John Jodzio - Knockout

Through his window, Lessig saw candlelight in Mada’s hut. He buttoned up his shirt as he walked across the plaza. He knocked on Mada’s door and she grunted for him to enter. Lessig found her sitting cross-legged on the ground, weaving one of those shapeless ponchos he was so goddamn sick of all the women in Los Roques wearing.

“Where the hell have you been?” he asked her in his broken Utu.

“Around,” she said.

“Around where?”

“Around around,” she sighed.

Mada’s hut was claustrophobic, one side of it packed with animals whittled from driftwood, the other crowded with baskets of dried fruit. Her bed was like a little girl’s, the surface of it packed with braided palm frond dolls and throw pillows filled with quinoa. She was not particularly pretty, her nose had been broken and never reset, but she had a body that reminded him of a wasp, a skinny torso above a bulbous ass. A month after Lessig arrived in the village, Mada had gotten him drunk on something that tasted like kerosene and she’d pulled him back to her hut and unbuckled his belt with her teeth. Lessig was thirty-seven, newly divorced, his wife, Carol, stolen away from him by a classic rock deejay. After his divorce, he’d taken a leave from the University of Maryland to do some fieldwork and lick his wounds. He’d come to the rainforest to reconfirm his faith in anthropology, to make sure that his life thus far hadn’t been an utter waste, but when Mada yanked his cock from his cargo pants he could not have cared less about any of that crap. Her mouth was wet and a little gritty and he busted his nut instantly, like a schoolboy, Mada pulling away right before he shot his skeet onto the thatched wall of her hut. Lessig tried to laugh it off, but Mada clucked her tongue in disapproval. She stood up and walked to the door, holding it open until Lessig understood that he should pull up his pants and leave.

In the weeks since, Mada had ignored him. And while Lessig should’ve been pleased that she wasn’t spreading the news of their drunken liaison to any of the tribal elders or to any of the other anthropologists, Mada’s lack of interest in him made his self-doubt blossom. If I could just talk to her, he thought, explain to her that he hadn’t been touched in over a year; explain to her that his performance that night wasn’t indicative of his overall sexual skill set. A couple of days ago, Lessig followed Mada into the jungle, hoping to set the record straight, but she saw him trailing her and lost him by the caves near the waterfall. Now that she was back she wouldn’t even make eye contact.

“I was worried about you,” Lessig said. “I thought you’d gotten snatched up too.”

“I had to work out some things,” she told him.

“What things?” he asked.

Mada sucked in air through her teeth. She dug her heels into her cocoa shell floor until she hit the hard clay beneath.

“Things things,” she grunted.

Mada got up, took a guava from her table and broke it open with her splitting stone. She ate without offering Lessig any. She was a brusque woman, childless, widowed at an early age. During a communal dinner a few weeks ago, Lessig had seen her slap a boy who’d eaten more than his fair share of rice. After she’d finished with the boy, she’d lectured the boy’s mother for her lack of oversight.

“Everything’s bad now,” Lessig told her. “Tunney and Rautins are probably dead and Schneider and I are next.”

Mada took out a clay frog necklace from a basket, tossed it to Lessig.

“Wear this and you’ll be safe,” she told him.

Lessig still wanted to talk, but Mada was finished. She turned her back to him, returned to weaving her dumbass poncho. Lessig stormed out, slamming the rickety door behind him.

For his postdoc fieldwork, Lessig had lived in the forests of Papua, growing a gnarly beard and contracting malaria. He returned stateside with rock-hard abs and a sense of purpose, but the last ten years of lecturing in low-slung campus buildings and eating salt-and-vinegar-flavored potato chips had beaten down his vigor. Lessig’s return to the rainforest was a chance to reclaim the enthusiasm he’d lost, but after only a few days of the bugs and heat, he realized he’d made a huge mistake, that he didn’t want to live this hard life any more than his Anthropology 101 students wanted to listen to him prattle on about its beauty and simplicity.

After Carol had left him, Lessig moved in with his alcoholic father, a retired real estate agent who liked to have his television on all hours of the day and night. While he was living there, Lessig became addicted to the Home and Garden Channel, especially to a show called Curb Appeal . Most nights he sat on the couch gulping wine with his father and his father’s alcoholic girlfriend, Dottie, the three of them watching designers tweak house after house to make them more salable.

“Lipstick on a pig,” Dottie would say whenever the designers were stuck with a dud. “Like bright red lipstick on a Botox-lipped pig.”

Sometimes on his way home from work, Lessig drove past his old condo, where Carol still lived. If the weather was decent, he’d park his car and crouch down in the bushes to look in her windows. One night Carol saw him hunched outside and called the cops. Lessig had been slapped with a trespassing charge and then a restraining order.

“When a wife leaves you,” Lessig’s father explained after he bailed him out, “you find another one. Maybe she drinks more than your last wife. Maybe she’s not as smart. Maybe you realize you made another mistake. Whatever the case is, you make peace with it and trudge forward.”

When he got back to his hut, Lessig strung the clay frog around his neck and put on a pot for tea. Recent rains had made the river majestic, full of whirling currents. Everyone else in Los Roques had a great view of the water, but Lessig’s hut was behind a thick stand of palms and he could only see a sliver of it. He dropped a bag of Earl Grey into his cup and listened to the macaws bicker. It was midnight, shouldn’t they be asleep? They were not asleep. They were alive and unbidden like everything else here.

Lessig readied his mosquito netting and wet some Kleenex to stuff into his ears to stifle the sounds of the jungle. This was the one point in his day he savored. A moment of peace in this shitty existence he’d led for the past few months. A moment when he could block out everything foul, when he could shut his eyes and dream of convenience, of hot water gushing out of a shiny tap, of his mouth being safe from stink bugs. He’d only filled one of his ears with Kleenex when Schneider pounded on his door.

“Any word on Tunney and Rautins?” Schneider asked.

Schneider was blond and tall and twenty-six years old and his skin looked like it did not have any pores. Lessig was stocky and dark haired and had stopped applying sunblock in the last few days in the hopes that a better tan might help him blend in with the natives when the Kula showed up again.

“The search party got back a little while ago,” Lessig said. “They didn’t find anything.”

Lessig had tried to hate Schneider but could not. Schneider kept a knife strapped to his belt and had once saved Lessig’s life by scaring away a jaguar that lunged at them while they gathered firewood. He also had a large cache of liquor and weed he readily shared. While Schneider was generally clueless about what it meant to be an anthropologist, Lessig knew he probably wasn’t doing the Campas a huge disservice by acting like a bemused tourist, constantly snapping pictures, overdocumenting everything that happened in the village.

“Totally fucked,” Schneider said. “One day they’re here and then the next they’re gone. Into the goddamn gorilla’s mist.”