Donald Pollock: Knockemstiff

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AFTER THAT OTHER MILITARY BOY GOT AWAY THAT NIGHT, I sat up there on top of the knob listening to his buddy moan and cry. Every once in a while, I’d toss a rock down in there beside him, and I’d hear one of the snakes hit him again. He went out of his head about midnight, and I listened to him talk to his mother for a while. He told her some things he shouldn’t have told her, but finally, everything went quiet, and I knew he’d give up the ghost. The next morning, the one who ran off came back with some men in a big camouflaged truck, and they must have emptied forty rounds of buckshot into the side of that holler before they’d go in and get that boy’s body out. They left me alone after that, and it wasn’t until the war was over that they came back, and this time I let them catch me because I was sick and tired of worrying about it all the time. I figured they’d hang me or something, but all they did was stick me in a hospital with some veterans who were shell-shocked and crazy from what they’d seen in the war. There were men in there that couldn’t leave their dicks alone and others who’d get down and lick the floor until their tongues were raw and bloody. I spent two years in there, and then one day they just up and turned me loose, paid young Henry Skiver twenty dollars to come get me and take me back to the holler.

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IFINALLY LET GO OF THE GIRL AND CLIMBED UP ON THE bank. I know it sounds funny, but once I got my air back, all I could think about was trying to remember that little girl’s name. She was right there in front of me, facedown and turning white as snow in that muddy water; and I wanted more than anything to say her name out loud to the sycamore trees. But even though I’d heard her mother holler it plenty of times down where they lived, calling her to supper or to bed, I couldn’t recollect it now, and before I could stop myself, I began to weep. I cried like that for a long spell, the first time I guess I ever cried in my life, and I was still crying when I got up and carried her through the water to the other side of the Dynamite Hole.

There was a cave on the far bank that I knew about where the dirt had give way, and I used to reach up inside when I was hunting for turkles. I dunked the little girl under the water like I was baptizing her and kept stuffing her up inside the hole until she got caught. Then I went back across and got the boy and hid him up under the water with his little sister, her in the back and him in the front. There was a pile of dead brush in the water along the deep end and I managed to shove most of it in front of the little cave. When I got done, I gathered up their clothes that they’d hung in some bushes and hid them inside my bibs, and took the club and slung it off into the woods. Then I picked up my copperhead and walked up through the field and down the road.

I went right past the Mackey house on my way up the holler, saw the mother hoeing weeds in her garden patch. The first thing I did was pour some kerosene on those clothes and burn them behind the school bus. Then I skinned the copperhead and hung the skin up to dry, and by the time I got done, I was wore clear out. I crawled inside the bus and pulled off my bibs and fell asleep on my tick. When I woke up, I watched the sun go down behind the flats, and I decided the best thing to do was try to make a belt for myself out of that snakeskin. Then I cut open a can of beans I had hid away, and I’d just started eating them when I heard that Mackey woman down over the hill start yelling for her kids to come home.

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EVEN BACK IN THIS HOLLER, A LOT OF THINGS HAVE changed since then. Henry Skiver passed away a couple year ago, but his old woman, Pet, she still allows me to live in the school bus so long as I stay away from her house. There’s people from town that’s started building fine homes up on the flats now, and I never would have thought I’d see the day when city people would run the copperheads out. And the government must have forgot all about that boy that got himself killed hunting for me because now they send a welfare man clear out from Meade every month just to make sure I’m doing okay. He brings me a bag of groceries and a little envelope of food stamps, and I haven’t been what you’d call hungry in a long time.

That Mackey family, they up and left the holler a year or so after their children turned up missing, and I never did hear the straight on where they went off to. I still walk by their house every day I’m able, and it’s all boarded up and empty just like mine was that night I came down off the flats looking for some of my mother’s biscuits. People still mention those two kids once in a while, but I don’t think anybody really gives a damn except for me. Sometimes, when I’m sitting in front of Maude’s store and watching the cars go by and I’m dipping my finger into a can of something and smoothing it across some crackers, I can’t help but think about them down there in the Dynamite Hole. I like to picture in my head that that’s where they play now, hiding under the water behind those dead rotten branches, where the leeches hang, black and shiny as jewels, beating their tiny hearts. And all the time I’m thinking it, I’m saying to myself, “Jesus, save me.”

TINA ELLIOT IS LEAVING TOMORROW, HEADING OFF WITH Boo Nesser to shack up in a trailer next to a Texas oil field, and I feel as bad as the time my mother died. After I close up for the day, I sit out back by the little camper I live in behind Maude Speakman’s store, and I drink too many Blue Ribbons. I lean over in my chair and puke up some froth. My throat burns as I light another cigarette and watch a swarm of black gnats gather around the mess. I hear Clarence Myers a couple of houses down raising hell with his old lady about a lost corn knife, and I wonder just how much a person can take. He’s bitched about that machete all summer long, and I hope if Juney ever finds it, she sticks it clear through his stupid, toothless head. A carload of boys from the holler keeps racing up and down the road in a ’56 Chevy coated with primer, and I can tell by the way they’re burning rubber that there will be another wreck somewhere tonight.

Though she’s rotten to the core, I reckon I’ve always loved Tina Elliot, from the first time I laid eyes on her. She came in the store with her mother right after I started working there, just a little-bitty thing, said she’d give me a kiss for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. But that was back before she was old enough to do other things, and ever since she started putting out for the boys, she’s been looking for someone to take her away. I wish I could have been the one, I really do, but I don’t figure I’ll ever leave the holler, not even for Tina. I’ve lived here all my life, like a toadstool stuck to a rotten log, never even wanting to go into town if I can keep from it.

Not too long ago, she told me that I reminded her of a cousin she’s got down in Pike County, an old crazy boy who plays with a plastic coin purse all day, talks off-the-wall shit to the birds. I knew she was high on some of the stuff that Boo’s always taking, but it hurt me when she said that, made me think about the time my old man took me rabbit hunting. I can still remember the disappointment in his cold, red face because I couldn’t pull the trigger that day in the snow. “You done ruined him,” he said to my mother when we got back to the house. He must have told the poor woman that a thousand times before he died. Sometimes it scares me to think I will probably spend the rest of my days wishing I’d blown a rabbit’s guts clear across Harry Frey’s orchard when I was six years old.

The mosquitoes finally drive me inside the camper around midnight, and I watch a Charlie Chan movie on Armchair Theater . It always gives me a comfort, watching the TV late at night, thinking about all the other people around Ohio watching the same old movie, maybe even thinking the same old thoughts. I picture them curled up on their couches in their living rooms, and all the lonely little sounds of the night drifting in through their window screens. Maybe it’s because Tina is taking off tomorrow, but I get choked up tonight when the movie flickers to an end and the Columbus station signs off the air. I finish my last beer while they play “America the Beautiful” and the big flag whips around in the breeze. Then I crawl into my bunk that’s bolted to the wall and lie there listening to those goddamn boys run the dogshit out of that old junker some more.