One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (2 page)

She swoops her hand into her tight pockets and releases a handful of varying-sized gems and gold nuggets. It’s amazing so many could fit into such a tight pocket. They sprinkle and bounce across the tile floor. “But Warp-Speed doesn’t just handle small messes. It can tackle the heavy-duty work as well.”

And then she’s at it again, making quick, graceful circles with the tiny vacuum, sucking up each precious stone with a flick of the wrist and a side step here and there. It’s a dance. Wyatt is mesmerized. He’s forgotten all about the sledge, wondering to himself what heavenly training program blessed her with such a persona and why his hasn’t kicked in yet. Perhaps some people are just born with salesmanship talent. She is perfect. He seriously considers upgrading to a new vacuum. But he’d need to sell more knives.

Stay focused on the knives! Don’t be taken in by flashy false prophets. There’s only room for one miracle product today.

He’s back to sawing, stealing a glance as she swoops up the last gem. So perfect. The customer is in awe too. Blood wells up in the cracks of Wyatt’s fingers, forming into tiny red tributaries. Maybe the cut is a bit deeper than he first thought. He wipes behind his apron again, hopes nothing shows through, hopes she might keep the customer’s attention until his blood coagulates. Damn his blood.

“And just like that, your floors are spotless,” she says. “You’ll never need to toil away again. Just think of all the time you’ll save in cleaning the very biggest of messes to the peskiest specks of insignificant dust.”

The customer sets his basket down in order to clap.

Wyatt ponders the last thing she said: insignificant. She was referring to him and his metal shavings. This is not just competition. This is an attack. His stomach burns. Oh God, an ulcer! And no health insurance until he’s made one hundred sales or worked six months. He feels sweat build on the crest of his thinning hairline hidden under the poofy chef’s hat. His finger bleeds on, and he buries it in his pocket. He’s glad his sweat and blood are hidden. Customers want effortlessness. For Wyatt to have a chance here, everything must appear easy.

“But that’s not all. Warp-Speed never needs to be emptied. All messes are broken down into their molecular states and exhaust in a refreshing scent of coconut or pine tree fragrance.”

Thunder Blades suddenly feel much less miraculous. Her product has molecular innovations by
NASA
. Their knives are merely designed by some national culinary institute.

A colorful array of fruity Os spills across the floor. Lee must be trying to give him a fighting chance by keeping her busy. Or possibly, he is just as amazed by her miraculous product and wants to see more. Either way, it’s a chance for Wyatt to swing the balance of salesmanship back in his power.

He really digs in now, breathing heavily, clattering the knife against the sledgehammer. The customer looks just in time to see an edge of the sledge head disconnect and thud on the floor. Just a slice, but the smallness makes it no less impressive, Wyatt hopes.

The customer lifts his eyebrows and slaps his palms together a few times.

Toucan cereal boxes erupt from the endcap. “See if you can sweep that up, bitch!” Lee says, revealing his secret location.

The woman leans, shifts her weight, rolls her eyes. She walks over to the broken edge of the sledge and slips it into her pocket. Her pants are perfectly fitted, yet somehow she manages to make it disappear just as easily as she produced the gems and nuggets. Wyatt is dumbstruck. All his work gone in a flash, but he doesn’t mind so much. He may very well be in love with the small vacuum woman in the yellow blouse. If only they could combine forces.
He imagines an immaculately swept apartment fully stocked with blades that never go dull. Maybe a few toddlers pushing pop-ball vacuums and slicing plastic tomatoes with plastic knives. They’d all go for a drive down smooth California roads, their hearts nearly bursting with joy.

Lee tears open boxes of toucans and flings the contents in furious handfuls. His face is red. His leg juts from his cramped posture into the aisle. Wyatt’s guilt overcomes him, seeing Lee flailing from his hiding spot. Lee already has a family, already has teenagers who’ve grown out of their plastic utensils. Soon they’ll be leaving for college and will need real tiny vacuums and perfectly balanced blades. These things require money, which comes from sales, which come from Lee’s salesmen, whom Wyatt is one of. Maybe Lee hasn’t been managing so great. Why would he be here adding so much pressure to Wyatt’s first day? Why is his face so red, the silky hairs above his ears fraying violently in all directions?

From behind Wyatt’s stand, he hears cellophane rustle and Styrofoam squeak. He turns to see a ripple of packaged steaks in the refrigerated trough. The steaks erupt, and a large woman in an even yellower blouse pops up. “Fuck you, Lee!” She hurls a T-bone at Lee, who can’t move from his cramped hiding spot and takes the meat right across the face. “He’s our sale now. Get over it.”

“You vulture!” Lee squirms, makes some progress, and slides onto the floor like a walrus. “Candy Walton, I should have known you were behind this. When will you stop scavenging our sales?”

Wyatt wonders about their history, whether Lee was once in his position, enchanted by the beauty and grace of the competition, enticed into an affair. He imagines Lee and Candy in a dark motel room kissing passionately. But this is unpleasant, so he skips to the morning after, when their large sweaty bodies touch again in the morning light and recognition of their huge mistake sets in.

Why take chances with your satisfaction? Only Thunder Blades offers a risk-free trial.

The customer looks nervous now, caught in the middle of fiery competition. He sways to the left, but the small woman in yellow
pushes the vacuum in front of him, leaving all in her path sparkling and smelling of coconut. He sways to the right, and she’s there again. Spotless floors block his escape.

“Give ’em hell, Wyatt.” Lee hurls a box of toucans at Candy but misses, just before she tackles him. “Use the shearing scissors!” he cries, writhing on the tile floor.

Of course, Lee is right. The shearing scissors would be best with their ergonomic handle and deadeye accuracy. But releasing this astounding product so early in the sales pitch is not only radical to his traditional training. It would also be cruel to the saleswoman, who probably needs the money as much as he does. She’s just trying to vacuum out a place in this cold world.

“What are you waiting for? Don’t hold back now.” Lee tosses him the steak that had hit him in the face.

Loyalty comes first. Lee’s children. Wyatt’s training. Wyatt tears away the cellophane and Styrofoam. He holds the flank of what was once a cow, and it bleeds in his grip, staining his white sleeve. He no longer must hide his own bleeding finger. The cow’s blood fuses with his own. He imagines this cow mawing lazily on its cud in an open pasture beside a Michigan freeway, cars zooming past with the windows up. The cow never had to worry about sales pitches or jarred alignment or the products it needed to sell itself. Cows sell well as is.

He raises the scissors. The small woman looks at him, jutting that hip slightly, waiting. He looks back at her, tries to express with his eyes that he’s sorry it has come to this. He cuts into the meat, marveling at the control of the twin blades. If only the man in the orange vest could feel how the ergo grips anticipate the shape of his callused skin, welcome his touch, how the hours of shoveling asphalt would melt away. Wyatt wishes the customer stood in his place thinking roadworker thoughts. Wyatt thinks nursing home thoughts. The roadworker would’ve liked to have heard about roads. He might have cared to listen, might have been able to help.

He slices, snips. Chunks of meat plop in all directions. The tiny vacuum darts after each bloody piece. Sweat builds in tiny dots
along the woman’s blonde hairline. The customer flicks a piece of meat off his boot, hops back to dodge another.

The results are undeniable now.

Candy lifts herself from the tile floor, kicking away Lee’s grabs at her ankles. She pulls two retractable tiny vacuums from black holsters around her hips. “No job too messy for
NASA
innovation!” She pushes one in each hand, aiding her saleswoman.

Lee trots to Wyatt’s side. “Can you believe this?” he huffs, spouting testimonial, wringing his hands at the customer. “I never thought meat preparation could be
so
easy. With Thor’s Mighty Shearing Scissors, you’ll never have to worry about dangerous fats and gristle again.”

Wyatt tries to stay focused on the flesh in his hands. He whittles from the mass of flesh. The meat in his hands, in the blades of the scissors, starts to form two fat arcs on the top, funneling to a point—a heart. But not a heart like the one in elderly Henderson’s weak ribs with ventricles and aortas and tangles of swelled junctions. This heart is simpler, like on a Valentine’s card, voluptuous and vibrantly red.

You can’t make a sale without putting your heart into it.

Lee leans in toward Wyatt’s shoulder and speaks through the side of his mouth. “What are you doing? Stick to the protocol. You’ll lose your ass trying to get so fancy.”

But Wyatt can’t stop at this point. Protocol obliterated. There’s no turning back. He looks up and sees all eyes on him—the customer dangling his basket, Candy swooping two vacuums in his direction, and the small woman with the blonde hair. She gazes at him with an inquisitive twist of her hips. They all look at him, not the knives. The knives he should be pushing.

When faith falters, trust thyself.

“You’re pretty good with those scissors.” The customer speaks for the first time. He steps across the polished floors, his boots leaving ghostly prints behind. “How did you do that?”

How could he explain? Looking in the roadworker’s eyes, Wyatt sees an appreciation, as if the skilled cuts with his scissors led
somewhere real or maybe helped smooth the way, as the constant filling and refilling of potholes does.

Lee steps in between the man and Wyatt. “Anyone could accomplish such a feat with the power of Thunder Blades.”

“But I really don’t want to. I don’t need new knives or a vacuum, but, damn, you all sure put on quite a show for some guy like me.”

Candy and Lee crowd the man, telling him about four easy payments, free shipping and handling, then three payments, doubling his order, tripling his order. They pile boxes of amazing products next to his asphalt-scabbed boots. He slides his hands into his pockets and listens, smiling politely. Wyatt doesn’t think he’ll buy a thing. He wonders about this man’s home. His dull steak knives, fast-food wrappers, a push broom with a broken handle. He goes to work, fixes roads, comes home, and is satisfied with less than miraculous. His roads do what they need to do, despite their potholes. They get people places.

While Candy and Lee chatter, the small woman nears the Thunder Blades stand and plants her delicate fingers on the cutting board. Wyatt still holds the heart sculpted from cow. It almost feels like it pumps and thumps.

“That
is
something I’ve never seen before,” she says, shifting her hip. “Must be some training program you guys have.”

“I’m learning still,” Wyatt says.

She seems impressed. Maybe he’s not such a terrible salesman after all.

“Can I hold it?”

Wyatt places his heart into the woman’s hands, her soft-looking palms. Droplets of cow blood run down her thin fingers. Maybe it’s his blood. She drops the heart to the floor and zooms the vacuum over it. The vacuum struggles at first, clogging, but sucks it through, and a large plume of coconut scent exhales. She wipes the blood on her hand across the outside of Wyatt’s white apron, which has been covering the pocks and slashes he’s hidden all day.

We tore up the earth in the yard of a three-story four-thousand-square-footer in Swinging Willow subdivision. We backhoed a gash through the silky sod, brown like a week-old scab, red at the center. That hole in the Glavine family’s front lawn was a big dig, so deep it split us into pieces, and we were never right again.

We were making a fountain, the Glavines willing to shell out fifteen grand to piddle a Zen waterfall down their front lawn’s downgrade, to sparkle diamonds in their eyes from the big bay window large as the sky. They could’ve just looked outside from seven to five and seen our half-dozen torsos, bare chests gleaming sweat, pocked with clay.

Because we dug earth, because we heaved shovels, because we hauled it away in the back of Rex’s not-so-shiny ’92 Dodge Ram, our skin never stopped sparkling. We couldn’t tear away enough layers to cool down. No one works harder than the hardscaping boys. Won’t catch us snipping copper and tugging carpet and swinging brushes inside an air-conditioned house.

We chunked twelve tons out of the ground, dropped ten tons of polished granite and slate back in. Tommy was helping Al set the schedule 40 lines, when Tommy said, “I’d rather be laying ass than laying brass.” We boys laughed, because it sounded nice, even
though every line was
PVC
and Tommy didn’t know shit about plumbing. That’s why three weeks ago the boss had hired Al, a career pipe bender. No more houses for him after they stopped digging foundations in the subdivisions and started planting foreclosure signs. Now he was ours. We liked him and his toolboxes full of purple primers and chamfer cones and the way he could pour hot sand in a pipe and make it bend like magic. We liked how he knew everything about making water flow.

Tommy stood up from the lines and cracked his neck. “Can’t wait to get home. Gonna fuck Silvy from behind until Saturday morning,” he said, as he announced every Friday. “Who you fucking tonight, boss?”

“I’m fucking serious,” Stas, the boss, said, and then pivoted a two-man rose stone toward the sun. “Serious about finishing this fountain before dark, so let’s see you all start busting ass.”

“Who you fucking, Al?” Tommy said. “One of them tight and crazy Betties from the bar? Take her home and slip that pretty piece of yours between her thighs.”

“I don’t fuck Betties. I fuck Bobs,” Al said, bowed over one of his last pipe seams.

“A butt fucker, eh?” Tommy thrust his pelvis in the air, paddled his invisible lover with a slate shard. “A genuine cocksucker.”

We all held our breath, tried not to look at Tommy’s mouth, the words spilling past that one veneered tooth that flickered like new
PVC
. And we didn’t look at Al, afraid of how far down to the bottom of the fountain he was, all by himself down there.

“Did you know you hired such a fancy boy, boss?”

“I did not, Tommy,” Stas flipped open his phone, clicked it shut. “But now I know at least one of you assholes can oversee design with me.”

“Man sauce makes a body strong,” Tommy said, “gives you an eye for aesthetics.” He kicked some Mexican River Rock pebbles at Al, who kept his head down, laser focused on his chemical weld. “And look here. Ain’t two pieces of pipe he don’t know how to couple, it appears.”

Al flung one of the pebbles back at Tommy’s gut. “Couldn’t have done it without you,” Al said. “Now get down here and hold your end of the pipe, like a good bear.”

“Don’t try to pretend like that’s the end of the shit I’m gonna give you. You’ve been keeping sexy secrets from Tommy. I have weeks to make up for.”

Down in the trench with Al, Tommy kept at it until lunchtime, cussing and coaxing while he held pipe and passed tools. We stayed close, heaved chunks of granite around the dry hole. Not because Al needed us or a wall, but because we had work. Money to make, wives and girlfriends and child support and parole officers. We dumped wheelbarrows of River Rock over backhoe teeth marks. After Tommy’s cum-guzzling jokes hit a dozen, they sounded the same as any other. Sounded the same as when Tommy talked about the tight pink kitty between Stas’s twenty-two-year-old honey’s legs, or when Tommy said nothing beat getting a
BJ
while he took a shit, or how Rex’s favorite hooker told him his foreskin smelled like blue cheese. It was just work. Al laid pipe and rigged the pump, and we heaved boulders.

But Rex stayed silent, didn’t laugh, didn’t act out Tommy’s words waving his wire strippers in front of his crotch like he usually did. Some current crossed inside him, shorted his nerves until his tongue mangled into a mute lump. Rex used to be a union electrician, until his union folded. Now the closest he came to his old trade was wiring up the fountain pump. Boring to a wire snipper who used to diddle the guts of x-ray machines, wattage that could broil intestines.

We thought maybe Rex was just pissed about the glitch in the pump that kept the fountain silent as his mouth. Rex kept his head down, digging through the dirt to find the lost connection. Once Al finished his perfect lines, he tried to help, dug alongside Rex with a scrap piece of pipe. He was standing behind Rex’s bent waist, plowing with his schedule 40, when Tommy said, “Looks like Rex is curious. Give him a few thrusts and see if he likes it.”

Rex jumped up, knocked Al’s pipe clinking to the pebble bed.
Their shirtless bellies collided in Rex’s attempt to scuttle out of the hole, and that got Tommy going even worse. We tried not to laugh, but we couldn’t help it when Rex tripped over the outcropping, ran to his shirt, crumpled and baking in the sun, yanked it over his hairy back. His fat lips twisted over his clenched teeth.

Rex slunk to his truck. He sat in the cab for the next two hours, his cell phone jammed against his ear, his mouth still unmoving. Close to quitting time, he headed back to the yard and stabbed his spade into the pebble bed, into the dirt beneath, as if he were hunting magma. He dug hard and deep, shoving elbow and swinging fist. None of us dared go near him. We moved up the fountain, dodging flung pebbles. His gray shirt darkened to sweat-black.

We hauled in the last of the two-man granites. Each cost more than we would earn that day. Rocks too smooth for proper grip. Rocks variegated with bolts of pink quartz and sparkles of blue and green. Rocks that sucked sweat from our hands. We carried in twos up the downgrade, shoulders leaning toward our partners, foreheads pulled together under the weight. An assembly line of shirtless hardscapers. Stas jerked and budged, adjusted each boulder a quarter inch here and there, didn’t ask Al for his aesthetic opinion, didn’t ask any of us, same as any other gig. And Tommy ran out of jokes, as he always did, his jaw tired as our arms. But Rex kept digging deeper into the gash in the earth filled with slate steppers and pebbles and boulders and shirtless men and Al.

Just before we finished sprinkling the rest of the Mexican River Rocks, before the sun turned purple and then smashed into dusk, Rex gave up digging. He paced the fountain, stopped at the top, and leaned against one of Stas’s perfectly adjusted rose rock boulders. The dying sun lit up the pinks, cast Rex’s crinkled forehead in purples. We smoked cigarettes on the sod while Al recoupled the flex lines. It was the last touch of the gig, something only Al knew how to do, so we waited. Waited until Rex winked at Tommy, aimed the point of his spade down at Al. Rex said to Tommy, “Here’s a way to make a fag rock hard.” Then Rex pushed the rose rock, a two-man boulder disturbed by one man. Tommy ran toward Rex.
We exhaled smoke in their direction, our bodies lurching. But we couldn’t stop falling rocks. No one can.

We heard the smacks, the sickening sound of a two-hundred-dollar rock snapping slate shards, busting itself into useless fragments. Al held his glued flex too long, jumped too late. Rose rock careened, a deadened landing on shin. Snap of bone or rock. And then Tommy was gripping Rex’s collar. The torn cotton shrieked. Rex laughed, scanned our faces, waited for us to join. He kept laughing when Tommy shoved him to the ground, kicked him in the kidney. And Tommy, our joker, he couldn’t stop the laughs. Couldn’t silence silent Rex. We bit through our filters, dropped our cherries onto the pristine sod.

Al crawled out of the pebble bed, and it was then that we saw the dark around his left shin. Blood. Stone blood from Rex’s rock. The two-man, two-days’-pay rock that smashed into worthless shards.

We wanted to lift him, haul his broken body. That’s what we knew how to do. But that seemed stupid now. Al sucked air and squinted up at us through the burned-out dusk. We wished we knew how to handle him, didn’t want to give him to some
EMT
kid who could lift that rock-bleeding leg. Stas fumbled for his cell phone, dropped it into the fountain. The phone clacked, battery popping out and disappearing into crag shadows. We dug through our pockets, through sweat-soaked denim for our own explodable phones. All but Tommy. Only he knew how to touch broken Al. He reached out his hand, interlaced fingers, pulled. Tommy heaved Al’s arm over his bare shoulders and lugged him to his Honda Civic, the smallest car for the biggest guy on our crew. Panels scratched, front door dented from that night when Tommy drank too much and had to slam an even bigger man’s head into the door. His piece-of-shit car whined and gurgled every morning before the sun eked up over the sod of the suburbs. But on this night, Tommy’s Honda glimmered as it serpentined out of the cul-de-sac.

We slept restlessly, next to snoring wives and silent girlfriends and all alone. We rolled into the divot of worn-out springs, dreamed
of suffocation, reawoke. Where was Rex tonight? Still driving his rusty Dodge, afraid to pull into his driveway, beside the lawn we had no hand in sodding or seeding?

On one of our dozen trips out of bed, hands fumbling against leaden shadows where we knew there was once a light switch, we gave up, slid down the wall to a squat. We couldn’t bring on quiet dreams by jerking off or drinking milk or chewing two o’clock salami sandwiches. We carried our cell phones in the waistband of our underwear, waiting for a call. On his way home, Stas bought a new phone at the shop next to the hospital where Tommy and Al sit in the emergency waiting room. No insurance, so no rush. Stone blood hardly life threatening. Stitches and tetanus needles, some bandages cleaner than Tommy’s sweat-hardened T-shirt wrapped tight around Al’s shin. An x-ray and some valium in waiting. Waiting for results, for the bright-white bone sparking across black film. Waiting with Tommy, who keeps patting Al’s back, asking if there’s someone he should call. Parents? Sisters or brothers? Tommy’s hand circles around Al’s shoulder blades, across muscles tense and taut like his own. He pulls his hand away when the old man across the room turns his one good eye toward him, the other hidden behind a handful of bunched-up white panties stained with brown-dried blood.

No, no one, Al says through his teeth.

Your boyfriend? Tommy whispers, and thinks of denim crotches pressing together, can’t find the joke that should be there.

No boyfriend, Al says. Don’t bother him with this shit.

And Tommy thinks of the time he smashed that bigger man’s head into his door panel, which was after Tommy called that bigger man a fag at the bar. Just a joke, like at work, but the bigger man didn’t get it like his rock-slinging boys. They always got it. Until Rex didn’t. And that bigger man at the bar wouldn’t stop shoving and swinging until Tommy clunked skull to metal. He wonders if that bigger man told his wife that night. Tommy wouldn’t tell those jokes outside work no more. Tommy didn’t tell his old lady he dented his car with a skull that night, and they didn’t fuck from
behind like she likes. He said he was too tired, and she just flicked off the lamp. But he felt her staring all night.

Tommy pours coffee for Al into a chipped Styrofoam cup. Al takes a sip, passes it back. And it’s probably burned, cooked on the hot plate for the last six hours, but it smells good, like earth and warm, and the emergency room air-conditioning is blowing hard. Not like the comfort of sweat, of day, of lawns and stones, of hauling rocks and spreading sod with his boys, with us, who want to be us, but we can’t find the light switch and can’t get to sleep because we’re wondering about Tommy and Al and Rex. We hate that old man and his bleeding eye and his bunched-up panties who won’t stop glaring at Tommy even though his good eye probably isn’t worth a shit, all pale and milky.

But Tommy forgets about him, and the old man turns as invisible as the crinkled fashion magazine under his seat, opened up to a spread on bikini season where a page has been torn away, stashed into the pants of an eleven-year-old who was waiting for its mama to get her blackened, busted-up eye sewn for the twenty-second time. Tommy takes a sip, puts his lips where Al’s pressed, and it doesn’t mean a damn thing to Tommy. We finally fall asleep.

We got to the fountain early, before sun, full of coffee and nicotine, sitting in our running cars and waiting to see who showed. We twisted the radio knob, skipped past morning shows, one
DJ
’s belching laugh bleeding into the next one’s. We rechecked our phones, cycled through missed calls, but there was nothing missed from missing Tommy and Al and Rex. And what if Rex showed? We gripped our steering wheels, dirt-crusted nails digging into rubber.

Boss Stas arrived late for the first time ever. He stepped out of his truck, phone pinched between ear and shoulder. His neck looked broken through our rearview mirrors. We got out to steal the words he hummed into the receiver: “Sorry, honey. We’ll get new rocks. I need them for this gig. No. No word from the guys yet.” Nothing that told us everything we wanted to know.

Stas cracked his tailgate, and inside was a stack of slate steppers
and one two-man rose rock, a rock like any other rock. Like the rock that stomped Al’s shin. Like the rock we wanted to toss into the gash of earth after Rex crawled inside, and we would close our eyes and say a joke like a prayer. But this rock wasn’t like any other. It blazed up all kinds of quartz and sparkle. This rock was Stas’s young old lady’s cherry-picked perfect rock, transplanted from his own home.

Stas climbed onto his truck bed, leaned into the rose rock, budged it inch by inch, rock screaming against steel. He worked it to the edge, and then we cradled it. That two-man rock turned into a many-man rock, and we carried it all the way up the downgrade, to the gap-toothed outcropping.