Free Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock Page A

tumblebugs. His father, Mr. Jenkins, was the cause of it all. There were nine kinds of hell raised over at their house every night. The old man was some kind of maniac, and William walked around with a bitter scowl and a constant migraine. Before he moved in next door, I thought only old people got headaches. He was always getting me to steal some of my mom’s aspirins for him, and then he sucked on them like hard candy, trying to make each one last as long as possible. Living with my mother was no picnic, but compared to what William and his sister, Lucy, had to go through, I was, as my uncle Clarence always put it, shittin’ in high cotton.
    “Did you bring the matches?” he asked. Yesterday William had finally agreed that if I brought the fire, we could kill Vietcong this week. My mom and I watched bits of the war on TV every night, and I had waited all goddamn summer to wipe out a Communist village.
    I pulled the box of blue kitchen matches out of my pocket, and he ran to retrieve the empty bleach bottle he’d stashed in a clump of horseweeds that grew along the sagging fence. “We gotta be careful,” he said, glancing back at his house. “The old man’s on the warpath again.”
    “Jesus, don’t that guy ever let up?” I said. The bruises on William’s skinny arms were the color of a bum banana. All my life I’d wished for a father, but living next to Mr. Jenkins was making me have second thoughts. Mine had skipped out on my mom before I was born, and I’d always been ashamed of that. But maybe I’d lucked out after all.
    “Light it,” he commanded, ignoring me. Ramming a long stick in the mouth of the bleach bottle, he held it over the fence. I struck a match and held the flame close to the bottom of the jug until it caught. Then, swinging the stick around, William positioned the melting bottle directly over the anthill. Sizzling drops of white plastic began raining down on the tiny red ants like a firestorm.
    “Look, Theodore,” he said casually, “let’s forget that Vietnam crap.”
    “But you said we could—”
    “I can’t stand it,” he coughed. “It’s all you ever talk about.” Poisonous fumes were already swirling around his sweaty face. He waved his hand like a handkerchief, trying to fan the plastic smoke away.
    “Fuck you,” I said. “Find someone else to boss around.” I was the only kid in Knockemstiff who would even talk to him, and that was just because my mom kept insisting that I play the good neighbor. Anytime I pointed out to her that William treated me like shit, she’d look up from whatever she was doing and say, “Teddy, you have no idea what goes on over there. Like I said, just keep
pretending
that William’s your friend, and before you know it, he will be.”
    Maybe the reason my mother loved pretending so much was that she had such a hard life. When I was still a baby, she began working at the meatpacking plant in Greenfield, jamming bloody hog bones into cardboard boxes all day. She walked around smelling of pork, her knuckles swollen with tiny infected cuts. Over the years, she slowly become a devout dreamer, hooked on a special kind of make-believe that she made me promise not to talk about. She was always searching for my next persona, mostly in the cheap detective magazines she borrowed from Maude Speakman and read religiously every night before going to bed.
    The first time it happened, she’d been telling me about Richard Speck over dinner, going into detail about the eight dead nurses while we ate bologna sandwiches and potato chips. She made it sound scary, but by bedtime I’d forgotten all about him. Then she came in and sat down on the side of my bed, drew tattoos on my arms with a ballpoint pen, handed me a pair of scissors. “Look, Teddy,” she said, “I need you to do something for me.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Remember that Speck guy we talked about?” she said.
    “The creepy killer?”
    “That’s him,” she said. “Now what I want