Donald Pollock - Knockemstiff

“Fuck you,” I said. “Find someone else to boss around.” I was the only kid in Knockemstiff who would even talk to him, and that was just because my mom kept insisting that I play the good neighbor. Anytime I pointed out to her that William treated me like shit, she’d look up from whatever she was doing and say, “Teddy, you have no idea what goes on over there. Like I said, just keep pretending that William’s your friend, and before you know it, he will be.”

Maybe the reason my mother loved pretending so much was that she had such a hard life. When I was still a baby, she began working at the meatpacking plant in Greenfield, jamming bloody hog bones into cardboard boxes all day. She walked around smelling of pork, her knuckles swollen with tiny infected cuts. Over the years, she slowly become a devout dreamer, hooked on a special kind of make-believe that she made me promise not to talk about. She was always searching for my next persona, mostly in the cheap detective magazines she borrowed from Maude Speakman and read religiously every night before going to bed.

The first time it happened, she’d been telling me about Richard Speck over dinner, going into detail about the eight dead nurses while we ate bologna sandwiches and potato chips. She made it sound scary, but by bedtime I’d forgotten all about him. Then she came in and sat down on the side of my bed, drew tattoos on my arms with a ballpoint pen, handed me a pair of scissors. “Look, Teddy,” she said, “I need you to do something for me.”

“What’s that?”

“Remember that Speck guy we talked about?” she said.

“The creepy killer?”

“That’s him,” she said. “Now what I want you to do is come in my bedroom and play like you’re him. Just for a minute.”

“How do I do that, Mom?”

“I don’t know. Just spit on the floor maybe, talk like a drunken sailor,” she said. “Hurt me, but don’t really hurt me.”

Other than the black pills she sometimes got off her sister, Wanda, fear seemed to be the only thing that made my mother feel alive. And because I wanted so much for her to be happy, I became a master at scaring the bejesus out of her. Albert De-Salvo was her favorite psycho, and she had a picture of him taped inside her closet. Sometimes, if she’d had a really bad day, I’d go outside and cut a hole through a window screen, then slip in and tie a fancy knot around her neck with a pair of her panty hose, all the while confessing that I was the real Boston Strangler.

In the beginning, before I got good at it, she was always giving me advice, always pointing out little ways in which I could better become somebody else. “You need to work on that accent,” she’d say, or “Good Lord, Teddy, I could hear you coming from a mile away that time.” So with my mother, fantasizing that William was my friend was no big deal, just another game to her. I stuck the box of matches in my pocket and turned to go home.

“Hold up, Theodore,” William said. “What if we say they’re giants?” He was standing with his feet spread apart, swinging the burning bleach bottle back and forth like an incense pot.

I looked down at the terrified ants fleeing their fortress. Last week he’d insisted that they were African pygmies, talked me into playing Cheetah to his Tarzan. Now this. “Well,” I said, “there’s all kinds of giants. King Kong, Colossal Man, maybe…”

“For Christ’s sakes, Theodore,” he said, “this is serious business. These are fucking giants planning on taking over the world, not stupid movie monsters.”

“So what are we then?” I asked hopefully. “Marines?”

“Marines?” he snorted. “What’s a fuckin’ jarhead going to do against a horde of giants?” I watched him look up at the sun and squint. “I know,” he finally said. “We’re gods. Only a god can stop something this big.”

I looked down at William’s feet. Crooked toes were poking through the ends of his rotten tennis shoes. The scars on his legs glistened like snakeskin in the morning light. Gods? He was the closest thing to a dead person that I’d ever played with. “Whatever,” I said, giving in. “Gods. Giants. Giant ants.”

He smiled, then coughed again. “I saw that Hiroshima on TV one time,” he said, raising the bottle higher to get more of a splatter effect. “It looked just like this.”

“Bullshit,” I protested. “That was an atom bomb.”

“So? What’s your point?” he asked, staring at me through his thick dirty glasses.

“Well, this stuff — this stuff is more like napalm,” I said. “Like what they use over in Vietnam .” The jug was frothing now, like a volcano. Ants were burning to death all around us. I imagined their pitiful screeches. They smelled like little whiffs of burned popcorn.

“Jesus,” William yelled, “there you go again!” He cocked the stick back as if he were going to sling the bottle on me. His whole body was quivering. A drop of sputtering plastic landed on his forehead, but he never flinched.

The last time he got excited like this, he chopped himself in the leg with a hoe, all because I refused to admit that my blue marble was really his green one. “Okay,” I said, giving in again. “Then can we at least say that the smoke is—”

“Fallout!” he yelled. “Radioactive fallout. Yeah, that’s what turned the ants into giants in the first place. See, Theodore, you’re not so dumb.”

Just then, Lucy came tearing out of the house. She was wearing William’s fake army helmet and her cowgirl outfit, the one with the short sequined skirt. “He’s got Mother trapped in the basement!” she panted. “I think he’s killed her this time.”

William looked grimly toward the house. “Good,” he said. “Maybe he’ll kill us all. We’d be better off.” Last Christmas, right after they moved in, Mr. Jenkins beat his wife so bad that her left eye still drooped like a wilted blue blossom. I’d seen her a few times, wrapped in a sheet, staring out the kitchen window. She reminded me of the rocking-chair hag in Psycho , my mom’s favorite movie.

“Hey, shithead,” Lucy said to me, “you’re not stepping over the line, are you?” Nobody was allowed on their property, especially me. My mom had called the sheriff on Mr. Jenkins a hundred times, but the fat deputies didn’t want to get involved. They wouldn’t even climb out of the cruiser anymore, just turned on the flashing light as they sped on through the holler.

William and I both looked down to make sure my feet were legal. Lucy was like the secret police. She had a mouth that wouldn’t quit. The last time she’d ratted her brother out, you could hear his screams all the way to Foggy Moor. “Go spy on someone else,” he told her.

“Just checking,” she said, tossing the toy helmet to the ground. Then she took off and did a flip that made her skirt go over her head. She was twelve, practically a grown woman to a nine-year-old. I could see her crack pressed tight against her white underwear. It looked like the knot in a tree. I wanted to fuck her, though I wasn’t sure what fucking actually entailed. I just knew my mom did a lot of it. Every kid on the school bus said so.

“Dickweed,” Lucy called out to me when she landed.

“Funny,” I said, feeling my face begin to heat up.

“Cock breath,” she yipped, kicking the toy helmet across the yard. The girl knew cuss words my mom’s boyfriends had never even dreamed of.

“Lucy,” William said, “leave Theodore alone! You’re just jealous because I got a friend and you don’t.” Friend? It was the first time William had ever hinted that I was anything but his dumb puppet. Maybe my mom was right; perhaps all you had to do was pretend something was true and then someday it would be, no matter how fantastic, no matter how fucked up.