Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock

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