Knockemstiff

by Donald Ray Pollock

  My bedroom door opened and my mother walked in holding a lighted candle. “Bobby?” she said. I pretended to be asleep. She leaned over me, brushed my sore cheek with her soft hand. Then she reached up and closed my window. In the candlelight, I sneaked a look at the bruise spreading across her face like a smear of grape jelly.

  She tiptoed out of the room, leaving the door ajar, and walked down the hall. “There,” I heard her say to my father, “is that better?”

  “I think I fucked it up,” my father said. “That bastard’s head was hard as a rock.”

  “You shouldn’t drink, Vernon,” my mom said.

  “Is he asleep?”

  “He’s wore out.”

  “I’d bet a paycheck he broke that kid’s nose, the way the blood came out,” my father said.

  “We better go to bed,” my mom said.

  “I couldn’t believe it, Agnes. That fucking kid was twice Bobby’s size, I swear to God.”

  “He’s just a boy, Vernon.”

  They walked slowly past my door, leaning into each other, and went into their bedroom. I heard my mother say, “No way,” but then after a few minutes, their bed began to squeak like a rusty seesaw. Outside, the storm finally cut loose, and big drops of rain began pounding the tin roof of the house. I heard my mother moan, my father call out for Jesus. A bolt of lightning arced across the black sky, and long shadows moved about on the bare plaster walls of my room. I pulled the thin sheet over my head and stuck my fingers in my mouth. A sweet, salty taste stung my busted lip, ran over my tongue. It was the other boy’s blood, still on my hands.

  As my parents’ bed thumped loudly against the floor in the next room, I lapped the blood off my knuckles. The dried flakes dissolved in my mouth, turning my spit to syrup. Even after I’d swallowed all the blood, I kept licking my hands. I tore at the skin with my teeth. I wanted more. I would always want more.

  DYNAMITE HOLE

  I WAS COMING DOWN OFF THE MITCHELL FLATS WITH THREE arrowheads in my pocket and a dead copperhead hung around my neck like an old woman’s scarf when I caught a boy named Truman Mackey fucking his own little sister in the Dynamite Hole. I’d been hunting flints all morning up around the old Indian furnaces and was headed for the store down in Knockemstiff to trade them for some potted meat and crackers. Maude Speakman allowed me forty cents for each one I brought her, and then she sold them over again to some man from Meade who delivered her gas every Tuesday.

  It was hot that day, and as I crossed Black Run, knee deep in the water and fighting the green flies that were swarming around the snake’s mashed-up head, I heard some splashing around the bend. I stopped and listened close for a minute, then cut back over and sneaked up to the edge of the big hole that a county road crew had blasted in the creek years ago digging for gravel. I hoped to see something is all, thought maybe I’d have some fun with that dead snake if it turned out to be that goddamn gang of boys who’d been throwing rocks at my old school bus, the one Henry Skiver let me stay in up behind his property. Henry’s daddy used to keep the bus for a chicken house, but I shoveled it out good, and it wasn’t so bad after that. Lately, though, those boys had busted so many holes in the top of it that every time it rained I might as well been living in a bathtub.

  I damn near swallowed my cud when I got up there and saw the Mackey boy had his sister down on her hands and knees at the edge of the water and him behind her with no clothes on. I stepped back off the path a ways, then eased down on the ground and crawled up behind some chokecherry bushes to watch. My heart started beating so big I thought it was going to pop out of my chest, and I was afraid they’d hear all the noise it was making, but Truman and her just went on about their business like they were the only two people on this little patch of God’s wicked earth.

  . . . . .

  NOWADAYS I RECKON MOST PEOPLE WOULD STARVE TO death if they tried to live like me, but I learned years ago that a man can get by in this world without being somebody’s nigger if he don’t mind what he eats for supper. Back when I was nineteen, they started drafting boys for the big war against the Germans, and I hid on top of the Mitchell Flats for almost three years with nothing but a penknife and a ball of twine I stole from Floyd Bowman’s barn. My old man threw a fit when I told him I wasn’t going to answer the call, spit all kinds of names in my face like I wasn’t nothing but dirt. “Jake, you goddamn chickenshit, I won’t be able to face people around here you run away,” he told me, but I left that night anyway. I’d never been more than two miles away from Knockemstiff, Ohio, in my whole life. And though there have been plenty of days I still regret I didn’t try to make him see things my way that night, I guess taking off just seemed easier at the time. Hell, how could I have told that old man, the way they were drafting and killing boys left and right, that I wasn’t afraid of the fighting nearly as much as I was scared of leaving the holler?

  . . . . .

  THAT MACKEY GIRL COULDN’T HAVE BEEN MORE THAN twelve or so, but she was backing up against her brother like she’d been at it for quite a while. Truman was maybe fifteen or sixteen years old, and long and skinny as a horseweed, same as his mouthy old man. He’d push it in her a few times and get her all squirmy, and then they’d both jump up and raise their arms into the sticky air and yell, “Jesus, save me!” And every time they said it, they’d fall backward in the hole laughing, and then Truman would get up behind her again, that filthy brown water running off him onto her, and they’d do it all over. And Lord, though my family never was one for religion, the first time I heard those words coming out of their mouths like that, they cut me near as bad as the ones my old man called me the night I left his house for good. I started to get up and come out from behind the bushes, figuring if I let them know I was around, they’d run on home and maybe think twice about what they’d been doing. But then I didn’t, and the longer I laid there and watched them, the more I talked myself into believing that they’d just found their own little way of praying, and that maybe they really did want the Savior or even somebody else to come down and wipe away their sins.

  . . . . .

  WHEN I TOOK OFF THAT TIME TO GO HIDE UP ON THE flats from the military, the old man wouldn’t allow me to take nothing but the bibs I was wearing and my old mackinaw and that penknife. I went awful hungry those three years, and I got used to that empty feeling eating away at my insides, which I know ain’t nearly as bad as some of the feelings people carry around with them. I mostly lived on field corn and what squirrels and rabbits I could knock in the head and the sunfish and crawdads I scooped up out of Black Run. In the winter, I stayed in a tepee I made out of corn shocks, and in the good weather I slept underneath a briar patch or else back in this hollow log that laid up behind Harry Frey’s orchard. Once in a while, I’d slip down to the holler in the middle of the night and go to my family’s house. My mother would keep a watch out for me and leave me some biscuits in a poke behind the smokehouse and maybe a piece of meat if there was any. Looking back on it, I guess I can recall only one time in my life when I knew what it was like to have a full belly, and that was just a few years ago when Maude gave me a big roll of old-fashioned bologna she thought was going bad. She said maybe I could feed it to the stray beagle dog that was following me around at the time, but I bought a loaf of bread and took it back to the school bus and ate the whole damn thing myself before I got sick. It must have took a month for me to get over that, and I ain’t never been able to eat more than just a little bit since.

  . . . . .

  I CREPT UP CLOSER TO THE BANK, AND PRETTY SOON I WAS near enough that the water splashed on me whenever those kids did their little dance. It was a beautiful sight, the way the sunlight floated down through the sycamore trees on that young girl and turned everything she did into something sweet and golden. I felt myself growing hard against the ground through my old bibs, and I guess watching her push back and forth on her brother made me all light-headed. I remember holding that dead copperhead up to my lips and kissing it the same wa
y I’d seen men kiss their women in their bedrooms at night. Maybe it was the heat, or maybe it was because of the things I was seeing, but all of a sudden it seemed as if everything inside me started swirling around like a storm cloud.

  . . . . .

  I’D BEEN HIDING UP ON THE FLATS FOR ABOUT A YEAR WHEN I came down to the holler one night hoping to get some biscuits and my family was gone. The old house was empty, and somebody had pulled all the windows out and took the doors right off the hinges. They’d left a letter in the smokehouse that said my little brother Bill had been killed on some island out in the ocean and that they’d gone back to Kentucky, which is where my old man was from before. I didn’t even know my brother was in the army until I read that letter, and he couldn’t have been much older than Truman Mackey when he got himself killed. I stood there looking at my sister’s handwriting and wishing they’d taken me with them, but the old man had always favored Bill over the rest of us, and I guess it made him sad that he lost the youngest instead of me. I never saw them again, and after that, I never could get rid of that feeling that I wasn’t much welcome nowhere in the world.

  It was late that same summer when the military finally sent two boys in green uniforms out to hunt for me, and I’ve always wondered if my old man didn’t tell them where to look. You could hear them boys tromping through the woods from a mile away; and when I saw there were only two of them, I came out and let them see me. I led them on a damn goose chase up and down the hills all the rest of that day, just keeping ahead of them enough they couldn’t get a shot at me. By evening, I could tell they was all wore out, and I heard them cussing the hillbillies and the briars, and the fatter one was telling the other about panthers coming out at night and that they better get down off the hill before dark. But I wasn’t ready for them to leave yet, so I snapped a branch off a tree right behind them, and they jumped up and started the chase all over again. And that’s when I led them down into that little holler I’d been fixing up in case I ever had any trouble.

  . . . . .

  SOMEHOW, I ENDED UP WITH THAT LITTLE MACKEY GIRL IN my arms. I don’t expect no one would ever believe me, but it was like the dark cloud busted in the top of my skull, and I opened my eyes and there was an angel. I ran my hands through her wet hair and tried to settle her down, but she kept blubbering and going on about her brother. I looked over and saw Truman all bloody about the head, his pecker still hard and sticking up out of the water like a piece of carved wood. Then the girl saw the snake I had wrapped around my neck and she started screaming so loud I was afraid they’d hear her clear down on the road. So I held the snake’s head up to her face and told her I’d turn it loose on her if she couldn’t be quiet. But that made her carry on all that much more, and finally I had to get my hands around her neck and squeeze a little bit, just enough to settle her down until I could get straight on what had happened to that boy. Her face turned red as a raspberry, and her eyes flipped back in her head until only the whites were showing, and I let up on her and pushed her nose down in the gravel. I remember a mud dauber landed close to her ear, and I smashed it against the side of her head with my hand. She got easy after that, and I got my bibs down and slipped inside her the way I’d seen her brother do. I tried to get her to say some things like I’d heard a couple of those women do with their men, but this one, all she wanted to do was whimper and cry.

  . . . . .

  THE PLACE I LED THOSE MILITARY TO THAT EVENING wasn’t nothing but a little washed-out gully with slate rock and dead timber lying in the bottom of it, and I’d been catching copperheads and throwing them in there all summer. By the time those two boys got to the spot I’d picked out, I’d already climbed up the other side and was looking down on them. Like I said, there was just a little light left, and they were standing down at the lower end of that gully and looking up into it, trying to decide what to do next. I saw one of them light up a smoke, and I was close enough to smell it was store-bought. Then I tossed a rock up ahead of them, and the skinny one said, “By God, Jesse, I think we got that sonofabitch now.” They climbed over the dead logs I’d blocked up the lower end with and rushed in, and I saw a big fat bastard pop out of the side of the hill and strike the one boy smack in the face so hard it knocked him backward. He was still trying to pull that snake off his cheek when the other one turned and ran off firing his gun every which way.

  . . . . .

  I’D NEVER BEEN INSIDE A REAL PERSON BEFORE, AND WHEN I started to finish, it was like everything I’d ever known didn’t matter no more. All the hard years and the loneliness flowed out of me and bubbled up inside that little girl like a wet spring coming out of the side of a hill. I still had the snake around me, and I held it up and shook it at the sun and cried out, “Jesus, save me!” because I thought she might like that. But when I pulled loose from her, she started fighting to get away again, and I looked over at the boy and saw the club that had killed him floating by his head. His eyes were wide open and staring up at the puffy clouds stuck in the sky, and the blood coming out of his mouth was turning the water the color of wine. And I realized that no matter what I did, I couldn’t stop this thing now. It was already turning some kind of wheel all its own, like the time those boys followed me into that nest of copperheads. I held the girl down with one hand while I tried to reach over for the club. But she was slippery as an eel, and I got afraid that if she got loose, I couldn’t run her down. So I clenched both hands around her neck, and this time I didn’t let up until there wasn’t anything left but her sweet face all bloomed out like a purple flower and a skinny little body turned to wax.

  . . . . .

  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.

  . . . . .

  I FINALLY 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 ma
naged 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.

  . . . . .

  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.”