John McManus - Fox Tooth Heart

“No. They do worse to pigs than dogs. I say lock up pig farmers, let Vick go.”

“I hope he comes and lives here after parole,” Gus said.

Allen shook his head. “The blacks have got their own camp, across town.”

Watching his frosty breath mingle with the smoke, Stephen wondered if his neighbors were joking. Didn’t they realize that Vick, after serving his time, could live where he pleased? He supposed he didn’t care. Embers rose into a starless sky and he wished a winter storm would bear down, trapping him at work to save him from a night here, but there wasn’t one snowflake, and by next day’s close of business he was choosing a recovery meeting from the list to fulfill his weekly mandate.

“My name’s Pam, and I’m a sex addict,” said a woman with vibrantly black curls, across the circle from Stephen in the church gym. “Over time I lost interest in dealings that didn’t involve sex. My family, even my dear kitty-cats bored me.” The group thanked her. The vaguer a story, the more likely its teller had come for a signed note. Vera was taking it day by day; Blake was trying not to play games. Churches didn’t have gyms, Stephen decided. It was a former school, a place twice forbidden, so that he imagined a double gnat line surrounding it. That was his name for the circles ordaining where he could and couldn’t live. The real gnat line ran horizontally across the state, near Macon. “Folks is different below it,” Patrick had said, but the only difference was the gnat problem.

Stephen wasn’t listening. Clockwise around the circle he studied faces: a dead ringer for Lee Harvey Oswald, an exterminator in a pink tie, and then none other than Jeremy, the cute one from camp, in his World of Coke shirt.

“I’m Jeremy,” Jeremy said, his glazed eyes staring at the one called Vera, “and I’m addicted to booze, sex, various drugs. Down in Savannah when I was in high school, this fellow Kevin smashes into my mom. He doesn’t have insurance, so he begs her not to report it, he’ll pay cash. Mom agrees, but her back starts to hurt. Pretty soon she’s walking stooped over. Three weeks later, Kevin hasn’t paid a cent, her car won’t run, pain gets worse, she’s a hunchback by the time I go to Kevin’s.”

Jeremy swallowed and took a breath. “Kevin tells me his dad just died and he’ll pay next Friday. Okay, but I see this brand-new electric guitar in his back seat. Another week. Mom’s in agony. I drive back and damned if Kevin’s car hasn’t been fixed up like new. So I bang on the door and this kid wearing Mickey Mouse ears peeks through the blinds.”

As soon as Stephen heard Mickey Mouse ears , he knew Jeremy wasn’t speaking as himself, but as Bruce, the wisecracking video editor from camp.

“Door’s hollow. I bust through. Kid runs to his room. Next thing, he’s got this cigarette lighter and he’s burning my arm. That was what flipped the switch. I grab it and burn him back and say okay, here’s what’s coming.”

Stephen shifted in his seat. He knew what was coming. Having researched his neighbors on LexisNexis, he couldn’t listen, but he couldn’t block out the words. Please , he wanted to scream. Maybe Jeremy heard him somehow in his mind, because he turned and noticed Stephen.

He paused his story. “I can’t sit here and nod,” said a guy in Army camouflage.

“We’d like you to leave,” Vera said, folding her hands.

“First I need a form signed,” Jeremy said.

“Actually I’ll be the one leaving,” said the Army guy, and he did, followed by two women. It seemed like the group might break apart, until Stephen heard himself speak his own name.

“I used to get shitfaced and invite guys over,” he said, feeling the tension begin to resolve around him and in his own shoulders. “Anyone willing to come. If I had a partner, I cheated. If he said no don’t, you’re the one I love, I dumped him. The only ones I wanted to stay were trying to escape, like my last boyfriend, this kid from NA whose arms bent way back like Gumby. He was trying to quit. I did everything in my power to keep him high so we could just fuck fuck fuck fuck until he leapt off Stone Mountain.”

With thirty curious, supportive eyes on him, Stephen paused. What came after Seamus died? The bus. He wasn’t about to tell that part. He mumbled a few words about living with the pain. The room thanked him. Jeremy in particular should be grateful, he thought, for how he’d redirected their energy — except from all the histories at the camp Jeremy had chosen Bruce’s. The self-calumny was baffling. In sobriety, we found we know how to instinctively handle situations that used to baffle us . Did Jeremy believe Stephen had invaded his meeting? He could be a loose cannon — a convicted sex offender, after all. Maybe Stephen was in danger. As the circle’s testimonies continued, his anxious mind drowned them out. By the end, he felt keyed up enough to rush to the guy in the pink tie, get his form signed ahead of Pam and Blake, and hit the road before anyone could speak his name.

3.

Like his neighbor in the woods, Jeremy visited no meeting twice. Like Stephen again he lay in wait for winter storms. It was a matter of aesthetic taste, the snow, and so was Jeremy’s behavior in the meetings, where no member had the right to stand in judgment, where most appeared as smugly pleased in their neutrality as the Honorable Diane Stokes had been at Jeremy’s sentencing. To put their objectivity to the test and then watch it evaporate satisfied him. He’d portrayed Bruce several times, honed the performance until it marshaled a real oppressive energy that peaked at the Unitarian church, where he might have emptied the gym if Stephen hadn’t destroyed the moment.

The sex rooms had few locations, so Jeremy often wound up at the more populous groups, as well as Crystal Meth Anonymous, Pills Anonymous, even Survivors of Incest Anonymous, channeling voices like Travis’s, the janitor who’d earned his living selling rohypnol that his brother smuggled in. Had he drugged girls himself? Travis said no, while Jeremy’s answer changed with the rooms’ moods. He tended to give his own name. If need be, he assigned himself an addiction to match the group, but his story’s spine was Travis’s roofies, Bruce’s boy, Allen’s girls, Patrick’s dancer, Gus’s gang bangs.

“I’m an addict,” he told an unusually diverse group at the Triangle Club the evening before the snow. “Growing up in Hiwassee, my cousin Garth and I were racing to see who’d get laid most. Same girl twice didn’t count, you had to get new girls. It’s a small town. Ladies got wind. Nothing we did up there was a crime, though; all Hiwassee could do was chase us down to Clayton.”

He kept ramping it up. They would hate him no matter what. They wanted him ashamed of loving Melissa, and if he could learn to feel shame over that, it might be a step toward turning the love into something else. Something positive. He had petitioned to move to Alaska, where it was dark all winter and snowed in July and he’d heard there were twelve men per woman. Of course his mother didn’t want him to go. The snow he awoke to on 1 December felt like a premonition to ignore her.

Five minutes down the slippery trail, ten to de-ice his windshield, twenty to creep toward I-75. An hour later, when he arrived downtown, inches of snow lay unblemished on the empty parking lot of the World of Coke, closed due to weather.

He walked six deserted blocks to a diner, where he bought the paper. Emotionlessly he read about the presidential primary. He’d backed away from caring about stuff like that. His candidates, like his teams, lost every time. That was the kind of guy he was. Most people had bad and good luck mixed together, but not Jeremy. He’d been accepted to Emory by accident, a mistake the school had cleared up weeks later. There was a fifty-fifty chance he had the Huntington’s gene. When he was ten, his class had flown to D.C., and he was the only boy without a window seat on either flight leg.