Maggot and I sat like bumps on our log, letting the moon make us pretty. The whole place was, honestly, apart from me hating it for not being the place I wanted. On the other side of the sparkly water, a cone-shaped mountain with a pelt of pine trees rose halfway up the sky. The moon had a fuzzy ring around it. It was cold, and getting colder.
Maggot yelled across the lake at the mountain: “Who goes there?”
Like in our olden days, playing king of the hill. I yelled, “Nobody here but us hungry motherfuckers.” For a long while after that, we yelled across the lake at the dark mountain to hear our echoes. “I am one HUNGRY MOTHER,” we shouted.
Hungry hungry hungry. Mother mother mother.
The echoes were just in our minds, with the aid of a reefer. The truth is, it didn’t matter what or how hard we yelled. Nothing was coming back to us.
Emmy and Fast were gone for an age and came back with a large cold pizza and their faces rubbed raw, like they’d been making out. Some dishevelment. I noticed the buttons up the back of Emmy’s sweater were askew. We ate our pizza on the beach, which I don’t recommend as a tourist option because, sand. We’d brought a pile of blankets on this trip with the plan of camping out, and now got them all out to wrap around us while we sat on the beach. Maggot and Emmy both had their quilts that Mrs. Peggot made for all the grandkids out of cut-up squares of their outgrown clothes. I used to lie on Maggot’s bed staring at his, picking out all our good times. The green corduroys for instance that he’d wrecked playing on the Ruelynn coal tips.
After we ate, we cased a picnic shelter as a possible sleeping location, considering it for all of about ten seconds. The temperature was dropping like a rock. There was nobody around this park. We found some cabins and broke into one, which in our defense was not locked. The bunks had bare mattresses that smelled like mouse pee. A person can do worse.
The others were out like lights. Maggot’s snore I noticed had changed with his voice. Fast and Emmy had claimed the loft and it was quiet up there, so the hankypank evidently had been gotten out of the way. All I could think of was Dori. What kind of day did she have with Vester, what kind of jerk was I to leave her. I was getting bad sweats also, even as cold as it was, so I got up and took a smidge of oxy to stave off midnight shits. I only had a few with me. Fast Forward was serious about us not getting busted on the road, and had ordered us to bring minor items only, weed and beer. Once we got to Richmond we’d be taking on valuable cargo, meaning his business arrangement, and he said he’d take care of it. Hubcaps I assumed, or duct-taped to body parts, he was worldly-wise. I wondered if the other end of this deal was Mouse, his tiny, bossy friend that had sold her goods from the Pringles can at the Fourth of July party. She’d said she was from Philly, but a Mouse nest relocation was possible.
Right away I felt the oxy quieting down my aching guts, but not my brain. I couldn’t sleep. Too far from home, too much smell of mouse pee. I wrapped up in my blankets and went out on the porch. It was exactly the same cold, inside or out. They had rocking chairs and I sat in one, letting my eyes get friendly with the dark. I was surprised to see the door open and another blanket-cocoon slip outside, quiet as a cat. Emmy. I thought of those nights in June’s apartment, her sneaking out to lie down with me on my pillow fort bed. Water under a long bridge. She sat in the other rocker. I couldn’t see any part of her, just the burrito of her childhood quilt.
“Hey,” I said. “The moon went to bed already. So what’s wrong with us?”
She was quiet a long time. Then said, “Some guy threatened Mom’s life.”
“Christ. Who?”
“Some pillhead. He’s not the first. But this was just a few days ago. Then Maggot and I take off without even telling her, so right now she’s up at the house worried about us while some maniac off his nut could be creeping around with his Mac-10 fixing to blow her face off.”
Her surprising knowledge of firearms made that sentence way too disturbing. “Why would anybody want to hurt June? She’s Miss Popularity of the county.”
The tube of quilt shifted down a little and Emmy’s head came out of it. “You have no idea what she’s dealing with. People come in every day just wanting her to write them. They’ll say anything to get their painkillers. Kidney stones. They take the cup in the bathroom and prick their finger to put blood in the urine sample. She knows they’re shopping doctors, but if she says no, some of them get really ugly. Screaming, calling her a ruthless cunt.”