Knockemstiff

by Donald Ray Pollock

“We could always do another can,” he suggested, his face hovering just inches above the glittering columns.

  I thought about going back to my uncle’s house, snaking out the clogged tubes, listening to the poor bastard repeat the same bitter stories over and over again. Behind us, the two big women were busy exchanging obscene fantasies, making suction sounds with their mouths, while poor Mrs. Leach dozed on her blue feet behind the display case. “Man, that shit just eats me up,” I groaned, already feeling pukey from the thought of the ether smell.

  Detecting a hint of surrender in my voice, Jimmy looked up and smiled with all his soft, twisted teeth. “You just say the word, cuz,” he told me.

  I decided to ignore him. Besides, what was there to say? Because of who we were, I already knew what we would do. In a few minutes, Jimmy and I would leave this place and go find somewhere to park in his filthy car. He would fill up the plastic bag again with Bactine, and I would sit and listen to him suck the cold fog down into his lungs. The smell of it would sicken me, and I would crack the window. The snow would slowly cover the windshield. Jimmy’s eyes would turn as red and sticky as candy, and his head would fall back against the seat in a dream. If he were lucky tonight, maybe he would see something that he hadn’t seen before. And then it would be my turn.

  DISCIPLINE

  WE DROVE DOWN TO PARKERSBURG TO COP SOME MORE ’roids—fifty ccs of Mexican Deca for 425 American dollars—and I fixed up my son, Sammy, right there in the parking lot of the Gold’s, one cc in the hip. Deca is thick as molasses, tough shit to inject, but it won’t bloat you up like a fucking Amish ham, either. He started whimpering like a little girl even before I found the sweet spot. “Stay focused,” I said, pushing the plunger down slowly with my thumb. “Remember: Mr. South Ohio. No pain, no fucking gain.” Sammy’s dumb, zit-faced cousin Little Ralph was with us, hanging over the front seat, saying, “Let me do it, let me do it,” until I had to slap the mouth right off him. Then I stuck my Best of Sousa tape in the stereo and lit up a serious fattie for the long haul back. I could listen to “The Gladiator March” all fucking day long. It’s the music I used to play with my routine when I was competing.

  Nobody said another word, except for Little Ralph as he spat blood out the back window, until we swooped off the exit ramp on the other side of town and damn near collided with a clusterfuck in front of the McDonald’s. For a second, I thought I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere. I mean, it was the first traffic jam I’d ever seen in Meade, Ohio. Then I figured it had to be a fire, or maybe some drunken sonofabitch had crashed his car pulling out of the Tecumseh Lounge. But that wasn’t it at all.

  Bobby Lowe was standing out along the main drag doing a double bicep. It was the middle of December, definitely sweatshirt weather, but all he had on was a pair of radiant white briefs. I’d heard he’d been hitting the juice, but I had no idea how much size he’d gained. His arms were nearly as big as mine. Cars and trucks were lined up along Main Street, people honking their horns and whooping every time he hit a new pose, the way the trashy bastards show their appreciation around here. Bobby was mostly running through the seven classics, shit any retard can do. He was staring straight ahead, the sweat glistening on him even in the cold, shaking like a dog shitting razor blades. Nobody realizes how hard it is to hold a pose for ninety seconds and squeeze a year’s worth of your life into it. Imagine some sonofabitch holding a gun to your head and forcing you to eat shit forever, like in hell.

  “Fuck, why didn’t we think of that?” Little Ralph said as two babes ran up and put hickeys on Bobby’s biceps, then skipped back to their Mustang. That even made me hard, watching the one little bitch in the hip-huggers suck on his cannons.

  “What would a fat fuck like you do out there?” I said to Ralph as I eyeballed Bobby’s calves. The bastards must have been a good nineteen inches.

  “Maybe get some face for one thing,” he cracked.

  “I’d hate to see the dirty skank that would go down on you,” I shot back. “Shit, she’d turn the whole fuckin’ town to stone.”

  “You oughta know,” Sammy said, a goddamn smirk stretched across his face.

  “Watch yourself, boy,” I said. “Besides, that ain’t a bit professional. He might as well be prancing around in some strip show.” I still couldn’t get over the size of Bobby’s arms, which probably had a good two inches on Sammy’s. And then, with a sickening feeling, I suddenly realized that Willard Lowe’s son was going to beat Sammy for the South Ohio, him of all the people in the goddamn state. Willard Lowe was my one true enemy; I’d hated that prick since we used to fight over the plastic weight set in fourth-grade gym class.

  “Aw, Luther, I’m just talkin’ for fun,” Little Ralph said.

  “Hey, go ahead, Ralphie,” I said. “Get on over there and shake your flabby ass for those fucking drunks.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “You fuckin’ faggots are all the same, no discipline at all,” I said. “Don’t talk that shit no more. He’s just showing off like some little punk in school.” As soon as I said that, Willard Lowe walked out of McDonald’s with a cup of coffee. He had that big grin on his face that shows off all his perfect white teeth: the same one he used to taunt me with back in the old days whenever we went up against each other. Nobody realizes how important the smile is in a contest. I’d be the first to admit, I never could smile worth a shit; people always said I looked like a starving rat clamping down on a chicken neck. It was my only defect, but it cost me the Midwest title seven years in a row. Still, Willard’s lost his juice now, gave up pumping iron for big buckets of slop and an old lady’s treadmill, so I guess, in the end, I won after all. He’s just another lazy bastard now and the world’s full of them.

  We drove on back to the Power House; I mixed Sammy up some protein, then ordered him to hit the sack. I had the only true weight gym in southern Ohio, no women, no aerobics, no Nautilus shit. But since it was damn near impossible to find any decent bodybuilders around here, I had to rely on fat-ass powerlifters or the occasional football player to keep the place open. It used to be a gas station, and Sammy and I slept in the back. On rainy nights the fumes rising out of the oil-stained cement smelled like dinosaur blood.

  A couple of days after Bobby Lowe made an ass out of himself in front of the McDonald’s, he stopped over at the gym. I knew immediately something was up; his old man used to pull the same kind of shit right before a contest. “I thought it up myself,” he started explaining. “Extreme posing, that’s what I call it. The more fucked the situation, the better. Shit, I even got ESPN willing to come down and take a look. We’re talkin’ big money here, Luther.”

  “So?” I said.

  “Well, I thought I could get Sam over there next Saturday. Make it a little contest. The other night was just a trial run.”

  “Get the fuck out of here,” I said. “Sammy’s training for the South Ohio.”

  “Hey, Dad,” Sammy said, “I think—”

  “Shut up!” I yelled and then turned back to Bobby. “Look, I know what you’re doing. Your old man was the same way, always fucking with me. Him and that goddamn stupid grin of his. Now get the fuck out of my gym!”

  “Gym?” he said, glancing around. “More like a fuckin’ prison maybe.” Then he turned and strutted out like hot shit, his lats scraping the paint off the doorframe.

  I cranked up the discipline that week, three sessions a day. Sammy was too gutted at night to even untie his lifting shoes, just slept propped up in the corner like a bag of shit. But it was the only way we were going to win; he’d taken after his skinny-ass mother, just a little bird of a thing who kept sneaking cigarettes and coffee until the cancer got her. I kicked myself a thousand times for not knocking up some fat-ass Amazon with big bones. Still, with the Deca I was pumping in him, Sammy managed to put on five pounds of muscle that week. Every two hours, I meted out creatine and fat burners and liquid protein. For breakfast, he got a spoon of oatmeal; for dinner, a sliver of baked fish. At nig
ht, I gave him wooden clothes hangers to chew on. “Shit, son, we’re mostly powder anyway,” I’d tell him whenever he started to cramp. “South Ohio!” I screamed every time he puked.

  But then, the next Saturday, Sammy didn’t show up for the eight o’clock workout. I’d spent the afternoon purging in the bathroom, and somehow he’d slipped away. I walked back to the fridge to get a bottle of Nitro, and discovered the Deca bottle was almost empty—six weeks’ worth! The little faggot was going for the easier, softer way, just like his mother always did. I went ahead and did my back and shoulders, then took a shower and got dressed. I had a good idea where he’d run off to, and I wanted to catch the little bastard in the act. My plan was to kick his ass all over Main Street, embarrass the fuck out of him. Nobody disobeyed Luther Colburn. I had twenty-one-inch arms and a fifty-four-inch chest.

  By the time I made it down to the main drag, traffic was at a standstill; shit, cars were even backed up onto Route 23. The cold weather had definitely set in, and the sign on the bank read eighteen degrees. I cut back and forth through the alleys until I finally found a spot to park behind Miller’s Auto Parts. As soon as I walked around the corner, I spotted him, my stupid son. He was standing across the street under the Mickey D’s sign in his posing trunks, a pair of women’s panties hanging on his head.

  The town was in an uproar, even worse than the week they put on the Farmers’ Festival. Bobby Lowe would hit a pose, then Sammy would copy him. Everyone was honking their horns and passing bottles and screaming stupid shit, as if they’d just discovered Elvis beating his meat in their shower stall. Then I saw it. It stretched across his face, gleaming like a toothpaste ad. I’d never realized Sammy could smile like that. It was like seeing his mother all over again. But then, just as I started across the street, dodging the cars and cursing the fucking drivers, he swung around to do a full frontal and dropped to the sidewalk.

  I remember kicking him, ordering him to get up, and then some bastard hitting me in the head with something from behind. They were sliding Sammy and me into the ambulance when I came to. He was code blue. As we flew up the highway with the siren wailing and the lights flashing, I watched the paramedic work on him. Sammy was still smiling when the man gave up. “You’re shitting me,” I said as a chunk of bloody glass fell out of my head and landed on the rubber floor mat. “Do something, goddamn it!”

  The paramedic zapped Sammy with the paddles again. Little white sparks flew off his frozen chest. Nothing.

  “Jesus Christ, that boy’s the next South Ohio,” I said, grabbing the man by the throat. “He’s got a smile that can beat the world. He can’t be dead!” I shut off his air, watched as the veins in his eyes started to burst, and then I suddenly turned him loose. “I’m sorry,” I told him, “but that’s my boy.”

  “Really, mister, I did everything I could.”

  “He’s only eighteen years old,” I said, kneeling down beside the gurney and running my hand over my son’s dead body.

  In the ER, some doctor came in the curtained-off room where they were stitching up the back of my head. He laid his hand on my shoulder. “Mr. Colburn, your son suffered a heart attack. He had hypothermia, and his cholesterol was…” He glanced down at his clipboard. “Six hundred to be exact. Was he on medication?”

  I shook my head. “No, he was healthy as a horse. Shit, you saw him.”

  “Well, maybe on the outside,” the doctor said, staring at me. “Okay, let me ask you this, was he on some type of steroids? We’ll get a toxicology report back tomorrow, but do you know anything about it?”

  “That’s stupid,” I said. “Why do you think he was on the juice?”

  “Well, besides the needle marks on his legs, he—”

  “Fuck off,” I said, grabbing my coat. Then I called a taxi and went back to the gym and did stiff-legged dead lifts until I passed out. When I woke up the next morning, I was curled up on the platform with shit in my pants.

  After that night, nobody came to the gym anymore, not even Little Ralph, but half the town came to Sammy’s funeral. I buried my boy and went back to my routine, wiping down the equipment every day, sweeping the floor, plodding through my workouts. But I kept losing focus; one morning I woke up hanging upside down from the power rack like a bat, all the mirrors covered with old newspapers. A few nights later, I binged on two boxes of candy bars I found stashed under Sammy’s cot, then turned around and overdosed on a box of laxatives. The next day I tacked a CLOSED sign to the front door and scattered a box of nails in the parking lot.

  A few weeks later, on a Sunday afternoon in early February, the radio started issuing reports about a cold front moving in, warning everyone to stay home. As I listened to predictions about record lows, my head suddenly became as clear as a zip-lock baggie. I pulled on some old sweats, ate some aspirin. After sticking a stack of Sammy’s Megadeth CDs in the stereo and cranking it up, I just started doing set after set after fucking set. I pumped iron for eight hours straight, a personal best. Then around 2 AM, I took a scorching shower, shaved off all my body hair and greased myself down.

  The town was dead when I pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot. Beer cans and hamburger wrappers were frozen to the ground. The sign on the bank said two degrees. Little beads of ice were falling out of the sky, and the Christmas lights still hanging in Miller’s store popped on and off in the dark windows. I got out of the car and began taking off my clothes. After stripping down to nothing, I stepped over to the spot on the sidewalk where Sammy had fallen.

  I started off with some basics, going through them slowly, trying to warm up. Then I went into some secret stuff that I’d been working on for years, shit I was going to show Sammy when he was good enough. The wind cut across my naked body like a meat slicer. Staring across at the bank sign, I kept sucking the icy air and praying for the discipline to hold each pose perfectly. The temperature finally bottomed out at minus thirty-six degrees. My muscles ground against each other like ice floes in the cold silence.

  As morning approached, I lifted my frozen arms for one more shot and a loud crack shook the entire valley. A white light exploded in my head and my body shattered into a thousand tiny pieces. Then I blew like flakes of dirty snow down the gray, empty street.

  ASSAILANTS

  STANDING IN HIS UNDERWEAR IN FRONT OF THE FADED pink duplex that he and Geraldine rented, Del came out of a blackout while taking a leak in the dead August grass. That was the bad thing about coming to: one minute he was like some brainless carp happily munching shit on the bottom of Paint Creek, then pop, a flash of light and he was floundering around on dry land again, caught in the middle of another embarrassing fuckup. Lately it seemed to happen every time he got loaded. “Jesus,” he said to himself. “Well, at least it ain’t the goddamn broom closet.” The last time, he’d cut loose in the spoon drawer in the middle of the night after passing out at Geraldine’s birthday party. They had been eating with plastic forks ever since.

  Del didn’t realize that it was still daylight outside until he looked up into the shocked eyes of the two old ladies standing on the sidewalk staring at him. They were close enough to spit on. One of them, tall and thin with a silver beehive hairdo, began gasping for air, her mouth popping open like the trunk of a car, her false teeth ready to leap out and clatter down the street like in some old-time cartoon. The other woman, round and squat, wore a shiny red jogging suit that made her look like a fat tomato. Her pancake makeup was beginning to melt in the heat, and he watched in hungover awe as part of her greasy face suddenly broke loose and slid down her neck just as she started pounding on the back of her wheezing friend. Turning away from them, he lurched toward the porch, warm piss dribbling on his bare feet. And just like that, Del was home.

  Geraldine was hiding behind the front door with Veena, their baby, propped on her hip, peering out at her husband through the thin, smoke-stained curtain. She stood there all the time, sucking on menthol cigarettes and watching the street for possible assailants. Six months ago,
her old doctor at the Henry J. Hamilton Rehabilitation Center had put her back on all her medications after somebody disguised in a paper bag tried to strangle her in front of the Tobacco Friendly. Though she described the sack perfectly, even drew a picture of it down at the station, the cops never found a single suspect. Nowadays, she wouldn’t even stick her hand out the door to check the mailbox.

  “I shoulda stayed at the Henry J!” Geraldine cried to Del on the way home from the police station right after the attack. She was in the backseat, frantically trying to burrow into the floorboards with her hands.

  “Hey, Geri, you’re the one that was beggin’ to get out of that damn nuthouse,” Del yelled back at her. “You’re the one wanted to get married,” he pointed out for the hundredth time. He’d first met Geraldine when she was living in the group home over on Fourth Street. Back then she did sex in public places, carried cold fish sticks in her purse the way other people pack chewing gum, handing them out to strangers like precious gifts. Then Del had gotten her pregnant, and in one brave, ecstatic moment, Geraldine flushed all her pills. The next day, she filled out a job application for Del at the plastics factory, conjured up an old wedding ring out of thin air. Now he was stuck.

  Del shoved the door open, and Geraldine listed to one side to let him pass. She’d never lost the weight from the baby. “What the hell?” she said. “The whole friggin’ neighborhood’s watching us, for Christ’s sakes.” Sickly dark circles surrounded her cloudy eyes like little moats. Sometimes Del envied her; he couldn’t get a doctor within fifty miles of Meade, Ohio, to put him on anything.

  “I musta been sleepwalkin’,” Del mumbled. Then he staggered on and flopped down on the itchy plaid couch. Guns N’ Roses was blasting away in the apartment upstairs. The speed-freak nurses from the VA hospital were starting early today. First, they’d get cranked up at home, then go out trolling for men in the bars uptown. Every time they got lucky, Del stared at the ceiling and listened to the squeaking beds above him, half expecting the entire orgy to crash down on his head any second. On those nights, he held his dick in his hand like a holy cross, praying for their hearts to burst into pieces so that he could get some sleep.