Knockout. John Jodzio

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Название Knockout
Автор произведения John Jodzio
Жанр Контркультура
Серия
Издательство Контркультура
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781619027688



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It’s about half done, mostly just girders, the outline of what it will be.

      “This is what I’m working on now. It’s an up-and-coming neighborhood,” he tells me. “There’s a coffee shop going up over there. There’s going to be a new grocery store around the corner.”

      Graham gets out of the car and I follow him. We stare through the chain link fence into the construction site. Graham keeps talking and pointing. I’m cold, so I lean into him and he puts his arm around me. The snow has placed a soft cover over everything hard and I close my eyes and turn toward his face and wait patiently for him to press his lips against my lips.

       THE WEDDING PARTY

      Cantwell found the dead horse near the dry creek. There was a neon-green Post-it note slapped on the horse’s flank with the word “Sorry” written on it. The word was scribbled in blue glitter pen and the “o” in “sorry” was shaped like a goddamn heart.

      The early morning sky was orange but would not be for much longer. Cantwell’s bad hip said rain, but his trick knee said no way. He leaned against the hood of his truck and pulled out his cell phone and dialed up Lupe. While he waited for him to answer, Cantwell’s eyes scanned back across the pasture. The destruction started at the county road. Muddy tire ruts that dropped down from the tar. A gaping hole in the west-edge fence. Shitty after shitty spirographed in the pasture grass. The horse lay at the end of a long skid, its ribs bayonetted through its midriff. Around its torso was a pool of blood that hadn’t yet settled into the loam. Cantwell fished the bottle of whiskey he’d dug out of the snake-bite kit and took a long pull.

      “Hello?” Lupe said.

      “When you come in,” Cantwell told him, “bring your digging gloves.”

      Last summer, the owner of the Tanglewood Ranch, Tee Dennison, had transformed the ranch into a wedding venue. With this change, he turned Cantwell into a cowboy who barely cowboyed. Instead of mending fences, Cantwell drove a pickup to the discount liquor store in Kalispell. Instead of loading hay bales, he filled his payload with vodka and beer.

      Cantwell had nearly quit ten times since. Every time he voiced his displeasure, Dennison went into his safe and pulled out a thick stack of twenties. He pushed them across his desk to Cantwell and told him he was sorry but that this was the way it was now. Dennison knew full well that Cantwell had a daughter in college and that he still paid the tab for his ex-wife’s twice-a-week dialysis. Cantwell had a weakness for tax-free cash and he always shoved the money into his pocket.

      It wasn’t just the new job that burned Cantwell’s ass lately. The town of Junction Creek was creeping closer to the ranch. The county had started to parcel out acreage last summer. They divided and subdivided, curbed and guttered. Five years ago, the ranch was the only place for twenty square miles. Cantwell remembered sitting in the field on summer nights, shit-faced, tracing constellations with his index finger, one dot to the next. Developers had ruined all of that. They snaked winding side-walks up to oak doors. They shoved streets signs into the dirt. They put up halogen streetlights that made the stars look hazy and small.

      Cantwell was overjoyed when the housing market went tits up. The developers sent their crews home and now all that remained on the hills above the ranch were house frames. At dusk they looked to him like the old ribs of beached whales, picked over and bleached by the sun.

      “Already got something in your bonnet?” the chef, Jen Purvey, asked as Cantwell trudged back to the truck. He had a bag of quick lime draped over his shoulder and he was short of breath.

      Purvey reached into a plastic storage bin and scattered a handful of croutons for the pond ducks. The birds were already the size of small turkeys. They were so fat that Cantwell suspected that come October there would be no way they’d be able to gain lift-off.

      “Those birds know about that set of fancy German knives you got inside?” he asked. “They know that their next stop is a stew?”

      Purvey handfulled another mound of croutons out onto the crushed rock of the paddock. She was middle-aged and wide-hipped. While Cantwell didn’t like all the turns the ranch had taken recently, she wasn’t bad. Each night there was a plate of grub in the walk-in for him to take up and microwave in his room. Every morning there was a thermos of coffee and a blueberry muffin sitting on a silver tray in the foyer.

      “Me and the birds have come to an understanding,” she told him. “They’ve traded their lives for these easy weeks of day-old sourdough.”

      Purvey walked back into the kitchen and Cantwell went into the barn to get a pickaxe. Still calling it a barn was a misnomer—last year it had been expanded and the stables had been remodeled into a reception hall. The hall was retrofitted with a projection screen and surround sound and a parquet floor for dancing. He and Lupe had built the mounts for the speakers and dry-walled the AV booth. They hoisted and electrified the huge chandelier Dennison had found at the architectural salvage place over in Cut Bank.

      “Change or adapt,” Dennison told Cantwell when he saw his new chandelier hanging down from the rafters. “We change up or our dicks shrivel and die, right?”

      “Speak for yourself,” he told Dennison.

      Cantwell slid the truck through the clumpy fescue back to the dead horse. In his twelve years at the Tanglewood, he had seen a lot of dead shit. Moose and deer and coyotes and foxes. Jackrabbits too numerous to count. Vultures circling dead vultures. Seeing all this dead shit in no way meant he wasn’t squeamish about dead shit. Cantwell still hated how dead shit’s eyes held a glint of life and how sometimes that glint tricked you into staring deeper—into an abyss so deep and so black thick that it stabbed a reminder into your own chest that your own ticker was only half an inch away from irreparable harm.

      He’d lost some weight since his heart attack two summers ago. He’d had to cut new notches in his belt. He still hadn’t bought any new pants and the ones he had puckered around his waist.

      He parked the truck and hoisted himself out of the cab. As he walked toward the horse, he caught his shadow in the dirt—his legs looking like a bowed clothespin. If he did not hurry, the flies would catch the scent and descend upon the animal. Cantwell spit his chaw into the scrub and shoved his spade into the dirt.

      There was another wedding happening that night. From where he dug, Cantwell could see two women connecting the aluminum tines for the balloon arch. Earlier that morning, before he’d driven the fences, a man had driven over from Grey Eagle and dropped off the caged doves. Cantwell was responsible for their release during the ceremony.

      “All you need to do,” the guy told Cantwell, loud and halting, like Cantwell was deaf, “is open the door. The birds. Will know. What to do. After that.”

      When Lupe drove up, Cantwell had already scored out a rectangle that was about a foot deep. For a horse, you went eight. At six, a stubborn coyote might dig. At eight, they’d circle the ground and whine, pissed that they could smell the meat, but knowing that it was not worth their while.

      Last summer, whenever he was in the pasture, all Cantwell could hear was the snap of nail guns. Now all he heard was the chirp of the blue jays and the tip of his shovel echoing off the butte.

      “What the hell happened?” Lupe asked.

      Cantwell pulled the Post-it note apology from his wallet. He handed it to Lupe.

      “That absolves everything,” Cantwell said. “Right?”

      Lupe shook his head and handed back the Post-it note to Cantwell. Lupe had just turned twenty-two, worked weekdays cleaning and detailing at Dennison’s Buick dealership in Blood Lake and weekends at the ranch. He was married with a kid. There was another one on the way in a few months. How could someone so young even have a clue that this was the right way to do things?

      “Why didn’t you use the backhoe?” Lupe asked him. “You