One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (13 page)

Sloan paused, looked back toward his friend. He knew he’d have to go, make sure Topper didn’t do something stupid. The greatest heights meant the greatest powers, the greatest dangers. And it meant knowing every place of the powerhouse. He had no choice. It was finishing in a way. He imagined his shoes crunching the stones on top of Kilimanjaro.

“Where are you?”

“See this?” Topper flicked his lighter.

Far above, Topper’s sparks lit up the room. Sloan followed the flashes up and around the catwalks until he found his friend already scaling the ladder they’d never found, always missed. Topper easily jumped the gap in the ladder and scrambled up the wall. The sound of his sneakers climbing the metal rungs made a
ting ting
.

This time, Alex knew someone was there. The tapping of metal, the head sprouting from the floor. Then his shoulders. Here he comes. They found her. Ghost. Then two ghosts. Ghosts looking like boys with moonstruck wide eyes and hair cropped close to shiny heads. Factory workers from a previous time, must be, returned to recover the things she’d stolen and sold. She thought they’d be older. She’d
been waiting for them. They’d absorb her in place of their treasures, suck her into their black-sky history.

That could be, she supposed. There could have been child labor, like Blake’s little chimney sweeps. Fingers lost in pulp presses, ears dulled by mechanical roar, skin sliced by endless paper cuts. She smelled the grease and paper and blood. Oily red iron and pulp-caked steel. If it’s ghost children, so be it. They have the right to haunt just like any other. They worked hard to die.

One stared down at her, wearing the crumpled brow of an older man. He was asking something of her. She felt her ether evaporating into a cloud, yellow, curling, pulling toward him. Her body was collapsing into human slush, puddle flesh. It was warm, quiet, soft, dark. Easy to go. She closed her eyes.

“Think she’s dead?” Sloan asked his friend.

Topper prodded her thigh with the toe of his shoe. Nothing. He kicked her softly. Her leg twitched. “Nope. Fucked up is what she is.”

Sloan bent close to her and listened for breathing. “Are you sure?” He could smell her hair. Like dry dirt. Like the crushed concrete that circled the lot outside the powerhouse, the smell of their secret freedom.

“She’s not dead, but she sure as hell ain’t here.” Topper picked up one of her arms and waved to Sloan with it, the limp fingers flopping hello. “She’s on Jupiter, man. Maybe fucking Pluto.”

“That’s not cool. She might be in trouble.” He grabbed her limp hand from Topper, rested it gently in her lap. “We should call an ambulance or something. What if she’s
OD
ing?”

“Then a dopehead dies. You think they give a shit about that, man? She’s hopping planets to us, but she’s definitely dead to them.”

“Who’s them?”

“You’re such a dolt.” Topper blew a cloud of smoke into her face. “The Man, man. The Man don’t care about her. The Man don’t care about us.”

Sloan had heard this sermon before. Topper picked it up from his
brother, who hated the world. Topper was crazy about his brother, and since his brother hated the world, Topper did too, found more reasons every day. It was stupid. The world was too big to blur all together.

“Well, I’m not the Man, and I do care,” Sloan said.

“You certainly are not a man, my friend, but that’s beside the point.”

He ignored the insult. Sloan didn’t need to prove himself with a lip of soft hairs like the ones Topper grew on his lip, trying to look like his brother—the ultimate man, the righteous rebel. Sloan’s actions would make him a man. Just like Teddy Roosevelt, whom Mr. Bendele had taught him about. A rough-riding motherfucker who could still be a teddy bear.

Sloan slid his hand under her legs, his arm rubbing against her buttocks. It made him tingle, and he felt warmth, wet. She was pissing on him. But heroes aren’t stopped by a little piss. He reached his other arm behind her neck, bent his knees, his face close to hers. Her jaw and lips were sunk, and it made her look like she was puckering. She was kind of pretty. A crooked nose in a pleasing way, short bangs that curled into her eyes. The way her eyes hid under those bangs intrigued him. Maybe she’d see him someday. Thank him. He struggled to stand with her in his arms.

“What the fuck?” Topper laughed. “Here goes the tough guy again.”

His friend tottered for a few steps with the weight of a woman in his arms. Topper thought she looked like a squashed spider, thin, lifeless limbs dangling. There was no way Sloan could go anywhere with this except into trouble. Topper’s aunt smoked meth. She’d sit on the couch for hours, disassembling alarm clocks and television remotes in a trance. She had no understanding of the precise arrangement of circuit boards and wires and plastic casings, but she carried on, taking everything apart and leaving electronic guts everywhere she went. Her face fell apart within months. She stopped being a woman. Stopped being a person. More like the jumbled mess of dissected electronics than any person. When she
finally got busted, Topper’s dad had come to her defense, pleading with the cops. His silhouette became blank and black against the backdrop of blue and red lights flooding the street. They made his dad lie face down on the sidewalk, hands behind his head, while Topper and his brother watched from the porch. His aunt, a waste, had done this to his father. Kalamazoo was full of junkies. They were all just waiting to leech, suck the life out of people. And now Sloan carried one like she was Sleeping Beauty.

Sloan wasn’t strong enough to do it alone, though, so Topper grabbed on to the legs of the woman for his friend’s sake. Her middle slumped toward the floor. They toted her like this to the ladder.

“Okay, genius, how do we get her down?” Topper asked.

“I don’t know.” Sloan peered through the access hole to the catwalk ten feet down and the continuing blackness below. “We lower her, like with a rope or something.”

“Ah shit, I happened to pick this day to leave my utility belt at home.” He adjusted the weight of her legs higher up into his arms. “Where you gonna get rope?”

“She’s pretty light. It’s not like we need heavy-duty rope or anything.”

“Your ideas suck, man.” Topper spit his cigarette down the hole. The orange cherry bounced through the catwalk into the black below. “This is going to suck.”

Rough plywood pushed against Alex’s lower back, her bare forearms, the back of her head. The two child ghosts stood above her. They slipped off their shirts like skins of white. Their chests reflected moon, waning and waxing pectoral as their bodies shifted. Maybe they weren’t ghosts. Instead of from the powerhouse below, maybe from above, from the sky she watched all nights, let burn into her own skin. They removed their pants, and their white shorts were the brightest sight she had ever seen. Like one of those constellations she could never find. She’d forgotten how amazing it was to put the pieces together. For specks to manifest heroes.

“It still won’t be enough,” they said. They looked down at her,
summing up the variables, calculating her deflated, gelatinous body. What else did they want? How could she be enough? “We’ll need hers, too.”

Something of hers. They wanted to take it. Excavate. Salvage for parts. She wouldn’t stop them. She’d stolen their history, sold it to the pawnshop. She would compensate with body.

“You do it.” One knelt near her head. She clenched her eyes tight.

Her T-shirt lifted over her stomach, her breasts, bunching in the back. Fingers slid between her skin and jeans, fiddling with her buttons. Over her hips, knees, feet. Denim and cotton ebb. Everything soft gone. Every part of her cold. How could she resist the sky coming to her tonight? She could be Leda to see the sky so close, in the form of ghost children.

“Congratulations on getting your first girl naked,” Topper said.

“Fuck you. You can’t take anything seriously.” Sloan worked alone, knotting the woman’s clothes they’d removed to their own. He didn’t want Topper to notice the piss on her jeans. He’d make a big deal, give up. Sloan needed him. He was nervous around her. Topper never was. “She’s still got on underwear.”

“All the same, credit where credit’s due,” Topper said. “This is completely fucking nuts, by the way.”

Sloan wrapped the legs of his pants under the woman’s arms, crafting a makeshift harness. He tugged at the knots.

“Now what?” Topper asked.

“I think we’re ready to lower her.”

“Down the fucking rabbit hole.” Topper tugged the woman’s legs toward the access hole where the ladder descended to the catwalk.

“Slow down.” Sloan waddled behind, struggling to keep her head from skidding across the floor. “Stop. Stop.”

“What, man?”

“You can’t just drop her down. We have to do it right.”

“Taking your time. You’re such a romantic.”

Under Sloan’s direction, Topper wound the rope of clothes around his back, bracing himself. Sloan lowered her body, an inch
at a time, through the hole. The rope jerked as she slipped over the brim, and Topper struggled to ignore the sting of the noose around his back. Sloan wrapped the rope around one arm and slowly let the knots strain through his palms. There went Topper’s black T-shirt, then Sloan’s tan cargo pants, the woman’s piss-soaked jeans. These knots strong enough to save a woman ground into the boys’ skin, forcing the same welts to surface on both of their bodies.

Alex began a slow spin. She was sinking now. Lowering into a new place. Darkness, then squares of yellow light came and went and came again. Her shoulders felt heavy, armpits pulled and stretched. Legs lost already in an eddy of shadows. She couldn’t feel them. Would she ever find her legs again? Somewhere at the bottom? Hell’s a shoe closet full of toes and tendons and achilles heels. Body parts strewn about. Impossible to sort. You are stumps. You are pieces. She realized now she could not face dismemberment, being salvaged for parts, becoming a part of these ghosts’ world. She raised her arms, attempting to swim the air, birth herself upward from gravity. But she couldn’t break the knots they’d tied.

They were getting close now. If Sloan’s palms held out, if Topper’s torso didn’t split, she’d land on the catwalk soon. And after that, Sloan thought, they would save a woman’s life. But in front of them, the fabric hissed, the sounds of failure. Sloan gripped tighter, slowed the rope’s drop. He could see it, the woman’s T-shirt, caught on a shard of metal over the access hole. The fabric was too weak; the powerhouse’s metal bones, too sharp. He tried to go faster now, yelled to Topper to let out more line. The rope burned harder into their skin, dragged them across the plywood. The rope snapped. Below, they heard the woman’s body clang against the catwalk.

They watched her through their rip in the universe, the one she’d fallen through. Their words bled down on her.

“That was the dumbest fucking idea.”

Alex could feel them. Legs again. Impossible discovery. Throbbing, pumping, but nothing in her left foot. No toes. Swept away.

“Are you still alive, lady?”

“What makes you think she’ll answer you now?”

Alive? No way to tell. Hell hurt, right? She tried to move a hand to pinch herself. Or was that only for dreams? Her fingers lifted like boulders. She gave up, left them wherever they were.

“Sloan, why do I smell like piss?”

She smelled it, too. Those distant, hollow voices above commanded her senses.

“What do you think we should do now?”

“Hey, you’re the man with the plan,” one of them said. “I still smell piss.”

She smelled it more acutely now. Ammonia pangs. What color would clouds of ammonia be in a nebula? Great curling fangs of blue or yellow? Torrent gaseous knuckles of brilliant green? No. Lower. Back to this world. Not a smell anymore. Something to feel. Feeling again. A well of shocking nerves from her left ankle just above her missing foot. Where was her foot? She lifted her head. The brightest white. Brighter than child ghosts’ bleached shorts. Her own little star gnashing bright through the darkness. This star was hers.

Sloan made his way down first, deftly jumping the gap in the rungs. Topper followed now. He descended slowly, prolonging his feet planting on the metal grates of the catwalk. He didn’t want to see. He was all about ladies in their underwear, but he didn’t want to see how they could be damaged. When he finally reached the floor, his stomach lurched. A tiny, sharp bone jutted through the arch of her foot. It glowed, slick from blood in the moonlight. Like a star. They were hard to come by. It had been since last summer that he’d been far enough out of the city to see stars. His girlfriend at the time, she was sixteen and drove a Firebird, the younger sister of one of his brother’s girls, had taken him to a golf course in Augusta. No streetlights, no orange glow in the sky, only stars and blackness as
they lay on their backs against a finely mowed putting green. He never knew how littered the sky was with stars, bright pin pricks. He made it to third base that night. Warm, dark places and brilliance.

But it was obvious that this woman was in a bad way. She was mumbling now. When he got himself to look at her again, her breasts, covered in a black bra, were invisible, camouflaged in darkness. Her waist gone in black, too. But that tiny bone was so white. It’s what stopped her from being swallowed.

“I said it before, man, and now it’s really time,” Topper said. “We gotta jet.”

“We can’t leave her.” Sloan touched the woman’s forehead, feeling her temperature with the back of his hand as his mother might do. He scooped the bangs from her eyes. “
We
did this.”

“No, man.
She
did this to herself. We should’ve left her where we found her.”

“Then I’ll just call an ambulance. The cops maybe.”

“Are you hell-bent on fucking yourself? Bad shit will happen to us if you call the cops.”

“Help me get her out of here, or I won’t have a choice.”

“Then what?” Topper cinched up his shorts. He was getting cold. He wanted to put his clothes back on. It was this lady, this damn junkie, who had him standing there stripped. And now she threatened to expose them further. He’d be paraded through the neighborhood in his underwear, highlighted by flashing blue and red, face down in shadows like his dad. Or like his brother, who’d gone to jail for a white woman. His brother couldn’t have hurt a woman. He loved women, just as Topper did. The wrong place with the wrong people and you got assumptions, court dates, rulings, permanent records. Nothing you did after could erase. This woman wasn’t worth it. He wished Sloan wasn’t so stupid. He wished Sloan wasn’t so good. “I can see how this is gonna turn out, and all of it ends with fucking me over.”