Knockemstiff

RAINY SUNDAY

IT WAS ONE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING ON A RAINY SUNDAY, and Sharon was sitting at the kitchen table debating whether or not to stuff another slice of American cheese into her mouth when Aunt Joan called, begging her niece to ride into town. “Would you mind we try one more time?” she said. Her voice sounded thick and fuzzy on the phone, and Sharon figured she had been taking somebody else’s pills again. Ever since her father died, Aunt Joan had been working in a nursing home in Meade, changing diapers and spooning soft food into the mouths of old people who’d worn out their welcome in this world. She considered their medication one of the perks of the job.

Sharon pulled back the curtain and looked out the window. In the glow from the security light, she could see water standing several inches deep on the road in front of the house. “Lord, woman,” she told her aunt, “it’s still pouring down out there.” She didn’t want to go outside again. Earlier that day, she had gotten soaked chasing Dean, her damaged husband, around the yard. Now her throat hurt and she could feel a cold coming on. Sharon dreaded wet weather more than anything.

“Please, honey, I’m so lonely tonight,” Aunt Joan said. “I cross my heart, I won’t ask you again.”

Sharon sighed. She had told her aunt the last time that she wasn’t doing it anymore. Not only was it dangerous, it made her feel dirty. Besides, if Dean ever found out, she would never cash another one of his social security checks again. But tonight she couldn’t think straight. Dean had the TV turned up full blast in the living room, listening to some big-mouth preacher with frizzy blond hair stuck up around his head like a halo, and no matter where Sharon went in the cramped house, she couldn’t escape the sounds of televised religion. Everything was either pearly gates or boiling pits. So with Dean flapping his arms like an angel trying to fly through the ceiling and the preacher pleading for more money and Aunt Joan promising it was just the one more time, she caved in. “Look, this is the last time,” Sharon said. “Are you sure you can drive?”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Aunt Joan said, her voice already perking up. “And, honey, don’t wear that stupid ball cap. I need you looking nice.”

Sharon hung up the phone and peeled the plastic wrap off one more slice of the waxy cheese. She yelled again at Dean to turn the TV down. Then she went into the bathroom and started putting on her face. In the last year, she had picked up five men for her aunt, but according to the older woman, not one of them had even stuck around for a sausage-and-gravy breakfast the next morning. When Sharon pressed her for details, she clammed up, refused to talk. It was hopeless. Though only in her forties, Aunt Joan wore old-lady dresses that hung like tired sheets on her fat body, and rubber galoshes over her black orthopedic shoes, even in dry weather. Her gray hair was piled on top of her head in a knot the size of a softball, and she had never tasted lipstick in her life. Sharon was heavy, too, but over the years she had learned the secrets of makeup application and how to camouflage her thick body with brightly colored sweats. It wasn’t that hard to keep a man if you took care of yourself.

Just as she was finishing her eyes, Sharon heard Dean yell something about a giant turtle and run out the back door. She was too tired and discouraged to go after him, even though she hated for anyone to see him when he was having one of his episodes, especially her aunt. By the time Aunt Joan pulled in the driveway, he was hacking away with a chop ax at the tall TV antenna propped against the side of the house. “My God,” Aunt Joan said as Sharon got in the car. “What in the world’s he doing now?”

“Who knows?” Sharon said. She crammed some empty pop cans and fast-food containers under the seat to make room for her feet. “This rain’s got him all screwed up.”

As they started to town, she waited for her aunt to begin her usual speech about marrying a man with a steel plate in his head, but instead, Aunt Joan began telling stories about her sister, Bessie, Sharon’s mother. “All the kids in Knockemstiff used to call me and your mom the Cave Women when we were growing up.” Sharon had heard most of Aunt Joan’s stories a hundred times, and she hated them all, especially this one. The image of some hairy, stooped, apelike creatures always came to mind. “Your mama, though,” Aunt Joan said, staring through the cracked windshield of the New Yorker at the dark, wet road, “she didn’t deserve all that name-calling, being compared with me. She was pretty, just like you.”

“Yeah,” Sharon said, “but look how she ended up.” Sharon bummed a Kool off her aunt, thinking the menthol might soothe her throat. “Maybe you were better off in the long run.”

“What? Being the ugly one? Slaving away for Daddy all those years?” Aunt Joan said. She rubbed her nose, wiped something on her coat. “No, I don’t think so. At least your mom, she had some fun.” Most everyone in the county had heard of Big Bessie. She had left home as soon as she turned eighteen and tended bar around Meade all her life. Men fell in love with her face and tried to imagine a different, slimmer body when they bedded her. One night she didn’t come home from work, but Sharon just assumed she’d gone off with one of her trucker boyfriends. Bessie would do that once in a while, after Sharon was old enough to look after herself, just up and quit a job and take off for Florida or Texas for a couple of weeks. She’d been gone only three days when Sharon got a call from a detective in Milton, West Virginia. Her mother’s body had been found in a Dumpster behind a pancake house. Even now, ten years later, Aunt Joan still called the police department down there to see if they’d made an arrest yet.

“I miss her so much,” Aunt Joan said.

As they approached the cement bridge in Knockemstiff that ran over the little creek called Shady Glen, Sharon said, “Be careful.”

“Oh, you always say that,” Aunt Joan said with a laugh, but she tapped the brakes anyway.

“I know, but I can’t help it.” She didn’t trust anyone’s driving anymore. Dean had crashed his car into the bridge four years ago, just before he and Sharon were supposed to get married. Some people he’d gone to vocational school with had thrown him a bachelor party, and the highway patrol estimated Dean was going eighty miles an hour when he flew through the windshield. The next morning, after the last of the emergency people had pulled away, one of the Myers boys from up in the holler found a pair of black panties and a sliver of pink brain in the grass. Nobody dreamed he would live, but eight months later he walked out of the rehab center on crutches. A thin layer of skin they’d peeled off his ass covered the steel plate in the back of his head. Sharon still thought about the panties occasionally, tried to picture the girl who wore a size five. She hadn’t worn underwear that small since she was in the third grade.

…..

“I THINK YOU WAITED TOO LONG,” SHARON SAID AS THEY drove slowly past the dark Tecumseh Lounge. It was the last dive her mother had worked in. The owner still had a photograph of Big Bessie on the wall behind the cash register. Twice, she and Aunt Joan had gotten lucky there.

“Damn, I was hoping we’d beat last call,” Aunt Joan said. “The drunks, they’re the easiest.” She pulled the car over at the edge of the empty parking lot and hunted in her purse for a fresh pack of cigarettes. The rain, which had practically stopped on the long drive into town, started up again. Sharon wondered if Dean had found his way back inside the house. “Oh, well,” Aunt Joan sighed. “What about we go get some doughnuts? I always got a sweet tooth, don’t you?”

Besides the cross-eyed waitress, there was only one other person in the Crispie Creme, a wasted-looking young man in a booth near the back who seemed to be talking to himself. As they stood waiting for their order at the glass counter, Aunt Joan whispered that he was the same guy who’d been in there the last time they’d come to town. “Remember?” she said. “He was with some guy had a split-looking mouth.”

“Maybe,” Sharon said.

“He looks lonely.”

The man glanced up from his cup, then squinted at them in the bright fluorescent lighting. He stuck out his coffee-stained tongue. “You’re kidding, right?” Sharon said.

“What do you mean?”

“Christ, Aunt Joan, he looks like a friggin’ serial killer.”

“He don’t look no worse than the other ones, Sharon. Besides, I don’t figure we’re gonna find any movie stars out this late.” She counted out the exact change for the silent waitress. “C’mon, let’s sit.”

“Goddamn it,” Sharon muttered under her breath. She had hoped maybe her aunt would forget about finding one tonight. With their hot chocolates and the box of doughnuts, they sat down in a booth across from the man. He nodded and batted his bloodshot eyes, showed them a mouthful of yellow teeth. Aunt Joan gave him a shy smile, then kicked Sharon’s shin until her niece finally asked the man to sit with them.

He told them his name was Jimmy as he eagerly slid into the booth next to Sharon. His greasy hair hung down in his eyes and a patchy beard covered his skinny neck. Faded blue letters decorated the knuckles of each hand. Aunt Joan did most of the talking, asking him bullshit questions about his family origins, bitching about the rainy weather. Sharon knew she was sizing him up, trying to decide if he might be a man she wouldn’t mind waking up next to in the morning. For his part, Jimmy just kept repeating the same phrases over and over; “Cool” and “Party time” seemed to be the only words he knew. It was obvious to Sharon that he didn’t have a brain in his head. Her aunt would think he was perfect.

Aunt Joan finally nodded at Sharon and excused herself. They watched her walk back to the restroom, and Sharon hoped to God that she’d never waddle like that. Jimmy scooted up against her and suggested that they dump the old cow, but Sharon ignored him. By the time Aunt Joan returned, he had his arm wrapped around her niece, his tongue stuck in her ear. Five minutes later, they were all getting into the car. “You two go ahead and sit in the back,” Aunt Joan said. “I’ll handle the driving.”

As soon as they backed out of the parking lot, Jimmy pulled a plastic bag and a spray can from his coat pocket. “Party time,” he said again, nudging Sharon with his elbow. She watched him fill the bag with spray, then stick his face in it and inhale deeply several times. Whatever it was smelled like ether and she rolled her window down despite the rain. He finally let the can drop to the floor and leaned back in the seat. A glob of spit dripped off his dirty beard. His eyes became as vacant as a dead TV. Sharon looked up and saw her aunt smiling at her in the rearview mirror.

Whatever he sniffed didn’t last long, and as soon as Jimmy came out of his fog, Aunt Joan leaned across the seat and opened the glove box. She took out a pint of whiskey, made a big deal out of twisting the cap off and pretending to take a hit. At the last red light in Meade, she handed the bottle back to him. He took a drink and offered it to Sharon. She shook her head, told him she’d already drank too much hot chocolate. He and Aunt Joan passed the bottle back and forth several times, and every time Jimmy took another drink, he pushed his hand farther down inside Sharon’s sweatpants. Finally Aunt Joan said, “Sharon, I’ll bet your boyfriend can’t kill the rest of that bottle.”

Jimmy held the pint up and looked at it. “Lady, you don’t know ol’ Jimmy very well, do you?” he said. As he raised the bottle to his mouth, Sharon saw her aunt reach over and turn the heater on high. Warm air filled the car. When he finished chugging, Jimmy smacked his lips and said, “I could do that all night long.” Then he slipped his tongue in Sharon’s ear again. Just as she began to tingle a little bit, his hand quit moving inside her pants. She jerked it out and he fell back against the door, mumbling something about fat girls being tight.

“Okay,” Sharon said as she wiped spit out of her ear. “Stop the car.”

“What’s wrong?” Aunt Joan flipped on her turn signal, and began slowing down.

“Ain’t nothing wrong,” Sharon said. “But I’m not sitting back here all the way home. He smells like a medicine cabinet.”

Easing the car over to the side of the highway, Aunt Joan asked, “What was that stuff anyway?”

Sharon felt around on the floorboards until she found the can. She held it up to the light from a passing car. “Bactine,” she said. “Yeah, Aunt Joan, you sure know how to pick ’em.”

“Throw it out. They say that stuff will rot your brain sniffing it like that.”

“It’s already too late for this one,” Sharon said as she got in the front seat and slammed the door shut. “Mr. Party Time. Ha. He’s a pig.”

Aunt Joan laughed. “Oh, don’t talk about my new man like that. He might end up being a keeper.” A semi blew past them just before Aunt Joan pulled the big car back onto the highway.

“It ain’t funny,” Sharon shouted. “He had his hand clear up inside me.”

“Eat one of those doughnuts.”

“I don’t want no doughnut. I just want to go home.”

“Honey, this is the last time, I promise,” Aunt Joan said.

Sharon lit a cigarette just as the car engine started making a hammering sound. The New Yorker had been practically new when Aunt Joan’s daddy gave it to her three years ago, but she never took care of anything. John Grubb had traded his pickup in on the car the same day the doctors told him that his diabetes had scored another victory. Your legs this time, they had told him. He’d already lost most of his toes. On the way out of town with the new car, he stopped at Jack’s Hardware and bought a ten-gallon cowboy hat and a.45 pistol that came with a fancy shoulder holster. Then he drove back to the farmhouse he shared with his youngest daughter and wired a cow’s skull to the front grille of the car. For the next two months, he drove around the county drinking whiskey and eating bags of hardtack candy and listening to Jerry Lee Lewis cassettes. Sharon knew the story by heart; her aunt told it every time the car broke down.

They were halfway home when Aunt Joan tapped Sharon on the leg and said, “Honey, check on that boy, will you?”

Sharon groaned and twisted around in her seat. Though it was dark in the car, she thought she could see one of Jimmy’s eyes open, like a shiny coin, staring up at her. Getting up on her knees, she leaned over the front seat and lit her cigarette lighter. Both of his eyes flickered. She’d never seen that before. “What was in that bottle?” she said.

“Same as last time,” Aunt Joan said. “Those Percocets I been getting off old Mrs. Marsh.”

“Well, his friggin’ eyes are open,” Sharon said.

“Is he doing anything else? Is he moving?”

“No, but his goddamn eyes are awake.”

Aunt Joan was silent for a moment. “Burn him with your Zippo a little.”

“Are you nuts?”

“Oh, don’t set him on fire. Just see if he flinches is all.”

Sharon looked closely at Jimmy one more time, then dropped back down in her seat and said, “Aunt Joan, I ain’t doing that.” The clattering sound under the hood finally eased up, and Sharon tried to relax. She leaned her head back and watched the wipers flop loosely back and forth across the windshield. Her grandfather had finally returned home when his eyes gave out from the sugar and he couldn’t see to drive anymore. Hobbling into the house on his rotten legs, he gave his daughter a peck on the cheek and handed her both sets of keys. “Joanie, that’s a good car,” he told her. “Take care of it.” John Grubb had always kept his youngest daughter close, so close that people around the holler had spread rumors, and it had only gotten worse after Edna was killed. But while she was peeling potatoes for his dinner, he slipped out on the back porch and blew a hole behind his ear with the.45. She was forty-three years old and had never been on a date.

They turned off the highway onto Black Run, the secondary road that would take them back to the holler. “Do I have to help you carry him in?” Sharon asked.

Aunt Joan rubbed her chin, turned down the heater. “No, I don’t reckon,” she said. “You’ve done enough.”

Ten minutes later, she stopped the car in front of Sharon’s house. They could both see Dean pacing back and forth in the front room, jabbing his hands into the air. All the lights were on. It looked like a hundred people lived there. Pieces of the TV antenna were scattered in the muddy driveway. “Where’s your curtains?” Aunt Joan asked.

“I have no friggin’ idea,” Sharon said numbly. It was four o’clock in the morning, and Dean had been at it since yesterday afternoon when the rain started. He’d been to doctors all over Ohio, but nobody could explain why the rain made him so crazy.

“You’re going to have to do something about that boy one of these days,” Aunt Joan said. “He’s going to have one of those fits and hurt somebody.”

Sharon rolled her eyes. At least she had a regular man. “That last doctor he saw told us to try moving to the desert,” she said, watching her husband through the naked windows.

“The desert?” Aunt Joan said. “You mean with camels and sheikhs and stuff?”

“No, like Arizona.”

“Oh.” Aunt Joan got a serious look on her face. Reaching over, she took hold of her niece’s hand and squeezed it. “Sharon,” she said, staring into her eyes, “Dean ain’t worth moving away for, you hear me?” She turned and looked back at the house. “He gets to where you can’t handle him, we can take care of that.”

Aunt Joan was always suggesting that Sharon do something about Dean, either divorce him or stick him in a group home. Putting up with her advice had been more of an aggravation than anything else. Tonight though, as she listened to Jimmy’s soggy wheeze in the backseat, Sharon thought about the other men they had brought back to the holler, wondered again why Aunt Joan refused to talk about them.

Aunt Joan shrugged. “I’m just saying I wouldn’t want to live in no desert.”

Sharon started to get out of the car. “Don’t worry, that’s just what the head doctor said.”

“Here, you take these,” Aunt Joan said, handing Sharon the box of doughnuts.

“I thought you had a sweet tooth.”

“I do,” the older woman chuckled. She turned and glanced back at Jimmy. “But not for no doughnuts.”

…..

WALKING IN THE HOUSE, SHARON SAW THAT DEAN HAD NOT only torn all the curtains down, but he’d smashed every pretty thing she had hanging on the walls. “You’re gonna clean this up, mister,” she told him. A confused look clouded his face, and he curled up on the couch and started scratching the back of his head. He dug harder and harder into his scalp until she had to run over and grab his arms. The thin piece of skin over the steel plate was raw and bleeding. He calmed down for a few moments, then jumped up and started singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” at the top of his froggy voice.

Sharon gave up and went around shutting off all the lights. A photograph of her and Dean lay on the floor in the kitchen, the frame broken, and she kicked it under the table. Then she walked down the hallway and unlocked her bedroom door with a key she kept on a chain around her neck. Pulling off her sweats, she crawled into bed with the box of doughnuts and pulled the blankets up over her. Yes, she thought, she was definitely catching a cold. She turned on the little radio that sat on the nightstand and twisted the dial until she found some easy-listening music.

Taking a doughnut from the box, Sharon bit into it, a chocolate cream filled. Raindrops splattered against the window. She ate the doughnut and wondered what it would be like to live in the desert. Everything there would be new. She could go on a diet and Dean could get his head dried out. They could do whatever people do who live in the sand.

Biting into a glazed, she started to think about Jimmy. He’d stuck his tongue in her ear, the first time anyone had ever done that. His breath was bad, but so was Dean’s. She wished now that she’d asked him, when they were in the backseat together, if he’d ever been to Arizona. She wondered if he had a girlfriend, maybe even a wife. She hadn’t noticed a wedding ring, but that didn’t mean anything these days. Then she remembered Aunt Joan and decided that she better not think about Jimmy anymore. Besides, she was done with all that business now.

Sharon licked the sugary coating off her fingers and picked up a blueberry, one of her favorites. Through the door, she heard Dean moving around again. Then the DJ came on and said something about more precipitation. She reached over and turned the radio up a little. The rain had settled, the man said in his late-night voice, over the Ohio valley. It was going to stick around a while.