Donald Pollock - Knockemstiff

“Well, well, well,” he said.

“No way,” I told him.

“Shit, I ain’t had none in a month. I’d blow the top of that one’s head off.”

The older woman waddled over and squeezed into a booth opposite the counter while the young one stood and ordered a big box of day-olds and two quarts of hot chocolate. She was packed in a pair of those stretch pants that overweight people should be thrown in prison for wearing. A faded Reds ball cap was cocked on her head at an angle that seemed to foretell, in my gloomy state, an ill-fated ride with a stranger. I could almost see a garden of moss slowly spreading over her secret resting place.

“Want me to talk to ’em?” Jimmy offered, between attempts to attract the younger one by extending his tongue until it touched the tip of his runny nose.

“Nah, they’re here for the sweets,” I said. “Besides, I ain’t never screwed a big woman and ain’t about to start now.”

“What the hell? Fat girls like to fuck, too. I can’t believe someone like you is so goddamn picky.”

“Why’s that?” I asked, setting down my coffee cup.

“Well, your teeth and all. You’d be doing good to screw that old girl. You ain’t exactly Glen Campbell.”

I’d had enough of his mouth. Grabbing hold of his collar, I jerked him across the table. “You little sonofabitch,” I said, twisting the dirty shirt around his skinny neck, “you just don’t know when to shut up, do you?”

I choked him until his tongue popped out, then shoved him back down in the booth. He coughed and spit a gob of thick poisonous snot out onto the worn linoleum. “Jesus, man, I didn’t mean nothing,” he said, rubbing his throat.

“Just mind your own business, okay?” I said. Turning away, I looked out the window at the snowy street, hoping someone would show up with enough stuff to put me under. At one time, I’d practically been considered a handsome man, a regular party boy; decent women called me by my real name while the strippers at Tater Brown’s let me light their cigarettes. But that was before some ugly bastard named Tex Colburn caught me in the Paint Creek bottoms picking through a patch of buds that he’d been planning on ripping off himself. By the time he ran me down in that cornfield, he was so pissed that he had his boys hold me while he chipped my front teeth out one by one with a spike nail he pulled out of a rotten fence post. Every time I flinched, he cut up my lips. Now I was at the mercy of a welfare dentist who spent his office hours at the clinic trading spit with the volunteer eye doctor. In the reflection from the glass, I tried out one of my old smiles. But the happy-shit days were gone, and I sat staring somberly into a pink, toothless cave.

“Well, fuck,” I said after a few minutes, and turned back to face Jimmy, who was busy pouring sugar out of the dispenser and dividing it into two lines with a coffee spoon. “What you think?”

“Hey, I don’t even know this Phil fucker,” he said. “We just gonna sit around all night, or what?”

A clock shaped like a doughnut said 4:20 AM. Though I hated to admit it, Phil was probably passed out somewhere, enjoying his dead father’s legacy. I found myself wishing I had a loved one who would die and leave me their barbiturates, but I couldn’t think of anyone who’d ever loved me that much. My uncle had already promised his to the mail lady.

“Goddamn him,” I said, half expecting Jimmy to snort the white crystals spread out on the table.

“We could always do another can,” he suggested, his face hovering just inches above the glittering columns.

I thought about going back to my uncle’s house, snaking out the clogged tubes, listening to the poor bastard repeat the same bitter stories over and over again. Behind us, the two big women were busy exchanging obscene fantasies, making suction sounds with their mouths, while poor Mrs. Leach dozed on her blue feet behind the display case. “Man, that shit just eats me up,” I groaned, already feeling pukey from the thought of the ether smell.

Detecting a hint of surrender in my voice, Jimmy looked up and smiled with all his soft, twisted teeth. “You just say the word, cuz,” he told me.

I decided to ignore him. Besides, what was there to say? Because of who we were, I already knew what we would do. In a few minutes, Jimmy and I would leave this place and go find somewhere to park in his filthy car. He would fill up the plastic bag again with Bactine, and I would sit and listen to him suck the cold fog down into his lungs. The smell of it would sicken me, and I would crack the window. The snow would slowly cover the windshield. Jimmy’s eyes would turn as red and sticky as candy, and his head would fall back against the seat in a dream. If he were lucky tonight, maybe he would see something that he hadn’t seen before. And then it would be my turn.

WE DROVE DOWN TO PARKERSBURG TO COP SOME MORE ’roids — fifty ccs of Mexican Deca for 425 American dollars — and I fixed up my son, Sammy, right there in the parking lot of the Gold’s, one cc in the hip. Deca is thick as molasses, tough shit to inject, but it won’t bloat you up like a fucking Amish ham, either. He started whimpering like a little girl even before I found the sweet spot. “Stay focused,” I said, pushing the plunger down slowly with my thumb. “Remember: Mr. South Ohio. No pain, no fucking gain.” Sammy’s dumb, zit-faced cousin Little Ralph was with us, hanging over the front seat, saying, “Let me do it, let me do it,” until I had to slap the mouth right off him. Then I stuck my Best of Sousa tape in the stereo and lit up a serious fattie for the long haul back. I could listen to “The Gladiator March” all fucking day long. It’s the music I used to play with my routine when I was competing.

Nobody said another word, except for Little Ralph as he spat blood out the back window, until we swooped off the exit ramp on the other side of town and damn near collided with a clusterfuck in front of the McDonald’s. For a second, I thought I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere. I mean, it was the first traffic jam I’d ever seen in Meade, Ohio. Then I figured it had to be a fire, or maybe some drunken sonofabitch had crashed his car pulling out of the Tecumseh Lounge. But that wasn’t it at all.

Bobby Lowe was standing out along the main drag doing a double bicep. It was the middle of December, definitely sweatshirt weather, but all he had on was a pair of radiant white briefs. I’d heard he’d been hitting the juice, but I had no idea how much size he’d gained. His arms were nearly as big as mine. Cars and trucks were lined up along Main Street, people honking their horns and whooping every time he hit a new pose, the way the trashy bastards show their appreciation around here. Bobby was mostly running through the seven classics, shit any retard can do. He was staring straight ahead, the sweat glistening on him even in the cold, shaking like a dog shitting razor blades. Nobody realizes how hard it is to hold a pose for ninety seconds and squeeze a year’s worth of your life into it. Imagine some sonofabitch holding a gun to your head and forcing you to eat shit forever, like in hell.

“Fuck, why didn’t we think of that?” Little Ralph said as two babes ran up and put hickeys on Bobby’s biceps, then skipped back to their Mustang. That even made me hard, watching the one little bitch in the hip-huggers suck on his cannons.

“What would a fat fuck like you do out there?” I said to Ralph as I eyeballed Bobby’s calves. The bastards must have been a good nineteen inches.

“Maybe get some face for one thing,” he cracked.

“I’d hate to see the dirty skank that would go down on you,” I shot back. “Shit, she’d turn the whole fuckin’ town to stone.”