Knockemstiff (15 page)

In the rearview, I see one of the boys say something that makes the girl laugh; then I watch in disbelief as she raises her shirt to show her tits. “Holy shit,” I say, stopping the car. “Jerry, damn boy, turn around and check that out.” For a moment, the girl’s breasts are framed in the window like some advertisement for a new double-scoop sundae. They glow in the blazing sunlight, and I think of soft, precious metal. But even though they’re beautiful, it’s really her smile that takes my breath away. I’d give anything just to feel the way she feels right now. It’s the kind of feeling that people never realize they’ve had until years later, when it’s no longer possible to feel it. “Jerry,” I say again, turning around to look at him; but all he does is curl up his lips and make that damn duck sound again.

“Jesus Christ, Bernie, what are you doing?” Jill says.

I don’t answer. The boys in the Camaro have noticed me staring at the girl, and one of them starts imitating Jerry, squishing his face up and hanging his head on his chest. The girl is still laughing, but she’s pulling her top back down. And though I know that two years ago Jerry would have been right there with them, making fun of the retard, I set the emergency brake and haul my fat ass out of the car. I stand there for a second, pulling my shirt down over my white belly, wondering what I’m supposed to do now; but just before I lose my nerve, one of the boys calls out “Porky,” then another squeals, “Oink, oink.” Taking a deep breath, I walk back to their car and start kicking the shit out of the side panel. Believe me, I’m just a big tub of lard, but when the driver jumps out, a tall boy with big teeth and barbed wire tattooed around his skinny arms, I knock him down with one punch. I’ve never hit anyone that hard in my life, not even Delbert Anderson.

Suddenly, the world lights up, as if someone peeled the skin off my eyeballs. I look up at the sky, startled by the giant bloom of blue. But fuck, it’s only my sunglasses. I’m so pumped that it takes me a second to realize they’ve fallen off my face, and when I stoop over to pick them up, the boy tries to bite me. I reach down and grab the front of his shirt. My sweat splatters his shiny head like greasy rain. I pull him up off the pavement and smack him again, busting his lip open. By this time, the others are out of the car yelling shit, but keeping their distance. I realize then that they’re afraid of me, and I run at them. I grab the one that was making the stupid faces and bang his head against the hood of the car. A wave of dizziness rushes over me, and I let go of his skinny neck. Teeth marks burn my knuckles. A few drops of blood stain my shirt. I wobble for a second in the heat, then head back to the Chevy and flop down behind the wheel.

Jill’s squished up in the corner like she’s afraid I’m going to hammer her next, but I just sit there sucking the steamy air through my mouth. Jerry is still making the duck sound, and I finally turn around to look at him. Even after all this time, he’s got that angel dust glaze in his eyes, as if torching his brain is the only thing he’ll ever remember. His face and neck are broken out in a bumpy red rash from where Jill tried to shave him this morning. His white T-shirt is soaked with slobber, stained with his grandmother’s watery gravy. Every time Jerry attempts the duck, his tongue pops out and spit runs off his chin. I fumble around, then pull a napkin from one of the sacks of food and wipe his face. When my hand brushes against his jaw, his eyes close like a puppy’s.

The other boys are helping the driver back up. They’re talking big now, strutting around like they’ve got shit in their pants. I stick my head out the window and growl like a dog. Then I give them the finger. The girl in the window yells, “Fat motherfucker!” I turn back around and blast my horn, hold it down for a long minute. “My God,” Jill says. “Oh, my God.” She’s holding her hands over her ears.

“Hey, Jerry,” I say, “you wanta drive?” I drop the Chevy into low, and rev the engine until the Dairy Queen’s windows are rattling. The customers inside are staring at us and I wave at them. In my side mirror, I see the manager approaching cautiously from behind and talking on a cell phone. Suddenly, gunk breaks loose in the carburetor and a huge puff of black smoke shoots out of the tailpipe.

“You’re going to jail,” Jill says.

I laugh and pull out fast onto High Street, burning rubber, honking the horn. “Slow down!” Jill screams. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

I slide the Zippo from my pocket and squeeze the small metal case, rub it between my fat, sweaty fingers. It has two dates engraved on it, like a tombstone. I toss the lighter out the window and shift the Chevy into second gear, then stomp the gas pedal and squeal down the street. People hanging out on their porches point at us as we rocket past in third. An old lady grabs a little girl up off the sidewalk. A siren begins to whine in the distance.

Suddenly, happiness rips through me like a sword. Reaching over, I grab Jill’s knobby knee, but she shoves my hand away. “Kak, kak!” Jerry squawks, as he bounces forward against his restraints. I dig a hot dog out of the sack and tear the wrapper off, cram it in my mouth. In the rearview, I see a police car coming up fast behind us, all of its lights throbbing. The trees, the signs, the entire world, start to bend backward as we race up the highway. “Kak, kak!” Jerry goes again, and I almost grit my teeth. But then, ramming the gearshift into fourth, I start over.

BLESSED

I
WAS ON THE PHONE ONE DAY, TRYING TO UNLOAD A HOT
four-wheeler to a deer hunter I knew over in Massieville, when Tex Colburn knocked on my door, introduced himself like he was selling Kirby vacuum cleaners or State Farm. I knew who the fucker was, but I decided to play dumb, just stood there looking at him. He pulled his big hands out of the pockets of his leather jacket, lit a cigarette. “I need a second-story man,” he finally said, out of the side of his mouth. I’d heard he talked like that, like he’d watched too many old gangster movies.

“What the fuck’s that?” I asked.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, shaking his head. “What I got to do, kiss your ass? I need a fuckin’ partner.”

I glanced over his shoulder, saw his shiny new Mustang parked behind my rusty Pinto. My wife and I had just had a baby, a son named Marshall who constantly needed Pampers and formula and all that other baby shit. We were barely scraping by, and so, though I knew it was always better to work alone, I accepted his offer. Tex Colburn was serious business: front-end loaders, jewelry stores, vintage cars—high-priced stuff that people actually commissioned him to steal. Me, I was pinching push mowers and breaking into mom-and-pop groceries out in the sticks. Hooking up with him was big-time.

I ran with him for over a year and made more money than I’d ever dreamed a thief could make in southern Ohio. My wife and I moved into a fancy apartment, bought a new Monte Carlo, put down a hundred on the Super Lotto every Saturday night. Dee soon lost the baby fat, and I started bringing home a porno two or three nights a week to help rekindle our former fires. For every new position she mastered, I bought her another Longaberger basket. Finally I’d begun to enjoy a certain illegal prosperity.

But then, before my son was old enough to talk, I was nearly killed falling off the roof of Burchwell’s Pharmacy in the middle of a rainy night in Meade, Ohio. My first coherent thought after landing on the blacktop with the crowbar still in my hand was that Tex would leave me for the law to find. Then I felt him snatch the tool from my hand, and my second coherent thought was that he was going to finish me off first. That was his way—never leave anything to chance. “Please, Tex,” I managed to say, as I lay flat on my back, staring up at the black sky pouring down on me. Waiting for the blow, I suddenly thought about all the hogs I’d knocked in the head with a sledge at the meatpacking plant I’d worked in right after high school. It was the only real job I’d ever had, and I’d held it only six months, but it seemed as if, lying there helpless behind the drugstore, my life was coming full circle. I was going to die the same way I’d slain all those animals.

Instead Tex surprised me with something like compassion, grabbing me under the arms and dragging me to his Mustang. A few minutes later, we were pulling up outside the big glass doors of the ER at Meade General. Though I could still move my toes, my legs were numb, and every time I took a breath, hot nails of pain shot through my lower back. When he stopped the car, I gasped, “Tex, can you help me inside?”

He snorted and flicked his cigarette out the window at a big potted plant. “Don’t push your luck, you shit-for-brains,” he said. Then he turned and stared into my eyes until I had to look away. I opened the door. “Don’t say anything,” he warned.

“I ain’t stupid,” I said.

“We had a good run,” he said. Then, leaning over, he shoved me out onto the concrete and drove away.

An orderly in a white outfit finally came out and led me inside. Though my injuries were severe—a broken collarbone and two crushed disks in my back—the doctor on call that night turned out to be a god. Twelve hours after getting to the hospital, I went home with a bottle of his religion. I never even had to see him again; he’d just phone in the Oxy ’scripts whenever I called and complained. I was cashing in three, sometimes four ’scripts of 80s a month. Because the Oxy was time-released, I learned to lick the coating off the tabs and chop them into powder, then snort them for a quicker delivery. If I was too far gone to handle the razor blade, I’d just chew them up before swallowing. My head became a perfect holiday, my nerves foamy little buds of milk. The Oxy filled holes in me I hadn’t even realized were empty. It was, at least for those first few months, a wonderful way to be disabled. I felt blessed.

In reality, though, my life was now on a downward course. Under the influence of the Oxy, I lost even the ambition to steal other people’s belongings. Tex picked up a new partner, and the bank repossessed the Monte Carlo. Luckily, we’d kept the Pinto as backup. By the time my opiate honeymoon was over, we were renting a leaky, mildewed trailer on the outskirts of Knockemstiff, the holler where I’d grown up. Though I’d sworn a million times that I’d never go back there, I broke that promise, just like I did all the other vows I’d made before my accident.

The last renters of the trailer had cut a hole in the floor for a toilet after the plumbing went bad. When we moved in, the landlord reluctantly fixed the busted pipes and Dee covered the hole with a piece of plywood that sagged and creaked whenever somebody stepped on it. On a warm day, the stench of strangers’ waste hung in the narrow rooms like the thick fog of failure. My son was terrified of falling in the hole because, according to Dee, I’d once threatened him in one of my blackouts that I could stick him down there and he’d never get out. And though I was certain that I must have been joking, it was evident that my sense of humor had been bred out of him.

Every time I came to, it seemed like Dee was lying on the couch in her Marlboro sweatpants, drinking bargain Big K pop from a plastic jug that looked like a gas can, while Marshall scratched the bottoms of her feet with a hairbrush. Sometimes, as I watched her stuff another bag of Fritos into her mouth, I thought about the time I’d invited Tex over for a beer. Walking up to the front door, we could see Dee through the curtains, sitting on the couch with her silk robe parted, letting the baby suck on her swollen brown nipples. She was beautiful that night. “Damn,” Tex said. “Would you look at that!”

“Better let me go in first,” I said.

Then later, after Dee had gone to bed, as Tex was leaving, he stopped outside the door and said, “Look, I don’t know how you feel about stuff like this, but I’d give a pretty penny for one night with your old lady.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“How ’bout two grand?” he said. Tex was sawed-off and hairy in all the wrong places. “Manly,” he called himself, whenever anyone had nerve enough to comment on his fur. He looked like an ape in cowboy boots and a leather jacket.

“I won’t ever need your money that bad, Tex,” I’d said, shutting the door in his face.

That had been only a couple of years ago. Now Dee was nothing but patches of pimples and rolls of fat. The only thing she seemed capable of doing besides watching the tube was pointing out my defects. And even if she happened to be in a good mood, it was just as horrible. She’d got on this kick where she pretended to be a movie star, and she’d go on for hours about crab cakes and evening gowns and the sunset over some beachfront hideaway. That she stayed with me was just another sign of her indolence. In a more advanced society, they would have probably killed us both and fed our bodies to the dogs.

Meanwhile, Marshall was quickly turning into one of those sullen, creepy kids who never says a word, the kind who goes on to communicate telepathically with a pet rat and sincerely dreams of eternal infamy. It aggravated my condition, all that silence, not even a
Dad Dad
. His muteness was a thorn in my side whenever I was alert. Even retarded talk would have been better than no talk at all. Even a garbled
Fuck you
would have been nice once in a while.

Sometimes I’d suggest to Dee that she have Marshall checked out. “He’s deaf!” I’d scream in her ear. “Can’t you see he’s fucked up!” I’d grab him by his thin shoulders and try to shake a sentence out of him. “Marshall, say something, goddamn it,” I’d plead, but when I turned him loose, he’d just roll away in a corner like a ball of lint. Then Dee would act insane and start waving her hands around in some sort of make-believe sign language as if she were making fun of me for caring. If I kept pressing her, she’d warn me that she was on the verge of calling her family over to settle me down. They’d kicked my ass a few times for what they called rude behavior, and I’d become careful about how I performed domestic abuse. So I’d back off and chew another Oxy, then crawl into bed and dismiss Marshall’s silence as just another one of those problems that Dee refused to recognize.

Even though I got my medication for free with the welfare card, and the government sent me a check every month for my bad back, we were always broke. Toward the end of the month, we’d run out of all the essentials that make living that sort of life bearable—candy and ice cream and cigarettes—and I’d start hinting to Dee that we should sell some blood. It was the only type of work that I could get her to do. Mine was no good because of my hepatitis, but Dee was AB negative and still pathogen-free, so the technicians welcomed her with open arms. We’d go to Portsmouth and sell a pint at the clinic on Fourth Street, then unload another one at the lab down along the river. By the time they siphoned the second one off, she’d be white as a sheet, as cold as ice. It made her feel special, having that rare blood. It was the only piece of her that anybody still desired.

So one bitterly cold morning in November, we found ourselves driving down the highway on a trip we’d made a hundred times, to sell the fluids from her body. The exhaust system on the Pinto was shot, and because carbon monoxide kept spewing up through the rotten holes in the floorboards, we had to roll the windows down to keep from getting gassed. Marshall was sitting in the backseat quiet as a snail and all snotty from a cold, and I shucked off my coat and threw it to him. Yesterday’s cereal crud was still caked to his face like dry-wall mud, and the new clothes that Dee had bought him last week were already filthy.

The damp, gray sky covered southern Ohio like the skin of a corpse. The landscape was a seemingly endless row of squat metal buildings full of cheap junk for sale: carpet remnants, used furniture, country crafts. Because Dee had insisted that I do the driving, I’d held off on my morning Oxys, and was feeling a little more on edge than usual. But still, the cold air blowing through the windows was refreshing after a month spent penned up in the trailer. As I drove, I even began to look around for businesses that might be suitable candidates for burglary.

Then Dee started talking her bullshit, stuff about rich celebrities and their private lives. A stranger would have thought she knew these people personally, the way she described their wants and desires. I shut her out, started thinking about the two 80s I’d stashed in the dash for an emergency. “Poor Brad,” she said wistfully.

I thought she was commenting on my cousin’s bad luck; he’d been arrested again for stealing hubcaps. “Shoot, he’ll be out in three months,” I said. “That bag biter can do that standing on his head.”

“Brad Pitt, you idiot,” Dee said.

“Fuck him.”

“Oh, believe you me, mister, if I ever got the chance.”

“Ha, that’s a good one. You hear that, Marshall? Shit, you and a fuckin’ donkey maybe.”

“Or Tex,” she said, sticking her big round face out at me. “What about Tex, you asshole? Maybe you could even get him ready for me.”

“You mention that bastard’s name again, I’ll knock your teeth out,” I said, regretting again that I’d ever told her about the offer of two grand. And though it was true that Tex had driven me to the hospital that night instead of smashing in my head, he’d gone on to ruin my reputation, told around that I’d begged for my life that night behind the drugstore, that I’d offered to suck him off in exchange for mercy. Every day I prayed for his capture.

We were stopped at a red light right outside of Portsmouth when a silver Lexus pulled up beside us. Glancing over, I was startled by the bold, sparkling eyes of the most stunning woman I’d ever seen. She was checking us out, laughing into her cell phone. Every inch of her radiated money and happiness and fine genes. Though there had once been a time when I would have yelled over and asked her to fuck, now all I felt was shame that she’d had to look at me at all. My hair was uncombed and greasy, my teeth coated with yellow scum, my tattoos meaningless and outdated. I turned my head and waited for the light to change.

As the Lexus sped on down the street, I let out the slippery clutch on the Pinto and started cramping. Because of the opiates, I seldom ate anything but candy bars and ice cream, but that morning Dee had insisted on stopping at Mickey D’s for breakfast. I’d poisoned myself with sausage gravy and biscuits and Egg McMuffins and a chocolate shake. By the time we got downtown, I knew I couldn’t hold it. “Jesus Christ, stop somewhere,” Dee said. But I couldn’t face the public now. All I could see was that beautiful woman in the fancy car turning her nose up at me.

Though I fought it, tensing my muscles and squeezing the steering wheel with both hands, the pains kept getting worse. Desperate, I turned down an alley and saw a Dumpster behind an old brick building. I stomped the parking brake and jumped out. Diving behind the metal container, I jerked my pants down and cut loose. For a second, the relief was better than any drug, but then I heard tires crunching in the gravel behind me. Looking around, I saw a police car approaching slowly. I was trapped, my skinny ass shining at the two officers inside. There was no way I could stop—the stuff was pouring out of me like pancake batter. I gave a little wave, cursing them under my breath.

As the two cops got out of the cruiser, I tried to stand, but another wave of cramps forced me down into a squat again. I saw shit splatter on my jeans, inside and out. “What the hell we got here, Larry?” one of the cops said, an older man with a red nose and a thick mustache. He pulled a black club out of a holster attached to his belt.

Foul watery slime squirted from me again, and I lowered my head. “I ain’t sure, Dave,” the other cop said, a young man with sharp features, muscles sticking out of his shirtsleeves. “The only thing that I ever see doing that in public is a dog.” He kicked some loose gravel at me. “Are you a dog, you dirty bastard?” he asked me.