Knockout

by John Jodzio

  I pour another glass of wine and then I call the grocery store.

  “I need a bag of marshmallows and a jar of peanut butter,” I tell James. “I need a bottle of tonic water.

  “Give me twenty minutes,” James says.

  I hang up the phone and then I go and check on Mitch and Swayze. I brush Mitch’s hair from his eyes. Swayze’s thrown his blankets aside and I cover him back up. When I’m finished, I walk into the garage. I press the opener and watch the door slide up. The wind moves through the tops of the pine trees and some crows flutter off into the dark sky. I unbutton my shirt, slide off my shorts. I throw my bra aside and step out of my panties. I stand there naked, waiting for James to bump up the driveway. I stand there, waiting for the lights of his car to wash over my pale body. I wait for him to see that even though I’m trapped inside, I’m still free.

  FIELDWORK

  Lessig’s hut was closest to the latrine, downwind from the yucca being fermented in the hollowed-out rubber trees. He was lying in his hammock, itching a rash on his calf and wondering if tonight was the night the Kula were going to come through the jungle with their machetes and garrote his white ass. Three days ago, they’d abducted Tunney, who’d disappeared exactly like Rautins had the week before, without screams or hubbub, his hiking boots set neatly in front of his hut filled with stones from the river. Lessig and Schneider were the only anthropologists in the village now. After the first abduction, Gtal, the chieftain of the Campas, had ordered extra sentries in the watchtower and more warriors on foot patrol, but the increased security hadn’t done dick, the Kula had poached another one of his colleagues. Even though he was less than forty-eight hours away from the supply plane splashing down in the river to ferry him away from this godforsaken place, Lessig knew he was probably fucked.

  Through his window, Lessig saw candlelight in Mada’s hut. He buttoned up his shirt as he walked across the plaza. He knocked on Mada’s door and she grunted for him to enter. Lessig found her sitting cross-legged on the ground, weaving one of those shapeless ponchos he was so goddamn sick of all the women in Los Roques wearing.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he asked her in his broken Utu.

  “Around,” she said.

  “Around where?”

  “Around around,” she sighed.

  Mada’s hut was claustrophobic, one side of it packed with animals whittled from driftwood, the other crowded with baskets of dried fruit. Her bed was like a little girl’s, the surface of it packed with braided palm frond dolls and throw pillows filled with quinoa. She was not particularly pretty, her nose had been broken and never reset, but she had a body that reminded him of a wasp, a skinny torso above a bulbous ass. A month after Lessig arrived in the village, Mada had gotten him drunk on something that tasted like kerosene and she’d pulled him back to her hut and unbuckled his belt with her teeth. Lessig was thirty-seven, newly divorced, his wife, Carol, stolen away from him by a classic rock deejay. After his divorce, he’d taken a leave from the University of Maryland to do some fieldwork and lick his wounds. He’d come to the rainforest to reconfirm his faith in anthropology, to make sure that his life thus far hadn’t been an utter waste, but when Mada yanked his cock from his cargo pants he could not have cared less about any of that crap. Her mouth was wet and a little gritty and he busted his nut instantly, like a schoolboy, Mada pulling away right before he shot his skeet onto the thatched wall of her hut. Lessig tried to laugh it off, but Mada clucked her tongue in disapproval. She stood up and walked to the door, holding it open until Lessig understood that he should pull up his pants and leave.

  In the weeks since, Mada had ignored him. And while Lessig should’ve been pleased that she wasn’t spreading the news of their drunken liaison to any of the tribal elders or to any of the other anthropologists, Mada’s lack of interest in him made his self-doubt blossom. If I could just talk to her, he thought, explain to her that he hadn’t been touched in over a year; explain to her that his performance that night wasn’t indicative of his overall sexual skill set. A couple of days ago, Lessig followed Mada into the jungle, hoping to set the record straight, but she saw him trailing her and lost him by the caves near the waterfall. Now that she was back she wouldn’t even make eye contact.

  “I was worried about you,” Lessig said. “I thought you’d gotten snatched up too.”

  “I had to work out some things,” she told him.

  “What things?” he asked.

  Mada sucked in air through her teeth. She dug her heels into her cocoa shell floor until she hit the hard clay beneath.

  “Things things,” she grunted.

  Mada got up, took a guava from her table and broke it open with her splitting stone. She ate without offering Lessig any. She was a brusque woman, childless, widowed at an early age. During a communal dinner a few weeks ago, Lessig had seen her slap a boy who’d eaten more than his fair share of rice. After she’d finished with the boy, she’d lectured the boy’s mother for her lack of oversight.

  “Everything’s bad now,” Lessig told her. “Tunney and Rautins are probably dead and Schneider and I are next.”

  Mada took out a clay frog necklace from a basket, tossed it to Lessig.

  “Wear this and you’ll be safe,” she told him.

  Lessig still wanted to talk, but Mada was finished. She turned her back to him, returned to weaving her dumbass poncho. Lessig stormed out, slamming the rickety door behind him.

  For his postdoc fieldwork, Lessig had lived in the forests of Papua, growing a gnarly beard and contracting malaria. He returned stateside with rock-hard abs and a sense of purpose, but the last ten years of lecturing in low-slung campus buildings and eating salt-and-vinegar-flavored potato chips had beaten down his vigor. Lessig’s return to the rainforest was a chance to reclaim the enthusiasm he’d lost, but after only a few days of the bugs and heat, he realized he’d made a huge mistake, that he didn’t want to live this hard life any more than his Anthropology 101 students wanted to listen to him prattle on about its beauty and simplicity.

  After Carol had left him, Lessig moved in with his alcoholic father, a retired real estate agent who liked to have his television on all hours of the day and night. While he was living there, Lessig became addicted to the Home and Garden Channel, especially to a show called Curb Appeal. Most nights he sat on the couch gulping wine with his father and his father’s alcoholic girlfriend, Dottie, the three of them watching designers tweak house after house to make them more salable.

  “Lipstick on a pig,” Dottie would say whenever the designers were stuck with a dud. “Like bright red lipstick on a Botox-lipped pig.”

  Sometimes on his way home from work, Lessig drove past his old condo, where Carol still lived. If the weather was decent, he’d park his car and crouch down in the bushes to look in her windows. One night Carol saw him hunched outside and called the cops. Lessig had been slapped with a trespassing charge and then a restraining order.

  “When a wife leaves you,” Lessig’s father explained after he bailed him out, “you find another one. Maybe she drinks more than your last wife. Maybe she’s not as smart. Maybe you realize you made another mistake. Whatever the case is, you make peace with it and trudge forward.”

  When he got back to his hut, Lessig strung the clay frog around his neck and put on a pot for tea. Recent rains had made the river majestic, full of whirling currents. Everyone else in Los Roques had a great view of the water, but Lessig’s hut was behind a thick stand of palms and he could only see a sliver of it. He dropped a bag of Earl Grey into his cup and listened to the macaws bicker. It was midnight, shouldn’t they be asleep? They were not asleep. They were alive and unbidden like everything else here.

  Lessig readied his mosquito netting and wet some Kleenex to stuff into his ears to stifle the sounds of the jungle. This was the one point in his day he savored. A moment of peace in this shitty existence he’d led for the past few months. A moment when he could block out everything foul, when he could shu
t his eyes and dream of convenience, of hot water gushing out of a shiny tap, of his mouth being safe from stink bugs. He’d only filled one of his ears with Kleenex when Schneider pounded on his door.

  “Any word on Tunney and Rautins?” Schneider asked.

  Schneider was blond and tall and twenty-six years old and his skin looked like it did not have any pores. Lessig was stocky and dark haired and had stopped applying sunblock in the last few days in the hopes that a better tan might help him blend in with the natives when the Kula showed up again.

  “The search party got back a little while ago,” Lessig said. “They didn’t find anything.”

  Lessig had tried to hate Schneider but could not. Schneider kept a knife strapped to his belt and had once saved Lessig’s life by scaring away a jaguar that lunged at them while they gathered firewood. He also had a large cache of liquor and weed he readily shared. While Schneider was generally clueless about what it meant to be an anthropologist, Lessig knew he probably wasn’t doing the Campas a huge disservice by acting like a bemused tourist, constantly snapping pictures, overdocumenting everything that happened in the village.

  “Totally fucked,” Schneider said. “One day they’re here and then the next they’re gone. Into the goddamn gorilla’s mist.”

  Schneider had bunked in Lessig’s hut for a week when they’d first arrived. He’d just finished a postdoc at Georgia Southern, which he kept referring to as “a party school.” He brought presents for Gtal, a Georgia Southern hoodie and an expensive pen set, and after he presented his gifts to the chief, Schneider was immediately invited to live in a better hut, one with a wonderful view of the river, one with a female servant, Yelma, who sometimes cleaned his hut topless.

  All of them had contaminated the tribe, Lessig knew, all of these anthropologists, coming year after year to study the Campas’ innocence, even though they all knew that studying innocence was the one thing that always ruined it. When Lessig’s department chair suggested he do his sabbatical in Los Roques to recharge his batteries, he talked about a world where traditions were passed down like heirlooms, people doing the same exact things in the same exact way their ancestors had a thousand years ago—sharpening rocks into spear tips, binding thatch to keep out monsoon rain, catching tarpon in woven baskets—and while all those things ended up being real, Gtal was also parading around in an oversized Georgia Southern hoodie.

  “They were cutting apart a parrot outside Htul’s hut a few minutes ago,” Schneider told him. “Some fertility thing to help Htul’s wife conceive. Lots of blood.”

  Schneider held up his Nikon to Lessig, scrolled through the pictures of the blue and yellow bird, first with two wings, then one, then none, then its head lopped off and bleeding out in the white sand. The last picture was a grinning selfie of Schneider’s face inches away from the bird’s head.

  “Two more days,” Schneider yelled back to Lessig as walked away. “Two more days and then that plane splashes down, brother.”

  The next morning, Lessig woke to find a pile of dead fish stacked like a teepee outside his door. Inside the fish teepee were his spare hiking boots, filled with what looked to be butter. Schneider came over to look, circling around the fish teepee with his camera, snapping pictures. Lessig kicked the pile of fish over so he would stop.

  “I’m trying not to freak out here,” Lessig yelled at Schneider. “I’m trying not to freak out even though there are fish stacked outside my hut like a fucking teepee and my boots are filled with some sort of butter or butter substitute.”

  “You’ve got to stay calm,” Schneider said. “We’re stuck. We wouldn’t stand a chance out in the forest alone.”

  Lessig knew that Schneider was right. It was a four-day walk to a passable road through Kula-controlled forest in blinding heat. They could die any number of ways—caught in a foot trap, withered by dehydration, bitten by a deadly spider, buried in a mudslide.

  “Do you want to watch Yelma clean my place?” Schneider asked him. “It always helps calm me down.”

  Lessig picked up one of the dead fish and hurled it like a discus into the river. He scooped some of the butter out of his boot with his fingers and flicked it onto the ground.

  “You got any of that weed left?” he asked Schneider.

  Later that afternoon, Lessig and Schneider were wasted out of their gourds. They were watering the garden plot when the search party came back from the jungle. Schneider and Lessig walked over to the group and watched as Bartik dumped Rautins’s head and Tunney’s hand out from his satchel. Rautins’s head had been shrunken to the size of a cantaloupe. Tunney’s hand was the opposite—it looked like a catcher’s mitt, swollen to five times its normal size. Rautins’s mouth was held in a scream, his eyes full of fear. Tunney’s wedding band was still around his ring finger, cinching it like a twist tie.

  “That’s a head?” Lessig yelled at Bartik. “That’s a hand?”

  Bartik nodded, showing no emotion. It was all the same to Bartik. Huge hands, tiny heads. Just another day in the jungle.

  Schneider pulled Lessig back to his hut. “We’re gonna make it,” Schneider told him, stuffing his one hitter and putting it into Lessig’s palm.

  “Sure we are,” Lessig said as he inhaled.

  That night was windless and Lessig stared out his window, tracking any strange sounds or weird movements in the brush. There was a bonfire down on the beach tonight, the night patrol chucking log after log into the fire pit until the blaze touched the sky. Across the plaza, Lessig saw there was candlelight in Mada’s hut. He knew he should stay put, but he finger-combed his hair and grabbed the spear Htul had given him for protection. He was about to knock on Mada’s door when he heard giggling. Lessig knelt down, peered into inside through a small crack in the thatch door. He saw Mada lying naked in her hammock and Schneider sliding around the room, snapping picture after picture of her.

  “You’re a natural,” Schneider cooed.

  Schneider kept taking pictures, pausing occasionally to pose Mada in different positions or fluff her hair. Soon Mada got out of the hammock and pulled the camera from Schneider’s hands and kissed him. Schneider wrapped his arms around Mada and licked her nipple and her moan echoed around her hut.

  In the way they touched each other, Lessig could tell that this coupling wasn’t new, that their desire was not concocted through alcohol or loneliness. He could tell they had touched each other before, a bunch. He gripped his spear tighter, thought about bursting into the hut and pushing it up to Schneider’s throat, making the two of them explain how this had happened. Lessig watched Mada pull down Schneider’s pants. She pushed him down on her floor and straddled him. While he stood there, a sharp puffing sound came from the trees and Lessig felt a sharp pain in his arm. When he looked down, he saw a blow dart sticking out of his shoulder. Before he could scream for help, his legs buckled under him and he fell face first into the sand.

  When Lessig opened his eyes, it was morning. He was bound, his arms and legs hog-tied to a long pole. He was bouncing up a mountain trail being carried by two Kula warriors.

  “Where are you taking me?” Lessig yelled, struggling against the ropes.

  The two men stared forward, stone-faced. Off in the valley below, Lessig could see trees being felled by chainsaws, bulldozers scrapping the forest floor clean. He heard chanting up ahead and he was carried into a clearing. About a hundred warriors were kneeling down in front of a stone altar. There was an idol carved in the altar that looked like some strange combination of a parrot and a pig.

  “Please,” he pleaded. “I can get money. I can get you anything you want.”

  Lessig was held down and lashed to the altar. A priestess lit a bundle of palm leaves and circled around him, wafting the acrid smoke around his face. She mumbled as she pointed to the construction below, mumbled as she held her hands up to the sky in prayer.

  The math wasn’t hard for Lessig to do. He was being sacrificed to a god who would try to keep the bulldozers at bay, who
would try to stop roads from being grated and paved, power lines being snaked from pole to pole.

  “I can help stop them,” Lessig screamed to the priestess as she walked back to her hut. “Me. Not your god.”

  Lessig strained against the ropes, bucked his body up and down. The warriors started to chant, pounding their spears on the ground.

  “I can help you,” he screamed as the Kula surrounded his body, his words echoing off the mountain top and then returning back to where he lay.

  INSIDE WORK

  There was a tiny man mowing my lawn. Mowing the lawn was my husband David’s job and when he left I let it grow. David had been gone two months now and the grass was almost as high as the birdbath. At night, I sat on my porch and drank Mexican cough syrup and marked its progress. As I drank I imagined there were huge snakes inside that vast thicket—poisonous snakes writhing around in there with their poisonous snake babies. Now there was this little guy, cutting everything down.

  “Did my husband send you?” I yelled.

  The man was rail thin and about five feet tall. He wore a white tank top and black jeans. It looked like he had a teardrop tattoo below his left eye, but as I got closer to him I realized it was just a teardrop-shaped piece of dirt.

  “Ma’am,” he said. “I sent myself.”

  I watched him as he loaded the lawn mower into his truck. He was chewing on a red cocktail straw, really working it over. I’d seen him around here before; he cut a few of my neighbor’s lawns too.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Ronnie,” he said.

  “Ronnie, you’re positive no one named David Hallberg hired you for this?”

  “Lady,” he said. “I saw this mess and I cut it down. And now I’d like my twenty bucks.”

  I pretended to cough, and then to soothe my pretend cough I took a long swallow off my bottle of cough syrup. I was doing what any sane person would do in my circumstances—I was drinking large amounts of cherry-flavored cough syrup and interrogating anyone who crossed my path for any information they had about David.