John Jodzio: Knockout

“Turn your ass around,” Masoli tells me.

I keep walking toward him. He tells April to go inside and then he marches toward me, his hands already clenched into fists.

“Get out of my yard now,” Masoli says.

“Hold on, hold on,” I say. “I need to tell you something.”

I hold my palms up to show him I mean no harm, but Masoli doesn’t care. He shoots his right fist through my palms and hits me in the mouth. I feel my teeth dig into my tongue and the bones in my jaw slide upward and I taste blood. I grab my face and topple to the ground in a lump.

As Masoli is walking away from me, the boy flies out of our front door. He screams as he leaps on Masoli’s back, flails at Masoli’s chest with his spindly arms. The boy gets in a couple of good shots before Masoli tosses him off and stomps back inside his house.

“That motherfucker is going to get his,” I tell the boy as we lie there in the grass. “Don’t you worry about that.”

“Okay,” the boy says. “Sure.”

There’s conviction in my voice, but not in the boy’s. I can tell he’s tired of defending me. I want to explain to him how this time was different, how my intentions were pure, how what happened was unprovoked. I want to tell him I was trying to help but things went sideways. I keep my mouth shut because I can tell that no matter what I say, he’s already grouped this together with all the other dumb things I’ve done.

After the boy is in bed, I lie down on the couch in the living room. Around midnight Ms. Brunell comes downstairs. It’s windy outside; it’s getting ready to storm. The room is dark; she doesn’t notice I’m lying there. I could say something, try to intervene, but I don’t. I let whatever’s going to happen, happen.

After she walks out the door, I twist off the top of a bottle of Beam and pour out a couple of fingers into a lowball. I stand on my front porch as the rain grows harder, the wind stripping the leaves from the trees. At some point I know I’m going to need to go down to the basement and spread out bath towels where the foundation leaks. After that I’ll need to set a bucket in the upstairs bathroom to collect all the water that drips from the ceiling. Ms. Brunell is dressed in all black, black hoodie, black stocking cap. She pries open Masoli’s basement window with a crowbar and slips inside his house. When she slides out the front door a few minutes later, April is asleep in her arms. I watch her drive away and then I take a piece of scrap paper and write the boy a note that says “Steak and Eggs for Breakfast.” I write it in big, dark letters and I leave it on his bedside table so he’ll be sure to see it right away when he wakes up.

When I was in rehab, my roommate Tommy showed me how to knock out animals by pinching a spot on the back of their necks. I mostly practiced on the rehab cat but I also practiced on the overnight counselor, Jeff, who sort of looked like a cat. Sometimes I would sneak up behind Jeff and touch him on the neck and he’d zonk out. The rehab place was near a zoo and after we’d knock out Jeff, Tommy and I would steal the keys to his Corolla and drive over there. One time we found a ladder and knocked out a giraffe. That was probably my favorite time at the zoo. The giraffe was very elegant in the way it fell, slowly dropping to its knees and then gently tipping over on its side with a slight puff of breath.

After I finished my stint at rehab, I moved back home with my father. He’d been an insurance salesman, but he’d recently retired. Now, for a hobby, he taught archery to poor kids. Last summer, when I’d been on drugs, he shot me in the thigh with an arrow. I remember that he was trying to teach me some lesson about life. It must not have been very profound, because I could not remember what it was. All I remembered now was the sound of that arrow entering my thigh. It went ffffffftttt. Maybe that was the only lesson that he was trying to teach me. That an arrow entering into your thigh goes ffffffftttt.

I still hung out with Tommy a few nights a week. My father would not allow him inside our house though. He said Tommy reminded him of the all the bad stuff that I’d ever done. Like that time I totaled his Buick as I drove to the pawnshop to sell his coin collection. Or that time I accidentally pitchforked that duck that sometimes waddled into our backyard looking for bread crusts.

“Tommy and I are keeping each other clean,” I explained. “In rehab, everyone had fake spiders crawling on them, but Tommy and I had fake ants crawling all over us. We bonded over that shit.” “He’ll let you down,” my dad said, loading a bunch of arrows into a quiver to take down to the community center. “Or you’ll let him down. Letting people down is the only thing you two really have in common.”

Even after a couple months of staying sober, my father wouldn’t accept Tommy as my friend. One night when Tommy picked me up, my dad ran outside and shot an arrow in the driver-side door of his truck. I apologized to Tommy, but he waved me off.

“People have shot arrows at me before,” Tommy said, “and they probably will again.”

Lately Tommy and I hung out down by the river. We’d gotten tired of going to the zoo long ago, and the time we’d tried to pick up women at the local pet store by knocking out those chinchillas had been an absolute disaster. Instead of going to AA meetings, we wrestled on the banks of the river to see which one of us could knock the other one out. Once when I knocked Tommy out I pulled down his pants and wrote the word “Jackass” across his ass cheeks in black marker, and the next time he knocked me out he wrote the word “Dummy” on mine. This continued on for the next couple of months, back and forth, sometimes one of us drawing a very funny and detailed picture on the other’s butt cheeks or writing a few sentences about our state of mind. Each time I got knocked out I went home and pulled down my pants and pondered Tommy’s writings or his cartoons in my bathroom mirror and I thought about how hilarious this whole situation was and how good it was to finally find someone who liked the same things I did. It was great to finally be able to communicate some of my struggles with another human being and also have something interesting they thought be written on my body a few days later. Tommy’s writings and cartoons were often very poignant and thoughtful. I really wished my father could see this side of him.

“We’re not going to wrestle tonight,” Tommy said one night when he picked me up. “We’ve got a job to do.”

“What job?” I asked.

Tommy usually drove with his knees so he could gesture with his hands while he talked. Now he turned toward me and slapped me on the shoulder. At first I thought he was trying to knock me out, but this was just a regular, friendly shoulder slap.

“We’re going to steal a tiger and then sell him to this guy I know,” he told me.

Tommy turned down a driveway and I saw a small house behind a thin stand of trees. He shut off his headlights but kept the car creeping up the driveway.

“This is it,” Tommy said. “The guy keeps a tiger in a cage in his backyard, but he doesn’t feed it enough. It’s a totally bad situation.”

I tried to get a better look inside the house, to see if it looked like there was anyone at home. There were no lights on, but I knew that didn’t mean a damn thing. Most tiger owners I knew liked to sit at their kitchen tables and clean their guns and knives by the light of the moon, and I could only assume this tiger owner was exactly the same, sitting in the dark and waiting for that time when he could use those super-clean guns and knives on anyone who tried to steal his pet.