Donald Pollock - Knockemstiff

After he folded his clean black jeans, Del and the Fish Stick Girl left the Suds and headed up the street. It was one o’clock in the morning and the air was cool and damp with dew. “Boy, you sure get into it,” the Fish Stick Girl said. “What was so funny?”

“I think I saw my cousin.”

“Nobody ever told me that before,” she said. “Have you been taking my meds again?”

“Well, I appreciate it anyway,” he said.

“You’re welcome. Now you do something for me,” she said, opening up her purse.

“What’s that?”

“Here,” she said, shoving a fish stick in Del’s face.

Del hesitated, then grabbed the fish stick and bit a cold chunk off one end. It didn’t taste like fish at all, but he imagined it was something else anyway, the way the devout do with the little wafer and the grape juice. “Okay, now close your eyes,” she said. Del shut his eyes. “Don’t peek,” she ordered. As she pulled him down the street, he pretended not to know where they were going. She liked that. Cracking his eyes open, Del saw thick black clouds move across the sky and cover the moon like a grave blanket. He closed his eyes again and crammed the rest of the fish stick into his mouth. Suddenly, he was very tired. He felt like the ragged ghoul staggering across the screen in an old movie, the peace he sought always out of reach. They walked on, the Fish Stick Girl leading him by the hand.

I’D BEEN STAYING OUT AROUND MASSIEVILLE WITH MY CRIPPLED uncle because I was broke and unwanted everywhere else, and I spent most of my days changing his slop bucket and sticking fresh cigarettes in his smoke hole. Every twenty-four hours, I wiped him off with a wet cloth and turned his broken body over to air everything out. He’d been totaled in a freak car crash and had ended up with a giant settlement that cursed him with enough money to vegetate for the rest of his sorry-ass life.

I was supposed to be staying straight — his daughter had even insisted I sign a goddamn scrap of paper — but late one night I found myself fucked up in a strange car littered with flakes of dead skin and stolen tools and those gas station cassettes that are always on sale for $1.99. The driver was a hillbilly guy named Jimmy who kept calling me cousin, but I couldn’t even remember meeting him — let alone seeing him at one of the reunions we used to have when our family was still permitted in the state parks. Still, being the type of person I was, I’d apparently let him talk me into huffing several cans of Bactine, and then I was sick, and my brain felt like a frozen bleach bottle. As snow swirled all around us in the Wal-Mart parking lot, I rinsed the inside of my face with Jimmy’s last beer and vowed never to stick my head in a bread sack again.

Some time after that, around 3:00 AM, we ended up at the Crispie Creme looking for Phil, a friend of mine, who was supposed to have some Seconal suppositories left over from his dead dad’s unsuccessful bout with cancer. The Creme is the only thing open in our town after the bars close where you might find people like us, but there was just Mrs. Leach, the cross-eyed waitress who always creeped me out because once, in jail, I’d held her son in my arms. Wherever I went in those days, I stumbled across the bill collectors and misfortunes of my past, while any chance of a future worth living kept spinning farther and farther away.

We ordered coffee, and then Jimmy and I sat down in a corner booth away from the old lady so she didn’t have to look at us. Why worry an old woman at that time of night? The place was all windows and plastic woodwork and those buzzing fluorescent lights that always make me look like a corpse. A radio in the back was playing a fast Christmas song that only religious people could understand.

“That’s the last time I do any of that stuff,” I said. “I was talkin’ to fucking Fred Flintstone that last can.” Fumbling with a cigarette, I took a chance, surprised I didn’t ignite from all the fumes I’d inhaled.

“Fuck, all I ever get is the sirens and those goddamn goofy lights.” Jimmy pushed back a wad of crusty hair. He had sideburns that didn’t match, and the eyes of a man you wouldn’t trust with a milk cow. “One time though, out at the Torch Drive-in, I did get eaten by a giant bird.” He said this with great feeling, like he was recalling his first kiss or the best day he ever lived. “Sonofabitch pulled me up outta the car like I was a little worm. Damn, cousin, that was a good time.”

Mrs. Leach brought the pot, set down two cups smeared with orange lipstick and chocolate thumbprints. Looking up at her, Jimmy asked, “Hey, girl, how’s that ol’ Lester doing these days?” I motioned with my hand for him to shut up, but he’d already blurted it out.

“Cream?” was all she said. Though she was looking at Jimmy, her face was turned toward me because of the awful way her eyes were scrambled. Heartache and ridicule and the night shift had turned her into a coffee-spilling zombie. You could have nailed a cross to her forehead and the woman wouldn’t have changed her expression. Then, without waiting for a reply, she turned and trudged back to the shiny counter, her white waitress pants saggy in the ass and stained with coffee spots and doughnut grease. If I were a man running for office, she was just the kind of person I might appeal to.

“What the fuck’s the matter with you? Don’t you know he’s dead?” I said in a low voice, hoping the mom wouldn’t hear.

“Who died?” Jimmy asked, tearing open a little plastic thimble full of artificial cream. “You mean Lester?”

“He’s the one hung himself in the jail last summer,” I whispered, covering my cup with my hand as some of the red, crusty skin around his mouth flaked off and dropped onto the table.

“Shit,” Jimmy said loudly, slapping his tattooed hands together, “I remember now.” He lit a cigarette, then glanced back at Lester’s mom. She was picking pieces of lint off her frayed sweater, dropping them to the floor like little mashed cooties. “Oh, well,” he said, shrugging his skinny shoulders, “what you gonna do? Hell, me and Lester went to school together.” He motioned with his cup toward Mrs. Leach. “I knowed that old bag all my life.”

Then, without thinking, I said, “I was there when they cut him down.” It seemed that I always talked about shit that I didn’t want to talk about, but could never say the things I wanted to say. “Had a trash bag wrapped around his neck,” I added. I could still see the young deputy, dropping his big key ring, screaming on the radio for backup. Before I knew it, I’d wrapped my arms around Lester’s quivering legs and lifted him up, his piss soaking through the top of my orange jumpsuit. I was doing ten shamefaced days for shoplifting a lousy package of cheese, and for a brief second or two, I saw saving him as a chance to prove that I was better than that. But when the deputy ran down the stairs, I grew confused, then limp. I hoped nobody would know the difference. The day before, Lester had pushed a pencil up his dick. It was his greatest accomplishment. I’ll never forget the way he kicked when I let him go.

“I can see killin’ yourself, but not with no fucking trash bag,” Jimmy said.

“You keep doing that spray lube and shit, you won’t have to worry about it.”

The glass door swung open and two big, homely women walked in looking guilty. They were the kind of women who, out of sheer loneliness, end up doing kinky stuff with candy bars, wake up with apple fritters in their hair. They looked over at us with bold little smiles that indicated either stupidity or desperation. Jimmy leaned back in the booth, eyeing them like a desert sheikh buying a keeper at a white-slave auction.