Knockemstiff

by Donald Ray Pollock

  When he finally woke up that second time, Frankie was gone, along with the Ford and the jar of money. All the rest of that night, Todd cried and kept apologizing to his grandmother’s ghost. It had taken her a lifetime to save that much money. When daylight came, he searched around and found two hits of blotter acid taped under the bottom of the hubcap they used as an ashtray and enough roaches to roll two skinny joints. Out back in a clump of weeds, he stumbled upon five bottles of beer in a paper sack. Frankie had taken most everything else, even the flashlight and Todd’s little transistor radio.

  Not knowing what else to do, he waited. He rationed his cigarettes, tried to sleep. His ear bled off and on. There were some canned blackberries in the cupboard left over from one of Frankie’s visits to the old woman. They gave Todd the shits, but he ate them anyway. He rubbed the wall with a flat rock until the stick family disappeared. His forehead still had the boot print on it. Once he woke up thinking that his grandmother was fixing him pancakes on top of the coal stove. By the end of the third day, he knew Frankie wasn’t coming back.

  That night, Todd ate the two hits of blotter and drank the last beer. Then he put on his shoes and walked through the weeds along the creek bank down to Schott’s Bridge. It was three o’clock in the morning and traffic was dead. Everything was damp with dew. Todd walked back and forth across the smooth planks for a few minutes and then hoisted himself up onto the outer rail at one end of the bridge. It was slick. With his arms held out away from his body, he slowly made his way to the middle. Then he stopped and stared down into the black water for a long time, feeling the first tiny rushes of the acid streak through his brain. Todd lit his last cigarette and smoked it almost down to the filter. Then he let it drop, and the burning orange coal fell through the damp air. As he stood there, aching with sorrow and regret, he watched the water swallow it.

  LARD

  EVERYONE IN KNOCKEMSTIFF, OHIO, THOUGHT THAT DUANE Myers was going out with his first real woman that night, but he was just blowing smoke. He’d spread the rumor all over the holler, then covered the major details at the Torch Drive-in: smeared a glob of ketchup across the backseat of his father’s Chrysler, spilled some wine on a pair of his sister’s ragged panties, even branded two hickeys on his neck with a metal spoon that he heated up with a Zippo lighter. Then he spent the rest of the evening hunkered down behind the steering wheel like a toad, waiting to go home. He drank a six-pack of warm beer and watched Women in Cages and Female Moonshiners. The odor of scorched flesh lingered in the car like the smell of buttered popcorn.

  Ever since Duane had turned sixteen that spring, his old man, Clarence, had been on his ass about finding a girlfriend. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” the old man asked. “Goddamn, Duane, when I was your age, I was bustin’ cherries all over this damn county.” They were setting tomato plants out in the long, rocky garden that Clarence made the boy slave over every summer. The old man sucked down a beer for every three Big Boys that Duane stuck in the ground. Empty cans were scattered along the crooked rows like giant seedpods. “I shit you not, boy,” Clarence bragged, settling back on his skinny haunches and wiping sweat from his dirt-streaked brow, “one time I fucked a mud dauber’s nest I was so goddamn horny.” Duane kept moving forward silently on his knees, raking up lumpy clay mounds around each wilted plant with his hands. Clarence had been telling these stories forever; one day it was a bee’s nest, then a sweaty sock, sometimes a pint of pig brains. It had always been a big joke, but things were different now.

  By the middle of the summer, Clarence seemed to be on the verge of cracking up. He paced around the pasture behind the house sometimes for hours, stomping through cow shit and seriously wondering if maybe his only son might be God’s punishment for a life that had been so littered with lust. At night he had nightmares that Duane was turning into a sissy like that Dixon boy from over on Plug Run, the one that got nabbed wearing his mother’s nightgown, then moved to Columbus for a Swedish operation.

  “You gotta quit readin’ them books,” Clarence warned Duane one morning at the kitchen table. He looked like hell, anyone could tell he’d had another fucked-up dream. “Start watchin’ more TV,” he advised. The old man took a sip of hot coffee, pushed away the plate of white bread and bologna gravy his sleepy wife had set in front of him.

  Duane leaned against the door, gulping a glass of cold milk. His stomach had been on fire for weeks now. Trying to avoid his father’s baggy, bloodshot eyes, he kept glancing nervously around the room until he finally caught his wavy reflection in a shiny copper skillet that hung on the wall. He stared at the purple craters sunk into his thin face, the black-framed glasses, the short choppy haircut that Clarence still insisted on. “Check out that Twiggy girl,” he heard his father say. “By God, I’d take a piece of that.”

  The problem with Duane became the old man’s favorite topic. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Even the bastards that Clarence worked with at the paper mill got in on the act. Every day they waited until Clarence walked into the lunchroom, then started blowing off about finding dried jizz sparkling like doughnut glaze in the backseat of their junior’s muscle car, used rubbers lying in the driveway like fat dead slugs. They kept feeding the old man new insults to throw at Duane: faggot, poofer, fudgepacker. It was like tossing logs on a fire. Clarence would come home wound tight as a clock, stomp through the kitchen door waving his sweaty, sawdust-covered arms, screaming “Pansy!” at the top of his lungs.

  Duane’s friends only made things worse. Just a couple of weeks after school started, Porter Watson and Wimpy Miller stopped by on their way to pull a train on Geraldine Stubbs. Clarence was standing in his socks under the walnut tree in the front yard drinking a quart of beer. As Duane climbed into the backseat of the Fairlane, Porter yelled, “Hey, Clarence, how’s it going, man?”

  “Shit,” Duane muttered when he saw his father start ambling toward them.

  “What you boys into tonight?” Clarence asked.

  Porter grabbed a cigarette off the dash and stuck it between his lips. “Geraldine Stubbs,” he answered with a grin. Porter’s black hair hung past his square shoulders as thick and shiny as any woman’s. He wore cheap rings shaped like skulls and marijuana leaves that had turned his fingers a bluish-green color. He’d had more girls than you could shake a stick at. Earlier that summer, his mother had banished him to the garage after he brought home a dose of crabs and spread them all over her new couch.

  “Who?” Clarence said, running a hand over his stiff, gray crew cut.

  “One of them retards from over on Reub Hill,” Wimpy spoke up, pulling a little black comb out of his mouth and running the spit through his thin red hair. Wimpy had a flat stupid face, long yellow teeth. He reminded Duane of a can opener.

  “Nice?” the old man asked. He leaned against the car and tipped up the foamy beer.

  Porter shrugged, took a drag on his cigarette, then said, “Well, she ain’t much to look at, but she sure likes to spread ’em.”

  “Yeah,” Wimpy cracked, “that’s why they call her Peanut Butter.”

  Clarence slung the empty bottle in the grass. “How old?” he belched.

  “Fifteen,” Porter said.

  Clarence pulled out a wrinkled pack of Red Man, dug out two fingers of chew, and shoved them in his mouth. He took a long look at the hills that surrounded the holler. The leaves were turning fast. Bright patches of red and orange stood out against the green pines. He hadn’t had a hard-on in six months. “Hey, like I’m always tellin’ Duane,” he finally said in a solemn voice, “puss is puss. It’s all good, just some better than other.” He sounded like some ancient philosopher who’d mulled over the problem for centuries. Then he bent down and peered in at Duane, made wacky up-and-down signals with his bushy eyebrows until Porter backed out of the driveway.

  But Duane couldn’t go through with it. They parked in front of Geraldine’s old house and leaned on the horn until she finally came out. Stumbling through the weedy yard with her h
ead down, wrapped in her shabby clothes, she reminded Duane of a timid ghost hovering just inches above the ground, searching for an empty tomb to hide in. Then, to make matters worse, he had to sit beside her in the backseat all the way to Train Lane while Wimpy argued with Porter about who was going to get firsts. Geraldine never said a word, just sat scrunched up against the door staring out the window, sucking down the beers Wimpy handed her. She smelled like pee, had gray lint stuck in her frizzy brown hair.

  “You’re too damn picky,” Porter said later, after they let her out. “Fuck, your old man woulda tore that up.” He jabbed Wimpy in the arm and they both laughed.

  “I ain’t him,” Duane said, staring down at the big wet spot in the middle of the backseat.

  Wimpy shook his head. “Yeah, Duane, what you wanta do?” he said, lighting a joint. “End up like that crazy Lard and his goddamn Cher?”

  “Nancy,” Duane corrected. Almost everyone made fun of Lard McComis. Besides being the fattest kid in Knockemstiff, he was crazy in love with Nancy Sinatra, the famous singer. He knew everything about her, down to the size of her feet and what kind of ice cream she liked to eat. But though Lard was a couple bricks shy of a load, Duane still considered him sharper than Wimpy any damn day.

  “What?” Wimpy said.

  “It ain’t Cher, it’s Nancy!” Duane yelled. Then he turned and watched Geraldine as she floated across the muddy ditch that ran alongside the gravel road and disappeared into the dark house. Nobody, he suddenly realized, had bothered to tell her good-bye or thanks or even see you next time, whore.

  . . . . .

  BY THE TIME HE LEFT THE DRIVE-IN AND DROVE BACK TO Knockemstiff, Duane’s beer buzz was gone along with his nerve. Topping the last steep hill before the holler, he slowed down, and then turned into Porter’s rutted driveway. It was one o’clock in the morning, but a light still burned in the run-down garage. He dreaded facing the old man with a clear head tonight. Duane could picture Clarence sitting on the couch waiting up for him, a bottle cocked between his legs, anxious to examine evidence, ask dumb questions. Even talking to his old man on a good day felt like being trapped in an elevator with a cannibal who’d been off his feed.

  Pulling in next to Porter’s beat-up Ford, Duane shut off the engine and stuck his sister’s wet panties in his pocket. He walked around the side of the building, pushed back the piece of heavy brown felt that served as a door, and looked in. Lard was sprawled out on two bales of musty straw, his greasy bibs pulled down around his scabby knees. A trouble lamp plugged into a frayed extension cord hung from one of the rafters above his head, shining down on his mountainous belly like a circus spotlight. A few feet away, Porter and Wimpy were passing a bong back and forth and tossing an occasional dart at the huge ball of fat. The darts were special ones with points that had been ground off until they were only an inch or so long. Every time one of the shafts found a sweet spot, the boys turned Lard on to another hit off the plastic pipe. It was the only sport they were any good at.

  As soon as Duane stepped through the door, Lard grinned and yelled in his ducky voice, “Hey, Duane, see my girlfriend?” Then he held up his Nancy Sinatra album cover, the same one he’d shown Duane a million times before. It was her Boots LP, the one that transformed her from a spoiled rich brat into a bona fide sex goddess. She was all curled up like a cat in tight go-go shit, red leather skirt, knee-high boots. Lard carried it with him everywhere, stuck down the front of his bibs. Sometimes he used it as a shield, held it in front of his fat pasty face whenever someone got ready to chuck another bomber at him. He claimed he wanted to save his eyes.

  Duane smiled and shook his head. “Damn, boy, ain’t you got any other records?”

  Lard whooped and hugged the record jacket, then planted a wet smacker on Nancy’s frosted lips. “Not like her I don’t, Duane,” he said.

  Porter tipped up a can of beer and killed it. “Man, am I glad you’re here,” he said to Duane. “You babysit the fat bastard for a while. He’s gettin’ to be a real pain in the ass.”

  “Aw, he’s all right,” Duane said. “Lardy, you been bad again?”

  “No, Duane, it’s him,” Lard protested, pointing a stubby finger at Porter. “He drink too much Blue Ribbon.”

  Porter winked at Duane, then tossed his empty can at Lard’s head. “Duane, them two’s been at it like dogs all night,” he said, yanking a cigarette lighter out of his pocket. “It ain’t right. I say we light that cardboard bitch up unless the fat stud wants to start sharing.”

  “No! No!” Lard cried. He tried to stand up, but fell back down. Pink sap ran slowly from a small puncture in his stomach, disappeared beneath the dunes of blubber. “Porter, you leave her alone,” he wailed, rocking side to side on the straw bales.

  Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Duane saw Wimpy cock his arm back. “Incoming!” Wimpy yelled. Duane watched Lard jerk the cardboard cover up to his face just as a dart bounced off his chest and stuck in the dirt floor. “Almost got you, you damn freak,” Wimpy said.

  “Darn you, Wimpy,” Lard said, smearing the tears running down his cheeks with a dirty palm, “you put my eyes out, my granny gonna be mad.”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” Duane said. “Shit, you got him bleeding again.”

  “Hey, ain’t nobody twistin’ his arm,” Porter said. “He asks for it.”

  It was true. Lard would do anything to get someone to pay attention to him. Sometimes late at night, after Armchair Theater signed off and the TV screen went dead, he would slip out of his granny’s house and walk up and down the dark road that ran through Knockemstiff. He’d wake people up by tapping on their windows, then hold out his darts and plead with them to come out and toss a few. Then he’d step away from their house, unfasten his bibs and let them fall to the ground. His white belly shone as big and bright as the fucking moon. Listening to the mosquitoes buzz in his ears, he might stand there for hours, waiting for someone to walk out and try to throw a bull’s-eye.

  “Who cares?” Wimpy said. “Shit, his fuckin’ gut’s just one big scab anyway. That damn thing’s hard as a turtle shell.” He picked up a dart and started honing the short dull point against a grindstone lying on a workbench in the corner.

  Duane handed Lard an oily rag that was lying on the floor. “Here, wipe yourself off. And fasten up those bibs.”

  Porter fired up the bong, passed it to Duane. “Fuck, man, what happened to your neck?”

  Duane pushed his glasses up, felt his face begin to glow red with embarrassment. He’d never been a good liar. “She tried to eat me up,” he answered. It was one of the lines he’d been rehearsing for his father.

  Wimpy turned and squinted at Duane’s neck. “Boy, I’d say. Look like she tried to chew yer whole damn head off.”

  Duane didn’t reply, just wrapped his lips around the mouth of the bong and sucked up smoke through everybody’s spit. The weed tasted vaguely of potato chips. In the light, he could see crumbs swirling in the bubbling water like tiny sea monkeys. He shuddered, then took another hit.

  As soon as he had heard that Duane was taking a girl to the Torch Drive-in on Friday night, Porter had asked, “What’s her name?” He and Wimpy were huddled around the workbench in the garage, trying to wire an eight-track tape player to a leaky car battery.

  Duane had spent weeks thinking up a name, went over a million of them in his head before finally stumbling across the perfect one. Already, he’d fallen in love with it, got hard every time it rolled off his tongue. “Mapel McAdams,” he said slowly.

  “She got any sisters?” Porter asked unexpectedly.

  “Uh…no, she’s an only kid,” Duane answered, tipping up his RC Cola and chugging a long drink.

  Wimpy looked up from the mess of wires he was wrapping in black electrical tape. “I know her,” he said out of the blue. Duane coughed and fizzy pop shot out his nose.

  “What the hell?” Porter yelled, jumping back. He wiped RC off his face with a big hairy forearm. “Jesus, Duane.”r />
  Duane caught his breath. “Went down the wrong pipe,” he sputtered. Then he turned to Wimpy. “How could you know her? She’s a town girl.”

  “So?” Wimpy said. “My cousin Jimmy, he used to take her out.” He leaned forward and bit the tape off, then added, “Yeah, he said she stunk so bad he had to roll the winders down.”

  “That creepy bastard’s always talkin’ shit,” Duane said angrily. “This girl ain’t no damn Geraldine.” After all, they were talking about Mapel McAdams, not some zombie with dust balls in her hair. Besides, how could anyone know her? Duane wasn’t even sure he’d recognize Mapel himself. Hell, he was still making her up.

  “Well,” Wimpy spat, “I bet you a dollar she’s the same one.”

  “Aw, you stupid fuckin’…” Duane began, but then he shut up. It suddenly dawned on him that Wimpy’s lie had just made his woman that much more believable. He looked up and stared for a moment at a mud dauber’s nest plastered to one of the rafters. Then he walked away just as the tape deck shorted out in a shower of hot orange sparks.

  . . . . .

  “DUANE, YOU GONNA GET MARRIED NOW?” LARD ASKED. Duane was helping him pull up his bibs. A black fly was smashed flat below one of his sagging tits.

  “No, Lardy, she’s just some girl.”

  “More like a goddamn vampire,” Porter said. “I hope you didn’t let her give you a blow job. From the looks of your neck, it’d be like stickin’ your dick in a meat grinder.”

  Wimpy popped a beer, then asked, “So, Duane, what did it smell like? And don’t lie either.”