Knockout. John Jodzio

in his gut and he steadied himself on the aluminum siding of the barn. There was a clear view of the hills from here and he saw that there were more bright lights up there by those houses, more men gutting them of their remaining aluminum and copper. Cantwell wished he was younger and stronger. He wished he had a tank full of gas and a bandolier full of ammo. He wished he still knew some badass motherfuckers.

      As he stood there, he felt the salt rise in his throat and he buckled over and puked.

      As he stumbled away, Cantwell pulled out his wallet. He went over to the bride and groom’s convertible. He stuck the Post-it note to the windshield of their car.

      Sorry. It was in that jackass blue glittery handwriting. He stood staring at it. Would the bride even see it? Would someone else pull it off the windshield before they drove away? Would someone think that it was just garbage and crumple it up and toss it into the wind?

      Cantwell left the car and moved off toward the creek. The crickets were chirping at a quick enough pace to let him know it was still warm enough to bed down outdoors. He walked until the lights from the ranch fell away then he flopped down in the grass and closed his eyes. He hoped for the bride and groom’s convertible to ride down the road soon. He wanted the sound of tin cans clattering down the blacktop. From this far away that sound would not be annoying. He figured it would sound like wind through chimes, something that might help you drift off into a long and uninterrupted sleep.

       DUPLEX

      When I was thirty-three, my mother died and I had to move out of her rent-free basement. At first I crashed on my brother’s couch, but then a bunch of his wife’s bras and panties went missing and I got blamed. Next I lived in an apartment above a laundromat but there was a mysterious bra and panty fire in my bedroom and the landlord kicked me out. After the apartment, I rented a room at the Starlite Motel but then my ferret, Stabby, killed the owner’s cat. At that point I was running low on cash so I crashed in the backseat of my Corolla. One night I went to a bar for free happy hour tacos and played darts with a man named Jayhole. Jayhole told me he was looking for a new roommate because his old roommate, Dan, had recently passed away.

      “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.