Knockemstiff

ASSAILANTS

STANDING IN HIS UNDERWEAR IN FRONT OF THE FADED pink duplex that he and Geraldine rented, Del came out of a blackout while taking a leak in the dead August grass. That was the bad thing about coming to: one minute he was like some brainless carp happily munching shit on the bottom of Paint Creek, then pop, a flash of light and he was floundering around on dry land again, caught in the middle of another embarrassing fuckup. Lately it seemed to happen every time he got loaded. “Jesus,” he said to himself. “Well, at least it ain’t the goddamn broom closet.” The last time, he’d cut loose in the spoon drawer in the middle of the night after passing out at Geraldine’s birthday party. They had been eating with plastic forks ever since.

Del didn’t realize that it was still daylight outside until he looked up into the shocked eyes of the two old ladies standing on the sidewalk staring at him. They were close enough to spit on. One of them, tall and thin with a silver beehive hairdo, began gasping for air, her mouth popping open like the trunk of a car, her false teeth ready to leap out and clatter down the street like in some old-time cartoon. The other woman, round and squat, wore a shiny red jogging suit that made her look like a fat tomato. Her pancake makeup was beginning to melt in the heat, and he watched in hungover awe as part of her greasy face suddenly broke loose and slid down her neck just as she started pounding on the back of her wheezing friend. Turning away from them, he lurched toward the porch, warm piss dribbling on his bare feet. And just like that, Del was home.

Geraldine was hiding behind the front door with Veena, their baby, propped on her hip, peering out at her husband through the thin, smoke-stained curtain. She stood there all the time, sucking on menthol cigarettes and watching the street for possible assailants. Six months ago, her old doctor at the Henry J. Hamilton Rehabilitation Center had put her back on all her medications after somebody disguised in a paper bag tried to strangle her in front of the Tobacco Friendly. Though she described the sack perfectly, even drew a picture of it down at the station, the cops never found a single suspect. Nowadays, she wouldn’t even stick her hand out the door to check the mailbox.

“I shoulda stayed at the Henry J!” Geraldine cried to Del on the way home from the police station right after the attack. She was in the backseat, frantically trying to burrow into the floorboards with her hands.

“Hey, Geri, you’re the one that was beggin’ to get out of that damn nuthouse,” Del yelled back at her. “You’re the one wanted to get married,” he pointed out for the hundredth time. He’d first met Geraldine when she was living in the group home over on Fourth Street. Back then she did sex in public places, carried cold fish sticks in her purse the way other people pack chewing gum, handing them out to strangers like precious gifts. Then Del had gotten her pregnant, and in one brave, ecstatic moment, Geraldine flushed all her pills. The next day, she filled out a job application for Del at the plastics factory, conjured up an old wedding ring out of thin air. Now he was stuck.

Del shoved the door open, and Geraldine listed to one side to let him pass. She’d never lost the weight from the baby. “What the hell?” she said. “The whole friggin’ neighborhood’s watching us, for Christ’s sakes.” Sickly dark circles surrounded her cloudy eyes like little moats. Sometimes Del envied her; he couldn’t get a doctor within fifty miles of Meade, Ohio, to put him on anything.

“I musta been sleepwalkin’,” Del mumbled. Then he staggered on and flopped down on the itchy plaid couch. Guns N’ Roses was blasting away in the apartment upstairs. The speed-freak nurses from the VA hospital were starting early today. First, they’d get cranked up at home, then go out trolling for men in the bars uptown. Every time they got lucky, Del stared at the ceiling and listened to the squeaking beds above him, half expecting the entire orgy to crash down on his head any second. On those nights, he held his dick in his hand like a holy cross, praying for their hearts to burst into pieces so that he could get some sleep.

He was standing in a green pasture pitching a perfect ringer when Geraldine shook him awake. “Get your ass up,” she ordered. “It’s your turn to babysit.”

Geraldine was still pissed because Del had slipped out that morning while she was in the shower. It was his day off, and they were supposed to attempt a trip to the Columbus Zoo, but at the last minute he decided to flee. He couldn’t stand the thought of dealing with Geraldine’s panic attacks all the way up Route 23. Her doctor had suggested the trip weeks ago, but she’d kept putting it off, hoping the medication would eventually make the outside world a friendlier place to visit.

Instead Del had driven out to Knockemstiff that morning in the beat-up Cavalier, then spent the better part of the day pitching horseshoes with some of his worthless cousins. “It’s cleaner than the last batch,” Porter assured him, handing him a joint laced with angel dust. Del hated PCP; it seemed like the gods fucked with him every time he smoked the shit. And sure enough, by the time he headed back to town, some bearded bastard with bad teeth wrapped in a piece of outdoor carpet was popping on and off in the rearview mirror like a beer sign, talking crazy shit about Del’s old high school.

…..

“WHAT?” DEL SAID, REARING UP FROM THE COUCH, BLOWING some pillow fuzz out of his mouth. “Where you going?” he asked Geraldine. She’d smeared some lipstick across her face, put some limp curls in her oily hair.

“None of your goddamn business,” she spat. “Maybe I’ll go to the Topper. How would you like that, you prick?” The Topper sat right across the street from the plastics factory. All the patrons had raw, red faces from the heat of the ovens, splatter burns up and down their arms. No one who drank there was ever completely healed.

“What about Veena?” Del said, looking around on the floor for his pants. He knew his wife wasn’t going anywhere; Geraldine hadn’t been out of the house in six months.

“She’s all yours tonight, daddy,” Geraldine said hatefully. “And by the way, where in the fuck did you go this morning?”

“I think I got hold of a green beer.”

She stared at him for a few seconds, then said, “You’re pathetic, Del, you know that?” She lit a cigarette and stood over him with an ugly sneer on her face. Her crotch was just inches from his nose. “I’ll tell you what, buddy boy, you better start paying attention.”

“I know, Geri, I know,” Del said. Then he added, looking up at her, “I’ll do better, I promise.” Lately, though, he’d begun wishing for the old days, when he’d only known her as the Fish Stick Girl, and they were bumming spare change at traffic lights. Groaning, he pulled on his jeans and trudged across the hall to Veena’s room. He picked her up out of the crib. “She’s wet,” he yelled.

“Then change her,” Geraldine said as she started toward the front door. She was jangling the car keys in her hand, twisting her ass as if she were taking off on some runway in a fashion show. She had on her good jeans, had her big feet crammed into a pair of cheap spiky shoes.

Del laid Veena down gently on the couch and pulled the last diaper out of a Pampers box. There, in the bottom of the carton, lay a small cache of fish sticks wrapped in a greasy paper towel. He stared at the brown, crumbly wafers in disbelief. Geraldine hadn’t touched a fish stick since he’d become her legal guardian; it was part of the agreement. He wiped Veena off, sprinkled some baby powder on the raw red rash that covered the insides of her pudgy thighs. Looking at his daughter, Del suddenly felt a great sorrow well up inside him. Falling to his knees, he was just beginning to ask the baby for her forgiveness when he heard his wife tromp back down the hall and slam the bedroom door shut. Both daughter and father jumped at the sound, one still flush with innocence, the other guilty of a thousand trespasses.

After he fed Veena and put her to bed, Del sat in front of the window fan eating slices of white bread and watching the TV with the volume turned low, listening to the nurses party upstairs. He waited impatiently until he figured Geraldine was asleep, then stole the few dollars she had managed to stick in Veena’s college-fund jar. Next he filched a couple of her Xanax from the medicine cabinet and swallowed them dry. Slipping out of the house, he jumped in the Cavalier and drove straight over to the Quikstop for a twelve-pack. A shiny new Cadillac was parked right up next to the glass entrance door. A fat man was leaning against the counter checking out the little clerk, his big belly smashing the candy bars on the shelf underneath. The girl was bent over tearing open a carton of cigarettes, nervously chewing on a strand of her long brown hair. Dressed in a pair of white slacks and a silky purple shirt, the man was decorated in gold jewelry, matching chains and bracelets, big rings that twinkled like stars under the fluorescent lights.

As Del approached the counter with his beer, the fat man turned and scowled at him, then stomped out the door. The minty smell of cologne hung in the air where he’d stood. Del watched as he lowered himself daintily into the Caddy. He thought the man looked vaguely familiar, but then all rich people looked the same to him.

“Thanks,” the clerk said when Del set the beer down on the counter.

“Huh?”

“See that guy?” she said, nodding toward the window. They both watched as the expensive car slowly pulled out onto the street. “He’s in here every night almost,” she explained. “Just stands around staring at my butt, offers me money to go out with him. It’s creepy.”

“I figured him for a queer,” Del said. “All that disco shit he’s wearing.”

“I think he could go either way,” she said with a shrug. “You should hear some of the stuff he talks about.” Del looked at the girl. Her name tag said AMY in raised white letters. She had big eyes like funhouse mirrors; a gray metal stud stuck through her tongue like a nail. All the while she was talking, she kept chewing on her hair, rearranging the cigarettes in the case above her head. When he first walked in, Del had figured her for just another speed freak; crank had spread like a virus all over southern Ohio that summer. But suddenly he understood that the fat man was the real reason the girl was so twitchy.

“Call the cops,” Del advised.

“Shoot,” she snorted, “they’re in here every night for the free coffee, but they won’t do nothing. They’re afraid if they say something, he won’t hire their kids for summer help. Heck, I don’t even get free coffee.”

“What do you mean, hire their kids?” Del asked. “Who is that guy?”

“He’s some big shot over at the plastics plant,” the girl said. “He’s like a millionaire.”

Suddenly Del recalled the first time he’d seen the man. Three months ago, a meeting was set up for all the workers to meet the new manager. When they got to the conference room, a TV with a VCR was wheeled in on a little stand. Then the foreman turned on the set and everyone watched the fat man give a speech about productivity. He told them if things didn’t pick up, they were all out of a job. He mentioned China, Vietnam, Alabama. The speech lasted fifteen minutes, then the foreman shut off the set and spat on the screen. “Imagine that fat bastard running a press,” he said as he rewound the tape. “His candy ass wouldn’t last one day.” Then he turned and faced the workers. Half of them were already asleep. “Boys,” he said, “you heard what the sonofabitch said. Let’s get back to work.”

“Well,” Del said to the clerk, “he’s gone now.”

“Oh, he’ll be back,” she said. “He’s like some kind of crazy stalker or something.”

“Aw, maybe he just wants to be your boyfriend,” Del joked, slipping his wedding ring off and sliding it into his pocket. “Who could blame him for that?”

“That’s the other thing,” she said excitedly, suddenly pulling her hair out of her mouth. “Guys like to come in here and flirt, you know? But he gets pissed about it. He even ran this one boy off the other night. I couldn’t believe it.”

“You’re kiddin’ me,” Del said.

“No, I’m serious,” she said. “And when I told him to leave, he just laughed at me.”

“Jesus, maybe you better be careful,” Del said. “Hell, he could be some kind of goddamn sex fiend.”

“Don’t say that,” she said with a shudder. “It’s already bad enough being in here at night by myself.”

“Hey, I’m serious,” Del said. “What about the woman who got attacked down there by the cigarette store? They never did catch that guy.”

The clerk gave a little laugh. “Yeah, but that woman was some kind of nutcase, homeless person or something,” she said, handing Del his change and sticking the beer in a bag. “She used to come in here with all this rotten food in her purse, trying to give it away. Believe me, she was like totally gross.”

His face turning red, Del jammed the pennies and dimes into the pocket of his jeans, then grabbed the beer. He started out the door, but suddenly stopped, his hand frozen on the metal handle. “That’s bullshit, what you just said,” he said angrily, his back to the clerk. “That woman? She’s married to some guy I know.” He stared out into the illuminated parking lot, empty except for his old beater. He pushed the door open. “They even got a little baby,” Del added, his voice on the verge of cracking.

He walked quickly across the lot and got into the Cavalier. He sat there trembling, thinking about what the girl had said about Geraldine. “You think you’re scared of that fat man, you just wait,” he said out loud. Then, pulling the beer out of the bag, he tore two ragged eyeholes in the brown paper. He could see the clerk inside, now sitting on a high stool, her hand crammed into a bag of Doritos. Taking a deep breath, he slipped the sack over his head, then jumped out of the car and raced up to the window. “Hey!” he screamed, slamming his fists against the plate glass. The startled girl tumbled backward off the stool, banging her head against the sharp corner of the deli case. Del stood there for a moment in the humid night, his sour breath trapped in the bag, looking down at the still figure lying on the tile floor. Then he slipped his wedding ring back on, walked quickly to his car, and drove home.