Donald Pollock: Knockemstiff

But then, before my son was old enough to talk, I was nearly killed falling off the roof of Burchwell’s Pharmacy in the middle of a rainy night in Meade, Ohio. My first coherent thought after landing on the blacktop with the crowbar still in my hand was that Tex would leave me for the law to find. Then I felt him snatch the tool from my hand, and my second coherent thought was that he was going to finish me off first. That was his way — never leave anything to chance. “Please, Tex,” I managed to say, as I lay flat on my back, staring up at the black sky pouring down on me. Waiting for the blow, I suddenly thought about all the hogs I’d knocked in the head with a sledge at the meatpacking plant I’d worked in right after high school. It was the only real job I’d ever had, and I’d held it only six months, but it seemed as if, lying there helpless behind the drugstore, my life was coming full circle. I was going to die the same way I’d slain all those animals.

Instead Tex surprised me with something like compassion, grabbing me under the arms and dragging me to his Mustang. A few minutes later, we were pulling up outside the big glass doors of the ER at Meade General. Though I could still move my toes, my legs were numb, and every time I took a breath, hot nails of pain shot through my lower back. When he stopped the car, I gasped, “Tex, can you help me inside?”

He snorted and flicked his cigarette out the window at a big potted plant. “Don’t push your luck, you shit-for-brains,” he said. Then he turned and stared into my eyes until I had to look away. I opened the door. “Don’t say anything,” he warned.

“I ain’t stupid,” I said.

“We had a good run,” he said. Then, leaning over, he shoved me out onto the concrete and drove away.

An orderly in a white outfit finally came out and led me inside. Though my injuries were severe — a broken collarbone and two crushed disks in my back — the doctor on call that night turned out to be a god. Twelve hours after getting to the hospital, I went home with a bottle of his religion. I never even had to see him again; he’d just phone in the Oxy ’scripts whenever I called and complained. I was cashing in three, sometimes four ’scripts of 80s a month. Because the Oxy was time-released, I learned to lick the coating off the tabs and chop them into powder, then snort them for a quicker delivery. If I was too far gone to handle the razor blade, I’d just chew them up before swallowing. My head became a perfect holiday, my nerves foamy little buds of milk. The Oxy filled holes in me I hadn’t even realized were empty. It was, at least for those first few months, a wonderful way to be disabled. I felt blessed.

In reality, though, my life was now on a downward course. Under the influence of the Oxy, I lost even the ambition to steal other people’s belongings. Tex picked up a new partner, and the bank repossessed the Monte Carlo. Luckily, we’d kept the Pinto as backup. By the time my opiate honeymoon was over, we were renting a leaky, mildewed trailer on the outskirts of Knockemstiff, the holler where I’d grown up. Though I’d sworn a million times that I’d never go back there, I broke that promise, just like I did all the other vows I’d made before my accident.

The last renters of the trailer had cut a hole in the floor for a toilet after the plumbing went bad. When we moved in, the landlord reluctantly fixed the busted pipes and Dee covered the hole with a piece of plywood that sagged and creaked whenever somebody stepped on it. On a warm day, the stench of strangers’ waste hung in the narrow rooms like the thick fog of failure. My son was terrified of falling in the hole because, according to Dee, I’d once threatened him in one of my blackouts that I could stick him down there and he’d never get out. And though I was certain that I must have been joking, it was evident that my sense of humor had been bred out of him.

Every time I came to, it seemed like Dee was lying on the couch in her Marlboro sweatpants, drinking bargain Big K pop from a plastic jug that looked like a gas can, while Marshall scratched the bottoms of her feet with a hairbrush. Sometimes, as I watched her stuff another bag of Fritos into her mouth, I thought about the time I’d invited Tex over for a beer. Walking up to the front door, we could see Dee through the curtains, sitting on the couch with her silk robe parted, letting the baby suck on her swollen brown nipples. She was beautiful that night. “Damn,” Tex said. “Would you look at that!”

“Better let me go in first,” I said.

Then later, after Dee had gone to bed, as Tex was leaving, he stopped outside the door and said, “Look, I don’t know how you feel about stuff like this, but I’d give a pretty penny for one night with your old lady.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“How ’bout two grand?” he said. Tex was sawed-off and hairy in all the wrong places. “Manly,” he called himself, whenever anyone had nerve enough to comment on his fur. He looked like an ape in cowboy boots and a leather jacket.

“I won’t ever need your money that bad, Tex,” I’d said, shutting the door in his face.

That had been only a couple of years ago. Now Dee was nothing but patches of pimples and rolls of fat. The only thing she seemed capable of doing besides watching the tube was pointing out my defects. And even if she happened to be in a good mood, it was just as horrible. She’d got on this kick where she pretended to be a movie star, and she’d go on for hours about crab cakes and evening gowns and the sunset over some beachfront hideaway. That she stayed with me was just another sign of her indolence. In a more advanced society, they would have probably killed us both and fed our bodies to the dogs.

Meanwhile, Marshall was quickly turning into one of those sullen, creepy kids who never says a word, the kind who goes on to communicate telepathically with a pet rat and sincerely dreams of eternal infamy. It aggravated my condition, all that silence, not even a Dad Dad . His muteness was a thorn in my side whenever I was alert. Even retarded talk would have been better than no talk at all. Even a garbled Fuck you would have been nice once in a while.

Sometimes I’d suggest to Dee that she have Marshall checked out. “He’s deaf!” I’d scream in her ear. “Can’t you see he’s fucked up!” I’d grab him by his thin shoulders and try to shake a sentence out of him. “Marshall, say something, goddamn it,” I’d plead, but when I turned him loose, he’d just roll away in a corner like a ball of lint. Then Dee would act insane and start waving her hands around in some sort of make-believe sign language as if she were making fun of me for caring. If I kept pressing her, she’d warn me that she was on the verge of calling her family over to settle me down. They’d kicked my ass a few times for what they called rude behavior, and I’d become careful about how I performed domestic abuse. So I’d back off and chew another Oxy, then crawl into bed and dismiss Marshall’s silence as just another one of those problems that Dee refused to recognize.

Even though I got my medication for free with the welfare card, and the government sent me a check every month for my bad back, we were always broke. Toward the end of the month, we’d run out of all the essentials that make living that sort of life bearable — candy and ice cream and cigarettes — and I’d start hinting to Dee that we should sell some blood. It was the only type of work that I could get her to do. Mine was no good because of my hepatitis, but Dee was AB negative and still pathogen-free, so the technicians welcomed her with open arms. We’d go to Portsmouth and sell a pint at the clinic on Fourth Street, then unload another one at the lab down along the river. By the time they siphoned the second one off, she’d be white as a sheet, as cold as ice. It made her feel special, having that rare blood. It was the only piece of her that anybody still desired.