I said Hey, I’m Demon. Trying my best to look like just, whatever. Not a person that bites. The bigger one said he was Tommy and this here was Swap-Out, and he grabbed the buckets I’d cleaned and started stacking them. The smaller kid went in the tool room for a shovel and went to work shoveling shit in the far end of the barn. This kid Swap-Out, everybody knew. He’d been in second grade with me, not his first time at it, and probably was still stalled out in the lower grades due to something going on with him that affected his mind and his growth. He was small in a freakish way, weird face, the eyes and everything not quite where they should be. People said it was from his mom drinking too much while he was in the oven. I always thought, And mine didn’t? But Mom claimed she’d stayed on the wagon for the most part with me, at least in the early months, due to every single thing she looked at making her want to puke. My good luck.
“We knew you’d be coming,” Tommy said. Which I said was interesting because I sure didn’t. He said he didn’t mean me exactly. Some tax bill comes due on the farm in April and September that the old man needs the money for, so usually there’d be an extra boy coming then. I had no idea what to make of that. I asked Tommy how long he’d been living here and he said a couple of years, off and on. Sometimes he was the April and sometimes the September. He said Creaky’s wife had always liked him before she died, but Creaky hated him, so now Tommy came and went as needed. I just said, Huh, and left it at that.
This Tommy individual I’d also seen at Elk Knob Elementary, but he was some older than me, at middle school now. Last name of Waddell, so people called him Tommy Waddles, which he did. He was a chubby teddy-bear type of kid with big round eyes and brown hair that looked like it was too much for his head. It stood straight up. Some guys in those days were trying for the Luke Perry hair thing from 90210, but in the case of Tommy you could tell that wasn’t gel or trying, that was just all Tommy. Also too much Tommy for his clothes: sausage arms in his jacket sleeves, jeans straining at the belt. Now I knew why. Foster care. I don’t reckon they look at you all that often and say Hey kid, you’re busting out a little bit, let’s go shopping.
But after all my fears over getting judged as a biter, Tommy was so nice. He showed me where to stack the buckets, how to go in the corn crib and get the corn for graining the heifers and calves, and various things we had to do before going in. The corn crib was a small barn type of thing, so full of rats you had to look where you stepped. Seriously, they ran over your feet. If something was hard to lift, like a grain bag, Tommy tried to do it. He explained things without acting like I was an idiot. He said the cattle were Angus, boy or girl either one, all called Angus. The cows got bred to have calves, and the boy ones would get castrated into steers and raised up in the pastures to about half grown. Before winter came on hard, they’d be sold to the stockyards and go out west someplace to get fattened up the rest of the way. From there, hamburgers.
Tommy talked sweet to the cattle whenever we were graining them and putting them up for the night, even though they were just dumb giant monsters. He was the same with me. Like he was trying to make up for all the bad things in our lives. At least I wasn’t looking to get castrated and turned into hamburger, that I knew of. Tommy said you got used to it here. He called it the Creaky Farm, a name made up by Fast Forward because he was a genius at thinking up names. Fast Forward was the other foster kid here, not home yet because in high school and at football practice, a major star on the Lee High team, which are the Generals as everybody knows. To hear Tommy tell it, Fast Forward was the best-liked person of everybody alive, even by Mr. and especially the dead Mrs. Crickson. I would like him too, just wait and see. He’d been at this farm forever and was kind of like their real son, even though he hated Mr. Crickson. Or Creaky rather, which we were all supposed to call the old man, except to his face.
Tommy showed me where to wash up before we went in. By the porch with the screens hanging off, they had a spigot for hosing off your hands, shoes, whatever you could without getting too wet. I was already wet from getting rained on all day. But excited about getting to eat something. I wanted it to be true what Tommy said, that I could get used to this or at least lie low and get through it. Maybe at school not too much trash-talk about me would be going around, if it was only up to Swap-Out, a kid that was respected by nobody. I’d last out Mom’s three weeks in rehab and go back home with nobody the wiser. Stoner, I had no plan for. Maybe the DSS did. Maybe there was a God in his heaven after all, and we would all fart perfume.
Tommy Waddles let me hang on him while I stood on one foot trying to hose the shit off my shoes. My shoelaces were all knotted up. I realized I hadn’t had my shoes off since I put them on last night in the ambulance. No socks, same reason. Everything I was wearing was wet and smelled like cow shit. All the clothes I had. Tomorrow at school, I’d smell like cow shit.
Fast Forward got home as we were sitting down to dinner, and everybody acted like it was Captain America out there in a Ford pickup. “He’s here!” and all like that. This kid has done no chores whatsoever, plus he’s driving a Lariat F-150, two-tone red and silver with the square headlights. Sweet. I wondered if the vehicle was his, or borrowed from the farm, or what. I wondered if fosters were allowed to have anything belonging to them. I had much to know.
He came in the kitchen and even the damn dogs looked up. First they’d moved all day. He’s long and lean with a look to him like somebody famous, all clean teeth and dark eyebrows and a head of hair not to be believed, like an explosion. Mad curly, like Mariah Carey in her mop-hair days, only not that long obviously. They’d not let you on a football team with long hair back then. “Hey Fast,” all the other boys said, and “This here’s Demon.”
Fast Forward stops dead in his tracks like he’s a comedy act, looking from the other kids to me, me to them, working out what to make of me. I’m ready for the biter remarks, bared teeth and snarl. But he smiles his rock star smile and says, “New blood! About time we upgraded the stock around here.” And Mr. Crickson smiles and nods like he thinks so too, and I’d been all his idea. Nutso. A grubby little bunch of boys looking up to an older kid, that’s the normal. But he’s even got the old bastard under his powers. Demon, I’m thinking, watch and learn.
Dinner was hamburger meat with cans of Manwich poured on it plus macaroni and melted cheese, awesome. I would tell Mom about this. She never could think of a thing to make for dinner. Mr. Crickson asked Fast Forward how was practice and who was on defense and did he still think the Generals would go undefeated this year. So many words out of the old man’s janked throat. He’d been saving it up all day for Fast Forward. After supper Mr. Crickson went in the other room and watched TV, aka fell asleep in his recliner chair, and Fast Forward scooted out. Leaving the rest of us to clean up in the half-assed way you would expect from three boys, one of them being quite a few bricks shy of his full load. Why that kitchen looked like it did.