Knockout (5 page)

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.

C
antwell 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 kissed 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.

A
s 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

W
hen 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.

F
or 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.”

O
ne 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 tromped 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.

“Caruso,” the voice whined. “Hurry up already.”

Jayhole stood with his fists raised waiting for Caruso to charge him again, but instead Caruso just shrugged his shoulders, turned, and walked back upstairs.

I
n July I had a great month selling steaks. I sold them as quickly as I stole them. Some of my regular customers began to make requests for specific cuts of meat and I was more than happy to oblige.

Unfortunately July was also the month that Jayhole lost his job at the office supply warehouse. After an argument with his boss, Jayhole drove his forklift out to the parking lot and gored the side of his boss's car. The cops were called, but Jayhole knew all of them from his bounty hunting days and they let him off with a warning.

“Everyone at work knows when I'm drinking tequila you should keep your distance,” Jayhole told me, “but I guess my boss didn't get that memo, did he?”

Jayhole didn't start looking for a new job right away and so he had plenty of time on his hands. Mostly he filled up his hours by seeing which hard lemonades mixed best with which flavored vodkas, but he also spent a lot of free time playing practical jokes on me.

One night he unscrewed the top of our saltshaker and I dumped a mountain of salt all over my chicken salad sandwich.
On my birthday, he hid my wallet underneath the cedar chips in Stabby's cage and I didn't find it for three days. One time Jayhole spread cellophane over our toilet bowl and when I took a piss, the piss bounced right back up onto my jean shorts. Jayhole's laugh was loud, and sometimes after one of his practical jokes he'd slap me hard on the back and shoulders and the next day my back and shoulders would be sore.

“Could you take it easy on the jokes?” I asked.

Jayhole pinched his eyes together, incredulous. He looked shocked I wasn't enjoying his pranks as much as he was.

“Sure,” he told me. “I had no idea they were bothering you.”

I went to bed that night hopeful Jayhole would stop his practical joking, but the next morning I woke up and found he'd filled my car up with microwave popcorn and lured some squirrels and pigeons inside the car to eat the popcorn and claw and peck the shit out of my dashboard and bucket seats. Jayhole was watching the proceedings from a lawn chair in our front yard, laughing his ass off.

“Dan didn't get my sense of humor right away either,” he told me, “but after a while he thought everything I did was hilarious. You'll come around just like Dan did.”

Inside my car, a pigeon squawked at one of the squirrels. I wondered if the birds and squirrels would leave after the popcorn was gone or if they'd hunker down and try to make my car their home.

“Just get a broom and shoo them away,” Jayhole said. “They won't put up a fight unless they're rabid.”

Before I got the broom, one of the pigeons took a watery shit in my glove compartment. Lately, I'd thought a lot about moving out, but I'd recently taken all the profits from my steak stealing and sunk them into expensive glass beads I was planning to use for my fall jewelry collection. If I was going to move, I needed a few months to scrape together some money for a security deposit.

A
few weeks later, Jayhole started to inject horse steroids into his bad knee. He'd gotten them from a friend who was a trainer at the racetrack. His back acne got immediately worse, but his knee started to feel much better. One day, Jayhole woke up and his knee pain was gone. He tossed his cane into the closet and decided it was time he opened his own bounty hunting agency.

“I've gotta be my own boss,” he explained. “At this point in my life, I'm too set in my ways to answer to another douchebag in a suit and tie.”

To get his body in shape for the grind of bounty hunting, Jayhole lifted weights in our garage. He did yoga, sometimes naked, sometimes not, in our living room.

“I just need a little start-up money to open up shop,” he told me. “I just need a couple of bucks to buy tasers and tear gas. I'm not asking for much, but every single person I hit up for money tells me no.”

I knew exactly what Jayhole was talking about. I was having the same problem getting my jewelry kiosk off the ground. Over the last month I'd asked my relatives for seed money, but no one would help. Most of them gave me bullshit excuses like, “I just got arrested for vehicular homicide,” or, “I finally decided to start paying my child support.” The rest of them were shocked that I had the balls to hit them up for money after all the meat and lingerie I'd stolen from them over the years.