Donald Pollock - Knockemstiff

Four bottles of black beauties—240 pills — was enough rocket fuel to send a trash can to Mars. The pills still had frost on them when Frankie opened the first bottle and handed me two. Our plan was to eat just a couple, and then head west on Route 50 after we sold the rest in town. Within forty-five minutes my heart was ticking like a live bomb. By midnight I was chewing holes in my tongue listening to Frankie obsess about having sex with movie stars. “What about it, Bobby?” he finally asked me. “What would you do to her?”

Frankie had been listing all the stuff he wanted to do to Ali McGraw. I’d known him my whole life, but the part about the ax handle took me by surprise. I’d never been with a woman, and I was still trying to figure out if such a thing was even possible. “Shit, I don’t know,” I finally said with a shrug.

He fired up another cigarette off the one he was smoking. “Did you get off?” he asked, looking over at me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

“I don’t know, man. You just seem out of it.”

“Look, I’m thinking maybe we should take them pills back, Frankie,” I said. “I mean, if Wanda finds out—”

“Are you fuckin’ nuts?” he said. He uncapped the bottle and handed me a couple more of the black capsules. “You’re just comin’ down, Bobby, that’s all.”

He was right — two more made all the difference. Within a few minutes, a great happiness surged up inside of me as I thought of running away to California. Suddenly, I knew that all the lousy, fucked-up things that kept happening in my life would never happen again. I remembered the last time my old man had went crazy on us, all because my mother had fixed him oatmeal instead of eggs for his breakfast. I began to talk and found that I couldn’t stop. While Frankie drove around the township in circles that night, I told him all the secrets in my house, every single rotten thing that my old man had ever done to us. And though, in a stupid way, I felt like a fucking rat the more I blabbed, by the time the sun came up the next morning, it seemed as if all the shame and fear I’d ever carried inside of me was burned away like a pile of dead leaves.

…..

WE RAN OVER THE CHICKEN THREE DAYS AFTER WE STOLE the pills. It came out of nowhere. I was at the height of my powers then. Eat twenty-five black beauties in three days and you will know what I’m talking about. “Fuck!” I yelled when I heard it thump against the car. Frankie slammed on the brakes and the car skidded to a stop. I jumped out. The chicken was smashed against the grill, its neck broken. I pulled it gently away from the chrome and held it up by its bumpy yellow feet. A glob of blood as fat and round as a red pearl hung on the end of its busted beak.

Climbing out of the car, Frankie said, “How’d that get there?” He checked the front grill, wiped it off with his coat sleeve. Then he got down on his knees and looked underneath for damage. He loved that Super Bee. “Goddamn chicken,” I heard him say.

“I can save it,” I said.

Frankie stood up and frowned at me, pressed a finger against the side of his nose and blew snot all over his work boots. “It’s dead, Bobby.” He rubbed the toe of each shoe against the legs of his greasy coveralls while chewing the inside of his mouth as if it was a big soft seed. His pupils shone like tiny headlights in the dusk.

“I can save it,” I repeated. I held the bird close to my chest, felt its warmth slowly slipping away in the cold wind blowing across the flat fields. The farmers had already picked the harvest. Two-inch stubble covered the landscape. Even the highway was empty. I stroked the chicken’s tiny head with my thumb. “Pop the trunk,” I said. Then I wrapped the body in my flannel shirt and laid it gently on top of a spare tire.

…..

LATER THAT SAME NIGHT, I LOST MY CHERRY TO A GIRL with razor-thin lips who kept telling me to hurry up. Her name was Teabottom. We first saw her coming out of Penrod’s Grocery in Nipgen carrying a carton of milk. Her red frizzy hair looked like a bush burning atop her head. She was wearing a ragged blue work shirt and grimy plastic sandals. Her feet were purple from the cold. A little leather purse hung from a dirty string around her neck. “Hey, baby!” Frankie yelled as he whipped the car into the gravel lot and cut her off.

We worked out a trade, and she climbed in the backseat. Frankie flipped a coin, and I went first. From everything I’d seen in the movies, I thought I should hold her tenderly, but she was all business. She pulled her shirt up over her head so I couldn’t kiss her. The carton of milk busted in the floorboards and sloshed on my feet. I might as well have been in a barnyard.

“Damn, she ain’t no Ali McGraw, but I wish I had that fuckin’ ax handle now,” Frankie said to me the second time he climbed over the seat. Because of the speed, we couldn’t get enough. We tried to wear her out, mostly because of the disdainful way she looked at us. But nothing we did made any difference to her as long as we handed her two more pills every time we took a turn. She stuck all of them in her change purse.

The third time I went for it, I asked her about the milk. My socks were soaked with it. “It was for my baby, dumbass,” she said. She was smoking a cigarette, bitching about being sore.

“You got a baby?” I said.

“What, you hard of hearing too?”

“Well, where is it now?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she told me, holding out her hand. I laid two pills in her palm, and she spread herself down on the seat with a groan. But I couldn’t stop thinking about her baby, and wondering who was taking care of it while Frankie and me tried to screw her brains out. I kept imagining all kinds of horrible, fucked-up things happening to it. When I finally gave up and climbed off of her, she cupped some of the spilled milk from the floor into her hand and poured it over her crotch. She didn’t even bother pulling her jeans back on anymore.

Toward morning, as I drove us along a gravel road, I thought I heard Frankie telling the Teabottom girl that he would take her to Nashville as soon as he could get rid of me. But when I turned the radio down, all I could hear was the steady squeak of the seat behind me. I turned around in the seat, saw him hovering over the top of the girl with his eyes shut. “Frankie?” I asked.

“What?”

“What about California, man?” I asked. We hadn’t left the county yet, hadn’t sold a single pill.

“Jesus Christ, Bobby, not now.”

When we finally let her out, Teabottom stumbled bow-legged to her trailer through a yard strewn with rusty car parts and old empty dog boxes. We sat in the Super Bee watching numbly as she stepped up on some wobbly cement blocks and went inside. A light popped on, then off again. I lit a cigarette and pulled another black beauty from the stash I had in my coat pocket. “My dick feels like a goddamn snappin’ turtle’s been chewing on it,” Frankie said. Then he backed out of the driveway, burned a patch of rubber all the way through first gear. Above us, the black sky slowly turned into a gray waxen sea.

…..

BY THE END OF THE FIFTH DAY, WE WERE FRIED. NOW THE speed was like water running through our veins, and we couldn’t get off anymore. Our throats had turned to leather from cigarettes and talk; our gums bled and our jaws ached from grinding our teeth together. Frankie kept whispering to a beer can that he held in his hand like a microphone, and I had struggled off and on all that day to convince myself that it wasn’t talking back to him. And in the backseat, the spilled milk had soured and filled the car with rotten fumes that kept reminding me of Teabottom’s little baby. “What about California, you fuck?” I finally said. “Shit, we coulda been there by now.”