Knockout (2 page)

B
y the time the boy comes back with the ladder, the raccoon is dead and the house is caked in blood.

“Keep Brunell busy,” I tell him. “Don't let her go back to her room until I can get this crap cleaned off her window, okay?”

I grab a bucket and a sponge and climb up the ladder. While I'm scrubbing, I can't help but look inside Ms. Brunell's room. There's a black bra hung on the doorknob. Her bird-watching binoculars are lying on the bed. There's other stuff there too, weird things. Laid out on the desk are a dozen pictures of Masoli's daughter, April, when she was younger. There are also a few pictures of Ms. Brunell, Masoli, and April on the desk—one of them standing in front of the Grand Canyon. In another, the three of them are standing on the deck of a cruise ship with the endless blue of the ocean behind them. Ms. Brunell's suitcase is open on the floor next to her bed and I can see now why it was so heavy—it's filled with a couple of handguns, a tent, some cans of food. It's taken me a minute to connect the dots—that Ms. Brunell is actually April's mom, that she's Masoli's ex-wife, that she's here to steal April—but when I do, I quit cleaning the blood off the window and scramble down the ladder to tell Masoli.

B
efore I can get over to Masoli, he starts up his lawn mower. And while I'm running toward him I hear a loud crunch, one of the rocks I've tossed into his yard hitting the blade. There's a puff of
blue smoke and his mower grinds to a halt. Masoli flips it over, sees a huge gouge in the blade and a rock that matches the rock from my driveway. When he looks up, he sees me coming toward him—drunk and out of breath, raccoon blood smeared down the front of my shirt. April is jumping rope in his driveway. When she sees me, she stops.

“Turn your ass around,” Masoli tells me.

I keep walking toward him. He tells April to go inside and then he marches toward me, his hands already clenched into fists.

“Get out of my yard now,” Masoli says.

“Hold on, hold on,” I say. “I need to tell you something.”

I hold my palms up to show him I mean no harm, but Masoli doesn't care. He shoots his right fist through my palms and hits me in the mouth. I feel my teeth dig into my tongue and the bones in my jaw slide upward and I taste blood. I grab my face and topple to the ground in a lump.

As Masoli is walking away from me, the boy flies out of our front door. He screams as he leaps on Masoli's back, flails at Masoli's chest with his spindly arms. The boy gets in a couple of good shots before Masoli tosses him off and stomps back inside his house.

“That motherfucker is going to get his,” I tell the boy as we lie there in the grass. “Don't you worry about that.”

“Okay,” the boy says. “Sure.”

There's conviction in my voice, but not in the boy's. I can tell he's tired of defending me. I want to explain to him how this time was different, how my intentions were pure, how what happened was unprovoked. I want to tell him I was trying to help but things went sideways. I keep my mouth shut because I can tell that no matter what I say, he's already grouped this together with all the other dumb things I've done.

A
fter the boy is in bed, I lie down on the couch in the living room. Around midnight Ms. Brunell comes downstairs. It's windy outside; it's getting ready to storm. The room is dark; she doesn't notice I'm lying there. I could say something, try to intervene, but I don't. I let whatever's going to happen, happen.

After she walks out the door, I twist off the top of a bottle of Beam and pour out a couple of fingers into a lowball. I stand on my front porch as the rain grows harder, the wind stripping the leaves from the trees. At some point I know I'm going to need to go down to the basement and spread out bath towels where the foundation leaks. After that I'll need to set a bucket in the upstairs bathroom to collect all the water that drips from the ceiling. Ms. Brunell is dressed in all black, black hoodie, black stocking cap. She pries open Masoli's basement window with a crowbar and slips inside his house. When she slides out the front door a few minutes later, April is asleep in her arms. I watch her drive away and then I take a piece of scrap paper and write the boy a note that says “Steak and Eggs for Breakfast.” I write it in big, dark letters and I leave it on his bedside table so he'll be sure to see it right away when he wakes up.

KNOCKOUT

W
hen I was in rehab, my roommate Tommy showed me how to knock out animals by pinching a spot on the back of their necks. I mostly practiced on the rehab cat but I also practiced on the overnight counselor, Jeff, who sort of looked like a cat. Sometimes I would sneak up behind Jeff and touch him on the neck and he'd zonk out. The rehab place was near a zoo and after we'd knock out Jeff, Tommy and I would steal the keys to his Corolla and drive over there. One time we found a ladder and knocked out a giraffe. That was probably my favorite time at the zoo. The giraffe was very elegant in the way it fell, slowly dropping to its knees and then gently tipping over on its side with a slight puff of breath.

A
fter I finished my stint at rehab, I moved back home with my father. He'd been an insurance salesman, but he'd recently retired. Now, for a hobby, he taught archery to poor kids. Last summer, when I'd been on drugs, he shot me in the thigh with
an arrow. I remember that he was trying to teach me some lesson about life. It must not have been very profound, because I could not remember what it was. All I remembered now was the sound of that arrow entering my thigh. It went ffffffftttt. Maybe that was the only lesson that he was trying to teach me. That an arrow entering into your thigh goes ffffffftttt.

I still hung out with Tommy a few nights a week. My father would not allow him inside our house though. He said Tommy reminded him of the all the bad stuff that I'd ever done. Like that time I totaled his Buick as I drove to the pawnshop to sell his coin collection. Or that time I accidentally pitchforked that duck that sometimes waddled into our backyard looking for bread crusts.

“Tommy and I are keeping each other clean,” I explained. “In rehab, everyone had fake spiders crawling on them, but Tommy and I had fake ants crawling all over us. We bonded over that shit.” “He'll let you down,” my dad said, loading a bunch of arrows into a quiver to take down to the community center. “Or you'll let him down. Letting people down is the only thing you two really have in common.”

Even after a couple months of staying sober, my father wouldn't accept Tommy as my friend. One night when Tommy picked me up, my dad ran outside and shot an arrow in the driver-side door of his truck. I apologized to Tommy, but he waved me off.

“People have shot arrows at me before,” Tommy said, “and they probably will again.”

L
ately Tommy and I hung out down by the river. We'd gotten tired of going to the zoo long ago, and the time we'd tried to pick up women at the local pet store by knocking out those chinchillas had been an absolute disaster. Instead of going to AA meetings, we wrestled on the banks of the river to see which one of us
could knock the other one out. Once when I knocked Tommy out I pulled down his pants and wrote the word “Jackass” across his ass cheeks in black marker, and the next time he knocked me out he wrote the word “Dummy” on mine. This continued on for the next couple of months, back and forth, sometimes one of us drawing a very funny and detailed picture on the other's butt cheeks or writing a few sentences about our state of mind. Each time I got knocked out I went home and pulled down my pants and pondered Tommy's writings or his cartoons in my bathroom mirror and I thought about how hilarious this whole situation was and how good it was to finally find someone who liked the same things I did. It was great to finally be able to communicate some of my struggles with another human being and also have something interesting they thought be written on my body a few days later. Tommy's writings and cartoons were often very poignant and thoughtful. I really wished my father could see this side of him.

“We're not going to wrestle tonight,” Tommy said one night when he picked me up. “We've got a job to do.”

“What job?” I asked.

Tommy usually drove with his knees so he could gesture with his hands while he talked. Now he turned toward me and slapped me on the shoulder. At first I thought he was trying to knock me out, but this was just a regular, friendly shoulder slap.

“We're going to steal a tiger and then sell him to this guy I know,” he told me.

T
ommy turned down a driveway and I saw a small house behind a thin stand of trees. He shut off his headlights but kept the car creeping up the driveway.

“This is it,” Tommy said. “The guy keeps a tiger in a cage in his backyard, but he doesn't feed it enough. It's a totally bad situation.”

I tried to get a better look inside the house, to see if it looked like there was anyone at home. There were no lights on, but I knew that didn't mean a damn thing. Most tiger owners I knew liked to sit at their kitchen tables and clean their guns and knives by the light of the moon, and I could only assume this tiger owner was exactly the same, sitting in the dark and waiting for that time when he could use those super-clean guns and knives on anyone who tried to steal his pet.

“After we knock it out we're going to throw it in the back of the truck,” Tommy told me. “And then we'll drive over to Randy's. He's going to keep the tiger in his basement to scare the shit out of people.”

Tommy grabbed the bolt cutter and I followed. I was scared, but mostly what I was thinking about was how we'd get paid some good cash for this and how it would be great to slap a stack of bills down in front of my father and how that stack of bills might prompt my father to finally say he was proud of me.

We walked over to the cage and Tommy was right, the tiger didn't look good. The fur on its chest was rubbed raw and one of its eyes was glassed over with a cataract. His breath kept catching in its throat. The tiger brought its head up to the bars of the cage and I scratched him behind his ears.

“Quit dicking around,” Tommy said. “Do it already.”

I reached in the cage and pinched the back of the tiger's neck and he slumped over. Tommy opened the lock and we hauled the tiger to the truck.

“W
hen we meet Randy, you need to be cool, okay?” Tommy told me as we drove. “Don't be your normal dumbass self.”

I hadn't planned to say a word when we got to Randy's house, because who hadn't heard a story about a stolen tiger deal going
sour and someone getting shot up? In my neighborhood you heard these kinds of stories all the time. I knew to keep my mouth shut.

We pulled into the driveway and Randy came running out of his house. It was pretty cold outside to be shirtless and barefoot, but it didn't look like it was bothering Randy all that much.

“Where's my guy?” he yelled to Tommy. “Where's my guy?'

The tiger was still out cold, his tongue lolling around. I could see where muscles had formerly filled his body, where his fur lay slack.

Randy ran his hand over the bare spots on the tiger's fur, then he slid his fingers up the tiger's neck. He shifted his fingers around a couple of times. Then he did it again. He shook his head.

“This tiger you brought me doesn't have a goddamn pulse,” he said.

Tommy put his fingers on the tiger's neck, shifted them around.

“It was alive when we stole it,” he said. “It must have died on the way here.”

“You brought me a dead tiger,” Randy said as he walked back toward his house. “When you bring me a live tiger, you get your meth.”

Tommy hadn't said anything to me about us stealing the tiger in trade for drugs. I wondered if maybe Randy was mistaken, that maybe Randy had misunderstood Tommy when they'd struck their deal.

“Don't worry,” Tommy told me. “I'll get this straightened out.”

Tommy followed Randy inside. While I waited, I looked at the tiger. I felt bad about what we'd put it through, what everyone had put it through, that its last moments of life were bumping around in the back of a pickup instead of chasing down a water buffalo on the savannah. A minute or two later, Tommy walked out of the house, smiling.

“I don't know about you,” he said, holding up a dime bag, “but I'm sick of everything being stupid and boring.”

Tommy shook some of the meth onto his knuckle and snorted. He held out the baggie to me. I also hated how boring and stupid our lives were now. More than that though, I hated how sometimes life threw you a curveball—how you thought you were going to make some money selling a stolen tiger to make your dad proud, but then all the sudden there were drugs instead of money and then you were probably going to relapse mostly because you didn't want to disappoint your best friend who had recently drawn a very funny cartoon about an octopus on your ass cheeks that would not come off your body no matter how hard you scrubbed.

“Before we go on this bender,” I told Tommy, “before this all happens, we need to bury the tiger.”

“No problem,” he said.

W
e drove back to my house and I snuck inside the garage and grabbed two shovels. Once when I was high I'd stolen my father's old riding lawn mower. I pushed it out of the garage and started it up when I was a block away so he didn't wake up. I drove the mower down the street, right up to the door of the pawnshop and sold it for eighty bucks. My father had bought another lawn mower recently and I ran my hand over it as I walked by, thinking how the new one was probably worth way more.

Tommy and I had decided to bury the tiger by the river. We'd dig a hole and then maybe one of us would say some kind words. After that, after our shoulders ached from digging, we'd get high and drive to the bars downtown. We'd planned all this out already, but when I got back to the truck, I saw Tommy hoovering a line off the hood. The bag was already half gone.

Tommy threw his hair out of his eyes and looked at me. “You're judging me, aren't you? I can feel your judgey-ass eyes all over me.”

“I'm not judging you,” I said. “I just want to get this tiger in the ground before you get too paranoid to dig.”

“You're not going to even get high,” Tommy said, pressing his index finger into my chest. “You'll puss out. When it comes to it, you'll start rubbing on your six-month coin and then you'll run to a goddamn meeting and everyone there will say you saved yourself when you ran away from me.”

I slapped Tommy's finger away from my chest, but he grabbed onto my forearm. I twisted it away, but then Tommy dropped down and hooked my leg. As we wrestled, I tried to slide my arm around to the back of Tommy's neck to knock him out, but he smacked my hand away. He shoved me down on the front lawn and tried to jump on top of me, but I stuck my foot out and kicked him square in the gut. Tommy reeled back against the truck and stood there for a second catching his breath. As he stood there, a large paw rose up from the payload and slashed across his jacket. Tommy fell forward and I watched as the tiger leapt from the truck and onto Tommy's back. Tommy started screaming and I ran toward him and smacked the tiger in the ribs with the shovel. The tiger was stunned for a second and he rolled off Tommy. But then he charged at me. I dropped the shovel and ran, but he snagged my pant leg with his paws. I kicked at his face, but then he got a hold of my other leg. The tiger began to reel me toward his mouth.

“Knock him out!” I yelled to Tommy, “Knock him out!” But Tommy was gone, running down the block, not looking back.

The tiger pulled me closer, clawing its way up my body. I thought I was done for, but then the motion lights on my front porch kicked on and the entire yard lit up and then there was my father striding toward me, holding up his compound bow, and then ffffffftttt, one into the tiger's chest, and then ffffffftttt, one splitting the tiger's forehead, and then fffffffftttt, one last arrow into my thigh, deep, deep inside there, so I would never forget.