Knockout. John Jodzio

to stay at the Mount Angel House right after this.”

      “I saw you with your binoculars earlier,” I tell her. “There’s good birding around here. If you’re interested, I could show you some owls later tonight.”

      I’m trying to go the extra mile for Ms. Brunell so she’ll give us a decent review, but I suspect she’s used to better offers than dumb-ass owls. The fancier places probably pull out all the stops; give her gift baskets full of fine chocolates and cheeses to help her remember her stay.

      “Yes, owls might be nice,” she says to me as she lies down on the couch and closes her eyes.

      I’m shooting some beer bottles off the back fence with the pump rifle when the boy comes home with his report card. The thing is perfect, straight As. His teachers have filled up the comments sections with great things about his attitude and work ethic. I hand him a twenty from my wallet. I tell him to spend it on something frivolous, like candy or fireworks, like I would’ve when I was young.

      “Sure,” he tells me. “Okay.”

      Even though he says this, I know he won’t spend it on anything good. He’ll tuck it away in the shoebox he keeps under his bed for household emergencies. If I want him to have fireworks or candy, I’ll probably need to buy them myself.

      While we’re resetting the bottles on the fence, we hear a loud squawking noise near the house. The boy and I run over and see a hawk fighting with the raccoon that lives up in the soffit. A family of hawks nested there before the raccoons and now I suppose one of them has returned to find someone else has invaded their roost. The hawk and the raccoon are really going at it, the hawk flapping and screaming and the raccoon clawing and hissing. I fire my gun in the air to break things up, but it doesn’t do anything. I fire again, this time a little closer to them, and my shot scares off the hawk, but I accidentally hit the raccoon in the gut. It scrambles back inside my roof and then it starts to bellow. The boy and I watch as a shitload of raccoon blood starts to pour out of the soffit, a river of red running down the side of the house, right over Ms. Brunell’s window.

      By the time the boy comes back with the ladder, the raccoon is dead and the house is caked in blood.

      “Keep Brunell busy,” I tell him. “Don’t let her go back to her room until I can get this crap cleaned off her window, okay?”

      I grab a bucket and a sponge and climb up the ladder. While I’m scrubbing, I can’t help but look inside Ms. Brunell’s room. There’s a black bra hung on the doorknob. Her bird-watching binoculars are lying on the bed. There’s other stuff there too, weird things. Laid out on the desk are a dozen pictures of Masoli’s daughter, April, when she was younger. There are also a few pictures of Ms. Brunell, Masoli, and April on the desk—one of them standing in front of the Grand Canyon. In another, the three of them are standing on the deck of a cruise ship with the endless blue of the ocean behind them. Ms. Brunell’s suitcase is open on the floor next to her bed and I can see now why it was so heavy—it’s filled with a couple of handguns, a tent, some cans of food. It’s taken me a minute to connect the dots—that Ms. Brunell is actually April’s mom, that she’s Masoli’s ex-wife, that she’s here to steal April—but when I do, I quit cleaning the blood off the window and scramble down the ladder to tell Masoli.

      Before I can get over to Masoli, he starts up his lawn mower. And while I’m running toward him I hear a loud crunch, one of the rocks I’ve tossed into his yard hitting the blade. There’s a puff of blue smoke and his mower grinds to a halt. Masoli flips it over, sees a huge gouge in the blade and a rock that matches the rock from my driveway. When he looks up, he sees me coming toward him—drunk and out of breath, raccoon blood smeared down the front of my shirt. April is jumping rope in his driveway. When she sees me, she stops.

      “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.

       KNOCKOUT

      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