She remembered my birthday was coming, and asked what I wanted. I could name a few things. The Impala’s transmission was grinding like nails in a bucket. But I said I only wanted my girl. Pretty as a picture and forever mine. She wanted to know did that mean getting married. I said why not. We were never getting married, we could barely pull our act together to buy a phone plan. But Dori wouldn’t remember this conversation. She’d shot a patch and was lying on the bed with her feet over the edge. I got down on my knees and kissed the little rings on her toes. A dot of blood stood like a jewel on the top of her pale foot. I touched it, thinking of Maggot and me in another age, pricking ourselves, sharing our blood to promise brotherhood. As if it’s only by hurting yourself that you can be true.
She was dipping out fast, all dreamy over our make-believe wedding. I was going out later, so I’d done a 40 and was letting the jangly ups and downs even out while I sat on the floor listening to her. Tommy would be my best man. Sweet. She wasn’t always kind about Tommy, due to all the time I spent over there. But with the juice in her veins, she was all love. Jip would be our ring burier. Thelma and Angus, bridemaids. Or Angus could be my best man, she said. Kind of confused about where Angus came into it. My best girl-man, she said. She described the dress she’d wear and how everybody would say what a beautiful bride. How young we were.
Once she was out completely, I took care to turn her on her side and prop her with pillows before I left the house.
51
Another week, another shit show. Monday night. Maggot wants me to pick him up from Mrs. Peggot’s and drive around. Fine, we’re two guys getting away from women, as far as I know. He gives directions to this sketchy house in Woodway to pick up a friend, and who should that turn out to be but Swap-Out. News to me, that they know each other. Next thing I know we’re behind Walgreens, they’ve put a cement block through the drive-through window and we’re watching Swap-Out crawl in that tiny hole. He climbs up and clears the top-shelf boxes and we’re out of there in under three minutes. I have to pull over on Duff Patt Highway to put my head between my knees. Maggot is skunked out of his skull, yelling that he’s the fucking Robin Hood of Sudafed. I drop them both back at Woodway and fly out of there.
Tuesday. Fast Forward calls, wanting to know if I’d like to take a ride for old time’s sake. Where to? He says Richmond. I tell him not on your life, give my regards to the Mousehole, and by the way, how is Emmy? He says he and Emmy have parted company. I hang up and call June to find out if she’s back home, which she isn’t. June wants to know why. Shit. This is bad.
Wednesday. Not technically terrible, but as far as throwing me off my keel, yes, bad. Tommy tells me people are writing to the paper about Red Neck. He calls it an upswell of public opinion. Nobody ever writes the paper unless over something major, like after they took the soft serve machine out of Dana’s Quickmart. Pinkie orders Tommy to keep running that strip every week, by all means and no matter what, forcing Tommy to confess it’s not out of the regular package. “Contributed by a local talent,” he says. Pinkie takes this to mean Tommy himself, and offers him a ten-dollar-a-week bonus. Tommy says he’ll have a discussion with Anonymous as to where ten bucks per strip might get them. Every week would be a lot of pressure. Half of me says I’m already living on the knife edge between functional and dead meat blackhole junked, and this is the thing that’s going to shunt me in. And half of me says, Ask her for twenty.
People in need of a hero, there’s no shortage in the local supply. Ideas came at me from everywhere. It was fall now, topping and cutting time, so I did a series on tobacco. I drew little kids working to top the tall plants, girls in hair bows and short socks, boys in ball caps. All of them start seeing stars, reeling around dizzy with the green tobacco sickness. Red Neck swoops in and tears through the field, holding out a blade in each hand to top all the flowers at once. Then he piles the kids in the back of his pickup and takes them out for corn dogs. In the last panel you can see they’ve made a stop on the way: with the truck bouncing off into the distance, it’s a close-up on tobacco flowers they’ve left on two graves. One is Pappaw, one is Little Brother.
I gave him a DeSoto truck, 1950s model with the fins. Just so you know. Not a Lariat.
That strip started a whole thing of people leaving tobacco flowers at their cemetery plots. Pinkie sent her photographer Guy Greeley out there to take pictures, so that was crazy. The newspaper making the newspaper. Tobacco flowers also got left on the front stoop of the paper office. Pinkie got calls from the Russell County weekly and the daily over in Bristol, asking how they could run this strip, so she marched in to talk to Tommy. Pinkie coming in after-hours was such a rare event, it scared the living piss out of him, hearing that locked front door open. Half the storefronts in Pennington had been broken into lately, including ones you’d not expect to be all that rewarding. Extension office, H&R Block. This happened on an evening I wasn’t there, due to a small bender after getting fired from Sonic. I’d never met Pinkie. Tommy said picture a pit bull with Dutch boy hair, lighting one cigarette off the last, staring you down like she’s CIA special ops. Good with words, Tommy. She said it was time to formalize the Red Neck arrangement. There was money involved, so they needed a contract signed, a real person with a name. Still thinking it was him.