Knockemstiff Read Free Page A

swallowed all the blood, I kept licking my hands. I tore at the skin with my teeth. I wanted more. I would always want more.

DYNAMITE HOLE
    I WAS COMING DOWN OFF THE MITCHELL FLATS WITH THREE arrowheads in my pocket and a dead copperhead hung around my neck like an old woman’s scarf when I caught a boy named Truman Mackey fucking his own little sister in the Dynamite Hole. I’d been hunting flints all morning up around the old Indian furnaces and was headed for the store down in Knockemstiff to trade them for some potted meat and crackers. Maude Speakman allowed me forty cents for each one I brought her, and then she sold them over again to some man from Meade who delivered her gas every Tuesday.
    It was hot that day, and as I crossed Black Run, knee deep in the water and fighting the green flies that were swarming around the snake’s mashed-up head, I heard some splashing around the bend. I stopped and listened close for a minute, then cut back over and sneaked up to the edge of the big hole that a county road crew had blasted in the creek years ago digging for gravel. I hoped to see something is all, thought maybe I’d have some fun with that dead snake if it turned out to be that goddamn gang of boys who’d been throwing rocks at my old school bus, the one Henry Skiver let me stay in up behind his property. Henry’s daddy used to keep the bus for a chicken house, but I shoveled it out good, and it wasn’t so bad after that. Lately, though, those boys had busted so many holes in the top of it that every time it rained I might as well been living in a bathtub.
    I damn near swallowed my cud when I got up there and saw the Mackey boy had his sister down on her hands and knees at the edge of the water and him behind her with no clothes on. I stepped back off the path a ways, then eased down on the ground and crawled up behind some chokecherry bushes to watch. My heart started beating so big I thought it was going to pop out of my chest, and I was afraid they’d hear all the noise it was making, but Truman and her just went on about their business like they were the only two people on this little patch of God’s wicked earth.
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    N OWADAYS I RECKON MOST PEOPLE WOULD STARVE TO death if they tried to live like me, but I learned years ago that a man can get by in this world without being somebody’s nigger if he don’t mind what he eats for supper. Back when I was nineteen, they started drafting boys for the big war against the Germans, and I hid on top of the Mitchell Flats for almost three years with nothing but a penknife and a ball of twine I stole from Floyd Bowman’s barn. My old man threw a fit when I told him I wasn’t going to answer the call, spit all kinds of names in my face like I wasn’t nothing but dirt. “Jake, you goddamn chickenshit, I won’t be able to face people around here you run away,” he told me, but I left that night anyway. I’d never been more than two miles away from Knockemstiff, Ohio, in my whole life. And though there have been plenty of days I still regret I didn’t try to make him see things my way that night, I guess taking off just seemed easier at the time. Hell, how could I have told that old man, the way they were drafting and killing boys left and right, that I wasn’t afraid of the fighting nearly as much as I was scared of leaving the holler?
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    T HAT MACKEY GIRL COULDN’T HAVE BEEN MORE THAN twelve or so, but she was backing up against her brother like she’d been at it for quite a while. Truman was maybe fifteen or sixteen years old, and long and skinny as a horseweed, same as his mouthy old man. He’d push it in her a few times and get her all squirmy, and then they’d both jump up and raise their arms into the sticky air and yell, “Jesus, save me!” And every time they said it, they’d fall backward in the hole laughing, and then Truman would get up behind her again, that filthy brown water running off him onto her, and