John Jodzio - Knockout

Schneider had bunked in Lessig’s hut for a week when they’d first arrived. He’d just finished a postdoc at Georgia Southern, which he kept referring to as “a party school.” He brought presents for Gtal, a Georgia Southern hoodie and an expensive pen set, and after he presented his gifts to the chief, Schneider was immediately invited to live in a better hut, one with a wonderful view of the river, one with a female servant, Yelma, who sometimes cleaned his hut topless.

All of them had contaminated the tribe, Lessig knew, all of these anthropologists, coming year after year to study the Campas’ innocence, even though they all knew that studying innocence was the one thing that always ruined it. When Lessig’s department chair suggested he do his sabbatical in Los Roques to recharge his batteries, he talked about a world where traditions were passed down like heirlooms, people doing the same exact things in the same exact way their ancestors had a thousand years ago — sharpening rocks into spear tips, binding thatch to keep out monsoon rain, catching tarpon in woven baskets — and while all those things ended up being real, Gtal was also parading around in an oversized Georgia Southern hoodie.

“They were cutting apart a parrot outside Htul’s hut a few minutes ago,” Schneider told him. “Some fertility thing to help Htul’s wife conceive. Lots of blood.”

Schneider held up his Nikon to Lessig, scrolled through the pictures of the blue and yellow bird, first with two wings, then one, then none, then its head lopped off and bleeding out in the white sand. The last picture was a grinning selfie of Schneider’s face inches away from the bird’s head.

“Two more days,” Schneider yelled back to Lessig as walked away. “Two more days and then that plane splashes down, brother.”

The next morning, Lessig woke to find a pile of dead fish stacked like a teepee outside his door. Inside the fish teepee were his spare hiking boots, filled with what looked to be butter. Schneider came over to look, circling around the fish teepee with his camera, snapping pictures. Lessig kicked the pile of fish over so he would stop.

“I’m trying not to freak out here,” Lessig yelled at Schneider. “I’m trying not to freak out even though there are fish stacked outside my hut like a fucking teepee and my boots are filled with some sort of butter or butter substitute.”

“You’ve got to stay calm,” Schneider said. “We’re stuck. We wouldn’t stand a chance out in the forest alone.”

Lessig knew that Schneider was right. It was a four-day walk to a passable road through Kula-controlled forest in blinding heat. They could die any number of ways — caught in a foot trap, withered by dehydration, bitten by a deadly spider, buried in a mudslide.

“Do you want to watch Yelma clean my place?” Schneider asked him. “It always helps calm me down.”

Lessig picked up one of the dead fish and hurled it like a discus into the river. He scooped some of the butter out of his boot with his fingers and flicked it onto the ground.

“You got any of that weed left?” he asked Schneider.

Later that afternoon, Lessig and Schneider were wasted out of their gourds. They were watering the garden plot when the search party came back from the jungle. Schneider and Lessig walked over to the group and watched as Bartik dumped Rautins’s head and Tunney’s hand out from his satchel. Rautins’s head had been shrunken to the size of a cantaloupe. Tunney’s hand was the opposite — it looked like a catcher’s mitt, swollen to five times its normal size. Rautins’s mouth was held in a scream, his eyes full of fear. Tunney’s wedding band was still around his ring finger, cinching it like a twist tie.

“That’s a head?” Lessig yelled at Bartik. “That’s a hand?”

Bartik nodded, showing no emotion. It was all the same to Bartik. Huge hands, tiny heads. Just another day in the jungle.

Schneider pulled Lessig back to his hut. “We’re gonna make it,” Schneider told him, stuffing his one hitter and putting it into Lessig’s palm.

“Sure we are,” Lessig said as he inhaled.

That night was windless and Lessig stared out his window, tracking any strange sounds or weird movements in the brush. There was a bonfire down on the beach tonight, the night patrol chucking log after log into the fire pit until the blaze touched the sky. Across the plaza, Lessig saw there was candlelight in Mada’s hut. He knew he should stay put, but he finger-combed his hair and grabbed the spear Htul had given him for protection. He was about to knock on Mada’s door when he heard giggling. Lessig knelt down, peered into inside through a small crack in the thatch door. He saw Mada lying naked in her hammock and Schneider sliding around the room, snapping picture after picture of her.

“You’re a natural,” Schneider cooed.

Schneider kept taking pictures, pausing occasionally to pose Mada in different positions or fluff her hair. Soon Mada got out of the hammock and pulled the camera from Schneider’s hands and kissed him. Schneider wrapped his arms around Mada and licked her nipple and her moan echoed around her hut.

In the way they touched each other, Lessig could tell that this coupling wasn’t new, that their desire was not concocted through alcohol or loneliness. He could tell they had touched each other before, a bunch. He gripped his spear tighter, thought about bursting into the hut and pushing it up to Schneider’s throat, making the two of them explain how this had happened. Lessig watched Mada pull down Schneider’s pants. She pushed him down on her floor and straddled him. While he stood there, a sharp puffing sound came from the trees and Lessig felt a sharp pain in his arm. When he looked down, he saw a blow dart sticking out of his shoulder. Before he could scream for help, his legs buckled under him and he fell face first into the sand.

When Lessig opened his eyes, it was morning. He was bound, his arms and legs hog-tied to a long pole. He was bouncing up a mountain trail being carried by two Kula warriors.

“Where are you taking me?” Lessig yelled, struggling against the ropes.

The two men stared forward, stone-faced. Off in the valley below, Lessig could see trees being felled by chainsaws, bulldozers scrapping the forest floor clean. He heard chanting up ahead and he was carried into a clearing. About a hundred warriors were kneeling down in front of a stone altar. There was an idol carved in the altar that looked like some strange combination of a parrot and a pig.

“Please,” he pleaded. “I can get money. I can get you anything you want.”

Lessig was held down and lashed to the altar. A priestess lit a bundle of palm leaves and circled around him, wafting the acrid smoke around his face. She mumbled as she pointed to the construction below, mumbled as she held her hands up to the sky in prayer.

The math wasn’t hard for Lessig to do. He was being sacrificed to a god who would try to keep the bulldozers at bay, who would try to stop roads from being grated and paved, power lines being snaked from pole to pole.

“I can help stop them,” Lessig screamed to the priestess as she walked back to her hut. “Me. Not your god.”

Lessig strained against the ropes, bucked his body up and down. The warriors started to chant, pounding their spears on the ground.

“I can help you,” he screamed as the Kula surrounded his body, his words echoing off the mountain top and then returning back to where he lay.

There was a tiny man mowing my lawn. Mowing the lawn was my husband David’s job and when he left I let it grow. David had been gone two months now and the grass was almost as high as the birdbath. At night, I sat on my porch and drank Mexican cough syrup and marked its progress. As I drank I imagined there were huge snakes inside that vast thicket — poisonous snakes writhing around in there with their poisonous snake babies. Now there was this little guy, cutting everything down.