John Jodzio - Knockout

“Thanks for the gift,” she said, pointing to her calflet, “but I told you the other day was a one-time thing, okay?”

“Maybe you could let our one-time thing be a two-time thing or four- or nine-time thing?” I asked.

“How about I help you get revenge on Jayhole instead?” she asked.

“I don’t think you can help with that,” I said. “I don’t think anyone can.”

“I can help you,” she said. “Caruso left me some information I can use.”

I shook my head no. “Let’s just leave well enough alone,” I said.

“Has Harley been coming over?” Erica asked. “Was he in your room before the ceiling fell?”

“He comes over to listen to you walk around above him,” I said.

When I told her this, I noticed a softening around Erica’s eyes. Her mouth curled into a quick smile. I could tell she was remembering something good that Harley had done for her once. I could tell she was rooting around in her file of Harley memories and she was wondering if whatever had gone wrong between them could be patched up.

“That sounds like something he would do,” she said.

Later that day, Harley knocked on my door. Erica had gone to the hospital to visit Caruso.

“She’s not here,” I told him. “She might not be back for a while.”

Harley held out two twenties.

“I’ll chance it,” Harley said.

I went and walked around my neighborhood for about an hour to give Harley some privacy. When I got back to my room, Erica’s ladder was lying on my floor and my bed sheets were twisted and half of the aphrodisiac was gone. There was a padded envelope sitting on top of Stabby’s cage. I opened it and two pairs of panties fell out on the floor.

“Harley and I patched things up,” the note said. “We’re going to give it another go. Here are a couple of things to add to your collection. Tomorrow, you’ll receive an even better present from me.”

V

When I got up the next morning, I found two women, one old and one young, clearly mother and daughter, sitting on the kitchen floor. They both had the same color eyes and the same pursed lips and they had both tied their long hair in a knot around our radiator. They were sharing a bag of potato chips, passing it back and forth.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“We’re not leaving until we see Jayhole,” the older one said.

“We’re sitting right here until we talk to that delinquent bastard,” the younger one said. “He owes us a ton of child support.”

“Thousands of dollars’ worth,” the older woman said.

“Lots of zeroes,” the younger one said. “Time for him to pay up.”

Soon Jayhole walked into the kitchen to make himself breakfast. He’d just gotten out of the shower and was wearing his robe. When he saw the two women sitting on the floor, he jumped backward.

“Oh, hell no,” he screamed. “No goddamn way.”

“We thought that’s what you’d say,” the younger one said.

“Those exact words,” the older one said.

“Unfortunately we know you too well,” the younger one said.

“Too bad for us,” the older one said.

“Too bad for us indeed,” the younger one said.

Jayhole stood across the room from them. The younger one had Jayhole’s nose and his scratchy voice and she seemed to be taking great satisfaction in someone else’s unease in the same exact way Jayhole liked to do.

“Damn,” she told him, “you’ve really gotten fat.”

Jayhole cinched the belt of his robe tighter. I poured a bowl of cereal and sat down at the kitchen table to watch.

“Now that we found you,” the older one said, “we’re not leaving here until you pay up.”

“How the hell did you find me?” Jayhole asked.

“You were fucking easy to find,” the older woman said. “We have our ear to the ground and people hate you.”

“So damn easy,” the younger one said. “You’ve got tons of enemies.”

Jayhole ran to his room and I heard him ranting to himself about how unfair this was, how this was bullshit, that a mistake he’d made twenty years ago was still haunting his ass.

“Same old Jayhole,” the older one said.

“Same old Jayhole,” the younger one said. “He’ll pack his bags tonight and disappear, but then we’ll track him down in a few months and fuck up his life again.”

I chatted with the ladies for the rest of the morning. I found out their names were Julie and Lisa and that they’d driven here from Ohio when they’d gotten the tip about Jayhole’s location from Erica. While we talked, we heard Jayhole packing up his possessions. He carried the aquarium with Strangles in it down the hall and outside. Soon we heard his van peel out.

“He won’t ever pay up,” Lisa said. “So we like to track him once every six months to mess up his life.”

“That’s the fun part of it,” Julie said. “We love doing that to him. It’s like our hobby now. We plan our vacations around tracking him down. We’ve seen a lot of the country this way.”

Soon Julie and Lisa untied their hair from the radiator and I gave them a tour of the house and introduced them to Stabby. While they were in my room, they looked over some of my new spring jewelry collection. A lot of it they didn’t like, but some of it they did. They bought a couple of pairs of earrings for themselves, a necklace for one of their friends. It wasn’t much, but it was what I needed right then, a small victory, something to build on, something that told me I was on the right track.

In March, Lily and Annabelle’s dad cheats on their mom with a landscape painter named Fern Greenwald. When their mom finds out, she pushes their father out of the window of their second-floor apartment. Their dad lands on his back in the muddy ground near the bike rack and starts to moan.

Earlier that week, Annabelle found a walkie-talkie on top of a garbage can. As she and Lily run down the fire escape, Annabelle gives a trucker named Rascal the play-by-play.

“My dad just fell out of the window and we’re going to see if he’s okay,” Annabelle tells Rascal.

Lily stands over her father and watches his chest rise and fall. Annabelle bumps her rain boot against her dad’s ribs until he opens his eyes.

“Jesus Christ,” he tells them. “I could’ve died.”

It’s spring and there’s mud everywhere and where there isn’t mud there are mountains of dirty snow leftover by the plow. Their mother sticks her head out of the apartment window above them. She’s holding a big beer glass shaped like a boot in her hand and she motions the girls out of the way and she chucks the beer glass at their dad. It nails him in the shin and he grabs his leg and rolls around on the ground, screaming.

“Now my mom threw a beer stein at my dad and it hit him in the leg and my dad yelled ‘fuck,’” Annabelle tells Rascal.

Their dad has been homeschooling the two of them, so the next morning, their mom drives them back to Longwater Community School. Their mom hates Longwater. She hates all the teachers there. She hates the curriculum. She especially hates the principal. Last year she drove over to the principal’s house in the middle of the night and dumped a bucket of red paint onto the hood of the principal’s car. Their mom believes that there’s asbestos in the classroom ceiling tiles even though the principal showed her the paperwork that said all the asbestos in the building was disposed of ten years ago. Their mom’s hatred of Longwater doesn’t matter anymore, it’s been trumped by her anger at their dad. She’s bringing the girls back to Longwater for revenge. She’s re-enrolling them there because their father hates the school even more than she does.