Knockout

by John Jodzio

  The grasshoppers throw their reedy bodies off the walls while Vic and I try to sleep. I’ve pleaded with corporate to move us to another hotel. I’ve held my phone out and let the accountants listen to the grasshoppers’ constant chirping. Instead of moving us, corporate sends us earplugs, mosquito nets, two cans of Raid.

  “Hope for a cold snap,” Spiros, the manager of the Acropolis, says. “Pray there’s a late frost that kills the bastards.”

  I don’t blame Spiros. He’s like us, he’s not the owner, he’s the help. He lives in a tiny room behind his office, sleeps on a pullout couch. He’s going out of his mind too. A few days ago I saw him trying to chase the grasshoppers out of his room with a torch made from a magazine.

  The pool is usually empty in the mornings, but today I find a girl curled up on one of the chaise lounges. She’s young, early twenties. Her legs are covered up by a satin jacket from Ari’s King of Clubs, the strip club down the street. When I dive into the pool, she opens her eyes.

  “What time is it?” she asks.

  “Too damn early,” I say.

  The girl has a wide mouth I want to be generous, but probably isn’t. She slides off her cutoffs to reveal bikini bottoms and then she drops into the pool. She swims a few laps then hops out and towels herself off. I’m probably never going to see her again unless I say something to her right now.

  “You just swam in my tears,” I blurt out.

  I can tell she’s probably used to men blurting out strange things in her presence. She stares at me for a bit, gathers herself, her face slowly tightening into a smile.

  “Sometimes I come here to rinse off the drunken stares of hundreds of horny men,” she tells me before she grabs her stuff and hightails it to her car.

  Our ops center is down the street from the Acropolis, in a renovated shoe factory. Whenever the air conditioning kicks on it smells like leather and glue. I complained about this to corporate, told them the chemical smell gives us migraines, makes us dizzy. Instead of finding us new office space, they sent us some pine-scented air fresheners and a box of Dramamine.

  “Nothing new on the wire,” Foot Nose yells out to Vic and I when we walk in. “Quiet as shit.”

  Foot Nose looks like a fetus; he can’t grow a proper stakeout beard. The hair on his face is patchy, mostly coming in around his cheeks. He’s been working overnights this week, twelve hours straight, fueled by Red Bull and Hot Cheetos. Right now his forehead is so oily I can almost see my reflection in it.

  Grimace sits on a metal folding chair, puking into a garbage can. Grimace is pushing sixty, pear shaped, too old for this shit. Every time I walk by his computer, instead of clicking off porn, he clicks off pictures of beachfront time-shares.

  “Take a sick day, vodka tits,” Foot Nose yells over to him.

  Grimace responds to him by puking again. His puke is green and leafy and it smells like when you stick a shovel into the wet ground and flip over the dirt underneath. He’s told me if it was up to him, he would’ve retired long ago. It’s not. He’s dragging three divorces behind him. He’s got a kid in college, one in diapers. He’s going to be working until he’s eighty.

  While I type in my log data from yesterday’s run sheets, I occasionally glance over at Grimace. He lies down on the floor, pulls his knees to his chest, moans.

  “Retire already, you assface-looking mofo,” Vic says, chucking a soda can at his head.

  This morning Vic and I park the surveillance van outside Kristoff’s warehouse. We’ve bugged his house, hacked his email, tapped his landline and his cell. The DEA keeps assuring us Kristoff’s a huge player in the Southern drug trade, that he’s smuggling guns up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Unfortunately for us most of his phone calls are with his wife, Lani. The DEA wants us to parse their words for code, but there’s no code there. They’re talking like a married couple talks. We’re out of toilet paper, we’re out of milk. Can you pick up my blood pressure medicine at the pharmacy? Should we drive over to the mall this weekend and pick up that daybed we’ve been thinking about? These are conversations I used to have with Autumn. There’s no code here, the words only mean what they mean.

  The headphones in the van reek of barbeque sauce. While I listen to Kristoff gab with his wife, I can’t help but wonder what Autumn talks about with her new boyfriend, Randall. Randall’s a personal trainer, so maybe the two of them talk about his rock-hard abs. Or maybe after they have tantric sex they discuss the aerobic benefits of tantric sex. Or maybe they talk about sweet things, like how many kids they’re going to have or how goddamn long it took them to find each other and how sad and lonely they were before they met.

  Before I left the motel this morning, I stuck Autumn’s panties in my jacket pocket. I pull them out and wipe my brow with them, just to see if Vic notices. He doesn’t notice the first couple of times, but the third time he catches me.

  “Are those panties?” he asks.

  “Huh?” I say. “What?”

  “Lemme see those,” Vic says.

  I push them back into my jacket pocket, but Vic wrestles them out.

  “Whose are these?” he asks.

  “I stole them,” I say.

  “You stole them?”

  “I stole them. Right out of the dryer at a laundromat.”

  Vic stretches them taut and then flicks them out the window onto Kristoff’s lawn. I jump out of the van and scoop them up.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Vic asks. “You steal a pair of panties and that’s the pair you steal?”

  This morning Vic borrows a fan from Spiros. He unscrews the safety grate from the back of it. He sets the fan on high and flicks grasshoppers into it. My bulletproof vest is crumpled on the floor nearby, getting pelted with bug shreds.

  “This can save your life,” Vic says, picking it up and tossing it at me. “Have some fucking respect.”

  I brush it off. Out the window, I see the girl from the other morning sunning herself down by the pool. The last time I was here her hair was brown, but now it’s dark red. I do fifty push-ups, put on my swimsuit, and head down there.

  “Here for your morning cry?” she asks after I walk through the gate.

  “You here to wash off your men?” I ask.

  I swim a couple laps while she sits in the sun. Before she goes, she sets a card by the side of the pool. It’s a coupon for Ari’s, two bucks off a beer or a buck off a mixed drink.

  “If you come to see me dance,” she says, “then the next morning you could swim in both your tears and your glances.”

  I go into the bathroom at the ops center to wash the grease of my face. Grimace is in there already, standing in front of the mirror, pulling down the skin under his left eye. There’s fresh puke in the garbage can. This round is black and sludgy.

  “You ever gonna get that checked out?” I ask.

  “What for?” Grimace says. “I’ve always had a weak stomach.”

  “That seems like more than a weak stomach,” I say.

  “If you knew me,” Grimace tells me, “you’d know this is standard procedure.”

  I glance inside the garbage can. What came out of Grimace looks like something that should not come out of a human being. It looks like something that might spill out of a chassis.

  “Abrodabo called again today,” he tells me. “Sounded like he was calling from a golf course.”

  Abrodabo is our supervisor. He was hands-off for the first few weeks of our operation, but he’s tightening the screws more lately, checking in hourly, pushing us hard to find dirt on Kristoff.

  “What did you tell him?” I ask.

  “I told him Kristoff’s a pro,” Grimace says. “I said we’d be lucky to get him for jaywalking.”

  Foot Nose and I partner up today. We drive to Kristoff’s house and use the parabola mic to listen to him chat with his wife about her bunions.

  “Are you going to get the surgery?” he asks.

  “It’s gonna hurt,” she says. “And then there’s the li
mping. I’ll be limping around the whole summer. Who wants to be limping all summer?”

  “You’re limping now,” Kristoff says. “Maybe this makes it better? Maybe after two months you don’t limp anymore for the rest of your life.”

  When you get divorced you’re supposed to be able to throw yourself into your work. You’re supposed to be able to disappear into the long hours and forget what ails you. Unfortunately this job is too lonely, too introspective, too full of shitty fast food for me to do that at all.

  “How much longer you think we’re stuck here?” Foot Nose asks.

  There are rumors that Kromberg’s profits are down this quarter, scuttlebutt that our CEO just cashed in his stock options, chatter that the DEA won’t be renewing our contract. Vic and Foot Nose are paranoid, sure that we’re all about to get canned. Both of them are sending out feelers, but I can’t summon that kind of energy yet.

  “I miss my girlfriend,” Foot Nose tells me. “I miss her titties.”

  He opens his wallet and shows me a picture of her. It’s a grainy photo. She’s naked in it, these big floppy tits hanging down nearly past her stomach. Her tits are secondary to the sadness I see in her eyes. I’ve been duped again, that’s what she’s thinking.

  “What do you want from me here?” I ask.

  “You say she’s pretty,” Foot Nose says. “And then I say thanks.”

  “Fine,” I say. “She’s a total knockout.”

  “Isn’t she though?” Foot Nose says.

  I rub the binocular calluses on my nose as I watch Kristoff massage his wife’s shoulders. He and his wife have made it through the tricky parts of marriage, the years when there are options, when temptations can pop up from anywhere. Foot Nose pokes me in the ribs.

  “What now?” I ask.

  “When I fall in love,” Foot Nose says, snatching the picture of his girlfriend out of my hand. “I stay in love.”

  I wake up choking on a grasshopper. It is midnight and I can’t get back to sleep. Instead of going for a swim, I walk over to Ari’s King of Clubs. I sit near the stage and drink whatever ten-dollar beer they set in front of me.

  “Give it up for Eleanor,” the DJ yells and the girl from the pool struts out on the stage. She’s wearing a stars-and-stripes bikini. As she dances, her ponytail whips around. I set down a couple of bucks on the stage and she snatches them up. When her song ends, she sits down next to me.

  “Eleanor’s not a stripper name,” I say.

  “It’s my real name,” she tells me. “I make way more money than anyone with bullshit names like Chastity or Angel.”

  I see Grimace over at the bar, sitting alone. In this light, his skin looks green and his teeth look gray. The girls, even the real hustlers, aren’t hounding him.

  “You want a table dance?” she asks.

  “Sure,” I say.

  Autumn had a lot of curves, was thick in the right spots, but Eleanor is a piece of balsa, thin and flexible, her ass about as big as both of my palms spread. She grinds on me and the pain in my back disappears.

  “Another one?” Eleanor asks when the song ends.

  I hand her another twenty, point over at Grimace.

  “Give that guy over there one,” I tell her.

  I follow Kristoff alone today. He goes to the Asian buffet where he likes to eat lunch a couple of times a week. After the buffet, I follow him to the barbershop for his weekly haircut. Yesterday, Vic and I spent all afternoon watching him supervise the roofing crew that reshingled his house. I got a headache from the echo of the nail guns, had to lie down in the back of the van to sleep it off.

  When I get back to the ops center, Grimace and Foot Nose are unhooking all our surveillance equipment, tossing everything into boxes.

  “Corporate called,” Vic says. “We’re shuttered. DEA’s sick of paying us for nothing.”

  I drink a beer while Vic and Foot Nose book flights home. I drink a couple more while Grimace packs up his car. Everyone is leaving immediately, but I’m going to wait until morning. Foot Nose is on the phone with his girlfriend, whispering and giggling. I think about calling Autumn, but I know I’ll need to get drunk first.

  I want to see if they all want to grab a drink before we all split up, but I know to not even ask.

  “Maybe our paths will cross again,” Grimace says, shaking my hand.

  After I go for a swim, I put on my bulletproof vest and Autumn’s panties under my clothes. When I walk into Ari’s, Eleanor is giving a fat guy a lap dance on a couch by the back wall. When she finishes, the fat man gives her a long, uncomfortable hug. I order a drink, down it, order another. Eleanor walks over to me.

  “Is Eleanor actually your real name?” I ask her.

  She goes behind the bar and gets her wallet, hands me her ID. It says “Eleanor Tricando” on it. “There’s your proof.”

  While she’s shoving her ID back into her wallet, a picture floats out of it, lands onto the floor. I pick it up. It’s a picture of a little boy, with a wide smile, floppy brown hair.

  “Yours?” I ask.

  “Yep,” she says.

  She reaches for the picture, but I pull it away from her, hold it above my head.

  “I should tell you he’s cute, right?” I say.

  She jumps up and down, slaps at my wrist. I’m only teasing, but her face turns hard.

  “I don’t care what the fuck you say about my kid,” she says. She motions to the three bouncers by the door.

  “You fucked with one of our ladies,” the biggest one says. “That means your night is done.”

  The man’s voice is weary, like he’s been here since noon, like he just wants to head home to his family.

  “Time to go,” another one of the bouncers says.

  The three of them start to push me outside, but I decide I’m not going anywhere, that I want to talk to Eleanor some more. They wrestle me to the ground, kneel on my back. I know I should cut my losses, go limp, let them chuck me out in the street. I don’t go easy. My mouth is right next to the ankle of one of these guys and I bite him hard, dig my teeth into his skin until I hit bone. The guy screams and jumps off my back, but the other two bouncers start wailing on me, kicking and punching. My vest doesn’t do shit to help. I feel every blow.

  CANNONBALL

  Lisa’s father was shot from a cannon once. It was on Circus of the Stars. It’s twenty years ago now, when her dad was playing Dr. Lance Turner on the soap opera Sunset Beach, but he still likes to watch his grainy videotape of it whenever he gets wasted.

  In the video, her father wears a white jumpsuit and a silver helmet. He sheds his red cape as he climbs up the stepladder. He slides into the cannon, gives a thumbs up to the crowd. There’s a long drum roll followed by a thunderous boom. Suddenly, bursting through the gray smoke, flying up into the night sky, is her father.

  Usually when he watches this tape, Lisa gives him his space. Tonight though, she plops down on the arm of his recliner and watches his descent. She watches him overshoot the landing net and fly past the bales of safety hay. She sees his body slam down on the hard and unforgiving earth, sees him tumble head over heel, shattering his left shoulder, dislocating his right elbow, breaking both ankles and his hip.

  “Maybe there’s a movie on?” she says.

  Her dad takes a swallow from his lowball while she slips on her jacket. He hits rewind.

  “And maybe you should stop dating your weed dealer,” he tells her.

  Eric’s her weed dealer and sort of boyfriend. Their date tonight is part work and part fun. A week ago Eric tore his Achilles playing beach volleyball and he asked her to drive his car out to the swamp to buy his weekly brick from his wholesaler.

  “It’s a two-hour drive,” he tells her, “but it’s scenic.”

  In exchange for chauffeuring him, Eric will pay her three hundred dollars. He’s also promised to cook her dinner. He’s the one who first called this a date, but Lisa is the one who keeps calling it that.

  When she pulls up i
n front of his apartment building Eric hops over to her car. When she signed his cast last week it was totally blank, but when he gets into the passenger seat she sees that it has filled up and that her well wishes have disappeared underneath a drawing of a dragon torching up a blunt.

  “You ready for an adventure?” he asks, holding up a bag of beef jerky.

  She’s trying to let Eric’s enthusiasm for life work its charms on her. Instead of questioning his motives, she’s letting things flow to wherever they’re naturally going to flow. She’s not obsessing over each word he says, she’s not revealing all her needs and concerns too early on.

  “Up for anything,” she says.

  They drive north. She doesn’t leave Tampa much and she’s forgotten what it’s like in the swamp, every leaf and tree battling for its own sunlight, vines choking anything moored to solid ground.

  She brought some Trivial Pursuit cards along to fill the silences. She memorized all the answers beforehand so she’ll look smarter than she is.

  “What president once sang ‘Amazing Grace’ with Willie Nelson?” he asks.

  “Jimmy Carter,” she answers.

  “What Italian liqueur is made from bitter almonds?” he says.

  “Amaretto?” she says, the lilt of a question in her voice.

  After a couple more correct answers, Eric tells her to take a left turn. They bump down a dirt road.

  “Over there,” Eric says, pointing to a trailer perched on the edge of a pond. When they pull up the red rock driveway, the door of the trailer pops open. Eric’s wholesaler, Terry, walks out, wearing a stretch-marked tank top that’s so tight Lisa can see the darkness of his belly hair underneath. Three dogs, German Shepherds, their coats caked with mud, jump around him and bark.

  “This your girl?” he yells out to Eric.