Knockemstiff

by Donald Ray Pollock

  Cowboy Roy was an independent trucker, but drove much of the time for a big slaughterhouse in Illinois, delivering meat throughout the tristate area. He’d seen enough filth to give up eating most flesh altogether. “It just breaks my heart to see some mom stick a hot dog in her baby’s trap,” he told Daniel. His favorite food now was pork and beans. “Eat ’em right out of the can,” he said, “just like the cowboys do.” He’d inherited a little spread, and as they crossed over into Illinois that evening, he invited Daniel to spend the night. “It gets pretty lonely at the ranch ever since Mom died,” he said, his voice cracking just a little.

  Daniel was surprised that the landscape didn’t change after they left Ohio. He’d always thought of every other state as an exotic world, but so far everything he’d seen was as dull as a Lawrence Welk tuba special. In the meantime, though, the pills and whiskey turned him into a regular chatterbox, and before he could stop himself, he told Cowboy Roy the whole sad story of Lucy and the butcher knife.

  “Sounds kinda kinky to me,” the trucker said. He lit the butt of a skinny black cigar he’d stashed behind his ear, and blew a cloud of smoke in the boy’s face.

  “It woulda been down to my shoulders by the time school started,” Daniel said, shivering with a speed rush.

  “I never cared much for dolls myself,” Cowboy Roy said. “Hell, they just lay there, you know what I mean?”

  “My little cousin’s got one that talks when you pull a string,” the boy said. He rocked back and forth in the seat, unable to hold still.

  “It’s a shame they don’t sell live ones,” the man said, mashing his bloodshot eyeballs with his fist.

  Eventually Daniel and the trucker dropped the trailer off in a potholed parking lot outside a warehouse on the edge of a small town. Then they drove on for another hour or so, and near dark, the trucker pulled down a long, secluded driveway lined with pine trees. He parked the semi in front of an ancient house trailer that had PONDEROSA spray-painted in big red letters across the front of it. “I got twelve acres here,” the trucker told Daniel as they stomped through the weeds to the trailer. “We could put on a rodeo if we took the notion.”

  Stepping up on some cement blocks, he pushed a key in the door and shoved it open. “It ain’t no dude ranch, but it’s good enough,” he said, beckoning the boy inside. The trailer smelled like a closet full of bad times. All the windows were shut, and it must have been a hundred degrees inside. Black flies crawled on the walls. A flaky brown snakeskin was stretched out on the kitchen counter. Daniel looked around at the empty whiskey bottles and pork-and-beans cans lying on the floor. The shabbiness of the trailer suddenly choked him up, made him think of home.

  He asked Cowboy Roy for another pill. “I can pay for it,” Daniel said, reaching for some crumpled singles in the front pocket of his jeans. The sixteen dollars was all the money he had left from selling blackberries that summer. He’d picked them in the bottoms down past Pumpkin Center, then walked door to door all over Twin Township peddling them for thirty cents a quart.

  “Shoot, pardner, your money ain’t no good here,” the trucker said. “What’s mine is yours.” Digging the bottle out of the side pocket of his coveralls, he uncapped it and gave Daniel two more pills, then flopped down on a sagging couch. “You think you could pull these boots off for me?” Cowboy Roy asked the boy. “My poor feet’s killin’ me.”

  Daniel got down on his knees in front of the truck driver and tugged both boots off. “How ’bout my socks, too?” Cowboy Roy said. Peeling the damp, dirty socks off, the boy was nearly knocked down by the rotten odor that sprang up from the wrinkled purple feet and filled the cramped room. The smell reminded him of the sick bucket his mom sat by the couch whenever the old man was on a binge.

  “It sure is hot in here, ain’t it?” the boy said, as he stood up and stepped away.

  “Yeah, Mom screwed all the damn winders shut the first year I went out on the road,” Cowboy Roy said. “Poor old woman, she always got jittery when I was gone.” Then he heaved himself up off the couch and stepped into the kitchen. “What we need is some cold beer.”

  The thought of any more alcohol combined with the smell of the trucker’s feet made Daniel queasy. “Maybe later,” he said. All his nerve endings felt exposed, the coating that covered them burned away by the speed. Even the light from the lamp hurt his eyes.

  “Well, what about a shower?” the trucker yelled from the kitchen. Daniel could hear drawers sliding open, cupboards slamming shut. “That’d cool you off.”

  Walking into the bathroom, Daniel saw a shoot-’em-up paperback floating in the commode, its pages swollen with water. An old road atlas lay on the filthy blue linoleum. He hesitated, then locked the hollow door and took his clothes off. Pulling back the feed sack that served as a shower curtain, he saw that the tub was caked in hard gray scum. He tore some pages from the atlas, and covered the trucker’s slime with the endless highways of America. There wasn’t any soap, but he rinsed off in the cold spray anyway, patted himself dry with a stiff, bloody towel that hung from a nail on the wall. Then he put his clothes back on and walked out to the living room.

  Cowboy Roy was sitting on the couch, a can of beer in his hand. He was grinning wildly at Daniel, baring his brown teeth like a dog. Uncapping the pill bottle, he threw several more tablets in his mouth and chased them down with the beer. “Look what I found,” he said, reaching down and lifting a long blond wig delicately from a plastic bag on the floor.

  “What the hell?” Daniel said, jumping back. He suddenly felt closed in, as if the room was a coffin, and the hair the trucker held in his hand the same as that which grew in the graves on the hill back home.

  “Aw, come on,” the truck driver said. “We’re just fuckin’ around here.”

  “Whose is that?” the boy asked.

  “It was my mom’s,” Cowboy Roy explained. “But she don’t need it no more. The cancer done ate a hole clean through her.” He held the wig out to Daniel. “Go ahead, try it on.”

  Daniel took another step back. “No, I better not,” he said.

  “You was crying about not having no hair, wasn’t you?” Cowboy Roy said. “I’m just tryin’ to help you out is all.”

  “I don’t know,” the boy said. “Seems kinda weird.”

  “Son, your daddy caught you fuckin’ a doll,” Cowboy Roy said. “If that ain’t weird, then nothing is.”

  Daniel ran his hand over the patchy stubble on his head. A cricket chirped from somewhere in the room. Glancing out the window, he saw the darkness settling over unfamiliar land. It amazed him to think that just that morning he’d slipped out of bed while his parents were still sleeping and now he was hundreds of miles from home. “Okay,” he finally told the trucker.

  “Now we’re talking. Why walk around like that when you don’t have to?” the fat man said, wiping the sweat from his bloated red face with the hairpiece. “Okay, just stand in front of that mirror and I’ll help you put it on. I used to stick this thing on Mom all the time.”

  Daniel stepped over to the big oval mirror hanging from the paneled wall and shifted about nervously as Cowboy Roy set the musty-smelling wig on top of his head. “Hold still,” he ordered the boy, working the elastic band of the hairpiece down over the boy’s skull. “Got to make it fit right, don’t we?” the trucker said, looking over Daniel’s shoulder and grinning at him in the mirror. The boy could feel the man’s belly pressing up against him.

  Finally, the trucker said, “Not bad. What you think?”

  The long wig cascaded down Daniel’s scrawny back, a tangle of big blond curls. “It’s a little long, ain’t it?” the boy said.

  “Well, shoot, you just need a trim,” the trucker said. “Stay right there.” Cowboy Roy hurried into the kitchen and came back out with a jagged fillet knife. “I can’t find no scissors, but this will do the job.” He grabbed a length of the brittle hair in his stubby fingers. “Say about this much?” he asked the boy.

  “Maybe I
oughta do that,” Daniel said.

  “Just don’t make no sudden moves,” Cowboy Roy said.

  “That’s what my old man told me.”

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot,” the trucker said. “Hell, I ain’t gonna hurt you. This damn thing cost thirty dollars.”

  “That’s good.”

  The trucker started in, chewing his chapped lips as he hacked off pieces of his dead mother’s fancy wig and let them flutter to the floor. After a few minutes, he stepped away and slid the knife into the back pocket of his coveralls. He reached behind him for a pint bottle sitting on the end table next to the couch, his eyes never leaving the boy. As he unscrewed the cap, he said, “What you say now, pardner?”

  Daniel stared into the mirror. The hair draped from his head like a thick curtain. He kept turning from side to side, looking at himself from different angles. No longer did he see the scabs on his scalp, the bony triangle of face, the acne flaming across his skin like a brushfire. “It does make a difference,” he finally said, turning away from the mirror, his voice barely a whisper.

  “Goddamn if it don’t,” Cowboy Roy said. “Hell, I bet there ain’t many dolls look so pretty.” His face was flushed with heat, his body trembling. After steadying himself with a deep breath, he stepped closer and held out the bottle of whiskey. “C’mon, let’s celebrate,” he croaked.

  Daniel tried to laugh, but that had always been too hard for him. He’d never had anything to celebrate, not once in his whole life. He took a small drink from the bottle, and as he handed it back, he felt the trucker’s fat, sweaty hand touch his and linger there for a moment. And suddenly, Daniel knew that if he looked in the mirror again, he’d see the wig for what it really was. So instead, he closed his eyes.

  PILLS

  I WAS HIDING OUT IN FRANKIE JOHNSON’S CAR, A CANARY-YELLOW ’69 Super Bee that could shit and get. We were on a spree, stealing anything we could get our hands on—tape players and car batteries, gasoline and beer. It was a day or two after my sixteenth birthday, and I hadn’t been home in a week. And even though my old man was telling everyone around Knockemstiff that he hoped I was dead, he kept driving up and down the township roads with his head out the window looking for me like I was one of his lost coonhounds.

  Frankie kept saying that three hundred dollars would get us to California, but the only person we knew who had anything worth that much money was Wanda Wipert. Depending on who she was fucking at the time, a man could end up sleeping at the bottom of the Dynamite Hole with trash fish and bald tires for ripping Wanda off. Besides that, my old man’s place was right across the road from her house. “No way,” I said. Even talking about it gave me the willies.

  “Fuck ’em,” Frankie said. “Shit, Bobby, we’ll be three thousand miles away.”

  We broke in through the bathroom window. Pressed into the gray scum of the tub, our boot prints looked like those fossil feet frozen in rocks that my crazy cousins said the Devil had planted all over the world to trick people into believing that we came from frog shit and monkeys. There was a little radio next to the sink playing one of the country music stations. The DJ was announcing a sale on Thanksgiving turkeys at the Big Bear. A pair of red panties was balled up on the linoleum floor, and Frankie stuffed them into the back pocket of his coveralls. “Let’s don’t be fuckin’ around here,” I whispered. Every creak of the old house sounded like a gunshot to me.

  The little meat freezer was in the hallway next to the bedroom door. Inside we found four bottles of black beauties—pharmaceutical speed—hidden under a quart of frozen strawberries and a Barbie doll still in the box. The pills were wrapped in a sheet of bloody butcher’s paper that had CHUCKIE’S HOG BRAINS writ on it with a blue crayon. Somebody had already eaten the brains.

  Wanda tended bar at Hap’s and sold the black beauties on the side. The hilljacks loved them because a three-dollar capsule made it possible to drink four times as much and still miss the telephone poles on the way home. She had a whole posse of big girls that she carted around southern Ohio to the fat doctors. To get a prescription of black beauties, all they had to do was stand on the scales and let the nurse take their blood pressure. Wanda bribed the women with cheap tennis shoes from the Woolworth’s and Rax Roast Beef sandwiches and Dairy Queen milk shakes. My older sister, Jeanette, was one of her regulars. The only time I ever saw her happy was after one of those trips with Wanda to cop a ’script. She always came back with mustard stains on her good blouse and something sweet for her two illegits.

  “Maybe we oughta leave one bottle,” I said.

  “No way, Bobby,” Frankie said. “We use our heads, these babies will get us clear to goddamn San Francisco.”

  “How long will it take to get there?”

  “Five days,” he said, shoving all four bottles deep down into his front pockets.

  Leaving out the back door, we climbed up over Slate Hill and through the woods toward Foggy Moor. That’s where we’d stashed the Super Bee. The moon rose up behind us like a flat, shiny skull. We had to fight our way through the brush and briars for two miles, but at least nobody would be able to say they’d seen us in the holler that night.

  Four bottles of black beauties—240 pills—was enough rocket fuel to send a trash can to Mars. The pills still had frost on them when Frankie opened the first bottle and handed me two. Our plan was to eat just a couple, and then head west on Route 50 after we sold the rest in town. Within forty-five minutes my heart was ticking like a live bomb. By midnight I was chewing holes in my tongue listening to Frankie obsess about having sex with movie stars. “What about it, Bobby?” he finally asked me. “What would you do to her?”

  Frankie had been listing all the stuff he wanted to do to Ali McGraw. I’d known him my whole life, but the part about the ax handle took me by surprise. I’d never been with a woman, and I was still trying to figure out if such a thing was even possible. “Shit, I don’t know,” I finally said with a shrug.

  He fired up another cigarette off the one he was smoking. “Did you get off?” he asked, looking over at me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

  “I don’t know, man. You just seem out of it.”

  “Look, I’m thinking maybe we should take them pills back, Frankie,” I said. “I mean, if Wanda finds out—”

  “Are you fuckin’ nuts?” he said. He uncapped the bottle and handed me a couple more of the black capsules. “You’re just comin’ down, Bobby, that’s all.”

  He was right—two more made all the difference. Within a few minutes, a great happiness surged up inside of me as I thought of running away to California. Suddenly, I knew that all the lousy, fucked-up things that kept happening in my life would never happen again. I remembered the last time my old man had went crazy on us, all because my mother had fixed him oatmeal instead of eggs for his breakfast. I began to talk and found that I couldn’t stop. While Frankie drove around the township in circles that night, I told him all the secrets in my house, every single rotten thing that my old man had ever done to us. And though, in a stupid way, I felt like a fucking rat the more I blabbed, by the time the sun came up the next morning, it seemed as if all the shame and fear I’d ever carried inside of me was burned away like a pile of dead leaves.

  . . . . .

  WE RAN OVER THE CHICKEN THREE DAYS AFTER WE STOLE the pills. It came out of nowhere. I was at the height of my powers then. Eat twenty-five black beauties in three days and you will know what I’m talking about. “Fuck!” I yelled when I heard it thump against the car. Frankie slammed on the brakes and the car skidded to a stop. I jumped out. The chicken was smashed against the grill, its neck broken. I pulled it gently away from the chrome and held it up by its bumpy yellow feet. A glob of blood as fat and round as a red pearl hung on the end of its busted beak.

  Climbing out of the car, Frankie said, “How’d that get there?” He checked the front grill, wiped it off with his coat sleeve. Then he got down on his knees and looked underneath for damage. He loved that Super Bee
. “Goddamn chicken,” I heard him say.

  “I can save it,” I said.

  Frankie stood up and frowned at me, pressed a finger against the side of his nose and blew snot all over his work boots. “It’s dead, Bobby.” He rubbed the toe of each shoe against the legs of his greasy coveralls while chewing the inside of his mouth as if it was a big soft seed. His pupils shone like tiny headlights in the dusk.

  “I can save it,” I repeated. I held the bird close to my chest, felt its warmth slowly slipping away in the cold wind blowing across the flat fields. The farmers had already picked the harvest. Two-inch stubble covered the landscape. Even the highway was empty. I stroked the chicken’s tiny head with my thumb. “Pop the trunk,” I said. Then I wrapped the body in my flannel shirt and laid it gently on top of a spare tire.

  . . . . .

  LATER THAT SAME NIGHT, I LOST MY CHERRY TO A GIRL with razor-thin lips who kept telling me to hurry up. Her name was Teabottom. We first saw her coming out of Penrod’s Grocery in Nipgen carrying a carton of milk. Her red frizzy hair looked like a bush burning atop her head. She was wearing a ragged blue work shirt and grimy plastic sandals. Her feet were purple from the cold. A little leather purse hung from a dirty string around her neck. “Hey, baby!” Frankie yelled as he whipped the car into the gravel lot and cut her off.

  We worked out a trade, and she climbed in the backseat. Frankie flipped a coin, and I went first. From everything I’d seen in the movies, I thought I should hold her tenderly, but she was all business. She pulled her shirt up over her head so I couldn’t kiss her. The carton of milk busted in the floorboards and sloshed on my feet. I might as well have been in a barnyard.