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World Turns
on the little TV I’ve got set up behind the candy case when I see Jake Lowry walking out of the holler past the church. He shuffles along with his hands crammed deep down inside his patched-up bibs like he’s playing pocket pool with himself. As he crosses the road, he kicks at a busted beer bottle lying at the edge of the store lot. Most times I turn the TV off when I see someone coming because I don’t like for people to know I watch soap operas, but I don’t give a damn what Jake thinks. He never has played with a full deck all the time I’ve known him, and people say it’s because he lived so long in the woods by himself back during WWII, hiding out from the draft. Right outside the door, he stops and spits a long string of tobacco juice in the gravel. The screen door slams behind him as he steps inside the store, and he jumps like someone just shoved a cob up his ass. He’s the flightiest bastard I’ve ever seen.
    Jake works the chew in his mouth, lays two arrowheads down carefully on the counter. I open the register and count out some change. Maude gives him forty cents for each one he finds, then she turns around and sells them to the Sinclair man for two dollars. He brings in five or six a week, sometimes more. I lay the money on the counter and Jake pushes a quarter back at me, like he always does. His dirty fingernails are long and cracked down the middle. I slide the glass door open on the meat case and lift out a roll of headcheese. He likes his cut thick, and I adjust the meat slicer. I try not to think about us both eating the same damn thing every day, and what that might mean to a head doctor.
    I’ve been slicing meat so many years now I don’t even bother with the scales anymore. I can hit it within a penny or two every time. After I wrap the gray meat in a sheet of butcher’s paper and tape it shut, Jake sticks it in his pocket. He stands there working his chew, staring at the TV show. Neither one of us says a fucking word the whole time, but I’m used to that. Jake wouldn’t say
shit
if he had a mouthful. I’m lighting a cigarette when Boo Nesser’s car flies past the store and turns in at Tina’s mother’s house down the road. Suddenly, my headache breaks loose again, and I crack open another RC, pop a couple more aspirins.
    As the World Turns
is just going off when I hear car tires crunching on the gravel. A new Cadillac convertible pulls up to the gas pumps with a man and woman in the front seat. Jake leans back against the pop cooler and peers through the screen door. By the time I grab my oil rag, the woman’s already out of the car and taking a picture of the store sign out by the road. It’s just a rusty old Sinclair sign on a metal pole, but underneath the green dinosaur hangs a piece of plywood that says in big black letters WELCOME TO KNOCKEMSTIFF, OHIO. Maude spent a whole day in the back room painting the letters on, trying to get them right, but they’re still crooked.
    The man slides out from behind the wheel and stretches. He’s maybe forty years old, tall and thin, wearing neat gray slacks and a white shirt. A gold chain hangs around his tan neck. He reminds me of one of those soap opera doctors, the way he smiles as he looks around. “So, this is Knockemstiff?” he says, waving his arm about slowly. The Cadillac has California license plates. We’ve had a few people drive through here from other states before, most of them lost, but never from that far off.
    I follow the man’s hand with my eyes, up the dirt lane lined with dusty trees that leads to the top of the holler, then down the patchy blacktop road that runs in front of the store and goes all the way over to Route 50. There’s not a single soul moving about. “This is it,” I say. I wad up the greasy rag in my hand.
    “Don’t seem to be much here,” the man says. He takes a white handkerchief from his back pocket and pats his forehead.
    “Well,” I say, “there’s a church over