Donald Pollock - Knockemstiff

Sometimes at night, they’d sit on opposite sides of the big room on old kitchen chairs that Frankie had salvaged from a dump over on Reub Hill. They would smoke and drink and pop whatever they’d been able to scrounge that day, and Frankie talked while Todd listened. By that time, Frankie’s liver stuck out from his side like a baby’s fist and often throbbed like a toothache. He’d sit and rub it like he was trying to coax a genie out of a bottle as he told his stories. Mostly they were about the Super Bee or some of the women he’d been with before the scar, but once in a while he recalled other crazy shit he had done. “Back four or five years ago,” he said one night, “I ate a raw chicken, guts and all.” For most of that week, they’d been smoking on a big block of mildewed Lebanese hash that a logger had sold them for practically nothing because it made people’s gums bleed. The floor of the fish camp was sticky with bloody spit. Flies buzzed around them like they were dead meat.

“No way,” Todd said. He had a finger jammed in his mouth, working a loose tooth back and forth. He couldn’t leave it alone. He’d already lost one of his good ones since he’d started smoking the fungus.

“Goddamn I didn’t,” Frankie said. “Ask Bobby Shaffer, he’ll tell you.”

“Guts and everything? Fuck, man, that would have killed you.”

Frankie didn’t say anything, and Todd knew that something bad was coming. He reached up and touched his left eye, still tender from a sucker punch that had come out of nowhere the week before. Ever since he’d told the story about the VISTA man, it seemed as if things had turned to shit between them, and he suddenly realized that he no longer had any fantasies about Frankie and him making a life together. They had just been crazy ideas that he’d latched onto when he found himself all alone after his grandmother died. Most of the inheritance money was still in the jar. He could get out any time he wanted to.

In the dark room, Todd listened to Frankie take a couple swigs from a bottle of Wild Irish Rose he’d been nursing all evening. Something scurried across the floor, and he jerked his feet up. The silence grew, filled the dirty room. Musty-smelling hash fumes drifted out the doorway. A night bird called out from across the creek. “You callin’ me a liar?” Frankie finally said, his voice barely a whisper.

Before Todd could answer, Frankie jumped up and knocked him off his chair onto the floor. His fists caught him seven or eight times in the side of the head, and Todd felt something bust in one of his ears. Then Frankie got his arm around Todd’s neck and squeezed, shutting off his air. He kicked and tried to break loose and then felt nothing but a small black hole that fit around him like a sleeve. His last thought before he went under was that he would see his grandmother again. But after a while he woke up, lying on his belly on the bloody floor with his jeans down around his ankles. He rolled over and spit out his loose tooth. Frankie was standing over him, wiping his dick off with a rag. Raising his hips, Todd started to smile as he pulled his pants back up. “What you grinnin’ about, you little faggot?” Frankie said. Then he stomped down hard on Todd’s face with the heel of his work boot.

When he finally woke up that second time, Frankie was gone, along with the Ford and the jar of money. All the rest of that night, Todd cried and kept apologizing to his grandmother’s ghost. It had taken her a lifetime to save that much money. When daylight came, he searched around and found two hits of blotter acid taped under the bottom of the hubcap they used as an ashtray and enough roaches to roll two skinny joints. Out back in a clump of weeds, he stumbled upon five bottles of beer in a paper sack. Frankie had taken most everything else, even the flashlight and Todd’s little transistor radio.

Not knowing what else to do, he waited. He rationed his cigarettes, tried to sleep. His ear bled off and on. There were some canned blackberries in the cupboard left over from one of Frankie’s visits to the old woman. They gave Todd the shits, but he ate them anyway. He rubbed the wall with a flat rock until the stick family disappeared. His forehead still had the boot print on it. Once he woke up thinking that his grandmother was fixing him pancakes on top of the coal stove. By the end of the third day, he knew Frankie wasn’t coming back.

That night, Todd ate the two hits of blotter and drank the last beer. Then he put on his shoes and walked through the weeds along the creek bank down to Schott’s Bridge. It was three o’clock in the morning and traffic was dead. Everything was damp with dew. Todd walked back and forth across the smooth planks for a few minutes and then hoisted himself up onto the outer rail at one end of the bridge. It was slick. With his arms held out away from his body, he slowly made his way to the middle. Then he stopped and stared down into the black water for a long time, feeling the first tiny rushes of the acid streak through his brain. Todd lit his last cigarette and smoked it almost down to the filter. Then he let it drop, and the burning orange coal fell through the damp air. As he stood there, aching with sorrow and regret, he watched the water swallow it.

EVERYONE IN KNOCKEMSTIFF, OHIO, THOUGHT THAT DUANE Myers was going out with his first real woman that night, but he was just blowing smoke. He’d spread the rumor all over the holler, then covered the major details at the Torch Drive-in: smeared a glob of ketchup across the backseat of his father’s Chrysler, spilled some wine on a pair of his sister’s ragged panties, even branded two hickeys on his neck with a metal spoon that he heated up with a Zippo lighter. Then he spent the rest of the evening hunkered down behind the steering wheel like a toad, waiting to go home. He drank a six-pack of warm beer and watched Women in Cages and Female Moonshiners . The odor of scorched flesh lingered in the car like the smell of buttered popcorn.

Ever since Duane had turned sixteen that spring, his old man, Clarence, had been on his ass about finding a girlfriend. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” the old man asked. “Goddamn, Duane, when I was your age, I was bustin’ cherries all over this damn county.” They were setting tomato plants out in the long, rocky garden that Clarence made the boy slave over every summer. The old man sucked down a beer for every three Big Boys that Duane stuck in the ground. Empty cans were scattered along the crooked rows like giant seedpods. “I shit you not, boy,” Clarence bragged, settling back on his skinny haunches and wiping sweat from his dirt-streaked brow, “one time I fucked a mud dauber’s nest I was so goddamn horny.” Duane kept moving forward silently on his knees, raking up lumpy clay mounds around each wilted plant with his hands. Clarence had been telling these stories forever; one day it was a bee’s nest, then a sweaty sock, sometimes a pint of pig brains. It had always been a big joke, but things were different now.

By the middle of the summer, Clarence seemed to be on the verge of cracking up. He paced around the pasture behind the house sometimes for hours, stomping through cow shit and seriously wondering if maybe his only son might be God’s punishment for a life that had been so littered with lust. At night he had nightmares that Duane was turning into a sissy like that Dixon boy from over on Plug Run, the one that got nabbed wearing his mother’s nightgown, then moved to Columbus for a Swedish operation.

“You gotta quit readin’ them books,” Clarence warned Duane one morning at the kitchen table. He looked like hell, anyone could tell he’d had another fucked-up dream. “Start watchin’ more TV,” he advised. The old man took a sip of hot coffee, pushed away the plate of white bread and bologna gravy his sleepy wife had set in front of him.