I admitted it to Angus, and it turned out she was a Gifted and Talented. No surprise, she was a reader like Tommy but more adult ones like sci-fi and female-type shit that could scare the hair off your balls, titles alone. Her scariness pertained to taking apart everything she looked at. Not just amateurs like Michaela, I mean people on TV. Like if we’re watching some show and a girl is ugly, glasses, etc., Angus would say, Okay, watch. They’ll make her the smart one. If a foreigner, possibly the villain. Angus could wreck a show like nobody’s business. If a character ever turned up that talked like us, country-type person, he was there for one reason only, stupidness. Wait for it … joke! He’s a dumbass! If a girl, worse. She thinks condoms are party balloons and the guy trying to get in her pants is just the sweetest li’l ol’ gentleman. Angus couldn’t believe I’d never noticed this before. You get so used to not even being anything on TV, I guess I was just like, Yay, country kid gets invited to the party!
She gave me the advice of not freaking out over Gifted and Talented. No big deal, they pull you out of class to do stuff that’s interesting. At Easter break you go on a trip. The ocean? She said possibly. One time it was to Stone Mountain, Georgia, which is practically as far. So the ocean was not out of the running. That would be something. If I was still around next spring, and got my math shit together, and pulled out of the bonehead zone. A lot of ifs.
In the meantime I had to figure out how to live in that big house with Angus, because Coach only came out like a bear from his cave to chew up dinner and crunch his PBR can in his fist and leave it on the table. The big square teeth looked to be hurting his mouth at all times. Angus told me they weren’t his teeth, by the way. He’d worn dentures since high school after he lost his whole front row biting off more end-zone turf one time than he could chew.
Another by-the-way she told me was her real name. Agnes. Some kids in first grade turned it around to tease her, and to shut them up she said she liked Angus better. Then decided she really did. Likewise, her daddy used to take her to every practice and game, sitting her up on his shoulders. Coach’s girl, in her tiny Generals jersey some lady made for her, riding high for all to see. Then in fifth grade he stopped letting her come to practices because it was no place for a young lady. She said fine, she hated football. Then decided she really did. And that’s the story on a motherless girl named Angus. Unbeatable. Coach was a big guy with big hands holding the world by its neck, with every game a win or else the world ends. Storm in a shot glass type of thing. And Angus was the opposite. A whole ocean, dark and chill.
31
Through some cousin or another, the Peggots tracked me down in Jonesville and called the house. Mattie Kate passed the phone over without a word, and the voice of Mrs. Peggot knocked the wind out of me. Wanting to know was I all right. Oh, I had answers, starting with “Now you care,” but instead I got choked up. Yes, I did want to see Maggot and her and Mr. Peg. I would see if I could get a ride over there. On Saturday, after football practice.
I knew Coach would make U-Haul drive me if I asked, and he did. U-Haul sat outside in the car waiting the whole time, so it was like the old days of supervised visits, only not really, because U-Haul had no power. I stayed for dinner.
The Peggots crowded around me like I’d come back from the moon. Mrs. Peggot saying how big I’d got, Maggot shocking me with how different he looked, serious raccoon eyes with the makeup, two earrings in his bottom lip. They asked about Jonesville and Coach and my grandmother Betsy and how come she was to take an interest in me after all this time. I said probably because she didn’t know I existed till I showed up in her yard looking like dog vomit.
“No,” Mrs. Peggot said. “That isn’t so. She knew about you.”
They got quiet. Mr. Peg looked at her. She nodded. And then in the Peggot kitchen after twelve years of life, I finally got the true story on my grandmother coming to have words with Mom. Not the day I was born, but some weeks prior. A car came up the holler that nobody had seen before. “It was a Chevy wagon,” Mr. Peg said. “With some sassy little gal a-driving it.”
Mrs. Peggot swatted his arm because she wanted to tell it. “It was a little gal driving, and a great big tall lady that got out and went up there to see your mama.”
“Then that little gal gets out and opens the back door, and what do you think is in there?”
Mrs. Peggot knuckled him again. “In the back seat, here sits the littlest old fellow you ever saw. A grown man, but he’s real small, some way.”