John Jodzio - Knockout

“Didn’t I tell you to radio me if Hollenbeck showed up again?” I ask.

“He said he was gonna put a hex on me,” Vince says. “He held up his cross and muttered a bunch of Latin shit. I’d much rather just have you pissed at me than him.”

When I get down to the cemetery, Hollenbeck’s wiping his brow off on his vestments. The man’s nearly eighty years old, but he’s digging like he’s twenty. He’s already reached the top of Chet’s casket. I see the gouges on the lid from the last time he did this.

“Sure is hot out, huh, padre?” I say.

Father Hollenbeck turns toward me, the sweat rolling down his forehead and catching in the folds of his face. He’s getting worse. Last week, he walked into the produce aisle of the grocery store, pulled out his dick, and rubbed it all over the Bibb lettuce. I heard the church was moving him into assisted living, a place with large orderlies and locked doors, but he’s obviously not there yet.

“Do I know you?” he asks.

“Bryce Jordahl,” I say. “I was an altar boy a few years back?”

Father Hollenbeck pulls a flask from a secret pocket inside his cassock and takes a nip. He’s forgotten to put in his dentures today and his lips look like they’re being sucked into his mouth.

“I’d remember that,” he says, “but I don’t. Which means you’ve probably been sent here by the devil to confound me.”

Hollenbeck clears away more dirt from around the coffin. His breath is gamey, full of scotch and garlic. I look at Chet’s gravestone. It’s not in the best of shape. There’s bird shit streaked on it and someone keeps bringing flowers out here but never taking them away. There’s a bale of decaying roses next to Chet’s grave, curled together, smelling like sweet piss.

“Bryce?” I say, pointing to the name on the stone, “Chet’s brother?”

“Whose brother?” Hollenbeck asks.

I notice a bunch of my relatives standing in front of the big windows of the cafeteria, my aunts and uncles, a handful of my cousins, all of them looking down at me. It is way too hot to pussyfoot around, so I grab Hollenbeck’s shovel. Unfortunately, he sidesteps me before I can get a good grip on it and he swings the shovelhead and nails me in the shin. I fall onto the ground and writhe.

“God’s will is God’s will,” Hollenbeck tells me.

While I rub my leg, Hollenbeck walks over to the casket. He sticks the shovel under the lid, rocks it back and forth, trying to pry it open. Before he does, I lurch to my feet. I unholster my taser and blast his ass, because priest or no priest, this mofo deserves to be tased. Hollenbeck yelps and his jaw clenches and his eyes bug out of his head and he tips to the ground. He’s still breathing and everything, but he’s just way less interested in digging up my dead brother now.

“Leave my family the hell alone,” I whisper in Hollenbeck’s ear as I slap the handcuffs on.

I stuff Hollenbeck into the cab of my truck. My relatives are all looking at me from the cafeteria window. Most of them think I’ve got anger management issues. Most of them think that just because I tased Allen after he stole my burrito from the employee fridge I’m a loose cannon. Most of them think I should’ve been suspended by Jimmy for much longer than a week for blasting my own cousin over something as insignificant as a burrito. I look up at all of them looking down at me with the judgey hazel-colored eyes that dominate my family tree, and I flip all of them off because guess what, fuck what the fuck they think.

Hollenbeck’s still out of it when I pull up in front of the rectory. His eyes are open, but he hasn’t said a word. I give his cheek a little slap but that doesn’t help. His housekeeper, Ethel, comes out from the house and we carry him to bed. Once he’s safely under the covers, he closes his eyes and starts to snore.

“He used to be such a peaceful man,” Ethel tells me, “but he’s the exact opposite now. He can’t find any relief.”

When I get home, Flor is in the backyard weeding around the tomato plants and I walk over and give her a kiss. Today’s our first wedding anniversary. My dad is coming over in a few hours to babysit Antonio and the two of us are going to dinner to celebrate.

“The birds are back,” she says.

Even though I call Antonio my stepson, since he’s Chet’s kid, he’s my nephew too. For his birthday last year one of the presents I gave him said “Uncle Bryce” and the other one read “Dad.” I look at him sitting in the shade of the big oak tree in our backyard. There are six crows sitting about ten feet away from him, their feathers pressed tightly against their bodies, their eyes unblinking, watching Antonio play with his Matchbox cars like he’s giving them some sort of lecture.

“Did you stop shooing them away?” I ask Flor. “Didn’t we decide we needed to keep doing that?”

For some reason Antonio attracts birds. It’s one of the many weird things about the kid. Whenever he goes outside, the crows swoop down from their perches and park themselves a few feet from where he’s playing. Antonio will hardly say a word to me, but often interacts with the crows, caws at them, whispers things to them under his breath. Flor hopes it’s a phase, but this isn’t any phase.

“Did we decide to start shooing again?” Flor asks. “I thought we were just letting them be.”

I don’t have the energy to shoo the crows away from Antonio so I just let them be. I just want to have fun tonight. Flor and I had to bargain with my father for the babysitting help. Even though Antonio’s his only grandchild, the last time he babysat, Antonio told him he was going to die soon, that he was going to have a heart attack. Normally my dad would’ve just laughed a comment like that off, but at the grocery store a few weeks earlier Antonio told August Johnson he was going to drown. August tousled Antonio’s hair and told Antonio that he sure had an active imagination, ha, ha, ha. The next night, on the way home from his dart league, August drove his truck off the Lester River Bridge and his truck sank and his lungs filled up with water.

“Hollenbeck came back again today,” I tell Flor. “He almost got the casket open this time.”

I skip the part about tasing Hollenbeck because after I tased Allen over that burrito, after he spent that day in that medically induced coma, after his life was sort of touch and go there for a few hours, me tasing anyone is a sensitive subject with Flor.

“That poor man,” she says. “I wish there was some way to help him.”

My father arrives and gives Antonio a halfhearted hug. My dad used to always bring along a little gift whenever he came to visit, a wood car or a Lego set, but tonight he comes over empty-handed. He sits across the room from Antonio.

“Be nice to Grandpa,” Flor tells Antonio as we head out the door.

At dinner, I order steak and fries and Flor gets the pasta special. We quickly finish off a bottle of wine. It’s so great to be out of the house on a date. It’s been a while.

“I can’t believe it’s already been a year,” I say, toasting Flor.

I’m trying to keep things upbeat, but truth be told the last year has been difficult. A few months ago I came home early from work and found Flor in our bed rubbing an eight-by-ten picture of Chet against the crotch of her jeans. I hadn’t thought about it much before, but it really made me start to wonder — was she happier with Chet than she was with me? Was Chet a better husband? A better lover? It’s hard to compete with a dead man because all of the jackass things he did that have been washed away by time and all the jackass things I do keep on happening every day.

“It flew by,” she says.