Page 25 of Devil

The optimism also hasn’t reached Buddy’s Gas Mart, the gas station twenty miles north of town where I work now. It was desperation that drove me to Buddy’s a few years ago; I’d worked other jobs with better pay and hours, but I was fired or firmly asked to quit from each one, and the bad references gradually stacked up into an insurmountable wall that no application or interview could get past.

It was the same problem every time: my sister.

Busy calling from some town in Illinois or Colorado or even Florida, needing help. A quick escape or a way home or someone to bail her out of jail. The worst was when I’d get a call that wasn’t from her. It either meant she was in the hospital or that she’d be spiteful and unwilling to leave with me when I got to wherever she was.

And then there were the bad nights at home, the long days when I couldn’t leave her alone because I didn’t know what she’d do to herself, what kind of harm she could conjure up when left unattended. Direct harm to herself or maybe the indirect injuries that kept slicing and scoring away at her life—drugs, alcohol, the worst men imaginable.

The first few jobs had some degree of PTO, but I burned through that quickly and burned through my employers’ goodwill quickly too with my unexpected absences. Then came the hourly jobs without PTO, where I was expected to cover any shift I couldn’t show up for, which was frequently impossible with how little notice Busy’s emergencies gave me.

Somehow I washed up on the shore of Buddy’s, a lone outpost on a county road from Leavenworth to Oskaloosa, on a route no one drives except for the small handful of people who live in Oskaloosa and nearby McLouth.

Buddy himself—yes, it’s his real name—isn’t a good boss in the traditional sense. Everyone at Buddy’s is paid the Kansas minimum wage of $7.25 an hour with no exceptions, and there’s no PTO or health insurance. But he’s also not abadboss because he’s the only employer I’ve had in the last seven years who’s come close to understanding what it’s like to be on call for someone like Busy. He understands when I have to disappear, and he gives me the night shift so if I have to leave without notice, the gas station can simply close for the night.

So for the last three years, I’ve been able to scrape together enough hours at Buddy’s to pay for the utilities and property taxes at the farm and my phone and my car insurance. Then there are Busy’s medicines and her food and her phone and her new place, but the new place is worth every minute I spend at Buddy’s, because she’s safe and steady for the first time since high school. All I have to do is keep paying for it, which is impossible on paper, but it’s socloseto possible…if I can get one or two more furniture commissions a month.

It’s not much to be proud of, but this is what I’ve accomplished: enough to claw myself along. I don’t have any savings—at least not any that last beyond whatever new emergency Busy might have—but I have the farm outright and I still have my old car, kept sputtering along by Paxico and his Mary Poppins bag of a workshop, which somehow always coughs up parts when I need them.

And while the hill house had to be gutted down to the studs after the flood, I’ve gradually made the farmhouse somewhat livable. I even replaced the roof myself, clumsily, with the help of Paxico shouting from a camp chair on the lawn and too many YouTube videos to count.

Today, I’m fixing a leak around an upstairs window gable, trying to balance a borrowed nail gun and a roll of underlayment. Paxico’s not here to shout up at me—his back is giving him more bad days than good lately, and same with his knee and shoulder. He won’t go to the doctor until he gets Medicare, he says, but that’ll be a few years away, and there’s only so much naproxen and Voltaren can do.

I worry about him, but it’s a dull, tired kind of worry, an expensive thing made cheap by both its frequency and its pointlessness. There’s no shortage of things to worry about, and there’s nothing anyone can do about any of it. I can’t give Paxico the money to go to a doctor. I can’t afford it even for myself, and everything extra I ever have is going toward this new arrangement for Busy anyway.

I’ve stopped worrying about myself too. It became too exhausting and too fucking laughable after a while, a joke at my expense. Birdie Cooper thinking she deserved better. Birdie Cooper, who let a boy with golden curls break her career like he broke apart a pomegranate and left it on the floor.

Stupid, shy Birdie, whom no one likes, whom no one thinks about, except for a sister when the sister needs help. Except for a single old man even lonelier than herself.

No one else cares about Birdie Cooper, so why the hell should I?

I finish nailing the underlayment in place, then crawl onto the gable to sit for a moment and stare at the hot blue sky above the trees. Clouds bunch threateningly along the horizon, not unusual for summer and nothing to worry about according to the news. My dad used to take me out on this very same gable when I was girl. Mom hated it, but my dad had climbed on it and his dad before him and so on, so he believed every Cooper should see what the hawks see when they watch the rustling in the crops or the shuffling in the brush.

He believed every Cooper should know what it feels like to try to touch the sky.

And the sky is massive up here, dizzying, a height and breadth that defies a human sense of scale and space. It used to make me feel small, like I was cupped in the palm of God’s hand, like I was small in a way that was beloved and cared for.

Now it only makes me feel small and none of the rest.

I close my eyes a moment. It’s the cusp of evening. I worked last night until eight this morning and then spent a few hours with Busy in her new apartment, trying to make her feel like it could be home and not another cage that inevitably leads to more terry-cloth socks. I slept from noon until four and then forced myself out of bed to fix this leak while I’d still have plenty of daylight. Four hours of sleep isn’t bad for me, between Buddy’s, Busy, and the carpentry commissions.

The evening shift cashier has to leave early, so I told him I’d get to Buddy’s early tonight. I force myself off the roof and down the rickety ladder left over from my grandparents’ days. I foolishly try to carry everything with me, the nail gun and the spare nails and the underlayment roll, and halfway down the rungs, the underlayment slips from the crease of my elbow, and I fumble the nails trying to catch it. The underlayment drops, but I manage to keep the nail gun from dropping by twisting hard on the ladder and pinning it between my hip and a rung.

Which apparently is the final straw for one of the bolts holding the rusted rung I’m standing on. It shears and gives way, and suddenly, there’s nothing between my shoes and the dry grass except for six feet of empty air. There’s a wrench in my shoulder as I try desperately to hold on to a rung with one hand—a screaming, gashing pain up my calf—then I’m hitting the ground hard enough that all the air is punched out of my body in a wretched instant that also feels a million years long.

I lie there in the grass in airless purgatory, sparks dancing in my vision until my heaving stomach and seizing lungs finally remember how to draw in a breath. I make a gasping wheeze up at the sky and then roll over onto my side and start sobbing, my hand clutching reflexively at the grass like a baby clutching at a stuffie in her crib, like a patient reaches for the hand of a nurse. Like the grass will hold my hand back, since there’s no one else around to do it.

Static fills my vision as my lungs keep forgetting how to inhale and exhale, and the sobbing keeps interrupting their work.

I have to work tonight.I have to work tonight. Everyone is counting on that money.

It takes me a long time to sit up and even longer still to test the different parts of my body. My shoulder hurts, but it can move—it’s not dislocated—and I don’t think I’ve broken my tailbone or fractured any ribs. I’ll have a nasty bruise on my backside, since that was the first part of me to hit the ground, but better that than a broken back or hip.

My lower leg, though, is bleeding hot and fast, and I feel woozy when I see that the cut is less of a cut and more of a rip in the skin. The broken metal rung is the culprit, and it didn’t cut kindly or cleanly. It needs stitches, but there’s not a world where I can afford a trip to the emergency room or urgent care. I just hope the tetanus booster I got at a free clinic a few years ago is still in my system.

Knowing there’s no one around to see, I crawl on my hands and knees to the front porch and then in through the front door to the downstairs bathroom where my medicine cabinet is. With a shaking hand, I manage to dump a glug of rubbing alcohol over the torn skin, and I scream through my teeth as the alcohol lights my nerves on fire.

Everything is painted in shadows and static—the floor is a thousand feet below me?—

When the shadows finally recede, wave-like, I find myself slumped on the floor. Everything hurts. I don’t know how long it is before I become aware of the blood pooling under my leg, before I’m able to sit up, sway, stand up, sway again.