Knockout (9 page)

“Time for bed,” their mom tells them.

The girls fall asleep to the noise of Jerry's drill in the next room and the lonely sighs of truckers calling out for company. When they wake up the next morning they find the old bathroom door draped over their bodies, keeping them warm.

ALLIANCES

I
bring a bag of balloons and a mini helium tank to the park. My dog Tater takes a crap by the basketball court and I pick it up with a baggie. I blow up a bouquet of balloons and tie the baggie onto them and then Tater and I sit on the park bench and watch everything float away.

As we sit there, a homeless man flops down next to us. He's wearing cutoff camouflage shorts and a T-shirt with the words “Cabo San Lucas” on it. There's a paper clip and some rice caught in the man's long beard. He's a bruiser, large biceps and big thighs. He's perfect.

“Excuse me,” I say, “would you like to form an alliance?”

The man looks me over. I've just turned fifteen. I'm dressed like a skater, even though I don't skate. I've gotten sick of trying to grow a moustache, so I've just penciled one in.

“Is this some sort of dicksuck thing?” he asks. “Because I'm not down for anything dicksuck.”

“It's the furthest possible thing from being dicksuck,” I say. “The furthest possible thing.”

The man pulls a bottle of whiskey from his backpack and takes a swig. He takes off his shoe and reconfigures his sock.

“Would this alliance get me some of that helium?” he asks me.

We're sitting near a water fountain that looks like a big dandelion. The fountain was recently shut down by the city because people kept getting caught having sex in it. I can see the fountain from the window of our apartment. I miss its soft lighting and the people who used to grope underneath its spray.

“You'd get all the helium you could ever want,” I say.

The man runs his tongue over his chapped lips. He's not looking at me at all; he's staring right at my helium tank like I'm not even there.

“Then we've got a deal,” he says.

I shake his hand and hand him the tank. He puts the release valve up to his mouth and inhales. I watch as his eyes roll back in his head.

“My name's Frankie,” he says to me in a very high voice.

W
hen I get back to my apartment, my sister, Ellen, is sitting at our dining room table. She's wearing sunglasses. She has a cardigan sweater draped over her shoulders. She's running her fingertips over my mother's old braille book,
Braille for a New Century
, moaning gently like my mother used to moan whenever she read braille.

“Are you still pretending to be blind?” I ask.

Ellen just turned twenty-two. She became my legal guardian two years ago, after my mom died. For a long time it was just Ellen and me and it was wonderful. Then she met her new boyfriend/acting coach, Cal, in an acting chatroom and a few days
later he just showed up at our apartment with his suitcase. Now, through a variety of week-long method acting exercises, Cal is training Ellen to become a world-class actress. Last week Ellen pretended to be deaf. Before that she wore a hockey helmet and was mesmerized by jingling keys. The week before that, she wore an overcoat and talked with a British accent.

“Who's your new friend?” she asks me.

I see my binoculars on the kitchen counter and realize she's been spying on me.

“If you're blind, how did you see what I was doing in the park?” I ask.

Ellen's hands graze over the bumps in the braille book lightly, like she's playing a harp. She chuckles a little—like there's a joke her fingers just relayed to her brain.

“My other senses are heightened,” she tells me. “That's what happens when you lose one of them. The other ones step up.”

Ellen taps her way over to the refrigerator with my mom's old cane. She slides her hand inside the fridge and rummages around exactly like my mother used to rummage. She opens a jar of pickles, pulls one out, and takes a snapping bite.

“That guy in the park asked for directions,” I say. “That's all it was.”

Ellen makes her way out to the living room. On the way there, she smacks me in the shin with her cane. Hard. Her face shows no emotion. It's like she'd smacked a parked car or an ottoman.

“Sure,” she tells me, “sure.”

W
hen Ellen goes to the grocery store, Tater and I turn on the TV and watch our favorite reality show. There's a very exciting race happening. To win the race you have to paddle a log boat out to a totem pole in the middle of a river and then you have to shimmy
up the pole and grab a red flag. Whoever does this the fastest won't have to eat beetles for dinner.

While we're watching, Cal comes home. He takes off his coat and walks into the living room. He stands right in front of the TV, blocking our view.

“Didn't we already talk about this shit?” he asks.

Cal and I talked about this shit last week. He sat me on the couch and gave me a stern lecture about how reality television is killing legitimate acting, how television is killing legitimate theatre, how everyone only wants to watch dumbass people doing dumbass things and if I watch them doing these dumbass things, I am, by extension, a dumbass.

“I guess we're going to do this the hard way,” Cal says.

I watch as he lifts up the television and carries it over to the window. He leans it on the ledge and pushes it out. I run to the window just in time to see it crash down on the parking lot below.

“Doesn't that feel better?” Cal asks me. “You're freed from your yoke.”

After he says this he opens his arms like he wants to give me a hug, like he's trying to be my new dad. Instead of a hug, I take a swing at him. It's an awkward and telegraphed punch from a gangly, weak arm and he ducks it easily.

“Not a good idea,” he says, putting up his fists and starting to circle me. “I've been taking stage fighting classes for years.”

He circles me for a few seconds and then rifles a punch into my stomach. I buckle over, out of breath. Luckily, before he can get in another shot, Ellen comes home.

“Everything okay in here?” she asks.

“Just a little roughhousing,” Cal tells her. “No big deal.”

T
he next morning, Tater's sick. One minute he's eating his kibble and then the next minute he has a seizure. I carry him over to Ellen's bedroom and bang on her door.

“It's Tater,” I yell.

The door swings opens and Cal stands in front of me in his underwear.

“Something wrong with your little doggie?” he asks.

I can tell from his voice that he's involved in this, that it's revenge for me taking a swing at him yesterday, that it's revenge for simply existing in my sister's life. I see Ellen behind him, lying on the bed in her bra and panties, wearing her sunglasses.

“Please help,” I ask her.

Ellen gets up from the bed and slowly taps her way over to me. Tater's breath is shallow and then it stops.

“What's the matter?” she asks, like she can't see that his eyes are shut, like she can't see he's not breathing, like she can't see the black foam that's gurgling out of his mouth. I hold Tater's limp body up to Ellen's face like he's a sacrifice and she's some old-timey god who can snap her fingers and bring him back to life. There's a dead dog right under her nose, but Ellen does not step back, her nostrils don't flare.

“What's wrong?” she asks.

I
wrap Tater in a fleece blanket and put him in a wicker basket and bring him to the park. I blow up a big bouquet of balloons and tie them onto the basket. I write him a note that says “I will miss you forever” and then I let him go.

Frankie makes his way over to me and we stand side by side as Tater floats away.

“That was a nice ceremony,” he says. “He'll obviously be missed.”

We watch Tater move south, toward the ocean. Frankie takes
a sip from his bottle of whiskey, then he hands it to me. I take a swallow.

“Where do you think he'll end up?” Frankie asks.

I tell him about the local elementary school that puts their school's phone number on a scrap of paper inside the balloons and lets them go. I tell him about how they get calls from faraway places, places you'd never imagine a simple balloon could get.

“They get calls from Peru,” I explain to him. “From Russia. From Kenya. They get calls from everywhere.”

W
hen I get home, Ellen bangs on my bedroom door with her cane.

“Was your friend lost again?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say. “But I gave him the directions he needed.”

“I could smell the liquor all the way from here,” she says. “It was like you two were sitting right next to me sipping on your bottle of hooch.”

I want things to go back to how they were. I want Tater's warm body lying at my feet. I want to relax on the couch in my apartment with my sister while we watch our reality shows together, while we talk about how this or that strategy could work or backfire on someone, while we discuss how this person is a bastard or how that one is nice.

“I saw Cal with another woman,” I tell her. “A blonde. I heard Cal call her ‘honey' and saw him slap her ass.”

After I say this, I see Ellen's eyes bulge a little, but she catches herself quickly, focuses them on a spot on the wall above my shoulder.

“You're lying,” she says.

“Ask him,” I say. “Just ask Cal and see what he says.”

T
he next morning, I go to the party supply store and I purchase two large helium tanks and a bunch of balloons. I roll all of this stuff over to Frankie in the park.

“No helium until later,” I tell him. “Okay?”

Frankie nods. I walk back to my apartment building and kneel down in the bushes by the front stairs. The window of our apartment is open and I can hear my sister yelling at Cal.

“He says he saw you with her,” Ellen says. “He described her in detail.”

“He's a liar,” Cal tells her. “He's jealous of what we have. He wants you back and he wants me out of here.”

“You're still seeing her, aren't you?” she asks. “You said you weren't but you just can't stop.”

There's more yelling and then the door slams and Cal bursts out the front of our apartment building. I slide out of the bushes and walk up behind him with a two-by-four.

“Hey, Cal,” I say.

Cal turns around to see who's calling out his name and before he can lift his arms to protect himself, I swing the board and nail him on the temple and he crumples to the sidewalk.

F
rankie comes across the street with the wheelbarrow and we throw Cal inside and roll him over to the park.

“We're all set,” Frankie says.

I see the hundreds and hundreds of balloons that Frankie has blown up.

“Is this going to work?” Frankie asks. “Is he too big?”

We tie balloon bouquet after balloon bouquet onto the wheelbarrow. For a while we think it's not going to work, that Cal's too heavy, but soon he lurches a couple of inches off the ground. We tie one more bunch of balloons onto the wheelbarrow and then Cal lifts off, climbing up into the air, over the trees.

I turn and look up at my apartment window. Ellen is standing there, looking down at us through her binoculars. I push the helium tank toward Frankie.

“Knock yourself out,” I tell him.

Frankie puts the nozzle from the helium tank up to his mouth and inhales.

“Your turn,” he tells me.

I wave him off, but he won't take no for an answer.

“All right,” I say. “Just this once.”

I take the nozzle from Frankie and put it up to my mouth. I take a deep breath in. I see Cal floating out over the city, higher and higher, heading out toward the ocean.

Soon Ellen runs out of our apartment building, not using the cane, not wearing her sunglasses. When she gets close, I call out to her. I yell out to my sister in a voice that is my own but that is also much higher and much more fierce.

ACKERMAN IS SELLING HIS SEX CHAIR FOR TEN BUCKS

I
t's a garage sale and Ackerman is selling his sex chair for ten bucks. It dangles from a beam in his garage. Underneath it there's a set of cross-country skis and a bread maker. The sex chair is brown leather. I check the tag—it's Swedish—very high quality. I inspect the various fucking holes—it's in great shape, very gently used.

“That's priced to sell,” Ackerman yells to me.

I had a weekly thing with Ackerman's wife, Elaine, before she died. Every Tuesday night we met at a motel and screwed. She kept telling me she was going to leave Ackerman, but she never did. One Tuesday Elaine didn't show up at the motel and when I drove by her house a few days later I saw a hearse and a bunch of people dressed in black.

“What happened?” I asked one of the kids standing in her yard.

“Aunt Elaine crashed her car,” he said.

T
here are a couple of other people roaming around in Ackerman's garage too. There's a young girl flipping through his record
collection. There's an old guy rooting around in a box of tools. Ackerman's middle-aged, not much older than me. He's way too young to have lost a wife, but maybe too old and too sad to look for another one.

“That chair's gonna go quick,” he says. “I wouldn't dillydally.”

Ackerman's right. There's already another guy eyeing it. I look at this guy and can tell exactly what he's thinking. He's thinking about the chair's possibilities. He's thinking about where he could put it in his house, who he could talk into using it. He's not thinking what I'm thinking—how I miss Elaine so damn much that I stopped by her husband's garage sale to buy something she once sat in or touched or that still held the scent of her shampoo. Before this other guy pulls out his wallet, I pluck the price tag off the chair and hand Ackerman my money.

“Sold,” he says.

A
ckerman pulls the chair down from the rafters. Everyone else is gone now; it's just me and him. Grief isn't a contest, but suddenly I want it to be. I want someone to invent a grief-testing machine and then hook both of us up to it so I can show Ackerman I miss his wife way more than he does.

“You're really gonna enjoy this chair,” he says.

What a normal person does now is says “thank you very much” and walks back to his car. This isn't what I do. Now that I'm here, I realize how badly I want to get inside Ackerman's house to see what other things of Elaine's I'm missing out on. The only way I can figure out how to do this is to pretend to faint. And so that's what I do. I roll my eyes back in my head and make my legs go slack and down I go.

“Oh shit,” Ackerman says.

After I count to twenty, I open my eyes.

“Let's get you somewhere cool,” Ackerman tells me.

“Yes,” I say. “Let's.”

I
sit on Ackerman's couch and eat a banana. I assure him I'm fine, that this happens to me once in a while.

“Low blood sugar,” I say.

He hands me a glass of water and I drink it down. Lately I've been listening to a lot of talk radio for company. I don't care what the topic is—sports or celebrity gossip or politics—I'm just really scared of it being quiet. I want to ask Ackerman what he does to fill up the silence, how he copes with Elaine being gone, but I can't let him know I'm anything other than a random garage sale pervert.

“Great house,” I tell him.

I look out the window into his backyard. There's a garden bed with some sweet corn and cucumbers, there's a patio with a fire pit. Elaine always complained about Ackerman being selfish, not paying enough attention to her, but he seems nice enough to me.

“You want to see the rest of the place?” he asks.

T
he last time I shoplifted anything was in high school, but each room Ackerman and I walk through I shove something of Elaine's into my pocket—a five-by-seven black and white of her at the beach, a fridge magnet, a dart from the rec room. When Ackerman goes to take a piss, I slide into the bedroom and shove a pair of her panties into my pocket.

“I'm really sorry about all this,” I tell him when he comes back.

“It happens,” he says. “It's not your fault.”

We're standing on his front porch now, staring out toward the street. A car slows down for a speed bump. It's a convertible, full of teenagers. When they go over the bump they bounce
around, laugh their asses off. Ackerman stares at them and I see tears form in his eyes. I understand how something insignificant can suddenly overwhelm you, how any old thing can dredge up a memory that knocks the breath from your lungs.

“You want to grill up some burgers?” Ackerman asks.

“Sure,” I say.

Ackerman fixes me a drink, tosses the meat on the grill. We sit on the back deck and watch the sun slide down below the horizon.

When Ackerman clears our plates, I run to the bathroom. I shove some fancy soaps and a hair brush of Elaine's into my pocket. While I am in there, I hear a glass shatter. Then another one. Then another. The shattering is spaced out enough that I can tell Ackerman hasn't had an accident, that he's doing this on purpose.

When I get out there, he's already got the broom out. He's sweeping the chards into the dust pan.

“You okay?” I ask.

“Just a little clumsy,” he tells me.

W
hen I leave, Ackerman follows me to my car. I move in a measured way, weighed down by all of Elaine's curios. While I'm loading the sex chair into my trunk, that pair of Elaine's panties I stole accidentally falls out of my jacket pocket and onto the ground. I quickly kick them under my car and turn back toward to Ackerman to see if he's noticed. His lips have pursed and his eyes are held in a squint. He's not looking at me, he's gazing up at the clouds in the night sky.

“We should do this again,” he says.

“Definitely,” I say, offering a handshake. Ackerman lets my hand hang out in the air for a long time, but then he finally grabs it.

“I'm a hugger,” he says, and before I can stop him Ackerman pulls me into his body, surrounds me. I squirm a little at the beginning of his hug; wonder if he can feel everything else I've
stolen from him pressing against his body, wonder if he can feel the picture of Elaine, or if maybe the dart is poking him in the thigh. He doesn't say anything so I settle in, get comfortable, hug him back. We stand there for a long time. I don't let go until he lets go.