Knockemstiff

by Donald Ray Pollock

  Just then a scream erupted from inside the house, followed by a loud crash. When William saw his sister start running toward the porch, he turned and handed me the stick. “Here,” he said. “I better get in there. Aim for their heads.”

  “Wait, William,” I blurted out. I stood there trying to think of something brave to say, but we both knew that I was scared shitless of his father. He cocked his head and looked at me impatiently. “Is there anything I can do?” I finally said.

  “Theodore,” William said, his face suddenly breaking into a crazy grin, “we’re gods, remember? Shit, we can do anything.” Then he turned and charged bravely at the house, pushing Lucy out of the way and disappearing through the back door.

  All of the ants were dead. William had destroyed the entire colony once again. As I started across the yard, my mother and some guy with fat sideburns pulled in our driveway in a homemade convertible. She was always bumming lifts from the people that she worked with at the hog plant. He was steering the car with one hand, grabbing at my mom’s tit with the other. They were both laughing. When she looked up and saw me walking toward them carrying the charred stick like a smoking rifle, she pulled her blouse back down and waved wildly in my direction. Then, jumping out of the car, she gave her ride a peck on the cheek and ran inside the house.

  Later that night, my mother told me again that I looked just like my father, and I wondered if that was make-believe too. She was lying on the bed in her silk robe, the scent of her perfume filling the hot room with flowers. Reaching over, she turned down the lamp that sat on the nightstand. Then she tilted her head back, and taking my hand in hers, guided the kitchen knife to her soft throat. “Okay,” she whispered, closing her eyes, “who do you want to be tonight?”

  Her moist pale skin glowed in the dim light, and a moth fluttered madly against the rusty window screen. I could feel her body trembling against the thin sharp blade. Outside, a thousand throbbing crickets urged me on, but I stood there a long time trying to decide. “Teddy,” I finally said, pretending it was true. “I just want to be Teddy.”

  SCHOTT’S BRIDGE

  NETTIE RUSSELL DIED IN THE SPRING, AND LEFT HER GRANDSON, Todd, an old Ford Fairlane and a Maxwell House coffee jar with two thousand dollars in it, a fair sum of money in 1973. Her only daughter, Marlene, had been a wild girl who had tossed her life away one snowy night when Todd was just two years old. A sheriff’s deputy had found her in the backseat of a car at the edge of Harry Frey’s orchard with a strange man from town lying on top of her, both of them stiff and blue and puffed up like toads from carbon monoxide. And since none of Marlene’s boyfriends had the nuts to step up at the funeral and offer to help out with the orphaned boy, not even after a special plea from the preacher, Nettie had had no choice but to raise him.

  When she handed over the inheritance, just a few hours before she took her last, wheezy breath, Nettie told her grandson, “Toddy, you never did belong here. You take this, and you go somewhere else before you get hurt.” He had just turned nineteen, and everyone in the holler had always joked that he had too much sugar in him for a boy. For several years, he had dreamed of moving away and selling real estate, maybe working in a bank. The fantasy of someday coming back to Knockemstiff dressed in a shiny burgundy suit and carrying a leather briefcase was one that had kept both him and his grandmother going during the last weeks of her long illness.

  He should have headed for town as soon as she handed over the keys and the money, but Todd discovered that he was afraid of leaving the holler, even if it was bad. He kept stalling, hanging around the county, and within a month of the old lady’s passing, he and Frankie Johnson moved into a fish camp that sat on the high side of Paint Creek. People couldn’t figure it out. Frankie was rough as a cob and liked the splittails; Todd talked like a prissy girl in a beauty pageant and walked on his toes like his feet were full of glass.

  Though they had known each other all their lives, they didn’t start running together until one night after a beer party over by Copperas Mountain. Todd had been sleeping in the Fairlane ever since his grandmother’s funeral, riding around listening to love songs on the radio and wishing his uncle Claude would get colon cancer. As soon as they’d returned from the cemetery, Claude had pitched Todd’s clothes out into the muddy yard and told him to hit the road. “Mom wouldn’t let me kick you out when she was alive, but she can’t stop me now,” he told his nephew. Except for the ghost he’d seen at his grandmother’s headstone, Todd hadn’t spoken to a soul in three weeks. He was just looking for a safe place to park for the night when he came upon the beer party. Loneliness always got him into trouble quicker than anything, and he knew that, but he pulled over and shut off the engine anyway.

  He sat down under the canopy of a willow tree a good ways off from the bonfire and listened to the laughter and the wild talk. Nobody invited him over, but he didn’t expect them to. People in the holler, especially the men, treated him with contempt at best. Tonight though, after the keg went dry, Frankie Johnson walked over and sat down on a log near him. “You got any money, Russell?” Frankie asked.

  Todd thought for a moment. Though Frankie had never been what you’d call friendly, at least he’d left him alone when the others cussed him or chased him down the road throwing rocks. “Little bit,” Todd said warily.

  “Why don’t we go into town and get some breakfast?” Frankie said. He looked off when he said it, like he was ashamed. “They say that Frisch’s Big Boy is open all night now.”

  “Why?”

  Frankie let out a sigh. He picked up a rock and squeezed it, then pitched it into some weeds. “I’m hungry, that’s why,” he said.

  A car wreck had left Frankie with a long purple scar that ran down the side of his face like a crack in an egg, but Todd could still remember when he’d been a handsome man. Todd looked over at him, chewed his lower lip, considered the dangers and the possibilities. The possibilities won out. “Okay,” he said.

  A few of the drunks around the fire hooted when they saw Frankie start to climb into the old Fairlane. Todd was afraid there might be some trouble, but Frankie just flipped them the bird and settled back in the seat. Someone threw a beer bottle as they were turning around in the dirt lane, and it bounced off the fender. “Stupid sonsabitches,” Frankie muttered. Then he closed his eyes and snored all the way to town. His rotten breath filled the front seat. Todd studied the raised scar in the headlights of oncoming cars and fought the desire to run his finger over it. He wondered if Frankie knew about the two thousand dollars.

  As he ate his breakfast at Frisch’s Big Boy, Frankie told Todd that the only thing he’d ever loved in his life was a yellow ’69 Super Bee that he’d owned when he was seventeen. “I remember that car,” Todd said.

  Frankie smiled, stuffed some more egg into his mouth. “Everybody knew my Super Bee,” he said. “Sonofabitch would fly. By God, I ever get a chance, I’ll have another one just like it.”

  “Ain’t that the one you wrecked?” Todd said.

  Frankie stopped chewing and nodded. “Worst day of my life so far,” he said. “Had some bitch call me Frankenstein the other night.” Three years ago, he had missed the curve at Pumpkin Center, and when the Super Bee smashed into a telephone pole, he went face-first through the windshield. Everything might have turned out okay, but he was in the middle of a damn good binge, and he drank three more days before someone finally took him to the hospital to see about getting his face sewn up. By then, everything was starting to heal over, and there wasn’t any way that the doctor could pull the big gash closer together. He told Frankie it was a miracle he hadn’t bled clear out.

  When Frankie paused to butter some toast, Todd started talking about his grandmother’s slow death in the back room of the house. Uncle Claude had stopped by every day to see if she was dead yet, kept complaining that the smell was going to keep him from finding a buyer for the place once she was gone. Todd did okay until he tried to describe what it felt like when she took her
last, shallow breath. “She was the only mother I ever had,” he tried to say, but the words came out all garbled and snotty. Frankie put down his fork and handed Todd a napkin from the dispenser. Then he stared out the window and picked at his teeth until Todd got up and paid the bill. They slept in the car that night, and early the next morning they bought three bottles of Thunderbird at Gray’s Drugstore. By that afternoon, drunk and half sick, they were looking for a permanent place to stay.

  The fish camp they rented was just two moldy rooms and a screened-in porch. They got it cheap from an old widow in town named Fletcher because it had no plumbing or electric. She told them her husband used to take his whores there on the weekends. “I oughta burn the damn place down, but I need the income,” she said when she handed Todd the key. There was a rusted-out coal stove in one corner of the big room that housed black wasps in the summer and leaked black smoke in the winter. Somebody had drawn a life-size stick family on the wall with crayons. All the faded figures had blood pouring from their mouths. Even the dog or cat or whatever it was supposed to be was puking red. Out back was an old well lined with slimy green rocks where they could draw a bucket of water, but it tasted like gasoline. They never drank it, but sometimes Frankie liked to soak his rotten feet in it.

  Neither one of them was much for work; so a couple of weeks after they moved in together, they bought a hundred hits of strawberry mescaline for ninety dollars. They ate a few and sold the rest, then bought another batch. Frankie knew lots of people, most of them bad. Todd handled the money and was enterprising in his own small way, but he was also careful. He worked it out so they made just enough to pay the rent, buy some lunch meat and bread, and keep Frankie supplied with cheap wine.

  He hid the coffee jar filled with his inheritance behind a rock in the well. His brown hair grew long, and he cut a notch in the doorframe every time he took a trip. He watched the stick family move around on the wall and kill one another over and over. Within a few months he calculated he’d been completely out of his mind more than a hundred times. There were days when he had a hard time remembering his name. Sometimes he worried that he’d forget where he’d hid the coffee jar, and he’d go check on it. Frankie started walking around with a .22 pistol stuck down in his pants. “We gotta protect our empire,” he said whenever Todd complained about the gun.

  The fish camp overlooked Schott’s Bridge, the easiest way in or out of the holler. Todd liked to sit on the porch, watch the cars pass over Paint Creek, and listen to the rumble of the tires on the heavy wooden planks. He still daydreamed about leaving. Once in a while, on hot days, they would walk down to the bridge to soak in the shallow riffles and hunt for pop bottles along the road. Invariably, Frankie would try to goad Todd into jumping off the bridge. He’d call him a chickenshit and a coward and then he’d climb up to the top rail and leap off himself. A couple of years ago, a boy from town had dived in headfirst and broke his neck. Todd imagined the snap of that stem every time Frankie hit the water. Once, after mixing beer and whiskey all morning, Frankie pressed his pistol to the back of Todd’s head and ordered him to jump. “Go ahead and shoot, you sonofabitch,” Todd said. “I’d be dead anyway.” He could barely dog paddle, let alone high dive from forty feet. Getting his head blown off didn’t scare him nearly as bad as the deep hole of water on the east side of the bridge. But after a minute or two, Frankie eased the hammer back and stuck the gun down in his pants. As he started to walk away, he said over his shoulder, “You can’t be a pussy all your life, Todd. Someday you’re just gonna have to say fuck it.”

  Once a month, Frankie would take off and spend the weekend with an old woman that lived over in Massieville. He’d lost all his confidence around pretty women after his face got mangled, but he told Todd he still needed to get a nut off once in a while. The hag didn’t give a damn what he looked like, as long as he could make his hogleg stand up. On Sunday evenings, he’d come back to the fish camp bruised with denture marks and loaded down with food she’d packed for him: dusty jars of preserves, bread sacks of bloody turtle meat, sometimes a soggy pie. Todd would sniff the food and throw most of it out the door for the raccoons and possums. “I think she’s trying to poison you,” he said one day, peeling back the paper on a package of green hamburger.

  “I got to find me something else,” Frankie complained. “My God, she’s awful. I might as well stick my dick in that jar of peaches.”

  “The way I figure it, something’s always better than nothing,” Todd said.

  “Shit, how would you know?”

  “Don’t worry, I know.” Todd went back to rummaging through the sack. He found a slab of macaroni and cheese wrapped up in tinfoil and set it off to the side.

  “Well, let me ask you something then,” Frankie said, looking down and picking at a brown scab on his arm. “How did you first figure out you was funny?”

  Todd looked up, both surprised and alarmed by the question. “What the fuck’s that mean? Funny.”

  “I mean queer.”

  “Why do you want to know?” Todd said.

  Frankie gave a little laugh. “Jesus, don’t go getting any ideas. I’m just asking is all.”

  Todd thought for a moment. He’d rehearsed the story in his head a thousand times, but nobody had ever asked him anything that personal before. “Remember that VISTA man a few years back?” he said, his voice suddenly shaky. In 1968, when Todd was fourteen, the government had sent a man named Gordon Biddle to Knockemstiff to help the hillbillies build a playground. He told everyone at the first meeting he held at the Shady Glen Church of Christ in Christian Union, “Better to work with the poor in America than fight the poor in Vietnam.” Everyone in the pews, even the old men who had fought in World War Two, grinned and nodded at that, and before the night was over, they had accepted the outsider. For Todd, it had seemed as if everything about the VISTA man—his hair, his skin, even his glass eye—had glowed in the soft colored light coming through the cheap stained glass of the church. He had never met a man so beautiful, nor one so friendly. Within two weeks, he found himself high on weed and naked in the backseat of Gordon’s beat-up Ford station wagon, and nearly every night after that for the rest of the summer. “Man, that seems like a long time ago,” he said when he finished telling the story.

  “You’re shittin’ me? So all that stuff was true?” Frankie said as he lit a cigarette. “That funny-talkin’ fucker?”

  “He was from New Jersey.”

  “That’s some sick stuff, man.”

  “He didn’t make me do nothing I didn’t want to do,” Todd said, though he didn’t tell Frankie the whole story. Gordon had promised him that he’d take him away when he finished the ball diamond and headed back to New Jersey, and Todd was young enough to believe that he was telling the truth. All he had to do was keep quiet about the nights they spent in the back of the station wagon. But then a coon hunter saw them parked on Train Lane one night, and within a couple of days, ugly rumors about the VISTA man started cropping up all over Knockemstiff. By the time Todd heard the gossip, Gordon had already taken off. Things had gone downhill from there: a janitor in the broom closet at the high school, a few creepy perverts in the rest area over on Route 50. He laughed to himself; his love life was even worse than Frankenstein’s.

  Sometimes at night, they’d sit on opposite sides of the big room on old kitchen chairs that Frankie had salvaged from a dump over on Reub Hill. They would smoke and drink and pop whatever they’d been able to scrounge that day, and Frankie talked while Todd listened. By that time, Frankie’s liver stuck out from his side like a baby’s fist and often throbbed like a toothache. He’d sit and rub it like he was trying to coax a genie out of a bottle as he told his stories. Mostly they were about the Super Bee or some of the women he’d been with before the scar, but once in a while he recalled other crazy shit he had done. “Back four or five years ago,” he said one night, “I ate a raw chicken, guts and all.” For most of that week, they’d been smoking on a big block of mildewe
d Lebanese hash that a logger had sold them for practically nothing because it made people’s gums bleed. The floor of the fish camp was sticky with bloody spit. Flies buzzed around them like they were dead meat.

  “No way,” Todd said. He had a finger jammed in his mouth, working a loose tooth back and forth. He couldn’t leave it alone. He’d already lost one of his good ones since he’d started smoking the fungus.

  “Goddamn I didn’t,” Frankie said. “Ask Bobby Shaffer, he’ll tell you.”

  “Guts and everything? Fuck, man, that would have killed you.”

  Frankie didn’t say anything, and Todd knew that something bad was coming. He reached up and touched his left eye, still tender from a sucker punch that had come out of nowhere the week before. Ever since he’d told the story about the VISTA man, it seemed as if things had turned to shit between them, and he suddenly realized that he no longer had any fantasies about Frankie and him making a life together. They had just been crazy ideas that he’d latched onto when he found himself all alone after his grandmother died. Most of the inheritance money was still in the jar. He could get out any time he wanted to.

  In the dark room, Todd listened to Frankie take a couple swigs from a bottle of Wild Irish Rose he’d been nursing all evening. Something scurried across the floor, and he jerked his feet up. The silence grew, filled the dirty room. Musty-smelling hash fumes drifted out the doorway. A night bird called out from across the creek. “You callin’ me a liar?” Frankie finally said, his voice barely a whisper.

  Before Todd could answer, Frankie jumped up and knocked him off his chair onto the floor. His fists caught him seven or eight times in the side of the head, and Todd felt something bust in one of his ears. Then Frankie got his arm around Todd’s neck and squeezed, shutting off his air. He kicked and tried to break loose and then felt nothing but a small black hole that fit around him like a sleeve. His last thought before he went under was that he would see his grandmother again. But after a while he woke up, lying on his belly on the bloody floor with his jeans down around his ankles. He rolled over and spit out his loose tooth. Frankie was standing over him, wiping his dick off with a rag. Raising his hips, Todd started to smile as he pulled his pants back up. “What you grinnin’ about, you little faggot?” Frankie said. Then he stomped down hard on Todd’s face with the heel of his work boot.