Donald Pollock - Knockemstiff

Not that I really would, but I can’t help feeling the way I feel, even with the new combo Doc Webb prescribed the other day. I even told him about the commercial, but he dismissed it as postretirement depression. “Just quit watching it,” he said.

“How’s that?” I asked.

He was standing by the window in his office, staring at the car dealership across the street. “It’s like that anthrax scare,” he muttered to himself.

“Well, what about the Zippo?” I said. I hauled it out of my pocket and held it up, a final attempt to convince him that I’m a troubled man.

He glanced over his glasses at the shiny lighter, then checked his watch. “Bernard, you shouldn’t smoke,” he said. Then he handed me a little grab bag of samples and showed me out the door.

I didn’t understand what he was trying to say, but I do know my problem has nothing to do with powdered germs or free pills. The poor fuck didn’t know what to do, so he was just trying to fluff it up and make the whole ordeal seem like it was happening to somebody else. Everything is too complicated when you’re alive, even for the experts.

…..

IPULL UP TO THE SPEAKER AND GO HOG WILD WHILE GRABBING for the sun-bleached antacids I keep on the dash. I order enough junk to tear me up for the rest of the afternoon. The Chevy is missing a little, and my plan is to take it out on the highway and blow the carbon out of it after we put Jerry to bed this evening. “There is a difference,” Jill says out of the blue. Though I know better, I ask her what the hell she’s talking about. “Between big and fat,” she says.

“Big and fat,” I repeat slowly, waiting for the goddamn punch line to smack me upside the head.

“Yeah,” she says, “I mean, the way I see it, big is like that Arnold guy in the movies, but fat is like your aunt Gloria. So I’ve always wondered why they call you Big Bernie and not Fat Bernie.”

I tear off three of the crumbly Rolaids and chomp them while staring at the little amplified speaker protruding between the giant photos of the Chocolate Rock and the Dilly Bars. Even if I ate everything on the menu, I’d still be hungry. White foam begins to bubble from my mouth. I look like the rabid dog in the horror movie that Jerry made us play over and over last winter until Jill finally rigged it to look like it broke in the VCR. “Maybe you better sleep in the other room tonight,” Jill says, scooting over next to the door.

A station wagon loaded with kids in bathing suits is ahead of us in the line. One little guy in the back keeps messing with us, making gestures with his tongue that kids his age shouldn’t know anything about. “Maybe we oughta take him home with us,” I joke, making a feeble attempt to turn the lousy day around. I’m kicking myself in the ass now because I bitched so much about the mother-in-law’s half-dead chicken. “Many kids as that woman’s got, she wouldn’t even miss him.”

“I think he’s eating his own shit,” Jill says, and then sticks her big sunglasses on so nobody can see her.

“Oh, Christ, Jill,” I say, “what makes you say stuff like that? The kid’s just playing around.” I make a goofy face at the boy just as he turns around to grab his ice-cream cone. I think back to when Jerry was that age. It makes me feel like shit, thinking it, but there are days when I’d give anything just to be able to prop him out on the curb like a broken appliance for the junk man to haul away. And almost like he can read my mind, Jerry starts making that hacking sound way down in his throat that he’s been making all summer. It’s the type of noise that makes you grit your teeth.

“Not the kid, you idiot,” she says. “Jerry.”

Whenever I figure it can’t get any worse, it always gets worse. Because I try to follow the rule that we don’t talk about Jerry in his presence, I decide not to say anything. Besides, I can’t stand the thought of another argument. We’ve been at it for months. Her latest bitch has been over this old car I’m driving, a souped-up 1959 Chevrolet with big fins that I traded my pickup for so I’d have something to drive to the cruise-ins they put on around here in the fast-food parking lots. It’s just an excuse to get out of the house, but Jill’s always ragging me, pretending to be jealous of the skanky whores who hang out in the custom vans.

As I pull up to the window, she starts in again about the car shows. “There’s no reason you can’t take Jerry with you,” she says.

I get so sick of explaining it. “Hell,” I stutter, “what good’s that gonna do you? I mean, even if I was screwing around, Jerry wouldn’t know the difference between a piece of ass and your mom’s false teeth.” I immediately hate myself for saying it, for breaking the rule, for even reacting to the crazy bitch at all. Still, there’s no way I’m hauling Jerry to a car show, not even in handcuffs.

I pull the car up and there’s the girl that works the window, the one with the twisted chains of baby blond hair and the perfectly calibrated gap between her white teeth. She’s like that song about the angel that gives head, and I almost blurt out, Look, Jill, an angel at the Dairy Queen , but I catch myself. This girl can have any man who buys a milk shake. She’s the type of girl that ends up in one of those damn commercials, tormenting the shit out of every old geezer with cable.

The girl grabs my money in a huff before I can even ask her to sack up the Blizzards. This afternoon she’s chewing purple gum, and the way she blows bubbles reminds me of Jill back when we were young and horny, before we lost the map that takes you to places like that. “Hey,” I say, turning to Jill, “that girl is the spittin’ image of you back when you carhopped at the Sumburger. Remember that?” But it’s one of those memories that makes the present only that much more unbearable, and Jill just shakes her head, sinks lower into the seat.

While we wait for the order, I listen to my son try to swallow his tongue and go over the whole fucking mess for the thousandth time. Two years ago, on the night before Jerry was supposed to board the bus for boot camp, he went to a party out in the sticks and never came home. Three days later someone threw him out of a car in front of a hospital in Portsmouth, fifty miles away. We were sitting in the dayroom of the wing where Jerry was transferred after he came out of the coma. The young doctor on duty walked in and stuck a video in the TV. It was that old commercial with an egg frying in a skillet while a voice-over explained that this was your brain on drugs or whatever. I’d seen it a hundred times. They used to play it on the tube back when Jerry was a kid as a warning to stay off the shit. I couldn’t believe they still used it. “What about the marines?” I asked. “Shit, he’s already AWOL, and he don’t even have his uniform yet.”

The doctor was crouched down trying to shine a light into Jerry’s eyes. He finally shook his head and turned the flashlight off. On the TV, the egg began to pop and sputter in the little pan. The doctor stood up and handed me a card from his coat pocket. “Sorry,” he said. “Tell them to call me if they have any questions, but I’m pretty sure they won’t want him now.” Then he turned and hurried away.

“Look, they’ve got the same microwave we’ve got,” Jill said that day at the hospital, her voice skipping like one of her old Wayne Newton records. She was trying to pick pork and beans out of Jerry’s hair while he made another attempt to walk through the wall. We’d already planned our golden years — a new camper on Rocky Fork Lake, a hot tub in Jerry’s old bedroom. Then three weeks later, poor little Delbert Anderson came to work blowing off about his perfect son, the one that built the telescope for the senior citizens, and I broke his jaw with my lunch bucket. The company had me up front signing my papers before the blood was even dry on the break-room floor.