Donald Pollock: Knockemstiff

“What’s going on?” I said, sitting down on the edge of a chair. My brother, Sam, was lying on the couch, his long ponytail hanging over the end cushion, the brown tip of it nearly touching the wooden floor. He was a stringy but strong man, like my father had been before he got sick, rode a Harley even in the winter, shoed horses for beer money. Sam still lived in my parents’ basement when he wasn’t shacked up with some welfare puss, and though he’d never been convicted of anything major, he looked like he’d spent his entire life in prison. My old man had always played favorites, and most of the love he had inside him had been spent on my little brother.

“That nigger’s takin’ a helluva beating, that’s what’s going on,” Sam said, a hint of glee in his voice.

“Aw, the black bastard,” my old man said. I looked at the TV. Two men, one black, one Hispanic, stood in the middle of the ring holding on to each other for dear life.

“Who’s fighting?” I said. I took a sip of coffee, wished we were still allowed to smoke in the house.

“Two nobodies,” the old man said. “They shouldn’t even be in there.”

Sam rose up off the couch and jabbed the air with his fists. “Goddamn it,” he yelled at the TV, “kiss him, why don’t cha?”

I sighed and glanced around the room at the family photos on the walls. One showed our sweaty family standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon in 1970. My brother is still in diapers. A toothless Indian had snapped the photo with our camera for a dollar. It was supposed to be our summer of national monuments, but turned out to be just another fucked-up episode in our lives. As we’d approached the rim that afternoon, the old man had blackened my mother’s eye for trying to defend me. She was always taking punches for somebody else back in those days. I was twelve years old, and I’d puked up a fried egg sandwich that the old man had forced me to eat at a truck stop. He swore that I was going to eat chicken parts all the way back to Ohio. In the photograph, he is the only one smiling. His lean muscles fill out his tight T-shirt, and his eyes are squinted against the bright Arizona sun. He looks like he is having a good time.

“What’s that on your lip?” the old man said. He was staring at my thin mustache, another one of my sorry attempts to reinvent myself.

“Nothing,” I said, turning away from the picture.

He looked back over at the fight, adjusted the red-and-yellow comforter that covered him. “I had a full beard when I was fourteen year old,” he said.

“What kind of money you makin’ at that pizza outfit?” Sam asked.

“It pays the bills,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it. Jim had insisted I get a job after rehab, and slinging pies at Tommy’s Pizza was the best I’d been able to do so far. Whenever business slowed down, I had to stand out along the main drag with a nervous retard named Joey holding a plastic banner that advertised the latest $3.99 special. Every time some bastard blew their horn or gave us the bird, Joey spun around like a Frisbee and dropped his end of the sign. We spent half of our time picking it back up off the ground. I kept hoping he’d get canned or sent back to the handicap school for more training.

“You still on the wagon?” the old man asked.

“Five months now.”

“Damn,” he said, “that’s a long time without a cold one.” After my brother was born, the old man had quit drinking the hard stuff on his own, but he still liked his beer. He reached down and adjusted a valve on top of the oxygen tank. “What about those alcohol meetings? You still got to go?”

“I hit one about every day.”

“Do you ever see a guy there named Jim Woodfork? Someone told me he goes there.”

I thought about it for a second. I wasn’t supposed to tell who I saw at meetings. Jim was pretty strict about that. “Well,” I started to say, “I ain’t—”

“That crazy sonofabitch,” my old man said, shaking his head. “He’d do damn near anything for a drink. He was the worst I ever saw.”

“Yeah, I know him,” I said.

“He wouldn’t remember it now he was so drunk, but one time he let me damn near beat him to a pulp for a dollar. Just so he could buy another fifth of goddamn wine. That was probably the best dollar I ever spent in my life.”

“He does pretty good now,” I said.

“That’s what I hear,” he said. Then he shrugged. “He’s still a nigger though, ain’t he, Bobby?”

I looked up from my empty cup. He was grinning at me, a mean look in his pale blue eyes, waiting for an answer. I wondered if somehow he knew that Jim was my sponsor. “Yeah,” I finally said, looking away, “he’s still a nigger.” Then I stood up and walked back out to the kitchen.

My mom shook her head. “I think he’s getting worse,” she whispered. She was always making this pronouncement about the old man, as if at one time he’d actually been better.

“Agnes, what the hell are you talking about?” the old man yelled from his chair. He had ears like a dog. When we were growing up, he used to beat us kids for whispering behind his back. “Teaching ’em how to dance,” he called it. And though those days were over now, though he couldn’t even take a piss without dragging along a tank of air, we were all still afraid of him, even my badass brother.

My mother grabbed her TV remote and lowered the volume. “I was just telling Bobby about Jeanette’s promotion.” She looked at me and shrugged. Mom had told me months ago that Jeanette had finally made assistant manager at the discount store where she’d worked for years.

“Promotion, shit,” the old man hollered, his voice suddenly hoarse and weak. “Did I tell you that goddamn Clyde Chaney’s daughter got her nursin’ license? Clyde says she’s making thirty-two dollars an hour. By God, I’d call that a job, wouldn’t you, Bobby?”

I thought about the six bucks an hour I was making at Tommy’s Pizza, and I tried not to think about all the shit the old man was saying about me when I wasn’t around. “Yeah,” I yelled back at him.

“That’s it,” I heard him say, “kill the black bastard.”

For a few minutes, my mom and I sat at the kitchen table in silence. She watched the TV but never bothered to turn the sound back up, and I stared out the window at the field behind the house. It was a damp March evening and a soft gray mist was easing down from the woods on the other side of the creek. A deer loped across the pasture and jumped effortlessly over a sagging fence. In the living room, a bell ended another round.

“So,” I finally said to my mom, “what movie you watching?”

“Oh, I don’t know the name of it,” she said. “I haven’t been paying that much attention. It’s a murder movie, I think.” She slipped a cookie from a pack on the table and dipped it in her coffee.

Just then my brother strolled into the kitchen. Pulling up his T-shirt, he made a big show of rubbing his hairy belly. A faded tattoo of a yellow Tweety Bird peeked through the brown fur. He grabbed a bowl from the cabinet above the sink and dipped some chili from a pot on the stove. “I got some brewskies out in the truck you get thirsty,” he said to me.

“And I got you a job delivering pizzas if you ever decide you want to go to work,” I replied.

He pointed his spoon at me and squished his face up like he was on the verge of busting into tears. Then he laughed and started back toward the living room, blowing on the chili as he went. I heard the old man say, “Watch it, honey. That looks hot.”

“Jesus, I don’t see how you stand it,” I said to my mother in a low voice. I walked outside and lit a cigarette. It was nearly dark by then, and I wandered deep into the front yard before I remembered the money I was supposed to pay back to my mother. Next time, I told myself. Wood smoke from a neighbor’s house hung in the chilly air. I thought about all those years as a kid when we’d been forbidden to step over the fences my father had erected around his property. He had always been in control of everything that touched his life, but now he couldn’t even manage his own heart. Somewhere over the next hill, a dog barked three or four times, and up the road a car engine sputtered and died. I’d grown up here, but it had never felt like home.