Knockemstiff

by Donald Ray Pollock

  Peg groaned and took a step back. “All of them, Howard. You worked with those people at the paper mill. Remember?”

  “Y-e-s,” he said slowly, lightly stroking the hair on his left arm like some kind of pet.

  “Good,” she said. “Here, better write them down.” She handed Howard a little notebook and pen, then walked over and turned the TV off. “What about the bathroom?” she asked. “Do you need to go?”

  Howard looked around the room, under the coffee table. The tall, big-boned woman was standing in the doorway, still watching him. “There’s a lot of them,” he said.

  . . . . .

  HE STUDIES THE PHOTOGRAPH ALL AFTERNOON, HIS EYES slowly turning to sand, but the only thing he can recall is that the little guy wearing the railroad hat used to buy a new Lincoln every year. Hell, even the supervisors couldn’t afford that. Out in the kitchen, Peg drops a pan that bounces across the cold linoleum, sounds like a goddamn cymbal clanging in his ears. Lately every little noise gets on his nerves, tears his guts up, makes him forget shit that no man should ever forget.

  Glancing out the big picture window, Howard watches the new neighbors fall out of their trailer laughing, roll around in the snow like dogs. Convinced the ponytailed man and his fat wife were thieves from the moment they moved in across the road, Howard had Peg buy locked gas caps for both vehicles, but so far all he’s seen the bastards do is hang a dead ground-hog from the maple tree. “We’ll be damn lucky if the sheriff even finds our bodies,” Howard predicted, when he first saw the swollen carcass rocking in the breeze like a kid’s swing. He watches them jump into a banged-up Festiva plastered with bumper stickers advertising OHIO’S SCENIC CAVERNS and something called MONSTER MAGNET, then burn a little patch of rubber in front of Howard’s mailbox. A trail of black smoke follows them all the way up the road. A valve job, Howard thinks, and starts to write a note to himself to check the oil in the Buick. But then, in that mysterious way his memory works now, he suddenly recalls a night in Honolulu and a shipmate’s name. He yells for Peg.

  “What?” she asks, sticking her head through the doorway.

  “That guy I was telling you about the other day—the one from New York—his name was…Damn, I had it. Had a nose like a…that guy’s nose was…”

  “Jesus, Howard, what about the people on the wall?” Peg yells. “You know what the doctor said. If you don’t try, it’s only going to get worse.” Suddenly, she stops and leans against the wall, takes a deep breath, counts to ten silently. “Okay, how many did you get?” she asks, her voice careful and quiet now.

  “His nose was like a…” he replies.

  She walks over and takes the notepad from his hand. “Oil,” she reads aloud. “That’s it? Oil? Oil what?”

  Howard throws the pen across the room, then picks up the remote and stabs at the buttons until the TV pops on. A rodeo coming from Atlantic City prances across the screen. Tilting the recliner back with a hard thump, he stares red-faced at a sequined girl standing in the middle of the ring doing rope tricks.

  “All right then, take a break,” Peg says, looking down at her husband. “We’ll eat maybe in an hour.” She wants to ask him if he’s been to the bathroom, but he’s already upset. Turning, she goes back into the kitchen. Howard’s made her promise that no one will ever pin a diaper on him, as if she’ll actually have a choice in the matter.

  It is true that he keeps forgetting his life, but a few minutes later Howard suddenly remembers the time he and that crazy bastard from New York picked up the white floozy on that street corner in Honolulu where the little crippled Samoan sold flowers. She wore a red dress, carried a straw purse with a broken wooden handle, kept licking a cold sore on her upper lip that was as big as one of those tropical roaches. The way she walked ahead of them shaking her big ass reminded Howard of the story about the flute guy that drowned all those rats in the river; but the woman led them instead to a pink motel that advertised a radio in every room, which was pretty plush for Honolulu in 1952. Howard was up for anything that night, but when the woman turned on the light, he saw the little baby asleep in a shoe box in the corner. It reminded him of the Baby Jesus picture that Maude Speakman had tacked up in the store back home. “Hey, there’s a kid here,” Howard said, as if someone had forgotten it when they checked out.

  “Yeah,” the whore said, undoing the big black buttons on her wrinkled dress. “I named him Cary, like that new movie star.”

  “What? You mean he’s gonna watch us?” Howard asked.

  “What’s the big deal?” the woman said. “He’s asleep. Besides, he ain’t but three months. He don’t know nothing.”

  “Don’t pay no attention to him, honey,” the guy from New York said. “Howie’s from some dump in Ohio they call Knockemstiff. Shit, he ain’t never even had a pizza.”

  “Lady, there ain’t no way,” Howard said angrily. “Lord, you oughta be put in jail.”

  Damn, Howard thinks, suddenly leaning forward in the squeaky chair. I almost had it, that bastard’s name. Always laughing, that fucking guy. Had a nose like a tomato…like a banana…like a…

  But ol’ New York had already dropped his pants, already said, “Look, babe, we ain’t here for no kissy-face. Just bend over and say your prayers.” Before he realized what he was doing, Howard grabbed the baby and ran out the door. He can still see New York’s hairy hands reaching around to squeeze the whore’s big tits and the two pale streams of milk shooting out all over the thin plaid bedspread. Howard lugged the tiny baby down the hot street, sat on a bench under a brown palm tree crawling with bugs the size of gumballs, counted each car that passed by until he figured New York had shot his three dollars’ worth.

  . . . . .

  PEG RUSHES INTO THE LIVING ROOM, GRABS HER PURSE OFF the piano. “We’re clear out of Crisco. You need anything?”

  “Like what?” Howard asks suspiciously.

  “I won’t be long,” she assures him, fluffing her flat gray hair in the mirror. “What’s my birthday, Howard?” Peg asks suddenly.

  “What? Who?”

  “My birthday. Try to have it when I get back, okay?” She pats him on the shoulder.

  “Are you leaving?” he says.

  He watches the woman back out the driveway in his wife’s car and wonders what ever happened to the people he used to know. Jesus Christ, even that kid in the motel would be damn near fifty now.

  The TV rodeo drags on, high-strung horses and killer bulls and clowns that fart and shoot blue flames across the corral. Howard’s sure they’re trying to do him in with all the grease, all that goddamn noise every day, but then he seems to recall that they went somewhere far away.

  I mean, I served four years with that guy, Howard thinks, fighting to hold on to the memory. I was in the United States Navy. The whore had a blond wig pinned to her head that tilted all over the place like the one that stupid clown’s wearing on the TV.

  When he returned to the motel with the baby, the New York prick razzed Howard about stuff right in front of the woman, said she was tight as a mouse’s ear. Howard’s face turned purple, and the woman laughed, asked if he was ready to get his cherry popped. He dropped the baby on the bed like he was trying to bounce a basketball, got the hell out of there. Poor little guy never made a sound.

  He was a good kid, Howard thinks to himself, but somehow that’s just not good enough.

  Jumping up, he quickly walks down the hallway to the spare bedroom. He’s got detailed instructions written out like a recipe hidden in his wallet, but he doesn’t need them today. Reaching under the dresser, he pulls out a rolled-up piece of plastic, then spreads it on the floor. He stands there lost for a moment, then removes his dentures, wipes them on his pants, sticks them in the front pocket of his shirt. Howard still remembers where he stashed the pistol in the bottom drawer, which, just for a second, almost convinces him to wait another day. But then, easing himself down on the floor, his dried-out joints cracking like old pine, he pulls one end of the plastic up over hi
s head like a hood, sets the barrel against his soft palate. He clicks the safety off. He smells his bad breath, wonders if he’ll shit his pants. “Okay,” he says to himself, “just squeeze the goddamn thing.” For the first time in ages, there’s nothing left to remember.

  But then there’s a noise, somebody coming through the back door, probably that damn woman again, or maybe those fucking robbers from across the road. Howard lies there on the floor with the gun barrel cutting his gums and listens. He should do something, but then he’d have to start all over again. They’ve got balls to break into a man’s home, no doubt about that. Sure as hell they’re going to siphon the gas out of his truck. Christ, he thinks, the sons of bitches must be looking for the key.

  He tastes blood and suddenly remembers the time his dad caught Bill Willard stealing gas out of his old Ford tractor, right after Howard went off to boot camp up at the Great Lakes. Damn, it was cold up there. The old man later wrote Howard that he’d told everyone in Hap’s Bar that Bill could suck a hose better than any damn woman in Knockemstiff, maybe the whole state of Ohio. Scrawled HA! HA! in big black letters that took up half the page. It was the only letter his father sent him all the time he was in the service; shit, probably the only letter Floyd Bowman wrote in his entire life. Staring up at the ceiling, Howard watches the shadows of early evening float across the wavy old plaster like the ghosts that swim in his head.

  . . . . .

  OUT IN THE KITCHEN, PEG’S BUSY, COOKING WITH ONE hand, gripping the phone in the other. She dumps sliced potatoes into the hot skillet, along with some chopped onion, and then steps back from the sputtering grease. “He must be asleep,” she says quietly into the phone. “They gave him some new stuff that just knocks him for a loop.” She covers the skillet with a lid and adjusts the flame, then bends down to light a cigarette from the stove. “No way,” Peg says. “Believe me, it’s easier just to cook at home. He started up with that F word the last time we were in Bob Evans and just wouldn’t stop. Lord, I wanted to crawl under the table.”

  Sitting down at the kitchen counter, she takes a long weary drag on her cigarette as she listens to her daughter on the other end of the line go on about stuff she knows nothing about yet. “Carrie, you don’t understand,” Peg finally says, stubbing her cigarette out. “Your daddy’s second-stage already. He don’t even know me half the time.” Standing up, she tries to smooth the wrinkles out of her long corduroy dress. “No, all he talks about is Hawaii,” Peg sighs, looking out the window as the evening sun dives like a flaming bird into that other world. And just like that, for one brief beautiful moment, as the crashing rays turn the kitchen a bright blood-red, she forgets everything.

  THE FIGHTS

  JIM PEERED AT ME OVER HIS WHITE CUP. “HOW’S THAT OLD man of yours doing?” he asked. We were shooting the shit in the Bridge Street Diner. I was smoking his cigarettes and drinking their coffee. Jim was my AA sponsor, and we’d just been to the Friday Night Sober N’ Crazy Group over at the Lutheran church on High Street. He liked to stop by the diner after the meeting and check for new piercings on the bony blonde who worked the late shift. He was old, but he still liked to look at the young stuff. Every time the little wench bent over a table, he whimpered like a dog having a bad dream.

  “He’s hanging in there as far as I know.” I shrugged, blew on my coffee. Though I seldom mentioned my father to anyone, I’d told Jim a couple of weeks ago that the old man’s heart had taken a turn for the worse. According to my sister, the surgeons said there wasn’t any more they could do. Jeanette was always calling and giving me updates on the situation. She worried enough for the whole family, and then some. “Too much scar tissue,” she’d tell me every time. He’s not the only one, I felt like saying.

  Jim nodded, took another drag from his Kool. “What about that money you stole?” he said. “You take care of that yet?”

  Jesus Christ, I thought, I never should have told him. “It was only twenty fucking dollars,” I said. “You make it sound like I took their life savings.” The last time I’d visited my parents, I’d slipped a lousy Andy Jackson out of my mother’s purse. Though I wasn’t drinking anymore, I was still messed up in a lot of ways.

  “I don’t care if it was a fucking nickel. It’s still important, goddamn it,” Jim said. “You can’t start being honest, you’ll never stay off the sauce.” He made such a big deal out of telling the truth that I figured he was constantly fighting the urge to spin a tremendous whopper.

  I nodded my head. I didn’t want to argue. Jim was a black man, and anytime I was around him, I had to be careful with my language. Though I was getting better, I was still afraid of letting a nigger or a coon slip out of my mouth whenever he pissed me off. Old habits are hard to break. In the holler where I’d grown up, everyone was white. The only time we ever saw black people was when we went into Meade to buy groceries or pay the electric bill. There were hillbillies in Knockemstiff, Ohio, who wouldn’t watch a TV show that had blacks in it. My old man was one of the worst.

  Jim rubbed his chin, twisted a kink out of his old wrinkled neck. “You do want to stay sober, don’t you, Bobby?” His gray hair was as thick and wiry as a Brillo pad, and his skin shone like wet black tar under the fluorescent lighting. Whenever he spoke at lead meetings, he told stories about trolling the bars near the paper mill for free drinks, red-eyed and stinking of piss, pretending to be deaf and dumb. He’d let white guys try to knock his teeth out for a pint of Thunderbird. Now he drove a jade-colored Cadillac, owned a landscaping outfit with three crews. He was all business when it came to Alcoholics Anonymous, an old-time Big Book thumper who could sometimes be a royal pain in the ass, but it had kept him sober fifteen years.

  I glanced over at him, thought about the last couple of years that I drank. A lot of people get the wrong impression, think there’s something romantic or tragic about hitting bottom. Every so often, strange men knocked on my door and threatened to kick my ass for something they said I had done. Sometimes I hid in the corner of the room, afraid to even breathe, and other times I called their bluff. Once a detective had me picked up for a rape, and I had to admit in the interrogation room that I couldn’t remember one way or another. Thank God he later determined that I wasn’t the type of pervert they were looking for. I went bankrupt, and caught the crabs, and broke my nose on a sidewalk. I stalked my ex-wife and missed so much work at the paper mill that even the union got sick of fighting for me. A few months after I lost my job, I woke up in a charity rehab wrapped in an army blanket. My roommate was an old puker seething with yellow sores. His name was Hobo, and he’d once had a glass eye but had lost it somewhere along the way. I grew afraid, started going to meetings.

  “Jim, I wouldn’t be sitting here in this goddamn place if I didn’t,” I said. I started to reach for his cigarettes, but he placed his hand over the pack.

  “Then you go and have a nice visit with your folks this weekend,” he said. “And while you’re there, you pay that money back to your poor old mother.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said. “I hear you.”

  “Do you need a loan?”

  “No,” I said. “I just got paid.”

  “Good.” Two streams of smoke drifted from his nostrils as he stubbed out his cigarette and shook another from his pack. He handed it to me. Then he slid out of the booth and dug in his pocket for some change to sprinkle on the table. “We all fuck up, Bobby. Just got to keep trying, that’s all.” Slapping me on the shoulder, he took one more look at the blonde and left me with the check.

  The next day I put on the shirt that I’d bought with the money I’d stolen from my mother and drove out to Knockemstiff. Though I never wanted to live there ever again, it still saddened me to see how much the place had changed in the last few years. Both the store and the bar were closed now, and new houses covered with vinyl were crammed together in the fields that had once been filled with corn and hay. My younger brother’s rusty pickup was sitting in the driveway, the back glass covered with NASC
AR stickers and a Confederate flag. A weathered squirrel’s tail hung from the radio antenna. As I walked up to the front porch, I could see my old man through the big picture window in the living room. The twin stems of an oxygen tube were stuck up his nose, and he was all laid back in his blue luxury recliner, the chair my sister had bought him after his heart blew the first rod. He’d had at least three heart attacks since then, each worse than the one before.

  He was watching the fights with my brother. I didn’t even have to go inside to figure that out. After he got sick, the only thing my old man enjoyed in life was watching men beat the shit out of each other. The worse somebody got hurt, the better he liked it. Most of the fights took place in seedy Indian casinos between men who were just like him, though he’d never admit it. He had my sister record every minute of boxing that came down from her satellite, and then he watched the tapes all day long as if he were studying for some kind of comeback.

  I went in through the breezeway. I found my mother at the kitchen table, her papery hands wrapped around a cup of milky coffee. She was watching another TV. “Hi, stranger,” she said, struggling to pull her attention away from the movie that had her hypnotized. “Ooh, I like that shirt. Where’d you get it?”

  “Penney’s.” I bent over and kissed her on top of the head, then poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the counter. Sitting next to the powdered creamer was the purse I’d ransacked during my last visit. Turning back to her, I winked and walked down the short hallway leading to the living room.

  “I’ll be damned,” my old man said. “Look who’s here.” My father used to be the roughest sonofabitch in the holler, but now his skin was gray and the flesh on his arms hung as loose as an old woman’s. He had barely made it through the sixth grade, grew up in a family that traded his labor for sacks of flour and plugs of tobacco. He’d pounded spikes on the railroad at fifteen, been a boxer in the army. I’d once seen him damn near kill a man with his fists at the Torch Drive-in. All my life, I’d carried around the knowledge that I could never be that tough. But there was little of that man left now.