Knockemstiff (3 page)

There was a cave on the far bank that I knew about where the dirt had give way, and I used to reach up inside when I was hunting for turkles. I dunked the little girl under the water like I was baptizing her and kept stuffing her up inside the hole until she got caught. Then I went back across and got the boy and hid him up under the water with his little sister, her in the back and him in the front. There was a pile of dead brush in the water along the deep end and I managed to shove most of it in front of the little cave. When I got done, I gathered up their clothes that they’d hung in some bushes and hid them inside my bibs, and took the club and slung it off into the woods. Then I picked up my copperhead and walked up through the field and down the road.

I went right past the Mackey house on my way up the holler, saw the mother hoeing weeds in her garden patch. The first thing I did was pour some kerosene on those clothes and burn them behind the school bus. Then I skinned the copperhead and hung the skin up to dry, and by the time I got done, I was wore clear out. I crawled inside the bus and pulled off my bibs and fell asleep on my tick. When I woke up, I watched the sun go down behind the flats, and I decided the best thing to do was try to make a belt for myself out of that snakeskin. Then I cut open a can of beans I had hid away, and I’d just started eating them when I heard that Mackey woman down over the hill start yelling for her kids to come home.

 . . . . . 

E
VEN BACK IN THIS HOLLER, A LOT OF THINGS HAVE
changed since then. Henry Skiver passed away a couple year ago, but his old woman, Pet, she still allows me to live in the school bus so long as I stay away from her house. There’s people from town that’s started building fine homes up on the flats now, and I never would have thought I’d see the day when city people would run the copperheads out. And the government must have forgot all about that boy that got himself killed hunting for me because now they send a welfare man clear out from Meade every month just to make sure I’m doing okay. He brings me a bag of groceries and a little envelope of food stamps, and I haven’t been what you’d call hungry in a long time.

That Mackey family, they up and left the holler a year or so after their children turned up missing, and I never did hear the straight on where they went off to. I still walk by their house every day I’m able, and it’s all boarded up and empty just like mine was that night I came down off the flats looking for some of my mother’s biscuits. People still mention those two kids once in a while, but I don’t think anybody really gives a damn except for me. Sometimes, when I’m sitting in front of Maude’s store and watching the cars go by and I’m dipping my finger into a can of something and smoothing it across some crackers, I can’t help but think about them down there in the Dynamite Hole. I like to picture in my head that that’s where they play now, hiding under the water behind those dead rotten branches, where the leeches hang, black and shiny as jewels, beating their tiny hearts. And all the time I’m thinking it, I’m saying to myself, “Jesus, save me.”

KNOCKEMSTIFF

T
INA ELLIOT IS LEAVING TOMORROW, HEADING OFF WITH
Boo Nesser to shack up in a trailer next to a Texas oil field, and I feel as bad as the time my mother died. After I close up for the day, I sit out back by the little camper I live in behind Maude Speakman’s store, and I drink too many Blue Ribbons. I lean over in my chair and puke up some froth. My throat burns as I light another cigarette and watch a swarm of black gnats gather around the mess. I hear Clarence Myers a couple of houses down raising hell with his old lady about a lost corn knife, and I wonder just how much a person can take. He’s bitched about that machete all summer long, and I hope if Juney ever finds it, she sticks it clear through his stupid, toothless head. A carload of boys from the holler keeps racing up and down the road in a ’56 Chevy coated with primer, and I can tell by the way they’re burning rubber that there will be another wreck somewhere tonight.

Though she’s rotten to the core, I reckon I’ve always loved Tina Elliot, from the first time I laid eyes on her. She came in the store with her mother right after I started working there, just a little-bitty thing, said she’d give me a kiss for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. But that was back before she was old enough to do other things, and ever since she started putting out for the boys, she’s been looking for someone to take her away. I wish I could have been the one, I really do, but I don’t figure I’ll ever leave the holler, not even for Tina. I’ve lived here all my life, like a toadstool stuck to a rotten log, never even wanting to go into town if I can keep from it.

Not too long ago, she told me that I reminded her of a cousin she’s got down in Pike County, an old crazy boy who plays with a plastic coin purse all day, talks off-the-wall shit to the birds. I knew she was high on some of the stuff that Boo’s always taking, but it hurt me when she said that, made me think about the time my old man took me rabbit hunting. I can still remember the disappointment in his cold, red face because I couldn’t pull the trigger that day in the snow. “You done ruined him,” he said to my mother when we got back to the house. He must have told the poor woman that a thousand times before he died. Sometimes it scares me to think I will probably spend the rest of my days wishing I’d blown a rabbit’s guts clear across Harry Frey’s orchard when I was six years old.

The mosquitoes finally drive me inside the camper around midnight, and I watch a Charlie Chan movie on
Armchair Theater
. It always gives me a comfort, watching the TV late at night, thinking about all the other people around Ohio watching the same old movie, maybe even thinking the same old thoughts. I picture them curled up on their couches in their living rooms, and all the lonely little sounds of the night drifting in through their window screens. Maybe it’s because Tina is taking off tomorrow, but I get choked up tonight when the movie flickers to an end and the Columbus station signs off the air. I finish my last beer while they play “America the Beautiful” and the big flag whips around in the breeze. Then I crawl into my bunk that’s bolted to the wall and lie there listening to those goddamn boys run the dogshit out of that old junker some more.

The sun is coming up over Bishop Hill when I wake up with a sick headache from all the Blue Ribbon. It’s the kind of fucking headache that almost makes me wish I’d taken my mother’s advice and knocked up a Christian girl who’d lay down the law. It’s hot in the camper, and I look outside and see the Pepsi thermometer I got nailed to the outhouse already shows seventy-seven degrees. I pull on a pair of dirty jeans and a clean T-shirt and pump some water from the well into an old dented dishpan. After I wash up, I fill the mop bucket I keep behind the counter. Some of the customers like to see me dip my hands in it before I slice their meat.

I jiggle the lock on the back door and carry the bucket inside the cinder-block building. A log truck rattles down the bumpy road out front, and I think how lucky I am not to be stuck working in the woods in this heat. After I turn on the lights and the gas pumps, I unlock the front door and flip the cardboard sign over that says we’re open. The box fan that sits behind the wooden candy case makes a hell of a racket when I start it up, but I leave it on anyway. It blows some dust around, some cigarette ashes, a couple of dead flies dried up in their husks. Maude keeps promising me a new one, but I know she won’t come through until the old one locks up completely. She’s tight as the bark on a tree when it comes to stuff like that. I pull out the gray metal box we keep under the counter behind a stack of old
True Confessions
, and I start counting money.

I arrange a hundred dollars in small bills and change in the cash register, then pop a couple of aspirins and hunt up a heel of bologna in the meat case from the roll I was cutting on yesterday. I find a bottle of RC Cola slushy with ice in the back of the pop cooler, rip open a bag of green onion potato chips. This is my breakfast, and has been every morning but Sundays for the past twelve years. As I stick my hand down in the chip bag, I think that even if I was to go away with Tina, I’d probably still keep eating the same thing. Then I catch myself and try to laugh it off. It’s crazy to think that kind of shit, I know, but I been doing it so long now, I have a hard time stopping myself. The old man used to say I lived in a dream world. I peel the skin off the bologna heel with my thumb, pitch it in the trash. Maybe I’ll stop wishing for things I can’t have once Tina’s gone for good.

I’ve been working in the store since I was sixteen years old and now I’m twenty-eight. Maude hired me right after my old man got his legs cut off up in Michigan. He was working around Flat Rock with a section gang on the DT&I Railroad, and he slipped in the snow and went under a railcar loaded with ties they were shoving off on a siding. Though he hated being away from the holler, the railroad was the best paying job he’d ever had. Every time he came home for the weekend, he joked, “It’s so goddamn flat up there I can’t stand up straight.” The old man didn’t last long after the accident, and the day we laid his box in the frozen ground, I quit school to help my mother hang on to the little house he’d bought us. We kept things afloat for a while, but then she got her cancer and the bank took the house back anyway. That was when Maude bought the camper and set it up behind the store for me to live in. It’s shaped like a lunch box on wheels. Sometimes I can’t help thinking it’s the same size as a prison cell.

I finish my breakfast and break open a fresh pack of Camels. Maude pays me thirty dollars a week, allows me one pack of smokes a day and whatever I can scrounge to eat out of the store. I open up at seven in the morning and work until whatever time she decides to show her face in the evening. It’s not a hard life, not like my old man’s was, but some days it’s a long one, especially if Maude don’t come in at all. I keep a few Blue Ribbons stashed in the bottom of the meat case for times like that. She gives me Sundays off because selling cigarettes and candy on the Sabbath isn’t good business around here. Even old Maude tries to put on a good act when it comes down to the Lord’s day. The Shady Glen Church of Christ in Christian Union sits only a couple hundred yards away from the store, and I wake up every Sunday morning to the crying and clamoring of people who fear God.

By midmorning, I’ve waited on twenty or so customers: loggers needing chain-saw oil and gasoline, old men after Doan’s Liver Pills and honey loaf, little kids trading pop bottles for SweeTarts and cigarettes. Most everyone that stops in talks about the money Boo will make in the oil fields. But then Henry Skiver says, “I can’t see it,” when I tell him that Floyd Bowman said Boo will make twenty dollars an hour starting out. “Shit, that Nesser boy wouldn’t work in a pie factory.” For a minute I get my hopes up, see all sorts of possible disasters happening once they hit Texas. Hell, I even picture Tina coming back with her head hanging down, asking me for a place to stay. Then Henry pulls out his little change purse and carefully counts out ten pennies for a cake, and I feel low again remembering the time she compared me to her dingbat cousin.

It looks like it’s going to be a slow Tuesday, so I start breaking open the boxes that the Manker’s man delivered yesterday. I check everything against the yellow invoice, stamp prices on cans of Spam and Campbell’s soup, and stock the bare spots on the shelves. I turn on the radio and listen to Miss Sally Flowers rattle on about everything she’s grateful for this hot, sticky morning. That gets old real quick and I turn the station. The DJ puts on a Monkees’ song, and I sing along to “Last Train to Clarksville” while I sweep the dust out the door and change the dirty fly ribbon that hangs over the kerosene stove in the back. All the time I’m piddling, I keep an eye on the gas pumps. Some people like to turn the handle back a gallon or two if they don’t think I’m watching. Boo’s one of the worst for pulling that kind of shit. He gets caught doing that down in Texas, they’ll break his goddamn head for him.

Around noon, I’m getting ready to take a break and watch
As the World Turns
on the little TV I’ve got set up behind the candy case when I see Jake Lowry walking out of the holler past the church. He shuffles along with his hands crammed deep down inside his patched-up bibs like he’s playing pocket pool with himself. As he crosses the road, he kicks at a busted beer bottle lying at the edge of the store lot. Most times I turn the TV off when I see someone coming because I don’t like for people to know I watch soap operas, but I don’t give a damn what Jake thinks. He never has played with a full deck all the time I’ve known him, and people say it’s because he lived so long in the woods by himself back during WWII, hiding out from the draft. Right outside the door, he stops and spits a long string of tobacco juice in the gravel. The screen door slams behind him as he steps inside the store, and he jumps like someone just shoved a cob up his ass. He’s the flightiest bastard I’ve ever seen.

Jake works the chew in his mouth, lays two arrowheads down carefully on the counter. I open the register and count out some change. Maude gives him forty cents for each one he finds, then she turns around and sells them to the Sinclair man for two dollars. He brings in five or six a week, sometimes more. I lay the money on the counter and Jake pushes a quarter back at me, like he always does. His dirty fingernails are long and cracked down the middle. I slide the glass door open on the meat case and lift out a roll of headcheese. He likes his cut thick, and I adjust the meat slicer. I try not to think about us both eating the same damn thing every day, and what that might mean to a head doctor.

I’ve been slicing meat so many years now I don’t even bother with the scales anymore. I can hit it within a penny or two every time. After I wrap the gray meat in a sheet of butcher’s paper and tape it shut, Jake sticks it in his pocket. He stands there working his chew, staring at the TV show. Neither one of us says a fucking word the whole time, but I’m used to that. Jake wouldn’t say
shit
if he had a mouthful. I’m lighting a cigarette when Boo Nesser’s car flies past the store and turns in at Tina’s mother’s house down the road. Suddenly, my headache breaks loose again, and I crack open another RC, pop a couple more aspirins.

As the World Turns
is just going off when I hear car tires crunching on the gravel. A new Cadillac convertible pulls up to the gas pumps with a man and woman in the front seat. Jake leans back against the pop cooler and peers through the screen door. By the time I grab my oil rag, the woman’s already out of the car and taking a picture of the store sign out by the road. It’s just a rusty old Sinclair sign on a metal pole, but underneath the green dinosaur hangs a piece of plywood that says in big black letters
WELCOME TO KNOCKEMSTIFF, OHIO.
Maude spent a whole day in the back room painting the letters on, trying to get them right, but they’re still crooked.

The man slides out from behind the wheel and stretches. He’s maybe forty years old, tall and thin, wearing neat gray slacks and a white shirt. A gold chain hangs around his tan neck. He reminds me of one of those soap opera doctors, the way he smiles as he looks around. “So, this is Knockemstiff?” he says, waving his arm about slowly. The Cadillac has California license plates. We’ve had a few people drive through here from other states before, most of them lost, but never from that far off.

I follow the man’s hand with my eyes, up the dirt lane lined with dusty trees that leads to the top of the holler, then down the patchy blacktop road that runs in front of the store and goes all the way over to Route 50. There’s not a single soul moving about. “This is it,” I say. I wad up the greasy rag in my hand.

“Don’t seem to be much here,” the man says. He takes a white handkerchief from his back pocket and pats his forehead.

“Well,” I say, “there’s a church over there.” I point with my rag. “And up the road a ways is a bar. They call it Hap’s. Right past it, there’s another store, but they don’t sell gas.” I stop and think for a second. Behind me, I hear the woman’s camera clicking, but I’m afraid to look her way. “We got a ball diamond just up there around the bend, but it’s mostly houses, I guess. It’s kinda spread out.”

“Looks like it,” the man says. He bends down and flicks a speck of dust off the top of his shiny shoe, then straightens back up. “Why the hell do they call it
Knockemstiff
?” he asks. “Seems like a pretty tough name for a place this quiet.”

I sigh and reach in my pocket for a cigarette, but I’ve left my pack inside. I’ve probably been asked that question thirty or forty times since I started working for Maude, but I’m no storyteller. And the tale of how Knockemstiff got its name sounds stupid, even when the old-timers get loaded and tell it. But these people have come clear from California, and the man is expecting some kind of answer. “Not much of a story,” I say. “Supposedly these two women got in a fight over a man up there in front of the church. One was the wife and the other was the girlfriend. The preacher heard one of them swear she was going to knock the other one stiff.” I shrug and look at the man. “I guess the place hadn’t been named yet. That all happened before I was born.”