John Jodzio - Knockout

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.”

The 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.

Iwrap 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.”

When 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.”

The 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.

Frankie 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.

It’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.