Free Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock Page B

you to do is come in my bedroom and play like you’re him. Just for a minute.”
    “How do I do that, Mom?”
    “I don’t know. Just spit on the floor maybe, talk like a drunken sailor,” she said. “Hurt me, but don’t really hurt me.”
    Other than the black pills she sometimes got off her sister, Wanda, fear seemed to be the only thing that made my mother feel alive. And because I wanted so much for her to be happy, I became a master at scaring the bejesus out of her. Albert De-Salvo was her favorite psycho, and she had a picture of him taped inside her closet. Sometimes, if she’d had a really bad day, I’d go outside and cut a hole through a window screen, then slip in and tie a fancy knot around her neck with a pair of her panty hose, all the while confessing that I was the
real
Boston Strangler.
    In the beginning, before I got good at it, she was always giving me advice, always pointing out little ways in which I could better become somebody else. “You need to work on that accent,” she’d say, or “Good Lord, Teddy, I could hear you coming from a mile away that time.” So with my mother, fantasizing that William was my friend was no big deal, just another game to her. I stuck the box of matches in my pocket and turned to go home.
    “Hold up, Theodore,” William said. “What if we say they’re giants?” He was standing with his feet spread apart, swinging the burning bleach bottle back and forth like an incense pot.
    I looked down at the terrified ants fleeing their fortress. Last week he’d insisted that they were African pygmies, talked me into playing Cheetah to his Tarzan. Now this. “Well,” I said, “there’s all kinds of giants. King Kong, Colossal Man, maybe…”
    “For Christ’s sakes, Theodore,” he said, “this is serious business. These are fucking giants planning on taking over the world, not stupid movie monsters.”
    “So what are we then?” I asked hopefully. “Marines?”
    “Marines?” he snorted. “What’s a fuckin’ jarhead going to do against a horde of giants?” I watched him look up at the sun and squint. “I know,” he finally said. “We’re gods. Only a god can stop something this big.”
    I looked down at William’s feet. Crooked toes were poking through the ends of his rotten tennis shoes. The scars on his legs glistened like snakeskin in the morning light. Gods? He was the closest thing to a dead person that I’d ever played with. “Whatever,” I said, giving in. “Gods. Giants. Giant ants.”
    He smiled, then coughed again. “I saw that Hiroshima on TV one time,” he said, raising the bottle higher to get more of a splatter effect. “It looked just like this.”
    “Bullshit,” I protested. “That was an atom bomb.”
    “So? What’s your point?” he asked, staring at me through his thick dirty glasses.
    “Well, this stuff—this stuff is more like napalm,” I said. “Like what they use over in
Vietnam
.” The jug was frothing now, like a volcano. Ants were burning to death all around us. I imagined their pitiful screeches. They smelled like little whiffs of burned popcorn.
    “Jesus,” William yelled, “there you go again!” He cocked the stick back as if he were going to sling the bottle on me. His whole body was quivering. A drop of sputtering plastic landed on his forehead, but he never flinched.
    The last time he got excited like this, he chopped himself in the leg with a hoe, all because I refused to admit that my blue marble was really his green one. “Okay,” I said, giving in again. “Then can we at least say that the smoke is—”
    “Fallout!” he yelled. “Radioactive fallout. Yeah, that’s what turned the ants into giants in the first place. See, Theodore, you’re not so dumb.”
    Just then, Lucy came tearing out of the house. She was wearing William’s fake army helmet and her cowgirl outfit, the one with the short sequined skirt. “He’s got Mother trapped in the basement!” she panted. “I think he’s