One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (14 page)

“It’s not all about you.”

“You’re a straight-A student.” Topper made a circle with his thumb and index finger and puckered into it. “A little ass kiss. Clean
record. They’ll pin this shit on me. So, yeah, it’s
all
about me.” It was half-true. Half to save his ass, but the other half was for Sloan, his stupid friend and his perfect grades.

“We were trying to help.”

“Yeah, and I bet that’s exactly how they’ll see it,” Topper said. “You’re so blind. Two black kids strip a white woman and bust her up. Junkie or not, she’s white. White is right, man.”

“Will you stop with that shit?”

“Don’t leave me,” the woman said.

The boys’ eyes darted to her body, a dripping puddle on the catwalk, tapping echoes onto the hollow boilers below. Her eyes and mouth were still closed. It seemed impossible for her to speak, like a baby sister’s first words.

“What do you want us to do, lady?” Sloan asked.

“Don’t make me dust. I want more stars.” She trailed off.

“See, man. She’s crazy,” Topper said.

“Let’s get her out of here.”

The boys carried her by thighs and arms over and down the labyrinthine catwalks, toward the window on the second floor. They retied the clothes rope around her. Topper climbed out first to help from the ground. It was cold and late. He stood in front of his sleeping neighborhood, wearing nothing but shorts. He thought about bolting, felt his legs throb full of adrenaline. It would be so easy to leave it all in Sloan’s hands. He might not get in much real trouble. He couldn’t risk screwing up Sloan’s life, though, abandoning the pride of their neighborhood—exemplary student, mower of lawns, half-white—which had so little to be proud about. He hated his friend for making him care too much.

Millie Bliss leaned her elbows on her knees. She’d been waiting an endless hour for boys to emerge men.

One of the boys darted out a window of the powerhouse, slicing through the night in white shorts. Another body, gleaming with yellow streetlights, spilled through the same window. It didn’t move with the nimbleness of the boys. It floated like an angel.
Where there was whiteness on the boys, blackness. Blackness across the waist and chest, refusing the yellow glow. This was no angel. Something sick and evil. The humid attic air caught heavy in her chest.

She couldn’t stand the weakness of her night vision, the weakness of distance that the cold lenses of her dead husband’s binoculars could not cure. The toes of her boots tapped against each other. She pulled at the wrinkles in her neck. Angels with black waists and one missing boy promised a disaster. She knew it.

In her husband’s closet, she found a black overcoat. She slipped a metal flashlight into one of the long pockets. Down the steps, she grabbed from the wall the small crucifix with the ivory Jesus; she’d need faith to face black angels. Near her front door, she grabbed her house keys, some matches, a photo of her husband in uniform holding an ice-cream cone—a man and a boy all in one. She put everything she could find into those pockets. Everything she might need to save the boys and the neighborhood: a handful of red-and-white mints, a hairbrush, a screwdriver, a hand towel, two spoons, her orange bottle of codeine. She swept through the door and across Belford Street. Past the houses and through the chain-link fence surrounding the powerhouse lot.

Millie Bliss flattened against a wall of the powerhouse. She peered around the side. The hunched angel, at this point, was landing in the fingertips of one of the boys. She was no angel. A young woman in her underwear, the boy in his shorts. The flying, merely a dangle of clumped, knotted fabrics. It was all parlor tricks. Deception led to sin. Sin, to disaster. All the important things in her pockets felt heavy. This would be a matter of subtraction, not addition. She needed to remove the sin, save the boys.

“Okay, I got her.” Topper’s whispers hissed alongside a lonely car rushing by on the street. “Get down here and take your woman.”

Sloan tossed the rope of clothes and then jumped down. He felt so close to finishing now. He’d done the search, the rescue, now what? He took the lady from his friend’s arms.

Topper picked up the rope and worked at the knots. To get his jeans free, he had to untangle Sloan’s T-shirt and the woman’s pants. To get his shirt, he had to loosen the knuckles that bound it to Sloan’s cargos. Everything was so fucking connected. A mess of knots. Why didn’t Sloan care about the tangles? The neighborhood could wake at any moment. All he wanted was to get his clothes free and get this thing over with. He felt small in his shorts and cold. The early a.m. chill of the late summer tightened his balls into an infant’s fist. He only had one leg of his pants free. The knot connecting to Sloan’s shirt refused to give.

“Boys your age shouldn’t be out so late,” Millie Bliss said, walking toward Sloan.

Topper yanked at the one pant leg he had free. He thrust his other foot into the hole still knotted tight, but as hard as he pushed, he couldn’t pull the pants to his waist. He stumbled to a standing position, gripping his jeans with tensed fingers. The clothes rope tailed at his feet, a shadow he couldn’t escape. But the intruder in their night paid little attention to Topper. She spoke to his friend.

“Sloan, how are your parents?”

“Fine, Mrs. Bliss.”

“You better get home to them, or they won’t be so fine.”

“Mrs. Bliss, it’s not what it looks like.” Topper stepped between the two of them, still struggling to keep his knotted pants up. “Sloan, and me too, we were trying to help. You don’t need to tell our parents, get anyone else involved.”

She nodded and smiled, as if he were someone she’d known all her life. The recognition made him shudder.

“Who else should be involved?” she asked. “I’ll bring my car around and take care of this mess.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Bliss.” Topper swung the tail of clothes rope over his shoulder.

“I’ll be back in a minute.” She eyed both of them. “No more trouble until then, boys.”

Sloan stood straight, holding the woman. He could hold her all
night if he had to. He had the strength to figure out what to do next, without Mrs. Bliss’s help. The woman was out again. Jupiter or Pluto, as Topper said. Sloan could see her better now under the hazy glow of streetlight that never let their street be truly dark. Her lips were pale, cracked, and peeling. Roots of blonde crowned the peak of her head, spilling into a brunette dye. Her lungs rattled softly through her back, against the palm of his right hand. Warmth slipped into his left. Like the piss before, but blood this time, from her skinned knee. Lower, there was the foot he’d ruined. Would the blood be scalding at the bone that popped from her foot? A core of brilliant magma. He felt the weight lightening. Finishing becoming a mystery. Out of his hands. Soon into Mrs. Bliss’s wrinkled fingers, which could not be as strong as his.

The boys watched Millie Bliss’s red Lincoln roll up and stop at the perimeter of the chain-link fence. Topper slapped his friend’s shoulder. “Come on, man. Let’s get this shit over with.”

Topper hustled ahead to the car. Sloan followed, taking slow steps. Topper couldn’t handle the weight Sloan held in his arms, even though he was taller. Topper was weak, a quitter. Here they had a chance to do something good, something that mattered.

At the car, Topper opened the passenger-side door, waving Sloan forward.

“Right there is fine, boys,” Millie said, pointing to the seat. Sloan hesitated, but she kept her finger pointed, eying him with a look she might give a child, waiting for him to surrender a slingshot. She made no reference to the woman. Her weight burned in his arms. He lowered her.

Through squinted eyelashes, Alex looked up at him again. Magnificent white eyes against a black sky. She was being released. Gods’ regrets became a soft gravity onto upholstery. Her neck rolled. Windshield. Digital clock. Steering wheel. Chariot. Canoe down River Styx so much like a car. An old woman full of cold. Her wrinkles made ghosts and gods seem like boys. And she had nothing to give for fare to the old woman. Maybe it had already been paid. Maybe
she was already too far in debt from stealing for anyone to care. She didn’t want to leave. But this was not her place. Goodbye to sky and almost stars, to crumbling history.

“Good boy.” Mrs. Bliss turned the key, rumbling the Lincoln to life.

“Her clothes are still tied up over here.” Sloan pointed to the tail of clothes over Topper’s shoulder.

“I’ll take care of her now. She won’t need those tatters.”

“So we’re good then?” Topper asked.

“That’s up to you two,” she said. “You young boys, running around in your underwear, playing games. You’ll catch a cold. Get dressed and go home.”

Goosebumps sprouted over Sloan’s arms. He felt chilled for the first time that night. The light hairs on his arms stood up, stained in the lady’s blood and piss.

“Sloan, be sure to get to my lawn this week. It’s embarrassing how long it is. God only knows what the neighbors think. I expect you to stay on top of things like that.”

And that was his place. Gifted gardener, grass and grass alone. He watched Mrs. Bliss and the woman creep down the street.

“I’m done with knots.” Topper slung what was left of the clothes rope around Sloan’s neck. His shirt and pants were finally untangled and free. The last knots bound Sloan’s clothing to the woman’s. “I’m done with this shit, too. Junkies and the mill. I’m going home.”

“What do you think Mrs. Bliss will do?” Sloan sank to a squat and yanked at his clothes, fumbling slowly with his cold, filthy fingers. “Take her to the hospital?”

“Fuck if I know. Hell if I care. We should just be glad she came along. I mean, what would we have done with her? You didn’t know.”

“We’d have figured something out.”

The Lincoln turned the corner of the lot, toting the woman he was supposed to save.

“Well, there you go, man. She’s going to a better place.”

“Why you gotta say it like that?”

“Junkie heaven in a Lincoln. Down to the methadone clinic in style. What lucky trash.”

Topper didn’t get it, couldn’t understand how close they’d been to doing something important, to finishing something. The lady was nothing to him but stupid jokes he’d learned from his loser brother. Sloan’s hands tightened into stones. He swung his fist into the side of Topper’s face. He’d been waiting all night for this to come to a conclusion, and here it was. This was how it would end, the descent from a mountain. His friend with no feelings, flat on his ass.

On the ground, Topper held his face, sucked cool air through his teeth. He watched Sloan pull his shirt over his head, step into his pants. And in that second, blood filling Topper’s mouth, Sloan looked strong like his brother. But would Sloan ever understand the important thing—that no one cared? This neighborhood, this city, Mrs. Bliss, no one gave a fuck about one good deed that wouldn’t change a thing. Better to give up and duck out. Mrs. Bliss knew. She’d lived here too long not to know. If she saved this woman, finished what Sloan started and took her to the hospital, there would have to be explanations. She could get in trouble. They could get in trouble. Mrs. Bliss wasn’t that stupid. She’d take the woman far enough, out of their neighborhood, and dump her. Away from them, where her body didn’t have the strength to tear anyone in this neighborhood apart. Maybe that was close enough to one good deed.

Forget eight hours, lunch breaks, smoke breaks, bathroom breaks. This is a twelve-hour mother. Boss Sleeth gives our crew one day to finish this house. He’s trying out the boys from Mexico, and if we can’t finish fast as them, some of us might not survive. We like their work, those boys from Mexico, who we know are actually from Colombia, farther south than Boss Sleeth imagines. They swing mud good as we’ve seen, good as we do. We like their brown skin against so much gray Sheetrock. Makes us think of sun. We won’t see sun today, except for a mushy glow through the plastic-masked windows. Same windows, same bulkheads and bullnose corners, same walls we’ve finished so many times that our hands don’t need our eyes. But today we must be faster. Faster than men, than ourselves, than boys from Mexico. Today is ours to get through. Our walls to build. We push into this house in the subdivision before dawn, before dew, before the moon drops like a cannonball through a boat hull. Hot sizzle into ocean like blue sky. Steam and bubbles.

Bubbles. We forget about those. We don’t see soap. Even when our hands ache for clean. Like when Ivan pitched a pile of dead possum babies from between the framing joists. Hairless things as pink as fiberglass insulation. Pink on top, turning brown against
the studs. Dead brown. Brown like the rust chewing up Bubba’s stilts. Started at the bottom of his stilt struts, a spot or two, but rust climbs all the way up to the platforms now, where he stands in dirty, ratty Reebok sneakers with a hole fraying the right big toe. We worry about that hole. Worry maybe rust’ll get tired of chomping on cold aluminum, and once it finds Bubba’s soft right toe with the split nail from when he dropped a five bucket of mud on it, the rust might crawl all the way up his leg. Maybe if he took off those stilts now and then. But he doesn’t. We’re not sure he can walk without them. Bubba’s always first on-site. Stilted up before we arrive. Won’t touch ground for twelve hours. Maybe thirteen today. Got to finish with the mudding to give the walls time to dry. Time like we never get. Always more walls for us, so long as we beat the boys from Mexico. These here walls need to be finished and dry. Tomorrow, Stags does his sanding thing.

Ever seen Stags do his sanding thing? It’s beautiful, like Christmas. Limestone snow falling all around. Chokes us up. But not because we’re thinking of that Christmas we got what we always wanted, that green thing that floated in the tub and was shaped like a boat but had knobby wheels too so you could push it through the dirt. That was before this thirteen-hour mother and all the mothers before it. That was a long time ago, when we scrubbed our soft hands in washtubs while Momma lifted us on her knee so we could reach and see all the tiny rainbows in the bubbles. Different kind of snow. Stags’s snow creeps into our lungs so sly we don’t even know, until we’re hacking up snakes of white.

Snow was pretty once. We hold on to that. We hope we don’t forget and hope Stags’s snow doesn’t work into our brains and smooth out those wrinkles.

Stags will never be replaced. Too cheap for Boss Sleeth. Stags picks up his kids from school and brings them to wintertime. Stags’s crew: eight-year-old What’s-His-Face and nine-year-old Pigtails. They know how to work the sanding pole. They know how to make snow. They know how to snap on a paper mask, and we hope they don’t forget to snug the straps both above their ears and around
their necks. Please don’t forget to bend the little metal piece over your nose. That kind of snow’s no good. Keep your masks tight.

Stags and his wintertime crew sand tomorrow. So today we drag our trowels careful as surgeons, because that means fewer ridges, less snowmaking for those kids. We take our time. We do it right, even if that means too slow for Sleeth.

No sun for us. Shaping into a fourteen-hour mother.

John is just John. Never called him no different, maybe because of the pink line sledding down his cheekbone under his right eye. A wave of missing skin. A flesh trough. A rut. John is just John, and you better not call him anything else. John keeps a baggy of little snowballs like Stags makes except it’s different stuff, chokes you up in another different way. If we don’t call John anything but John, he might share some, in the basement, among walls of stone, which don’t need Sheetrock and mud and Stags’s sanding. Someone else made these walls. We don’t think about how they did it, whether they survived. We just know we have walls around us to block out the wind so John can take the first hit out of a pipe he made by crinkling tinfoil around his pinkie finger. John passes it to us, and if we’re one of the ones who do that sort of thing and if we’re lucky and John is generous enough to load up his finger pipe with enough snowball stuff, then we’ll clutch it in our lungs as long as we can, until we grow strong enough to fight the thirteen motherfucking hours waiting for us upstairs.

What happened to fourteen?

Well, we filled a few screw holes, and Bubba’s on his stilts, knocking out the ceiling. That’s one less hour. It has to be.

John is not one of us. He’s one of Ivan’s Sheetrock-hanging boys. They’re almost done on the second floor, almost done hanging and hammering more walls for us to finish. Thunder overhead. Ivan won’t slow down our mudding and taping. Ivan has a crew of seven, more of them than us. We’ll miss him and his boys when they leave, when they go to the next house, hang Sheetrock for the boys from Mexico so they can sling mud faster than us. This is not Ivan’s betrayal. Not when there are always more walls. We
understand Ivan. We love Ivan. He sings to us,
Nobody does it better
. He tells us, if we worked for him, he’d under-the-table us fat bonuses and deport us to vacationland. Ivan grins like he’s breaking rocks with his molars.

Ivan has a bald spot flashing through his thick black hair. Bald in just one place, on the top of his head. Bubba sees it best from his stilts. A perfect circle the size of a fist. Not from getting old, Ivan says. And Papa in Russia has a full mop of gray hair. Ivan’s bald from lugging Sheetrock with his skull. His head can carry three stacked quarter-inch sheets, only two half-inch sheets. Heavy mothers. Hair can’t grow under that pressure. But that’s how diamonds do it. Lots of pressure. Time and more time. Some of us still believe it could be elephants stomping coal off in Africa. That’s fairytale. And so is Africa and Russia and maybe Mexico and definitely diamonds.

Except for Gordy. Gordy has a ring on layaway at JCPenney. Thirteen more hours is fine for him. Just fine. That’s another layaway payment. Big sparkling hunk of stone. Platinum band. Going to give it to his gal. Gordy must survive Sleeth’s test. We have to finish faster than the boys from Mexico for him. Only six more payments. We don’t want diamonds to turn fairytale for Gordy. Fairytales make our teeth itch, forearms tense, make us wish we hadn’t wasted time with John, even though we needed that to make us faster, those of us who need that sort of thing anyway.

Gordy’s gal brings him lunch or dinner or breakfast. We don’t know which until he snaps open the plastic container. We smell eggs. Eggs and corned-beef hash. Eggs with Tabasco sauce like drops of blood and hash with coagulated ketchup. It’s breakfast, then. Smells so good, but the smell creeps into our spines, into our insteps, into our incisors, and it hurts because that means we’ve only hit morning, only a few hours in and still don’t even have all the screw holes filled. Back to where we started, twelve hours at least.

John stops throwing Sheetrock scraps out the window upstairs, carries them down and out the front door instead, eying Gordy’s gal the whole time. Breathing her in, eggs and hash and Tabasco
and—there it is, flowers, perfume smelling like lilacs. We forgot about flowers.

Bubba likes the smell, too, but that’s all he gets. Just a whiff. Strapped into rusty stilts, up high, eyes blind to Gordy’s gal, eyes full of wall, full of ceiling, gray Sheetrock and white mud and the occasional flash of silver trowel, speck or two of brown where the rust has sneaked up his blade. He doesn’t look at Gordy’s gal, only walls. Same should go for all of us. And that’s why Gordy doesn’t steal his gal out to her car, why he feels safe powwowing with her on the plywood subfloors. We don’t gawk, because we have to keep working or we’ll never finish in time to save Gordy and his gal and their diamonds.

That doesn’t mean we don’t cheat looks. We scoop our trowels into our pans a little more often, linger a little longer in the mud. Only time we get to look away from the wall. Time we get to look at Gordy’s gal’s brown hair frizzing out its ponytail, fingernails painted orange and chipped, the zipper of her sweatshirt sprouting a flash of yellow tank top over a trail of shadow where one breast meets another.

Is Gordy’s gal beautiful? It’s eleven more hours, and we will not see another woman. She is the most beautiful thing we’ve ever seen, and we all want to give her diamonds on layaway at JCPenney. We want Gordy’s gal forever and always, until this fourteen-hour mother is over.

Gordy’s Gal leaves and Ivan leaves, John and his snowballs and eggs and hash and Tabasco with them. Boss Sleeth returns. Big and round and too much face to grow a mustache. Boss tries. A black hair here and there, like the mustaches we grew when we were fourteen. Bubba grew a beard at fourteen. Bubba was taller than stilts at fourteen. Bubba’s blond beard makes Boss Sleeth impatient, waiting for his upper lip to grow in, waiting for us to finish the walls.

He says, Daddy Sleeth is here now, boys. He says, Daddy Sleeth will help you boys finish what you need discipline and proper management to complete in a timely manner. Always milking me, you
boys, not like my Mexican boys. But I don’t have shit for you boys to milk today. See, see. He pulls his pockets inside out and leaves them hanging.

We do not take our eyes away from the walls. We don’t want to see Boss Sleeth’s empty pockets or his work. He picks up the spare trowel, heaps mud into a pan, jams mud into the cracks in the front door, seals it tight.

No one leaves until we finish, he says. This door is a wall now, see, he says. These windows are not windows but just gaps in a world you can’t leave until you finish, which won’t be until tomorrow at your rate. I want you boys to win, you see. Brown friends and white brothers. I love you all, but you are my boys, you see. I do this to get the best out of you.

He slaps mud over screw holes we’ve already filled, over seams we’ve already smoothed. New ridges. Big humps. Stags’s kids will have extra sanding, will learn about mothers of days tomorrow after they learn in school about how they can’t leave until the clock hands swing a certain way. When they grow up, Boss Sleeths will tally clock ticks, will squint at time cards, will show them the insides of pockets as white as milk. They have grown up already, though. They have snow-scarred lungs. A blister grew and popped and hardened on Pigtail’s palm under her ring finger.

Only Bubba’s work is safe from Boss Sleeth. Boss doesn’t climb ladders, wear stilts. Too big. Massive. Stomping the subfloor like Ivan-thunder around us, behind us, where we don’t dare to look.

Trowels and pans too slow for Boss Sleeth, he takes up the banjo—expensive equipment Boss bought to sail through his mothers of days. Small mothers for him. Daughters who play house with dolls and pink tea sets for him. The banjo is a box of shiny metal, mud and tape in one swing. No pick or twang from this banjo. No music. Not to Boss Sleeth anyway. We listen to the mud. We hear it hum: Too wet, too dry, bubbling from the inside. Mud sings: Too heavy, too light, tape’s going to slide. A language in clicks and squishes, something like crickets.

Boss Sleeth is too loud to listen. He clanks his banjo, smashes
into corners, zips through horizontal seams. We dodge Boss Sleeth when he comes our way. Pins to his bowling ball. Sleeth’s banjoing slops our seams. He writes the checks. He hires boys from Mexico, not caring they’re from Colombia. What can we do? Some of us sneak upstairs to work on Ivan’s newly hung rooms. Away from Boss Sleeth. Some of us need that. Some of us want to see Boss work, remind ourselves who’s milking who.

Mud’s too thin, too much water in the mix, drips out the banjo box. We hear trickle and plop. We don’t say anything. He sees his pants streaked wet and gray. His face reddens. He says, Fuck, hurls the banjo. Banjo breaks into shiny fragments littering the subfloor like veins of silver. If we were miners, shiny would matter. We’re not miners. We watch the mud spilled and lumped, hope not too much was lost. Picking up another five bucket would add an hour. We’ve already worked six, or seven, or four. Doesn’t matter. Only the mud on the walls matters. Our walls and the boys from Mexico’s walls. We hope Boss helps them too.

Boss Sleeth says, There’s no managing you boys. He breaks through his mudded front door. When he slams it behind him, dried mud shards fall like broken teeth. We exhale. We smile. No one recovers the broken banjo. Let silver shine until the sun is gone. We dream of seeing that sun refracted in the pieces of Boss’s tantrum.

Silver shine dims and dies.

Sal rumbles up the hopper, untangles the hose. Time for more snow that isn’t snow. Finished with the main floor finishing. Sal will spray texture from the hopper, and Bubba will knock it down. More stilt work, always on the stilts.

Sal crosses his arms over the bucket of water. Water to thin the mud for texture. Clean, clear water for the hopper. For us, no water. Sal’s 102-ounce soda squats in the corner, impossibly still has ice. We hear it jingle in Sal’s grip. Sal shares with no one.

Sal went to the dentist yesterday. First time in seven years. Black gaps between each tooth. Those dentists cleaned away most of his white. We want to fill his mouth with mud, because we are scared
of teeth cleaned so thin. Scared of soda. Thirsty for the water Sal cracks open for the hopper.

The hopper won’t share its mud-mixing water either. But when the bucket is empty, we will have a bathroom. No sooner. We squeeze our thighs. We tell ourselves, Three more walls and then we shit. We lie to our bodies. Always more walls.

We wonder if the boys from Mexico brought water. Seven-gallon coolers sweating pearls, stacks of little paper cups that must be refilled again and again. We peer through the dimming masked windows and hope they have water, hope they refill frequently, piss constantly. Healthy kidneys and slower finishing.