Knockemstiff

by Donald Ray Pollock

  “Maybe,” Sharon said.

  “He looks lonely.”

  The man glanced up from his cup, then squinted at them in the bright fluorescent lighting. He stuck out his coffee-stained tongue. “You’re kidding, right?” Sharon said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Christ, Aunt Joan, he looks like a friggin’ serial killer.”

  “He don’t look no worse than the other ones, Sharon. Besides, I don’t figure we’re gonna find any movie stars out this late.” She counted out the exact change for the silent waitress. “C’mon, let’s sit.”

  “Goddamn it,” Sharon muttered under her breath. She had hoped maybe her aunt would forget about finding one tonight. With their hot chocolates and the box of doughnuts, they sat down in a booth across from the man. He nodded and batted his bloodshot eyes, showed them a mouthful of yellow teeth. Aunt Joan gave him a shy smile, then kicked Sharon’s shin until her niece finally asked the man to sit with them.

  He told them his name was Jimmy as he eagerly slid into the booth next to Sharon. His greasy hair hung down in his eyes and a patchy beard covered his skinny neck. Faded blue letters decorated the knuckles of each hand. Aunt Joan did most of the talking, asking him bullshit questions about his family origins, bitching about the rainy weather. Sharon knew she was sizing him up, trying to decide if he might be a man she wouldn’t mind waking up next to in the morning. For his part, Jimmy just kept repeating the same phrases over and over; “Cool” and “Party time” seemed to be the only words he knew. It was obvious to Sharon that he didn’t have a brain in his head. Her aunt would think he was perfect.

  Aunt Joan finally nodded at Sharon and excused herself. They watched her walk back to the restroom, and Sharon hoped to God that she’d never waddle like that. Jimmy scooted up against her and suggested that they dump the old cow, but Sharon ignored him. By the time Aunt Joan returned, he had his arm wrapped around her niece, his tongue stuck in her ear. Five minutes later, they were all getting into the car. “You two go ahead and sit in the back,” Aunt Joan said. “I’ll handle the driving.”

  As soon as they backed out of the parking lot, Jimmy pulled a plastic bag and a spray can from his coat pocket. “Party time,” he said again, nudging Sharon with his elbow. She watched him fill the bag with spray, then stick his face in it and inhale deeply several times. Whatever it was smelled like ether and she rolled her window down despite the rain. He finally let the can drop to the floor and leaned back in the seat. A glob of spit dripped off his dirty beard. His eyes became as vacant as a dead TV. Sharon looked up and saw her aunt smiling at her in the rearview mirror.

  Whatever he sniffed didn’t last long, and as soon as Jimmy came out of his fog, Aunt Joan leaned across the seat and opened the glove box. She took out a pint of whiskey, made a big deal out of twisting the cap off and pretending to take a hit. At the last red light in Meade, she handed the bottle back to him. He took a drink and offered it to Sharon. She shook her head, told him she’d already drank too much hot chocolate. He and Aunt Joan passed the bottle back and forth several times, and every time Jimmy took another drink, he pushed his hand farther down inside Sharon’s sweatpants. Finally Aunt Joan said, “Sharon, I’ll bet your boyfriend can’t kill the rest of that bottle.”

  Jimmy held the pint up and looked at it. “Lady, you don’t know ol’ Jimmy very well, do you?” he said. As he raised the bottle to his mouth, Sharon saw her aunt reach over and turn the heater on high. Warm air filled the car. When he finished chugging, Jimmy smacked his lips and said, “I could do that all night long.” Then he slipped his tongue in Sharon’s ear again. Just as she began to tingle a little bit, his hand quit moving inside her pants. She jerked it out and he fell back against the door, mumbling something about fat girls being tight.

  “Okay,” Sharon said as she wiped spit out of her ear. “Stop the car.”

  “What’s wrong?” Aunt Joan flipped on her turn signal, and began slowing down.

  “Ain’t nothing wrong,” Sharon said. “But I’m not sitting back here all the way home. He smells like a medicine cabinet.”

  Easing the car over to the side of the highway, Aunt Joan asked, “What was that stuff anyway?”

  Sharon felt around on the floorboards until she found the can. She held it up to the light from a passing car. “Bactine,” she said. “Yeah, Aunt Joan, you sure know how to pick ’em.”

  “Throw it out. They say that stuff will rot your brain sniffing it like that.”

  “It’s already too late for this one,” Sharon said as she got in the front seat and slammed the door shut. “Mr. Party Time. Ha. He’s a pig.”

  Aunt Joan laughed. “Oh, don’t talk about my new man like that. He might end up being a keeper.” A semi blew past them just before Aunt Joan pulled the big car back onto the highway.

  “It ain’t funny,” Sharon shouted. “He had his hand clear up inside me.”

  “Eat one of those doughnuts.”

  “I don’t want no doughnut. I just want to go home.”

  “Honey, this is the last time, I promise,” Aunt Joan said.

  Sharon lit a cigarette just as the car engine started making a hammering sound. The New Yorker had been practically new when Aunt Joan’s daddy gave it to her three years ago, but she never took care of anything. John Grubb had traded his pickup in on the car the same day the doctors told him that his diabetes had scored another victory. Your legs this time, they had told him. He’d already lost most of his toes. On the way out of town with the new car, he stopped at Jack’s Hardware and bought a ten-gallon cowboy hat and a .45 pistol that came with a fancy shoulder holster. Then he drove back to the farmhouse he shared with his youngest daughter and wired a cow’s skull to the front grille of the car. For the next two months, he drove around the county drinking whiskey and eating bags of hardtack candy and listening to Jerry Lee Lewis cassettes. Sharon knew the story by heart; her aunt told it every time the car broke down.

  They were halfway home when Aunt Joan tapped Sharon on the leg and said, “Honey, check on that boy, will you?”

  Sharon groaned and twisted around in her seat. Though it was dark in the car, she thought she could see one of Jimmy’s eyes open, like a shiny coin, staring up at her. Getting up on her knees, she leaned over the front seat and lit her cigarette lighter. Both of his eyes flickered. She’d never seen that before. “What was in that bottle?” she said.

  “Same as last time,” Aunt Joan said. “Those Percocets I been getting off old Mrs. Marsh.”

  “Well, his friggin’ eyes are open,” Sharon said.

  “Is he doing anything else? Is he moving?”

  “No, but his goddamn eyes are awake.”

  Aunt Joan was silent for a moment. “Burn him with your Zippo a little.”

  “Are you nuts?”

  “Oh, don’t set him on fire. Just see if he flinches is all.”

  Sharon looked closely at Jimmy one more time, then dropped back down in her seat and said, “Aunt Joan, I ain’t doing that.” The clattering sound under the hood finally eased up, and Sharon tried to relax. She leaned her head back and watched the wipers flop loosely back and forth across the windshield. Her grandfather had finally returned home when his eyes gave out from the sugar and he couldn’t see to drive anymore. Hobbling into the house on his rotten legs, he gave his daughter a peck on the cheek and handed her both sets of keys. “Joanie, that’s a good car,” he told her. “Take care of it.” John Grubb had always kept his youngest daughter close, so close that people around the holler had spread rumors, and it had only gotten worse after Edna was killed. But while she was peeling potatoes for his dinner, he slipped out on the back porch and blew a hole behind his ear with the .45. She was forty-three years old and had never been on a date.

  They turned off the highway onto Black Run, the secondary road that would take them back to the holler. “Do I have to help you carry him in?” Sharon asked.

  Aunt Joan rubbed her chin, turned down the heater. “No, I don
’t reckon,” she said. “You’ve done enough.”

  Ten minutes later, she stopped the car in front of Sharon’s house. They could both see Dean pacing back and forth in the front room, jabbing his hands into the air. All the lights were on. It looked like a hundred people lived there. Pieces of the TV antenna were scattered in the muddy driveway. “Where’s your curtains?” Aunt Joan asked.

  “I have no friggin’ idea,” Sharon said numbly. It was four o’clock in the morning, and Dean had been at it since yesterday afternoon when the rain started. He’d been to doctors all over Ohio, but nobody could explain why the rain made him so crazy.

  “You’re going to have to do something about that boy one of these days,” Aunt Joan said. “He’s going to have one of those fits and hurt somebody.”

  Sharon rolled her eyes. At least she had a regular man. “That last doctor he saw told us to try moving to the desert,” she said, watching her husband through the naked windows.

  “The desert?” Aunt Joan said. “You mean with camels and sheikhs and stuff?”

  “No, like Arizona.”

  “Oh.” Aunt Joan got a serious look on her face. Reaching over, she took hold of her niece’s hand and squeezed it. “Sharon,” she said, staring into her eyes, “Dean ain’t worth moving away for, you hear me?” She turned and looked back at the house. “He gets to where you can’t handle him, we can take care of that.”

  Aunt Joan was always suggesting that Sharon do something about Dean, either divorce him or stick him in a group home. Putting up with her advice had been more of an aggravation than anything else. Tonight though, as she listened to Jimmy’s soggy wheeze in the backseat, Sharon thought about the other men they had brought back to the holler, wondered again why Aunt Joan refused to talk about them.

  Aunt Joan shrugged. “I’m just saying I wouldn’t want to live in no desert.”

  Sharon started to get out of the car. “Don’t worry, that’s just what the head doctor said.”

  “Here, you take these,” Aunt Joan said, handing Sharon the box of doughnuts.

  “I thought you had a sweet tooth.”

  “I do,” the older woman chuckled. She turned and glanced back at Jimmy. “But not for no doughnuts.”

  . . . . .

  WALKING IN THE HOUSE, SHARON SAW THAT DEAN HAD NOT only torn all the curtains down, but he’d smashed every pretty thing she had hanging on the walls. “You’re gonna clean this up, mister,” she told him. A confused look clouded his face, and he curled up on the couch and started scratching the back of his head. He dug harder and harder into his scalp until she had to run over and grab his arms. The thin piece of skin over the steel plate was raw and bleeding. He calmed down for a few moments, then jumped up and started singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” at the top of his froggy voice.

  Sharon gave up and went around shutting off all the lights. A photograph of her and Dean lay on the floor in the kitchen, the frame broken, and she kicked it under the table. Then she walked down the hallway and unlocked her bedroom door with a key she kept on a chain around her neck. Pulling off her sweats, she crawled into bed with the box of doughnuts and pulled the blankets up over her. Yes, she thought, she was definitely catching a cold. She turned on the little radio that sat on the nightstand and twisted the dial until she found some easy-listening music.

  Taking a doughnut from the box, Sharon bit into it, a chocolate cream filled. Raindrops splattered against the window. She ate the doughnut and wondered what it would be like to live in the desert. Everything there would be new. She could go on a diet and Dean could get his head dried out. They could do whatever people do who live in the sand.

  Biting into a glazed, she started to think about Jimmy. He’d stuck his tongue in her ear, the first time anyone had ever done that. His breath was bad, but so was Dean’s. She wished now that she’d asked him, when they were in the backseat together, if he’d ever been to Arizona. She wondered if he had a girlfriend, maybe even a wife. She hadn’t noticed a wedding ring, but that didn’t mean anything these days. Then she remembered Aunt Joan and decided that she better not think about Jimmy anymore. Besides, she was done with all that business now.

  Sharon licked the sugary coating off her fingers and picked up a blueberry, one of her favorites. Through the door, she heard Dean moving around again. Then the DJ came on and said something about more precipitation. She reached over and turned the radio up a little. The rain had settled, the man said in his late-night voice, over the Ohio valley. It was going to stick around a while.

  HOLLER

  I WOKE UP THINKING I’D PISSED THE BED AGAIN, BUT IT WAS just a sticky spot from where Sandy and me fucked the night before. Those kinds of things happen when you drink like I do—you shit your pants in the Wal-Mart, you end up living off some crackhead and her poor parents. I raised the blankets just a tad, traced my finger over the blue KNOCKEMSTIFF, OHIO tattoo that Sandy had etched in her skinny ass like a road sign. Why some people need ink to remember where they come from will always be a mystery to me.

  Wrapping my arms around her, I pulled Sandy up against me, blew my bad breath on the back of her neck. I was just getting ready to nail her again when Sandy’s dad started up down the hall in his sickroom, crying soft and sad like he’d been doing ever since his stroke. That pretty much drained the sap out of me. Sandy groaned and rolled away to the other side of the bed, covered her blond head with a lumpy pillow that was crusty with dried sex and slobber.

  I stared at the ceiling and listened as Mary, Sandy’s mom, trudged past the door on her way to check on Albert. The cold floorboards cracked and creaked like ice under her fat legs. Everything in the house seemed old and used up, and that included Sandy. It was just like what my old man always claimed about my mother after she took off—“If she had all of ’em stickin’ out of her that’s been stuck in her, she’d look like a fuckin’ porcupine.” That was Sandy all right; damn near every boy in Twin Township had tapped her one time or another.

  Through the thin walls, I heard Mary tell her bedridden husband, “No, he ain’t up yet.” Ever since Sandy brought me home with her one night last fall, I’d been helping take care of Albert. Each morning, before Mary would crack his first fifth of wine, I’d go in and shave the old man, scrub him off, change his diaper. It all came down to a matter of timing. If Albert didn’t get his breakfast by ten o’clock, he’d start seeing dead soldiers hanging from parachutes in the apple tree outside his window. This meant getting up early, but I kept thinking that if I did right by the old man, maybe somebody would return the favor someday. I rose up and looked at the clock on the dresser.

  Pulling on my jeans, I glanced down at some of Sandy’s pencil drawings scattered on the floor. She was always working on a picture of the Ideal Boyfriend. Sometimes she’d fire up some ice and lock herself in the room, stay revved up for two or three nights practicing different body parts. Reams of her fantasy were slid under the bed. Not a damn one of those pictures looked like me, and I suppose I should have been grateful for that. Every one of them had the same tiny head, the same cannonball shoulders. Eventually, she’d crawl out of the room with blisters on her fingers from squeezing the pencil, scabs around her mouth from smoking the shit.

  Albert started smacking his flaky white lips as soon as I entered the room. Except for a constant tremor in his left hand, he was dead as Jesus from the chest down. Mary had already retreated to the living room, but she’d put out a dishpan of warm water and a thin towel on the stand next to the hospital bed. A can of Gillette and a straight razor sat on top of the dresser. I lathered him up and lit a cigarette to steady my nerves. I studied the map of veins on his purple nose while he grinned at me through the foam.

  Just as I began scraping his neck, Mary rushed through the door with a fifth of Wild Irish Rose. Albert’s head started trembling as soon as his yellow eyes zoomed in on the wine. “It’s nearly ten, Tom,” Mary panted. “You about done?”

  “Almost,” I answered, flicking some ashes on the
floor. “Maybe you oughta go ahead and give him a hit. He gets to bouncin’ around, I might cut him.”

  Mary shook her head. “Not ’til ten o’clock,” she said adamantly. “We start that, it’ll just get earlier and earlier. He runs me ragged as it is.”

  “I still gotta change him, though,” I said, pressing my palm against his sweaty forehead to keep him still. “What about his medication? Maybe you ought to try it sometime.”

  “This is his medication,” Mary said, waving the bottle around. “Lord, he wouldn’t last a day without it.” There was a drawer full of pills in the nightstand, but in all the months I’d been staying there, I was the only one who took anything his doctor had prescribed.

  I finished the shave job, then wiped Albert’s face with a damp washcloth, ran a comb through his brittle gray hair. Pulling down the scratchy blankets, I said, “You ready, pardner?” His face twisted as he tried to spit out a few garbled words, and then he gave up and nodded his head. The old man hated me changing him, but it was better than lying in his squirts all day. I unfastened the paper diaper and took a deep breath, then raised his bony legs up with one hand and pulled it out from under him. It was soaked with brown goo. I dropped it in the wastebasket, wiped his ass with the washcloth. Then I taped a new diaper on him from the box of Adult Pampers lying on the floor. By the time I had him fixed up, he was bawling again.

  As soon as I tucked the blankets back up around him, Mary broke the seal on the bottle and handed it to me. I jabbed one end of a straw down the neck of the jug, slipped the other end in Albert’s mouth. The clock on the wall said 9:56. Four more minutes and he would have been back in Korea. I held the fifth and smoked another cigarette while the old man sucked down his morning oats. Sandy’s high, whiny voice traveled down the hallway into the sickroom. She was singing her song about a blue bird that wanted to be a red bird. “Where’d you two go last night?” Mary asked.