Donald Pollock - Knockemstiff

“Same as last time,” Aunt Joan said. “Those Percocets I been getting off old Mrs. Marsh.”

“Well, his friggin’ eyes are open,” Sharon said.

“Is he doing anything else? Is he moving?”

“No, but his goddamn eyes are awake.”

Aunt Joan was silent for a moment. “Burn him with your Zippo a little.”

“Are you nuts?”

“Oh, don’t set him on fire. Just see if he flinches is all.”

Sharon looked closely at Jimmy one more time, then dropped back down in her seat and said, “Aunt Joan, I ain’t doing that.” The clattering sound under the hood finally eased up, and Sharon tried to relax. She leaned her head back and watched the wipers flop loosely back and forth across the windshield. Her grandfather had finally returned home when his eyes gave out from the sugar and he couldn’t see to drive anymore. Hobbling into the house on his rotten legs, he gave his daughter a peck on the cheek and handed her both sets of keys. “Joanie, that’s a good car,” he told her. “Take care of it.” John Grubb had always kept his youngest daughter close, so close that people around the holler had spread rumors, and it had only gotten worse after Edna was killed. But while she was peeling potatoes for his dinner, he slipped out on the back porch and blew a hole behind his ear with the.45. She was forty-three years old and had never been on a date.

They turned off the highway onto Black Run, the secondary road that would take them back to the holler. “Do I have to help you carry him in?” Sharon asked.

Aunt Joan rubbed her chin, turned down the heater. “No, I don’t reckon,” she said. “You’ve done enough.”

Ten minutes later, she stopped the car in front of Sharon’s house. They could both see Dean pacing back and forth in the front room, jabbing his hands into the air. All the lights were on. It looked like a hundred people lived there. Pieces of the TV antenna were scattered in the muddy driveway. “Where’s your curtains?” Aunt Joan asked.

“I have no friggin’ idea,” Sharon said numbly. It was four o’clock in the morning, and Dean had been at it since yesterday afternoon when the rain started. He’d been to doctors all over Ohio, but nobody could explain why the rain made him so crazy.

“You’re going to have to do something about that boy one of these days,” Aunt Joan said. “He’s going to have one of those fits and hurt somebody.”

Sharon rolled her eyes. At least she had a regular man. “That last doctor he saw told us to try moving to the desert,” she said, watching her husband through the naked windows.

“The desert?” Aunt Joan said. “You mean with camels and sheikhs and stuff?”

“No, like Arizona.”

“Oh.” Aunt Joan got a serious look on her face. Reaching over, she took hold of her niece’s hand and squeezed it. “Sharon,” she said, staring into her eyes, “Dean ain’t worth moving away for, you hear me?” She turned and looked back at the house. “He gets to where you can’t handle him, we can take care of that.”

Aunt Joan was always suggesting that Sharon do something about Dean, either divorce him or stick him in a group home. Putting up with her advice had been more of an aggravation than anything else. Tonight though, as she listened to Jimmy’s soggy wheeze in the backseat, Sharon thought about the other men they had brought back to the holler, wondered again why Aunt Joan refused to talk about them.

Aunt Joan shrugged. “I’m just saying I wouldn’t want to live in no desert.”

Sharon started to get out of the car. “Don’t worry, that’s just what the head doctor said.”

“Here, you take these,” Aunt Joan said, handing Sharon the box of doughnuts.

“I thought you had a sweet tooth.”

“I do,” the older woman chuckled. She turned and glanced back at Jimmy. “But not for no doughnuts.”

…..

WALKING IN THE HOUSE, SHARON SAW THAT DEAN HAD NOT only torn all the curtains down, but he’d smashed every pretty thing she had hanging on the walls. “You’re gonna clean this up, mister,” she told him. A confused look clouded his face, and he curled up on the couch and started scratching the back of his head. He dug harder and harder into his scalp until she had to run over and grab his arms. The thin piece of skin over the steel plate was raw and bleeding. He calmed down for a few moments, then jumped up and started singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” at the top of his froggy voice.

Sharon gave up and went around shutting off all the lights. A photograph of her and Dean lay on the floor in the kitchen, the frame broken, and she kicked it under the table. Then she walked down the hallway and unlocked her bedroom door with a key she kept on a chain around her neck. Pulling off her sweats, she crawled into bed with the box of doughnuts and pulled the blankets up over her. Yes, she thought, she was definitely catching a cold. She turned on the little radio that sat on the nightstand and twisted the dial until she found some easy-listening music.

Taking a doughnut from the box, Sharon bit into it, a chocolate cream filled. Raindrops splattered against the window. She ate the doughnut and wondered what it would be like to live in the desert. Everything there would be new. She could go on a diet and Dean could get his head dried out. They could do whatever people do who live in the sand.

Biting into a glazed, she started to think about Jimmy. He’d stuck his tongue in her ear, the first time anyone had ever done that. His breath was bad, but so was Dean’s. She wished now that she’d asked him, when they were in the backseat together, if he’d ever been to Arizona. She wondered if he had a girlfriend, maybe even a wife. She hadn’t noticed a wedding ring, but that didn’t mean anything these days. Then she remembered Aunt Joan and decided that she better not think about Jimmy anymore. Besides, she was done with all that business now.

Sharon licked the sugary coating off her fingers and picked up a blueberry, one of her favorites. Through the door, she heard Dean moving around again. Then the DJ came on and said something about more precipitation. She reached over and turned the radio up a little. The rain had settled, the man said in his late-night voice, over the Ohio valley. It was going to stick around a while.

IWOKE UP THINKING I’D PISSED THE BED AGAIN, BUT IT WAS just a sticky spot from where Sandy and me fucked the night before. Those kinds of things happen when you drink like I do — you shit your pants in the Wal-Mart, you end up living off some crackhead and her poor parents. I raised the blankets just a tad, traced my finger over the blue KNOCKEMSTIFF, OHIO tattoo that Sandy had etched in her skinny ass like a road sign. Why some people need ink to remember where they come from will always be a mystery to me.

Wrapping my arms around her, I pulled Sandy up against me, blew my bad breath on the back of her neck. I was just getting ready to nail her again when Sandy’s dad started up down the hall in his sickroom, crying soft and sad like he’d been doing ever since his stroke. That pretty much drained the sap out of me. Sandy groaned and rolled away to the other side of the bed, covered her blond head with a lumpy pillow that was crusty with dried sex and slobber.

I stared at the ceiling and listened as Mary, Sandy’s mom, trudged past the door on her way to check on Albert. The cold floorboards cracked and creaked like ice under her fat legs. Everything in the house seemed old and used up, and that included Sandy. It was just like what my old man always claimed about my mother after she took off—“If she had all of ’em stickin’ out of her that’s been stuck in her, she’d look like a fuckin’ porcupine.” That was Sandy all right; damn near every boy in Twin Township had tapped her one time or another.