Donald Pollock: Knockemstiff

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WHEN I TOOK OFF THAT TIME TO GO HIDE UP ON THE flats from the military, the old man wouldn’t allow me to take nothing but the bibs I was wearing and my old mackinaw and that penknife. I went awful hungry those three years, and I got used to that empty feeling eating away at my insides, which I know ain’t nearly as bad as some of the feelings people carry around with them. I mostly lived on field corn and what squirrels and rabbits I could knock in the head and the sunfish and crawdads I scooped up out of Black Run. In the winter, I stayed in a tepee I made out of corn shocks, and in the good weather I slept underneath a briar patch or else back in this hollow log that laid up behind Harry Frey’s orchard. Once in a while, I’d slip down to the holler in the middle of the night and go to my family’s house. My mother would keep a watch out for me and leave me some biscuits in a poke behind the smokehouse and maybe a piece of meat if there was any. Looking back on it, I guess I can recall only one time in my life when I knew what it was like to have a full belly, and that was just a few years ago when Maude gave me a big roll of old-fashioned bologna she thought was going bad. She said maybe I could feed it to the stray beagle dog that was following me around at the time, but I bought a loaf of bread and took it back to the school bus and ate the whole damn thing myself before I got sick. It must have took a month for me to get over that, and I ain’t never been able to eat more than just a little bit since.

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ICREPT UP CLOSER TO THE BANK, AND PRETTY SOON I WAS near enough that the water splashed on me whenever those kids did their little dance. It was a beautiful sight, the way the sunlight floated down through the sycamore trees on that young girl and turned everything she did into something sweet and golden. I felt myself growing hard against the ground through my old bibs, and I guess watching her push back and forth on her brother made me all light-headed. I remember holding that dead copperhead up to my lips and kissing it the same way I’d seen men kiss their women in their bedrooms at night. Maybe it was the heat, or maybe it was because of the things I was seeing, but all of a sudden it seemed as if everything inside me started swirling around like a storm cloud.

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I’D BEEN HIDING UP ON THE FLATS FOR ABOUT A YEAR WHEN I came down to the holler one night hoping to get some biscuits and my family was gone. The old house was empty, and somebody had pulled all the windows out and took the doors right off the hinges. They’d left a letter in the smokehouse that said my little brother Bill had been killed on some island out in the ocean and that they’d gone back to Kentucky, which is where my old man was from before. I didn’t even know my brother was in the army until I read that letter, and he couldn’t have been much older than Truman Mackey when he got himself killed. I stood there looking at my sister’s handwriting and wishing they’d taken me with them, but the old man had always favored Bill over the rest of us, and I guess it made him sad that he lost the youngest instead of me. I never saw them again, and after that, I never could get rid of that feeling that I wasn’t much welcome nowhere in the world.

It was late that same summer when the military finally sent two boys in green uniforms out to hunt for me, and I’ve always wondered if my old man didn’t tell them where to look. You could hear them boys tromping through the woods from a mile away; and when I saw there were only two of them, I came out and let them see me. I led them on a damn goose chase up and down the hills all the rest of that day, just keeping ahead of them enough they couldn’t get a shot at me. By evening, I could tell they was all wore out, and I heard them cussing the hillbillies and the briars, and the fatter one was telling the other about panthers coming out at night and that they better get down off the hill before dark. But I wasn’t ready for them to leave yet, so I snapped a branch off a tree right behind them, and they jumped up and started the chase all over again. And that’s when I led them down into that little holler I’d been fixing up in case I ever had any trouble.

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SOMEHOW, I ENDED UP WITH THAT LITTLE MACKEY GIRL IN my arms. I don’t expect no one would ever believe me, but it was like the dark cloud busted in the top of my skull, and I opened my eyes and there was an angel. I ran my hands through her wet hair and tried to settle her down, but she kept blubbering and going on about her brother. I looked over and saw Truman all bloody about the head, his pecker still hard and sticking up out of the water like a piece of carved wood. Then the girl saw the snake I had wrapped around my neck and she started screaming so loud I was afraid they’d hear her clear down on the road. So I held the snake’s head up to her face and told her I’d turn it loose on her if she couldn’t be quiet. But that made her carry on all that much more, and finally I had to get my hands around her neck and squeeze a little bit, just enough to settle her down until I could get straight on what had happened to that boy. Her face turned red as a raspberry, and her eyes flipped back in her head until only the whites were showing, and I let up on her and pushed her nose down in the gravel. I remember a mud dauber landed close to her ear, and I smashed it against the side of her head with my hand. She got easy after that, and I got my bibs down and slipped inside her the way I’d seen her brother do. I tried to get her to say some things like I’d heard a couple of those women do with their men, but this one, all she wanted to do was whimper and cry.

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THE PLACE I LED THOSE MILITARY TO THAT EVENING wasn’t nothing but a little washed-out gully with slate rock and dead timber lying in the bottom of it, and I’d been catching copperheads and throwing them in there all summer. By the time those two boys got to the spot I’d picked out, I’d already climbed up the other side and was looking down on them. Like I said, there was just a little light left, and they were standing down at the lower end of that gully and looking up into it, trying to decide what to do next. I saw one of them light up a smoke, and I was close enough to smell it was store-bought. Then I tossed a rock up ahead of them, and the skinny one said, “By God, Jesse, I think we got that sonofabitch now.” They climbed over the dead logs I’d blocked up the lower end with and rushed in, and I saw a big fat bastard pop out of the side of the hill and strike the one boy smack in the face so hard it knocked him backward. He was still trying to pull that snake off his cheek when the other one turned and ran off firing his gun every which way.

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I’D NEVER BEEN INSIDE A REAL PERSON BEFORE, AND WHEN I started to finish, it was like everything I’d ever known didn’t matter no more. All the hard years and the loneliness flowed out of me and bubbled up inside that little girl like a wet spring coming out of the side of a hill. I still had the snake around me, and I held it up and shook it at the sun and cried out, “Jesus, save me!” because I thought she might like that. But when I pulled loose from her, she started fighting to get away again, and I looked over at the boy and saw the club that had killed him floating by his head. His eyes were wide open and staring up at the puffy clouds stuck in the sky, and the blood coming out of his mouth was turning the water the color of wine. And I realized that no matter what I did, I couldn’t stop this thing now. It was already turning some kind of wheel all its own, like the time those boys followed me into that nest of copperheads. I held the girl down with one hand while I tried to reach over for the club. But she was slippery as an eel, and I got afraid that if she got loose, I couldn’t run her down. So I clenched both hands around her neck, and this time I didn’t let up until there wasn’t anything left but her sweet face all bloomed out like a purple flower and a skinny little body turned to wax.