Knockemstiff

THE FIGHTS

JIM PEERED AT ME OVER HIS WHITE CUP. “HOW’S THAT OLD man of yours doing?” he asked. We were shooting the shit in the Bridge Street Diner. I was smoking his cigarettes and drinking their coffee. Jim was my AA sponsor, and we’d just been to the Friday Night Sober N’ Crazy Group over at the Lutheran church on High Street. He liked to stop by the diner after the meeting and check for new piercings on the bony blonde who worked the late shift. He was old, but he still liked to look at the young stuff. Every time the little wench bent over a table, he whimpered like a dog having a bad dream.

“He’s hanging in there as far as I know.” I shrugged, blew on my coffee. Though I seldom mentioned my father to anyone, I’d told Jim a couple of weeks ago that the old man’s heart had taken a turn for the worse. According to my sister, the surgeons said there wasn’t any more they could do. Jeanette was always calling and giving me updates on the situation. She worried enough for the whole family, and then some. “Too much scar tissue,” she’d tell me every time. He’s not the only one, I felt like saying.

Jim nodded, took another drag from his Kool. “What about that money you stole?” he said. “You take care of that yet?”

Jesus Christ, I thought, I never should have told him. “It was only twenty fucking dollars,” I said. “You make it sound like I took their life savings.” The last time I’d visited my parents, I’d slipped a lousy Andy Jackson out of my mother’s purse. Though I wasn’t drinking anymore, I was still messed up in a lot of ways.

“I don’t care if it was a fucking nickel. It’s still important, goddamn it,” Jim said. “You can’t start being honest, you’ll never stay off the sauce.” He made such a big deal out of telling the truth that I figured he was constantly fighting the urge to spin a tremendous whopper.

I nodded my head. I didn’t want to argue. Jim was a black man, and anytime I was around him, I had to be careful with my language. Though I was getting better, I was still afraid of letting a nigger or a coon slip out of my mouth whenever he pissed me off. Old habits are hard to break. In the holler where I’d grown up, everyone was white. The only time we ever saw black people was when we went into Meade to buy groceries or pay the electric bill. There were hillbillies in Knockemstiff, Ohio, who wouldn’t watch a TV show that had blacks in it. My old man was one of the worst.

Jim rubbed his chin, twisted a kink out of his old wrinkled neck. “You do want to stay sober, don’t you, Bobby?” His gray hair was as thick and wiry as a Brillo pad, and his skin shone like wet black tar under the fluorescent lighting. Whenever he spoke at lead meetings, he told stories about trolling the bars near the paper mill for free drinks, red-eyed and stinking of piss, pretending to be deaf and dumb. He’d let white guys try to knock his teeth out for a pint of Thunderbird. Now he drove a jade-colored Cadillac, owned a landscaping outfit with three crews. He was all business when it came to Alcoholics Anonymous, an old-time Big Book thumper who could sometimes be a royal pain in the ass, but it had kept him sober fifteen years.

I glanced over at him, thought about the last couple of years that I drank. A lot of people get the wrong impression, think there’s something romantic or tragic about hitting bottom. Every so often, strange men knocked on my door and threatened to kick my ass for something they said I had done. Sometimes I hid in the corner of the room, afraid to even breathe, and other times I called their bluff. Once a detective had me picked up for a rape, and I had to admit in the interrogation room that I couldn’t remember one way or another. Thank God he later determined that I wasn’t the type of pervert they were looking for. I went bankrupt, and caught the crabs, and broke my nose on a sidewalk. I stalked my ex-wife and missed so much work at the paper mill that even the union got sick of fighting for me. A few months after I lost my job, I woke up in a charity rehab wrapped in an army blanket. My roommate was an old puker seething with yellow sores. His name was Hobo, and he’d once had a glass eye but had lost it somewhere along the way. I grew afraid, started going to meetings.

“Jim, I wouldn’t be sitting here in this goddamn place if I didn’t,” I said. I started to reach for his cigarettes, but he placed his hand over the pack.

“Then you go and have a nice visit with your folks this weekend,” he said. “And while you’re there, you pay that money back to your poor old mother.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “I hear you.”

“Do you need a loan?”

“No,” I said. “I just got paid.”

“Good.” Two streams of smoke drifted from his nostrils as he stubbed out his cigarette and shook another from his pack. He handed it to me. Then he slid out of the booth and dug in his pocket for some change to sprinkle on the table. “We all fuck up, Bobby. Just got to keep trying, that’s all.” Slapping me on the shoulder, he took one more look at the blonde and left me with the check.

The next day I put on the shirt that I’d bought with the money I’d stolen from my mother and drove out to Knockemstiff. Though I never wanted to live there ever again, it still saddened me to see how much the place had changed in the last few years. Both the store and the bar were closed now, and new houses covered with vinyl were crammed together in the fields that had once been filled with corn and hay. My younger brother’s rusty pickup was sitting in the driveway, the back glass covered with NASCAR stickers and a Confederate flag. A weathered squirrel’s tail hung from the radio antenna. As I walked up to the front porch, I could see my old man through the big picture window in the living room. The twin stems of an oxygen tube were stuck up his nose, and he was all laid back in his blue luxury recliner, the chair my sister had bought him after his heart blew the first rod. He’d had at least three heart attacks since then, each worse than the one before.

He was watching the fights with my brother. I didn’t even have to go inside to figure that out. After he got sick, the only thing my old man enjoyed in life was watching men beat the shit out of each other. The worse somebody got hurt, the better he liked it. Most of the fights took place in seedy Indian casinos between men who were just like him, though he’d never admit it. He had my sister record every minute of boxing that came down from her satellite, and then he watched the tapes all day long as if he were studying for some kind of comeback.

I went in through the breezeway. I found my mother at the kitchen table, her papery hands wrapped around a cup of milky coffee. She was watching another TV. “Hi, stranger,” she said, struggling to pull her attention away from the movie that had her hypnotized. “Ooh, I like that shirt. Where’d you get it?”

“Penney’s.” I bent over and kissed her on top of the head, then poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the counter. Sitting next to the powdered creamer was the purse I’d ransacked during my last visit. Turning back to her, I winked and walked down the short hallway leading to the living room.

“I’ll be damned,” my old man said. “Look who’s here.” My father used to be the roughest sonofabitch in the holler, but now his skin was gray and the flesh on his arms hung as loose as an old woman’s. He had barely made it through the sixth grade, grew up in a family that traded his labor for sacks of flour and plugs of tobacco. He’d pounded spikes on the railroad at fifteen, been a boxer in the army. I’d once seen him damn near kill a man with his fists at the Torch Drive-in. All my life, I’d carried around the knowledge that I could never be that tough. But there was little of that man left now.

“What’s going on?” I said, sitting down on the edge of a chair. My brother, Sam, was lying on the couch, his long ponytail hanging over the end cushion, the brown tip of it nearly touching the wooden floor. He was a stringy but strong man, like my father had been before he got sick, rode a Harley even in the winter, shoed horses for beer money. Sam still lived in my parents’ basement when he wasn’t shacked up with some welfare puss, and though he’d never been convicted of anything major, he looked like he’d spent his entire life in prison. My old man had always played favorites, and most of the love he had inside him had been spent on my little brother.

“That nigger’s takin’ a helluva beating, that’s what’s going on,” Sam said, a hint of glee in his voice.

“Aw, the black bastard,” my old man said. I looked at the TV. Two men, one black, one Hispanic, stood in the middle of the ring holding on to each other for dear life.

“Who’s fighting?” I said. I took a sip of coffee, wished we were still allowed to smoke in the house.

“Two nobodies,” the old man said. “They shouldn’t even be in there.”

Sam rose up off the couch and jabbed the air with his fists. “Goddamn it,” he yelled at the TV, “kiss him, why don’t cha?”

I sighed and glanced around the room at the family photos on the walls. One showed our sweaty family standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon in 1970. My brother is still in diapers. A toothless Indian had snapped the photo with our camera for a dollar. It was supposed to be our summer of national monuments, but turned out to be just another fucked-up episode in our lives. As we’d approached the rim that afternoon, the old man had blackened my mother’s eye for trying to defend me. She was always taking punches for somebody else back in those days. I was twelve years old, and I’d puked up a fried egg sandwich that the old man had forced me to eat at a truck stop. He swore that I was going to eat chicken parts all the way back to Ohio. In the photograph, he is the only one smiling. His lean muscles fill out his tight T-shirt, and his eyes are squinted against the bright Arizona sun. He looks like he is having a good time.

“What’s that on your lip?” the old man said. He was staring at my thin mustache, another one of my sorry attempts to reinvent myself.

“Nothing,” I said, turning away from the picture.

He looked back over at the fight, adjusted the red-and-yellow comforter that covered him. “I had a full beard when I was fourteen year old,” he said.

“What kind of money you makin’ at that pizza outfit?” Sam asked.

“It pays the bills,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it. Jim had insisted I get a job after rehab, and slinging pies at Tommy’s Pizza was the best I’d been able to do so far. Whenever business slowed down, I had to stand out along the main drag with a nervous retard named Joey holding a plastic banner that advertised the latest $3.99 special. Every time some bastard blew their horn or gave us the bird, Joey spun around like a Frisbee and dropped his end of the sign. We spent half of our time picking it back up off the ground. I kept hoping he’d get canned or sent back to the handicap school for more training.

“You still on the wagon?” the old man asked.

“Five months now.”

“Damn,” he said, “that’s a long time without a cold one.” After my brother was born, the old man had quit drinking the hard stuff on his own, but he still liked his beer. He reached down and adjusted a valve on top of the oxygen tank. “What about those alcohol meetings? You still got to go?”

“I hit one about every day.”

“Do you ever see a guy there named Jim Woodfork? Someone told me he goes there.”

I thought about it for a second. I wasn’t supposed to tell who I saw at meetings. Jim was pretty strict about that. “Well,” I started to say, “I ain’t—”

“That crazy sonofabitch,” my old man said, shaking his head. “He’d do damn near anything for a drink. He was the worst I ever saw.”

“Yeah, I know him,” I said.

“He wouldn’t remember it now he was so drunk, but one time he let me damn near beat him to a pulp for a dollar. Just so he could buy another fifth of goddamn wine. That was probably the best dollar I ever spent in my life.”

“He does pretty good now,” I said.

“That’s what I hear,” he said. Then he shrugged. “He’s still a nigger though, ain’t he, Bobby?”

I looked up from my empty cup. He was grinning at me, a mean look in his pale blue eyes, waiting for an answer. I wondered if somehow he knew that Jim was my sponsor. “Yeah,” I finally said, looking away, “he’s still a nigger.” Then I stood up and walked back out to the kitchen.

My mom shook her head. “I think he’s getting worse,” she whispered. She was always making this pronouncement about the old man, as if at one time he’d actually been better.

“Agnes, what the hell are you talking about?” the old man yelled from his chair. He had ears like a dog. When we were growing up, he used to beat us kids for whispering behind his back. “Teaching ’em how to dance,” he called it. And though those days were over now, though he couldn’t even take a piss without dragging along a tank of air, we were all still afraid of him, even my badass brother.

My mother grabbed her TV remote and lowered the volume. “I was just telling Bobby about Jeanette’s promotion.” She looked at me and shrugged. Mom had told me months ago that Jeanette had finally made assistant manager at the discount store where she’d worked for years.

“Promotion, shit,” the old man hollered, his voice suddenly hoarse and weak. “Did I tell you that goddamn Clyde Chaney’s daughter got her nursin’ license? Clyde says she’s making thirty-two dollars an hour. By God, I’d call that a job, wouldn’t you, Bobby?”

I thought about the six bucks an hour I was making at Tommy’s Pizza, and I tried not to think about all the shit the old man was saying about me when I wasn’t around. “Yeah,” I yelled back at him.

“That’s it,” I heard him say, “kill the black bastard.”

For a few minutes, my mom and I sat at the kitchen table in silence. She watched the TV but never bothered to turn the sound back up, and I stared out the window at the field behind the house. It was a damp March evening and a soft gray mist was easing down from the woods on the other side of the creek. A deer loped across the pasture and jumped effortlessly over a sagging fence. In the living room, a bell ended another round.

“So,” I finally said to my mom, “what movie you watching?”

“Oh, I don’t know the name of it,” she said. “I haven’t been paying that much attention. It’s a murder movie, I think.” She slipped a cookie from a pack on the table and dipped it in her coffee.

Just then my brother strolled into the kitchen. Pulling up his T-shirt, he made a big show of rubbing his hairy belly. A faded tattoo of a yellow Tweety Bird peeked through the brown fur. He grabbed a bowl from the cabinet above the sink and dipped some chili from a pot on the stove. “I got some brewskies out in the truck you get thirsty,” he said to me.

“And I got you a job delivering pizzas if you ever decide you want to go to work,” I replied.

He pointed his spoon at me and squished his face up like he was on the verge of busting into tears. Then he laughed and started back toward the living room, blowing on the chili as he went. I heard the old man say, “Watch it, honey. That looks hot.”

“Jesus, I don’t see how you stand it,” I said to my mother in a low voice. I walked outside and lit a cigarette. It was nearly dark by then, and I wandered deep into the front yard before I remembered the money I was supposed to pay back to my mother. Next time, I told myself. Wood smoke from a neighbor’s house hung in the chilly air. I thought about all those years as a kid when we’d been forbidden to step over the fences my father had erected around his property. He had always been in control of everything that touched his life, but now he couldn’t even manage his own heart. Somewhere over the next hill, a dog barked three or four times, and up the road a car engine sputtered and died. I’d grown up here, but it had never felt like home.

I turned and looked at the old man through the window. He was still watching the men on TV beat each other senseless for a chance at happiness. With my father everything had always been about the fight, and I sadly realized that we would never really know each other before he passed. For the first time since I’d been sober, I began to crave a drink. Even the smell of the wood smoke reminded me of whiskey. As I stood there, I recalled something that Jim told me every time he saw me. “You pick up the phone and call me before you take that first one, Bobby. At least give me that much respect.” But I’d called him a nigger behind his back, just to please my bitter old man, and I wasn’t sure I could ask for anybody’s help tonight.

My father suddenly punched the air and whooped loud enough that I could hear him outside. The look on his face was ecstatic. Then the plastic tube slipped from his nose, and I watched him grab for it. For a moment he seemed to hesitate, as if he might be considering his other option, and it became clear to me that he was tired of it all. But after glancing over at my brother, he carefully fastened the hose back in place. He took a deep breath, and I took one with him. The TV light brightened and then dimmed. Tossing my cigarette in the grass, I turned and started toward my car. The fight was nearly over.