Knockemstiff

HOLLER

I WOKE UP THINKING I’D PISSED THE BED AGAIN, BUT IT WAS just a sticky spot from where Sandy and me fucked the night before. Those kinds of things happen when you drink like I do — you shit your pants in the Wal-Mart, you end up living off some crackhead and her poor parents. I raised the blankets just a tad, traced my finger over the blue KNOCKEMSTIFF, OHIO tattoo that Sandy had etched in her skinny ass like a road sign. Why some people need ink to remember where they come from will always be a mystery to me.

Wrapping my arms around her, I pulled Sandy up against me, blew my bad breath on the back of her neck. I was just getting ready to nail her again when Sandy’s dad started up down the hall in his sickroom, crying soft and sad like he’d been doing ever since his stroke. That pretty much drained the sap out of me. Sandy groaned and rolled away to the other side of the bed, covered her blond head with a lumpy pillow that was crusty with dried sex and slobber.

I stared at the ceiling and listened as Mary, Sandy’s mom, trudged past the door on her way to check on Albert. The cold floorboards cracked and creaked like ice under her fat legs. Everything in the house seemed old and used up, and that included Sandy. It was just like what my old man always claimed about my mother after she took off—“If she had all of ’em stickin’ out of her that’s been stuck in her, she’d look like a fuckin’ porcupine.” That was Sandy all right; damn near every boy in Twin Township had tapped her one time or another.

Through the thin walls, I heard Mary tell her bedridden husband, “No, he ain’t up yet.” Ever since Sandy brought me home with her one night last fall, I’d been helping take care of Albert. Each morning, before Mary would crack his first fifth of wine, I’d go in and shave the old man, scrub him off, change his diaper. It all came down to a matter of timing. If Albert didn’t get his breakfast by ten o’clock, he’d start seeing dead soldiers hanging from parachutes in the apple tree outside his window. This meant getting up early, but I kept thinking that if I did right by the old man, maybe somebody would return the favor someday. I rose up and looked at the clock on the dresser.

Pulling on my jeans, I glanced down at some of Sandy’s pencil drawings scattered on the floor. She was always working on a picture of the Ideal Boyfriend. Sometimes she’d fire up some ice and lock herself in the room, stay revved up for two or three nights practicing different body parts. Reams of her fantasy were slid under the bed. Not a damn one of those pictures looked like me, and I suppose I should have been grateful for that. Every one of them had the same tiny head, the same cannonball shoulders. Eventually, she’d crawl out of the room with blisters on her fingers from squeezing the pencil, scabs around her mouth from smoking the shit.

Albert started smacking his flaky white lips as soon as I entered the room. Except for a constant tremor in his left hand, he was dead as Jesus from the chest down. Mary had already retreated to the living room, but she’d put out a dishpan of warm water and a thin towel on the stand next to the hospital bed. A can of Gillette and a straight razor sat on top of the dresser. I lathered him up and lit a cigarette to steady my nerves. I studied the map of veins on his purple nose while he grinned at me through the foam.

Just as I began scraping his neck, Mary rushed through the door with a fifth of Wild Irish Rose. Albert’s head started trembling as soon as his yellow eyes zoomed in on the wine. “It’s nearly ten, Tom,” Mary panted. “You about done?”

“Almost,” I answered, flicking some ashes on the floor. “Maybe you oughta go ahead and give him a hit. He gets to bouncin’ around, I might cut him.”

Mary shook her head. “Not ’til ten o’clock,” she said adamantly. “We start that, it’ll just get earlier and earlier. He runs me ragged as it is.”

“I still gotta change him, though,” I said, pressing my palm against his sweaty forehead to keep him still. “What about his medication? Maybe you ought to try it sometime.”

“This is his medication,” Mary said, waving the bottle around. “Lord, he wouldn’t last a day without it.” There was a drawer full of pills in the nightstand, but in all the months I’d been staying there, I was the only one who took anything his doctor had prescribed.

I finished the shave job, then wiped Albert’s face with a damp washcloth, ran a comb through his brittle gray hair. Pulling down the scratchy blankets, I said, “You ready, pardner?” His face twisted as he tried to spit out a few garbled words, and then he gave up and nodded his head. The old man hated me changing him, but it was better than lying in his squirts all day. I unfastened the paper diaper and took a deep breath, then raised his bony legs up with one hand and pulled it out from under him. It was soaked with brown goo. I dropped it in the wastebasket, wiped his ass with the washcloth. Then I taped a new diaper on him from the box of Adult Pampers lying on the floor. By the time I had him fixed up, he was bawling again.

As soon as I tucked the blankets back up around him, Mary broke the seal on the bottle and handed it to me. I jabbed one end of a straw down the neck of the jug, slipped the other end in Albert’s mouth. The clock on the wall said 9:56. Four more minutes and he would have been back in Korea. I held the fifth and smoked another cigarette while the old man sucked down his morning oats. Sandy’s high, whiny voice traveled down the hallway into the sickroom. She was singing her song about a blue bird that wanted to be a red bird. “Where’d you two go last night?” Mary asked.

“Hap’s,” I said, dabbing at a trickle of wine running off Albert’s chin.

“I should have figured,” she said, and left the room. Other than Hap’s Bar, the only other business that was still hanging on in Knockemstiff was Maude Speakman’s store. Even the church had fallen on tough times. Nobody had loyalty anymore. Everyone wanted to work in town and make the big money at the paper mill or the plastics factory. They preferred doing their shopping and praying in Meade because the prices were lower and the churches were bigger. I figured it was only a matter of time before Hap Collins sold his liquor license to the highest bidder and closed up the only good thing still left in the holler.

After Albert nodded off, I killed the inch of dregs he’d left in the bottle, then went out to the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee. From the back window, I could see all the way across Knockemstiff. It had snowed a bit during the night, and smoke rose from the chimneys of the shotgun houses and rust-streaked trailers scattered along the gravel road below. A chain saw started up somewhere over Slate Hill. I ate a piece of cold toast while watching Porter Watson fill his truck with gas at Maude’s, then stumble across the parking lot in all his camouflage padding and go inside the store.

Looking across to the other end of the holler, I could just make out the frosted nose of the Owl’s car sticking out of the hillside across from Hap’s Bar. It was an abandoned 1966 Chrysler Newport, but people around here called it the Owl’s ride, the Owl’s castle, the Owl’s this and that. Nothing was known about the car’s original owner, but Porter Watson made sure nobody in the fucking county ever forgot the screech owl that had roosted in the front seat the summer after the car, plates missing and engine busted, mysteriously appeared parked halfway up the hill. You’d have thought they were cousins the way Porter went on about that stupid bird.

I rinsed my cup and walked into the living room, eased myself down into the saggy couch. Scenic vistas torn from old calendars were pinned to the walls, looking like windows into other worlds. Triple A guidebooks were scattered everywhere. Though Mary had never owned a car, she had a book for every state. She was always pretending a trip somewhere.

“She’s nuts,” Sandy had told me the first night I went home with her. We’d just knocked one off and were lying in bed drinking our last quart of beer. “She laid a goddamn rock on my bed the other morning, claimed she’d found it at the Grand Canyon. Kept blowing off she wanted to bring me home something special.”

“So?” I’d said.

“So? I’d just watched her pick it up out of the driveway. Hell, that old bitch ain’t never been out of the state of Ohio, Tom.”

I kept my mouth shut, sucked down the suds in the bottom of the bottle. My wife had finally kicked me out, and I was desperate for a place to stay.

“Besides,” Sandy said, getting up and heading for the bathroom, “what kind of present is an old dirty rock anyways?”

…..

WE WATCHED THE TUBE ALL THAT WINTER DAY, SMOKING cigarettes and drinking weak coffee and eating cheese crackers from a box. With the house sitting on top of the knob like it did, the TV could pull in four channels, so there was always something to watch. Still, there were times I wished they had cable. During the commercials, Sandy worked on another drawing of the Ideal Boyfriend, and Mary flipped through a book about Florida. Every so often I’d get up and check on Albert, give him another straw of wine to keep the war away.

Then, right after dusk, Mary ran out of smokes. I watched her out of the corner of my eye as she ransacked drawers, looked under cushions. Finally, she straightened up and went down the hall talking to herself. When she came back, she held out a wrinkled twenty and asked us to go buy her a carton. Sandy grabbed the money and jumped up, ran back to her bedroom. “The store will be closin’ before long,” Mary yelled. “You don’t need to fix up just to go to Maude’s.”

I knew we were in for it as soon as Sandy pranced back out to the living room. She was wearing lipstick and her tightest jeans; she’d combed the rat’s nest out of her hair. The bitter scent of the perfume I’d bought her for Christmas cut through the stale air. Mary’s eyes clouded over with worry, but she didn’t have any choice. She hadn’t walked the hill in a coon’s age, and she couldn’t go without her smokes. I pulled my coat on and followed her daughter out into the winter darkness. It was the first time we’d been outside all day. “This must be how vampires feel,” I said, looking up at the stars through the bare branches of the trees.

“Huh?” Sandy said as she started to trot down the hill ahead of me.

“Slow down,” I said. The gravel was icy from where all the cars had packed down the snow. “What’s your hurry?”

“I’m thirsty,” Sandy said.

“Girl, I ain’t got no money.”

She turned around, pulled the twenty out of her pocket, and waved it in my face. “I do,” she said with a laugh.

“Don’t you think we oughta get your mom them cigarettes?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “She smokes too much anyway.”

…..

I KNEW ALL ALONG WE’D NEVER LAST, BUT WHEN I CAME OUT of the john at Hap’s and found Sandy gone, I still felt a sick feeling in my stomach. We’d been drinking the cheap draft and listening to her favorite Phil Collins for a couple of hours when she ditched me. I went outside and hunted for her in the parking lot, then came back in and sat down at the bar next to Porter Watson. “You see where Sandy went?” I asked Wanda, the barmaid. My voice was trembling, and I lit my last cigarette with shaky hands.

Wanda set another draft in front of me. “As soon as you hit the pisser, she left out the door with that logger that was in here,” she said. “Hell, they’d been eyeing each other since you two got here.”

“The Ideal Boyfriend,” I muttered.

“The idy what?” Porter asked, turning toward me. His bushy beard smelled like stomach acid.

“Nothing,” I said, staring down at the mug of beer. I started to pick it up but then pushed it back toward Wanda. “I ain’t got no money,” I said.

“I already poured it,” Wanda said.

“I’ll buy,” Porter told her, throwing a five on the bar.

And so I sat there until closing time, drinking on Porter and listening to him go on and on about the Owl’s car. When you first heard him talking about it, you’d figure he was bat-shit crazy, but really, he was just trying to latch on to something that would fill up his days so he didn’t have to think about what a fucking mess he had made of everything. It’s the same for most of us; forgetting our lives might be the best we’ll ever do.

“I’d still like to know the history of that car,” I said, just to show him I was still listening.

“History?” Porter snorted. “Man, that car’s like part of the landscape. It’s like fuckin’ nature.”

“No,” I said, “I mean, like, how you figure it got there in the first place?”

“It landed there.”

“Landed?” I looked over at him. His bloodshot eyes were locked on the wavy mirror behind the bar. “You mean like…”

“Hell, yes,” he said. “And we’re damn lucky it did,” he added, a sob starting to erupt from deep inside his throat.

A few minutes later, Wanda yelled, “Last call!” I looked over at the Miller Beer clock above the door. It said 1:00 AM. Then I remembered the old lady’s cigarettes. I couldn’t go back to the house without some Marlboros. Hell, she probably wouldn’t let me in. I waited until Wanda started to flick the lights off and on, then hit Porter up for the money to get a pack, hoping that would pacify Mary until morning.

“Last call!” Wanda yelled again, as I dropped eight quarters in the cigarette machine.

…..

WHEN I FINALLY MADE IT BACK TO SANDY’S HOUSE, THE gray light of the TV still glowed through the sheets of plastic stapled over the windows. I knocked on the door and watched through the glass as Mary struggled out of the recliner and slowly made her way across the room. Her blue fuzzy housecoat fit her round body like a cocoon. Her pockets bulged with wads of used Kleenex. Pulling the door open, she peered past me into the darkness. “Where’s Sandy?” she asked.

“I ain’t sure,” I said, my teeth chattering from the cold. “She took off.”

“What about my cigarettes?”

“I brought you a pack,” I said, holding them up to the porch light. “Sandy’s got the rest of them.”

“That girl,” she said, unlatching the screen door. “She don’t have the sense to pound sand down a rat hole.”

I stepped into the cramped living room, shrugged off my coat. The Love Boat was playing on the tube. “Jesus,” I said, “I ain’t seen that show since I don’t know when.” It had been one of my mom’s favorites, though I always felt it was bullshit, the way everyone fell in love and got what they wanted in the happy ending.

We stood in the middle of the living room staring down at the TV. “I’d give anything to take one of them cruises,” Mary said, as she peeled open the pack of smokes.

“Where is that?” I asked. It all looked so beautiful on the screen, the tropical scenery, the sexy bikinis, the sparkling blue water, even the bald captain in the tuxedo.

“Hawaii,” Mary answered. “I seen this one a dozen times. See that woman standing by the rail? The poor thing don’t know her hubby’s on the ship with his new girlfriend.” Mary dropped down into her recliner, lit a cigarette. The tip of the Marlboro began to glow like a stoplight in the middle of her wrinkled face.

“Is that them?” I said. Two has-been movie stars were strolling on the deck, their arms wrapped around each other, their smiling faces pointed up at the sun.

“Yep,” Mary said. “The shit’s gonna hit the fan pretty soon.”

…..

AFTER A FEW MINUTES, MARY NODDED OFF IN HER CHAIR. Taking one of the cigarettes from the pack I’d brought her, I went into the kitchen. I stood by the window smoking and wondering if Sandy and her logger were somewhere fucking right at that moment, their two hearts pounding against each other like sledgehammers while mine barely beat at all. Suddenly, I remembered Albert. I pulled a fifth of Rose from the refrigerator and walked down the hall to check on him. Though it was against Mary’s rule, I figured he could do with a snort. A nightlight plugged into an outlet above him shone on his face like a pale blue star. Sitting down beside him, I uncapped the bottle. “Hey, old man,” I whispered, “let’s have a drink.”

I stuck the straw down into the bottle before I realized that Albert was dead. It was probably the first time he’d ever turned down a drink in his life. I sat beside him for a while sipping from his jug and thinking about Sandy. Sometime tomorrow she’d roll in, and I made up my mind I didn’t want to be around for that. My job was done here anyway. I turned on the lamp and rummaged through the drawer of pills, found the bottle of Demerol. Then I leaned over, and as gently as I could, pushed Albert’s dry, pink eyelids down with my thumbs.

Going back out to the living room, I pulled on my coat and slipped the bottle of wine in my pocket. As I headed for the front door, I looked down and saw one of Sandy’s drawings lying on the coffee table. She’d printed WANTED in bold letters over the man’s shrunken head. I stuck it in my other pocket, then tiptoed over and gently pried the pack of cigarettes from Mary’s hand, leaving her three in the ashtray.

I stood outside the old house for a moment, and then started down the road. As the cold air quickly seeped through my coat, I realized I’d never make it out of the holler tonight. All of Knockemstiff was asleep, even the dogs, and I had no place to go. By the time I got to Hap’s cinder-block building, I was damn near frozen. I stood shivering in the middle of the road trying to decide what to do, then leaped over the drainage ditch and scrambled up the hillside. The briars and brush ripped my skin and tore my clothes, but I finally made it to the Owl’s car.

I pulled open the rusty door and crawled inside the Newport. I flicked my lighter and looked around. Dirty gray feathers lay everywhere; dry, pale droppings caked the faded cloth seat. I heard a scrunching sound like dried twigs under my boots. Holding the Zippo near my feet, I saw the thin white bones of small animals scattered on the floorboards. It occurred to me that these were probably some of the Owl’s victims. I rolled the stubborn windows up as far as they would go and hunkered down in the seat, with just my eyes above the cracked dash.

After finishing off Albert’s bottle and popping two of his Demerol, I stretched out as best I could across the front seat. I closed my eyes and sank deeper and deeper into that lonely world known only to those who sleep in abandoned vehicles. As a car rattled past on the road below, I recalled the story about Sandy’s uncle Wimpy Miller freezing to death in a Dumpster behind the Sack N’ Save, his body buried in outdated lettuce. Then I thought of Hawaii, tried my best to conjure up the hot sand of a tropical beach, the warm silky nights of paradise.

The wind picked up, rocking the old car back and forth. Flakes of snow blew through the cracks and swirled above me. Reaching down, I picked up the tiny skull of a wretched little bird. I held it in my hand for a long time. It seemed as if everything I’d ever done in my life, the good and the bad, rested there. Then I slipped it, as thin and fragile as an egg, into my mouth.