John Jodzio: Knockout

Me and the boy are out back shooting holes in the rusted-out johnboat when I hear the wheels of a suitcase bump over the cobble of the front path. It’s still light out and I’m halfway through my bottle of Beam, which, if I’m pacing myself correctly, means it’s five or six o’clock.

“Hop to it,” I tell the boy.

The boy isn’t mine. He’s my dead wife Sandy’s, from her dead ex-husband, Jerold. He’s blond haired and fine boned. The house we live in is a weathered Victorian that Sandy and I bought to fix up into a bed and breakfast. I got about as far as painting the sign out front with a couple of intertwined roses and the word “Bed” before Sandy died. There was talk after the funeral that the boy would go to live with some of Jerold’s relatives in Ohio, but when it came down to it none of them would actually drive down here to pick him up.

I watch the boy skip off. He’s eleven and he runs like he’s got a corncob up his ass. I try not to hold that against him. I don’t run like that and I do not look like him in the least, but he hasn’t ever called me anything other than Dad. I’ll tell him about his real father very soon, I suppose. I’ve thought the conversation all out. I want to do it when I am sober, which usually means right away in the morning. I’m planning on telling him over steak and eggs. I’ll sit him down at the kitchen table and tell him I’ve got something important to say. He’s smart, this boy, very inquisitive. I know how the conversation will go. He’ll start in with the questions before I’ve even started saying what needs to be said.

“Is this the sex talk?” he’ll ask.

“More or less,” I’ll say.

I lean the rifle against the woodpile and walk around to the front of the house. There’s a woman standing there. She’s in her late thirties, wearing a baseball hat and sunglasses. I can’t see her eyes, but I can tell by the tilt of her head she’s glancing up at the gable, looking at how it’s leaning some, not ready to fall or anything, but nowhere near straight. The boy does exactly what I’ve taught him to do anytime someone shows up on our doorstep — he grabs her luggage and hauls it up the stairs before she can change her mind.

“What brings you here, ma’am?” he asks.

The boy is having trouble lifting her suitcase. He’s bouncing it up the stairs, so I grab onto the handle and help him out. I can understand why he’s struggling. It’s heavy as hell; it must weigh a hundred pounds.

“Are there gold bars in here?” I ask the woman. “Or a dead body?”

The woman gives me a wincing smile. She hardly has any legs under her. She got these stubby things, hardly worth a glance. Sandy, now that was a lady. Long legs and a mouth that could let out a deep and powerful moan.

“I’m writing a travel guide,” she says.

I don’t know what that has to do with a heavy suitcase, but I don’t press her. I’ve only got two rules to stay here. Number one, you pay what you owe, and number two, don’t shoot, stab, or poison me or the boy.

“I’m staying at all of the B and Bs up and down the Eastern Seaboard,” she says. She takes another look up at the roof, right near that hole in the soffit where the raccoon lives. “And this is on my list of places to review.”

We haven’t had a guest in a month, but the boy hasn’t forgotten the protocol. He asks for a credit card for room deposit and incidentals. He runs an imprint on our credit card machine. He looks at the name on the card, hands it back.

“Thank you, Ms. Brunell,” he says.

The boy is polite and does well in school. When I go to teacher’s conferences I can’t get his teachers to say anything bad about him. He does his homework, shares, makes friends easily.

“Can I have a room with southern exposure?” Ms. Brunell asks.

I pluck a room key from the board underneath the till.

“Let’s put Ms. Brunell in the Grover Cleveland Suite,” I say.

The boy likes presidents so we named all of our rooms after the fat ones. While the Grover Cleveland Suite isn’t as big as the William Howard Taft Room, it’s the quietest. If I would actually get around to trimming the dogwood out back, the room would have a great view of the river. Right now about the only thing you can see is the swing set in the backyard of my neighbor Masoli’s house. I really hope Ms. Brunell takes into account all the potential we have here. I hope she can see what we could become, even though we won’t.

The boy shows her to her room, and I hear Ms. Brunell drawing a bath, the pipes hissing and clacking.

“What do you think she’ll write about us?” the boy asks over the noise.

“Only good things,” I yell back.

How Sandy died was a dumbass thing. One night, on her way to meet me at the Keg n’ Cork, she tried to go around a railroad barrier. Her car was speared by the front of the train, pushed all the way through our town, sparking and screeching, right past the courthouse and right past the barstool where I sat waiting for her. She went past the Riverwalk Mall and into Halsford before the conductor could get that fucking train stopped. The police report said she died in Halsford, but the coroner’s report said that she died on impact, and while it can’t really be both, it is.

The boy was a year and a half when that happened. Up until that point, I hadn’t done much for him other than read him some bedtime stories and change the occasional diaper, but over the next few years, I did it all. My grief was not helped by the fact that each time I looked at the boy’s face I saw Sandy, and each time I thought of Sandy a curl of pain rippled across my chest — a feeling like something had been torn out of me and then that very same thing had been rolled in glass and shoved back in me upside down.

“That’ll go away soon,” my sister, Marlene, told me.

“If it was going away it would have gone away by now,” I told her. “I’m stuck with it.”

I stopped drinking after Sandy died, but when the boy started kindergarten, I started up again. I ended up drinking on the job and I got fired when I cut off the tip of my pinky with a band saw. This started a long period of the boy and me making due, of one day melting into the next, of the occasional guest or two stumbling onto our doorstep. By now, the boy and I have developed a solid routine. He knows he can count on me to make him breakfast and hand him a bag lunch on the way to school. When he gets home, he knows that he’ll be the one making dinner and helping me up to bed.

The boy chops up some onions for a stew and I go back outside and shoot some more holes in the boat. While I’m out there I see Masoli and his six-year-old daughter, April, smacking a beach ball back and forth in their front yard. When Masoli first moved in we got along great; I lent him my socket set and he lent me his hedge trimmer. One night I invited him over for a barbeque. While our kids played together, we ate ribs and talked about how my wife was dead and how his ex-wife was batshit crazy.

“After I got custody she was so angry she lit my ’77 Corvette on fire. I spent ten years restoring that car and she burned it to a crisp in ten minutes.”

For a while I imagined Masoli and me becoming good friends, drinking beer, and shooting the shit. I pictured us commiserating about single parenting and keeping each other sane. None of that happened. A few nights after that barbeque, I got blind drunk and walked into Masoli’s front yard without any pants on and he punched me in the face. We haven’t talked since.