“How should I know? Send her a present for the damn baby shower.”
I’d had no reason to think Linda had any feelings for me. None. She never even wanted to go get McDonald’s or drive around or anything. But to find out she was playing me utterly? The mystery of her thinking, plus no more of those phone calls, cold turkey, and nobody ever even knowing about it, was a black hole of misery. A huge thing that basically didn’t happen.
Angus came close in those days to knowing everything about me, but not this. I never told her about the Linda calls, too embarrassing. Even more so now. Dumb little horn dog boy that thought he was a man. The breakup, if you can call it that, weighed on me hard, and ended up wrecking the next weekend that happened to be our big road trip to Murder Valley. Angus and me only, no U-Haul, which should have been the happiest of events. Angus had gotten her license and wanted to celebrate by driving us someplace other than Walmart. She settled on wanting to see the house where she used to go with her mom, to visit Miss Betsy. On the drive down, she started up her usual teasing about my girlfriends, and I told her she could stuff a sock in it.
“I could,” she said, grinning. “But how fun would that be?”
“It’s not a joke. You are cordially invited to stay the fuck out of my personal business, for a term of one hundred years to life.”
She said nothing. Eyes on the road, hands on the wheel at eight and four o’clock.
“If you think my love life is so interesting, Angus, why don’t you get your own?”
“Why? Let me think. Because males are infantile, and females are exasperating? So, what does that leave me, animals? You know, I might get there. But so far I’m just not feeling it.”
Silent treatment after that. For over an hour, which was hideous. We’d never really had a fight before, other than our nonsense ones that were purely for entertainment. I hated that I was harsh with Angus, but you can’t help what you are. I spent some time idling on the memory of punching the dash of Mrs. McCobb’s car. Eventually Angus tried to bring up another subject, of being worried about her dad. But Coach seemed the same as always to me, and I said so.
Things didn’t lighten up till we got down there to the house. Angus jumped out of the car with a big smile, walking all around with her hand clamped on her hat like she’s in shock, and it might fly off. Looking at things outside the house, inside the house, like this happy big-eyed fairy in a white T-shirt and leather vest, saying, Oh, I remember this! Which I’m sure she did, since nothing probably had changed in that house since God was a child. I hadn’t really thought before about the place being special to her, like seeing my dad’s grave was to me. The house where her mom grew up. The bed where she slept, the bathtub. A dead parent is a tricky kind of ghost. If you can make it into more like a doll, putting it in the real house and clothes and such that they had, it helps you to picture them as a person instead of just a person-shaped hole in the air. Which helps you feel less like a person-shaped invisible kid.
They were tickled at us for coming, and had cooked a feast. Mr. Dick had a kite to show me, not ready for takeoff. Miss Betsy wanted to have a discussion on our futures, and sat us down in her living room where old furniture goes to die. Angus went first, being older, junior year, which Miss Betsy said was time to think about college. Angus said she definitely wanted to do that, and study psychology or sociology, which I wasn’t even sure what those were. But so what, because that was her plan, Angus had no intention of staying in Jonesville. Not that she’d made any promises, but I felt betrayed. She was leaving us. What about Coach?
So I was already upset whenever it came my turn to tell Miss Betsy my future. Plus I’d never given it a thought, other than hoping to be still alive. All I could come up with was maybe trying for college on a football scholarship. Miss Betsy said the same thing as always: “As long as you don’t let the sports interfere with your studying.” With no comprehension that on a football scholarship, sports are kind of the whole point. She wasn’t opposed though. She said it was important to leave Lee County at some point and “take a look around.”
At what, I wanted to ask. Cities? Harsh streets and doom castles where nobody lived that I cared about? I couldn’t stand to live anyplace without Coach and Angus. And Mattie Kate, I included her. The Peggots close at hand, and my teammates, and all of Lee County chanting my name from the stands: Dee-mon Copper-head! To start over someplace from scratch, as nobody and nothing? I hated the thought. I was only just now starting to exist.
The drive home was no better. Well, Angus was better, chatty and cheerful. But I was still hurt at her, with more reason. Miss Betsy had got her off and running. She wanted to talk about the colleges she’d thought of applying to. There was one in eastern Virginia she had her eye on, so she might actually end up living near the ocean! That was just lording it over me, I felt. She was older, leaving first. Making sure I knew she wasn’t scared of a thing. Worldly-wise.
I rolled down my window and tuned her out. I could smell the dirt of the fields waking up, see the mountains with every tree lighting up on top like a candle, first neon green of spring. It should have been enough for any human person. I did know that, I have to say. Give me a view, pretty as a picture, I’m still pissed that I’ll never get to see the ocean. I wondered what would it take to stop me feeling like I had rotten fruit down in me instead of a heart.
All I could think about on that drive was my lonely runaway spree that got me down to Murder Valley the first time. I took notice of all the sorry attractions as we went past them: the barn where I hid out to sleep in somebody’s haymow. The mini-mart where I curled up starving behind a dumpster, in the rain. The truck stop where I lost everything, and cursed a hooker to die. My entire life’s savings, that probably amounted to less than Angus had spent on her latest change of clothes. I didn’t point out any of those places to Angus. I’d been so young back then. And still was, I guess. She liked to tease me that if we lived to a hundred, she would still be the one to get there first. Which was true. No credit given for all the extra miles that take you nowhere.
38
Once I’d stopped being a kid, summers were nothing more than a crap job to clock into. That or school, same difference. But living with Coach, summers came back. I was a kid again, as far as somebody else taking care of the harder aspects, bill-paying, etc. I should have been thankful, and can’t say why I wasn’t, other than that growing up goes one direction only. You can’t stuff a baby back where he came from, and on from there.
Oh, I said thank you. All the time. To Mattie Kate for feeding me, to Angus for driving me places, to Coach for every freaking thing. Saying thanks, but at the same time thinking, where can I hide my dope, how can I get out of doing all this homework, who is he to tell me I can’t go riding around with my friends on a Saturday night, I’m not a damn child.