Knockemstiff (4 page)

The man nods as I finish talking, and I turn to see the woman standing next to me now, writing something down in a little black notebook. “My wife’s a photographer,” he explains. “We’ve been driving across the country all summer, looking for places just like this to put in her book. It’s been pretty exciting for her.”

I pull my eyes away from the woman’s made-up face. She’s wearing white slacks and sandals and a soft flowered blouse. I wonder if the man is putting me on, making fun of me in front of his pretty wife. It’s hard to imagine why someone would make a special trip just to take a picture of Knockemstiff, or put such a picture in a book, but then I’ve never been able to figure out why the government sent those VISTA guys here two years ago to help the kids out, either. I look down at the greasy rag in my hands. The pink polish on the woman’s toenails is the same color as her lips. All of her parts match perfectly, and I try to remember if I’ve ever seen that before in real life.

“Did you know there’s a place called Toad Suck?” the man says, smiling.

“That’s a good name.”

“It’s in Alabama,” he says. “Or Arkansas, I can’t remember. Which is it, Charlotte?”

“Arkansas,” the woman says. She’s fiddling with her camera, taking another glass lens out of the leather bag hanging from her shoulder.

“It’s hard to believe there’s people that poor in this country,” the man says. “Living in the richest nation in the world.” He shakes his head and frowns, and though I don’t figure he really gives a shit, I can’t help but think that he sounds just like the VISTA man. I smile to myself and remember the first time Gordon Biddle stopped at the store in his short pants and floppy straw hat, looking for volunteers to help build a ball diamond. Someone had talked the paper mill in town into donating a little piece of flat land that sat at the edge of one of their timber stands. The boys from the holler worked like dogs for him all that summer, clearing the field of brush and rocks, smoothing over the rough spots with picks and shovels. Gordon paid more attention to them that one summer than most of their parents ever had. Once or twice a week, he’d load a bunch of them in his station wagon and take them swimming at the state park over by Hillsboro. Then one night he just packed up and left without even saying good-bye, and there was a lot of stupid talk about him and that Russell boy after that. Within a couple of weeks, the government sent another VISTA man, but that one, he was all business. That was just two years ago, but I noticed the other day that the green briars are already taking back the playground. The swing sets were already knocked over. It’s no wonder poor people get a bad name.

The man coughs and I snap out of it. “Sorry,” I say. “Did you want gas?”

Just then the woman squeals at her husband. “My God, Arthur, a chicken just walked into that house over there!” She’s pointing at Whitey Ford’s place right across the road from the store. Ever since his wife died back in the spring, the old man has kept his front door open, even at night. Animals and insects congregate there like fat people at a free dinner. Some people claim he’s gone off the deep end, but Whitey says he likes the company. Hell, I can surely understand that. The woman takes a couple of steps forward, shoots some more pictures of the stray dogs curled on the front porch.

The man looks at me and grins. “She’s a city girl.”

I glance back at the store, wonder what Jake is up to inside. “Look, I got things to do,” I tell the man. “Anything you need?”

The man says, “Yeah, anyplace we can get something to eat around here?”

“Well, not really. I got lunch meat and cheese. I could fix you-all a sandwich, if that’s what you mean.”

The man looks down at my dirty hands, and then glances at the store. “What about that bar you mentioned?”

I shake my head. “Hap don’t serve no food. Besides, I don’t think you’d want to take your wife in there.” Just then the door squeaks opens and Jake tries to sneak out past us, his head hanging down like a whipped dog’s. The woman wheels around at the sound and snaps his picture faster than a pheasant hunter getting off a shot.

Then she says to Jake in a loud voice, “Excuse me?” He hurries along, his face turned away from us. I wonder if I should stop her. He’ll shit his pants if the woman keeps it up. “Excuse me,” she says again, louder this time. Jake’s practically going at a run by now. She motions to me and points. “That man,” she says excitedly. “Could you ask him if I could take his photograph before he gets away?”

“I don’t know, lady,” I say. “Jake’s kinda funny.”

“Just one,” she says. “He’d be perfect.”

I toss the rag toward the door and yell for Jake. He freezes in his tracks at the edge of the store lot. I jog across the gravel and say to him in a low voice, “That lady wants to take your picture.”

He looks at me with fear in his eyes, and then shoots a quick glance back at the California people. “I didn’t do nothing,” he says. His voice is shaky. Tobacco juice has stained his gray chin whiskers brown.

I see the round bulge of something in his pocket, and I figure he’s probably got me for another can of pork and beans. “I know that,” I say. “It’s just what she does, Jake. She takes pictures of people.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t like that, Hank,” he says. Then he starts off again. It’s the first time in all these years I’ve ever heard him say my name.

I walk back over to the woman. By the look on her face, I can tell she’s disappointed. “I didn’t figure he’d do it,” I say.

She shrugs, takes a photo of Jake’s backside, and then turns to me. “What about you?” she asks. “Just a couple of pictures underneath that sign?” She steps a little closer and I get a faint whiff of her perfume. A trickle of sweat runs down her neck, and disappears beneath her silky blouse.

I look up and down the road, but I don’t see any cars coming. The holler’s dead, everything in it hypnotized by the noonday heat. “I don’t know,” I say. “I ain’t much for pictures either.” The last time I had one taken was in high school, right before the old man died. We drove into Meade on a Saturday, and he bought me a white shirt and one of those little clip-on ties at Elberfelds. All the way home he kept teasing me about looking like a preacher boy. That was the last good day we ever had together.

“Please?” the woman says.

Though I wish these people would just leave, I can’t refuse the lady. “All right,” I say, “if you hurry. I got work to do.”

“It won’t take but a minute,” she says. We walk out to the sign by the edge of the road. She tells me exactly where to stand, and then she moves away a few feet. I see Jake glance back at us, and then slow down a little bit. Behind me, I hear a car coming. I turn and see Boo Nesser’s green Ford pop up over the hill. “Christ,” I say to myself, looking back at the woman, hoping she’ll speed things up a little bit. But the car pulls up fast beside me and squeals to a stop on the asphalt. I stare straight ahead. “Okay,” the woman says. “Say
Knockemstiff
.”

“What?” I say. I push the hair out of my eyes. Standing in the sun, I’m starting to sweat out last night’s Blue Ribbon, and I worry about the smell.

“She wants you to say
Knockemstiff
, you dumb shit,” Boo says. He’s got a red bandanna wrapped around his head, a little feather sticking up in the back. His head is hanging out the window, his big teeth as yellow as dandelion blooms in the bright light. Three or four big cardboard boxes are strapped to the top of the car with baling wire and rope. A table lamp is standing up in the backseat. Everything he and Tina own in the world, I think. Boo flicks a cigarette butt at me and laughs when I jump back. Though I won’t go so far as to say I hate him, I guess I wouldn’t mind if he dropped over dead right now.

“You know, like instead of
cheese
,” the woman says. “Just try it.”

“Okay,” I say. Then I hear a door open on the Ford and Tina runs around the car and hops in the grass beside me. The girl doesn’t have a backward bone in her body. She’s wearing a tight pair of cutoff jeans and a baggy T-shirt she bought two weeks ago at the county fair for a dollar that says
DO UNTO YOUR NEIGHBOR, THEN SPLIT.
I know everything about her, and I wonder how long it will take me to forget that. “Do you care if I get in on this?” she asks the woman. “This might be my last chance to get my picture took with a dumb hillbilly.” She smells like bacon grease and Ivory soap.

“Your last chance?” the woman says, looking up from the viewfinder. “What do you mean by that?” Her voice sounds a little aggravated at first, but then I see her look down at Tina’s dirty bare feet and smile.

“Because me and Boo’s headed for Texas,” Tina says, “and we ain’t coming back.” Her arm brushes against mine, and I feel a jolt like electricity. “Ain’t that right, baby?” My heart starts beating faster.

“That’s right, sweetie,” Boo says. Then he shuts the engine off. “We done outta this fuckin’ place,” he whoops.

The woman gives a little laugh and glances over at her husband. I turn and look, too. He’s leaning against the car, his eyes fixed on Tina’s ass. “Well, I sure don’t blame you for that,” the woman says to Boo, flashing him a smile. She raises the camera again and steadies herself. “Okay, ready? Say
Knockemstiff
.”

“Knockemstiff!” Tina yells, so loud it seems to echo off the hills. Then she turns and punches me hard in the arm. “Come on, Hank, goddamn it, you didn’t even try.”

“All right,” I say and nod at the camera. “One more time.” Then we say it together—Knockemstiff—and it almost sounds like it means something. The woman squats down and shoots a couple more pictures. Tina giggles, and I try my best to smile, but my face can’t seem to manage that right now. As I stand there, next to the woman that I covet, my head buzzes with all the things I want to tell her before she leaves, but I don’t say a word. I might as well be out following my old man’s ghost around in that orchard, afraid to kill a rabbit. And then I hear Boo yell, “Come on, Tina, it’s time to go,” and I can’t even say good-bye. Instead, I lean back against one of the signposts and watch Jake’s gray head start to sink over the other side of the hill.

That same night, at nine o’clock sharp, I take the money out of the cash register and stick it in the box. I figure I took in over a hundred dollars since morning. Maude never did come around, never even called on the phone to see how I was doing, and it’s been another long fucking day. I sit out back beside my camper and watch the green hills slowly disappear as the last of the light fades away. After a while, I take my shoes off and pop a Blue Ribbon, light a cigarette.

Down the road Clarence starts up the same shit again with his old lady, and I wonder where Tina is tonight. I think about us putting on a show out front today for that California woman, and all those photographs that she took. I turn the beer up and suck the suds out of it, toss the empty over in the pile. Right before she left, the woman tried to hand me a couple dollars for my trouble, but instead I asked her to send me one of those pictures. “One with me and the girl,” I told her, and she promised that she would. When it comes, I’ll stick it up in the store through the day so that people can see it. And at night, I’ll take it down.

HAIR’S FATE

W
HEN PEOPLE IN TOWN SAID INBRED, WHAT THEY REALLY
meant was lonely. Daniel liked to pretend that anyway. He needed the long hair. Without it, he was nothing but a creepy country stooge from Knockemstiff, Ohio—old-people glasses and acne sprouts and a bony chicken chest. You ever try to be someone like that? When you’re fourteen, it’s worse than being dead. And so when the old man sawed off Daniel’s hair with a butcher knife, the same one his mom used to slice rings of red bologna and scrape the pig’s jowl, he might as well have cut the boy’s ugly head off, too.

The old man had caught Daniel playing Romeo in the smokehouse with Lucy, Daniel’s little sister’s carnival doll. Daniel was giving it to her good, making believe she was Gloria Hamlin, a snotty, bucktoothed cheerleader who’d spit chocolate milk on him last year in the school cafeteria. “Boy, that’s Mary’s doll,” the old man said when he jerked the smokehouse door open. He said it matter-of-factly, like he was just telling his son that the radio was calling for rain, that the price of hogs was down again.

To make matters worse, Daniel couldn’t quit, or even slow down. Trapped in the bright July sunlight pouring in through the open doorway, he was at that point in his fantasy where Gloria was begging him to split her in two with his big, hairy monster; his poor hand couldn’t have stopped if the old man had chopped it off and thrown it to the dogs. With a shudder, he unloaded his jizz all over Lucy’s plastic face, the crooked orange mouth, the bobbing blue eyes. Then, like an omen, a black wasp glided down from the rafters and landed gently on top of the doll’s fake blond hair.

“That’s Mary’s doll,” the old man repeated, his voice revving up this time, trembling with static. He stood there for a minute, looking down at the doll Daniel still clutched in his shaky hand. The wasp began struggling to pull itself loose from the sticky hair. “I always knew you was a retard,” the old man said, reaching over and squashing the insect between two calloused fingers. Then he pursed his lips and shot a stream of brown tobacco juice on Daniel’s bare feet, something he loved to do to all his family at impromptu times. “Now zip up and get rid of that goddamn thing before your sister gets hold of it,” the old man said. “I’ll take care of you later.”

Stooped over with another disgrace, Daniel carried Lucy down to Black Run and threw her into the muddy water. He watched her float past the cable that marked their property line, then walked slowly back up through the field to the slab house. Maybe he was turning into a sex fiend like his uncle Carl, he thought. He pictured himself in the nuthouse on the hill over in Athens, sharing a padded cell with his crazy uncle, trading sick stories about the good old days, arguing over who gave the best blow job, Barbie or Ken.

For the rest of the afternoon, Daniel warily watched the old man strut around with a fifth of wine like the Prince of Knockemstiff, the kind of windbag who showed no mercy and killed blood relatives for an extra sack of corn. Finally, near suppertime, he called Daniel into the kitchen. The rest of the family was already gathered around the Formica table with the bent leg so they could benefit from the old man’s royal blathering. Daniel’s mom nervously polished one of her lard buckets and Toadie, the little brother, kept sticking his tongue on the fly ribbon that hung from the ceiling, while the sister, Mary, stood still as a tree in front of the window.

The old man walked in a circle around Daniel, scratching his chin and looking the boy over as if he were a prize shoat at the county fair. Finally he stopped and pronounced, “You need you a goddamn haircut, boy.”

Daniel, his heart sinking like a stone, took a deep breath and resigned himself to the scissors his mom kept in the kitchen drawer. But then, in a surprise move, the old man whipped out the long knife instead and shoved his son down in a chair. “You goddamn move, I’ll scalp you like an Injun,” he said as he gathered up a long brown lock of Daniel’s hair in his fist and began sawing close to the scalp. He was like that, the old man, full of mischief when everyone else was down.

It was like being in the electric chair, Daniel would think later, though without the pleasure of dying, or even a last meal. But with specks of his blood splattered all over the corn bread, and hair floating in the soup beans, who was hungry anyway?

Later that evening, Toadie skipped out to the rotten picnic table under the hickory tree where his older brother sat brooding over hair and hair’s fate. All summer, Daniel had dreamed of stepping onto the school bus after Labor Day with his hair hanging down to his shoulders. The scene was as clear and vivid as a movie in his head, and now the old man had taken it away. “You look like a dern lightbulb,” Toadie said, running a broken plastic comb through his own greasy locks.

“Shut your mouth,” Daniel said.

“You was ugly and now you’re real ugly,” the little brother said.

“Want your ass kicked?”

“Mary wants her doll back,” Toadie said, determined to rub it in.

“Tell her it ran away.”

“That ain’t the truth and you know it,” Toadie said, though a crinkle creased his forehead as if he were trying to imagine it. “How’s Lucy gonna run away?”

Daniel stared across the hills behind the house. The red sun was sinking like a giant fizzing bomb behind the Mitchell Cemetery, where hair continued to grow, undisturbed by butcher knives and old men. “She hitchhiked,” he told his little brother.

That night, while lying in bed and listening to the old man cuss some rock-and-roll band playing on the
Ed Sullivan Show
, it suddenly occurred to Daniel that anyone, even he, could be a hitchhiker. He’d had it with hick hairdos and lard sandwiches and having to make up movies in his head while the old man hogged the TV. When Ed called the rock group out for an encore, Daniel heard the crash of a bottle against the wall. “Might as well watch niggers as listen to this shit,” the old man yelled at the TV. The boy ran his hands slowly across his head, searching out each tiny gash that had been made with the knife. Then he rolled over and began planning his escape.

 . . . . . 

A
FEW DAYS LATER, DANIEL WALKED TO ROUTE
50
AND
stuck his thumb out. It wasn’t long before a white semi speeding past suddenly downshifted to a stop, the air brakes screeching, the trailer bucking and hopping on the asphalt. The truck driver’s name was Cowboy Roy. At least that was the name spelled out in ragged black electrical tape on the rusty doors of the cab. “I ain’t really no cowboy,” he blurted before the boy even got settled in the seat. Pulling back onto the highway, he went on to confess that he’d never actually been on a horse, either; that, in fact, he was allergic to horsehair. “Everyone’s got their cross to bear, I reckon,” the trucker said, pushing back the black ten-gallon hat that sat on top of his round, sweaty head.

Cowboy Roy was on his way home to Illinois. He was fat and wore tight coveralls that threatened to split open every time he hit a bump in the road. His feet were encased in pointy brown cowboy boots. A set of shiny spurs hung from the mirror. To make up for his allergy to horses, Cowboy Roy did other manly cowboy stuff, like drink cheap whiskey from a pint bottle and chew stringy tobacco and write songs in the tradition of Marty Robbins.

Daniel didn’t say anything. He figured the man had as much right to call himself a cowboy as the movie stars on TV. The trucker rattled on about the best way to build a campfire in the rain. It suddenly occurred to Daniel that out here on the road you could be any damn thing you wanted to be. You could make up a new life story for every stranger who offered you a ride. You could be a Boy Scout without a single badge, a millionaire without a pot to piss in, a cowboy without a horse.

“So,” Cowboy Roy finally said, “where’d you get that haircut? Cops do that to you?”

“Nah, my old man,” Daniel said.

“Damn, he musta been highly ticked off,” the trucker said. “What the dickens got him so riled up?”

Daniel hesitated, thinking of the day in the shed with Lucy, then finally said, “He caught me with his girlfriend.”

Cowboy Roy gave a low whistle. “Well, that’d do it,” he said. “But pap or no pap, I’d shoot a man down like a dog that scalped me like that.”

“It weren’t like I didn’t want to.”

“So you ran off instead?” the trucker asked.

“When I go back, I’ll have hair clear to my knees,” the boy vowed, staring out the dirty windshield.

Just as they crossed over into Indiana, Cowboy Roy gave Daniel a red snot rag to tie around his neck, just like the one that he wore. “So people will think we work the same spread,” he explained. Then he handed the boy a harmonica to play while he sang a song he’d just thought up. Puffing out his cheeks, Daniel raised the mouth harp up to his lips, then noticed a thick glob of tobacco juice oozing from one of the reeds. “I don’t know how to play,” he told the trucker.

“Shoot, just blow on the damn thing,” Cowboy Roy said. “You know how to blow, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“I’ll bet you do,” the fat man said with a grin.

“What’s the name of the song anyway?” the boy said, banging the harmonica on his knee, trying to knock the spit out of it.

“It don’t have no name,” the trucker said, “but it’s the best dern love song I ever wrote.”

They traveled across the bottom edge of Indiana, past sleepy cornfields and remodeled Indian mounds and small towns still decorated with sagging Fourth of July banners and painted rocks. Cowboy Roy broke out a pint of red-eye, and before long Daniel’s head felt as fluffy as a paper cone of cotton candy. The trucker began talking a mile a minute about driving straight on through to Mexico. He said they could become bandits and hide out in a smoky cantina with a servant boy who would worship them in return for scraps off the table. He described young Miguel in minute detail, right down to the tiny purple birthmark on his lower stomach. Then he pulled a small plastic bottle from his coveralls and shook out some white tablets. “Here you go,” Cowboy Roy said, handing Daniel two pills.

“What are these?” the boy said.

“Them’s trucker’s lifesavers. They keep you awake, make your dick hard as blacktop. Longhairs call ’em speed.”

Daniel recalled once seeing a photo of an actual speed freak in Mrs. Kenney’s health class at school. Her brother, a prison guard in Kentucky, had sent it to her. The teacher claimed the man was only thirty years old. His skin was drawn tight as a drum over his grinning face. “Once you start on that stuff, you’re like one of those space comets that don’t ever stop,” the woman warned the class that day, as they passed around the picture of the pale stick with the brittle heart. Daniel looked down at the white pills the trucker had given him, then tossed them in his mouth and waited for takeoff.

Cowboy Roy was an independent trucker, but drove much of the time for a big slaughterhouse in Illinois, delivering meat throughout the tristate area. He’d seen enough filth to give up eating most flesh altogether. “It just breaks my heart to see some mom stick a hot dog in her baby’s trap,” he told Daniel. His favorite food now was pork and beans. “Eat ’em right out of the can,” he said, “just like the cowboys do.” He’d inherited a little spread, and as they crossed over into Illinois that evening, he invited Daniel to spend the night. “It gets pretty lonely at the ranch ever since Mom died,” he said, his voice cracking just a little.

Daniel was surprised that the landscape didn’t change after they left Ohio. He’d always thought of every other state as an exotic world, but so far everything he’d seen was as dull as a Lawrence Welk tuba special. In the meantime, though, the pills and whiskey turned him into a regular chatterbox, and before he could stop himself, he told Cowboy Roy the whole sad story of Lucy and the butcher knife.

“Sounds kinda kinky to me,” the trucker said. He lit the butt of a skinny black cigar he’d stashed behind his ear, and blew a cloud of smoke in the boy’s face.

“It woulda been down to my shoulders by the time school started,” Daniel said, shivering with a speed rush.

“I never cared much for dolls myself,” Cowboy Roy said. “Hell, they just lay there, you know what I mean?”

“My little cousin’s got one that talks when you pull a string,” the boy said. He rocked back and forth in the seat, unable to hold still.

“It’s a shame they don’t sell live ones,” the man said, mashing his bloodshot eyeballs with his fist.

Eventually Daniel and the trucker dropped the trailer off in a potholed parking lot outside a warehouse on the edge of a small town. Then they drove on for another hour or so, and near dark, the trucker pulled down a long, secluded driveway lined with pine trees. He parked the semi in front of an ancient house trailer that had
PONDEROSA
spray-painted in big red letters across the front of it. “I got twelve acres here,” the trucker told Daniel as they stomped through the weeds to the trailer. “We could put on a rodeo if we took the notion.”

Stepping up on some cement blocks, he pushed a key in the door and shoved it open. “It ain’t no dude ranch, but it’s good enough,” he said, beckoning the boy inside. The trailer smelled like a closet full of bad times. All the windows were shut, and it must have been a hundred degrees inside. Black flies crawled on the walls. A flaky brown snakeskin was stretched out on the kitchen counter. Daniel looked around at the empty whiskey bottles and pork-and-beans cans lying on the floor. The shabbiness of the trailer suddenly choked him up, made him think of home.

He asked Cowboy Roy for another pill. “I can pay for it,” Daniel said, reaching for some crumpled singles in the front pocket of his jeans. The sixteen dollars was all the money he had left from selling blackberries that summer. He’d picked them in the bottoms down past Pumpkin Center, then walked door to door all over Twin Township peddling them for thirty cents a quart.

“Shoot, pardner, your money ain’t no good here,” the trucker said. “What’s mine is yours.” Digging the bottle out of the side pocket of his coveralls, he uncapped it and gave Daniel two more pills, then flopped down on a sagging couch. “You think you could pull these boots off for me?” Cowboy Roy asked the boy. “My poor feet’s killin’ me.”