“For the record, I never heard of anybody that died of being a linebacker. Maybe just fang-banged into a coma by horny cheerleaders.”
His half smile yanked back in so fast, like a slug if you touch his little horns. All pulled back inside the pissed-off black leather and the blank eyes. Shit. I was piling stupid on stupid here, but didn’t know how else to go. As far as I’d seen, the basis of friendship for guys past the age of bedwetting is trash talk. Throw “fuck” into any sentence and you’re dead hilarious.
“Tell your dad thanks for the bed,” I said. All else fails, try kissing up. “The last place I was living, I got the floor of the laundry room.”
“At Miss Woodall’s? She made you sleep on the floor?”
“No, not there. You know her? My grandmother?”
My grandmother. It felt like casually pulling a hundred bucks out of my pocket. I saw something move behind the eyes of Angus, like, Damn, dude. One hundred bucks.
“My mother used to take me to see her,” he said. “But I was too little to remember.”
Right. Before all the cancer and the death.
Angus showed me a bathroom that was for me and nobody else. Shower-tub combo. I’d find a way. His room and his dad’s were one floor down. I asked how many rooms were in the house total, which he didn’t know. Unbelievable. Counting is the first thing I’d do. I asked did they ever switch around.
“Why? You don’t like the room you’re in?”
“No, I mean you or your dad. Like if you got bored and moved into another one.”
He stared at me.
“Just every so often trying out different windows. I mean, it’s all here, so why not?”
“I might not be able to find him, is why not.”
“He’s a pretty big person to lose track of,” I said.
“You’d be surprised.”
We were in the bathroom, both facing the mirror. I tried out his same medicine, staring him in the eyes. “I guess you could, in that holy hash of mess downstairs.”
I saw him light up with a little bit of fight. Barely, but seeable. Underneath the screw-you was a kid that wanted to protect his dad. Maybe more than he got protected back.
He went downstairs to get towels and things for me, which took so long I forgot about it. I unpacked the clothes out of the suitcase and put them in the drawers. Empty. Go Mattie Kate. Shoved the suitcase under the bed, looked out all three windows: the guy still mowing hay, streetlights on in Jonesville. Put on a clean T-shirt and got in the bed. I was beat up. Almost asleep before Angus knocked on the door and came back in to say he’d left my stuff in the bathroom. I sat up spooked, like in the days of little Haillie popping up out of nowhere.
“Okay. Thanks.”
Angus was altered. Ready for bed, out of the jacket and the hat, in some kind of white stretch outfit that showed the build, skinnier even than I’d thought and small through the waist. A lot of curly, sort of moppy blond hair. What I am saying is, girl hair. A girl build.
We stared at each other, then the door shut and Angus was gone, leaving me to stuff my blown-out brain back in my head and remember what all I’d stupidly said to him, to her. I couldn’t. There was too much. Other than, was she on the JV football squad, pretty memorable. Fang-banging cheerleaders. Had I said I thought we’d be sharing the same room?
I couldn’t fall asleep for wondering how I was so stupid. I guess I’d not been around girls much lately, especially not in those boots. But still. The second I knew, it was plain as daylight. And my mind couldn’t stop running back over every single asshole thing I’d said to Angus, the girl. Starting with, “Like the cattle.”
29
The deal here was, I would get a do-over. Like Stoner did, walking out of our mess to start his clean slate. I’d planned on hating his guts permanently for it. Now came my turn, and I kind of hated my own. How was it fair to Mom, being still alive with all new everything: clothes, room, killer amazing castle house. New grade in a new school where I was the new boy.
The house alone, Mom would have killed for a peep inside of. She used to tell me how she and her friends would lay out of school and break into teachers’ houses in the daytime to see what booze they had, what was in their bedroom drawers, like porn, vibrators, etc. I was living with a teacher. God alone knows what was in his bedroom, but you could open a store with the crap he threw on his living-room floor. Plus beer in the fridge, Jim Beam in the cabinet. Given how early he went to bed, the man was just asking me to teach him how to share.
But that didn’t make life easy. At Jonesville Middle they had two little cement bulldogs on towers out front, like guarding the place, and on it went from there as far as being baby-town. An office lady in her clack-clack heels walked me to my new homeroom, and I’m thinking, Lady I hitchhiked to fucking Nashville, you think I can’t walk down this hall by myself? All these puppy eyes looking at me like, New boy! Please don’t hurt me! Was it a town versus country thing, I don’t know, but these kids were oversize Haillies and Brayleys with their wet-combed hair and buttoned-up shirts, some with breakfast crumbs still around their mouths, I swear to God. Sixth graders. No comprehension.
Did they know more than me as regards pronouns and subjunctions, Roman civilization etc.? Yes. Being checked out of school mentalwise for the last year and then some, I was so far behind it looked like a race with my own ass. But the weirdness wasn’t in what I didn’t know. It’s what I did know. How to watch your back at all times. What a hooker means by “fun” and an asshole means by “discipline” and a caseworker means by “We’re working on it.” And money. Christ. Watching these kids pull it out of their pockets in fistfuls of fives or ones or tens, holding out the whole wad for the lunch lady to pick through, like they don’t know the difference. Or don’t care. Outside at recess, betting and losing actual quarters over utterly ignorant shit, like who holds his breath longest or will that bee fly up Miss Wall’s dress and sting her twat.
What stood between this pack of blind puppies and me was the education of how many batteries drained, bags of garbage hauled, hours clocked in and out, makes the difference between a oner and a ten. I was inked with the shit-prints of life: thrashings, lies told, days of getting peaced out on weed, months of going hungry. I didn’t want to be like these other kids. But I didn’t want to be the freak fish out of water anymore either, dead sick of that. Feeling every minute like somebody’s going to call me out, tell me I’ve got no business walking around that place in expensive new shoes, and should go back to whatever shithole I crawled out of.
The Air Maxes, new jeans and all that, another story of weirdness. Angus took me shopping. Coach headed off to Saturday practice and said to go get me what I needed. Nobody asked me, we just took off in U-Haul’s Mustang, Angus up front with Snake Man, me in the back seat fixing to shit myself. How far would this adventure go before they found out I had smoke-all in the way of cash, being the question. Pretty far, was the answer. I tried telling Angus I would stay and wait while they did their shopping, but she said not to be an idiot, get out of the car. U-Haul stayed. I followed Angus into Walmart, down one aisle after another with her throwing stuff in the cart. First groceries. What did I like to eat, she wanted to know. Anything that’s not rotten, the more the better, I said. She rolled her eyes like I was purposefully being a dick.
“I’m serious,” I said. “You don’t want to know some of the crap I’ve eaten before.”
“Like what?” She frog-eyed me. “Human livers? Used Tampax?”