Knockout Games

For Carrie Dietz

“You've got to destroy a few lives on the
way to where you want to get.”
—Joe Frank, radio artist

PROLOGUE

It came out of nowhere.

The sound of Nikes charging across asphalt—

the bounce of baby fat in the black kid's face—

the meat of his fist smashing into a random stranger's jaw—

I heard the
SMACK!
from where I was standing.

Through my lens, I saw the stranger's cigarette fly out of frame, his eyes rolling back into his head—

And then he just fell.

Hard.

The guy's head bounced off the sidewalk with a
thunk
as the boy yelled “Knockout!” His friends rushed in and jumped all over him like he'd just scored the game-winning touchdown.

I stared at the man on the ground with my camera, his eyes gazing at the sky, blood trickling from his mouth. He looked like a character in a movie.

But this was real. It was on my screen. But it was real.

To the boys, it was just a game. Some called it One Hit or Quit, most just called it the Knockout Game. One kid, an eighth-grader with a crooked smile and ketchup stains on his school uniform, noticed the man's eyes were still open. He grinned at me, the white girl with the camera, and jumped on the man's head like it was a balloon that needed popping.

The Knockout King would be proud.

1

(months earlier)

“Pain is a gift,” Mom whispered.

There was a ringing in my ears; my face burned like someone had just smacked me. But it was only her words that stung. She was going on and on—about how we were leaving Dad, about how we were moving to St. Louis, and how we were going to leave everything behind to start over, just the two of us.

I felt sick.

We were sitting by the overgrown pool at our house in Little Rock. I tried to focus on the ripples in the water, but the wind was kicking up and my eyes were getting wet.

“Things will get better, Erica,” she told me, trying to make it hurt less. I didn't believe her.

“It's not your fault,” she said, but I knew somehow it probably was. It's been my fault a lot lately.

I leaned over the edge of the pool until I dropped straight into the deep end. I didn't care that I was wearing clothes. I let myself sink to the bottom and watched the surface bob and weave. I could see Mom up there, distorted and all bent out of shape. She was yelling at me until Dad came out. They started fighting again.

Fuck 'em.
The water was freezing, but I could stay down here forever. The cold stung for a few seconds, then I felt the pain slowly floating floating away. Who needed it? The numbness came and it felt good to be underwater where everything was blue and quiet and I didn't have to feel anything anymore . . .

If pain was a gift, then it sucked ass.

2

Right before I was cast into exile, Dad gave me one of those mini HD video cameras for my birthday. I guess he felt guilty for splitting up the family.

“You always liked movies,” he said, searching for a way in. “I thought . . . maybe you could make your own. Maybe send me some about St. Louis.” He gazed at me with those gray-blue eyes of his, hoping it would help get me on his side. The camera looked tiny, engulfed in his thick fingers.

“Why don't you just come and see it for yourself,” I shot back.

He winced, brushing his rough reddish hair off his forehead. “I will, Erica. When you and your mom are settled . . .” His voice trailed off and I knew it wasn't going to happen.

He tried to smile, something I hadn't seen him do for a while. He pressed the camera into my hands and neither of us knew what to say. I spotted my name and phone number engraved into the bottom of it, next to a little heart. He was a bail bondsman who was used to dealing with drug addicts, liars, and thieves. He was not used to saying good-bye to his daughter.

I wanted to smash that camera into a thousand pieces. But I took it and turned on him without a hug, running straight to the car, where Mom was already gunning the engine.

The drive took seven hours. Mom didn't say much, just let the wind howl through the windows as if it would blow away the past. Normally, her hair was tied back tight in a bun; now she let it fly wild. Her pale blue eyes were fixed on the horizon, searching for something. Maybe a new beginning.

Through my new camera, I watched the Midwest rush by, but refused to record anything because that's what Dad would've wanted. The camera had one of those flip viewfinders so you could point the camera at yourself and see what you were filming.

I didn't like what I saw.

“This thing makes me look fat,” I said to myself.

“You look like a real girl,” answered Mom.

I turned the camera off. “A real fat girl, you mean.”

“No, a
real
girl. Not some skinny, anorexic home wrecker—” she caught herself, and didn't say anything more.

She was all tensed up, so I rested my head against the window and stared at myself in the side view mirror. I'm big for my age I guess, but that wasn't the thing that ruined my freshman year.

It was the red hair. In grade school, it was cute. Got called leprechaun, the usual little-kid crap. But by my freshman year when I really hit puberty, I blew up and everything got bigger—my butt, my breasts. I tried dying my hair but the red made every color muddy, so I just cut it short and took to wearing hoodies and baggie clothes—mostly to piss Dad off once it was clear things were coming to an end.

It's not like anyone was ever going to ask me out or anything.

When we finally reached St. Louis, we had to go downtown to pick up the key to our place. We had to drive by the only thing I remembered about the city, its one real tourist attraction: the Gateway Arch. A couple years ago, we drove here just to go up in that thing. It was Dad's idea of a weekend getaway. He talked the whole way out about having gone up there when he was a kid and how you could see forever out of those tiny windows. Told the whole history of how it was built and this crazy elevator system they had that worked like a Ferris wheel and how once you got up there, it felt like there was no way this thing should be standing.