I eventually found my manners to ask about Coach, the scandal and everything. She said she and Coach went together to the school board to explain things, and he might get suspended, but not till after the fall season. The Generals without Coach, there would be rioting in the streets. Angus said he was okay with whatever got decided, he was wanting to pay the piper. I asked what they would do for money if he lost his job. She was on top of it, aiming to sell or rent out that big house. She was looking at apartments in Norton where she could go to her community college classes and Coach could get dried out. They had AA meetings over there. She was putting him on the clock. She’d stay and help him for another year, and then it was sink or swim because she was going away to the other type of college. I asked her wasn’t that a little harsh. She said no. She was not in the business of throwing her life away so other people can stay shitfaced.
She stopped herself. “I don’t mean you, Demon. You understand that, right?”
I said I knew I was not their problem. She argued with me, saying Coach was still my guardian. How was it fair, me getting assigned to a shitfaced guardian? I said add it to the list. But I could see she was getting upset. She’d made all new life plans over the last couple weeks, while there was still a me and Dori. Now she’d have to rethink. Not necessary, I said. She asked where I was going to live. I said I’d figure it out. I wasn’t mad at her. I wasn’t anything. I heard what she was trying to say, that we were still family. I just wasn’t feeling it.
She was wearing the little black hat with the veil that I’d given her our first Christmas. She’d joked at the time about how she was going to get known countywide as the funeral fox. Thanks, God. Nice one. We walked back to the burial in time to see it through. Thelma was one of the few that stayed. She was sweet and gave me a hug. But all told, other than Angus, not too many of the attendees gave me the time of day. Some few asked if I had known the deceased.
I had to move fast to get my things out of the house, because the Fred team came back after the funeral, pulled on yellow rubber gloves, and moved through like Haz-Mat with their Lysol and trash bags, clearing the place out. Furniture, pictures, precious Mom clothes Dori had kept for all time, all bagged and thrown outside. A guy was coming in two days’ time to haul everything to the dump. Not even a yard sale. To their mind, our life was entirely trash.
Luckily they ignored the Impala, seeming to think it was mine. All my stuff fit inside it. The two days they were cleaning, I would drive a ways and then circle back, sleeping in the vehicle, watching the heap of black trash bags grow to a mountain. They were scrubbing this branch off their tree. It turns out, Newport News is in Virginia. Same state, different planet.
The other mystery nobody cared to solve was Jip. I’d found him, too, not lying on top of her as usual but under the sheet, curled up against her cold belly. Did he have the same junk in his veins she did, I’ll never know. Accident or no accident, the question of my life. As part of my cleanup before calling 911, I’d picked up his hard little body that was curled like a cinnamon roll and wrapped it in the ratty striped towel he always dragged around the house. Pretending that rag was me, I assumed. Then later, with so much else going on, I forgot about him.
The little towel bundle turned up outside, on the black-bagged trash pile. This fierce tiny being that never stopped loving her, nor wanting me for dinner. I took him around to the back and buried him behind the tool shed. The one goodbye that was left up to me.
57
I’m not sure how many days I lived in my car before Maggot tracked me down. He was back living with Mrs. Peggot now. The kid had been bounced around in his time, but never homeless, because blood is thicker than water. I ought to know, born in the bag of water. No relatives, homeless, but at least I would never drown, yay! The gospel according to Mrs. Peggot.
She’d turned me out once, and I had my pride. I was not going back there begging. But now she actually wanted me to move in, and it took some convincing. Maybe she was hoping for the good influence on Maggot after all, or for somebody to fix busted hinges and everything else that was going undone with Mr. Peg sick for so long, then dead. Maggot’s talents ran in other directions.
I didn’t end up fixing much. There’s not a lot to say about those days I was there, mainly because I don’t remember them. Maggot and I went on a bender that obliterated the weekend and ran to the end of the month. Then we thought, who needs May?
All previous statements as regards junkies not really trying to get high, just trying not to get dopesick? Scratch that. After Dori was gone, I was chasing the big zero. With fair success. My job at the co-op finally joined the tits-up work history of Demon. And poor Mrs. Peggot, I did nothing around that house except to surface on rare occasions to drive her to the grocery. We’d have starved otherwise, since she didn’t drive, and Maggot was useless on Mr. Peg’s truck. One more strike on his blighted manhood: Maggot never learned to drive a manual.