If she had to run out for groceries, she’d let me babysit him, which mainly involved making sure his oxygen tubes didn’t fall out of his nose. He’d want me to come sit close and hear the story of his life. The heart attack being least of the man’s woes. I’d wondered about his age, this grandpa type of guy being Dori’s father, and it turns out he did marry a wife ten years younger. But neither was he as old as he looked. Fifty-one. He’d worked for the mines prior to the layoffs, not as a miner proper but maintenance in the prep plant, longwall, I didn’t really know what that meant. It put him in the way of coal dust and asbestos. He said he would come home with little white hairs of that all over him, like after you’ve had a haircut. Throw off his coverall on the kitchen floor by the washer and think no more of it, because nobody told him to. After he got bad lungs, they got a settlement from the asbestos, which was how he and his brother started the farm store. But now his brother was dead and he was as good as, so don’t look for money to buy your life back, was his advice to me. And not that I said so, but I didn’t think I’d mind giving it a shot. I’d buy a new knee, because one of mine was shot to hell. I just did my best with Vester to change the subject onto car engines or football plays, and try not to stare at the skull behind his face and the arm bones under the spotty skin.
One noticeable feature of their house was a horse on the roof. Plastic, semi-life-size. It used to be on top of the store, but little-girl Dori begged to have it on their house, so there it stood. This was after her mom died and various aspects of family life took a header. The whole upstairs was a dead Mom museum, dusty closed window blinds, closets crammed with dresses they never threw out. Dori’s room was a different type of weird, rival to Haillie McCobb’s as far as stuffed animals go, but with Christina Aguilera Dirrty posters and a Sims Deluxe Edition box where she hid her condoms. She said she got those free from one of the home-care nurses. We would make out on her bed because we couldn’t help ourselves, but only to a point. Her dad was pretty much always asleep, so, not a problem. Jip was the problem. Adorable Jipsy Wipsy. If he wasn’t barking his brains out at me, he was making a low chain saw rumble and eyeing me with a view to clean castration. No way was I taking my pants off in that house.
My first choice would have been outside in the woods, on a blanket, with lightning bugs dancing around. Total Disney fuck, she’d go wild for that. But this was the dead of winter. I had to be creative. The special place I thought of was on Creaky Farm, which was foreclosed and sold now to some out-of-towner that never showed up to farm it. We heard of city guys buying and selling Lee County land they had no need of, just because it was dirt cheap and one more place to hide their cash. Creaky’s tobacco bottom had been fallow for two seasons, the cattle pastures all grown up in thistles, and none of these problems mine to fix. With the old man gone, the snake had no fangs. I’d enjoyed the place, on the few occasions I’d gone back to plunder it.
The spot I had in mind was the stripping house, that used to be my boy cave. It was built into the ground like a cold cellar, with stone walls cool at all times of year and damp to the touch. The cool would keep the cured stalks soft so you could work through the winter, stripping the leaves from the stalks by hand. But I used to go there just to be off by myself, safe. Nobody ever found me there. The soft dirt floor and sweet tobacco smell in the dark always put a spell on me, like starting life over in the belly of some mom that was getting it right this time.
I took Dori there. With a bottle of Thunderbird and some candles I’d pocketed at Mr. Peg’s funeral, which is how long I’d been planning this. I told her I had a surprise in store and she was all like, birthday girl. With anybody else it might have been a downer, driving out there on lonely roads, walking through dead weeds, no sound except some crows in a bald tree griping about the weather. Dori though. She’d get so excited for any small thing, it made you happy to be alive. I shoved open the heavy door like a castle keep. We spread out our quilt, and didn’t even get the bottle cap twisted off before we were out of our clothes and on each other. Her cold lips and little teeth biting my ears, the shock of her breasts with their brown eyes staring. The slipperiness of putting myself inside her, the pull of that. No force on earth could stop it, once we’d gotten that far. I’d spent so much of my life hungry, and these days were no different. Every minute I craved that feeling with another person, being that close. I couldn’t get air until I had Dori up against me again. Only then would the begging go quiet and let other good, strange things pass through my head. The beautiful slickness of all life, babies sucking tit, a calf getting born, pouring out of its mother the way they do, like blood from a pitcher.
Afterwards I lay looking up at the tobacco hanging above us like somebody’s laundry left on the line. Well cured now, for sure. I thought of taking some to roll in Zig-Zag papers and pass around to my friends for a change, instead of being the broke-ass that bums. Random, peaceful thoughts. I only ever felt like this after Dori and I banged our brains out. She liked to stay on me, balanced on my slippery chest and stomach and sloppy wet dick. Sometimes she’d take a nap. At first I’d worried every time about doing things right, but she said I did. How she knew, what other guys had or hadn’t touched her the right way, I had no wish to know. We were perfect together. She said before we were us, we weren’t anything. That’s why she could fall asleep on me, the perfectness of our fit. Or if not to sleep, she’d go all drifty, asking random things.
That day in the stripping house she asked if I ever noticed how those thousand-legger bugs, if you squash them, smell like cherry soda. Moving nothing but her mouth, this was her question. It shrank me up some. I mean, we’re naked. I asked why, did she see one? And she said no, just wondering. She also asked if animals knew they were going to die someday. She had to be thinking of Jip, she was senseless over that creature, so I said no. “Maybe sometimes, right beforehand, if it’s a situation,” I said. “But for the most part I’d say your normal animal day is a happy little bubble, like being always stoned.”
I felt her smile against my chest. She took my word on anything. She asked what did I think our baby chicken would be whenever he grew up. I said a rooster, if I had to guess. He was making sounds in that direction. Angus had started calling it Lovechild to aggravate me, and I took up the name to spite her. Even though he was living in the tool shed now and getting no love to speak of, unless Mattie Kate remembered to go out there and throw grain at him.
Finally Dori slid off me. Her teeth were chattering, so I gave her my flannel shirt. She scooted against the wall, drew her legs up to her chest, and buttoned my shirt around her whole body, knees and all. She looked like a plaid pillow with her head on top and the little pink peas of her toes poking out the bottom. I wanted to take her in my arms and hide her someplace. Her shiny black eyes watched while I lit Mr. Peg’s funeral candles and opened the bottle and poured the Thunderbird into paper cups. It felt like church, the part where they say, Remember who died for your sins. For Dori and me, all our best people died on us early, before we had any good shot at sin. So we had catching up to do. Maybe that’s why nothing we ever did felt wrong.