Knockout. John Jodzio

Mostly sweaty, I guess.”

      “You want the backhoe down here?” Lupe asked.

      Cantwell shook his head no. “This here is what we call environmentally friendly,” he said. “We’re saving the boss tons of money on his carbon credits.”

      Lupe got the pickaxe from the truck bed. He tied a rope around his trailer hitch and tossed it into the hole. He hopped down next to Cantwell and began to loosen the rocky ground near where Cantwell was sticking his shovel.

      “Dennison heard about this yet?” he asked.

      “For all I know, he’s the son of a bitch that wrote the dumbass apology,” Cantwell said.

      After his heart attack, Cantwell had turned into an insomniac. He figured it was partly due to his heart’s unstable rhythm and partly because he felt like everything around him seemed to have been pulled away from its moorings.

      There was a new town named Whisper Rock, a couple of towns over from the ranch. All the building facades were reproduced to look like a whitewashed version of America. There were draped flags and wraparound porches on all of the houses. It had been done horribly. The one time Cantwell had been to the hardware store to buy a new chainsaw, they didn’t have one. The whole town felt creepy and false, calling too much attention to what it tried to mean.

      In Cantwell’s mind, no one ever recreated the past right. Things like this, the way things were and had been and were not now, this was, as far as Cantwell could tell, even though he knew full well it was a stupid damn thing to ponder, was what kept him up at night. That and sitting there in bed waiting for his heart to explode.

      The wind picked up and Cantwell caught a whiff of the dead horse. The smell would soon make its way toward the paddock and the balloon arch. Once it got there no amount of citronella would make it disappear. Cantwell’s eyes were pinched and itchy from the dust. He was kept up by the previous night’s nuptials. The guests had hooted and hollered underneath his window until late into the night. No matter how loud he turned up the calming ocean sound on that noisemaker that his sister, Lily, had sent him for his last birthday, Cantwell could not fall asleep. After an hour in bed staring at the ceiling, he got up and pushed a chair over to the window and watched everyone dancing below him. He’d tried a window fan before the noisemaker, but the whirring had irritated him—he always thought that he heard voices whispering to him underneath the hum.

      “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