Knockout (4 page)

“Drive,” I tell him.

A
few blocks later, I realize I'm still wearing my nametag, “Ms. Rita Johnstone,” and I rip it off me. I crumple it up and throw it out the window.

“My real name's Ellen,” I tell Graham.

Graham turns left, heads back toward downtown.

“Nice to meet you, Ellen,” he says. “Where do you want me to take you?”

“Show me something,” I say.

We drive for a few minutes and then Graham pulls up next to a construction site. 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

C
antwell 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.”

L
ast 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.

“A
lready 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.

C
antwell 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.

T
here 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 trying to stop your heart again?”

“I wanted to sweat,” Cantwell said. “And I was pissed. Now I don't know what I am. 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.

C
antwell 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.”