Dynamite Hole / Real Life
These stories were first published in the STORYCUTS series by Vintage Digital 2011
Taken from the collection Knockemstiff.
Copyright © Donald Ray Pollock 2008
Donald Ray Pollock has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
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Cover
Copyright
Dynamite Hole / Real Life
Dynamite Hole
Real Life
Backmatter
We hope you enjoyed these stories. If you want to read more stories by Donald Ray Pollock, try his other contributions to the Storycuts series such as
Hair's Fate / Knockemstiff 9781448128938
Holler / I Start Over 9781448128983
Bactine / Giganthomachy / Pills 9781448128945
Alternatively, read the original parent collection, Knockemstiff 9781409000969.
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.
NOWADAYS I RECKON MOST PEOPLE WOULD STARVE TO