Donald Pollock: Knockemstiff

JIM PEERED AT ME OVER HIS WHITE CUP. “HOW’S THAT OLD man of yours doing?” he asked. We were shooting the shit in the Bridge Street Diner. I was smoking his cigarettes and drinking their coffee. Jim was my AA sponsor, and we’d just been to the Friday Night Sober N’ Crazy Group over at the Lutheran church on High Street. He liked to stop by the diner after the meeting and check for new piercings on the bony blonde who worked the late shift. He was old, but he still liked to look at the young stuff. Every time the little wench bent over a table, he whimpered like a dog having a bad dream.

“He’s hanging in there as far as I know.” I shrugged, blew on my coffee. Though I seldom mentioned my father to anyone, I’d told Jim a couple of weeks ago that the old man’s heart had taken a turn for the worse. According to my sister, the surgeons said there wasn’t any more they could do. Jeanette was always calling and giving me updates on the situation. She worried enough for the whole family, and then some. “Too much scar tissue,” she’d tell me every time. He’s not the only one , I felt like saying.

Jim nodded, took another drag from his Kool. “What about that money you stole?” he said. “You take care of that yet?”

Jesus Christ, I thought, I never should have told him. “It was only twenty fucking dollars,” I said. “You make it sound like I took their life savings.” The last time I’d visited my parents, I’d slipped a lousy Andy Jackson out of my mother’s purse. Though I wasn’t drinking anymore, I was still messed up in a lot of ways.

“I don’t care if it was a fucking nickel. It’s still important, goddamn it,” Jim said. “You can’t start being honest, you’ll never stay off the sauce.” He made such a big deal out of telling the truth that I figured he was constantly fighting the urge to spin a tremendous whopper.

I nodded my head. I didn’t want to argue. Jim was a black man, and anytime I was around him, I had to be careful with my language. Though I was getting better, I was still afraid of letting a nigger or a coon slip out of my mouth whenever he pissed me off. Old habits are hard to break. In the holler where I’d grown up, everyone was white. The only time we ever saw black people was when we went into Meade to buy groceries or pay the electric bill. There were hillbillies in Knockemstiff, Ohio, who wouldn’t watch a TV show that had blacks in it. My old man was one of the worst.

Jim rubbed his chin, twisted a kink out of his old wrinkled neck. “You do want to stay sober, don’t you, Bobby?” His gray hair was as thick and wiry as a Brillo pad, and his skin shone like wet black tar under the fluorescent lighting. Whenever he spoke at lead meetings, he told stories about trolling the bars near the paper mill for free drinks, red-eyed and stinking of piss, pretending to be deaf and dumb. He’d let white guys try to knock his teeth out for a pint of Thunderbird. Now he drove a jade-colored Cadillac, owned a landscaping outfit with three crews. He was all business when it came to Alcoholics Anonymous, an old-time Big Book thumper who could sometimes be a royal pain in the ass, but it had kept him sober fifteen years.

I glanced over at him, thought about the last couple of years that I drank. A lot of people get the wrong impression, think there’s something romantic or tragic about hitting bottom. Every so often, strange men knocked on my door and threatened to kick my ass for something they said I had done. Sometimes I hid in the corner of the room, afraid to even breathe, and other times I called their bluff. Once a detective had me picked up for a rape, and I had to admit in the interrogation room that I couldn’t remember one way or another. Thank God he later determined that I wasn’t the type of pervert they were looking for. I went bankrupt, and caught the crabs, and broke my nose on a sidewalk. I stalked my ex-wife and missed so much work at the paper mill that even the union got sick of fighting for me. A few months after I lost my job, I woke up in a charity rehab wrapped in an army blanket. My roommate was an old puker seething with yellow sores. His name was Hobo, and he’d once had a glass eye but had lost it somewhere along the way. I grew afraid, started going to meetings.

“Jim, I wouldn’t be sitting here in this goddamn place if I didn’t,” I said. I started to reach for his cigarettes, but he placed his hand over the pack.

“Then you go and have a nice visit with your folks this weekend,” he said. “And while you’re there, you pay that money back to your poor old mother.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “I hear you.”

“Do you need a loan?”

“No,” I said. “I just got paid.”

“Good.” Two streams of smoke drifted from his nostrils as he stubbed out his cigarette and shook another from his pack. He handed it to me. Then he slid out of the booth and dug in his pocket for some change to sprinkle on the table. “We all fuck up, Bobby. Just got to keep trying, that’s all.” Slapping me on the shoulder, he took one more look at the blonde and left me with the check.

The next day I put on the shirt that I’d bought with the money I’d stolen from my mother and drove out to Knockemstiff. Though I never wanted to live there ever again, it still saddened me to see how much the place had changed in the last few years. Both the store and the bar were closed now, and new houses covered with vinyl were crammed together in the fields that had once been filled with corn and hay. My younger brother’s rusty pickup was sitting in the driveway, the back glass covered with NASCAR stickers and a Confederate flag. A weathered squirrel’s tail hung from the radio antenna. As I walked up to the front porch, I could see my old man through the big picture window in the living room. The twin stems of an oxygen tube were stuck up his nose, and he was all laid back in his blue luxury recliner, the chair my sister had bought him after his heart blew the first rod. He’d had at least three heart attacks since then, each worse than the one before.

He was watching the fights with my brother. I didn’t even have to go inside to figure that out. After he got sick, the only thing my old man enjoyed in life was watching men beat the shit out of each other. The worse somebody got hurt, the better he liked it. Most of the fights took place in seedy Indian casinos between men who were just like him, though he’d never admit it. He had my sister record every minute of boxing that came down from her satellite, and then he watched the tapes all day long as if he were studying for some kind of comeback.

I went in through the breezeway. I found my mother at the kitchen table, her papery hands wrapped around a cup of milky coffee. She was watching another TV. “Hi, stranger,” she said, struggling to pull her attention away from the movie that had her hypnotized. “Ooh, I like that shirt. Where’d you get it?”

“Penney’s.” I bent over and kissed her on top of the head, then poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the counter. Sitting next to the powdered creamer was the purse I’d ransacked during my last visit. Turning back to her, I winked and walked down the short hallway leading to the living room.

“I’ll be damned,” my old man said. “Look who’s here.” My father used to be the roughest sonofabitch in the holler, but now his skin was gray and the flesh on his arms hung as loose as an old woman’s. He had barely made it through the sixth grade, grew up in a family that traded his labor for sacks of flour and plugs of tobacco. He’d pounded spikes on the railroad at fifteen, been a boxer in the army. I’d once seen him damn near kill a man with his fists at the Torch Drive-in. All my life, I’d carried around the knowledge that I could never be that tough. But there was little of that man left now.