ALSO BY ALEXI ZENTNER
The Lobster Kings
Touch
VIKING
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Copyright © 2019 by Alexi Zentner
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Zentner, Alexi, author.
Title: Copperhead / Alexi Zentner.
Description: New York : Viking, [2019] |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019001145 (print) | LCCN 2019003008 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984877291 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984877284 (hardcover)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Coming of Age. | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.
Classification: LCC PS3626.E445 (ebook) | LCC PS3626.E445 C67 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001145
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
For my mother.
For all of the obvious reasons and for some of the less obvious ones, too.
CONTENTS
Also by Alexi Zentner
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Letter from the Author
T-Minus Zero
Minus Ten
Minus Nine
Minus Eight
Minus Seven
Minus Six
When It Happened
Sea Change
Cortaca and Surrounding
The Fight
The Aftermath
Kickoff
Seven to Three
Fourteen to Three
Halftime
The Tribe
Winner Winner
Parking Lot
Kirby’s
Plans
Cherries
Warning
100%
Minus Five
Near Darkness
Minus Four
Minus Three
Brandon Rogers
Kaylee
Minus Two
Say It
Telephone
Island in a Stream
Minus One
T-Minus Zero
Pearl Street
Soft
Questions
David John Michaels
Grace
Grace Itself
Where You Come From
Pride
Answers
The Sleep of the Just
Reap
Sow
Blood on His Hands
Question
Smoke Signals
David John
Them
Answer
Forest, Trees
Steel Trap
Tell Me
Bible Study
Bagman
Between the Gate and the Road
Motion
The Creamery
Nuclear Family
Hummingbird
The Water
For Your Viewing Enjoyment
Words and Actions
Butter with That?
Diggins
X’s and O’s
Balance
Punching Out
Garden
Eden
Serpent
Weather
Mileage
Forward Motion
History One
History Two
Pavement
Wyatt
The Lane
Passage
Bedtime Stories
The Curve
War Council
The Spin
The Sleep of the Dead
The Morning Shift
Cast Iron
Community and Christ
Give the Devil His Due
Papers
Round One
Caravan
Gatekeepers
Homecoming
Creature Comforts
A Walk in the Woods
Emoji
All Apologies
Turning Points
Seventeen
Lights
Pews
Grace
Sermon on the Mount
Honor Guard
Standoff
Sacrificial Lamb
Damage Control
Ecnalubma
After Action Report
Milling
Wyatt
Through the Woods, Down the Hill, Around the Bend, Past the Pond, and Back Again
Hits and Misses
Pit Viper
Don’t Tread on Me
One, Two
Promises Made, Promises Kept
(Step)father
Back into the Maelstrom
Homegoing
The Quiet
Killing Time
Carrier Pigeon
Sunday Dinner
Kindling
Jesus
Wept
Ownership
Protection
Represent
The Dead
The Living
Ten
Nine
Eight
Seven
Six
Five
Four
Three
Two
One
Zero
Epilogue: Telling It
Brothers
Liftoff
Orbit
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Dear Reader,
When I was growing up, my mother was a prominent local activist fighting against anti-Semitism and racism. She and my father were both clinical social workers, and they had a private practice in an old Victorian next door to our family house. Often, I’d come home from school and find my mom meeting with another activist or an official from the community. My mom was tiny, but she was fierce; I saw her scare the hell out of men three times her size. My dad was just as tough. My parents believed in standing up to bull
ies and fighting to make sure everybody got a fair shake.
But the year I turned eighteen—after years of threats and menace—my parents’ office was firebombed by a neo-Nazi group. We rebuilt the house and my mother doubled down on her convictions. Then the office was firebombed a second time. No arrests were ever made.
What happened to my family felt extreme back then, but the dog whistle of white supremacy and hatred is a straight-up shout today. With Copperhead, I wanted to look more closely at how our sense of morality both mutates and crystallizes as we come of age. I wanted to explore how hatred can complicate love, how love can make us blind to the danger around us, and how racism and hate are at work even in the lives of those who don’t think they’ve chosen a side.
I’ve been thinking about this story practically my whole life, and the place and time we’re living in propelled me to write it now. Doing so hasn’t brought me much certainty, but it has helped me articulate the questions that have dogged me. Is hatred as complicated as love? What if I had been another boy? What would my life have been like if I’d been raised with a different lodestar? Would I be able to step out from under the haze of bigotry? Who would I be now, as a man? What does it take to be good? And on the road to good, what mistakes will we make, what scars will all of us then bear?
Thank you for reading.
Alexi Zentner
T-MINUS ZERO
He spins the wheel hard, angry. He cannot pull away from the house fast enough. The truck lurches forward. A bee-stung horse. Snow and ice spit out from under the wheels, like a curse from a teacher’s mouth, like buckshot scattering through the air and bloodying the breast of a duck flushed from the water. The back end of the pickup, light and bouncy, skids wide and loose.
When it happens, he feels the sound of the impact as much as he hears it: like a soda can crushed by a stomped foot. But it’s two distinct sounds: the heavy thud of the boot and the gossamer crinkle of metal folding on itself.
Except the sound does not come from a soda can crushed by a foot. He knows what it is immediately. He stomps hard on the brake pedal, the truck stopping as violently as it started. He sits. The stereo is loud in the stillness, so he thumbs it off, but the windshield wipers squeak, so he turns them off too and then stops the motor.
It is too quiet. If everything were going to be okay, there would be a word. A voice. A sound. Something. Anything. But the only sound he can hear is an echo, a memory, the undertone that came with the thud and crumple of metal: the inevitable weakness of a body. He wishes it had simply been an empty soda can. But he knows it was a human being.
He gets out of the truck. He moves as slowly as he can force himself to.
He hit a deer once, more than a year ago, not long after he got the truck running, but that was different. The animal bounded out in front of him. Dumb-eyed and desperate. He barely had time to touch the brake before his fender tore open the deer’s belly. When he stopped the truck and walked back to where the deer was crumpled on the shoulder, it was still alive. A sort of miracle.
But the wrong sort of miracle. Guts spilled onto the asphalt, the slow sodium light of the streetlights washing everything down. The doe’s breath a desperate whistle of blood. Her right hind leg scraping weakly against the ground as if she was still trying to stand. He watched her like this for a minute or two and then went back to his truck. If he’d had his hunting knife with him, he could have been merciful, but there was nothing to do other than head home to hose off the blood and gore. He had to use a pair of pliers to fish out a chunk of the doe’s skin that was lodged in the creased fender.
Now he walks the long way around the front of the truck, touching the hood and then looking at the memory of the deer imprinted on the front fender; the metal still bears an ugly kiss.
When he has made his way around the truck, he looks. The body is ten, twenty feet behind the bed of the truck. He knows it is a person, but in the shadows and the false light coming from the house, it could be anything else. He wants it to be anything else. A soda can. A doe. But it is, and always will be, stubbornly, a dead body.
MINUS TEN
Halloween come and gone. It’s the month of November, and it is a miracle: Jessup is still playing football. The first time in forty years that Cortaca High School has made the playoffs. Jessup is a senior. Seventeen years old and big. He was athletic even when he was small, but he’s grown into himself. Played all four years on varsity. Four years of snot and blood. Freshman, sophomore, junior year they got bounced before the playoffs, but this year they’ve only lost two games. Tonight they play Kilton Valley High. Win or go home.
His cleats click and splash on the wet cement as he jogs to the stadium. Rain started in the middle of the night, and it’s been near freezing all day; he could smell the coming snow before he even walked out of his house this morning. A wet bruise on the air. All day, during school, sitting in math or English, the familiar itch of game day making his knee bounce, Jessup kept looking out the window, waiting for the sky to decide it was time to turn from rain to snow. Now, with the sun down, the sky has decided on neither: sleet. But he can feel the temperature still dropping. The sleet will make the transition to water-heavy snow soon enough.
He’s in the middle of the pack of boys heading to the stadium. He steps off the sidewalk as they cut across the asphalt parking lot. There’s a puddle of slush that the other boys jump over or dance around, but not Jessup. He’s on a straight line. He’s not moving for nothing. Steps right in the puddle. The icy water splashes his ankle, soaks through his sock. He doesn’t care. He’ll be soaked soon enough.
Only a few days earlier it was warm. In Cortaca, mothers make sure that children pick Halloween costumes that can be worn with winter jackets, hats, and gloves. More years than not, the ghouls and goblins can see their breath in the air. This year, however, the jack-o’-lanterns spit shadows into a fall night that held a heat that seemed like it would last forever. Jessup’s sister, Jewel, is eleven. Twelve in February. Sixth grade. Old enough to almost be too old to trick-or-treat, old enough to go with just her friends, but Jessup tagged along. Drove her into town in his truck. Walked with them but stayed on the sidewalk as they sprinted up to houses. Comfortable in his T-shirt despite the end of October. Just there to keep an eye on you, he said. I’m not asking for candy, not hitting the doorbells, Jewel, so I don’t need a costume. Jewel rolling her eyes, she and her friends dressed as zombies. Zombies never go out of style, Jessup thought. He helped her with her makeup. Mom’s eyeliner, ketchup for blood. By the end of the night she was sweaty from running, hopped up on sugar, and cranky, the makeup smudged. She let Jessup have all her peanut butter cups.
It stayed warm like that all week. As if winter were just a rumor. At practice, the smell of falling leaves and cut grass mixed with sweat. It was hot enough that it felt like an echo of summer. Practice in full pads, but only light hitting. Lots of water breaks. Coach, mindful of the heat, wanted them fresh for the playoffs. Yesterday, during practice, the first hint of chill. And overnight, things changed. Summer gone and skipped past the crispness of fall. This is the cold drudgery of sleet. The temperature dropping.
Tomorrow, Jessup knows, will be winter. Tomorrow it will be snow. Tomorrow, when he goes deer hunting, the woods will be a different world from the one that exists today. It will be ice and snow and the magic of whiteness, the crunch of his boots, the quiet hush of blanketed woods while he waits for a clear shot, for a buck with a rack worth taking. Fill the freezer with good meat they can’t afford to buy. His girlfriend, Deanne, has asked to come but he’s said no. The whole point isn’t the hunt but the wait. The quiet. To be in the trees, alone. Nobody looking at him and thinking about Jessup’s brother and his stepfather in prison. It’s been four years since Ricky beat those two boys to death. Black boys. His stepfather didn’t touch anybody, but he was there, and he has a history. History is everything in a town the size of Cortaca.
Ricky has another sixteen years, at least, if things go well. His stepfather, David John Michaels, was supposed to serve five, but he’s out early. Today. Jessup’s mom drove up north this morning to bring David John back. She brought Jewel with her, since she’s David John’s kid. Jessup argued that Jewel shouldn’t miss school, but it wasn’t a real argument. The kid’s only in sixth grade, and besides, she’s smart as hell. Smarter than Jessup, even. Honor roll in her sleep. A day of school won’t make a difference. There was never a question of Jessup going along as well. Even if he didn’t have football. They’re supposed to be back by now. Sitting in the stands. His stepfather up there with Jessup’s mother and Jewel. They’ll be expecting him to go out for dinner with them after the game. He’ll do that and then head to the party and, after that, what he’s really looking forward to tonight: time with his girlfriend.
But tomorrow, tomorrow Jessup can be alone.
MINUS NINE
That’s tomorrow. Tonight, it’s football. The sleet is starting to gather. It’s the kind of cold wet that makes certain kids wish they’d picked a different sport. Cortaca High School is a mix of kids. Poor whites like Jessup living outside of Cortaca on country roads, hills, and hollers, right off county highways or buried back down dirt roads, in trailers or beaten-down houses with missing windows, sweat-equity additions finished only with Tyvek, with months or years before siding goes up. Woodstoves if you’re lucky, the constant whine of a chainsaw or the thunk of a maul giving you a house warm enough to make you sweat. If you’re not lucky, propane, the house at forty-five degrees all winter, balls freezing under thin blankets, sleeping with your clothes on because nobody, not even Treman Gas, will fill your propane tank on credit. The poor blacks mostly living in Cortaca proper, up in the housing complex on East Hill, East Village—Jessup calls it the Jungle, but so do all of the blacks and the poor whites, with only the rich whites calling it by the proper name, too scared to give it its due—and the rest of the poor blacks near the downtown core, old houses once proud but now subdivided into two, four, eight apartments. Only a few of the poor blacks are out in the country like Jessup, but there are enough poor whites in town that there’s a lot of crossing of color lines there. The kids who aren’t poor are all affiliated with Cortaca University or in that orbit. Professors’ kids. Professionals’. Or just come from money. Moms available for birthday parties and carnival night during elementary school, dads who can take the day off to chaperone the middle school field trip to Hershey Park in the spring, parents who insist on honors and AP classes in high school, who know how to procure and pay for tutors when their darlings can’t handle the math or Spanish or chemistry. Jessup is in the classes dominated by rich kids and doing fine, top 10 percent of his class for grades. Not valedictorian, but within spitting distance, not bad for no tutors, for playing three sports and having a part-time job, for helping to raise his sister, top 10 percent of his class something to crow about, a ticket out of here. Beat the drum and check your numbers, teachers never quite believing he can hold his own. Not with a camo hunting jacket and what everybody knows about his brother and his stepdad. Small town, small town, small town. No way for a clean slate.