Knockemstiff (13 page)

“Same as last time,” Aunt Joan said. “Those Percocets I been getting off old Mrs. Marsh.”

“Well, his friggin’ eyes are open,” Sharon said.

“Is he doing anything else? Is he moving?”

“No, but his goddamn eyes are awake.”

Aunt Joan was silent for a moment. “Burn him with your Zippo a little.”

“Are you nuts?”

“Oh, don’t set him on fire. Just see if he flinches is all.”

Sharon looked closely at Jimmy one more time, then dropped back down in her seat and said, “Aunt Joan, I ain’t doing that.” The clattering sound under the hood finally eased up, and Sharon tried to relax. She leaned her head back and watched the wipers flop loosely back and forth across the windshield. Her grandfather had finally returned home when his eyes gave out from the sugar and he couldn’t see to drive anymore. Hobbling into the house on his rotten legs, he gave his daughter a peck on the cheek and handed her both sets of keys. “Joanie, that’s a good car,” he told her. “Take care of it.” John Grubb had always kept his youngest daughter close, so close that people around the holler had spread rumors, and it had only gotten worse after Edna was killed. But while she was peeling potatoes for his dinner, he slipped out on the back porch and blew a hole behind his ear with the .45. She was forty-three years old and had never been on a date.

They turned off the highway onto Black Run, the secondary road that would take them back to the holler. “Do I have to help you carry him in?” Sharon asked.

Aunt Joan rubbed her chin, turned down the heater. “No, I don’t reckon,” she said. “You’ve done enough.”

Ten minutes later, she stopped the car in front of Sharon’s house. They could both see Dean pacing back and forth in the front room, jabbing his hands into the air. All the lights were on. It looked like a hundred people lived there. Pieces of the TV antenna were scattered in the muddy driveway. “Where’s your curtains?” Aunt Joan asked.

“I have no friggin’ idea,” Sharon said numbly. It was four o’clock in the morning, and Dean had been at it since yesterday afternoon when the rain started. He’d been to doctors all over Ohio, but nobody could explain why the rain made him so crazy.

“You’re going to have to do something about that boy one of these days,” Aunt Joan said. “He’s going to have one of those fits and hurt somebody.”

Sharon rolled her eyes. At least she had a regular man. “That last doctor he saw told us to try moving to the desert,” she said, watching her husband through the naked windows.

“The desert?” Aunt Joan said. “You mean with camels and sheikhs and stuff?”

“No, like Arizona.”

“Oh.” Aunt Joan got a serious look on her face. Reaching over, she took hold of her niece’s hand and squeezed it. “Sharon,” she said, staring into her eyes, “Dean ain’t worth moving away for, you hear me?” She turned and looked back at the house. “He gets to where you can’t handle him, we can take care of that.”

Aunt Joan was always suggesting that Sharon do something about Dean, either divorce him or stick him in a group home. Putting up with her advice had been more of an aggravation than anything else. Tonight though, as she listened to Jimmy’s soggy wheeze in the backseat, Sharon thought about the other men they had brought back to the holler, wondered again why Aunt Joan refused to talk about them.

Aunt Joan shrugged. “I’m just saying I wouldn’t want to live in no desert.”

Sharon started to get out of the car. “Don’t worry, that’s just what the head doctor said.”

“Here, you take these,” Aunt Joan said, handing Sharon the box of doughnuts.

“I thought you had a sweet tooth.”

“I do,” the older woman chuckled. She turned and glanced back at Jimmy. “But not for no doughnuts.”

 . . . . . 

W
ALKING IN THE HOUSE, SHARON SAW THAT DEAN HAD NOT
only torn all the curtains down, but he’d smashed every pretty thing she had hanging on the walls. “You’re gonna clean this up, mister,” she told him. A confused look clouded his face, and he curled up on the couch and started scratching the back of his head. He dug harder and harder into his scalp until she had to run over and grab his arms. The thin piece of skin over the steel plate was raw and bleeding. He calmed down for a few moments, then jumped up and started singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” at the top of his froggy voice.

Sharon gave up and went around shutting off all the lights. A photograph of her and Dean lay on the floor in the kitchen, the frame broken, and she kicked it under the table. Then she walked down the hallway and unlocked her bedroom door with a key she kept on a chain around her neck. Pulling off her sweats, she crawled into bed with the box of doughnuts and pulled the blankets up over her. Yes, she thought, she was definitely catching a cold. She turned on the little radio that sat on the nightstand and twisted the dial until she found some easy-listening music.

Taking a doughnut from the box, Sharon bit into it, a chocolate cream filled. Raindrops splattered against the window. She ate the doughnut and wondered what it would be like to live in the desert. Everything there would be new. She could go on a diet and Dean could get his head dried out. They could do whatever people do who live in the sand.

Biting into a glazed, she started to think about Jimmy. He’d stuck his tongue in her ear, the first time anyone had ever done that. His breath was bad, but so was Dean’s. She wished now that she’d asked him, when they were in the backseat together, if he’d ever been to Arizona. She wondered if he had a girlfriend, maybe even a wife. She hadn’t noticed a wedding ring, but that didn’t mean anything these days. Then she remembered Aunt Joan and decided that she better not think about Jimmy anymore. Besides, she was done with all that business now.

Sharon licked the sugary coating off her fingers and picked up a blueberry, one of her favorites. Through the door, she heard Dean moving around again. Then the DJ came on and said something about more precipitation. She reached over and turned the radio up a little. The rain had settled, the man said in his late-night voice, over the Ohio valley. It was going to stick around a while.

HOLLER

I
WOKE UP THINKING I’D PISSED THE BED AGAIN, BUT IT WAS
just a sticky spot from where Sandy and me fucked the night before. Those kinds of things happen when you drink like I do—you shit your pants in the Wal-Mart, you end up living off some crackhead and her poor parents. I raised the blankets just a tad, traced my finger over the blue
KNOCKEMSTIFF, OHIO
tattoo that Sandy had etched in her skinny ass like a road sign. Why some people need ink to remember where they come from will always be a mystery to me.

Wrapping my arms around her, I pulled Sandy up against me, blew my bad breath on the back of her neck. I was just getting ready to nail her again when Sandy’s dad started up down the hall in his sickroom, crying soft and sad like he’d been doing ever since his stroke. That pretty much drained the sap out of me. Sandy groaned and rolled away to the other side of the bed, covered her blond head with a lumpy pillow that was crusty with dried sex and slobber.

I stared at the ceiling and listened as Mary, Sandy’s mom, trudged past the door on her way to check on Albert. The cold floorboards cracked and creaked like ice under her fat legs. Everything in the house seemed old and used up, and that included Sandy. It was just like what my old man always claimed about my mother after she took off—“If she had all of ’em stickin’ out of her that’s been stuck in her, she’d look like a fuckin’ porcupine.” That was Sandy all right; damn near every boy in Twin Township had tapped her one time or another.

Through the thin walls, I heard Mary tell her bedridden husband, “No, he ain’t up yet.” Ever since Sandy brought me home with her one night last fall, I’d been helping take care of Albert. Each morning, before Mary would crack his first fifth of wine, I’d go in and shave the old man, scrub him off, change his diaper. It all came down to a matter of timing. If Albert didn’t get his breakfast by ten o’clock, he’d start seeing dead soldiers hanging from parachutes in the apple tree outside his window. This meant getting up early, but I kept thinking that if I did right by the old man, maybe somebody would return the favor someday. I rose up and looked at the clock on the dresser.

Pulling on my jeans, I glanced down at some of Sandy’s pencil drawings scattered on the floor. She was always working on a picture of the Ideal Boyfriend. Sometimes she’d fire up some ice and lock herself in the room, stay revved up for two or three nights practicing different body parts. Reams of her fantasy were slid under the bed. Not a damn one of those pictures looked like me, and I suppose I should have been grateful for that. Every one of them had the same tiny head, the same cannonball shoulders. Eventually, she’d crawl out of the room with blisters on her fingers from squeezing the pencil, scabs around her mouth from smoking the shit.

Albert started smacking his flaky white lips as soon as I entered the room. Except for a constant tremor in his left hand, he was dead as Jesus from the chest down. Mary had already retreated to the living room, but she’d put out a dishpan of warm water and a thin towel on the stand next to the hospital bed. A can of Gillette and a straight razor sat on top of the dresser. I lathered him up and lit a cigarette to steady my nerves. I studied the map of veins on his purple nose while he grinned at me through the foam.

Just as I began scraping his neck, Mary rushed through the door with a fifth of Wild Irish Rose. Albert’s head started trembling as soon as his yellow eyes zoomed in on the wine. “It’s nearly ten, Tom,” Mary panted. “You about done?”

“Almost,” I answered, flicking some ashes on the floor. “Maybe you oughta go ahead and give him a hit. He gets to bouncin’ around, I might cut him.”

Mary shook her head. “Not ’til ten o’clock,” she said adamantly. “We start that, it’ll just get earlier and earlier. He runs me ragged as it is.”

“I still gotta change him, though,” I said, pressing my palm against his sweaty forehead to keep him still. “What about his medication? Maybe you ought to try it sometime.”

“This
is
his medication,” Mary said, waving the bottle around. “Lord, he wouldn’t last a day without it.” There was a drawer full of pills in the nightstand, but in all the months I’d been staying there, I was the only one who took anything his doctor had prescribed.

I finished the shave job, then wiped Albert’s face with a damp washcloth, ran a comb through his brittle gray hair. Pulling down the scratchy blankets, I said, “You ready, pardner?” His face twisted as he tried to spit out a few garbled words, and then he gave up and nodded his head. The old man hated me changing him, but it was better than lying in his squirts all day. I unfastened the paper diaper and took a deep breath, then raised his bony legs up with one hand and pulled it out from under him. It was soaked with brown goo. I dropped it in the wastebasket, wiped his ass with the washcloth. Then I taped a new diaper on him from the box of Adult Pampers lying on the floor. By the time I had him fixed up, he was bawling again.

As soon as I tucked the blankets back up around him, Mary broke the seal on the bottle and handed it to me. I jabbed one end of a straw down the neck of the jug, slipped the other end in Albert’s mouth. The clock on the wall said 9:56. Four more minutes and he would have been back in Korea. I held the fifth and smoked another cigarette while the old man sucked down his morning oats. Sandy’s high, whiny voice traveled down the hallway into the sickroom. She was singing her song about a blue bird that wanted to be a red bird. “Where’d you two go last night?” Mary asked.

“Hap’s,” I said, dabbing at a trickle of wine running off Albert’s chin.

“I should have figured,” she said, and left the room. Other than Hap’s Bar, the only other business that was still hanging on in Knockemstiff was Maude Speakman’s store. Even the church had fallen on tough times. Nobody had loyalty anymore. Everyone wanted to work in town and make the big money at the paper mill or the plastics factory. They preferred doing their shopping and praying in Meade because the prices were lower and the churches were bigger. I figured it was only a matter of time before Hap Collins sold his liquor license to the highest bidder and closed up the only good thing still left in the holler.

After Albert nodded off, I killed the inch of dregs he’d left in the bottle, then went out to the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee. From the back window, I could see all the way across Knockemstiff. It had snowed a bit during the night, and smoke rose from the chimneys of the shotgun houses and rust-streaked trailers scattered along the gravel road below. A chain saw started up somewhere over Slate Hill. I ate a piece of cold toast while watching Porter Watson fill his truck with gas at Maude’s, then stumble across the parking lot in all his camouflage padding and go inside the store.

Looking across to the other end of the holler, I could just make out the frosted nose of the Owl’s car sticking out of the hillside across from Hap’s Bar. It was an abandoned 1966 Chrysler Newport, but people around here called it the Owl’s ride, the Owl’s castle, the Owl’s this and that. Nothing was known about the car’s original owner, but Porter Watson made sure nobody in the fucking county ever forgot the screech owl that had roosted in the front seat the summer after the car, plates missing and engine busted, mysteriously appeared parked halfway up the hill. You’d have thought they were cousins the way Porter went on about that stupid bird.

I rinsed my cup and walked into the living room, eased myself down into the saggy couch. Scenic vistas torn from old calendars were pinned to the walls, looking like windows into other worlds. Triple A guidebooks were scattered everywhere. Though Mary had never owned a car, she had a book for every state. She was always pretending a trip somewhere.

“She’s nuts,” Sandy had told me the first night I went home with her. We’d just knocked one off and were lying in bed drinking our last quart of beer. “She laid a goddamn rock on my bed the other morning, claimed she’d found it at the Grand Canyon. Kept blowing off she wanted to bring me home something special.”

“So?” I’d said.

“So? I’d just watched her pick it up out of the driveway. Hell, that old bitch ain’t never been out of the state of Ohio, Tom.”

I kept my mouth shut, sucked down the suds in the bottom of the bottle. My wife had finally kicked me out, and I was desperate for a place to stay.

“Besides,” Sandy said, getting up and heading for the bathroom, “what kind of present is an old dirty rock anyways?”

 . . . . . 

W
E WATCHED THE TUBE ALL THAT WINTER DAY, SMOKING
cigarettes and drinking weak coffee and eating cheese crackers from a box. With the house sitting on top of the knob like it did, the TV could pull in four channels, so there was always something to watch. Still, there were times I wished they had cable. During the commercials, Sandy worked on another drawing of the Ideal Boyfriend, and Mary flipped through a book about Florida. Every so often I’d get up and check on Albert, give him another straw of wine to keep the war away.

Then, right after dusk, Mary ran out of smokes. I watched her out of the corner of my eye as she ransacked drawers, looked under cushions. Finally, she straightened up and went down the hall talking to herself. When she came back, she held out a wrinkled twenty and asked us to go buy her a carton. Sandy grabbed the money and jumped up, ran back to her bedroom. “The store will be closin’ before long,” Mary yelled. “You don’t need to fix up just to go to Maude’s.”

I knew we were in for it as soon as Sandy pranced back out to the living room. She was wearing lipstick and her tightest jeans; she’d combed the rat’s nest out of her hair. The bitter scent of the perfume I’d bought her for Christmas cut through the stale air. Mary’s eyes clouded over with worry, but she didn’t have any choice. She hadn’t walked the hill in a coon’s age, and she couldn’t go without her smokes. I pulled my coat on and followed her daughter out into the winter darkness. It was the first time we’d been outside all day. “This must be how vampires feel,” I said, looking up at the stars through the bare branches of the trees.

“Huh?” Sandy said as she started to trot down the hill ahead of me.

“Slow down,” I said. The gravel was icy from where all the cars had packed down the snow. “What’s your hurry?”

“I’m thirsty,” Sandy said.

“Girl, I ain’t got no money.”

She turned around, pulled the twenty out of her pocket, and waved it in my face. “I do,” she said with a laugh.

“Don’t you think we oughta get your mom them cigarettes?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “She smokes too much anyway.”

 . . . . . 

I
KNEW ALL ALONG WE’D NEVER LAST, BUT WHEN I CAME OUT
of the john at Hap’s and found Sandy gone, I still felt a sick feeling in my stomach. We’d been drinking the cheap draft and listening to her favorite Phil Collins for a couple of hours when she ditched me. I went outside and hunted for her in the parking lot, then came back in and sat down at the bar next to Porter Watson. “You see where Sandy went?” I asked Wanda, the barmaid. My voice was trembling, and I lit my last cigarette with shaky hands.

Wanda set another draft in front of me. “As soon as you hit the pisser, she left out the door with that logger that was in here,” she said. “Hell, they’d been eyeing each other since you two got here.”

“The Ideal Boyfriend,” I muttered.

“The idy what?” Porter asked, turning toward me. His bushy beard smelled like stomach acid.

“Nothing,” I said, staring down at the mug of beer. I started to pick it up but then pushed it back toward Wanda. “I ain’t got no money,” I said.

“I already poured it,” Wanda said.

“I’ll buy,” Porter told her, throwing a five on the bar.

And so I sat there until closing time, drinking on Porter and listening to him go on and on about the Owl’s car. When you first heard him talking about it, you’d figure he was bat-shit crazy, but really, he was just trying to latch on to something that would fill up his days so he didn’t have to think about what a fucking mess he had made of everything. It’s the same for most of us; forgetting our lives might be the best we’ll ever do.

“I’d still like to know the history of that car,” I said, just to show him I was still listening.

“History?” Porter snorted. “Man, that car’s like part of the landscape. It’s like fuckin’ nature.”

“No,” I said, “I mean, like, how you figure it got there in the first place?”

“It landed there.”

“Landed?” I looked over at him. His bloodshot eyes were locked on the wavy mirror behind the bar. “You mean like…”

“Hell, yes,” he said. “And we’re damn lucky it did,” he added, a sob starting to erupt from deep inside his throat.

A few minutes later, Wanda yelled, “Last call!” I looked over at the Miller Beer clock above the door. It said 1:00
AM
. Then I remembered the old lady’s cigarettes. I couldn’t go back to the house without some Marlboros. Hell, she probably wouldn’t let me in. I waited until Wanda started to flick the lights off and on, then hit Porter up for the money to get a pack, hoping that would pacify Mary until morning.

“Last call!” Wanda yelled again, as I dropped eight quarters in the cigarette machine.

 . . . . . 

W
HEN I FINALLY MADE IT BACK TO SANDY’S HOUSE, THE
gray light of the TV still glowed through the sheets of plastic stapled over the windows. I knocked on the door and watched through the glass as Mary struggled out of the recliner and slowly made her way across the room. Her blue fuzzy housecoat fit her round body like a cocoon. Her pockets bulged with wads of used Kleenex. Pulling the door open, she peered past me into the darkness. “Where’s Sandy?” she asked.

“I ain’t sure,” I said, my teeth chattering from the cold. “She took off.”

“What about my cigarettes?”

“I brought you a pack,” I said, holding them up to the porch light. “Sandy’s got the rest of them.”

“That girl,” she said, unlatching the screen door. “She don’t have the sense to pound sand down a rat hole.”