So maybe Mom’s pep talks were as much for her benefit as for mine. How lucky we were, because Stoner had a good job. Not a point to be argued in Lee County, I’ll grant you. The business he worked for was picking up, he’d be making good money, we would be safe.
This job that made Stoner the second coming of Jesus? A CDL driver. Meaning he drove a semi, with a special license so he could drive not just ordinary everyday shit around in his truck but beer. Or as Stoner called it, Product. Distribution truck driver for Anheuser-Busch. He had to pass an annual test proving he could lift and move Product weighing up to 165 pounds. All this and much more I never wanted to know, he told me while lying on the floor pressing his XMark free weights that had moved in along with certain bad smells and Satan. The weights took up most of the living room, all the more so if he was lying among them in his sweaty undershirt and leather bracelet, neck veins ready to pop, grunting on each press like he’s taking a shit. “Rotating and merchandising beverages at more than fifty customer accounts,” he says, like he’s a professor of whatever the hell. “Driving the routes to completion regardless of road conditions.”
“Medical and dental” was the part that got Mom excited. I would have coverage now in case I needed my tonsils out or got hit by a car. Or the ADHD drugs that some teachers had been wanting Mom to put me on from day one. Stoner said oh, yes, the riddling or whatever would take me down a notch. Mom was on the fence. But she said definitely I was going to the dentist now, whether needed or not. Which I wasn’t thrilled about. I’d heard kids say it was like a torture chamber, and I’d heard others say it wasn’t that bad, the dentist. I’d never been.
Soon I found out that teeth drilling was the best of what I could expect now. A whole new life for young Demon was Stoner’s plan, described to me one morning at breakfast after Mom left for work. I was going to learn self-discipline, like they teach you in the army. Not that Stoner had done military service, mind you. I reckon he saw the movie.
My mom has been too lenient with me, says Stoner, leaning over to take another slurp of his Cheerios and milk, and I’m thinking how much he eats like a dog. Even the red plastic bowl he’s eating from, how that could be a dog bowl. My mother has been letting me get away with ’tude. Now I’m going to learn how righteous people live, with discipline and respect for others.
I have nothing to say to this.
Stoner reaches forward lightning fast and decks me in the jaw. My spoon flies out of my hand onto the floor. One ear is ringing, my cheek burns. I stare at him. “What did I do?”
“Arrogant little piece of shit. It’s not what you did, it’s what you were thinking.”
What was I thinking? That Stoner ate his breakfast like a dog. A dog with gauges in its ears. That I’d like to clip a leash in one of those holes and take him for a hell of a walk.
“Here’s the thing,” Stoner explains calmly, like nothing just happened. Wiping milk out of his beard with the back of his wrist, scratching his tattooed head. He says it’s no surprise, me being so screwed up. How would Mom know how to raise a kid? She grew up in foster care. It’s inevitable she’s going to raise up another total loser. And I’m thinking, if he just called Mom a total loser, then he married her why, exactly? Losing track of where he’s going with this chat about how lucky we are, Mom and me. That Stoner came along to get us both straightened out.
I sit with my fists on the table, cereal bowl between them, my red-haired head still on my neck. Stoner finishes dog-slurping his cereal, I don’t blink, I don’t move. I’ve seen the army movie too. The milk in my bowl can go sour, day can turn to night, it’s nothing to me. I stay. Stoner shoves back his chair, throws his bowl in the sink, and goes out. The screen bangs shut.
Then I pick up my spoon off the floor and eat my cereal. That’s the win I get, if there is one. Filling up like a bowl under a dripping faucet. Filling with hate while I wait the man out.
I told Mrs. Peggot about Stoner, and she said she’d have to talk to Mom, either that or call DSS. I picked Mom. So they had their talk. I could tell Mom was hurt at Stoner. Maybe she didn’t realize how bad it was getting as regards the man-to-man shit. She tried pushing back on him some. One night she brought home a pizza, and while we were eating in the living room with the TV on, she used this bright, birdy little voice to say she still had opinions about things, and ought to be able to say them in her own house. It was during a commercial.
About what, was Stoner’s question, and her answer was: Me. That I was still her son. Stoner said nothing. The show came back on, which was Law and Order, and I didn’t want to eat any more. The pizza was a Hawaiian from Pro’s with the ham and pineapple, my favorite, which Mom of course knew and Stoner didn’t. This pizza was like a message in code from Mom to me, meaning: Don’t give up the ship, I’m still on it with you. But now with Stoner going quiet and all brutal in his eyes, I felt like I’d be lucky to keep down what I’d eaten so far.
The show ended. Stoner got up and turned off the TV and sat back down facing Mom. “I see,” he said. “Because drunks and pill heads are so good at taking care of their kids.”
Mom’s eyes went to mine. The house is on fire, is what they said, and I’m so sorry about it that I could die.
I knew she was sorry. We’d been over it a hundred times. That’s Step 9, apologizing to all the people you’ve hurt. That and the higher power, the moral inventory, the practicing of the principles, we’d been through it all. She’d tried, and to be fair I guess she was trying still.
“Mom is sober,” I said. “She got sober so she could keep me.”
“And who the hell asked you?” He leaned over the coffee table and closed the pizza box and slid it away from where I was sitting on the floor. Like I was an animal he was training that had just lost my privileges. He turned back to Mom.
“You love your kid so much, you let the neighbors fucking raise him. Even though we’ve discussed this. I have talked. And you have not listened. He’s still over at the damn Peggots’ more than he’s in his own house. Am I wrong?”
“No,” Mom said.
“No I am not. You sit here turning a blind eye while he runs around with that little queer next door, with the jailbird mother. Am I wrong?”
Mom said nothing.
“The little queer’s whore mother that is in the pen for shanking her goddamn boyfriend.” Stoner leaned over close to Mom and yelled, “Am. I. Fucking. Wrong?”
She nodded, then shook her head. Confused, due to being terrified. He turned to me.
“Is that your plan, Demon? To grow up and be a fag?”
“I don’t have a plan,” I said. I couldn’t even believe this conversation was happening.
“No? You’re not thinking you’ll find yourself a boyfriend, and then shank him and wind up getting gangbanged in prison? Is that the kind of people we are in this family?”
I wondered how Stoner would feel about getting vomit for an answer, because that’s where I was headed. But he didn’t care, he turned back to yell at Mom. I was starting to run low on sorry for Mom by that point. Marrying the asshole was not my idea.
“Tell him,” Stoner yelled at her. “Right now, so we can all hear it. He’s not going back over there to play with the queer. Not tomorrow and not ever. Or there will be consequences.”
She said it, and I didn’t see forgiving her for it.
I hardly went outside again until school started. It rained the whole week, which made it feel that much more like detention. I watched a thousand reruns of X-Men, Iron Man, Exosquad, Spawn, and Hulk. Whenever Stoner wanted the TV, I went in my room and read them in the comics versions. I drew pictures in my notebook of Stoner as a supervillain getting crushed in various ways. At some point the shows, comic books, drawings, and my dreams all got mashed up so it was like there wasn’t any me anymore. Just a quiet boy that looked like me with a beast inside, waiting to burst in a gamma warrior rage explosion.