Knockemstiff

BACTINE

I’D BEEN STAYING OUT AROUND MASSIEVILLE WITH MY CRIPPLED uncle because I was broke and unwanted everywhere else, and I spent most of my days changing his slop bucket and sticking fresh cigarettes in his smoke hole. Every twenty-four hours, I wiped him off with a wet cloth and turned his broken body over to air everything out. He’d been totaled in a freak car crash and had ended up with a giant settlement that cursed him with enough money to vegetate for the rest of his sorry-ass life.

I was supposed to be staying straight — his daughter had even insisted I sign a goddamn scrap of paper — but late one night I found myself fucked up in a strange car littered with flakes of dead skin and stolen tools and those gas station cassettes that are always on sale for $1.99. The driver was a hillbilly guy named Jimmy who kept calling me cousin, but I couldn’t even remember meeting him — let alone seeing him at one of the reunions we used to have when our family was still permitted in the state parks. Still, being the type of person I was, I’d apparently let him talk me into huffing several cans of Bactine, and then I was sick, and my brain felt like a frozen bleach bottle. As snow swirled all around us in the Wal-Mart parking lot, I rinsed the inside of my face with Jimmy’s last beer and vowed never to stick my head in a bread sack again.

Some time after that, around 3:00 AM, we ended up at the Crispie Creme looking for Phil, a friend of mine, who was supposed to have some Seconal suppositories left over from his dead dad’s unsuccessful bout with cancer. The Creme is the only thing open in our town after the bars close where you might find people like us, but there was just Mrs. Leach, the cross-eyed waitress who always creeped me out because once, in jail, I’d held her son in my arms. Wherever I went in those days, I stumbled across the bill collectors and misfortunes of my past, while any chance of a future worth living kept spinning farther and farther away.

We ordered coffee, and then Jimmy and I sat down in a corner booth away from the old lady so she didn’t have to look at us. Why worry an old woman at that time of night? The place was all windows and plastic woodwork and those buzzing fluorescent lights that always make me look like a corpse. A radio in the back was playing a fast Christmas song that only religious people could understand.

“That’s the last time I do any of that stuff,” I said. “I was talkin’ to fucking Fred Flintstone that last can.” Fumbling with a cigarette, I took a chance, surprised I didn’t ignite from all the fumes I’d inhaled.

“Fuck, all I ever get is the sirens and those goddamn goofy lights.” Jimmy pushed back a wad of crusty hair. He had sideburns that didn’t match, and the eyes of a man you wouldn’t trust with a milk cow. “One time though, out at the Torch Drive-in, I did get eaten by a giant bird.” He said this with great feeling, like he was recalling his first kiss or the best day he ever lived. “Sonofabitch pulled me up outta the car like I was a little worm. Damn, cousin, that was a good time.”

Mrs. Leach brought the pot, set down two cups smeared with orange lipstick and chocolate thumbprints. Looking up at her, Jimmy asked, “Hey, girl, how’s that ol’ Lester doing these days?” I motioned with my hand for him to shut up, but he’d already blurted it out.

“Cream?” was all she said. Though she was looking at Jimmy, her face was turned toward me because of the awful way her eyes were scrambled. Heartache and ridicule and the night shift had turned her into a coffee-spilling zombie. You could have nailed a cross to her forehead and the woman wouldn’t have changed her expression. Then, without waiting for a reply, she turned and trudged back to the shiny counter, her white waitress pants saggy in the ass and stained with coffee spots and doughnut grease. If I were a man running for office, she was just the kind of person I might appeal to.

“What the fuck’s the matter with you? Don’t you know he’s dead?” I said in a low voice, hoping the mom wouldn’t hear.

“Who died?” Jimmy asked, tearing open a little plastic thimble full of artificial cream. “You mean Lester?”

“He’s the one hung himself in the jail last summer,” I whispered, covering my cup with my hand as some of the red, crusty skin around his mouth flaked off and dropped onto the table.

“Shit,” Jimmy said loudly, slapping his tattooed hands together, “I remember now.” He lit a cigarette, then glanced back at Lester’s mom. She was picking pieces of lint off her frayed sweater, dropping them to the floor like little mashed cooties. “Oh, well,” he said, shrugging his skinny shoulders, “what you gonna do? Hell, me and Lester went to school together.” He motioned with his cup toward Mrs. Leach. “I knowed that old bag all my life.”

Then, without thinking, I said, “I was there when they cut him down.” It seemed that I always talked about shit that I didn’t want to talk about, but could never say the things I wanted to say. “Had a trash bag wrapped around his neck,” I added. I could still see the young deputy, dropping his big key ring, screaming on the radio for backup. Before I knew it, I’d wrapped my arms around Lester’s quivering legs and lifted him up, his piss soaking through the top of my orange jumpsuit. I was doing ten shamefaced days for shoplifting a lousy package of cheese, and for a brief second or two, I saw saving him as a chance to prove that I was better than that. But when the deputy ran down the stairs, I grew confused, then limp. I hoped nobody would know the difference. The day before, Lester had pushed a pencil up his dick. It was his greatest accomplishment. I’ll never forget the way he kicked when I let him go.

“I can see killin’ yourself, but not with no fucking trash bag,” Jimmy said.

“You keep doing that spray lube and shit, you won’t have to worry about it.”

The glass door swung open and two big, homely women walked in looking guilty. They were the kind of women who, out of sheer loneliness, end up doing kinky stuff with candy bars, wake up with apple fritters in their hair. They looked over at us with bold little smiles that indicated either stupidity or desperation. Jimmy leaned back in the booth, eyeing them like a desert sheikh buying a keeper at a white-slave auction.

“Well, well, well,” he said.

“No way,” I told him.

“Shit, I ain’t had none in a month. I’d blow the top of that one’s head off.”

The older woman waddled over and squeezed into a booth opposite the counter while the young one stood and ordered a big box of day-olds and two quarts of hot chocolate. She was packed in a pair of those stretch pants that overweight people should be thrown in prison for wearing. A faded Reds ball cap was cocked on her head at an angle that seemed to foretell, in my gloomy state, an ill-fated ride with a stranger. I could almost see a garden of moss slowly spreading over her secret resting place.

“Want me to talk to ’em?” Jimmy offered, between attempts to attract the younger one by extending his tongue until it touched the tip of his runny nose.

“Nah, they’re here for the sweets,” I said. “Besides, I ain’t never screwed a big woman and ain’t about to start now.”

“What the hell? Fat girls like to fuck, too. I can’t believe someone like you is so goddamn picky.”

“Why’s that?” I asked, setting down my coffee cup.

“Well, your teeth and all. You’d be doing good to screw that old girl. You ain’t exactly Glen Campbell.”

I’d had enough of his mouth. Grabbing hold of his collar, I jerked him across the table. “You little sonofabitch,” I said, twisting the dirty shirt around his skinny neck, “you just don’t know when to shut up, do you?”

I choked him until his tongue popped out, then shoved him back down in the booth. He coughed and spit a gob of thick poisonous snot out onto the worn linoleum. “Jesus, man, I didn’t mean nothing,” he said, rubbing his throat.

“Just mind your own business, okay?” I said. Turning away, I looked out the window at the snowy street, hoping someone would show up with enough stuff to put me under. At one time, I’d practically been considered a handsome man, a regular party boy; decent women called me by my real name while the strippers at Tater Brown’s let me light their cigarettes. But that was before some ugly bastard named Tex Colburn caught me in the Paint Creek bottoms picking through a patch of buds that he’d been planning on ripping off himself. By the time he ran me down in that cornfield, he was so pissed that he had his boys hold me while he chipped my front teeth out one by one with a spike nail he pulled out of a rotten fence post. Every time I flinched, he cut up my lips. Now I was at the mercy of a welfare dentist who spent his office hours at the clinic trading spit with the volunteer eye doctor. In the reflection from the glass, I tried out one of my old smiles. But the happy-shit days were gone, and I sat staring somberly into a pink, toothless cave.

“Well, fuck,” I said after a few minutes, and turned back to face Jimmy, who was busy pouring sugar out of the dispenser and dividing it into two lines with a coffee spoon. “What you think?”

“Hey, I don’t even know this Phil fucker,” he said. “We just gonna sit around all night, or what?”

A clock shaped like a doughnut said 4:20 AM. Though I hated to admit it, Phil was probably passed out somewhere, enjoying his dead father’s legacy. I found myself wishing I had a loved one who would die and leave me their barbiturates, but I couldn’t think of anyone who’d ever loved me that much. My uncle had already promised his to the mail lady.

“Goddamn him,” I said, half expecting Jimmy to snort the white crystals spread out on the table.

“We could always do another can,” he suggested, his face hovering just inches above the glittering columns.

I thought about going back to my uncle’s house, snaking out the clogged tubes, listening to the poor bastard repeat the same bitter stories over and over again. Behind us, the two big women were busy exchanging obscene fantasies, making suction sounds with their mouths, while poor Mrs. Leach dozed on her blue feet behind the display case. “Man, that shit just eats me up,” I groaned, already feeling pukey from the thought of the ether smell.

Detecting a hint of surrender in my voice, Jimmy looked up and smiled with all his soft, twisted teeth. “You just say the word, cuz,” he told me.

I decided to ignore him. Besides, what was there to say? Because of who we were, I already knew what we would do. In a few minutes, Jimmy and I would leave this place and go find somewhere to park in his filthy car. He would fill up the plastic bag again with Bactine, and I would sit and listen to him suck the cold fog down into his lungs. The smell of it would sicken me, and I would crack the window. The snow would slowly cover the windshield. Jimmy’s eyes would turn as red and sticky as candy, and his head would fall back against the seat in a dream. If he were lucky tonight, maybe he would see something that he hadn’t seen before. And then it would be my turn.