John Jodzio - Knockout

“How many guests tonight?” Cantwell asked.

“Two hundred,” Lupe told him. “Bride and groom were high school sweethearts or some damn thing.”

Cantwell wiped his brow with his shirt. This was where the digging got tough — all hard clay and bitten rock. He stepped on the shovel and it spun away from him and flopped on the ground.

“You sure this isn’t deep enough?” Lupe asked.

Cantwell didn’t answer him. He picked up the shovel and stuck it back into the earth. He dug until he could only see the sky and the lip of the grave above him and then he told Lupe they were done. Cantwell used the snowplow attached to the front of the truck to push the horse into the grave. Then he pushed all the shoveled dirt back into the hole. When the hole was full he drove the truck back and forth over it to tamp it down.

“You bartending tonight?” he asked Lupe.

“I’m here until this shit ends,” Lupe told him.

Cantwell spent the rest of the afternoon running around the ranch putting out the small logistical fires. The florist needed help connecting rose bunches to the balloon arch. The sections of the wedding cake needed to be transferred from the decorator’s minivan and into the kitchen’s fridge.

“You eat lunch yet?” Purvey asked him. She pulled out a chair from her desk, told him to sit. She placed a sandwich in front of him. She made him low-fat, low-cholesterol meals, something he knew he should eat but, left to his own devices, never did.

“You hear that the police caught a van with a ton of copper from the houses up on the hill the other night?” she asked. Purvey lived in Junction Creek in a small apartment. She had invited Cantwell there for dinner one night. He’d felt her wanting something from him the moment he walked inside the door. It was too small and too warm and she had too big of a smile on her face. After he’d eaten dinner, he had faked a migraine and gotten the hell out of there. She’d invited him a couple of times since, but he’d been ready with excuses.

“Saw it all,” he told her. When Cantwell heard the sirens and the flashing lights, he got out his telescope and watched the entire thing play out. The state troopers crouched behind their cars and drew their shotguns on the van and the men filed out of the van with their hands held high above their heads, then the troopers wrestled them to the ground, handcuffed them, and shoved them into their squad cars.

Cantwell ate his sandwich quickly, thanked Purvey. He found Lupe setting up chairs for the ceremony.

“Are the doves ready?” Lupe asked him. “The photographer just asked me.”

Cantwell found the photographer in the paddock standing with the bride. The bride was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, but her hair and makeup were already done. Standing next to her were two blonde girls with their hair in ringlets. They were all clearly sisters. All of them had dress bags draped over their shoulders. They held shoeboxes in their hands.

“We fell in love with this place,” the bride told the photographer as she walked into the bridal suite. “After we saw it, there was no other place we wanted.”

Usually Cantwell was too busy to watch the ceremony, but since he was responsible for the doves, he dressed in a gray suit and stood in the back. After the vows, when the music for the recessional started, he pulled the latch on the cage and shooed the doves out. He walked over to the dining room and helped finish setting up the tables for dinner. When that was done, Cantwell took three beers from the bar and leaned against the fence and drank.

Just after dinner, the bride came out from the dining room with a glass of champagne. She was walking with her sister. Both of them looked drunk and happy. They moved over and stood near Cantwell. The bride’s sister lit a cigarette and drifted over toward the paddock. The bride stood near Cantwell. She smelled like hairspray and cake frosting. There were tiny beads of sweat on her upper lip.

“I had to get away for a couple of minutes, you know?” she said.

The dance had started now and through the windows of the barn Cantwell saw a bunch of young people jumping up and down. It always looked strange to see people moving like this without being able to hear the accompanying music. They looked like they were flailing around without any sort of rhyme or reason.

“I’m doing the same damn thing,” he told her.

The girl took a sip of her drink. She reminded him of this woman he’d known before his ex-wife. Some girl he’d met at a bar once in Tulsa who kept on playing the same Steely Dan song on the jukebox over and over.

“You’re Jason’s uncle, right?” the bride asked.

“Am I?” he said.

“I’m so sorry about your wife,” the bride said.

Cantwell paused. He did not know whether or not he should go forward with this lie, but he wanted some company.

“Yes, yes,” he said, shifting his gaze toward the ground. “It’s been pretty difficult this last little while.”

The bride put her arms around him and gave him a hug. She pulled back and took her palm and cupped it around the back of his head. She placed her forehead against his.

“Save a dance for me,” she told him.

Cantwell usually called it a night after the dance began. Tonight he did not leave. He leaned against the bar and Lupe kept his gin and tonic full. Dennison had left for the night and the catering manager was working in her office. Cantwell had no clue how many drinks he’d had by now. Ten? Twelve? At some point the bride came over to the bar and pulled him onto the dance floor. She leaned her head on his shoulder and he spun her around. When the song ended, she kissed him on the cheek.

“It’ll get better,” she told him. “It just takes time.”

Cantwell nodded to her, then turned and made his way out through the side door. The dancing had loosed something in his gut and he steadied himself on the aluminum siding of the barn. There was a clear view of the hills from here and he saw that there were more bright lights up there by those houses, more men gutting them of their remaining aluminum and copper. Cantwell wished he was younger and stronger. He wished he had a tank full of gas and a bandolier full of ammo. He wished he still knew some badass motherfuckers.

As he stood there, he felt the salt rise in his throat and he buckled over and puked.

As he stumbled away, Cantwell pulled out his wallet. He went over to the bride and groom’s convertible. He stuck the Post-it note to the windshield of their car.

Sorry. It was in that jackass blue glittery handwriting. He stood staring at it. Would the bride even see it? Would someone else pull it off the windshield before they drove away? Would someone think that it was just garbage and crumple it up and toss it into the wind?

Cantwell left the car and moved off toward the creek. The crickets were chirping at a quick enough pace to let him know it was still warm enough to bed down outdoors. He walked until the lights from the ranch fell away then he flopped down in the grass and closed his eyes. He hoped for the bride and groom’s convertible to ride down the road soon. He wanted the sound of tin cans clattering down the blacktop. From this far away that sound would not be annoying. He figured it would sound like wind through chimes, something that might help you drift off into a long and uninterrupted sleep.

When I was thirty-three, my mother died and I had to move out of her rent-free basement. At first I crashed on my brother’s couch, but then a bunch of his wife’s bras and panties went missing and I got blamed. Next I lived in an apartment above a laundromat but there was a mysterious bra and panty fire in my bedroom and the landlord kicked me out. After the apartment, I rented a room at the Starlite Motel but then my ferret, Stabby, killed the owner’s cat. At that point I was running low on cash so I crashed in the backseat of my Corolla. One night I went to a bar for free happy hour tacos and played darts with a man named Jayhole. Jayhole told me he was looking for a new roommate because his old roommate, Dan, had recently passed away.