Donald Pollock - Knockemstiff

Duane didn’t say anything. He was stretched out in a wooden chair, smoking one of Porter’s Camels, going over his story one more time before he went home to face the old man. A wave of disgust suddenly washed over him, soaking him in shame. Even though she wasn’t real, he knew he’d treated Mapel badly, said stuff about her he wouldn’t say about a dog. He whispered her name again, but it didn’t feel the same now. She was gone. Taking another drag off the cigarette, he thought of Geraldine gliding across her yard after Porter and Wimpy were done with her.

They sat in silence for a few more minutes, then Lard spoke up again. “Duane?”

“What now?”

“Wanta trade?”

“Trade? Trade what?”

“I trade you my Nancy for your Mapel.”

Duane looked over at Lard in surprise. The fat boy was clutching the Nancy album close to his heart, his huge stomach moving slowly up and down like a worn-out bellows. He’d had his Nancy for years now; they did everything together. She’d protected him from a thousand stray darts. “You don’t want to do that, Lardy,” Duane said.

“Why not?” Lard asked. He was still staring up into the rafters.

Duane thought for a minute. “Because…because she’s your girl, always has been,” he explained. “Heck, she’s better than any ol’ Mapel.”

“Aw, Duane,” Lard said with a yawn, “Nancy ain’t even real. She’s just some old picture my granny give me.” Then he closed his eyes.

Duane waited a while, then stood up and pulled the damp panties out of his Levi jacket. He crept softly across the hard dirt floor and stood over his fat friend. Lard was snoring now, his flabby arms crossed over his belly. He smelled like potato chips and grimy sweat. Glancing over to make sure Porter and Wimpy were still asleep, Duane noticed the darts lined up in a row on the workbench. Ever since they were kids, Lard had claimed that he couldn’t feel anything, insisted that the darts never hurt. Still, Duane had always pitched his underhanded, keeping a secret promise to himself never to break the fat boy’s skin. “Like a goddamn girl,” Wimpy liked to jeer.

Duane stuffed the panties into the side pocket of Lard’s bibs, then gathered up all the darts and stepped outside into the night. He could hear the far-off rumble of a B&O freight as it rolled along the curved spine of the Summit heading west toward Cincinnati. Moving to the end of Porter’s driveway, he stared down at his parents’ house, moldering at the bottom of the hill like an illegal dump, surrounded by the old man’s rusty junk and overgrown lilacs and gray October fog. He couldn’t believe that he lived there.

As the sound of the train died away, the wind suddenly picked up, rattling the dry weeds in the field across the road. The cool air tingled on his blistered neck. He saw his parents’ porch light flash on, then off again. Looking up, he searched out the brightest star throbbing in the sky above Knockemstiff, then drew back and flung one of the darts at it. He kept throwing them, as hard as he could, until they had all disappeared into the darkness that surrounded him.

IT WAS THE DAY BEFORE HIS COUSIN’S FUNERAL AND DEL ended up at the Suds washing his black jeans at midnight. They were the only pants he owned that were fit for the occasion. Even Randy, the dead man who didn’t give a fuck anymore, would look better than Del. The one decent shirt in his trash bag had TROY’S BAIT SHOP stenciled across the back of it.

That wasn’t all. Del was with a woman he couldn’t get rid of, no matter what he did or said. Every time he dumped her off at the group home, she beat him back to his room with a fresh load in her automatic pill dispenser and another wad of clean underwear. To make matters worse, she kept bugging the shit out of him with these fish sticks she reeled up from the bottomless pond of a plastic purse. They were cold and greasy, feathered with gray lint. And even though she was probably the best woman Del Murray had ever been with — gobs of bare-knuckle sex, the latest psychotropic drugs, a government check — he was still embarrassed to be seen with her in public. Anyone who’s ever dated a retard will understand what he was up against.

Del bought a box of soap from a little vending machine that charged exorbitant prices and poured most of it into the washer, then walked over to the bulletin board. Every Laundromat has one, a place on the wall where people can peddle their junk or swap their kids. There was a notice for a big tent revival over on the hopeless side of town, a crudely written flyer promising a better life, something that Del had craved for a long time. In one corner a cartoon Jesus floated on a pink cloud above the earth, in the other a bloody fiend sat in a prison cell snacking on a plate of skulls labeled like homemade preserves: JUNKIE, WINO, HOMO, WHORE, ATHEIST. It was designed to scare the fuck out of the type of people who wash their clothes in a public place. But more than anything, the poster dredged up memories for Del, reminded him of the time he and Randy wasted an entire year attending the Shady Glen Church of Christ in Christian Union just to win a prize, a little red Bible that fell apart the first hot day. They were eight years old.

…..

SEVERAL YEARS AFTER THEY DROPPED OUT OF SUNDAY school, Randy and Del enrolled in a mail order Charles Atlas course. This was back in the days when a kid could still change the course of his life by filling out one of the order forms found in the back of a comic book, a long time ago, years before the Fish Stick Girl was even born. A new envelope filled with exercises arrived in the mail every week, but Del couldn’t get into it, all that work just so you could tear a phone book in half. Instead, he shoplifted a paperback from Gray’s Drugstore in Meade called “Reds.” Del wasn’t much of a reader, but he needed something to kill time until Randy gave up on building a different body.

Del would never forget “Reds.” He probably read it a dozen times that summer. It had the same powerful effect on him as the public service announcement on the radio about the guy who ripped his arm open with a can opener so he could blow dope in the bloody hole with a plastic straw. In the book, a clean-cut hero named Cole picks up these two runaway girls who shoot sleeping pills in his dad’s new Lincoln. For Del, it was like flipping on a light switch, and by the time the crazy bitches dropped acid and torched the hippie’s crash pad, he knew exactly how he wanted to live his life.

“Man, you gotta read this,” Del said, waving his copy of “Reds” under Randy’s nose. They were listening to a Hendrix album while Randy stood in front of the open window and worked out in the nude. Charles Atlas was big on sunshine and fresh air, which probably would have been fine if you lived on the moon, but in their county, the smog from the paper mill made everything smell like rotten eggs. Randy had already scratched the shit out of “Purple Haze,” and Jimi kept repeating “…while I kiss the sky…while I kiss the sky.” Glancing out the window over Randy’s shoulder, Del saw a dirty brown cloud drifting by, high over Knockemstiff, the holler where they lived.

Randy glanced at the cover of the book, the picture of the four-eyed boy and the two wasted chicks standing by a highway sign with their thumbs in their pockets. He snorted in disgust, then took a big gulp from the jelly glass of raw eggs he kept by the bed. He was up to a dozen a day. Sweat was dripping off the end of his dick. His stomach resembled a car grill. “I could break that sonofabitch like a pencil,” he said, flexing his biceps.

“Shoot, this guy gets more pussy than you ever dreamed of,” Del said. “He don’t need no muscles either.”