Donald Pollock: Knockemstiff

The sun is coming up over Bishop Hill when I wake up with a sick headache from all the Blue Ribbon. It’s the kind of fucking headache that almost makes me wish I’d taken my mother’s advice and knocked up a Christian girl who’d lay down the law. It’s hot in the camper, and I look outside and see the Pepsi thermometer I got nailed to the outhouse already shows seventy-seven degrees. I pull on a pair of dirty jeans and a clean T-shirt and pump some water from the well into an old dented dishpan. After I wash up, I fill the mop bucket I keep behind the counter. Some of the customers like to see me dip my hands in it before I slice their meat.

I jiggle the lock on the back door and carry the bucket inside the cinder-block building. A log truck rattles down the bumpy road out front, and I think how lucky I am not to be stuck working in the woods in this heat. After I turn on the lights and the gas pumps, I unlock the front door and flip the cardboard sign over that says we’re open. The box fan that sits behind the wooden candy case makes a hell of a racket when I start it up, but I leave it on anyway. It blows some dust around, some cigarette ashes, a couple of dead flies dried up in their husks. Maude keeps promising me a new one, but I know she won’t come through until the old one locks up completely. She’s tight as the bark on a tree when it comes to stuff like that. I pull out the gray metal box we keep under the counter behind a stack of old True Confessions , and I start counting money.

I arrange a hundred dollars in small bills and change in the cash register, then pop a couple of aspirins and hunt up a heel of bologna in the meat case from the roll I was cutting on yesterday. I find a bottle of RC Cola slushy with ice in the back of the pop cooler, rip open a bag of green onion potato chips. This is my breakfast, and has been every morning but Sundays for the past twelve years. As I stick my hand down in the chip bag, I think that even if I was to go away with Tina, I’d probably still keep eating the same thing. Then I catch myself and try to laugh it off. It’s crazy to think that kind of shit, I know, but I been doing it so long now, I have a hard time stopping myself. The old man used to say I lived in a dream world. I peel the skin off the bologna heel with my thumb, pitch it in the trash. Maybe I’ll stop wishing for things I can’t have once Tina’s gone for good.

I’ve been working in the store since I was sixteen years old and now I’m twenty-eight. Maude hired me right after my old man got his legs cut off up in Michigan. He was working around Flat Rock with a section gang on the DT&I Railroad, and he slipped in the snow and went under a railcar loaded with ties they were shoving off on a siding. Though he hated being away from the holler, the railroad was the best paying job he’d ever had. Every time he came home for the weekend, he joked, “It’s so goddamn flat up there I can’t stand up straight.” The old man didn’t last long after the accident, and the day we laid his box in the frozen ground, I quit school to help my mother hang on to the little house he’d bought us. We kept things afloat for a while, but then she got her cancer and the bank took the house back anyway. That was when Maude bought the camper and set it up behind the store for me to live in. It’s shaped like a lunch box on wheels. Sometimes I can’t help thinking it’s the same size as a prison cell.

I finish my breakfast and break open a fresh pack of Camels. Maude pays me thirty dollars a week, allows me one pack of smokes a day and whatever I can scrounge to eat out of the store. I open up at seven in the morning and work until whatever time she decides to show her face in the evening. It’s not a hard life, not like my old man’s was, but some days it’s a long one, especially if Maude don’t come in at all. I keep a few Blue Ribbons stashed in the bottom of the meat case for times like that. She gives me Sundays off because selling cigarettes and candy on the Sabbath isn’t good business around here. Even old Maude tries to put on a good act when it comes down to the Lord’s day. The Shady Glen Church of Christ in Christian Union sits only a couple hundred yards away from the store, and I wake up every Sunday morning to the crying and clamoring of people who fear God.

By midmorning, I’ve waited on twenty or so customers: loggers needing chain-saw oil and gasoline, old men after Doan’s Liver Pills and honey loaf, little kids trading pop bottles for SweeTarts and cigarettes. Most everyone that stops in talks about the money Boo will make in the oil fields. But then Henry Skiver says, “I can’t see it,” when I tell him that Floyd Bowman said Boo will make twenty dollars an hour starting out. “Shit, that Nesser boy wouldn’t work in a pie factory.” For a minute I get my hopes up, see all sorts of possible disasters happening once they hit Texas. Hell, I even picture Tina coming back with her head hanging down, asking me for a place to stay. Then Henry pulls out his little change purse and carefully counts out ten pennies for a cake, and I feel low again remembering the time she compared me to her dingbat cousin.

It looks like it’s going to be a slow Tuesday, so I start breaking open the boxes that the Manker’s man delivered yesterday. I check everything against the yellow invoice, stamp prices on cans of Spam and Campbell’s soup, and stock the bare spots on the shelves. I turn on the radio and listen to Miss Sally Flowers rattle on about everything she’s grateful for this hot, sticky morning. That gets old real quick and I turn the station. The DJ puts on a Monkees’ song, and I sing along to “Last Train to Clarksville” while I sweep the dust out the door and change the dirty fly ribbon that hangs over the kerosene stove in the back. All the time I’m piddling, I keep an eye on the gas pumps. Some people like to turn the handle back a gallon or two if they don’t think I’m watching. Boo’s one of the worst for pulling that kind of shit. He gets caught doing that down in Texas, they’ll break his goddamn head for him.

Around noon, I’m getting ready to take a break and watch As the World Turns on the little TV I’ve got set up behind the candy case when I see Jake Lowry walking out of the holler past the church. He shuffles along with his hands crammed deep down inside his patched-up bibs like he’s playing pocket pool with himself. As he crosses the road, he kicks at a busted beer bottle lying at the edge of the store lot. Most times I turn the TV off when I see someone coming because I don’t like for people to know I watch soap operas, but I don’t give a damn what Jake thinks. He never has played with a full deck all the time I’ve known him, and people say it’s because he lived so long in the woods by himself back during WWII, hiding out from the draft. Right outside the door, he stops and spits a long string of tobacco juice in the gravel. The screen door slams behind him as he steps inside the store, and he jumps like someone just shoved a cob up his ass. He’s the flightiest bastard I’ve ever seen.

Jake works the chew in his mouth, lays two arrowheads down carefully on the counter. I open the register and count out some change. Maude gives him forty cents for each one he finds, then she turns around and sells them to the Sinclair man for two dollars. He brings in five or six a week, sometimes more. I lay the money on the counter and Jake pushes a quarter back at me, like he always does. His dirty fingernails are long and cracked down the middle. I slide the glass door open on the meat case and lift out a roll of headcheese. He likes his cut thick, and I adjust the meat slicer. I try not to think about us both eating the same damn thing every day, and what that might mean to a head doctor.

I’ve been slicing meat so many years now I don’t even bother with the scales anymore. I can hit it within a penny or two every time. After I wrap the gray meat in a sheet of butcher’s paper and tape it shut, Jake sticks it in his pocket. He stands there working his chew, staring at the TV show. Neither one of us says a fucking word the whole time, but I’m used to that. Jake wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful. I’m lighting a cigarette when Boo Nesser’s car flies past the store and turns in at Tina’s mother’s house down the road. Suddenly, my headache breaks loose again, and I crack open another RC, pop a couple more aspirins.