by John Jodzio
“I wanted to sweat,” Cantwell said. “And I was pissed. Now I don’t know what I am. Mostly sweaty, I guess.”
“You want the backhoe down here?” Lupe asked.
Cantwell shook his head no. “This here is what we call environmentally friendly,” he said. “We’re saving the boss tons of money on his carbon credits.”
Lupe got the pickaxe from the truck bed. He tied a rope around his trailer hitch and tossed it into the hole. He hopped down next to Cantwell and began to loosen the rocky ground near where Cantwell was sticking his shovel.
“Dennison heard about this yet?” he asked.
“For all I know, he’s the son of a bitch that wrote the dumbass apology,” Cantwell said.
After his heart attack, Cantwell had turned into an insomniac. He figured it was partly due to his heart’s unstable rhythm and partly because he felt like everything around him seemed to have been pulled away from its moorings.
There was a new town named Whisper Rock, a couple of towns over from the ranch. All the building facades were reproduced to look like a whitewashed version of America. There were draped flags and wraparound porches on all of the houses. It had been done horribly. The one time Cantwell had been to the hardware store to buy a new chainsaw, they didn’t have one. The whole town felt creepy and false, calling too much attention to what it tried to mean.
In Cantwell’s mind, no one ever recreated the past right. Things like this, the way things were and had been and were not now, this was, as far as Cantwell could tell, even though he knew full well it was a stupid damn thing to ponder, was what kept him up at night. That and sitting there in bed waiting for his heart to explode.
The wind picked up and Cantwell caught a whiff of the dead horse. The smell would soon make its way toward the paddock and the balloon arch. Once it got there no amount of citronella would make it disappear. Cantwell’s eyes were pinched and itchy from the dust. He was kept up by the previous night’s nuptials. The guests had hooted and hollered underneath his window until late into the night. No matter how loud he turned up the calming ocean sound on that noisemaker that his sister, Lily, had sent him for his last birthday, Cantwell could not fall asleep. After an hour in bed staring at the ceiling, he got up and pushed a chair over to the window and watched everyone dancing below him. He’d tried a window fan before the noisemaker, but the whirring had irritated him—he always thought that he heard voices whispering to him underneath the hum.
“How many guests tonight?” Cantwell asked.
“Two hundred,” Lupe told him. “Bride and groom were high school sweethearts or some damn thing.”
Cantwell wiped his brow with his shirt. This was where the digging got tough—all hard clay and bitten rock. He stepped on the shovel and it spun away from him and flopped on the ground.
“You sure this isn’t deep enough?” Lupe asked.
Cantwell didn’t answer him. He picked up the shovel and stuck it back into the earth. He dug until he could only see the sky and the lip of the grave above him and then he told Lupe they were done. Cantwell used the snowplow attached to the front of the truck to push the horse into the grave. Then he pushed all the shoveled dirt back into the hole. When the hole was full he drove the truck back and forth over it to tamp it down.
“You bartending tonight?” he asked Lupe.
“I’m here until this shit ends,” Lupe told him.
Cantwell spent the rest of the afternoon running around the ranch putting out the small logistical fires. The florist needed help connecting rose bunches to the balloon arch. The sections of the wedding cake needed to be transferred from the decorator’s minivan and into the kitchen’s fridge.
“You eat lunch yet?” Purvey asked him. She pulled out a chair from her desk, told him to sit. She placed a sandwich in front of him. She made him low-fat, low-cholesterol meals, something he knew he should eat but, left to his own devices, never did.
“You hear that the police caught a van with a ton of copper from the houses up on the hill the other night?” she asked. Purvey lived in Junction Creek in a small apartment. She had invited Cantwell there for dinner one night. He’d felt her wanting something from him the moment he walked inside the door. It was too small and too warm and she had too big of a smile on her face. After he’d eaten dinner, he had faked a migraine and gotten the hell out of there. She’d invited him a couple of times since, but he’d been ready with excuses.
“Saw it all,” he told her. When Cantwell heard the sirens and the flashing lights, he got out his telescope and watched the entire thing play out. The state troopers crouched behind their cars and drew their shotguns on the van and the men filed out of the van with their hands held high above their heads, then the troopers wrestled them to the ground, handcuffed them, and shoved them into their squad cars.
Cantwell ate his sandwich quickly, thanked Purvey. He found Lupe setting up chairs for the ceremony.
“Are the doves ready?” Lupe asked him. “The photographer just asked me.”
Cantwell found the photographer in the paddock standing with the bride. The bride was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, but her hair and makeup were already done. Standing next to her were two blonde girls with their hair in ringlets. They were all clearly sisters. All of them had dress bags draped over their shoulders. They held shoeboxes in their hands.
“We fell in love with this place,” the bride told the photographer as she walked into the bridal suite. “After we saw it, there was no other place we wanted.”
Usually Cantwell was too busy to watch the ceremony, but since he was responsible for the doves, he dressed in a gray suit and stood in the back. After the vows, when the music for the recessional started, he pulled the latch on the cage and shooed the doves out. He walked over to the dining room and helped finish setting up the tables for dinner. When that was done, Cantwell took three beers from the bar and leaned against the fence and drank.
Just after dinner, the bride came out from the dining room with a glass of champagne. She was walking with her sister. Both of them looked drunk and happy. They moved over and stood near Cantwell. The bride’s sister lit a cigarette and drifted over toward the paddock. The bride stood near Cantwell. She smelled like hairspray and cake frosting. There were tiny beads of sweat on her upper lip.
“I had to get away for a couple of minutes, you know?” she said.
The dance had started now and through the windows of the barn Cantwell saw a bunch of young people jumping up and down. It always looked strange to see people moving like this without being able to hear the accompanying music. They looked like they were flailing around without any sort of rhyme or reason.
“I’m doing the same damn thing,” he told her.
The girl took a sip of her drink. She reminded him of this woman he’d known before his ex-wife. Some girl he’d met at a bar once in Tulsa who kept on playing the same Steely Dan song on the jukebox over and over.
“You’re Jason’s uncle, right?” the bride asked.
“Am I?” he said.
“I’m so sorry about your wife,” the bride said.
Cantwell paused. He did not know whether or not he should go forward with this lie, but he wanted some company.
“Yes, yes,” he said, shifting his gaze toward the ground. “It’s been pretty difficult this last little while.”
The bride put her arms around him and gave him a hug. She pulled back and took her palm and cupped it around the back of his head. She placed her forehead against his.
“Save a dance for me,” she told him.
Cantwell usually called it a night after the dance began. Tonight he did not leave. He leaned against the bar and Lupe kept his gin and tonic full. Dennison had left for the night and the catering manager was working in her office. Cantwell had no clue how many drinks he’d had by now. Ten? Twelve? At some point the bride came over to the bar and pulled him onto the dance floor. She leaned her head on his shoulder and he spun her around. When the song ended, she ki
ssed him on the cheek.
“It’ll get better,” she told him. “It just takes time.”
Cantwell nodded to her, then turned and made his way out through the side door. The dancing had loosed something in his gut and he steadied himself on the aluminum siding of the barn. There was a clear view of the hills from here and he saw that there were more bright lights up there by those houses, more men gutting them of their remaining aluminum and copper. Cantwell wished he was younger and stronger. He wished he had a tank full of gas and a bandolier full of ammo. He wished he still knew some badass motherfuckers.
As he stood there, he felt the salt rise in his throat and he buckled over and puked.
As he stumbled away, Cantwell pulled out his wallet. He went over to the bride and groom’s convertible. He stuck the Post-it note to the windshield of their car.
Sorry. It was in that jackass blue glittery handwriting. He stood staring at it. Would the bride even see it? Would someone else pull it off the windshield before they drove away? Would someone think that it was just garbage and crumple it up and toss it into the wind?
Cantwell left the car and moved off toward the creek. The crickets were chirping at a quick enough pace to let him know it was still warm enough to bed down outdoors. He walked until the lights from the ranch fell away then he flopped down in the grass and closed his eyes. He hoped for the bride and groom’s convertible to ride down the road soon. He wanted the sound of tin cans clattering down the blacktop. From this far away that sound would not be annoying. He figured it would sound like wind through chimes, something that might help you drift off into a long and uninterrupted sleep.
DUPLEX
When I was thirty-three, my mother died and I had to move out of her rent-free basement. At first I crashed on my brother’s couch, but then a bunch of his wife’s bras and panties went missing and I got blamed. Next I lived in an apartment above a laundromat but there was a mysterious bra and panty fire in my bedroom and the landlord kicked me out. After the apartment, I rented a room at the Starlite Motel but then my ferret, Stabby, killed the owner’s cat. At that point I was running low on cash so I crashed in the backseat of my Corolla. One night I went to a bar for free happy hour tacos and played darts with a man named Jayhole. Jayhole told me he was looking for a new roommate because his old roommate, Dan, had recently passed away.
“Dan fell off a bridge,” Jayhole said. “Or maybe he jumped. He didn’t leave a suicide note so nobody really knows for sure.”
Jayhole was a large man with a barrel chest and a short ponytail that resembled a salt and pepper turd. He’d been a bounty hunter for twenty years but then he’d gotten shot in the kneecap. He walked with a hitch, but he had this wicked cane with a bunch of writhing snakes on the handle that made it look awesome to have a fucked-up leg.
“Do you wanna take a look at Dan’s old room?” he asked.
I was five foot eight when I wore my tallest shoes. I weighed 150 pounds when I wore my heaviest coat. I’d recently grown a scraggly Civil War–style beard to hide my weak chin, but people kept on telling me that the beard made my face look even more horsey than it normally did.
“I’d love to,” I told Jayhole.
On the way over to his place, Jayhole told me more about himself. He was forty-five years old. He drove a forklift at an office supply store. He’d been divorced twice and had a teenage daughter he hadn’t seen in years.
“That’s too bad,” I told him.
“I heard through the grapevine she’s a total bitch,” he said, “so no big loss.”
I offered up some tidbits about myself. How I sometimes stole steaks from grocery stores and sold them door-to-door from a cooler in my trunk. How I’d recently taken a jewelry-making class and was planning to open a kiosk at the mall to sell some of my mind-blowing earring and necklace designs.
We pulled up in front of a duplex. It was brown stucco and there was a rusted basketball hoop out back. Jayhole lived in the bottom half of the building. He gave me a quick tour of the apartment, the kitchen, the bathroom and its claw-foot tub. In the living room, there was an aquarium with a boa constrictor inside it. There was a piece of paper taped to the aquarium that read “Hi! I’m Strangles.”
“We’re not supposed to have pets,” Jayhole said, “but the landlord is old and he never comes around.”
We walked down the hall to Dan’s old room. Dan’s single bed and his dresser were still sitting there. Some of Dan’s old T-shirts, which looked about my size, hung in the closet. The room smelled like incense, not death.
“It’s four hundred dollars a month plus utilities,” Jayhole told me. “What do you think?”
I quickly weighed the pros and cons. Had I showered in the sink of a Burger King bathroom that morning? Yes. Did my car reek of steak and ferret? Uh-huh. Was I going to die just because the guy who lived here before me died? Probably not.
“It’s perfect,” I told Jayhole.
For our first few weeks, Jayhole and I got along great. I made him a shark’s-tooth necklace and he gave me a punch card from a bagel place that only needed three more punches to get a free sandwich. One night I grilled him a stolen sirloin and he showed me his scrapbook.
Jayhole’s bounty hunting scrapbook was full of pictures of him standing next to bail jumpers he’d tracked down over the years. In the pictures, he was always smiling and laughing and the people he’d brought to justice were always frowning and bloody. In some of the pictures, Strangles was draped around Jayhole’s neck like a scarf.
“It looks like you loved your work,” I told him.
Jayhole stared out the window into our backyard where a stray dog was nosing through a garbage bag. He scratched behind his ear and some flakes of dead skin floated down among the crumbs on the kitchen floor. It wasn’t difficult to see Jayhole missed the rush of bounty hunting, that it was his one true calling, that he hadn’t found anything that would ever replace its powerful and enticing high.
“I don’t want to sound like some sad sack yearning for lost gridiron glory,” he told me, “but those were absolutely the best days of my life.”
One night I brought my tackle box of jewelry-making supplies into the kitchen to work on some new broche and stickpin designs. Jayhole saw me sitting there and got his storage tub of pictures and scrapbooking materials. For the rest of the night we worked side by side, him with his glue stick and me with my soldering gun. While we worked, Jayhole told me stories about the people in his scrapbook.
“This guy tried to get away from me by climbing into the ductwork of an auto parts store,” he said, pointing to a picture of a man with two swollen eyes and an ear that was partially torn off. “He didn’t think I’d go up there after him, but I tossed Strangles up into the vent and that dude jumped down real quick.”
Each page of Jayhole’s scrapbook held a picture of someone who thought they could outsmart him, who thought they could disappear off the grid. I didn’t have any sympathy for these dopes. I often liked to imagine them sipping a piña colada at a beachside bar thinking they’d gotten away scot-free until Jayhole leapt out from behind a palm tree, yelled “Surprise!” and tasered the shit out of them.
While Jayhole showed me some more pictures, the man who lived in the upstairs part of the duplex, Caruso, started to tromp around above us. Caruso was a fat, pasty guy who occasionally deejayed birthday parties and weddings. He had an English accent that disappeared whenever he was angry or drunk. Both Jayhole and I hated him. Whenever Caruso walked around or danced to one of his new mashups our ceiling shook and the pots and pans on our stovetop rattled. Jayhole had spoken to him a number of times about wearing noise-dampening slippers or simply walking around less, but Caruso never listened.
“Stop tromping!” Jayhole yelled up at him through the ceiling. “Stop deejaying, quit making your stupid mashups and dance jams!”
Jayhole took an aluminum tentpole that was sitting next to the refrigerator and he pounded it on the ceiling. A minute later Caruso tromp
ed down the front stairs and into our kitchen.
“Gimme it back,” Caruso yelled, poking Jayhole in the chest with his index finger. “Gimme it back right fucking now.”
Jayhole handed me his beer and then he reeled back and punched Caruso in the mouth. Caruso tumbled into the radiator.
“Give you what back?” Jayhole asked.
Caruso stood up and bull-rushed Jayhole. Caruso was ugly enough not to care what happened to his face, which was a lucky thing because Jayhole’s next punch smashed into Caruso’s nose and sent him sprawling back into the wall.
“There was a Tupperware container in my fridge,” Caruso said, spitting a rope of blood out onto our linoleum. “And there was a piece of tape with the word ‘Aphrodisiac’ written on the container. I paid good money for it and I want it back.”
I was actually the one who’d stolen Caruso’s aphrodisiac. A few days ago, I went upstairs to borrow an egg and found Caruso’s apartment door wide open. When I walked inside, I found him passed out on the couch. He didn’t have any eggs in his refrigerator so I took the Tupperware container instead. Right now it was hidden in the mini fridge in my room. The aphrodisiac was dark red—it looked like it was mostly made of beets. I knew I should ration it for when I finally found a girlfriend, but I’d started to eat spoonfuls of it before I went to bed because I loved the sex dreams it gave me.
“What do you need it for?” I asked Caruso.
“There’s a girl staying with me,” he said. “And she likes that sort of thing.”
I had a hard time imagining what kind of woman would date pig-nosed Caruso, with his pasty skin and his English accent that kept disappearing and reappearing. I was wondering why I couldn’t ever find a woman at any of the bars or apartment buildings where I sold my steaks or why the women who I chatted with online never actually showed up for our dates. As I watched Caruso and Jayhole circle each other, I heard a women’s voice call down.