Research: Journals
The Journal
Past Issues
29.1
Donald Ray Pollock
GigantomachyI’m standing in the middle of my apartment wrapping an extension cord around my neck while waiting for some girl to come over. She’s expensive, but the ad says she’ll do anything. The blood is just beginning to pound in my ears when the phone rings. “Hey, did you hear about Bobby Jenkins?” my mother wants to know as soon as I pick up. I haven’t been back to Ohio in years, haven’t talked to my mother in a coon’s age, but she acts as if we’d just been cut off in the middle of a gab session.
“You mean Robert?” I gasp, loosening the cord a little.
“What about him?”
“He killed himself last week,” she says, her voice sounding like a seashell. “His sister had it closed casket.”
“The bastard,” I mutter. I hate goddamn success stories. Lifting the end of the extension cord above my head, I picture myself swinging from the crabapple tree that stood in front of our old house in Knockemstiff.
“Teddy, you sound funny,” she says.
“That guy always was a nut,” I say, taking a deep breath.
“Hey, remember that time when you and Bobby—”
“Mom, I gotta go,” I say, hanging up just as the girl knocks.
I toss my noose on the kitchen table and let her in. She drifts through the apartment checking things out, a stoned smile pasted like a decal on her thin face. Leading her into the bedroom, I motion to a long row of masks arranged on the wall. “Pick one,” I tell her. She glances at the infamous faces, then yawns and shrugs.
“Okay,” I say, “what about this?” I point to the large Plexiglas tank setting at the foot of my bed.
“What the hell?” she says, her eyes finally coming alive.
“Ants,” I explain, tossing my shirt on a chair. “An ant farm.”
“Man, you can forget that,” she says with a shiver, pulling her fancy plastic coat tighter around her.
“I try,” I say, but then I remember…
It had rained hard during the night, and in the morning, everything along the fence line was bright wet green except for that brown anthill. Even though we’d flattened the shit out of it just the week before, the damn thing was already the size of a bushel basket again. Christ, they’d even buried the concrete block Robert had left standing as a monument to their war dead.
“They’re taunting us,” Robert said, staring down at the ants gliding about on top of the soggy mound, repairing storm damage, oblivious to us.
“What?” I said. “They’re just bugs.” Robert Jenkins made a big deal out of everything. He’d give you a headache just looking at him. I’d swallowed a barrel of my mom’s aspirins, eaten a truckload of crap since he and Lucy, his dingbat sister, had moved in next door.
“Did you bring the matches?” he asked. Yesterday, Robert had finally agreed that if I brought the fire, we could kill Viet Cong this week. I’d 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. “The old man’s on the warpath again.”
“Jesus, don’t that guy ever let up?” The bruises on Robert’s skinny arms were the color of a bum banana.
“Light it,” he commanded, ignoring me. Ramming a long stick in the mouth of the bleach bottle, Robert 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, Robert 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,” he said, “let’s forget that Vietnam crap.”
“But you said—”
“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.
“Go to hell,” I said. 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. If I pointed out to her that Robert treated me like shit, she’d look up from the TV and say, “Teddy, you have no idea what goes on over there. Just pretend he’s your friend, and before you know it, he will be.”
My mother was a devout dreamer, a great believer in make-believe; she was always searching through detective magazines for my next persona. One time she drew tattoos on my arms with a ballpoint pen, then had me press a pair of scissors to her heart. “Act like Richard Speck,” she told me.
“How do I do that?” I asked.
“Just talk like a drunken sailor,” she explained. “Spit on the floor.”
Another night she made me go outside and cut through a window screen, then slip in and wrap a fancy knot around her neck, all the while confessing that I was the real Boston Strangler. “You need to work on that accent,” she said.
Fantasizing that Robert was my buddy was just another game to her. I turned to go home.
“Hold up, Theodore,” Robert said. The bastard wouldn’t even call me by my real name. “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? No. Shit, we’re gods. Only a god can stop something this big.”
I looked down at Robert’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 sun. 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 told him. “That was like 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 could actually hear their pitiful screeches. They smelled like little whiffs of burnt popcorn.
“Jesus,” Robert 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 like this, he’d 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 exclaimed. “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 Robert’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 killed her this time.”
Robert looked grimly towards the house. “Good,” he said. “Maybe he’ll kill us all. We’d be better off.”
Last Christmas, right after they moved in, Mr. Jenkins beat his wife so bad that her left eye still drooped like a wilted blue blossom. I’d seen her a few times, wrapped in a sheet, staring out the kitchen window.
“Hey, shithead,” Lucy said to me, “you’re not stepping over the line, are you?” Nobody was allowed on their property, especially me. My mom had called the sheriff on Mr. Jenkins a hundred times, but the fat deputies didn’t want to get involved. They wouldn’t even climb out of the cruiser anymore, just turned on the flashing light as they sped on through the holler.
Robert and I both looked down to make sure my feet were legal. Lucy was like the secret police. She had a mouth that wouldn’t quit. The last time she’d ratted her brother out, you could hear his screams all the way to Foggy Moor. “Go spy on someone else,” he told her.
“Just checking,” she said, tossing the toy helmet to the ground. Then she took off and did a flip that made her skirt go over her head. She was twelve, practically a grown woman to a nine-year-old. I could see her crack pressed tight against her white underwear. It looked like the knot in a tree. I wanted to fuck her, though I wasn’t sure what fucking actually entailed. I just knew my mom did a lot of it. Every kid on the school bus said so.
“Dickweed,” Lucy called out to me when she landed.
“Funny,” I said, feeling my face begin to heat up.
“Cockbreath,” she yipped, kicking the toy helmet across the yard. The girl knew cuss words my mom’s boyfriends had never even dreamed of.
“Lucy,” Robert said, “leave Teddy alone! You’re just jealous because I got a friend and you don’t.” Friend? It was the first time Robert had ever hinted that I was anything but his dumb puppet. Maybe my mom was right after all; perhaps all you had to do was pretend something was true and then someday it would be, no matter how fantastic, no matter how fucked up.
Just then a scream erupted from inside the house, followed by a loud crash. When he saw Lucy start running towards the porch, Robert turned and handed me the stick.“Here,” he said. “I better get in there. Aim for their heads.”
“Wait,” I said. I stood there trying to think of something else to say, but we both knew that I was scared shitless of his father. He cocked his head and looked at me impatiently. “Is there anything I can do?” I finally said.
“Theodore,” Robert said, his face suddenly breaking into a crazy grin, “we’re gods, remember? Shit, we can do anything.” Then he turned and charged bravely at the house, pushing Lucy out of the way just before he disappeared through the back door.
I looked down. All of the ants were dead. Robert had destroyed the entire colony once again.
As I started across our yard, some guy with fat sideburns pulled into the driveway in a homemade convertible. He was steering the car with one hand, squeezing my mom’s tit with the other. They were both laughing. When she looked up and saw me walking towards them carrying the charred stick like a smoking rifle, she pulled her blouse back down and waved wildly. Then, jumping out of the car, she kissed the new boyfriend goodbye.
Later that night, she told me that I looked just like my father, at least from what she could remember. She was lying on the bed in her silk robe, the scent of her perfume filling the hot room with roses. Then she tilted her head back and took my hand in hers, guiding a kitchen knife to her throat. “Okay,” she whispered, closing her eyes tight, “who do you want to be tonight?”
Her moist pale skin glowed in the dim light. A moth fluttered madly against the rusty window screen. I could feel her body trembling against the thin, sharp blade. I stood there a long time trying to decide, surrounded by the doomed world I was destined to live in forever, the musty bedroom, the trashy holler, the scorched anthill.
“Teddy,” I finally said, pretending it was true. “I just want to be Teddy.”
