“Just tell me this,” June said. “Is she taking pills?”
“You want to sleep tonight? Or the truth.”
“I’m asking.”
“Then I’ll tell you. I don’t know a single person my age that’s not taking pills.”
June was quiet. I tried to decide if this really was true. Angus was the exception. Even Tommy popped NoDoz, due to the hours he kept. Late nights at work, and then the McCobbs had him up early taking the kids to school. We were halfway back before she spoke again.
“They did this to us. You understand that, right?”
I did not. Neither the who, nor the what.
She told me more of what I’d heard from Emmy, what she was seeing at the clinic. I asked if anybody was wanting to kill her lately, but she waved that off. “I’m not the one you need to worry about. It’s not just people your age. You know what I’m saying? If they’re old, sick, on disability? They need their scrip. If they’re employed, they get zero sick leave and can’t see me more than once a year, so there’s no follow-up. They need their scrip. That bastard.”
I shouldn’t have asked what bastard. Kent. And his vampire associates, quote unquote. Coming here prospecting. She said Purdue looked at data and everything with their computers, and hand-picked targets like Lee County that were gold mines. They actually looked up which doctors had the most pain patients on disability, and sent out their drug reps for the full offensive. June kept looking at me like she knew the parts of my business I wasn’t telling her. But Kent was nothing to me. If I had problems, they were my doing.
Back at the house, she wrapped up a lot of food for me to take, and walked me to the car. Instead of saying goodbye, she stood with her arms crossed, looking at me. Weirdly, I thought of that time at the Knoxville zoo, how she took hold of me by the ears and said she knew what I needed. And was exactly right. Of all the good people I knew, she was probably the best one.
Tommy let me draw a comic strip for the paper. How that came about, long story. Starting with Tommy in a newspaper office. This was basically his first-ever contact sport, Tommy vs. the great big world. Where had he been, up till then? Magic Treehouse. Having a job suited him, not a problem. But the big world itself? It was whipping Tommy’s ass.
These national type articles that came in over their machine were a grab bag, as mentioned. Election, Olympics, earthquake, Lance Armstrong, what have you. But it was a Pinkie requirement to run any of them with mention of Southwest Virginia or anything close, like Tennessee or Kentucky. Which they mostly never did. But if so, dead guaranteed to be about poverty, short life expectance, etc. The idea being, we are a blight on the nation. Tommy showed me one with the actual headline “Blight On the Nation.” Another one said “smudge on the map,” that he’d highlighted with yellow marker. He was saving these articles in a folder. Seriously. Where was the Tommy of old, that took other people’s lickings and kept on ticking? Over there on his spin-around stool was where, tugging on his stand-up hair, getting worked into a lather. I was like, Tommy. You didn’t know this? Evidently not. He couldn’t stop reading me headlines. “Rural Dropout Rates On the Rise.” “Big Tom Emerges as Survivor.”
“Technically that’s one for our side,” I said. “Our guy wins Survivor.”
Tommy held up the photo they ran of Big Tom. Okay, not good.
I tried to explain the whole human-being aspect of everybody needing to dump on somebody. Stepdad smacks mom, mom yells at the kid, kid finds the dog and kicks it. （Not that we had one. I wrecked some havoc on my Transformers though.） We’re the dog of America. Every make of person now has their proper nouns, except for some reason, us. Hicks, rednecks, not capitalized. I couldn’t believe this was news to Tommy. But I guess I’d seen the world somewhat, with our division games where they called us trailer trash and threw garbage at us. And TV, obviously. The month I moved out of Coach’s, Chiller TV was running this entire hillbilly-hater marathon: Hunter’s Blood, Lunch Meat, Redneck Zombies. And the comedy shows, even worse, with these guys acting like we’re all on the same side, but just wait. I dated a Kentucky girl once, but she was always lying through her tooth. Ha ha ha ha. Turns out, Tommy had squandered his youth on library books and had zero experience with cable TV.
He kept wanting to know why. Like I knew. “It’s nothing personal,” I said.
He was fidgeting with his shirtsleeves, unrolling and rolling them to his elbows. Finally he looked up. With tears in his eyes, honest to God. “It is, though. I’m afraid Sophie won’t ever want to come here. She says her mom keeps asking why she couldn’t date somebody closer to hand. What if her whole family thinks I’m just some big, toothless dumbass?”