The one person to cheer me up reliably was Tommy. One evening I went and found him in Pennington Gap, sure enough renting a garage from the McCobbs. Rack of garden tools on the wall, stained cement floor. He had a hose running from outside rigged up to a bucket for his washing. Hot plate, microwave. He put Dori and me to shame as far as tidiness, his books in shelves and his clothes folded in milk crates. A bed that was made. Bathroomwise, he had to use the one in the house. Weren’t they supposed to be putting one in out here? He said well, the McCobbs didn’t own that house, they rented. And their landlord wasn’t aware he was paying them to live in the garage. There you go, the McCobbs. But Tommy threw his hands wide to indicate his hose-bucket sink, his bed beside a hand tiller with sod dangling from the tines, and asked if I could believe how far we’d come in life. “My own place!” he said. A man among men.
I was lucky to find him home, most evenings he was at the newspaper office. They had him come in at day’s end to janitor up everybody’s unholy mess. Then the ad lady quit and they gave Tommy her duties of laying out the paper and making up the ads. His boss was Pinkie Mayhew that wore men’s trousers and drank on the job. People said the Mayhews had run the Courier since God was writing his news on stone tablets. Pinkie and two other people did all the photos and stories. Then Tommy came in nights and put the whole thing together. He said I could hang out over there any time, he could stand the company. So I did.
Tommy was carrying a lot of weight down there. Most of that paper was ads. The front page obviously would be your crucial factors, Strawberry Festival, new sewage line, etc. Then sports and crimes. They had other articles coming in over a machine, from the national aspect, and Pinkie would pick some few of those to run. All the rest was ads. Classifieds were laid out in columns, but the ones for car lots, furniture outlet, and so forth would be large in size, and Tommy had the artistic license of designing them. He had border tapes to dress up the edges, and what he called clip-art books that were like giant coloring books, on different subjects. Automotive, Hunting and Fishing, Women’s Wear. He’d find what picture he wanted, cut it out, and paste it up on the ad. A sofa for the furniture store, or he’d get creative, like a pirate ship for Popeye chicken. It depended on what pictures he could find in those books, which got picked over and cut to shreds. They didn’t buy him new ones very often. So he’d end up looking for the needle in the haystack, turning these pages of basically paper spaghetti.
Tommy was like a new person, a man in charge. He had clothes now that fit him, not the outgrown sausage-arm jackets of old. Plaid flannel shirts mostly, with the sleeves rolled up. He still had the girlfriend Sophie that worked at her newspaper in Pennsylvania, a much bigger operation than the Lee Courier, Tommy said. But he was proud of this one, showing me around: machines, computers, Pinkie Mayhew’s office with a stale ashtray smell that could knock a man flat. If you’ve ever opened a drawer where mice have ripped up toilet paper to make a nest in there, the entire space filled with white fluff? Pinkie’s office.
Tommy showed me how to feed print columns through the hot wax rollers and help him stick them on the pages. It was all done on a big slanted table with light inside. They had blue pencil marks showing where to line things up. The whole place smelled like hot wax. Little cut ends of waxy paper ended up all over everywhere, sticking to your shoes or the backs of your hands, like a baby eating Cheerios. This was the unholy mess that Tommy had to clean up. Honestly, he was holding that outfit together. I’d started coming in due to boredom, but he needed the help. He offered to pay me out of his check, but I said Jesus, Tommy, you have to quit being so nice to people. I still had his T-shirt.
One night I found Tommy pulling on his hair, looking for clip art he wasn’t going to find. He had a Chevy dealer ad, with nothing left in the automotive book but tow trucks, Fords, and fucking Herbie the Love Bug. I said, Look, let me just draw you a damn Silverado. And knocked it out. Gave it extra shine, one of those star-gleams on the bumper. That’s how it all started: clip-art Demon. I could do about anything. The Lee Courier started having a whole new aspect to its ads that probably was getting noticed. Tommy said I was a miracle art machine. I told him if there was ever a sale on skeletons, he’d have to take the wheel.
49
June wanted to see me. Emmy was two months AWOL, and she was at her wits ends. The scene of the crime was Fast Forward, everybody knew. But Emmy was well past the age of consent, and had gotten the message back to June that she was in no need of rescue.