Donald Pollock - Knockemstiff

Duane leaned against the door, gulping a glass of cold milk. His stomach had been on fire for weeks now. Trying to avoid his father’s baggy, bloodshot eyes, he kept glancing nervously around the room until he finally caught his wavy reflection in a shiny copper skillet that hung on the wall. He stared at the purple craters sunk into his thin face, the black-framed glasses, the short choppy haircut that Clarence still insisted on. “Check out that Twiggy girl,” he heard his father say. “By God, I’d take a piece of that.”

The problem with Duane became the old man’s favorite topic. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Even the bastards that Clarence worked with at the paper mill got in on the act. Every day they waited until Clarence walked into the lunchroom, then started blowing off about finding dried jizz sparkling like doughnut glaze in the backseat of their junior’s muscle car, used rubbers lying in the driveway like fat dead slugs. They kept feeding the old man new insults to throw at Duane: faggot, poofer, fudgepacker. It was like tossing logs on a fire. Clarence would come home wound tight as a clock, stomp through the kitchen door waving his sweaty, sawdust-covered arms, screaming “Pansy!” at the top of his lungs.

Duane’s friends only made things worse. Just a couple of weeks after school started, Porter Watson and Wimpy Miller stopped by on their way to pull a train on Geraldine Stubbs. Clarence was standing in his socks under the walnut tree in the front yard drinking a quart of beer. As Duane climbed into the backseat of the Fairlane, Porter yelled, “Hey, Clarence, how’s it going, man?”

“Shit,” Duane muttered when he saw his father start ambling toward them.

“What you boys into tonight?” Clarence asked.

Porter grabbed a cigarette off the dash and stuck it between his lips. “Geraldine Stubbs,” he answered with a grin. Porter’s black hair hung past his square shoulders as thick and shiny as any woman’s. He wore cheap rings shaped like skulls and marijuana leaves that had turned his fingers a bluish-green color. He’d had more girls than you could shake a stick at. Earlier that summer, his mother had banished him to the garage after he brought home a dose of crabs and spread them all over her new couch.

“Who?” Clarence said, running a hand over his stiff, gray crew cut.

“One of them retards from over on Reub Hill,” Wimpy spoke up, pulling a little black comb out of his mouth and running the spit through his thin red hair. Wimpy had a flat stupid face, long yellow teeth. He reminded Duane of a can opener.

“Nice?” the old man asked. He leaned against the car and tipped up the foamy beer.

Porter shrugged, took a drag on his cigarette, then said, “Well, she ain’t much to look at, but she sure likes to spread ’em.”

“Yeah,” Wimpy cracked, “that’s why they call her Peanut Butter.”

Clarence slung the empty bottle in the grass. “How old?” he belched.

“Fifteen,” Porter said.

Clarence pulled out a wrinkled pack of Red Man, dug out two fingers of chew, and shoved them in his mouth. He took a long look at the hills that surrounded the holler. The leaves were turning fast. Bright patches of red and orange stood out against the green pines. He hadn’t had a hard-on in six months. “Hey, like I’m always tellin’ Duane,” he finally said in a solemn voice, “puss is puss. It’s all good, just some better than other.” He sounded like some ancient philosopher who’d mulled over the problem for centuries. Then he bent down and peered in at Duane, made wacky up-and-down signals with his bushy eyebrows until Porter backed out of the driveway.

But Duane couldn’t go through with it. They parked in front of Geraldine’s old house and leaned on the horn until she finally came out. Stumbling through the weedy yard with her head down, wrapped in her shabby clothes, she reminded Duane of a timid ghost hovering just inches above the ground, searching for an empty tomb to hide in. Then, to make matters worse, he had to sit beside her in the backseat all the way to Train Lane while Wimpy argued with Porter about who was going to get firsts. Geraldine never said a word, just sat scrunched up against the door staring out the window, sucking down the beers Wimpy handed her. She smelled like pee, had gray lint stuck in her frizzy brown hair.

“You’re too damn picky,” Porter said later, after they let her out. “Fuck, your old man woulda tore that up.” He jabbed Wimpy in the arm and they both laughed.

“I ain’t him,” Duane said, staring down at the big wet spot in the middle of the backseat.

Wimpy shook his head. “Yeah, Duane, what you wanta do?” he said, lighting a joint. “End up like that crazy Lard and his goddamn Cher?”

“Nancy,” Duane corrected. Almost everyone made fun of Lard McComis. Besides being the fattest kid in Knockemstiff, he was crazy in love with Nancy Sinatra, the famous singer. He knew everything about her, down to the size of her feet and what kind of ice cream she liked to eat. But though Lard was a couple bricks shy of a load, Duane still considered him sharper than Wimpy any damn day.

“What?” Wimpy said.

“It ain’t Cher, it’s Nancy!” Duane yelled. Then he turned and watched Geraldine as she floated across the muddy ditch that ran alongside the gravel road and disappeared into the dark house. Nobody, he suddenly realized, had bothered to tell her good-bye or thanks or even see you next time, whore.

…..

BY THE TIME HE LEFT THE DRIVE-IN AND DROVE BACK TO Knockemstiff, Duane’s beer buzz was gone along with his nerve. Topping the last steep hill before the holler, he slowed down, and then turned into Porter’s rutted driveway. It was one o’clock in the morning, but a light still burned in the run-down garage. He dreaded facing the old man with a clear head tonight. Duane could picture Clarence sitting on the couch waiting up for him, a bottle cocked between his legs, anxious to examine evidence, ask dumb questions. Even talking to his old man on a good day felt like being trapped in an elevator with a cannibal who’d been off his feed.

Pulling in next to Porter’s beat-up Ford, Duane shut off the engine and stuck his sister’s wet panties in his pocket. He walked around the side of the building, pushed back the piece of heavy brown felt that served as a door, and looked in. Lard was sprawled out on two bales of musty straw, his greasy bibs pulled down around his scabby knees. A trouble lamp plugged into a frayed extension cord hung from one of the rafters above his head, shining down on his mountainous belly like a circus spotlight. A few feet away, Porter and Wimpy were passing a bong back and forth and tossing an occasional dart at the huge ball of fat. The darts were special ones with points that had been ground off until they were only an inch or so long. Every time one of the shafts found a sweet spot, the boys turned Lard on to another hit off the plastic pipe. It was the only sport they were any good at.

As soon as Duane stepped through the door, Lard grinned and yelled in his ducky voice, “Hey, Duane, see my girlfriend?” Then he held up his Nancy Sinatra album cover, the same one he’d shown Duane a million times before. It was her Boots LP, the one that transformed her from a spoiled rich brat into a bona fide sex goddess. She was all curled up like a cat in tight go-go shit, red leather skirt, knee-high boots. Lard carried it with him everywhere, stuck down the front of his bibs. Sometimes he used it as a shield, held it in front of his fat pasty face whenever someone got ready to chuck another bomber at him. He claimed he wanted to save his eyes.

Duane smiled and shook his head. “Damn, boy, ain’t you got any other records?”

Lard whooped and hugged the record jacket, then planted a wet smacker on Nancy’s frosted lips. “Not like her I don’t, Duane,” he said.