Knockout Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 duskthey looked to him like the old ribs of beached whales, picked over and bleached by the sun.
    â€œA 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.
    â€œThose 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.
    â€œMe 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.
    â€œChange 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?”
    â€œSpeak 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