It was a temptation to stay and eat, given all that food, so we did. Then midway through everything, Emmy showed up. A buzz ran through the place, plastic forks and chicken legs frozen midair. I’d not seen her earlier at the church, but she must have been there. She had one of those flowers they let you take off the casket. June shot her the get-over-here look, but Emmy turned on her heel and walked off, with that long-legged rose on her shoulder like a rifle.
I ate fast, and Maggot and I went outside for a toke. Dori was having a big time, but I’d had enough of this party, and Maggot needed a furlough from the war in his brain, with Mr. Peg now dead on his battlefield. I’m not saying Maggot’s and my problems stacked up equal, but the same remedy applied. Weed is versatile. We were out there having an ignorant dispute over why a funeral home would need an entire row of dumpsters lined up at the back of the building (his view: excess bodies), and out of nowhere we heard a catfight. Major bad-bitch business, you could just about hear the fingernails sinking up to their hilts. We walked around the corner in our friendly fog, and were shocked to see Rose Dartell with a fistful of hair, and Emmy on the other end of it. Emmy screaming so hard, some of that pretty brunette had to be coming out.
My reflexes weren’t top notch, but I managed to get around behind Rose and pull her away. The hair thing though, I had no skills with that. I shifted to a choke hold while Emmy worked both hands up over her head trying to untangle herself from Rose’s fists. Finally Emmy staggered back, bloody nose, little flouncy skirt skewed sideways, stockings shredded, little gravels stuck in her knees. Eyes like flamethrowers. Rose twisted out of my hold with such force, I got a flash of her growing up with murder-boy Fast Forward, holding her own. She stomped across the lot, threw herself into a pickup, and tore out with a squeal that froze the black-dressed huddle coming out the front door. Emmy was gone in the same instant, down the alley in all her wrecked glory. Maggot and I watched her cut between the dumpsters, stomping off towards the laundromat and points west.
“What in the everloving hell?” I asked Maggot.
More of the upstairs funeral people started coming out, barely missing the brawl. Family of Collins, that thought about destroyed me. I saw which one of them had to be the girlfriend, with the baby and the wrung-out face, gripping that child like her last ten cents. Her hair was done in an old-style way, teased in the fat bump behind the headband. I remembered her now from school, one of the countrier girls. I knew I should go say something to her, but God alone knows what.
“Did you talk to Hammer?” Maggot asked.
“Just to tell him I was sorry. About Mr. Peg and everything.”
“He’s a sorrier fuck than that. Emmy broke up with him.”
“Already? Well, hell. That was a flashbang.”
“Thanks to you, man.”
“I never touched the girl.” I felt myself going red in the ears. “Since fourth grade.”
“Not you, asshole. Your high-flying friend. Looks like his sidekick is pissed.”
I was confused enough, he had to spell it out. They’d been seen. Emmy and Fast Forward. I got a squelched feeling in my chest, like a rotten apple in there. “Demon’s friend, that Fast person,” June called him, and had been asking if this young man I’d introduced to Emmy was decent. I told Maggot I didn’t know him well enough to say. I wished it was the truth.
44
All the way up, or all the way down. That was me now, getting beat with both ends of that stick before any day’s end, never both at once, and not much in between. Nobody but Dori knew what I was going through. Coach had told me to cut back on the percs, get off the oxys altogether, and stay off that knee as much as possible. If pain wasn’t an issue, he said, I could taper out on the meds, get healed up, and he’d get me back in playing form in time for next fall.
I did what he said, or tried. Every day. Until I was hiding puke in my balled-up jacket and swamp-sacking my bed sheets. Then I’d give in, take a couple of pills and start again. Usually some percs and half an oxy in the morning would get me through school as a functioning being, and then afternoon and evening were just so many hours to get through until, until. Until the next hour that’s not completely horrible, bought and paid for with another pill. Pain was not the issue. Pain is just this thing, like a noise or a really bad smell. Here’s you, there’s the pain, you bump fists and make your deal. What I’m discussing is a feeling up inside your blood and lungs, like you’ve been snakebit from the inside. Shivering, loose-boweled, a body you want nobody to get anywhere close to until you can get it fixed. The issue is: how soon will this bottle run out.
Late December, was the answer. Dr. Watts had renewed me a few times over, and I’d taken exactly what he and Coach told me to, right up to our sad defeat at Richlands. I won’t pretend I’ve always been the obedient boy, but now I had people counting on me, and not just my teammates, this was a countywide situation. For the first time in my life I had a man’s job to do, and the guts to hold my bargain. We didn’t make it to semifinals, thanks to one mean motherfucker of a defensive end and God taking his regular dump on Demon. But even after I got hurt, I did everything in my power to be the man Coach thought I was. Now Coach was looking to seasons ahead, me getting off the meds and on my feet, so I’d die before I asked for another prescription. But dying felt like an actual option here. Day by day the orange bottle rattled its sadness at me, going down for the count.
Salvation was Dori. Everything was Dori.
I wanted a second first time with her, even if it was really our fifth or sixth. We were clocking them up pretty fast. But I wanted Dori to know I felt about her the way adult or married people do, if not better. To be together like that. Not in a car. It was a goal I set my mind to.
We spent most of our time looking after her dad, Vester, in their farmhouse that smelled of gas-stove pilot and adult diapers. Not sexy. Jip went berserk every single time I walked in the door, flattening himself to the linoleum like a rat-skin rug, his black beady eyes shooting murder. Vester’s hospital bed was in the front room so he could watch the comings and goings, which were sadly few. They had home-care nurses a few times a week to do stuff Dori couldn’t handle, catheters and such, and Dori would chat them up like crazy, being lonely. She was on her own for the most of it, even cutting the man’s hair. She said all her friends dropped her like a hot rock after Vester got sick. Staying in school wasn’t an option, it took all-day drives to get him to his different specialist doctors. At this point, those drives were probably the best part of her life. Beeping the horn whenever they crossed the state line, having their big adventure.