John Jodzio - Knockout

While we sat there, we heard Caruso start to tromp around above us. The overhead light rattled and the dishes in our kitchen cabinets bumped together. The saltshaker on the table tipped over.

“Is he jumping rope up there?” Harley asked. “Or doing step aerobics?”

“That’s just his normal walking,” I explained.

“That’s incredibly noisy normal walking,” Harley said.

Jayhole took off his boot and chucked it at the ceiling, but that didn’t do anything to make Caruso stop. Soon Jayhole stormed out to the garage. When he came back he was holding a chainsaw.

“What’s that for?” I asked, but Jayhole didn’t answer me. He walked into my room and climbed up on top of my bed. He started up the chainsaw. As he revved the engine, my room filled with blue smoke. Harley and I moved under the doorjamb and watched as Jayhole shoved the chainsaw into my ceiling. Chunks of plaster and wood rained down onto my jewelry table and bedroom floor. When the dust finally cleared, there was a hole in my ceiling. Caruso’s head quickly popped through it.

“What in the fuck?” he yelled down. “Are you crazy?”

“The girl comes down here now,” Jayhole yelled up.

“No, no, no,” Caruso said. “No way in hell. The girl stays put.”

“This here is her husband,” Jayhole said, motioning to Harley. “And he wants to talk to her.”

Caruso’s head disappeared and I heard him discussing the situation with Erica. Before this, whenever I’d climbed up on my bed to eavesdrop on them everything was muffled. I couldn’t hear their conversations clearly and I could never tell if they were moaning in pain or moaning sexually. The hole in the ceiling made the acoustics wonderful; you could hear everything they were saying like they were whispering it right into your ear.

“You stay here,” Erica said to Caruso. “I’ll handle this.”

Erica walked down the front stairs and into my room. Her hair was ratty and her face was so-so, but her calves looked even more buxom in real life than in the picture Harley had shown us. At first she held out her arms to Harley like she was going to give him a hug, but when he stepped closer, she clocked him. It was a good punch and Harley fell to the ground.

“We’re done,” she yelled down at him. “We’re finished. I’ve told you that a hundred times already, but I guess you needed to hear it again?”

Erica stormed upstairs. I knelt down next to Harley. There was a small river of blood sliding out of his mouth and down into the neck of his sweater. His eye was swollen and the word on his forehead was smudged. You could still make out the “S” and the “H” pretty well, but the “I” and the “T” were really hard to read.

III

The next morning I found that Caruso had covered the hole in my ceiling with an area rug. Unfortunately, whenever he or Erica walked around upstairs plaster dust rained into my room. I wiped things down constantly, but there always seemed to be a new layer of dust covering everything. While I wiped down my mini fridge, there was a knock on the door. When I opened it I found Harley standing there.

“What would it cost me to sit in your room and listen to Erica walk above me?” he asked.

The skin under Harley’s left eye was ringed purple and one of his nostrils was swollen shut, but he’d already heeded my advice and shaved off his beard. I could tell that the skin underneath it hadn’t seen sunlight in a long time. His forehead and nose were leathery while the rest of his face had a grayish, waxy look.

“How about twenty bucks an hour?” I said.

I didn’t expect to get this amount, but Harley dug into his wallet and pulled out forty bucks without complaint. I cleared off a recliner for him and he sat down. He pulled a six-pack from his bag and held out a can to me.

It didn’t seem worth it to me, to pay to interact with his wife in such a limited way, sometimes not at all, but Harley didn’t seem to mind. He kept stopping by, a couple times a week, sitting in my recliner while his ex-wife walked overhead.

One morning, I woke up to Erica staring down at me from the hole in my ceiling. Her legs were dangling into my room. She kicked them back and forth and then she crossed her calves, one over the other. She massaged her right calf with her big toe, slowly kneading it. I felt the blood rush to my cheeks.

“Is that you I heard crying the other night?” she asked.

It was me, but it wasn’t really crying. A couple of nights ago I’d gotten home and found that Jayhole had turned all the furniture in my room upside down. My bed, my desk, my jewelry table, everything. What came out of my mouth then was more of a low-pitched wail. There were hardly any tears at all.

I wondered how long Erica had been watching me sleep. I’d started to sleepwalk recently. A few weeks ago Jayhole had found me in the kitchen spreading mustard all over my chest. Another time I woke up sitting on top of our refrigerator, naked and hunched over like a gargoyle. I suspected it might be a side effect of the aphrodisiac but hell if I was going to stop taking it.

“Maybe I could help you with Jayhole,” Erica said. “Stop him from bullying you.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I told her.

The last time I’d tried to escape from Jayhole was the time he beardtied me to the door handle of his van and drove off around our neighborhood. I kept up with him for a block before I fell, but he kept dragging me for another block to teach me a lesson. I knew by now that it was better to laugh off his jokes, to play along, to not try to escape. Maybe one of us would die soon and maybe that person would be Jayhole.

“I know you stole Caruso’s aphrodisiac,” Erica told me. “I saw you eating some of it.”

I thought about the sex dream I had last night. How I got swallowed by a whale, but how there was a woman with large floppy breasts inside of the whale and then how we ended up screwing right on top of the whale’s tongue. It was wet and exciting. These sex dreams were the only thing keeping me sane right now. There was no way I was giving this aphrodisiac back.

“I don’t know what you think you saw,” I told Erica, “but I don’t have the aphrodisiac.”

Erica moved her legs out of the hole. A few seconds later a ladder slid down into my room. She climbed down the rungs and walked over to my mini fridge. She took out the Tupperware container of aphrodisiac and swallowed a spoonful of it and then scrambled back up the ladder. I was too shocked to do anything about it.

“Thanks!” she yelled down.

I heard Erica moaning a little while later. She hadn’t put the rug over the top of the hole to muffle the sound at all. I could hear everything clearly, which I thought was pretty neighborly of her.

The next day Caruso and Erica got into a huge fight. I’d just returned home after I’d shoplifted some fancy grass-fed steaks from the co-op. I took the aluminum tentpole from the kitchen and pushed the area rug away from the hole so I could hear them better.

“Where were you last night while I was deejaying the Rosales wedding?” Caruso asked her.

“I told you already,” Erica said. “Jill and I went shopping.”

“That’s sounds like fun,” he said, “except I called Jill and she told me she hasn’t seen you in a month.”

“You checked up on me?” Erica said.

“Now we’re even,” Caruso told her.

“Fuck if we’re even,” Erica said, “we’re never going to be even.”

Sometimes during their fights, Erica mentioned something hurtful that Caruso had done to her recently, some mysterious and horrible thing, but she never mentioned exactly what that thing was. All I knew is that she wasn’t going to probably forgive or forget whatever it was anytime soon.