Knockout

by John Jodzio

  “Do I know you?” he asks.

  “Bryce Jordahl,” I say. “I was an altar boy a few years back?”

  Father Hollenbeck pulls a flask from a secret pocket inside his cassock and takes a nip. He’s forgotten to put in his dentures today and his lips look like they’re being sucked into his mouth.

  “I’d remember that,” he says, “but I don’t. Which means you’ve probably been sent here by the devil to confound me.”

  Hollenbeck clears away more dirt from around the coffin. His breath is gamey, full of scotch and garlic. I look at Chet’s gravestone. It’s not in the best of shape. There’s bird shit streaked on it and someone keeps bringing flowers out here but never taking them away. There’s a bale of decaying roses next to Chet’s grave, curled together, smelling like sweet piss.

  “Bryce?” I say, pointing to the name on the stone, “Chet’s brother?”

  “Whose brother?” Hollenbeck asks.

  I notice a bunch of my relatives standing in front of the big windows of the cafeteria, my aunts and uncles, a handful of my cousins, all of them looking down at me. It is way too hot to pussyfoot around, so I grab Hollenbeck’s shovel. Unfortunately, he sidesteps me before I can get a good grip on it and he swings the shovelhead and nails me in the shin. I fall onto the ground and writhe.

  “God’s will is God’s will,” Hollenbeck tells me.

  While I rub my leg, Hollenbeck walks over to the casket. He sticks the shovel under the lid, rocks it back and forth, trying to pry it open. Before he does, I lurch to my feet. I unholster my taser and blast his ass, because priest or no priest, this mofo deserves to be tased. Hollenbeck yelps and his jaw clenches and his eyes bug out of his head and he tips to the ground. He’s still breathing and everything, but he’s just way less interested in digging up my dead brother now.

  “Leave my family the hell alone,” I whisper in Hollenbeck’s ear as I slap the handcuffs on.

  I stuff Hollenbeck into the cab of my truck. My relatives are all looking at me from the cafeteria window. Most of them think I’ve got anger management issues. Most of them think that just because I tased Allen after he stole my burrito from the employee fridge I’m a loose cannon. Most of them think I should’ve been suspended by Jimmy for much longer than a week for blasting my own cousin over something as insignificant as a burrito. I look up at all of them looking down at me with the judgey hazel-colored eyes that dominate my family tree, and I flip all of them off because guess what, fuck what the fuck they think.

  Hollenbeck’s still out of it when I pull up in front of the rectory. His eyes are open, but he hasn’t said a word. I give his cheek a little slap but that doesn’t help. His housekeeper, Ethel, comes out from the house and we carry him to bed. Once he’s safely under the covers, he closes his eyes and starts to snore.

  “He used to be such a peaceful man,” Ethel tells me, “but he’s the exact opposite now. He can’t find any relief.”

  When I get home, Flor is in the backyard weeding around the tomato plants and I walk over and give her a kiss. Today’s our first wedding anniversary. My dad is coming over in a few hours to babysit Antonio and the two of us are going to dinner to celebrate.

  “The birds are back,” she says.

  Even though I call Antonio my stepson, since he’s Chet’s kid, he’s my nephew too. For his birthday last year one of the presents I gave him said “Uncle Bryce” and the other one read “Dad.” I look at him sitting in the shade of the big oak tree in our backyard. There are six crows sitting about ten feet away from him, their feathers pressed tightly against their bodies, their eyes unblinking, watching Antonio play with his Matchbox cars like he’s giving them some sort of lecture.

  “Did you stop shooing them away?” I ask Flor. “Didn’t we decide we needed to keep doing that?”

  For some reason Antonio attracts birds. It’s one of the many weird things about the kid. Whenever he goes outside, the crows swoop down from their perches and park themselves a few feet from where he’s playing. Antonio will hardly say a word to me, but often interacts with the crows, caws at them, whispers things to them under his breath. Flor hopes it’s a phase, but this isn’t any phase.

  “Did we decide to start shooing again?” Flor asks. “I thought we were just letting them be.”

  I don’t have the energy to shoo the crows away from Antonio so I just let them be. I just want to have fun tonight. Flor and I had to bargain with my father for the babysitting help. Even though Antonio’s his only grandchild, the last time he babysat, Antonio told him he was going to die soon, that he was going to have a heart attack. Normally my dad would’ve just laughed a comment like that off, but at the grocery store a few weeks earlier Antonio told August Johnson he was going to drown. August tousled Antonio’s hair and told Antonio that he sure had an active imagination, ha, ha, ha. The next night, on the way home from his dart league, August drove his truck off the Lester River Bridge and his truck sank and his lungs filled up with water.

  “Hollenbeck came back again today,” I tell Flor. “He almost got the casket open this time.”

  I skip the part about tasing Hollenbeck because after I tased Allen over that burrito, after he spent that day in that medically induced coma, after his life was sort of touch and go there for a few hours, me tasing anyone is a sensitive subject with Flor.

  “That poor man,” she says. “I wish there was some way to help him.”

  My father arrives and gives Antonio a halfhearted hug. My dad used to always bring along a little gift whenever he came to visit, a wood car or a Lego set, but tonight he comes over empty-handed. He sits across the room from Antonio.

  “Be nice to Grandpa,” Flor tells Antonio as we head out the door.

  At dinner, I order steak and fries and Flor gets the pasta special. We quickly finish off a bottle of wine. It’s so great to be out of the house on a date. It’s been a while.

  “I can’t believe it’s already been a year,” I say, toasting Flor.

  I’m trying to keep things upbeat, but truth be told the last year has been difficult. A few months ago I came home early from work and found Flor in our bed rubbing an eight-by-ten picture of Chet against the crotch of her jeans. I hadn’t thought about it much before, but it really made me start to wonder—was she happier with Chet than she was with me? Was Chet a better husband? A better lover? It’s hard to compete with a dead man because all of the jackass things he did that have been washed away by time and all the jackass things I do keep on happening every day.

  “It flew by,” she says.

  On the way home, I swing by Beacon Point. As a surprise, I pull out a checkered tablecloth and spread it on the ground. I grab a bottle of champagne from a cooler in my truck, pop the cork. As we drink the lights of the city are below, hazy streetlamps cutting through the darkness. Maybe it’s nothing to brag about, maybe most people don’t give a shit about electricity unless it’s gone, but my family’s responsible for almost everything that happens down there, from lighting the houses, to opening the garage doors, to heating up everyone’s split pea soup. Everybody is always fawning over the police and fire departments, calling them real American heroes, letting them be in parades, buying their charity beefcake calendars. Would they be anything without having the electricity to make their alarms ring, though? Would they be so great if their dispatch radios were dead and they weren’t receiving any of the pertinent details of fires and robberies and murders? Every night I rescue everyone from total darkness and no one has ever asked me to ride on a float.

  I pour champagne into our flutes and clink glasses and take a gulp. Then my cell phone rings. It’s my dad.

  “Let it go to voice mail,” Flor says.

  “It might be an emergency,” I say.

  It’s not really an emergency. A crow has crawled into the house through the heating vents and perched itself on the top of Antonio’s bookshelf. This is old hat for Flor and I, something that happens at least once a month, something we’ve grown accustome
d to, but which is freaking out my dad.

  “Hang tight,” I tell him. “We’ll be home in few minutes.”

  The next day, I’m eating a burrito in the cafeteria when I see Hollenbeck riding away from the graveyard on a moped. He’s got a duffle bag slung over his shoulder and his vestments are flapping behind him in the wind. I run down to the parking lot to give chase, but before I get to my truck I hear the crackle of Vincent’s radio telling me I should get out to Chet’s grave quick.

  When I get there, Vincent and Uncle Jimmy are standing over the grave looking into Chet’s empty casket.

  “I don’t know how Hollenbeck got past me,” Vincent says. “He must’ve cut a hole in the fence or something.”

  I race over to the rectory. Hollenbeck’s sitting on his porch drinking some ice tea. He’s paging through his newspaper like nothing’s happened, like everything’s normal. I bound up the stairs and lift him up by his shirt.

  “Where the fuck are my brother’s bones?” I yell.

  Hollenback laughs at me then, long and hard, a hardy, mocking chuckle, full of garlic from his lunch, and Jesus Christ, something ratchets up inside me and I can’t stop myself, I pull out my taser and blast that fucker, blast him really good this time, crank up the voltage full throttle and hold down the trigger until his cackling stops and that shit-eating grin slides from his jackass mouth and the tears falling down his cheeks combine with his drool sliding over his lips into one long sad gushy river that slides off his chin and onto the floorboards of the porch.

  Luckily for Hollenbeck, Ethel comes outside and slaps the taser out of my hand.

  “What is wrong with you?” she yells. “He’s a helpless old man.”

  Ethel pushes me away and then she gathers up Hollenbeck. All of the color from Hollenbeck’s skin has disappeared, his body looks spectral, so pale, like he might glow in the dark.

  When I get back home, Antonio’s sitting on the front steps. At first it looks like he’s playing with a large stick, but when I get closer I see that it’s a femur. Antonio’s crows are sitting near him in the grass, watching me.

  “Where did you get that?” I snap.

  “From there,” he points.

  I find Chet’s bones in a duffel bag on the front porch. I grab the bag and run out the door. I want to rebury Chet quietly, before Flor sees him again, before any of her old feelings for him are dredged up again. On the way to my car, I try to yank the femur from Antonio’s hands, but he’s got it pulled tight to his chest, won’t it let go.

  “No, Uncle Bryce,” he says. “This is mine.”

  “I’ll get you a different bone,” I tell him. “A leg bone from a bear. Or one from a cougar. But I need this one back now, okay?”

  Antonio shakes his head no, no, no. I don’t have time to bargain with him, to explain how much this might scar him in later life, so I just wrestle his father’s femur away from him. I’m expecting a shitload of tears and howling, but Antonio doesn’t react at all. He looks through me, like he’s in a trance.

  “You’re going to die in a car crash,” he says. “Your truck is going to flip over ten times, but that isn’t going to kill you. Your truck will explode after the crash and you’ll suffocate in the fire, trapped inside.”

  And Jesus Christ, again, it’s just like a reflex, my anger, like a cresting wave that can’t be stopped from flipping itself down onto a sandy shore. Before I can stop myself, I yank my taser from its holster and quickly zap Antonio in the arm because not right now with the death shit, okay? It’s hardly even a tase really, just a little pop, something that might jumble your brain for a second, make your arms go limp so you let go of your father’s leg bone. I let go of the trigger before he even pees his pants, okay? Yes, yes, after I do this I know I’ve done something truly messed up, that I’ve overstepped my bounds as both a parent and uncle, maybe overstepped my bounds as a human being, that I’ve done something awful.

  Antonio is howling now. I think about bribing him with a new bike to quiet him down, but I don’t even get to offer the bribe because Flor sprints downstairs to see what’s wrong. She’s wrapped in a towel, her hair still wet from the shower. I’m holding my taser and Antonio has two fresh burn marks on his arm and it doesn’t take a whole lot for her to add everything up.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “He did his soothsayer thing to me and I overreacted.”

  I kneel down in front of Antonio to give him an apology hug, but before I can wrap my arms around him Flor scoops him up and carries him inside. I don’t get to explain anything about the bones, about Hollenbeck.

  “Go!” Flor screams before she slams the door. “Leave now!”

  For a while, I stand outside our house yelling apologies to the two of them from our driveway. I tell them about how I’ll change. I tell Flor that I’ll do whatever she wants me to do to make this right. I tell her how much I love her and Antonio and how I can’t live without them. I yell out apologies for a long time, but Flor doesn’t unlock the door. I decide to give her some space and so I leave to go bury Chet. Before I go I set the femur on the welcome mat as a peace offering to Antonio. Then I grab the duffel bag with the rest of Chet’s bones and drive to the graveyard.

  After I dump Chet’s bones back into the casket, I shut the lid and use the plow on my truck to push the dirt back over his grave. The bottle of champagne is still in the cooler in my trunk and even though it’s flat, I finish it off while I watch the old men fishing on the banks of the river, their bait slapping down into the water whenever they throw out a cast.

  When I get back home that night, Flor and Antonio are gone. No note, no nothing. I call Flor twenty times, over and over, but she never answers. I flop down on the couch and try to figure out where she and Antonio might have gone. Are they with one of my relatives? At a hotel? As I’m sitting there mulling everything over, the power goes out. It is really weird and eerie when the rattling of the world goes suddenly quiet, when the whirring and white noise that is constantly all around you flips off. I look outside and everything is dark. I pour myself some whiskey and I sit on the couch. After a while I remember there’s a flashlight in one of the drawers in the kitchen. I dig through the drawers. I desperately pat them down. I keep thinking the flashlight is in one of them. I keep thinking the flashlight will be the next thing I touch. I flail my hands around, searching, but I don’t ever find the damn thing.

  WINNIPEG

  I’m on the wrong side of history and I’ve got a vodka-soaked sea sponge shoved up my ass to help me forget. Reichmann’s got one up his shithole too, but Schliess can drink regular and so he’s sipping directly from the bottle of hooch and then passing it to us to douse our sponges some more. We’re hiding in a church rectory outside Winnipeg, all three of us ducking into a large armoire full of vestments whenever we hear the Americans outside.

  We know each other from the military hospital in Saskatoon. My tongue was cut off by an American sergeant who liked to collect tongues; Reichmann’s lips and jaw were blown off at the Battle of Thunder Bay. Schliess can’t talk because there’s something wrong with the way his mouth connects to his brain. The doctors wired my jaw shut and wrapped Reichmann’s head in bandages, leaving only a slit for his eyes. After we all got well enough to sit up, the doctors pushed our beds together and tossed us an old sign language book to share. Then the doctors laughed. We laughed along with them or did whatever each one of us did in lieu of laughing: snorting (me), or stomping our foot on the ground (Reichmann), or laughing regular with a lot of drool (Schliess). We laughed because the Americans had just occupied Montreal and it was only a matter of time before everything that was still considered Canadian collapsed or exploded. We laughed because even though it was only early April, it was already 106 degrees. We laughed because why in the hell would we learn something new when we could just pass our vintage porn mags back and forth to each other and point at some woman’s snatch and give a universally understood thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

  A few days after th
e doctors gave us the sign language book, the Americans shelled our hospital and killed everyone but a few people in our non-talking wing. The three of us hid in the rubble until Reichmann pulled out his sketch pad and drew a picture of a pretty woman with large breasts. He wrote the words “This is my wife!” underneath the picture. Then he wrote the words “She’s in Winnipeg!” Then he underlined both the words and the tits for emphasis. Schliess took the picture and circled her tits and wrote “Does she have any sisters?” and then there was much porkchopping and substitute laughter between Schliess and myself but then Reichmann wrote “I want to see her before I die!” underneath the tits and then there was a long and uncomfortable silence between all three of us that was luckily broken up by an American bomber flying over and dropping some more bombs and us ducking under some convenient pieces of rubble.

  We all knew getting to Winnipeg was a suicide mission, but what the fuck wasn’t? We loaded up our backpacks and started to trudge. All three of us were still in our early thirties, just old enough to remember how the seasons used to change, cursed with enough years on this tumbleweedy Earth to remember deciduous trees and spring breezes filled with scents of cut grass and lavender. When we stopped to rest on that first night, I got into an argument with Reichmann about how our lives would’ve been much better if they weren’t yoked to these idyllic memories of snowflakes melting on our tongues or of us jumping into piles of raked leaves. I told him we’d be much better off not knowing anything other than blistering heat and constantly pitted out T-shirts.

  “If we’d grown up in this perpetual sauna,” I wrote to him in the dirt with a stick, “the heat would feel just fine to us.”

  Reichmann grabbed the stick from me, scribbled his response.