Donald Pollock: Knockemstiff

Punching the accelerator, the old man shot off the little mound we were parked on and fishtailed down the aisle. Loose gravel splattered against the other cars. An old man and woman tripped over each other trying to get out of our way. Horns began blowing, headlights popped on. We tore out of the exit and skidded onto the highway, heading west toward home. An ambulance sped by us, its siren blaring. I looked back at the theater just as the movie screen flickered and went black.

“Agnes, you should have seen him,” my old man said, pounding the steering wheel with his bloody hand. “He busted that goddamn brat a good one.” He grabbed his bottle from under the seat, uncapped it, and took a long slug. “This is the best night of my fucking life!” he yelled out the window.

“You got Bobby in a fight?”

“Damn straight, I did,” the old man said.

My mother leaned over the front seat and felt my head with her hands, peered at my face in the dark. “Bobby, are you hurt?” she asked me.

“I got blood on me,” I said.

“My God, Vernon,” she said. “What have you done now, you sick bastard?”

I looked up just as he bashed my mother with his forearm. Her head bounced against the window. “You sonofabitch!” she cried, covering her face with her hands.

“Don’t baby him,” the old man said. “And don’t call me no bastard neither.”

I scooted across the seat and sat behind my father as we raced home. Every time he passed a car, he took another pull from the bottle. Wind rushed through his open window and dried my sweat. The Impala felt like it was floating above the highway. You did good , I kept saying to myself, over and over. It was the only goddamn thing my old man ever said to me that I didn’t try to forget.

…..

LATER THE SOUND OF AN APPROACHING STORM WOKE ME up. I was lying in my bed, still in my clothes. Through my window, I saw lightning flash over the Mitchell Flats. A rumbling wall of thunder rolled across the holler, followed closely by a high, horrible wail; and I thought of Godzilla and the movie that I’d missed. It was only after the thunder faded into the distance that I realized that the wail was just the sound of my old man getting sick in the bathroom.

My bedroom door opened and my mother walked in holding a lighted candle. “Bobby?” she said. I pretended to be asleep. She leaned over me, brushed my sore cheek with her soft hand. Then she reached up and closed my window. In the candlelight, I sneaked a look at the bruise spreading across her face like a smear of grape jelly.

She tiptoed out of the room, leaving the door ajar, and walked down the hall. “There,” I heard her say to my father, “is that better?”

“I think I fucked it up,” my father said. “That bastard’s head was hard as a rock.”

“You shouldn’t drink, Vernon,” my mom said.

“Is he asleep?”

“He’s wore out.”

“I’d bet a paycheck he broke that kid’s nose, the way the blood came out,” my father said.

“We better go to bed,” my mom said.

“I couldn’t believe it, Agnes. That fucking kid was twice Bobby’s size, I swear to God.”

“He’s just a boy, Vernon.”

They walked slowly past my door, leaning into each other, and went into their bedroom. I heard my mother say, “No way,” but then after a few minutes, their bed began to squeak like a rusty seesaw. Outside, the storm finally cut loose, and big drops of rain began pounding the tin roof of the house. I heard my mother moan, my father call out for Jesus. A bolt of lightning arced across the black sky, and long shadows moved about on the bare plaster walls of my room. I pulled the thin sheet over my head and stuck my fingers in my mouth. A sweet, salty taste stung my busted lip, ran over my tongue. It was the other boy’s blood, still on my hands.

As my parents’ bed thumped loudly against the floor in the next room, I lapped the blood off my knuckles. The dried flakes dissolved in my mouth, turning my spit to syrup. Even after I’d swallowed all the blood, I kept licking my hands. I tore at the skin with my teeth. I wanted more. I would always want more.

IWAS COMING DOWN OFF THE MITCHELL FLATS WITH THREE arrowheads in my pocket and a dead copperhead hung around my neck like an old woman’s scarf when I caught a boy named Truman Mackey fucking his own little sister in the Dynamite Hole. I’d been hunting flints all morning up around the old Indian furnaces and was headed for the store down in Knockemstiff to trade them for some potted meat and crackers. Maude Speakman allowed me forty cents for each one I brought her, and then she sold them over again to some man from Meade who delivered her gas every Tuesday.

It was hot that day, and as I crossed Black Run, knee deep in the water and fighting the green flies that were swarming around the snake’s mashed-up head, I heard some splashing around the bend. I stopped and listened close for a minute, then cut back over and sneaked up to the edge of the big hole that a county road crew had blasted in the creek years ago digging for gravel. I hoped to see something is all, thought maybe I’d have some fun with that dead snake if it turned out to be that goddamn gang of boys who’d been throwing rocks at my old school bus, the one Henry Skiver let me stay in up behind his property. Henry’s daddy used to keep the bus for a chicken house, but I shoveled it out good, and it wasn’t so bad after that. Lately, though, those boys had busted so many holes in the top of it that every time it rained I might as well been living in a bathtub.

I damn near swallowed my cud when I got up there and saw the Mackey boy had his sister down on her hands and knees at the edge of the water and him behind her with no clothes on. I stepped back off the path a ways, then eased down on the ground and crawled up behind some chokecherry bushes to watch. My heart started beating so big I thought it was going to pop out of my chest, and I was afraid they’d hear all the noise it was making, but Truman and her just went on about their business like they were the only two people on this little patch of God’s wicked earth.

…..

NOWADAYS I RECKON MOST PEOPLE WOULD STARVE TO death if they tried to live like me, but I learned years ago that a man can get by in this world without being somebody’s nigger if he don’t mind what he eats for supper. Back when I was nineteen, they started drafting boys for the big war against the Germans, and I hid on top of the Mitchell Flats for almost three years with nothing but a penknife and a ball of twine I stole from Floyd Bowman’s barn. My old man threw a fit when I told him I wasn’t going to answer the call, spit all kinds of names in my face like I wasn’t nothing but dirt. “Jake, you goddamn chickenshit, I won’t be able to face people around here you run away,” he told me, but I left that night anyway. I’d never been more than two miles away from Knockemstiff, Ohio, in my whole life. And though there have been plenty of days I still regret I didn’t try to make him see things my way that night, I guess taking off just seemed easier at the time. Hell, how could I have told that old man, the way they were drafting and killing boys left and right, that I wasn’t afraid of the fighting nearly as much as I was scared of leaving the holler?

…..

THAT MACKEY GIRL COULDN’T HAVE BEEN MORE THAN twelve or so, but she was backing up against her brother like she’d been at it for quite a while. Truman was maybe fifteen or sixteen years old, and long and skinny as a horseweed, same as his mouthy old man. He’d push it in her a few times and get her all squirmy, and then they’d both jump up and raise their arms into the sticky air and yell, “Jesus, save me!” And every time they said it, they’d fall backward in the hole laughing, and then Truman would get up behind her again, that filthy brown water running off him onto her, and they’d do it all over. And Lord, though my family never was one for religion, the first time I heard those words coming out of their mouths like that, they cut me near as bad as the ones my old man called me the night I left his house for good. I started to get up and come out from behind the bushes, figuring if I let them know I was around, they’d run on home and maybe think twice about what they’d been doing. But then I didn’t, and the longer I laid there and watched them, the more I talked myself into believing that they’d just found their own little way of praying, and that maybe they really did want the Savior or even somebody else to come down and wipe away their sins.