Knuckleheads Read Online Free PDF

box for you.”
    This is what you love about Daniel. He always finds a weasel third way to deal with problems. That’s why the two of you are the best sales team at the network, why you’ve won a free cruise every year for hitting your quotas. You were about to close a huge deal last week with Cypress Mineral Water when some stuck-up budget skank in their conference room started tapping her pen on the leather-bound proposal and whining about how it’s not enough primetime spots, and the Q-factor of the Thursday night sitcom is too low to generate the viewership of twenty-something females they want buying their bullshit over-priced fake water, and you were ready to reach over and smack her designer granny glasses straight through her eyeballs when Daniel said, Hold on, what if we talk to the writers? What if we have them write in a new love interest for our tragicomic hero and she’s this totally buffed rock climber with arms like lithe muscular snakes and we’ll do some product placement and every time he talks to her, she’ll zing hip witty comments and show off her guns and her beautiful flowing hair and she’ll be holding a cold dewy bottle of Cypress? How’s that sound?
    And now you’re making reservations for expensive berths on the boat going from San Juan to Porlamar, and it’ll be just like it’s been for the past three years. The kids will eat their heads off and attend day-camps starring Midwestern undergrads as warm and welcoming counselors, and Emily will play suntan and volleyball, and you and Daniel will do what you always do—beer, beer, and additional beer except there will be more of it, and better potato skins with grease that’s creamier and more luxurious and then the best part, the chugging forward through ocean as if you’re riding a grand carving knife splitting the watery seam of the world, and even though the waves will re-fold and heal themselves you will have made a cut in something so much bigger than you, something that could swallow you and not even taste you in its spit.
    “Listen,” you say to Daniel, “I think I know who did it.”
    You tell him how when you parked, there was a woman pulling garbage bags filled with cans and bottles out of what looked like a thirty-year-old Lincoln. It was rusted around the tire-wells and inside her trunk a large spool of yellow nylon rope lay on its side, surrounded by a half-dozen bruised and misshapen bleach-jugs that looked like they’d been used to pummel someone’s skull. She was maybe five-foot-four with brittle grey hair, blue jeans with oil stains and a lumpy lime-green sweatshirt with an ironed-on portrait of Dora the Explorer. Her face looked red and pissed-off as if she’d just lost a fight.
    Shit, you thought, maybe I should lock the car, but you didn’t because you hate locking your car and it was your second trip to Safeway that morning. You bought the Pop Tarts on the first trip and you forgot to pick up the toothpaste and tofu you were supposed to get, so now you had to stop back there, and you were irritated because who wants to go to the supermarket twice in one day, and why does your wife apparently believe tofu is the answer to every damn thing wrong with the world, and so, screw it, you didn’t lock the car.
    But you did open the rear passenger door and reach in to shoulder your computer bag, and the woman saw you, and she knew damn well you only grabbed your laptop because you thought she might steal it and she looked at you like she would like to batter you with one of those bleach bottles, so when you returned to your car and the Pop Tarts had vanished from the back seat, you figured she just took them out of spite.
    “Dude,” Daniel says, “I think we can catch her.”
    What would you do if you caught her? Beat her ass? Demand restitution? But you let Daniel spill his idea because he seems excited about it, rotating back and forth on his spinning desk-chair as if he’s a kid at an ice cream parlor, and when