Donald Pollock - Knockemstiff

He sighed and whispered one more time to the can, then tossed it out the window. “Hey, Bobby,” he said, “you can go anytime you want. I ain’t stopping you.”

A few minutes later, we pulled into Train Lane, a rutted farm road that divided two cornfields on the edge of Knockemstiff. It didn’t matter how many miles we traveled by day, we always ended up back in the holler at night, though I was scared shitless that we’d run into Wanda Wipert or, even worse, my old man. At the turnaround at the end of the lane, we parked beside an illegal dump, piled high with bags of trash and busted chairs and cast-off refrigerators. The sun was sinking with a purple glow behind the Mitchell Flats. The DJ announced the sale on Thanksgiving turkeys again.

“Jesus,” I said, “how many fuckin’ Thanksgivings are they having this year?”

Frankie shut the engine off and sat staring straight ahead for a few minutes. Then he jerked the keys from the ignition and stepped out of the car. I watched him hunt through the trash, throwing boards and paper off to the side. He found an old tire and rolled it out into the middle of the road. As he bent down and started stuffing the inside of it with paper and cardboard, I opened the glove box and grabbed one of the two bottles of black beauties we had left. I slipped the speed in the top of my sock and got out of the car. “What you doing, man?” I asked him.

He was holding his lighter to some of the damp paper, trying to get it to ignite. “I’m fuckin’ cold, and I’m fuckin’ hungry,” he croaked. We both watched as a tiny flame began to grow inside the tire. “When you figure was the last time we ate?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“It’s been a week. At least a week, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe so.”

Walking to the back of the car, Frankie opened the trunk and lifted the chicken out. My shirt was still wrapped around it like a shroud. “Oh, shit,” I said. I fumbled for the last pill I had in my coat pocket and bit it open. “Just give me a minute here, man,” I said, swallowing the bitter powder. “Maybe I can still do something.”

Frankie shook his head. “You want your shirt back?” he asked. He was swinging the chicken back and forth by its feet as if he was trying to hypnotize me.

“No,” I said. “Well, yeah, I guess so.”

“Here, hold this, just for a minute.” He handed me the stiff bird. Then he began digging through the trash again, finally pulling a broken stake out of the pile. “This’ll work,” he said to himself. Taking the chicken from me, he set it on the ground, and pressed his foot on its neck.

“What are you doing?” I said as I took off my coat and put my shirt back on.

“Watch,” he said. And with one quick motion, he bent down and rammed the stake up the chicken’s ass until the point broke through the breast with a crunchy sound.

“Goddamn it,” I cried. I was so worthless I’d forgotten all about it, and now nobody could bring the chicken back to life. Then another thought occurred to me. “You’re not going to screw that, are you?” I asked him. “Because I’ll tell you right now, Frankie, I won’t allow it.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” he said, “but no, I’m gonna eat the fuckin’ thing.” Then he lifted the chicken up and carried it toward the fire. One of the bird’s eyes was open, staring at me blankly. A thin strand of blue intestines hung from the tip of the stake.

The tire was blazing now, the thick black smoke funneling into the night. The smell of the burning rubber started to make me sick. I stood back and watched as Frankie held the carcass over the edge of the flames. The feathers curled and melted and disappeared. “Ain’t you even gonna gut it?” I said, stepping closer.

He looked back at me and showed his teeth. “Just got to cook it,” he gagged. He pulled Wanda’s red panties from his pocket and held them over his face. The chicken began to grow soft, and started to slide off the end of the stick, but Frankie righted it just in time. The skin sizzled and smoked and started to turn black. Drops of fat began to splatter into the fire. The feet shriveled up and fell into the flames.

Without another word, I stepped across the drainage ditch and out into the soft barren field. I pulled the bottle of pills out of my sock, stuck them in my pocket. Route 50 was two miles away, and I started walking toward it. Mud stuck to my boots like wet concrete, and every few steps I had to stop to shake it off. Looking up, I saw the red blinking lights of an airliner, miles above me, heading west. I’d never been on a plane, but I imagined big-shot bastards on vacation, movie stars with beautiful lives. I wondered if they could see the glow of Frankie’s fire from up there. I wondered what they would think of us.

IT HAD RAINED HARD DURING THE NIGHT, AND IN THE morning everything along the fence line was bright wet green except for that brown anthill. Even though we’d flattened the shit out of it just the week before, the damn thing was already the size of a bushel basket again. It was as if we’d never been there. Christ, they’d even buried the concrete block that William had left standing as a monument to their war dead.

“They’re taunting us,” William said, staring down at the ants gliding about on top of the soggy mound, repairing storm damage, oblivious to us, their mortal enemies.

“What,” I said, “they’re just bugs.” William made a big deal out of everything. The whole world was out to get him, even the milkweed and the tumblebugs. His father, Mr. Jenkins, was the cause of it all. There were nine kinds of hell raised over at their house every night. The old man was some kind of maniac, and William walked around with a bitter scowl and a constant migraine. Before he moved in next door, I thought only old people got headaches. He was always getting me to steal some of my mom’s aspirins for him, and then he sucked on them like hard candy, trying to make each one last as long as possible. Living with my mother was no picnic, but compared to what William and his sister, Lucy, had to go through, I was, as my uncle Clarence always put it, shittin’ in high cotton.

“Did you bring the matches?” he asked. Yesterday William had finally agreed that if I brought the fire, we could kill Vietcong this week. My mom and I watched bits of the war on TV every night, and I had waited all goddamn summer to wipe out a Communist village.

I pulled the box of blue kitchen matches out of my pocket, and he ran to retrieve the empty bleach bottle he’d stashed in a clump of horseweeds that grew along the sagging fence. “We gotta be careful,” he said, glancing back at his house. “The old man’s on the warpath again.”

“Jesus, don’t that guy ever let up?” I said. The bruises on William’s skinny arms were the color of a bum banana. All my life I’d wished for a father, but living next to Mr. Jenkins was making me have second thoughts. Mine had skipped out on my mom before I was born, and I’d always been ashamed of that. But maybe I’d lucked out after all.

“Light it,” he commanded, ignoring me. Ramming a long stick in the mouth of the bleach bottle, he held it over the fence. I struck a match and held the flame close to the bottom of the jug until it caught. Then, swinging the stick around, William positioned the melting bottle directly over the anthill. Sizzling drops of white plastic began raining down on the tiny red ants like a firestorm.

“Look, Theodore,” he said casually, “let’s forget that Vietnam crap.”

“But you said we could—”

“I can’t stand it,” he coughed. “It’s all you ever talk about.” Poisonous fumes were already swirling around his sweaty face. He waved his hand like a handkerchief, trying to fan the plastic smoke away.