Donald Pollock - Knockemstiff

His face turning red, Del jammed the pennies and dimes into the pocket of his jeans, then grabbed the beer. He started out the door, but suddenly stopped, his hand frozen on the metal handle. “That’s bullshit, what you just said,” he said angrily, his back to the clerk. “That woman? She’s married to some guy I know.” He stared out into the illuminated parking lot, empty except for his old beater. He pushed the door open. “They even got a little baby,” Del added, his voice on the verge of cracking.

He walked quickly across the lot and got into the Cavalier. He sat there trembling, thinking about what the girl had said about Geraldine. “You think you’re scared of that fat man, you just wait,” he said out loud. Then, pulling the beer out of the bag, he tore two ragged eyeholes in the brown paper. He could see the clerk inside, now sitting on a high stool, her hand crammed into a bag of Doritos. Taking a deep breath, he slipped the sack over his head, then jumped out of the car and raced up to the window. “Hey!” he screamed, slamming his fists against the plate glass. The startled girl tumbled backward off the stool, banging her head against the sharp corner of the deli case. Del stood there for a moment in the humid night, his sour breath trapped in the bag, looking down at the still figure lying on the tile floor. Then he slipped his wedding ring back on, walked quickly to his car, and drove home.

IT WAS ONE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING ON A RAINY SUNDAY, and Sharon was sitting at the kitchen table debating whether or not to stuff another slice of American cheese into her mouth when Aunt Joan called, begging her niece to ride into town. “Would you mind we try one more time?” she said. Her voice sounded thick and fuzzy on the phone, and Sharon figured she had been taking somebody else’s pills again. Ever since her father died, Aunt Joan had been working in a nursing home in Meade, changing diapers and spooning soft food into the mouths of old people who’d worn out their welcome in this world. She considered their medication one of the perks of the job.

Sharon pulled back the curtain and looked out the window. In the glow from the security light, she could see water standing several inches deep on the road in front of the house. “Lord, woman,” she told her aunt, “it’s still pouring down out there.” She didn’t want to go outside again. Earlier that day, she had gotten soaked chasing Dean, her damaged husband, around the yard. Now her throat hurt and she could feel a cold coming on. Sharon dreaded wet weather more than anything.

“Please, honey, I’m so lonely tonight,” Aunt Joan said. “I cross my heart, I won’t ask you again.”

Sharon sighed. She had told her aunt the last time that she wasn’t doing it anymore. Not only was it dangerous, it made her feel dirty. Besides, if Dean ever found out, she would never cash another one of his social security checks again. But tonight she couldn’t think straight. Dean had the TV turned up full blast in the living room, listening to some big-mouth preacher with frizzy blond hair stuck up around his head like a halo, and no matter where Sharon went in the cramped house, she couldn’t escape the sounds of televised religion. Everything was either pearly gates or boiling pits. So with Dean flapping his arms like an angel trying to fly through the ceiling and the preacher pleading for more money and Aunt Joan promising it was just the one more time, she caved in. “Look, this is the last time,” Sharon said. “Are you sure you can drive?”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Aunt Joan said, her voice already perking up. “And, honey, don’t wear that stupid ball cap. I need you looking nice.”

Sharon hung up the phone and peeled the plastic wrap off one more slice of the waxy cheese. She yelled again at Dean to turn the TV down. Then she went into the bathroom and started putting on her face. In the last year, she had picked up five men for her aunt, but according to the older woman, not one of them had even stuck around for a sausage-and-gravy breakfast the next morning. When Sharon pressed her for details, she clammed up, refused to talk. It was hopeless. Though only in her forties, Aunt Joan wore old-lady dresses that hung like tired sheets on her fat body, and rubber galoshes over her black orthopedic shoes, even in dry weather. Her gray hair was piled on top of her head in a knot the size of a softball, and she had never tasted lipstick in her life. Sharon was heavy, too, but over the years she had learned the secrets of makeup application and how to camouflage her thick body with brightly colored sweats. It wasn’t that hard to keep a man if you took care of yourself.

Just as she was finishing her eyes, Sharon heard Dean yell something about a giant turtle and run out the back door. She was too tired and discouraged to go after him, even though she hated for anyone to see him when he was having one of his episodes, especially her aunt. By the time Aunt Joan pulled in the driveway, he was hacking away with a chop ax at the tall TV antenna propped against the side of the house. “My God,” Aunt Joan said as Sharon got in the car. “What in the world’s he doing now?”

“Who knows?” Sharon said. She crammed some empty pop cans and fast-food containers under the seat to make room for her feet. “This rain’s got him all screwed up.”

As they started to town, she waited for her aunt to begin her usual speech about marrying a man with a steel plate in his head, but instead, Aunt Joan began telling stories about her sister, Bessie, Sharon’s mother. “All the kids in Knockemstiff used to call me and your mom the Cave Women when we were growing up.” Sharon had heard most of Aunt Joan’s stories a hundred times, and she hated them all, especially this one. The image of some hairy, stooped, apelike creatures always came to mind. “Your mama, though,” Aunt Joan said, staring through the cracked windshield of the New Yorker at the dark, wet road, “she didn’t deserve all that name-calling, being compared with me. She was pretty, just like you.”

“Yeah,” Sharon said, “but look how she ended up.” Sharon bummed a Kool off her aunt, thinking the menthol might soothe her throat. “Maybe you were better off in the long run.”

“What? Being the ugly one? Slaving away for Daddy all those years?” Aunt Joan said. She rubbed her nose, wiped something on her coat. “No, I don’t think so. At least your mom, she had some fun.” Most everyone in the county had heard of Big Bessie. She had left home as soon as she turned eighteen and tended bar around Meade all her life. Men fell in love with her face and tried to imagine a different, slimmer body when they bedded her. One night she didn’t come home from work, but Sharon just assumed she’d gone off with one of her trucker boyfriends. Bessie would do that once in a while, after Sharon was old enough to look after herself, just up and quit a job and take off for Florida or Texas for a couple of weeks. She’d been gone only three days when Sharon got a call from a detective in Milton, West Virginia. Her mother’s body had been found in a Dumpster behind a pancake house. Even now, ten years later, Aunt Joan still called the police department down there to see if they’d made an arrest yet.

“I miss her so much,” Aunt Joan said.

As they approached the cement bridge in Knockemstiff that ran over the little creek called Shady Glen, Sharon said, “Be careful.”

“Oh, you always say that,” Aunt Joan said with a laugh, but she tapped the brakes anyway.

“I know, but I can’t help it.” She didn’t trust anyone’s driving anymore. Dean had crashed his car into the bridge four years ago, just before he and Sharon were supposed to get married. Some people he’d gone to vocational school with had thrown him a bachelor party, and the highway patrol estimated Dean was going eighty miles an hour when he flew through the windshield. The next morning, after the last of the emergency people had pulled away, one of the Myers boys from up in the holler found a pair of black panties and a sliver of pink brain in the grass. Nobody dreamed he would live, but eight months later he walked out of the rehab center on crutches. A thin layer of skin they’d peeled off his ass covered the steel plate in the back of his head. Sharon still thought about the panties occasionally, tried to picture the girl who wore a size five. She hadn’t worn underwear that small since she was in the third grade.