John Jodzio - Knockout

“Dan fell off a bridge,” Jayhole said. “Or maybe he jumped. He didn’t leave a suicide note so nobody really knows for sure.”

Jayhole was a large man with a barrel chest and a short ponytail that resembled a salt and pepper turd. He’d been a bounty hunter for twenty years but then he’d gotten shot in the kneecap. He walked with a hitch, but he had this wicked cane with a bunch of writhing snakes on the handle that made it look awesome to have a fucked-up leg.

“Do you wanna take a look at Dan’s old room?” he asked.

I was five foot eight when I wore my tallest shoes. I weighed 150 pounds when I wore my heaviest coat. I’d recently grown a scraggly Civil War — style beard to hide my weak chin, but people kept on telling me that the beard made my face look even more horsey than it normally did.

“I’d love to,” I told Jayhole.

On the way over to his place, Jayhole told me more about himself. He was forty-five years old. He drove a forklift at an office supply store. He’d been divorced twice and had a teenage daughter he hadn’t seen in years.

“That’s too bad,” I told him.

“I heard through the grapevine she’s a total bitch,” he said, “so no big loss.”

I offered up some tidbits about myself. How I sometimes stole steaks from grocery stores and sold them door-to-door from a cooler in my trunk. How I’d recently taken a jewelry-making class and was planning to open a kiosk at the mall to sell some of my mind-blowing earring and necklace designs.

We pulled up in front of a duplex. It was brown stucco and there was a rusted basketball hoop out back. Jayhole lived in the bottom half of the building. He gave me a quick tour of the apartment, the kitchen, the bathroom and its claw-foot tub. In the living room, there was an aquarium with a boa constrictor inside it. There was a piece of paper taped to the aquarium that read “Hi! I’m Strangles.”

“We’re not supposed to have pets,” Jayhole said, “but the landlord is old and he never comes around.”

We walked down the hall to Dan’s old room. Dan’s single bed and his dresser were still sitting there. Some of Dan’s old T-shirts, which looked about my size, hung in the closet. The room smelled like incense, not death.

“It’s four hundred dollars a month plus utilities,” Jayhole told me. “What do you think?”

I quickly weighed the pros and cons. Had I showered in the sink of a Burger King bathroom that morning? Yes. Did my car reek of steak and ferret? Uh-huh. Was I going to die just because the guy who lived here before me died? Probably not.

“It’s perfect,” I told Jayhole.

For our first few weeks, Jayhole and I got along great. I made him a shark’s-tooth necklace and he gave me a punch card from a bagel place that only needed three more punches to get a free sandwich. One night I grilled him a stolen sirloin and he showed me his scrapbook.

Jayhole’s bounty hunting scrapbook was full of pictures of him standing next to bail jumpers he’d tracked down over the years. In the pictures, he was always smiling and laughing and the people he’d brought to justice were always frowning and bloody. In some of the pictures, Strangles was draped around Jayhole’s neck like a scarf.

“It looks like you loved your work,” I told him.

Jayhole stared out the window into our backyard where a stray dog was nosing through a garbage bag. He scratched behind his ear and some flakes of dead skin floated down among the crumbs on the kitchen floor. It wasn’t difficult to see Jayhole missed the rush of bounty hunting, that it was his one true calling, that he hadn’t found anything that would ever replace its powerful and enticing high.

“I don’t want to sound like some sad sack yearning for lost gridiron glory,” he told me, “but those were absolutely the best days of my life.”

One night I brought my tackle box of jewelry-making supplies into the kitchen to work on some new broche and stickpin designs. Jayhole saw me sitting there and got his storage tub of pictures and scrapbooking materials. For the rest of the night we worked side by side, him with his glue stick and me with my soldering gun. While we worked, Jayhole told me stories about the people in his scrapbook.

“This guy tried to get away from me by climbing into the ductwork of an auto parts store,” he said, pointing to a picture of a man with two swollen eyes and an ear that was partially torn off. “He didn’t think I’d go up there after him, but I tossed Strangles up into the vent and that dude jumped down real quick.”

Each page of Jayhole’s scrapbook held a picture of someone who thought they could outsmart him, who thought they could disappear off the grid. I didn’t have any sympathy for these dopes. I often liked to imagine them sipping a piña colada at a beachside bar thinking they’d gotten away scot-free until Jayhole leapt out from behind a palm tree, yelled “Surprise!” and tasered the shit out of them.

While Jayhole showed me some more pictures, the man who lived in the upstairs part of the duplex, Caruso, started to tromp around above us. Caruso was a fat, pasty guy who occasionally deejayed birthday parties and weddings. He had an English accent that disappeared whenever he was angry or drunk. Both Jayhole and I hated him. Whenever Caruso walked around or danced to one of his new mashups our ceiling shook and the pots and pans on our stovetop rattled. Jayhole had spoken to him a number of times about wearing noise-dampening slippers or simply walking around less, but Caruso never listened.

“Stop tromping!” Jayhole yelled up at him through the ceiling. “Stop deejaying, quit making your stupid mashups and dance jams!”

Jayhole took an aluminum tentpole that was sitting next to the refrigerator and he pounded it on the ceiling. A minute later Caruso tromped down the front stairs and into our kitchen.

“Gimme it back,” Caruso yelled, poking Jayhole in the chest with his index finger. “Gimme it back right fucking now.”

Jayhole handed me his beer and then he reeled back and punched Caruso in the mouth. Caruso tumbled into the radiator.

“Give you what back?” Jayhole asked.

Caruso stood up and bull-rushed Jayhole. Caruso was ugly enough not to care what happened to his face, which was a lucky thing because Jayhole’s next punch smashed into Caruso’s nose and sent him sprawling back into the wall.

“There was a Tupperware container in my fridge,” Caruso said, spitting a rope of blood out onto our linoleum. “And there was a piece of tape with the word ‘Aphrodisiac’ written on the container. I paid good money for it and I want it back.”

I was actually the one who’d stolen Caruso’s aphrodisiac. A few days ago, I went upstairs to borrow an egg and found Caruso’s apartment door wide open. When I walked inside, I found him passed out on the couch. He didn’t have any eggs in his refrigerator so I took the Tupperware container instead. Right now it was hidden in the mini fridge in my room. The aphrodisiac was dark red — it looked like it was mostly made of beets. I knew I should ration it for when I finally found a girlfriend, but I’d started to eat spoonfuls of it before I went to bed because I loved the sex dreams it gave me.

“What do you need it for?” I asked Caruso.

“There’s a girl staying with me,” he said. “And she likes that sort of thing.”

I had a hard time imagining what kind of woman would date pig-nosed Caruso, with his pasty skin and his English accent that kept disappearing and reappearing. I was wondering why I couldn’t ever find a woman at any of the bars or apartment buildings where I sold my steaks or why the women who I chatted with online never actually showed up for our dates. As I watched Caruso and Jayhole circle each other, I heard a women’s voice call down.