Knockout (11 page)

“Three hundred thousand copies sold worldwide,” I say as I hold up
Nurture Against Nature
and point to a sticker on the cover. “You can't argue with sales like that.”

Swayze keeps jumping, giggling maniacally. When Swayze and Mitch are next to each other, it's hard not to notice how much they look alike, the same almond-shaped eyes, the same bump on the bridge of their noses. When I look at Swayze, I honestly do not see one smidgen of me at all. It's like whatever genetic code of
mine was mixed in to make him was gobbled right up by Mitch's genes. Like my genes were not the fittest of the bunch and they decided that instead of fighting they'd just lie down and get run over.

James's Jeep pulls into the driveway and he hops out. He's wearing a red polo shirt and khaki cargo shorts. He presses the button on the intercom.

“Hi, James,” I say.

“Hello, Mrs. Roberts,” he says. “I've got everything you need.”

From our phone calls and our chats over the intercom, I know James wants to be a pharmacist, just like his dad. The last time we talked he told me that he'd just broken up with his high school sweetheart and he was taking it pretty hard.

“Come on in,” I say.

James knows the protocol—I open the garage and he walks inside and sets the grocery bags down. Then he walks back out to his car. I press the garage door opener and the door creaks shut.

I watch through the window as James climbs back in his Jeep. His radio is blaring. It is a song with a lot of bass that rattles the glass in my hutch. He gives me a hang loose sign with his fingers and then drives away. Sometimes I wonder if he wants to know what I look like, if he thinks that someone threw acid on my face or I was disfigured in a fire. Sometimes I want to invite James inside and talk to him face-to-face, prove that I'm normal. Sometimes I want to let him see that I've lost all my baby weight, that I still look damn good.

In the garage, James's cologne lingers. It smells like rain with some citrus notes mixed in. I close my eyes and hug the grocery bag until his scent slides away. When I put the groceries away, I notice he's given me an extra bag of pralines, free of charge.

T
he next day my mother brings medical supplies and our mail. She makes the trip twice a week here now, on Tuesdays and Fridays. She's been very supportive of me; she doesn't judge our indoor lifestyle, she sees the advantages.

“You turned out the way you did because of the things I did,” she tells me. “So who would I be to criticize? I'd be criticizing myself.”

I put Swayze in his playpen and my mom and I split a ham sandwich. She tells me she's met a man named Jerome on the Internet. Jerome lives in Fort Lauderdale and she might go visit him soon.

“Jerome thinks my legs are beautiful,” my mother says. “So thus far we're a perfect match.”

My mother tells me more about Jerome, how he owns a catamaran, how he lives in a gated community, how he always wanted to have kids but somehow never got around to it.

“This may be my last real chance at love,” she says, which is the same exact thing she said to me right after she met her last two husbands.

While we're eating, I hear a scream in the backyard. I look out the window and see an eagle trying to lift Snowball off the ground. Have you ever heard a dog scream? I hadn't. It sounds way more human than you'd think. I grab Swayze and all three of us watch as the eagle tries to get his claws into Snowball. Snowball bites and growls, giving the bird a good fight, but the eagle finally grabs him and flies off.

“What the hell is going on?” Mitch yells out from the other room.

My mother and I watch Snowball being carried away across the sky. This small white puff being pulled right up into the clouds and disappearing from our lives forever.

T
oday when I wake up I read this passage:

Your indoor baby will sometimes stare longingly out the window at the world. This is normal. Your baby is an inquisitive baby and he or she will wonder what is going on out there. Totally normal. This is how your baby tests their boundaries. Sometimes your indoor baby will bang his or her head on the window. Again, testing their boundaries. Sometimes your child will paw the window with their hand, run it down the entire length of the pane leaving these smeared and seemingly desperate handprints. All absolutely normal.

S
wayze's first birthday is coming up. He just started walking. This afternoon he tries to climb up on the kitchen counter. Over and over, he keeps trying to hoist himself up, he won't quit.

“You are not going to be able to hold him for long,” Mitch told me yesterday. “That's the thing. You think you'll be able to hold him inside here, but sooner or later he'll escape.”

Mitch might be right. I haven't figured out how I'm going to explain all of this to Swayze yet. My mother thinks I should make up some elaborate story about the apocalypse, about a nuclear event, about how his skin will melt off if he steps outside. Luckily I've got a little while to decide.

After Swayze and Mitch fall asleep, I call the grocery store. It's only Thursday, but James has already been here three times this week. I don't know what it is with me lately, but I've become absentminded. No matter how many times I call James I always forget something I really need.

Tonight I order a pound of coffee, a bag of frozen chicken strips, two cucumbers, a bag of oranges, and a case of Diet Coke with lime.

“On my way,” James says.

T
his time when James sets the groceries down in the garage, I accidentally close the garage door too quickly and he's stuck inside.

“Hello?” he calls out.

I immediately realize my mistake, but instead of opening the door, I press my ear against the door to the garage.

“Mrs. Roberts?” he yells out. “Are you there?”

The door's locked, but I swear I can smell his cologne seeping through it. For a second I think about flipping the deadbolt open, inviting him inside, but instead I press the garage door opener.

“You can let me see you,” he tells me before he walks out of the garage. “I'd be all right with whatever happened.”

T
his morning, on page 204:

Babies are hard work. Especially indoor babies. May we suggest that you buy a harness and stake your baby to something immovable? Don't skimp on the harness, because babies are very strong. Stronger than you might think. A baby with enough motivation can move a couch or a recliner or an antique armoire out from in front of a bedroom door. A baby with enough motivation can pull an oven off the wall and tunnel through the drywall behind it. A tip: when you do pound in your stake for your harness, pound the stake deep into the floor joists, so not even an adult can pull it out.

T
oday when I am giving Mitch his sponge bath, I lean in to lift him up to clean his back. My shoulder is right near his mouth. Mitch could sweetly kiss me, but he doesn't. He tries to bite me. I pull away just in time.

“What the hell was that for?” I yell.

“We do our best with what little we have,” Mitch tells me, then he starts laughing.

I don't understand what the hell he is talking about or why he's laughing, but I back away from him. I turn to look at Swayze . . . he's not there. I run through the house and cannot find him. Then I hear some squawking in the backyard. I look out the window and see Swayze standing on the patio and two eagles circling around him. He was just in his playpen a minute ago, but he must've escaped out the dog door while Mitch was distracting me. Swayze's wearing overalls and by the time I get outside the eagles have looped their claws around his shoulder straps. They pull him upward, trying to gain lift-off. Fortunately Swayze's a solid kid, much heavier than Snowball, and the birds only pull him a few inches off the ground before they set him back down and try again.

“Fight!” I yell to Swayze as I grab a broom. “Fight!”

But Swayze isn't fighting. He's jumping up and down as the birds flap their wings; he's trying to help them get off the ground. His jumping becomes more frantic when he sees me running toward him. I poke one of eagles in the gut with the broom handle and I knock the other one in the side of the head and they let go and flap away. Swayze is sitting on the ground now, holding out his hands to them as he watches them go.

Sometimes even with the best planning your indoor baby does not remain inside. Something goes badly. This is a time where you need to roll with the punches. Have a positive attitude, know which battles to fight, learn from your mistakes, have a steady hand, all of these things are necessary with any good parenting strategy. Your baby may not understand why these rules are necessary now, but later, later your baby will thank you for keeping him or her safe. Later, and this could be many, many years down the line, your baby will take your hand and look into your eyes and tell you all the good that you have done for him or her. Then all this hard work will be worth it, won't it?

I
stand over Swayze now and watch his little stomach rise up and down. I gave Mitch a pain pill about an hour ago. He's snoring in the other room.

First I take a piece of plywood and I nail the dog door shut, then I pour myself a glass of wine. I sit on the couch underneath the skylight and watch the clouds move across the night sky. It's been a stormy summer and sometimes the wind blows so hard that I think the whole damn house is going to fall down around me. Mitch used to tell me that I was crazy, that this house was as solid as they come, but I still can't stop thinking that it just might happen, that one of the construction workers missed a nail somewhere, that maybe the trusses are moving in the opposite way the foundation is settling. Everything in the universe was mashed together all nice and tight at one time and then somehow it all blew apart, didn't it? Who's to say that the opposite can't happen and that at some point we'll all be smashed together again, noses into armpits and knees into crotches?

I pour another glass of wine and then I call the grocery store.

“I need a bag of marshmallows and a jar of peanut butter,” I tell James. “I need a bottle of tonic water.

“Give me twenty minutes,” James says.

I hang up the phone and then I go and check on Mitch and Swayze. I brush Mitch's hair from his eyes. Swayze's thrown his blankets aside and I cover him back up. When I'm finished, I walk into the garage. I press the opener and watch the door slide up. The wind moves through the tops of the pine trees and some crows flutter off into the dark sky. I unbutton my shirt, slide off my shorts. I throw my bra aside and step out of my panties. I stand there naked, waiting for James to bump up the driveway. I stand there, waiting for the lights of his car to wash over my pale body. I wait for him to see that even though I'm trapped inside, I'm still free.

FIELDWORK

L
essig's hut was closest to the latrine, downwind from the yucca being fermented in the hollowed-out rubber trees. He was lying in his hammock, itching a rash on his calf and wondering if tonight was the night the Kula were going to come through the jungle with their machetes and garrote his white ass. Three days ago, they'd abducted Tunney, who'd disappeared exactly like Rautins had the week before, without screams or hubbub, his hiking boots set neatly in front of his hut filled with stones from the river. Lessig and Schneider were the only anthropologists in the village now. After the first abduction, Gtal, the chieftain of the Campas, had ordered extra sentries in the watchtower and more warriors on foot patrol, but the increased security hadn't done dick, the Kula had poached another one of his colleagues. Even though he was less than forty-eight hours away from the supply plane splashing down in the river to ferry him away from this godforsaken place, Lessig knew he was probably fucked.

Through his window, Lessig saw candlelight in Mada's hut. He buttoned up his shirt as he walked across the plaza. He knocked on Mada's door and she grunted for him to enter. Lessig found her sitting cross-legged on the ground, weaving one of those shapeless ponchos he was so goddamn sick of all the women in Los Roques wearing.

“Where the hell have you been?” he asked her in his broken Utu.

“Around,” she said.

“Around where?”

“Around around,” she sighed.

Mada's hut was claustrophobic, one side of it packed with animals whittled from driftwood, the other crowded with baskets of dried fruit. Her bed was like a little girl's, the surface of it packed with braided palm frond dolls and throw pillows filled with quinoa. She was not particularly pretty, her nose had been broken and never reset, but she had a body that reminded him of a wasp, a skinny torso above a bulbous ass. A month after Lessig arrived in the village, Mada had gotten him drunk on something that tasted like kerosene and she'd pulled him back to her hut and unbuckled his belt with her teeth. Lessig was thirty-seven, newly divorced, his wife, Carol, stolen away from him by a classic rock deejay. After his divorce, he'd taken a leave from the University of Maryland to do some fieldwork and lick his wounds. He'd come to the rainforest to reconfirm his faith in anthropology, to make sure that his life thus far hadn't been an utter waste, but when Mada yanked his cock from his cargo pants he could not have cared less about any of that crap. Her mouth was wet and a little gritty and he busted his nut instantly, like a schoolboy, Mada pulling away right before he shot his skeet onto the thatched wall of her hut. Lessig tried to laugh it off, but Mada clucked her tongue in disapproval. She stood up and walked to the door,
holding it open until Lessig understood that he should pull up his pants and leave.

In the weeks since, Mada had ignored him. And while Lessig should've been pleased that she wasn't spreading the news of their drunken liaison to any of the tribal elders or to any of the other anthropologists, Mada's lack of interest in him made his self-doubt blossom. If I could just talk to her, he thought, explain to her that he hadn't been touched in over a year; explain to her that his performance that night wasn't indicative of his overall sexual skill set. A couple of days ago, Lessig followed Mada into the jungle, hoping to set the record straight, but she saw him trailing her and lost him by the caves near the waterfall. Now that she was back she wouldn't even make eye contact.

“I was worried about you,” Lessig said. “I thought you'd gotten snatched up too.”

“I had to work out some things,” she told him.

“What things?” he asked.

Mada sucked in air through her teeth. She dug her heels into her cocoa shell floor until she hit the hard clay beneath.

“Things things,” she grunted.

Mada got up, took a guava from her table and broke it open with her splitting stone. She ate without offering Lessig any. She was a brusque woman, childless, widowed at an early age. During a communal dinner a few weeks ago, Lessig had seen her slap a boy who'd eaten more than his fair share of rice. After she'd finished with the boy, she'd lectured the boy's mother for her lack of oversight.

“Everything's bad now,” Lessig told her. “Tunney and Rautins are probably dead and Schneider and I are next.”

Mada took out a clay frog necklace from a basket, tossed it to Lessig.

“Wear this and you'll be safe,” she told him.

Lessig still wanted to talk, but Mada was finished. She turned her back to him, returned to weaving her dumbass poncho. Lessig stormed out, slamming the rickety door behind him.

F
or his postdoc fieldwork, Lessig had lived in the forests of Papua, growing a gnarly beard and contracting malaria. He returned stateside with rock-hard abs and a sense of purpose, but the last ten years of lecturing in low-slung campus buildings and eating salt-and-vinegar-flavored potato chips had beaten down his vigor. Lessig's return to the rainforest was a chance to reclaim the enthusiasm he'd lost, but after only a few days of the bugs and heat, he realized he'd made a huge mistake, that he didn't want to live this hard life any more than his Anthropology 101 students wanted to listen to him prattle on about its beauty and simplicity.

After Carol had left him, Lessig moved in with his alcoholic father, a retired real estate agent who liked to have his television on all hours of the day and night. While he was living there, Lessig became addicted to the Home and Garden Channel, especially to a show called
Curb Appeal
. Most nights he sat on the couch gulping wine with his father and his father's alcoholic girlfriend, Dottie, the three of them watching designers tweak house after house to make them more salable.

“Lipstick on a pig,” Dottie would say whenever the designers were stuck with a dud. “Like bright red lipstick on a Botox-lipped pig.”

Sometimes on his way home from work, Lessig drove past his old condo, where Carol still lived. If the weather was decent, he'd park his car and crouch down in the bushes to look in her windows. One night Carol saw him hunched outside and called the cops. Lessig had been slapped with a trespassing charge and then a restraining order.

“When a wife leaves you,” Lessig's father explained after he bailed him out, “you find another one. Maybe she drinks more than your last wife. Maybe she's not as smart. Maybe you realize you made another mistake. Whatever the case is, you make peace with it and trudge forward.”

W
hen he got back to his hut, Lessig strung the clay frog around his neck and put on a pot for tea. Recent rains had made the river majestic, full of whirling currents. Everyone else in Los Roques had a great view of the water, but Lessig's hut was behind a thick stand of palms and he could only see a sliver of it. He dropped a bag of Earl Grey into his cup and listened to the macaws bicker. It was midnight, shouldn't they be asleep? They were not asleep. They were alive and unbidden like everything else here.

Lessig readied his mosquito netting and wet some Kleenex to stuff into his ears to stifle the sounds of the jungle. This was the one point in his day he savored. A moment of peace in this shitty existence he'd led for the past few months. A moment when he could block out everything foul, when he could shut his eyes and dream of convenience, of hot water gushing out of a shiny tap, of his mouth being safe from stink bugs. He'd only filled one of his ears with Kleenex when Schneider pounded on his door.

“Any word on Tunney and Rautins?” Schneider asked.

Schneider was blond and tall and twenty-six years old and his skin looked like it did not have any pores. Lessig was stocky and dark haired and had stopped applying sunblock in the last few days in the hopes that a better tan might help him blend in with the natives when the Kula showed up again.

“The search party got back a little while ago,” Lessig said. “They didn't find anything.”

Lessig had tried to hate Schneider but could not. Schneider kept a knife strapped to his belt and had once saved Lessig's life
by scaring away a jaguar that lunged at them while they gathered firewood. He also had a large cache of liquor and weed he readily shared. While Schneider was generally clueless about what it meant to be an anthropologist, Lessig knew he probably wasn't doing the Campas a huge disservice by acting like a bemused tourist, constantly snapping pictures, overdocumenting everything that happened in the village.

“Totally fucked,” Schneider said. “One day they're here and then the next they're gone. Into the goddamn gorilla's mist.”

Schneider had bunked in Lessig's hut for a week when they'd first arrived. He'd just finished a postdoc at Georgia Southern, which he kept referring to as “a party school.” He brought presents for Gtal, a Georgia Southern hoodie and an expensive pen set, and after he presented his gifts to the chief, Schneider was immediately invited to live in a better hut, one with a wonderful view of the river, one with a female servant, Yelma, who sometimes cleaned his hut topless.

All of them had contaminated the tribe, Lessig knew, all of these anthropologists, coming year after year to study the Campas' innocence, even though they all knew that studying innocence was the one thing that always ruined it. When Lessig's department chair suggested he do his sabbatical in Los Roques to recharge his batteries, he talked about a world where traditions were passed down like heirlooms, people doing the same exact things in the same exact way their ancestors had a thousand years ago—sharpening rocks into spear tips, binding thatch to keep out monsoon rain, catching tarpon in woven baskets—and while all those things ended up being real, Gtal was also parading around in an oversized Georgia Southern hoodie.

“They were cutting apart a parrot outside Htul's hut a few minutes ago,” Schneider told him. “Some fertility thing to help Htul's wife conceive. Lots of blood.”

Schneider held up his Nikon to Lessig, scrolled through the pictures of the blue and yellow bird, first with two wings, then one, then none, then its head lopped off and bleeding out in the white sand. The last picture was a grinning selfie of Schneider's face inches away from the bird's head.

“Two more days,” Schneider yelled back to Lessig as walked away. “Two more days and then that plane splashes down, brother.”

T
he next morning, Lessig woke to find a pile of dead fish stacked like a teepee outside his door. Inside the fish teepee were his spare hiking boots, filled with what looked to be butter. Schneider came over to look, circling around the fish teepee with his camera, snapping pictures. Lessig kicked the pile of fish over so he would stop.

“I'm trying not to freak out here,” Lessig yelled at Schneider. “I'm trying not to freak out even though there are fish stacked outside my hut like a fucking teepee and my boots are filled with some sort of butter or butter substitute.”

“You've got to stay calm,” Schneider said. “We're stuck. We wouldn't stand a chance out in the forest alone.”

Lessig knew that Schneider was right. It was a four-day walk to a passable road through Kula-controlled forest in blinding heat. They could die any number of ways—caught in a foot trap, withered by dehydration, bitten by a deadly spider, buried in a mudslide.

“Do you want to watch Yelma clean my place?” Schneider asked him. “It always helps calm me down.”

Lessig picked up one of the dead fish and hurled it like a discus into the river. He scooped some of the butter out of his boot with his fingers and flicked it onto the ground.

“You got any of that weed left?” he asked Schneider.

L
ater that afternoon, Lessig and Schneider were wasted out of their gourds. They were watering the garden plot when the search party came back from the jungle. Schneider and Lessig walked over to the group and watched as Bartik dumped Rautins's head and Tunney's hand out from his satchel. Rautins's head had been shrunken to the size of a cantaloupe. Tunney's hand was the opposite—it looked like a catcher's mitt, swollen to five times its normal size. Rautins's mouth was held in a scream, his eyes full of fear. Tunney's wedding band was still around his ring finger, cinching it like a twist tie.

“That's a head?” Lessig yelled at Bartik. “That's a hand?”

Bartik nodded, showing no emotion. It was all the same to Bartik. Huge hands, tiny heads. Just another day in the jungle.

Schneider pulled Lessig back to his hut. “We're gonna make it,” Schneider told him, stuffing his one hitter and putting it into Lessig's palm.

“Sure we are,” Lessig said as he inhaled.

T
hat night was windless and Lessig stared out his window, tracking any strange sounds or weird movements in the brush. There was a bonfire down on the beach tonight, the night patrol chucking log after log into the fire pit until the blaze touched the sky. Across the plaza, Lessig saw there was candlelight in Mada's hut. He knew he should stay put, but he finger-combed his hair and grabbed the spear Htul had given him for protection. He was about to knock on Mada's door when he heard giggling. Lessig knelt down, peered into inside through a small crack in the thatch door. He saw Mada lying naked in her hammock and Schneider sliding around the room, snapping picture after picture of her.