Knockout

by John Jodzio

  “Yep,” I tell Stephen. “I’m Rita, Rita, Rita.”

  Even though it is the middle of winter, Stephen’s sweating. Beads of sweat form under his wispy hair and he wipes them off with his sleeve. The sweat immediately forms again. This time he takes a paper napkin and dabs it away. Unfortunately the napkin is maroon and it leaves a burgundy stain on his forehead.

  “I work in the restaurant supply business,” he tells me. “I can get you stuff at cost.”

  “Wow,” I say. “What stuff?”

  I’ve decided to say everything in this little girl voice, high and squeaky. I notice there are little pockets of spit forming in the corners of Stephen’s mouth.

  “Industrial mixers, pots and pans,” he says. “Professional ovens, pastry racks, ramekins.”

  “That’s incredible,” I tell him.

  “What do you do?” he asks.

  I tell him I’m a pediatric nurse, even though I really work part-time at a sandwich shop. I make up a sick child for my lie too, a boy named Eric who has bad lungs. I tell Stephen all about Eric, how each breath he takes is a struggle, how inspirational he is to everyone in the ward. I tell him how Eric drew a picture of me with angel wings and how I framed it and hung it right above my bed so that each morning I’ll see it and remember how precious life really is.

  “You sound like a saint,” Stephen says.

  “Part saint,” I say, “and part sinner.” I wink at Stephen as I say the word “sinner” and he nearly chokes on his drink.

  The bell rings again and Atomic sits down next to a woman with a dark-brown bob who has a ring on each of her fingers. I flop down in front of a man named Graham. Graham is skinny and bald, with a crooked nose. He tells me he works as an urban planner. He says he has a condo with a view of the river. He takes a cloth from his pocket and wipes off his glasses and I take a tortilla chip from the basket in front of me and put it in my mouth and crunch down.

  “Do you like my mouth?” I ask him. “Some people have told me they really like my mouth. Some people say that it’s the best part of me.”

  “It’s a good mouth,” Graham says.

  Someone has left a cocktail napkin with some questions on it at our table and I start asking Graham these questions rapid fire, not leaving him any chance to answer.

  Where do you see yourself in five years, how do you feel about kids, if I went blind or lost my legs would you stick by me, what is your spirit animal, what’s a perfect day to you, how long is a long backrub, do you have any hang-ups about psoriasis?

  Other than the psoriasis question, these are the kinds of things I often ask Atomic. He gets annoyed at me when I do this, calls me “Magazine Quiz.” Jesus, he’ll say, we might not be alive in five minutes and here you are wasting your time with this?

  When I run out of questions on the napkin, I start making up some questions of my own.

  “How do you want to die?” I ask Graham.

  “Fire,” he says immediately. He seems like he has actually prepared for this question, which I appreciate.

  “Really?” I say. “Me too.”

  “It would hurt for a bit,” he says, “but then it wouldn’t really matter, right?”

  After I’m done with the questions, Graham goes into his bag and pulls out a cardboard tube and spreads some onion skin sheets out over our table.

  “This is my latest project,” he explains. “Here’s the green space, here’s the ample parking. The bottom floor is zoned for mixed use.”

  I can tell he’s testing me, seeing if I like the same things that excite him. So I show him that they do. I run my fingers along the edges of the blue-lined paper. I ask him questions about his project, I smile and nod at his answers.

  “Things get torn down,” he tells me just before the bell rings again, “and then new things push out of the earth to fill the void. It’s like a new tooth cutting through your gums to replace what’s missing.”

  I sit down across from Atomic. His nametag says “Willem.” It has started to peel off his chest, but he presses it back down, smooths it out.

  “Jesus Christ,” he whispers, “I told you to wait outside.”

  “I got bored,” I say.

  “You always get bored,” he says. “What if I got bored with how bored you get? What would happen then?”

  A few months ago Atomic tied me to a chair. He said it was an experiment to help me learn more about myself. When he left to go get some cigarettes, I chewed through the twine he tied me up with, something he hadn’t figured I’d be able to do. The next time he was more careful. He handcuffed me to the door of our refrigerator.

  “You’re going to ruin it,” he says. “You’re going to fuck up the plan.”

  I look around at the other people here, lonely people trying to put their best foot forward, people who weren’t ready to meet someone when they still looked good enough, people who work too many hours, people who drink too much or can’t stop themselves from doing weird shit, like going to grocery stores and breaking all the candy bars in half when no one is looking.

  “Let’s go live in the country,” I tell Atomic. “We’ll open a restaurant. You’ll flip the burgers and I’ll bring out the plates. We’ll grow some weed in the basement of our house and sell it to all the high school kids. We’ll have a kid and name it Atomic Jr. and call it Tommy for short.”

  He shakes his head no.

  “This is going to work,” he says. “It’ll work if you’d just have a little patience.”

  The bell rings twice in a row and the speed dating ends. We fill out an index card to say who we liked best. I give Willem the highest rating, even though I know he doesn’t exist. Graham is my second choice because at least he and I know how we want to die. I watch as everyone gathers up their coats. Some of them look giddy, but there are other ones, ones who haven’t made a match, who slink away. Atomic makes his way over to the bar with the blonde woman with the horse teeth. I sit across the bar from him now, wrapping and unwrapping my coat.

  Don’t, I think, don’t. I try to make this word enter the blonde woman’s brain—get her to stop. It’s not working though, my telepathy; the blonde woman keeps twirling her hair, gulping her margarita. My powers of suggestion are weak and the waiters, dressed in those stupid Cuban shirts, keep cutting through my view, running baskets of chips, huge drinks, sizzling and steaming platters of food, their trays held up to the heavens like they are offering up a sacrifice to some enchilada-loving god.

  “You’ll follow me back,” Atomic told me, “and after I tie her up, I’ll let you in.”

  Don’t, I keep thinking, but this woman isn’t listening. She’s happy to be talking to Atomic, so beautiful and so interested in her. She’s drunk and she’s telling herself this is real. She’s probably telling that to herself over and over because that’s what she wants to believe.

  I run to the bathroom and while I’m there, I think about ruining the plan. I think about walking up to Atomic and saying something like, “I’ve been looking all over for you. Your mother just had a stroke.” Or maybe I’ll just yell at him like I’m a jilted lover.

  When I get back out to the bar there are now two women sitting next to Atomic, the woman with the horse teeth and a new woman with short black hair and glasses. I wonder where she came from, but I don’t have long to mull it over, because all three of them stand up, put on their coats, and leave.

  They walk out the door and down the street, arm in arm in arm. They skip for half a block. What the hell is he doing? Is he going to tie both of them up, bleed both of their bank accounts dry?

  The three of them walk past that coffee shop where I worked for a week before I got fired. They duck into a loading dock. I stand across the street and watch Atomic kiss the blonde woman. After he is finished kissing her, he kisses the brunette. Then the two women kiss. They pull apart and giggle for a second, but Atomic takes the back of their heads and pushes them back together.

  “Whatever you see isn’t real,” Atomic told me
before he went into the restaurant, “whatever you see is just acting, okay?”

  They stumble down the block. Soon both of the women guide Atomic up the steps of a condo. I see the lights turn on inside. I crouch right underneath the window. There are no cars around and I hear the clinking of glassware inside. It’s snowing now, huge flakes.

  I wait for Atomic to tie them up and let me in, but there’s nothing. I wait ten minutes, twenty minutes, still nothing. While I’m standing there, a car pulls up across the street and honks at me. And then it honks again. I hear someone call out for Rita.

  “Rita?” he says again. I do not answer him because that’s not my name. I do not answer him because I’m hiding in some bushes outside a stranger’s condo.

  “Rita?” he yells out. “Everything okay?”

  I climb out of the shrubbery and see Graham sitting in his idling car.

  “I saw you run out of the bar,” he says. “I’m not normally this creepy. I just wanted to make sure you got home okay.”

  I try to look inside the condo, but the blinds are closed. All I can see is the flicker of candlelight; all I can hear now are murmurings, maybe some light moaning. I know that I need to go now, that waiting here any longer will be horrible for me.

  “Hold on,” I tell Graham.

  I grab a piece of landscape brick from a retaining wall in front of the condo and I rear back and throw it through the window. I watch as the glass explodes and then I hear the screams from inside. I sprint to Graham’s car.

  “Drive,” I tell him.

  A few blocks later, I realize I’m still wearing my nametag, “Ms. Rita Johnstone,” and I rip it off me. I crumple it up and throw it out the window.

  “My real name’s Ellen,” I tell Graham.

  Graham turns left, heads back toward downtown.

  “Nice to meet you, Ellen,” he says. “Where do you want me to take you?”

  “Show me something,” I say.

  We drive for a few minutes and then Graham pulls up next to a construction site. It’s about half done, mostly just girders, the outline of what it will be.

  “This is what I’m working on now. It’s an up-and-coming neighborhood,” he tells me. “There’s a coffee shop going up over there. There’s going to be a new grocery store around the corner.”

  Graham gets out of the car and I follow him. We stare through the chain link fence into the construction site. Graham keeps talking and pointing. I’m cold, so I lean into him and he puts his arm around me. The snow has placed a soft cover over everything hard and I close my eyes and turn toward his face and wait patiently for him to press his lips against my lips.

  THE WEDDING PARTY

  Cantwell found the dead horse near the dry creek. There was a neon-green Post-it note slapped on the horse’s flank with the word “Sorry” written on it. The word was scribbled in blue glitter pen and the “o” in “sorry” was shaped like a goddamn heart.

  The early morning sky was orange but would not be for much longer. Cantwell’s bad hip said rain, but his trick knee said no way. He leaned against the hood of his truck and pulled out his cell phone and dialed up Lupe. While he waited for him to answer, Cantwell’s eyes scanned back across the pasture. The destruction started at the county road. Muddy tire ruts that dropped down from the tar. A gaping hole in the west-edge fence. Shitty after shitty spirographed in the pasture grass. The horse lay at the end of a long skid, its ribs bayonetted through its midriff. Around its torso was a pool of blood that hadn’t yet settled into the loam. Cantwell fished the bottle of whiskey he’d dug out of the snake-bite kit and took a long pull.

  “Hello?” Lupe said.

  “When you come in,” Cantwell told him, “bring your digging gloves.”

  Last summer, the owner of the Tanglewood Ranch, Tee Dennison, had transformed the ranch into a wedding venue. With this change, he turned Cantwell into a cowboy who barely cowboyed. Instead of mending fences, Cantwell drove a pickup to the discount liquor store in Kalispell. Instead of loading hay bales, he filled his payload with vodka and beer.

  Cantwell had nearly quit ten times since. Every time he voiced his displeasure, Dennison went into his safe and pulled out a thick stack of twenties. He pushed them across his desk to Cantwell and told him he was sorry but that this was the way it was now. Dennison knew full well that Cantwell had a daughter in college and that he still paid the tab for his ex-wife’s twice-a-week dialysis. Cantwell had a weakness for tax-free cash and he always shoved the money into his pocket.

  It wasn’t just the new job that burned Cantwell’s ass lately. The town of Junction Creek was creeping closer to the ranch. The county had started to parcel out acreage last summer. They divided and subdivided, curbed and guttered. Five years ago, the ranch was the only place for twenty square miles. Cantwell remembered sitting in the field on summer nights, shit-faced, tracing constellations with his index finger, one dot to the next. Developers had ruined all of that. They snaked winding side-walks up to oak doors. They shoved streets signs into the dirt. They put up halogen streetlights that made the stars look hazy and small.

  Cantwell was overjoyed when the housing market went tits up. The developers sent their crews home and now all that remained on the hills above the ranch were house frames. At dusk they looked to him like the old ribs of beached whales, picked over and bleached by the sun.

  “Already got something in your bonnet?” the chef, Jen Purvey, asked as Cantwell trudged back to the truck. He had a bag of quick lime draped over his shoulder and he was short of breath.

  Purvey reached into a plastic storage bin and scattered a handful of croutons for the pond ducks. The birds were already the size of small turkeys. They were so fat that Cantwell suspected that come October there would be no way they’d be able to gain lift-off.

  “Those birds know about that set of fancy German knives you got inside?” he asked. “They know that their next stop is a stew?”

  Purvey handfulled another mound of croutons out onto the crushed rock of the paddock. She was middle-aged and wide-hipped. While Cantwell didn’t like all the turns the ranch had taken recently, she wasn’t bad. Each night there was a plate of grub in the walk-in for him to take up and microwave in his room. Every morning there was a thermos of coffee and a blueberry muffin sitting on a silver tray in the foyer.

  “Me and the birds have come to an understanding,” she told him. “They’ve traded their lives for these easy weeks of day-old sourdough.”

  Purvey walked back into the kitchen and Cantwell went into the barn to get a pickaxe. Still calling it a barn was a misnomer—last year it had been expanded and the stables had been remodeled into a reception hall. The hall was retrofitted with a projection screen and surround sound and a parquet floor for dancing. He and Lupe had built the mounts for the speakers and dry-walled the AV booth. They hoisted and electrified the huge chandelier Dennison had found at the architectural salvage place over in Cut Bank.

  “Change or adapt,” Dennison told Cantwell when he saw his new chandelier hanging down from the rafters. “We change up or our dicks shrivel and die, right?”

  “Speak for yourself,” he told Dennison.

  Cantwell slid the truck through the clumpy fescue back to the dead horse. In his twelve years at the Tanglewood, he had seen a lot of dead shit. Moose and deer and coyotes and foxes. Jackrabbits too numerous to count. Vultures circling dead vultures. Seeing all this dead shit in no way meant he wasn’t squeamish about dead shit. Cantwell still hated how dead shit’s eyes held a glint of life and how sometimes that glint tricked you into staring deeper—into an abyss so deep and so black thick that it stabbed a reminder into your own chest that your own ticker was only half an inch away from irreparable harm.

  He’d lost some weight since his heart attack two summers ago. He’d had to cut new notches in his belt. He still hadn’t bought any new pants and the ones he had puckered around his waist.

  He parked the truck and hoisted himself out of the cab. As he walked to
ward the horse, he caught his shadow in the dirt—his legs looking like a bowed clothespin. If he did not hurry, the flies would catch the scent and descend upon the animal. Cantwell spit his chaw into the scrub and shoved his spade into the dirt.

  There was another wedding happening that night. From where he dug, Cantwell could see two women connecting the aluminum tines for the balloon arch. Earlier that morning, before he’d driven the fences, a man had driven over from Grey Eagle and dropped off the caged doves. Cantwell was responsible for their release during the ceremony.

  “All you need to do,” the guy told Cantwell, loud and halting, like Cantwell was deaf, “is open the door. The birds. Will know. What to do. After that.”

  When Lupe drove up, Cantwell had already scored out a rectangle that was about a foot deep. For a horse, you went eight. At six, a stubborn coyote might dig. At eight, they’d circle the ground and whine, pissed that they could smell the meat, but knowing that it was not worth their while.

  Last summer, whenever he was in the pasture, all Cantwell could hear was the snap of nail guns. Now all he heard was the chirp of the blue jays and the tip of his shovel echoing off the butte.

  “What the hell happened?” Lupe asked.

  Cantwell pulled the Post-it note apology from his wallet. He handed it to Lupe.

  “That absolves everything,” Cantwell said. “Right?”

  Lupe shook his head and handed back the Post-it note to Cantwell. Lupe had just turned twenty-two, worked weekdays cleaning and detailing at Dennison’s Buick dealership in Blood Lake and weekends at the ranch. He was married with a kid. There was another one on the way in a few months. How could someone so young even have a clue that this was the right way to do things?

  “Why didn’t you use the backhoe?” Lupe asked him. “You trying to stop your heart again?”