As far as the books he wanted to discuss, I can’t even tell you what they were about. I honestly wished for a good Boxcar with a beginning and end, because these went nowhere. Theories. I told him about the hard and surprising knocks of city life, and he explained it all back to me in book words. He said up home we are land economy people, and city is money economy. I told him not everybody here has money, there are guys with a piece of cardboard for their prize possession, so pitiful you want to give them the shirt off your back. (Which Tommy would.) And he was like, Exactly. In your cities, money is the whole basis. Have it, or don’t have it, it’s still the one and only way to get what all you need: food, clothes, house, music, fun times.
Maybe that sounds like the normal to you. Up home, it’s different. I mean yes, you want money and a job, but there’s a hundred other things you do for getting by, especially older people and farmers with the crops, tomato gardens and such. Hunting and fishing, plus all the woman things, making quilts and clothes. Whether big or small, you’ve always got the place you’re living on. I’ve known people to raise a beef in the yard behind their rented trailer. I was getting the picture now on why June’s doom castle had freaked me out. Having some ground to stand on, that’s our whole basis. It’s the bags of summer squash and shelly beans everybody gives you from their gardens, and on from there. The porch rockers where the mammaws get together and knit baby clothes for the pregnant high school girls. Sandwiches the church ladies pack for the hungrier kids to take home on weekends. Honestly, I would call us the juice economy. Or I guess used to be, up until everybody started getting wrecked on the newer product. We did not save our juice, we would give it to each and all we meet, because we’re going to need some of that back before long, along with the free advice and power tools. Covered dishes for a funeral, porch music for a wedding, extra hands for getting the tobacco in. Just talking about it made me homesick for the life of unlocked doors that Chartrain called Not the Real World. You couldn’t see him sticking around one day in Lee County. We all want what we’re used to.
Tommy and I discussed this nonsense way too much, with all my emailing at the library involving some degree of shenanigans with a hot librarian named Lyra, more on her later. I expected nothing to come of it. Mostly, it was Tommy being aggravated. He pointed out how a lot of our land-people things we do for getting by, like farmer, fishing, hunting, making our own liquor, are the exact things that get turned into hateful jokes on us. He wasn’t wrong, cartoonwise that shit refuses to die. Straw hat, fishing pole, XXX jug. Kill Stumpy Fiddles, along will come Jiggle Billy on adult swim. But all I could say was, Tommy, you know and I know, neither way is really better. In the long run it’s all just hustle. So our hustle is different. So what?
And he said, I’m still figuring that part out.
62
Thanks to my orphan jackpot, I didn’t work full-time like most of my housemates. June had offered to help if I needed it, and she was keeping tabs on me. But I was well used to paying my own way. The monthly house fees came out of my social security account, and part-time at Walmart covered the rest. The entertainments of sober living are all those best things in life that are said to be free. Breathing, sleeping, enjoying your newly regularized bowels. Eating your own bad cooking. Bumming Camels and playing penny poker, listening to two Kentucky boys tell Tennessee jokes that you grew up telling as Kentucky jokes. Listening to hair-raising tales of the hood, in a language you wish had subtitles. I spent a lot of time at the library.
The main librarian at our branch was Lyra. Not your father’s Oldsmobile. She had cherry-red hair with short, straight bangs, and a full sleeve tattoo representing the book of Moby-Dick. Sinking schooner, curling waves, wrathful whale. She wore shorts, spiderweb tights and motorcycle boots in all weather. Deadpan flirt. I hadn’t been laid since Dori, not even once. It’s a level of death, knowing another body that well, that’s touched every part of yours, thinking about it now cold in the ground. Some days, that killed me. Others, I felt nothing. Sex was just a vague and troublesome part of the feverish life I’d put on the other side of a glass wall. The counselors warn you this may be the case, and advise against romantic involvements till you’re on solid ground with your recovery. Triple underlined, if you’re a young man with multiple mommy issues and a thing for hot-mess rescue cases that are doomed to suck you under. Lyra seemed pretty solid, but I knew me and involvements. I couldn’t poke a stick at that beast without getting swallowed alive. This one came to work with weed on her breath and seemed in every sense a party girl. I opted not to find out.
We found other ways to share. She liked books obviously and pointed quite a few my way, some that made me smarter, some just weird. She helped me study for my GED, which turned out to be a hell of a lot easier than being physically present to two more years of disgrace and overpriced drugs cut with sheep wormer. Which would have been my lot, as a fallen General. I think most of humankind would agree, the hard part of high school is the people.
Lyra’s secret love was computers. She set me up with email, and showed me how to use the library’s scanner to upload my drawings. Red Neck as mentioned had to sleep it off for six months, but as soon as I had two sticks to rub together in my brainbox, I got right back on the job. Tommy had what he needed at the paper office so we could trade sketches. He pitched story ideas, I drew them, he shaded and inked. With both operatives sober, our efficiency was first class. Pinkie wanted to renew us for another year.
With some sadness, we decided against. We were both moving on. Tommy finally met his girlfriend, and it was the real thing. Sophie was crazy about Tommy, and so was her mom’s family, that threw a big dinner for all the relatives to check him out. Tommy came back home, gave Pinkie two weeks’ notice, untangled himself from the McCobb utility space, and moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania. He and Sophie got married at the Polish-American Citizens Club, followed by a huge reception with a polka band. Get me a hankie, somebody, and I’m not kidding. Tommy had a family. Before I saw him next, he would be a father.
On my end, I’d outgrown superheroes, even the much-needed hillbilly kind. The Fleischer style of Red Neck was hemming me in, those bulbous eyes and noodle limbs felt babyish. I wanted to try something harder-core. Lyra was educating me, and not in the ways my idle mind had toyed with. After turning me on to the adult comics and graphic novels section of the library, she showed me what was going on in the world of online comics, which rocked my marbles. She walked me through building my own website. Mainly this involved me getting out of her way so she could click furiously at the keys while I lost myself in the dramatic oceanscape of her left arm. I could upload my drawings to the site, and in this fashion I started my enterprise. Like most of Mr. McCobb’s, it made no money whatsoever for the first year. Unlike him, I stuck to it. It was my own little universe, created under my alias, Demon Copperhead. I was far from the football field and Lee County lore now, and had gotten used to my mom’s name again. Most people called me Fields. But I had this whole other part I didn’t want to lose. My dad.