Knockemstiff

by Donald Ray Pollock

  “Damn, she ain’t no Ali McGraw, but I wish I had that fuckin’ ax handle now,” Frankie said to me the second time he climbed over the seat. Because of the speed, we couldn’t get enough. We tried to wear her out, mostly because of the disdainful way she looked at us. But nothing we did made any difference to her as long as we handed her two more pills every time we took a turn. She stuck all of them in her change purse.

  The third time I went for it, I asked her about the milk. My socks were soaked with it. “It was for my baby, dumbass,” she said. She was smoking a cigarette, bitching about being sore.

  “You got a baby?” I said.

  “What, you hard of hearing too?”

  “Well, where is it now?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she told me, holding out her hand. I laid two pills in her palm, and she spread herself down on the seat with a groan. But I couldn’t stop thinking about her baby, and wondering who was taking care of it while Frankie and me tried to screw her brains out. I kept imagining all kinds of horrible, fucked-up things happening to it. When I finally gave up and climbed off of her, she cupped some of the spilled milk from the floor into her hand and poured it over her crotch. She didn’t even bother pulling her jeans back on anymore.

  Toward morning, as I drove us along a gravel road, I thought I heard Frankie telling the Teabottom girl that he would take her to Nashville as soon as he could get rid of me. But when I turned the radio down, all I could hear was the steady squeak of the seat behind me. I turned around in the seat, saw him hovering over the top of the girl with his eyes shut. “Frankie?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “What about California, man?” I asked. We hadn’t left the county yet, hadn’t sold a single pill.

  “Jesus Christ, Bobby, not now.”

  When we finally let her out, Teabottom stumbled bow-legged to her trailer through a yard strewn with rusty car parts and old empty dog boxes. We sat in the Super Bee watching numbly as she stepped up on some wobbly cement blocks and went inside. A light popped on, then off again. I lit a cigarette and pulled another black beauty from the stash I had in my coat pocket. “My dick feels like a goddamn snappin’ turtle’s been chewing on it,” Frankie said. Then he backed out of the driveway, burned a patch of rubber all the way through first gear. Above us, the black sky slowly turned into a gray waxen sea.

  . . . . .

  BY THE END OF THE FIFTH DAY, WE WERE FRIED. NOW THE speed was like water running through our veins, and we couldn’t get off anymore. Our throats had turned to leather from cigarettes and talk; our gums bled and our jaws ached from grinding our teeth together. Frankie kept whispering to a beer can that he held in his hand like a microphone, and I had struggled off and on all that day to convince myself that it wasn’t talking back to him. And in the backseat, the spilled milk had soured and filled the car with rotten fumes that kept reminding me of Teabottom’s little baby. “What about California, you fuck?” I finally said. “Shit, we coulda been there by now.”

  He sighed and whispered one more time to the can, then tossed it out the window. “Hey, Bobby,” he said, “you can go anytime you want. I ain’t stopping you.”

  A few minutes later, we pulled into Train Lane, a rutted farm road that divided two cornfields on the edge of Knockemstiff. It didn’t matter how many miles we traveled by day, we always ended up back in the holler at night, though I was scared shitless that we’d run into Wanda Wipert or, even worse, my old man. At the turnaround at the end of the lane, we parked beside an illegal dump, piled high with bags of trash and busted chairs and cast-off refrigerators. The sun was sinking with a purple glow behind the Mitchell Flats. The DJ announced the sale on Thanksgiving turkeys again.

  “Jesus,” I said, “how many fuckin’ Thanksgivings are they having this year?”

  Frankie shut the engine off and sat staring straight ahead for a few minutes. Then he jerked the keys from the ignition and stepped out of the car. I watched him hunt through the trash, throwing boards and paper off to the side. He found an old tire and rolled it out into the middle of the road. As he bent down and started stuffing the inside of it with paper and cardboard, I opened the glove box and grabbed one of the two bottles of black beauties we had left. I slipped the speed in the top of my sock and got out of the car. “What you doing, man?” I asked him.

  He was holding his lighter to some of the damp paper, trying to get it to ignite. “I’m fuckin’ cold, and I’m fuckin’ hungry,” he croaked. We both watched as a tiny flame began to grow inside the tire. “When you figure was the last time we ate?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “It’s been a week. At least a week, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe so.”

  Walking to the back of the car, Frankie opened the trunk and lifted the chicken out. My shirt was still wrapped around it like a shroud. “Oh, shit,” I said. I fumbled for the last pill I had in my coat pocket and bit it open. “Just give me a minute here, man,” I said, swallowing the bitter powder. “Maybe I can still do something.”

  Frankie shook his head. “You want your shirt back?” he asked. He was swinging the chicken back and forth by its feet as if he was trying to hypnotize me.

  “No,” I said. “Well, yeah, I guess so.”

  “Here, hold this, just for a minute.” He handed me the stiff bird. Then he began digging through the trash again, finally pulling a broken stake out of the pile. “This’ll work,” he said to himself. Taking the chicken from me, he set it on the ground, and pressed his foot on its neck.

  “What are you doing?” I said as I took off my coat and put my shirt back on.

  “Watch,” he said. And with one quick motion, he bent down and rammed the stake up the chicken’s ass until the point broke through the breast with a crunchy sound.

  “Goddamn it,” I cried. I was so worthless I’d forgotten all about it, and now nobody could bring the chicken back to life. Then another thought occurred to me. “You’re not going to screw that, are you?” I asked him. “Because I’ll tell you right now, Frankie, I won’t allow it.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said, “but no, I’m gonna eat the fuckin’ thing.” Then he lifted the chicken up and carried it toward the fire. One of the bird’s eyes was open, staring at me blankly. A thin strand of blue intestines hung from the tip of the stake.

  The tire was blazing now, the thick black smoke funneling into the night. The smell of the burning rubber started to make me sick. I stood back and watched as Frankie held the carcass over the edge of the flames. The feathers curled and melted and disappeared. “Ain’t you even gonna gut it?” I said, stepping closer.

  He looked back at me and showed his teeth. “Just got to cook it,” he gagged. He pulled Wanda’s red panties from his pocket and held them over his face. The chicken began to grow soft, and started to slide off the end of the stick, but Frankie righted it just in time. The skin sizzled and smoked and started to turn black. Drops of fat began to splatter into the fire. The feet shriveled up and fell into the flames.

  Without another word, I stepped across the drainage ditch and out into the soft barren field. I pulled the bottle of pills out of my sock, stuck them in my pocket. Route 50 was two miles away, and I started walking toward it. Mud stuck to my boots like wet concrete, and every few steps I had to stop to shake it off. Looking up, I saw the red blinking lights of an airliner, miles above me, heading west. I’d never been on a plane, but I imagined big-shot bastards on vacation, movie stars with beautiful lives. I wondered if they could see the glow of Frankie’s fire from up there. I wondered what they would think of us.

  GIGANTHOMACHY

  IT HAD RAINED HARD DURING THE NIGHT, AND IN THE morning everything along the fence line was bright wet green except for that brown anthill. Even though we’d flattened the shit out of it just the week before, the damn thing was already the size of a bushel basket again. It was as if we’d never been there. Christ, they’d even buried the concrete block that William
had left standing as a monument to their war dead.

  “They’re taunting us,” William said, staring down at the ants gliding about on top of the soggy mound, repairing storm damage, oblivious to us, their mortal enemies.

  “What,” I said, “they’re just bugs.” William made a big deal out of everything. The whole world was out to get him, even the milkweed and the tumblebugs. His father, Mr. Jenkins, was the cause of it all. There were nine kinds of hell raised over at their house every night. The old man was some kind of maniac, and William walked around with a bitter scowl and a constant migraine. Before he moved in next door, I thought only old people got headaches. He was always getting me to steal some of my mom’s aspirins for him, and then he sucked on them like hard candy, trying to make each one last as long as possible. Living with my mother was no picnic, but compared to what William and his sister, Lucy, had to go through, I was, as my uncle Clarence always put it, shittin’ in high cotton.

  “Did you bring the matches?” he asked. Yesterday William had finally agreed that if I brought the fire, we could kill Vietcong this week. My mom and I watched bits of the war on TV every night, and I had waited all goddamn summer to wipe out a Communist village.

  I pulled the box of blue kitchen matches out of my pocket, and he ran to retrieve the empty bleach bottle he’d stashed in a clump of horseweeds that grew along the sagging fence. “We gotta be careful,” he said, glancing back at his house. “The old man’s on the warpath again.”

  “Jesus, don’t that guy ever let up?” I said. The bruises on William’s skinny arms were the color of a bum banana. All my life I’d wished for a father, but living next to Mr. Jenkins was making me have second thoughts. Mine had skipped out on my mom before I was born, and I’d always been ashamed of that. But maybe I’d lucked out after all.

  “Light it,” he commanded, ignoring me. Ramming a long stick in the mouth of the bleach bottle, he held it over the fence. I struck a match and held the flame close to the bottom of the jug until it caught. Then, swinging the stick around, William positioned the melting bottle directly over the anthill. Sizzling drops of white plastic began raining down on the tiny red ants like a firestorm.

  “Look, Theodore,” he said casually, “let’s forget that Vietnam crap.”

  “But you said we could—”

  “I can’t stand it,” he coughed. “It’s all you ever talk about.” Poisonous fumes were already swirling around his sweaty face. He waved his hand like a handkerchief, trying to fan the plastic smoke away.

  “Fuck you,” I said. “Find someone else to boss around.” I was the only kid in Knockemstiff who would even talk to him, and that was just because my mom kept insisting that I play the good neighbor. Anytime I pointed out to her that William treated me like shit, she’d look up from whatever she was doing and say, “Teddy, you have no idea what goes on over there. Like I said, just keep pretending that William’s your friend, and before you know it, he will be.”

  Maybe the reason my mother loved pretending so much was that she had such a hard life. When I was still a baby, she began working at the meatpacking plant in Greenfield, jamming bloody hog bones into cardboard boxes all day. She walked around smelling of pork, her knuckles swollen with tiny infected cuts. Over the years, she slowly become a devout dreamer, hooked on a special kind of make-believe that she made me promise not to talk about. She was always searching for my next persona, mostly in the cheap detective magazines she borrowed from Maude Speakman and read religiously every night before going to bed.

  The first time it happened, she’d been telling me about Richard Speck over dinner, going into detail about the eight dead nurses while we ate bologna sandwiches and potato chips. She made it sound scary, but by bedtime I’d forgotten all about him. Then she came in and sat down on the side of my bed, drew tattoos on my arms with a ballpoint pen, handed me a pair of scissors. “Look, Teddy,” she said, “I need you to do something for me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Remember that Speck guy we talked about?” she said.

  “The creepy killer?”

  “That’s him,” she said. “Now what I want you to do is come in my bedroom and play like you’re him. Just for a minute.”

  “How do I do that, Mom?”

  “I don’t know. Just spit on the floor maybe, talk like a drunken sailor,” she said. “Hurt me, but don’t really hurt me.”

  Other than the black pills she sometimes got off her sister, Wanda, fear seemed to be the only thing that made my mother feel alive. And because I wanted so much for her to be happy, I became a master at scaring the bejesus out of her. Albert De-Salvo was her favorite psycho, and she had a picture of him taped inside her closet. Sometimes, if she’d had a really bad day, I’d go outside and cut a hole through a window screen, then slip in and tie a fancy knot around her neck with a pair of her panty hose, all the while confessing that I was the real Boston Strangler.

  In the beginning, before I got good at it, she was always giving me advice, always pointing out little ways in which I could better become somebody else. “You need to work on that accent,” she’d say, or “Good Lord, Teddy, I could hear you coming from a mile away that time.” So with my mother, fantasizing that William was my friend was no big deal, just another game to her. I stuck the box of matches in my pocket and turned to go home.

  “Hold up, Theodore,” William said. “What if we say they’re giants?” He was standing with his feet spread apart, swinging the burning bleach bottle back and forth like an incense pot.

  I looked down at the terrified ants fleeing their fortress. Last week he’d insisted that they were African pygmies, talked me into playing Cheetah to his Tarzan. Now this. “Well,” I said, “there’s all kinds of giants. King Kong, Colossal Man, maybe…”

  “For Christ’s sakes, Theodore,” he said, “this is serious business. These are fucking giants planning on taking over the world, not stupid movie monsters.”

  “So what are we then?” I asked hopefully. “Marines?”

  “Marines?” he snorted. “What’s a fuckin’ jarhead going to do against a horde of giants?” I watched him look up at the sun and squint. “I know,” he finally said. “We’re gods. Only a god can stop something this big.”

  I looked down at William’s feet. Crooked toes were poking through the ends of his rotten tennis shoes. The scars on his legs glistened like snakeskin in the morning light. Gods? He was the closest thing to a dead person that I’d ever played with. “Whatever,” I said, giving in. “Gods. Giants. Giant ants.”

  He smiled, then coughed again. “I saw that Hiroshima on TV one time,” he said, raising the bottle higher to get more of a splatter effect. “It looked just like this.”

  “Bullshit,” I protested. “That was an atom bomb.”

  “So? What’s your point?” he asked, staring at me through his thick dirty glasses.

  “Well, this stuff—this stuff is more like napalm,” I said. “Like what they use over in Vietnam.” The jug was frothing now, like a volcano. Ants were burning to death all around us. I imagined their pitiful screeches. They smelled like little whiffs of burned popcorn.

  “Jesus,” William yelled, “there you go again!” He cocked the stick back as if he were going to sling the bottle on me. His whole body was quivering. A drop of sputtering plastic landed on his forehead, but he never flinched.

  The last time he got excited like this, he chopped himself in the leg with a hoe, all because I refused to admit that my blue marble was really his green one. “Okay,” I said, giving in again. “Then can we at least say that the smoke is—”

  “Fallout!” he yelled. “Radioactive fallout. Yeah, that’s what turned the ants into giants in the first place. See, Theodore, you’re not so dumb.”

  Just then, Lucy came tearing out of the house. She was wearing William’s fake army helmet and her cowgirl outfit, the one with the short sequined skirt. “He’s got Mother trapped in the basement!” she panted. “I think he’s killed her
this time.”

  William looked grimly toward the house. “Good,” he said. “Maybe he’ll kill us all. We’d be better off.” Last Christmas, right after they moved in, Mr. Jenkins beat his wife so bad that her left eye still drooped like a wilted blue blossom. I’d seen her a few times, wrapped in a sheet, staring out the kitchen window. She reminded me of the rocking-chair hag in Psycho, my mom’s favorite movie.

  “Hey, shithead,” Lucy said to me, “you’re not stepping over the line, are you?” Nobody was allowed on their property, especially me. My mom had called the sheriff on Mr. Jenkins a hundred times, but the fat deputies didn’t want to get involved. They wouldn’t even climb out of the cruiser anymore, just turned on the flashing light as they sped on through the holler.

  William and I both looked down to make sure my feet were legal. Lucy was like the secret police. She had a mouth that wouldn’t quit. The last time she’d ratted her brother out, you could hear his screams all the way to Foggy Moor. “Go spy on someone else,” he told her.

  “Just checking,” she said, tossing the toy helmet to the ground. Then she took off and did a flip that made her skirt go over her head. She was twelve, practically a grown woman to a nine-year-old. I could see her crack pressed tight against her white underwear. It looked like the knot in a tree. I wanted to fuck her, though I wasn’t sure what fucking actually entailed. I just knew my mom did a lot of it. Every kid on the school bus said so.

  “Dickweed,” Lucy called out to me when she landed.

  “Funny,” I said, feeling my face begin to heat up.

  “Cock breath,” she yipped, kicking the toy helmet across the yard. The girl knew cuss words my mom’s boyfriends had never even dreamed of.

  “Lucy,” William said, “leave Theodore alone! You’re just jealous because I got a friend and you don’t.” Friend? It was the first time William had ever hinted that I was anything but his dumb puppet. Maybe my mom was right; perhaps all you had to do was pretend something was true and then someday it would be, no matter how fantastic, no matter how fucked up.