John Jodzio - Knockout

I must have ripped open the envelope too loudly because the next thing I knew Jayhole burst into my room, grabbed on to my ankle, and yanked me out from under my bed.

“What’s this?” he asked, snatching Dan’s note out of my hand.

“I found it while I was cleaning,” I lied, “but I hadn’t gotten a chance to read it yet.”

Jayhole read Dan’s note and then he crumpled it into a ball. He took his lighter from his pocket and lit it on fire and then he dropped it onto my floor and stood over it while it burned. The fire alarm in the hall went off, but Jayhole yelled over it. “That Dan,” he bellowed, “that guy really had a bizarre sense of humor, didn’t he?”

That night, after Jayhole left for his dart league, I put Stabby in his carrier and packed my suitcase. I was planning to sleep in my Corolla that night. The next morning, I’d go to a laundromat and steal some newer bras and panties to give to my sister-in-law as a peace offering. I hoped this would be enough for her to let me crash on their couch again.

I loaded Stabby into the trunk first. When I walked back to get my suitcase, Jayhole popped up from the azaleas. He was dressed all in black and his face was painted camouflage. Strangles was draped around his shoulders. I ran to my car, but before I got there, Jayhole shot me in the neck with a blow dart. My hands went numb and I dropped my keys. My knees went sideways and I toppled over into the shrubs.

“I didn’t think I put enough tranquilizer on that blow dart,” Jayhole said as he stood over me, his head blocking out the moon, “but watching the way you fell, I might have used too much, huh?”

Even though my eyes were having trouble focusing, I could tell Jayhole was excited about catching me. His eyes were open wide and his nostrils were flared. I tried to yell for help, but my tongue wouldn’t cooperate. Jayhole set Strangles down on the ground beside me and I felt him curl around my calf. Even though I was scared shitless, I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

In the morning, I woke up handcuffed to my bedframe. Jayhole stood across my room from me, flipping through a batch of earrings I’d recently made. I heard Caruso’s music upstairs, the heavy bass of his speakers pounding through the ceiling and into my chest. Jayhole’s scrapbook was sitting on the floor. There was a new picture of me pasted in it. When he saw I was awake, he walked over and pressed his boot into my stomach.

“What you need to understand,” he said, “is that no matter where you go, I’ll find you.”

He pressed his foot down harder, making it difficult to breathe.

“Now you say it,” he told me.

I thought about Dan and his suicide note. I understood how awesome it might have felt for him to jump from that bridge and fly through the air for a few seconds before he hit that water. How wonderful those precious moments of freedom probably felt before his face smashed into the river and his nose got pushed up into his brain and everything went black and Jayholeless.

“No matter where I go, you’ll always find me,” I repeated.

Jayhole bent down and unlocked the handcuffs. Then he went out into the kitchen and fried up one of my stolen steaks. I curled up under my covers. I listened to the bass of Caruso’s dance mix, ooontz, ooontz, ooontz, pounding over and over, never stopping, never ceasing. The pounding sounded so close it felt like it was happening right inside my stupid head.

II

Maybe it was Stockholm Syndrome kicking in, but over the next few weeks I learned to accept my situation with Jayhole. Like most abductees, I started to focus on the positive aspects of my current living situation. I had a roof over my head, didn’t I? Other people certainly had problems with their roommates too, didn’t they? Numerous scientific studies have proven that humans can get used to just about anything as long as they maintain proper perspective, right?

By now Jayhole had started to ask me to do him an occasional favor. Doing his laundry or helping him steal a Labradoodle from his ex-girlfriend’s yard. That kind of thing. I did these favors without asking too many questions because Jayhole asked me not to ask too many questions as a personal favor to him.

One day Jayhole asked me to run to the liquor store to get him a case of beer. When I got back with the beer, Jayhole wasn’t home and there was a strange man passed out on our kitchen floor. The man’s long black beard was knotted around our radiator. Besides being beardtied to our radiator, there was a balled tube sock stuffed into the man’s mouth and his hair had been cut in an unflattering way. The word “SHIT” had been written in capital letters on his forehead.

“Did Jayhole do this to you?” I asked the man. “Are you another one of his jokes?”

The man removed the tube sock from his mouth.

“I’m looking for my wife,” he told me.

The man was about my age and I could tell from the tone of his voice he was very tired of saying this particular sentence. I could tell that he’d said it too many times and now he wanted to say something different or better. The man tried to struggle to his feet. I warned him to stay down, but he got halfway up before the skin on his face pulled taut and he made a sound that reminded me of when Jayhole and I were down by the river and Jayhole kept hitting that muskrat over and over with that golf club.

“You’re beardtied,” I explained to him. “You’re beardtied good.”

The man slumped back down to the kitchen floor. I noticed he had a tattoo of a Jesus fish on his left arm. His fish had claw marks on it though, like he’d tried to scratch it away. I wanted to tell him about how Jayhole had recently beardtied me to the handle of his van, about how I had learned my lesson about beards. I wanted to tell the man that while the finely trimmed goatee I now wore might look dapper and sophisticated, it was mostly for safety.

The man was jerking his head back and forth to see if he could pull himself free, but this was useless; his beard was really knotted, he was wasting his energy. I handed him my pocketknife.

“It’s the only way,” I said.

The man’s beard was a thoughtful beard, something you could tell he took great pride in. It wasn’t something that had occurred because of laziness or because he’d lost a bet on a college football game. He tried to get his fingernail inside the knot, but that was not going to work either.

The man soon stopped pulling. Then he picked up my knife and started to saw. When he’d finished, I handed him a beer. He gulped it down. His beard was a jagged mess now, totally ruined. I could see the wheels turning in his head. It was starting to come back to him, how he’d arrived here, who’d done this horrible injustice. I was expecting him to yell out Jayhole’s name, but instead he shook his fist and yelled, “Caruso!”

The man’s name was Harley. He said he’d driven here to win his wife Erica back from Caruso but then Caruso had jumped him from behind and bonked him on the head with a lead pipe or a baseball bat, he did not know which.

As we talked, I heard the front door open and Jayhole walked into the kitchen.

“This looks like a fun time,” he said, noting the knot of beard around the radiator. “This looks like a fun time indeed.”

I popped open a beer for Jayhole, explained how I’d thought that Harley was one of his practical jokes, but then found out that Caruso was responsible.

“Christ,” Jayhole said. “Beardtying is my move. Isn’t anything sacred anymore?”

Harley pulled out a worn picture of Erica from his wallet and pushed it across the kitchen table. In the picture, she was wearing a skirt. She had incredibly curvy calves, calves that I could only think about running my tongue, slowly, up and down, over and over again. I’d long imagined finding a woman who would let me do this to her body without charging me premium prices, but I hadn’t found one yet.