Knockemstiff

HAIR’S FATE

WHEN PEOPLE IN TOWN SAID INBRED, WHAT THEY REALLY meant was lonely. Daniel liked to pretend that anyway. He needed the long hair. Without it, he was nothing but a creepy country stooge from Knockemstiff, Ohio — old-people glasses and acne sprouts and a bony chicken chest. You ever try to be someone like that? When you’re fourteen, it’s worse than being dead. And so when the old man sawed off Daniel’s hair with a butcher knife, the same one his mom used to slice rings of red bologna and scrape the pig’s jowl, he might as well have cut the boy’s ugly head off, too.

The old man had caught Daniel playing Romeo in the smokehouse with Lucy, Daniel’s little sister’s carnival doll. Daniel was giving it to her good, making believe she was Gloria Hamlin, a snotty, bucktoothed cheerleader who’d spit chocolate milk on him last year in the school cafeteria. “Boy, that’s Mary’s doll,” the old man said when he jerked the smokehouse door open. He said it matter-of-factly, like he was just telling his son that the radio was calling for rain, that the price of hogs was down again.

To make matters worse, Daniel couldn’t quit, or even slow down. Trapped in the bright July sunlight pouring in through the open doorway, he was at that point in his fantasy where Gloria was begging him to split her in two with his big, hairy monster; his poor hand couldn’t have stopped if the old man had chopped it off and thrown it to the dogs. With a shudder, he unloaded his jizz all over Lucy’s plastic face, the crooked orange mouth, the bobbing blue eyes. Then, like an omen, a black wasp glided down from the rafters and landed gently on top of the doll’s fake blond hair.

“That’s Mary’s doll,” the old man repeated, his voice revving up this time, trembling with static. He stood there for a minute, looking down at the doll Daniel still clutched in his shaky hand. The wasp began struggling to pull itself loose from the sticky hair. “I always knew you was a retard,” the old man said, reaching over and squashing the insect between two calloused fingers. Then he pursed his lips and shot a stream of brown tobacco juice on Daniel’s bare feet, something he loved to do to all his family at impromptu times. “Now zip up and get rid of that goddamn thing before your sister gets hold of it,” the old man said. “I’ll take care of you later.”

Stooped over with another disgrace, Daniel carried Lucy down to Black Run and threw her into the muddy water. He watched her float past the cable that marked their property line, then walked slowly back up through the field to the slab house. Maybe he was turning into a sex fiend like his uncle Carl, he thought. He pictured himself in the nuthouse on the hill over in Athens, sharing a padded cell with his crazy uncle, trading sick stories about the good old days, arguing over who gave the best blow job, Barbie or Ken.

For the rest of the afternoon, Daniel warily watched the old man strut around with a fifth of wine like the Prince of Knockemstiff, the kind of windbag who showed no mercy and killed blood relatives for an extra sack of corn. Finally, near suppertime, he called Daniel into the kitchen. The rest of the family was already gathered around the Formica table with the bent leg so they could benefit from the old man’s royal blathering. Daniel’s mom nervously polished one of her lard buckets and Toadie, the little brother, kept sticking his tongue on the fly ribbon that hung from the ceiling, while the sister, Mary, stood still as a tree in front of the window.

The old man walked in a circle around Daniel, scratching his chin and looking the boy over as if he were a prize shoat at the county fair. Finally he stopped and pronounced, “You need you a goddamn haircut, boy.”

Daniel, his heart sinking like a stone, took a deep breath and resigned himself to the scissors his mom kept in the kitchen drawer. But then, in a surprise move, the old man whipped out the long knife instead and shoved his son down in a chair. “You goddamn move, I’ll scalp you like an Injun,” he said as he gathered up a long brown lock of Daniel’s hair in his fist and began sawing close to the scalp. He was like that, the old man, full of mischief when everyone else was down.

It was like being in the electric chair, Daniel would think later, though without the pleasure of dying, or even a last meal. But with specks of his blood splattered all over the corn bread, and hair floating in the soup beans, who was hungry anyway?

Later that evening, Toadie skipped out to the rotten picnic table under the hickory tree where his older brother sat brooding over hair and hair’s fate. All summer, Daniel had dreamed of stepping onto the school bus after Labor Day with his hair hanging down to his shoulders. The scene was as clear and vivid as a movie in his head, and now the old man had taken it away. “You look like a dern lightbulb,” Toadie said, running a broken plastic comb through his own greasy locks.

“Shut your mouth,” Daniel said.

“You was ugly and now you’re real ugly,” the little brother said.

“Want your ass kicked?”

“Mary wants her doll back,” Toadie said, determined to rub it in.

“Tell her it ran away.”

“That ain’t the truth and you know it,” Toadie said, though a crinkle creased his forehead as if he were trying to imagine it. “How’s Lucy gonna run away?”

Daniel stared across the hills behind the house. The red sun was sinking like a giant fizzing bomb behind the Mitchell Cemetery, where hair continued to grow, undisturbed by butcher knives and old men. “She hitchhiked,” he told his little brother.

That night, while lying in bed and listening to the old man cuss some rock-and-roll band playing on the Ed Sullivan Show, it suddenly occurred to Daniel that anyone, even he, could be a hitchhiker. He’d had it with hick hairdos and lard sandwiches and having to make up movies in his head while the old man hogged the TV. When Ed called the rock group out for an encore, Daniel heard the crash of a bottle against the wall. “Might as well watch niggers as listen to this shit,” the old man yelled at the TV. The boy ran his hands slowly across his head, searching out each tiny gash that had been made with the knife. Then he rolled over and began planning his escape.

…..

A FEW DAYS LATER, DANIEL WALKED TO ROUTE 50 AND stuck his thumb out. It wasn’t long before a white semi speeding past suddenly downshifted to a stop, the air brakes screeching, the trailer bucking and hopping on the asphalt. The truck driver’s name was Cowboy Roy. At least that was the name spelled out in ragged black electrical tape on the rusty doors of the cab. “I ain’t really no cowboy,” he blurted before the boy even got settled in the seat. Pulling back onto the highway, he went on to confess that he’d never actually been on a horse, either; that, in fact, he was allergic to horsehair. “Everyone’s got their cross to bear, I reckon,” the trucker said, pushing back the black ten-gallon hat that sat on top of his round, sweaty head.

Cowboy Roy was on his way home to Illinois. He was fat and wore tight coveralls that threatened to split open every time he hit a bump in the road. His feet were encased in pointy brown cowboy boots. A set of shiny spurs hung from the mirror. To make up for his allergy to horses, Cowboy Roy did other manly cowboy stuff, like drink cheap whiskey from a pint bottle and chew stringy tobacco and write songs in the tradition of Marty Robbins.

Daniel didn’t say anything. He figured the man had as much right to call himself a cowboy as the movie stars on TV. The trucker rattled on about the best way to build a campfire in the rain. It suddenly occurred to Daniel that out here on the road you could be any damn thing you wanted to be. You could make up a new life story for every stranger who offered you a ride. You could be a Boy Scout without a single badge, a millionaire without a pot to piss in, a cowboy without a horse.

“So,” Cowboy Roy finally said, “where’d you get that haircut? Cops do that to you?”

“Nah, my old man,” Daniel said.

“Damn, he musta been highly ticked off,” the trucker said. “What the dickens got him so riled up?”

Daniel hesitated, thinking of the day in the shed with Lucy, then finally said, “He caught me with his girlfriend.”

Cowboy Roy gave a low whistle. “Well, that’d do it,” he said. “But pap or no pap, I’d shoot a man down like a dog that scalped me like that.”

“It weren’t like I didn’t want to.”

“So you ran off instead?” the trucker asked.

“When I go back, I’ll have hair clear to my knees,” the boy vowed, staring out the dirty windshield.

Just as they crossed over into Indiana, Cowboy Roy gave Daniel a red snot rag to tie around his neck, just like the one that he wore. “So people will think we work the same spread,” he explained. Then he handed the boy a harmonica to play while he sang a song he’d just thought up. Puffing out his cheeks, Daniel raised the mouth harp up to his lips, then noticed a thick glob of tobacco juice oozing from one of the reeds. “I don’t know how to play,” he told the trucker.

“Shoot, just blow on the damn thing,” Cowboy Roy said. “You know how to blow, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“I’ll bet you do,” the fat man said with a grin.

“What’s the name of the song anyway?” the boy said, banging the harmonica on his knee, trying to knock the spit out of it.

“It don’t have no name,” the trucker said, “but it’s the best dern love song I ever wrote.”

They traveled across the bottom edge of Indiana, past sleepy cornfields and remodeled Indian mounds and small towns still decorated with sagging Fourth of July banners and painted rocks. Cowboy Roy broke out a pint of red-eye, and before long Daniel’s head felt as fluffy as a paper cone of cotton candy. The trucker began talking a mile a minute about driving straight on through to Mexico. He said they could become bandits and hide out in a smoky cantina with a servant boy who would worship them in return for scraps off the table. He described young Miguel in minute detail, right down to the tiny purple birthmark on his lower stomach. Then he pulled a small plastic bottle from his coveralls and shook out some white tablets. “Here you go,” Cowboy Roy said, handing Daniel two pills.

“What are these?” the boy said.

“Them’s trucker’s lifesavers. They keep you awake, make your dick hard as blacktop. Longhairs call ’em speed.”

Daniel recalled once seeing a photo of an actual speed freak in Mrs. Kenney’s health class at school. Her brother, a prison guard in Kentucky, had sent it to her. The teacher claimed the man was only thirty years old. His skin was drawn tight as a drum over his grinning face. “Once you start on that stuff, you’re like one of those space comets that don’t ever stop,” the woman warned the class that day, as they passed around the picture of the pale stick with the brittle heart. Daniel looked down at the white pills the trucker had given him, then tossed them in his mouth and waited for takeoff.

Cowboy Roy was an independent trucker, but drove much of the time for a big slaughterhouse in Illinois, delivering meat throughout the tristate area. He’d seen enough filth to give up eating most flesh altogether. “It just breaks my heart to see some mom stick a hot dog in her baby’s trap,” he told Daniel. His favorite food now was pork and beans. “Eat ’em right out of the can,” he said, “just like the cowboys do.” He’d inherited a little spread, and as they crossed over into Illinois that evening, he invited Daniel to spend the night. “It gets pretty lonely at the ranch ever since Mom died,” he said, his voice cracking just a little.

Daniel was surprised that the landscape didn’t change after they left Ohio. He’d always thought of every other state as an exotic world, but so far everything he’d seen was as dull as a Lawrence Welk tuba special. In the meantime, though, the pills and whiskey turned him into a regular chatterbox, and before he could stop himself, he told Cowboy Roy the whole sad story of Lucy and the butcher knife.

“Sounds kinda kinky to me,” the trucker said. He lit the butt of a skinny black cigar he’d stashed behind his ear, and blew a cloud of smoke in the boy’s face.

“It woulda been down to my shoulders by the time school started,” Daniel said, shivering with a speed rush.

“I never cared much for dolls myself,” Cowboy Roy said. “Hell, they just lay there, you know what I mean?”

“My little cousin’s got one that talks when you pull a string,” the boy said. He rocked back and forth in the seat, unable to hold still.

“It’s a shame they don’t sell live ones,” the man said, mashing his bloodshot eyeballs with his fist.

Eventually Daniel and the trucker dropped the trailer off in a potholed parking lot outside a warehouse on the edge of a small town. Then they drove on for another hour or so, and near dark, the trucker pulled down a long, secluded driveway lined with pine trees. He parked the semi in front of an ancient house trailer that had PONDEROSA spray-painted in big red letters across the front of it. “I got twelve acres here,” the trucker told Daniel as they stomped through the weeds to the trailer. “We could put on a rodeo if we took the notion.”

Stepping up on some cement blocks, he pushed a key in the door and shoved it open. “It ain’t no dude ranch, but it’s good enough,” he said, beckoning the boy inside. The trailer smelled like a closet full of bad times. All the windows were shut, and it must have been a hundred degrees inside. Black flies crawled on the walls. A flaky brown snakeskin was stretched out on the kitchen counter. Daniel looked around at the empty whiskey bottles and pork-and-beans cans lying on the floor. The shabbiness of the trailer suddenly choked him up, made him think of home.

He asked Cowboy Roy for another pill. “I can pay for it,” Daniel said, reaching for some crumpled singles in the front pocket of his jeans. The sixteen dollars was all the money he had left from selling blackberries that summer. He’d picked them in the bottoms down past Pumpkin Center, then walked door to door all over Twin Township peddling them for thirty cents a quart.

“Shoot, pardner, your money ain’t no good here,” the trucker said. “What’s mine is yours.” Digging the bottle out of the side pocket of his coveralls, he uncapped it and gave Daniel two more pills, then flopped down on a sagging couch. “You think you could pull these boots off for me?” Cowboy Roy asked the boy. “My poor feet’s killin’ me.”

Daniel got down on his knees in front of the truck driver and tugged both boots off. “How ’bout my socks, too?” Cowboy Roy said. Peeling the damp, dirty socks off, the boy was nearly knocked down by the rotten odor that sprang up from the wrinkled purple feet and filled the cramped room. The smell reminded him of the sick bucket his mom sat by the couch whenever the old man was on a binge.

“It sure is hot in here, ain’t it?” the boy said, as he stood up and stepped away.

“Yeah, Mom screwed all the damn winders shut the first year I went out on the road,” Cowboy Roy said. “Poor old woman, she always got jittery when I was gone.” Then he heaved himself up off the couch and stepped into the kitchen. “What we need is some cold beer.”

The thought of any more alcohol combined with the smell of the trucker’s feet made Daniel queasy. “Maybe later,” he said. All his nerve endings felt exposed, the coating that covered them burned away by the speed. Even the light from the lamp hurt his eyes.

“Well, what about a shower?” the trucker yelled from the kitchen. Daniel could hear drawers sliding open, cupboards slamming shut. “That’d cool you off.”

Walking into the bathroom, Daniel saw a shoot-’em-up paperback floating in the commode, its pages swollen with water. An old road atlas lay on the filthy blue linoleum. He hesitated, then locked the hollow door and took his clothes off. Pulling back the feed sack that served as a shower curtain, he saw that the tub was caked in hard gray scum. He tore some pages from the atlas, and covered the trucker’s slime with the endless highways of America. There wasn’t any soap, but he rinsed off in the cold spray anyway, patted himself dry with a stiff, bloody towel that hung from a nail on the wall. Then he put his clothes back on and walked out to the living room.

Cowboy Roy was sitting on the couch, a can of beer in his hand. He was grinning wildly at Daniel, baring his brown teeth like a dog. Uncapping the pill bottle, he threw several more tablets in his mouth and chased them down with the beer. “Look what I found,” he said, reaching down and lifting a long blond wig delicately from a plastic bag on the floor.

“What the hell?” Daniel said, jumping back. He suddenly felt closed in, as if the room was a coffin, and the hair the trucker held in his hand the same as that which grew in the graves on the hill back home.

“Aw, come on,” the truck driver said. “We’re just fuckin’ around here.”

“Whose is that?” the boy asked.

“It was my mom’s,” Cowboy Roy explained. “But she don’t need it no more. The cancer done ate a hole clean through her.” He held the wig out to Daniel. “Go ahead, try it on.”

Daniel took another step back. “No, I better not,” he said.

“You was crying about not having no hair, wasn’t you?” Cowboy Roy said. “I’m just tryin’ to help you out is all.”

“I don’t know,” the boy said. “Seems kinda weird.”

“Son, your daddy caught you fuckin’ a doll,” Cowboy Roy said. “If that ain’t weird, then nothing is.”

Daniel ran his hand over the patchy stubble on his head. A cricket chirped from somewhere in the room. Glancing out the window, he saw the darkness settling over unfamiliar land. It amazed him to think that just that morning he’d slipped out of bed while his parents were still sleeping and now he was hundreds of miles from home. “Okay,” he finally told the trucker.

“Now we’re talking. Why walk around like that when you don’t have to?” the fat man said, wiping the sweat from his bloated red face with the hairpiece. “Okay, just stand in front of that mirror and I’ll help you put it on. I used to stick this thing on Mom all the time.”

Daniel stepped over to the big oval mirror hanging from the paneled wall and shifted about nervously as Cowboy Roy set the musty-smelling wig on top of his head. “Hold still,” he ordered the boy, working the elastic band of the hairpiece down over the boy’s skull. “Got to make it fit right, don’t we?” the trucker said, looking over Daniel’s shoulder and grinning at him in the mirror. The boy could feel the man’s belly pressing up against him.

Finally, the trucker said, “Not bad. What you think?”

The long wig cascaded down Daniel’s scrawny back, a tangle of big blond curls. “It’s a little long, ain’t it?” the boy said.

“Well, shoot, you just need a trim,” the trucker said. “Stay right there.” Cowboy Roy hurried into the kitchen and came back out with a jagged fillet knife. “I can’t find no scissors, but this will do the job.” He grabbed a length of the brittle hair in his stubby fingers. “Say about this much?” he asked the boy.

“Maybe I oughta do that,” Daniel said.

“Just don’t make no sudden moves,” Cowboy Roy said.

“That’s what my old man told me.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot,” the trucker said. “Hell, I ain’t gonna hurt you. This damn thing cost thirty dollars.”

“That’s good.”

The trucker started in, chewing his chapped lips as he hacked off pieces of his dead mother’s fancy wig and let them flutter to the floor. After a few minutes, he stepped away and slid the knife into the back pocket of his coveralls. He reached behind him for a pint bottle sitting on the end table next to the couch, his eyes never leaving the boy. As he unscrewed the cap, he said, “What you say now, pardner?”

Daniel stared into the mirror. The hair draped from his head like a thick curtain. He kept turning from side to side, looking at himself from different angles. No longer did he see the scabs on his scalp, the bony triangle of face, the acne flaming across his skin like a brushfire. “It does make a difference,” he finally said, turning away from the mirror, his voice barely a whisper.

“Goddamn if it don’t,” Cowboy Roy said. “Hell, I bet there ain’t many dolls look so pretty.” His face was flushed with heat, his body trembling. After steadying himself with a deep breath, he stepped closer and held out the bottle of whiskey. “C’mon, let’s celebrate,” he croaked.

Daniel tried to laugh, but that had always been too hard for him. He’d never had anything to celebrate, not once in his whole life. He took a small drink from the bottle, and as he handed it back, he felt the trucker’s fat, sweaty hand touch his and linger there for a moment. And suddenly, Daniel knew that if he looked in the mirror again, he’d see the wig for what it really was. So instead, he closed his eyes.