Knockout (14 page)

I
wake up choking on a grasshopper. It is midnight and I can't get back to sleep. Instead of going for a swim, I walk over to Ari's King of Clubs. I sit near the stage and drink whatever ten-dollar beer they set in front of me.

“Give it up for Eleanor,” the DJ yells and the girl from the pool
struts out on the stage. She's wearing a stars-and-stripes bikini. As she dances, her ponytail whips around. I set down a couple of bucks on the stage and she snatches them up. When her song ends, she sits down next to me.

“Eleanor's not a stripper name,” I say.

“It's my real name,” she tells me. “I make way more money than anyone with bullshit names like Chastity or Angel.”

I see Grimace over at the bar, sitting alone. In this light, his skin looks green and his teeth look gray. The girls, even the real hustlers, aren't hounding him.

“You want a table dance?” she asks.

“Sure,” I say.

Autumn had a lot of curves, was thick in the right spots, but Eleanor is a piece of balsa, thin and flexible, her ass about as big as both of my palms spread. She grinds on me and the pain in my back disappears.

“Another one?” Eleanor asks when the song ends.

I hand her another twenty, point over at Grimace.

“Give that guy over there one,” I tell her.

I
follow Kristoff alone today. He goes to the Asian buffet where he likes to eat lunch a couple of times a week. After the buffet, I follow him to the barbershop for his weekly haircut. Yesterday, Vic and I spent all afternoon watching him supervise the roofing crew that reshingled his house. I got a headache from the echo of the nail guns, had to lie down in the back of the van to sleep it off.

When I get back to the ops center, Grimace and Foot Nose are unhooking all our surveillance equipment, tossing everything into boxes.

“Corporate called,” Vic says. “We're shuttered. DEA's sick of paying us for nothing.”

I drink a beer while Vic and Foot Nose book flights home. I
drink a couple more while Grimace packs up his car. Everyone is leaving immediately, but I'm going to wait until morning. Foot Nose is on the phone with his girlfriend, whispering and giggling. I think about calling Autumn, but I know I'll need to get drunk first.

I want to see if they all want to grab a drink before we all split up, but I know to not even ask.

“Maybe our paths will cross again,” Grimace says, shaking my hand.

A
fter I go for a swim, I put on my bulletproof vest and Autumn's panties under my clothes. When I walk into Ari's, Eleanor is giving a fat guy a lap dance on a couch by the back wall. When she finishes, the fat man gives her a long, uncomfortable hug. I order a drink, down it, order another. Eleanor walks over to me.

“Is Eleanor actually your real name?” I ask her.

She goes behind the bar and gets her wallet, hands me her ID. It says “Eleanor Tricando” on it. “There's your proof.”

While she's shoving her ID back into her wallet, a picture floats out of it, lands onto the floor. I pick it up. It's a picture of a little boy, with a wide smile, floppy brown hair.

“Yours?” I ask.

“Yep,” she says.

She reaches for the picture, but I pull it away from her, hold it above my head.

“I should tell you he's cute, right?” I say.

She jumps up and down, slaps at my wrist. I'm only teasing, but her face turns hard.

“I don't care what the fuck you say about my kid,” she says. She motions to the three bouncers by the door.

“You fucked with one of our ladies,” the biggest one says. “That means your night is done.”

The man's voice is weary, like he's been here since noon, like he just wants to head home to his family.

“Time to go,” another one of the bouncers says.

The three of them start to push me outside, but I decide I'm not going anywhere, that I want to talk to Eleanor some more. They wrestle me to the ground, kneel on my back. I know I should cut my losses, go limp, let them chuck me out in the street. I don't go easy. My mouth is right next to the ankle of one of these guys and I bite him hard, dig my teeth into his skin until I hit bone. The guy screams and jumps off my back, but the other two bouncers start wailing on me, kicking and punching. My vest doesn't do shit to help. I feel every blow.

CANNONBALL

L
isa's father was shot from a cannon once. It was on
Circus of the Stars
. It's twenty years ago now, when her dad was playing Dr. Lance Turner on the soap opera
Sunset Beach
, but he still likes to watch his grainy videotape of it whenever he gets wasted.

In the video, her father wears a white jumpsuit and a silver helmet. He sheds his red cape as he climbs up the stepladder. He slides into the cannon, gives a thumbs up to the crowd. There's a long drum roll followed by a thunderous boom. Suddenly, bursting through the gray smoke, flying up into the night sky, is her father.

Usually when he watches this tape, Lisa gives him his space. Tonight though, she plops down on the arm of his recliner and watches his descent. She watches him overshoot the landing net and fly past the bales of safety hay. She sees his body slam down on the hard and unforgiving earth, sees him tumble head over heel, shattering his left shoulder, dislocating his right elbow, breaking both ankles and his hip.

“Maybe there's a movie on?” she says.

Her dad takes a swallow from his lowball while she slips on her jacket. He hits rewind.

“And maybe you should stop dating your weed dealer,” he tells her.

E
ric's her weed dealer and sort of boyfriend. Their date tonight is part work and part fun. A week ago Eric tore his Achilles playing beach volleyball and he asked her to drive his car out to the swamp to buy his weekly brick from his wholesaler.

“It's a two-hour drive,” he tells her, “but it's scenic.”

In exchange for chauffeuring him, Eric will pay her three hundred dollars. He's also promised to cook her dinner. He's the one who first called this a date, but Lisa is the one who keeps calling it that.

When she pulls up in front of his apartment building Eric hops over to her car. When she signed his cast last week it was totally blank, but when he gets into the passenger seat she sees that it has filled up and that her well wishes have disappeared underneath a drawing of a dragon torching up a blunt.

“You ready for an adventure?” he asks, holding up a bag of beef jerky.

She's trying to let Eric's enthusiasm for life work its charms on her. Instead of questioning his motives, she's letting things flow to wherever they're naturally going to flow. She's not obsessing over each word he says, she's not revealing all her needs and concerns too early on.

“Up for anything,” she says.

They drive north. She doesn't leave Tampa much and she's forgotten what it's like in the swamp, every leaf and tree battling for its own sunlight, vines choking anything moored to solid ground.

She brought some Trivial Pursuit cards along to fill the silences. She memorized all the answers beforehand so she'll look smarter than she is.

“What president once sang ‘Amazing Grace' with Willie Nelson?” he asks.

“Jimmy Carter,” she answers.

“What Italian liqueur is made from bitter almonds?” he says.

“Amaretto?” she says, the lilt of a question in her voice.

After a couple more correct answers, Eric tells her to take a left turn. They bump down a dirt road.

“Over there,” Eric says, pointing to a trailer perched on the edge of a pond. When they pull up the red rock driveway, the door of the trailer pops open. Eric's wholesaler, Terry, walks out, wearing a stretch-marked tank top that's so tight Lisa can see the darkness of his belly hair underneath. Three dogs, German Shepherds, their coats caked with mud, jump around him and bark.

“This your girl?” he yells out to Eric.

Even though it's vague, the mention of “your” and “girl” in the same sentence in regards to Eric makes Lisa blush.

“Uh-huh,” Eric nods.

Terry frisks Eric first. Then he pats her down. His hands are strangely soft and he smells like oranges.

While the two men chat, Lisa wanders over near the pond. She kneels down and picks up a rock off the ground, hugs it to her chest. The sun went down two hours ago, but there's still some heat from the day held inside. Eric hands Terry a manila envelope and Terry hands him a duffel bag and then they get in her car and drive back to Tampa.

“Totally easy, right?” Eric says.

E
ric tells her he is going to make her prawns for dinner but when they get back to his apartment he notices there are lights on his
living room he didn't leave on. He gets twitchy, scanning the street for any strange cars. He sees he missed a call, checks his messages.

“Everything's okay,” he says after he listens to it, “but I'm gonna need to take a rain check on dinner.”

Lisa knows if she opens her mouth now, whatever comes out will sound needy or disappointed. Eric peels off three one-hundred-dollar bills from his wad, pushes them into her palm.

“Thanks for tonight,” he smiles, kissing her cheek.

L
isa gets up the next morning and finds her father in his recliner moving his pencil around his crossword. He's not very good at them, but he read something about them staving off dementia so he gives it his best shot.

“What's an eight-letter word for pouring forth?” he asks.

They're close enough to the ocean to have the birds but not the fun. They're close enough to the beach that the birds carry things back from there to show them exactly what they're missing. A few days ago, a cormorant dropped a beach towel in their backyard. Last week, a seagull dropped half of a corndog on the patio. In the past six months, they've thrown away three deflated beach balls, two spatulas, a pink wig.

“How about ‘effusive'?” she says.

Her dad arches his shoulders up for her to rub. When she doesn't do it right away, he clears his throat.

“Effusive works,” he says. “So far.”

He fills out the crossword like he fills out his days—cautious at the beginning, then with much more abandon. She often hears him rumbling around in the kitchen late at night. It sounds like shopping carts banging into each other, his cane smacking the stove, the refrigerator. She waits until all the noise has died away, when he's passed out in his recliner, and she carries him off to
bed. He weighs next to nothing now, bends over her arms like a bolt of cloth.

“It's not a jaunt, it's a journey,” he told her recently, “full of starts and stops to select our roles.”

The roles they've settled on are these: He's the crotchety old soap opera star who feels the world has done him terribly wrong. Scared and broke, but unable to cop to it. She's the trapped daughter who drives off in her car with no intention of returning, but who always turns around before she reaches the state line.

His days are still full of frustration, jaw clenching, things that he cannot accomplish. The jar of pickles out of his reach. An imaginary mosquito always buzzing around his ankles. The way they communicate best is by him shaking the ice cubes in his empty gin glass and her filling it up.

After he finishes his crossword, they start his physical therapy. Lisa pulls and contorts his body into paperclip shapes. Each day she does this she finds he's stiffened, less pliable. She limbers him up with towels warmed in the microwave; treats his body as if it were day-old bread wet heat might soften.

“My slow trudge to sludge,” he says in his gravely news voice. She presses him into a small package, his thighs up to his chest.

“Screw you,” he grunts. “Screw you and yours.”

“Right back at you,” she says.

“You are killing me,” he says. “Every damn day of every damn day.”

They have their routines and the routines do what routines always do, take fear out the equation, tell your insides you're okay, make you able to corral your breath when your breath tries to run away.

“Just leave me to die,” he says. “Put me on a burning raft and set me adrift on the ocean current.”

“No money for a raft,” she tells him.

“Then sell that body of yours,” he says. “It's passable enough.”

“It's a buyer's market,” she responds. “You'd need more than I got.”

They could go on like this all day, back and forth like they were in some black-and-white talkie, clipped speeches about just how hard it is to put one foot ahead of the other, how happiness is always slightly out of reach. Even though noir always calls for you to keep on walking until you disappear right off the edge of the screen, she stays put. She thinks it's sad to know the exact strength of every fiber of your body—your heart, your lungs, your legs.

A
week later, Eric asks her on another date.

“Same deal as last time,” he says. “Except this time the dinner actually happens, all right?”

Lisa picks him up and they drive through the swamp. Eric asks her some more trivia questions.
What state, full of milk and honey, was the destination in
The Grapes of Wrath
? What's the main vegetable in vichyssoise?
This time the ride seems shorter—maybe because she actually knows how far they're going. While she drives, Eric nods off. Halfway back home, Lisa sees a man standing in the middle of the road, flagging her down. At first she thinks his car has broken down, but there's no car anywhere around. When she gets closer she sees the moon hit the man's skin and she realizes he's naked. The man is weaving back and forth across the road, like he's drunk. She screeches to a stop.

“Shit,” Eric yells, awake now, pulling a gun out of his jacket pocket. “What are you doing? Shit, shit, shit.” Eric waves his gun around, looking for any movement in the brush, thinking this is a trap, thinking that dudes with machine guns will step out of the desert darkness and riddle their car with bullet after bullet.

Lisa stares at the naked man. He's about twenty-five feet
away from her, breathing heavily through his mouth. He's young with shoulder-length blond hair, clean shaven. She watches as he pulls a lighter from his palm and flicks it and his body goes up in flames. She sees the man crumple to his knees.

It takes her a second to register what has happened. She opens her door to get out and help him, to throw her jacket over his body, something, but before she can get out Eric reaches across her body and pulls the door shut.

“Drive,” he tells her in a voice that seems much too calm.

Her father had a job a few months back, reading audio books, but he got fired. He has a perfect voice for reading anything—spy novels or travails of sappy love—all of the publishers tell him that, but lately he's too morose and stubborn.

“He'll get more work if he stops talking about death in between takes,” his old agent Twyla told Lisa. “And if he stops being so damn pedantic. He's acting like he's Orson Welles or something.”

His agent, Twyla, retired to St. Pete and she comes over to their condo every Tuesday night for dinner. She's going through menopause right now, full of hot flashes and gland puffiness. Twyla likes her dad, remembers the good times. After the accident, she could have dropped him as a client, but she stuck it out. She kept offering him up to casting agents, always hung up on them when they asked—
Who?
or
Isn't he dead?

They're like an old couple, recasting themselves in stories long past—Twyla as the pretty young agent who talked like a sailor, her father as the up-and-comer who had a shot to be a leading man.

Sometimes Lisa wraps up little presents for her father to give to Twyla. Last week, her father gave Twyla a pair of earrings shaped like butterflies.

“What is in the box?” her father asked as he signed the card. “So I can pretend I know.”

“Butterflies,” she said.

Lisa didn't bother to clarify. She'd rather have him think there was something alive in there, that once the bow was loosed, something amazing might flutter out.

L
isa doesn't sleep much for the next few days. Every time she closes her eyes she sees the burning man, flopping and spinning around on the road. The morning after it happened, she drove back out to the swamp. She couldn't find a body, no burn marks on the tar, no evidence that anything actually happened.

“Did we break up?” she asks Eric after she finally gets a hold of him after a week of calling. “Do I need to find a new dealer?”

“You were a car,” Eric tells her. “You were some fun for a day or two.”

Lisa scours the newspaper for any information about the burning man. They run a missing person piece on a man named Christian Eccles who looks like the man she saw. He battled schizophrenia. His mother, Ingrid, was quoted in the story. She looked up Ingrid Eccles's address and called her. She told her she was a reporter, made an appointment to talk.

“I'm going to see his mother,” she tells Eric.

“Let it go,” he says. “He was crazy. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Will I ever see you again?” she asks.

“Sometimes the beauty of something is its utter convenience,” Eric tells her.