“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.
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.