wants to eat off that floor or maybe open a fucking tattoo parlor.
Fine, scrub the floor I did. Mind you, I’m still of an age where most moms don’t want their kids messing with Clorox at all, my own included, as far as I knew. The fumes were getting me kind of high. I finished up and washed out the rags in the sink. Mom still right there with nothing to say about it. I looked at Stoner, needing to be done before I puked or passed out.
“Your boy says this is clean. Does that look clean to you?”
Mom looked over at him, surprised.
“Or does it look like his usual half-assed effort? Because I can still see his damn tracks on that floor. Can you not see the goddamn shit your son tracked in?”
Mom looked weird. I mean, she was in her regular work clothes, slacks and button blouse, Croc flats for standing in all day, hair in the ponytail she wore to look professional. But she had a glazed look, doped. Which she couldn’t have been, I thought. Did I want her to whip out a blade and slice him up? No. But something. For her to wake up in there for godsakes and see how mad is better than sorry. But all the mad Mom ever could muster just leaked right back out of her in tears and puke. Finally she said, “Demon, you better go on and clean it again.”
Bullshit. There was nothing to see. Mom’s eyes were excellent. They were about the only part of her head that always worked right. Whatever, I scrubbed the floor again, and as much rage as I put into it, they’d be lucky if there was any linoleum left. I dumped the bucket again, rinsed the rags again, threw them into the bucket like a ball I was firing home from the outfield. Pushed past Stoner to get myself out the door. He caught me by the collar of my T-shirt and dragged me back inside.
Where the hell did I think I was going, was his question, because I wasn’t done yet. Let’s all take a look at the living room, he said. More muddy tracks on the living-room carpet. Mind you, that carpet was nasty and old to begin with, stained since the dawn of time. Me and Mom were far from the first to live in this trailer. Stoner asked me what I saw and I said, A shitty-looking carpet. He said, That’s right. And he needed it clean. Because how was a man supposed to do his weight training on a floor that looked like that?