Knockemstiff (14 page)

I stepped into the cramped living room, shrugged off my coat.
The Love Boat
was playing on the tube. “Jesus,” I said, “I ain’t seen that show since I don’t know when.” It had been one of my mom’s favorites, though I always felt it was bullshit, the way everyone fell in love and got what they wanted in the happy ending.

We stood in the middle of the living room staring down at the TV. “I’d give anything to take one of them cruises,” Mary said, as she peeled open the pack of smokes.

“Where is that?” I asked. It all looked so beautiful on the screen, the tropical scenery, the sexy bikinis, the sparkling blue water, even the bald captain in the tuxedo.

“Hawaii,” Mary answered. “I seen this one a dozen times. See that woman standing by the rail? The poor thing don’t know her hubby’s on the ship with his new girlfriend.” Mary dropped down into her recliner, lit a cigarette. The tip of the Marlboro began to glow like a stoplight in the middle of her wrinkled face.

“Is that them?” I said. Two has-been movie stars were strolling on the deck, their arms wrapped around each other, their smiling faces pointed up at the sun.

“Yep,” Mary said. “The shit’s gonna hit the fan pretty soon.”

 . . . . . 

A
FTER A FEW MINUTES, MARY NODDED OFF IN HER CHAIR.
Taking one of the cigarettes from the pack I’d brought her, I went into the kitchen. I stood by the window smoking and wondering if Sandy and her logger were somewhere fucking right at that moment, their two hearts pounding against each other like sledgehammers while mine barely beat at all. Suddenly, I remembered Albert. I pulled a fifth of Rose from the refrigerator and walked down the hall to check on him. Though it was against Mary’s rule, I figured he could do with a snort. A nightlight plugged into an outlet above him shone on his face like a pale blue star. Sitting down beside him, I uncapped the bottle. “Hey, old man,” I whispered, “let’s have a drink.”

I stuck the straw down into the bottle before I realized that Albert was dead. It was probably the first time he’d ever turned down a drink in his life. I sat beside him for a while sipping from his jug and thinking about Sandy. Sometime tomorrow she’d roll in, and I made up my mind I didn’t want to be around for that. My job was done here anyway. I turned on the lamp and rummaged through the drawer of pills, found the bottle of Demerol. Then I leaned over, and as gently as I could, pushed Albert’s dry, pink eyelids down with my thumbs.

Going back out to the living room, I pulled on my coat and slipped the bottle of wine in my pocket. As I headed for the front door, I looked down and saw one of Sandy’s drawings lying on the coffee table. She’d printed
WANTED
in bold letters over the man’s shrunken head. I stuck it in my other pocket, then tiptoed over and gently pried the pack of cigarettes from Mary’s hand, leaving her three in the ashtray.

I stood outside the old house for a moment, and then started down the road. As the cold air quickly seeped through my coat, I realized I’d never make it out of the holler tonight. All of Knockemstiff was asleep, even the dogs, and I had no place to go. By the time I got to Hap’s cinder-block building, I was damn near frozen. I stood shivering in the middle of the road trying to decide what to do, then leaped over the drainage ditch and scrambled up the hillside. The briars and brush ripped my skin and tore my clothes, but I finally made it to the Owl’s car.

I pulled open the rusty door and crawled inside the Newport. I flicked my lighter and looked around. Dirty gray feathers lay everywhere; dry, pale droppings caked the faded cloth seat. I heard a scrunching sound like dried twigs under my boots. Holding the Zippo near my feet, I saw the thin white bones of small animals scattered on the floorboards. It occurred to me that these were probably some of the Owl’s victims. I rolled the stubborn windows up as far as they would go and hunkered down in the seat, with just my eyes above the cracked dash.

After finishing off Albert’s bottle and popping two of his Demerol, I stretched out as best I could across the front seat. I closed my eyes and sank deeper and deeper into that lonely world known only to those who sleep in abandoned vehicles. As a car rattled past on the road below, I recalled the story about Sandy’s uncle Wimpy Miller freezing to death in a Dumpster behind the Sack N’ Save, his body buried in outdated lettuce. Then I thought of Hawaii, tried my best to conjure up the hot sand of a tropical beach, the warm silky nights of paradise.

The wind picked up, rocking the old car back and forth. Flakes of snow blew through the cracks and swirled above me. Reaching down, I picked up the tiny skull of a wretched little bird. I held it in my hand for a long time. It seemed as if everything I’d ever done in my life, the good and the bad, rested there. Then I slipped it, as thin and fragile as an egg, into my mouth.

I START OVER

E
VERYBODY’S SEEN IT, THE COMMERCIAL WHERE THE OLD
man is running along the moonlit beach with the beautiful pink-haired starlet clad in the silver thong; the one that says it’s never too late to start over. This guy’s bounding along like a fucking gazelle, his feet barely touching the sand, a bulge the size of a sledgehammer knocking around inside his plaid swimsuit; and then this young girl, she can barely keep up he’s moving so fast. It’s bullshit, another lie they tease you with, hoping you’ll fall for the special effects, dial the toll-free number with a credit card clenched between your false teeth. And it’s like all those other artsy commercials nowadays, where they don’t actually tell you what they’re selling. I mean, they might have a little drama going on about an elephant and a sunflower, but then someone figures out it’s just an ad for sanitary napkins, that sort of thing.

But still, they suck you in, this new way they tell a story. The bastards prey on your regrets, divine all your little sorrows. Take me for example, Big Bernie Givens. I’m fifty-six years old and sloppy fat and stuck in southern Ohio like the smile on a dead clown’s ass. My wife shudders every time I mention the sex act. My grown son eats the dead stuff that collects on windowsills. I must watch that damn commercial twenty times a day. I dream about it at night, about starting over. I wake up with that background music knocking holes in my heart. Like I said, it’s bullshit.

 . . . . . 

“
W
HAT’S THOSE THINGS WHERE THEY BURN YOUR DEAD
body?” I ask my wife. We’re inching forward in the drive-through line at Fedder’s Dairy Queen, sucking car fumes and listening to Jerry thrash around in the backseat like an ape caught in a net. It’s been the worst summer on record, just one massive heatstroke. My new white shirt is already stained the color of pus; my shades are fogged over with greasy vapors. Fumes from the paper-mill stack across town make the whole county smell like a giant fart. The sun is everywhere.

“Crematorium?” she yawns. She rubs her eyes, runs a freckled hand through her thin brown hair, dead as straw now from too many dye jobs.

“No, not that, like over in Asia,” I say, wiping the sweat from my forehead. I should have gone ahead and driven the air-conditioned Mercury today, left the Chevy covered up in the garage. Glancing in the rearview mirror, I watch Jerry struggle against the plastic webbing we use to hold him down and keep him from jumping out into traffic. Blue veins thick as fingers bulge in his scarlet neck. The poor bastard never lets up.

“Shit, how should I know?” Jill groans. She begins fanning herself with a wrinkled map of Ohio she’s dug out of the glove box.

“That’s it,” I say. “That’s what it feels like.”

 . . . . . 

L
ATELY, I’VE BEEN FUCKING UP LEFT AND RIGHT. THE
other night on my way home, I even tried to pick up some young girl. She was walking along Third Street and I drove past first, checking her out. I could see that she was junior high, but I whipped around the block anyway, then pulled over to the curb. “Hey, you need a ride?” I asked. As soon as the words spilled out of my mouth, my teeth started chattering, even though the sign on the bank said it was ninety-two degrees.

The girl looked up and down the street, then edged closer to the car. “Where you going?” she asked. Her voice sounded like tinfoil. Pictures of butterflies covered her pink shirt. She had the body of a woman, but the face of a little kid. Cow hormones have the young people all fucked up.

It was still daylight, and I was nervous about being seen. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just ridin’ around.” I could smell my sweat, taste the bologna sandwiches I’d had for lunch.

She leaned in the window, looking the car over inside. She wore one of those necklaces strung with candy hearts, and they were melting against her throat. I tried to suck in my gut, but it still rubbed the steering wheel. “I got to be home in two hours,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “No problem.” For one brief moment, it was like that commercial come true, I swear to God. I was already picturing the stuff we’d do. But then, just as she opened the door to slide in beside me, someone began yelling from across the street. I looked over and saw a tall stocky woman with curlers in her hair standing on the porch of a big red-brick. “Oh, shit,” the girl said. “That’s my volleyball coach.” She stepped away from the car just as the woman leaped off the porch and began running toward us. I blew through two red lights, and then made a fast right out of town. That’s the reason I didn’t drive the Merc today. I figure every cop in Ross County has a description of Jill’s car stuck in his sun visor.

 . . . . . 

T
HIS AFTERNOON WE’VE BEEN OUT TO THE MOTHER-IN-LAW’S
for another one of her Sunday dinners—a raw pink chicken stuffed with bits of blue grass that I swear the old bag foraged from an Easter basket—and now my ulcers are screaming for long dogs with sauce and limp, greasy fries. Jill’s always on me about my clogged pipes, but I’m a big guy—they don’t call me Big Bernie for nothing—and I crave junk food like a baby craves the tit. Besides, I’m beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it.

As the row of cars creeps forward, I drift back to one of the daydreams I’ve been having lately, the farewell one where I douse myself with gasoline, then hand Jill the gold-plated lighter the guys at work gave me when the company forced me into early retirement. “Fire when ready,” I say, standing at attention, flipping her a little salute. Fantasizing myself as a brave orange fireball is damn near the only thing that makes me hard anymore; but today, for some reason, I crank it up a notch, and the flames in my mind leap across to Jill’s hair, then onto the house, and finally to Jerry. Whoosh! In less time than it takes Larry Fedder to burn a burger, the only thing left of the fucked-up family that lived at 124 Belmont is ashes.

Not that I really would, but I can’t help feeling the way I feel, even with the new combo Doc Webb prescribed the other day. I even told him about the commercial, but he dismissed it as postretirement depression. “Just quit watching it,” he said.

“How’s that?” I asked.

He was standing by the window in his office, staring at the car dealership across the street. “It’s like that anthrax scare,” he muttered to himself.

“Well, what about the Zippo?” I said. I hauled it out of my pocket and held it up, a final attempt to convince him that I’m a troubled man.

He glanced over his glasses at the shiny lighter, then checked his watch. “Bernard, you shouldn’t smoke,” he said. Then he handed me a little grab bag of samples and showed me out the door.

I didn’t understand what he was trying to say, but I do know my problem has nothing to do with powdered germs or free pills. The poor fuck didn’t know what to do, so he was just trying to fluff it up and make the whole ordeal seem like it was happening to somebody else. Everything is too complicated when you’re alive, even for the experts.

 . . . . . 

I
PULL UP TO THE SPEAKER AND GO HOG WILD WHILE GRABBING
for the sun-bleached antacids I keep on the dash. I order enough junk to tear me up for the rest of the afternoon. The Chevy is missing a little, and my plan is to take it out on the highway and blow the carbon out of it after we put Jerry to bed this evening. “There is a difference,” Jill says out of the blue. Though I know better, I ask her what the hell she’s talking about. “Between big and fat,” she says.

“Big and fat,” I repeat slowly, waiting for the goddamn punch line to smack me upside the head.

“Yeah,” she says, “I mean, the way I see it, big is like that Arnold guy in the movies, but fat is like your aunt Gloria. So I’ve always wondered why they call you Big Bernie and not Fat Bernie.”

I tear off three of the crumbly Rolaids and chomp them while staring at the little amplified speaker protruding between the giant photos of the Chocolate Rock and the Dilly Bars. Even if I ate everything on the menu, I’d still be hungry. White foam begins to bubble from my mouth. I look like the rabid dog in the horror movie that Jerry made us play over and over last winter until Jill finally rigged it to look like it broke in the VCR. “Maybe you better sleep in the other room tonight,” Jill says, scooting over next to the door.

A station wagon loaded with kids in bathing suits is ahead of us in the line. One little guy in the back keeps messing with us, making gestures with his tongue that kids his age shouldn’t know anything about. “Maybe we oughta take him home with us,” I joke, making a feeble attempt to turn the lousy day around. I’m kicking myself in the ass now because I bitched so much about the mother-in-law’s half-dead chicken. “Many kids as that woman’s got, she wouldn’t even miss him.”

“I think he’s eating his own shit,” Jill says, and then sticks her big sunglasses on so nobody can see her.

“Oh, Christ, Jill,” I say, “what makes you say stuff like that? The kid’s just playing around.” I make a goofy face at the boy just as he turns around to grab his ice-cream cone. I think back to when Jerry was that age. It makes me feel like shit, thinking it, but there are days when I’d give anything just to be able to prop him out on the curb like a broken appliance for the junk man to haul away. And almost like he can read my mind, Jerry starts making that hacking sound way down in his throat that he’s been making all summer. It’s the type of noise that makes you grit your teeth.

“Not the kid, you idiot,” she says. “Jerry.”

Whenever I figure it can’t get any worse, it always gets worse. Because I try to follow the rule that we don’t talk about Jerry in his presence, I decide not to say anything. Besides, I can’t stand the thought of another argument. We’ve been at it for months. Her latest bitch has been over this old car I’m driving, a souped-up 1959 Chevrolet with big fins that I traded my pickup for so I’d have something to drive to the cruise-ins they put on around here in the fast-food parking lots. It’s just an excuse to get out of the house, but Jill’s always ragging me, pretending to be jealous of the skanky whores who hang out in the custom vans.

As I pull up to the window, she starts in again about the car shows. “There’s no reason you can’t take Jerry with you,” she says.

I get so sick of explaining it. “Hell,” I stutter, “what good’s that gonna do you? I mean, even if I was screwing around, Jerry wouldn’t know the difference between a piece of ass and your mom’s false teeth.” I immediately hate myself for saying it, for breaking the rule, for even reacting to the crazy bitch at all. Still, there’s no way I’m hauling Jerry to a car show, not even in handcuffs.

I pull the car up and there’s the girl that works the window, the one with the twisted chains of baby blond hair and the perfectly calibrated gap between her white teeth. She’s like that song about the angel that gives head, and I almost blurt out,
Look, Jill, an angel at the Dairy Queen
, but I catch myself. This girl can have any man who buys a milk shake. She’s the type of girl that ends up in one of those damn commercials, tormenting the shit out of every old geezer with cable.

The girl grabs my money in a huff before I can even ask her to sack up the Blizzards. This afternoon she’s chewing purple gum, and the way she blows bubbles reminds me of Jill back when we were young and horny, before we lost the map that takes you to places like that. “Hey,” I say, turning to Jill, “that girl is the spittin’ image of you back when you carhopped at the Sumburger. Remember that?” But it’s one of those memories that makes the present only that much more unbearable, and Jill just shakes her head, sinks lower into the seat.

While we wait for the order, I listen to my son try to swallow his tongue and go over the whole fucking mess for the thousandth time. Two years ago, on the night before Jerry was supposed to board the bus for boot camp, he went to a party out in the sticks and never came home. Three days later someone threw him out of a car in front of a hospital in Portsmouth, fifty miles away. We were sitting in the dayroom of the wing where Jerry was transferred after he came out of the coma. The young doctor on duty walked in and stuck a video in the TV. It was that old commercial with an egg frying in a skillet while a voice-over explained that this was your brain on drugs or whatever. I’d seen it a hundred times. They used to play it on the tube back when Jerry was a kid as a warning to stay off the shit. I couldn’t believe they still used it. “What about the marines?” I asked. “Shit, he’s already AWOL, and he don’t even have his uniform yet.”

The doctor was crouched down trying to shine a light into Jerry’s eyes. He finally shook his head and turned the flashlight off. On the TV, the egg began to pop and sputter in the little pan. The doctor stood up and handed me a card from his coat pocket. “Sorry,” he said. “Tell them to call me if they have any questions, but I’m pretty sure they won’t want him now.” Then he turned and hurried away.

“Look, they’ve got the same microwave we’ve got,” Jill said that day at the hospital, her voice skipping like one of her old Wayne Newton records. She was trying to pick pork and beans out of Jerry’s hair while he made another attempt to walk through the wall. We’d already planned our golden years—a new camper on Rocky Fork Lake, a hot tub in Jerry’s old bedroom. Then three weeks later, poor little Delbert Anderson came to work blowing off about his perfect son, the one that built the telescope for the senior citizens, and I broke his jaw with my lunch bucket. The company had me up front signing my papers before the blood was even dry on the break-room floor.

The blonde hands me the Coneys, the fries, the melting Blizzards, but she doesn’t see me no matter how big and stupid I smile. While I’m still checking the sacks, a jacked-up Camaro full of boys pulls up behind us. They all look like the same model: matching earrings, shaved heads, little goatees sprouted around their mouths like hair around a poodle’s ass. They begin honking the horn, and the blonde tells me to move on, that I’m holding up the line. “Sorry,” I say, and pull forward without any ketchup.