One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (3 page)

The cul-de-sac rattled, backfired. Tommy’s Honda swerved down the blacktop, squealed to a stop behind Stas’s scraped tailgate. Al exited Tommy’s Honda, rapped on the hood, hollered, “Not done yet, boys?”

Tommy slid out next, and the two of them staggered up the downgrade. Al wore yesterday’s jeans but with the right leg hacked to thigh. And we were all wearing yesterday’s jeans, because there’s no point washing away the sweat we’d make again today and tomorrow. A bright-white cast wrapped his leg where the jeans were missing. Tommy and Al grinned like motherfuckers, reeked like Friday’s shots lined across the bar.

“Are you two drunk?” Stas gripped Al’s shoulder.

“What else do you do after getting out of the emergency room at four in the morning?” Tommy kicked at the new rose rock. It stayed put like it’d always been there.

We burned through the morning, replacing the chipped slate, careful not to shift every other stone, topple our precious puzzle. Every rock, pretty side up for the ugliest boys in town, shucked shirts and smeared dirt and beer guts and Tommy’s appendicitis scar winking like a stab wound. The only thing to worry about was Rex’s Dodge popping through the houseline. But he didn’t show, and he never did find that lost connection. Tommy found the frayed wire by chance, between him and Al betting quarters on
where that son-of-a-bitch splice could be. Al slapped the quarter in Tommy’s palm while we filled the fountain bed, diluted Al’s blood that was down there somewhere, dried and brown, now drowned. By lunchtime, the drunk was mostly worn off of our missing boys, and they recoupled the last of the flex.

Stas fired up the fountain, and it pissed a perfect stream. Tommy stood barefoot in the middle of our new steppers. He swayed, but our rocks didn’t. Solid like one hundred knuckles packed into a single giant fist.

While we’re taking lunch with the painters, my son Ramon tells Big Dave his job is easier than ours. Something you don’t say to any workingman and certainly not to Big Dave. When I was a twenty-three-year-old dumbshit like Ramon, I sat down with my crew at a Denny’s for an 8:00 p.m. Moons over My Hammy, after a ten-hour day of framing. A scraggly bearded Mexican bussed our table, and I told him not to strain himself carrying dishes for real workingmen. My crew laughed through two more coffee refills and three more cigarettes that we smothered into our empty mugs. That Mexican ambushed me in the parking lot, busted one of my teeth. I landed a jab on his right eye, kicked his gut when he fell. I got in my truck and drove home, and that guy went back to work.

But he was small. Big Dave is not. And now Ramon is so worked up he can’t hit a shiner with his nail set, keeps slipping and pounding deeper holes into the baseboard. It’d be painful to listen to him cracking through the wood, except it’s particleboard. All sawdust and glue mitered together to look like nice houses instead of the cookie-cutter junk that fills the subdivision. I haven’t sunk a nail through the grain of oak or cherry in over a year. Sometimes I imagine all the good trees have been used up.

“Maybe,” Ramon says to the baseboard, “Big Dave won’t come back to the sub if it’s raining.”

“That could be.” I look through my window trim at gray clouds rolling over the fresh shingles across the street.

“Maybe Big Dave’s so big he’s scared of storms. So big he gets hit by lightning.”

Thunder rattles the panes. Instead of lightning, Big Dave jumps in front of the window. A thin layer of glass separates our faces. He’s painting trim outside while we put it together inside. Big Dave and I stare at the same wall on our respective sides, would be shaking hands if not for the Sheetrock and studs and siding between us.

Ramon is right about Big Dave being big. Big Dave’s arms are so wide they split shirtsleeves, we guess, because we’ve never seen him wear sleeves. I feel my trim shake against the pressure of his mashing brushstrokes. Big Dave’s so big he can’t find a pair of pants that fit him, flashing ass crack when he bends to jam his four-inch barn brush into the cutting pot. And Big Dave’s so tough he chews a bent nail to help him quit smoking. I see it through the window, flickering between his lips. The flicker disappears, and since I don’t see him spit the nail out, I’m pretty sure he swallowed it, has a stomach like a porcupine.

“I’ll just stay out of sight.” Ramon doesn’t look our way. I hear him rip another hole through the base. “Give him time to cool down and deal with it tomorrow.”

“What will you do tomorrow?” I watch Big Dave bite off a few bent bristles from his brush.

There’s always tomorrow, another house, another quarter-acre plot, another slippery tentacle of cookie cutters made of plastic and glue and vinyl, so little metal and wood like the old days, when I was doing renovations and Ramon’s mama, Joni, was changing his diapers. Ramon used to chew up the handles on my tools. Ramon’s mama didn’t like that, and I didn’t like his spit rusting up my good hammer. Joni punched me one night, drove my jagged tooth through my lip, after I slapped a Stanley measuring tape out of Ramon’s mouth. I didn’t last much longer as a father after that night.

Now Ramon has got two kids he never sees, two grandkids as imaginary to me as pink ivory wood. Judge wouldn’t even dare an every-other-weekend situation. He has child support to pay, a background that’ll never check out clean since he got busted with a one-cook two-liter bottle for meth snuggled into his kid’s empty car seat. Then there’re the bullshit anger-management classes for biting that cop’s neck after they cuffed him. That’s what Joni told me the newspaper said the next day, but they exaggerate. Ramon has always been small, was a quiet and shy kid when I had him on my weekends. Now construction is the only job he can get, and I’m the only dope who would hire him. I needed someone reliable, someone I could count on every day, and he has proven to be a decent nail bender for the last three weeks. And Ramon needs me, this job, his last option.

Ramon rises from the corner and stretches his back. Big Dave spots him through the window and stabs the butt of his brush against the pane. He gives Ramon the finger, but since Ramon doesn’t see it, I’m the one who has to face that giant finger pressed against the glass.

“You shouldn’t have talked shit about the painters,” I say.

Telling Ramon what he shouldn’t have done today is as useless as when I told him last week that he shouldn’t mix making babies and making meth. I apologize to Ramon for that one by nailing my window casing home, filling the silent room with the roar of the compressor that drowns out Big Dave’s knocking. Once the compressor dies out, Big Dave has disappeared. The window shows nothing but gray clouds bunched together like knuckles.

“That stupid asshole just swings his brush around out there,” Ramon says. “You gotta agree they got the easiest job in the sub. Anyone can push paint.”

The front-door handle rattles, and then the door booms, someone kicking outside.

“Why’d you lock the front door?” I say.

“Let’s keep working. Maybe he’ll just piss off.”

Locked doors are for homeowners. Seven to seven, these doors
are open to anyone lugging a tool. So I open up, and Big Dave fills the threshold, hands full of rollers and brushes, sandpaper strips curling out his pockets, gallon cans hanging from each pinkie. His eyebrows look like they’re trying to collide, creases in his forehead small rodents could hide inside.

“Should have known it was the Smiley crew,” Big Dave says. “Locking up so you can take naps in the closets?”

And, yes, I named my business Smiley Carpentry, because that’s my name and it sounds friendly. Smiley guys are the type of guys you let in your house, maybe even leave them a spare key. But, no, I’ve never napped in a closet, and every one of my guys I caught sleeping in a closet got sent home permanently to sleep in his own bed. That’s the good thing about Ramon. He never sleeps, out late every night and still can swing hammer for fourteen hours. Even when he’s in bed, he growl-snores all night through my paper-thin apartment walls. I don’t let myself worry. Smiley Carpentry will work out for him, and he’ll have his own place and real sleep soon.

Big Dave stomps toward Ramon, and Ramon shrinks back to the base, smacking away, pretending he didn’t notice anyone come in. Big Dave plunks his paint cans behind Ramon, and Ramon flinches each time one drops on the
OSB
. We pop nails and buzz trim all day. He should be plenty used to loud noises.

“Hey, Dave,” Ramon says, when he finally pivots around to face him, “I was just setting the shiners for you.”

“Should I thank you for doing your job?”

Ramon laughs, and I shoot a few more nails home, make sure to leave the heads gleaming. “We’ll be out of here in a few hours,” I tell Big Dave. “And then you can get to painting.”

“That’s all right.” He digs his canine into a can of nail filler and cracks it open. “I don’t mind getting chummy with the hardest-working guys in the sub.”

“I never said we worked the hardest,” Ramon says, but gets cut off when Big Dave starts whistling. I think it’s a Rush song. We need to buy a radio. A silent house is a tryout for the amateur talent show. Big Dave whistles through a whole set list, not unlike what
I’m sure is playing in the other houses: more Rush, Steve Miller Band,
AC
/
DC
. He hits the high notes so loud I expect the contact cement to curdle and the laminate on the counters to curl. I pop out twice as many nails as the trim needs, just so the compressor kicks on more often. I cut each board twice, three times, four. Big Dave whistles through the compressor rumble, syncs his notes with the saw’s whine, as if I’m his backup.

Ramon sings along. Quiet and falsetto. Ramon is trying to make nice. My, sir, you might not work as hard as a Smiley, but your whistling is infectious.

I finally head upstairs and leave the lovebirds to jam it out. I’m only up there an hour before I hear Ramon yelling. He has a high and light singing voice, but he roars like someone punched nails through his spine. Now I know why his neighbors in his wife’s apartment complex phoned the cops. It must’ve sounded like a bear loosed in Ramon’s unit when they called in those domestics. I never believed he really had it in him. My skinny kid. Even a small Smiley T-shirt looks too big on him.

I hustle downstairs and Ramon is covered in white primer. He stands in the middle of the room, arms outstretched, eyes closed, chest heaving. Some fancy breathing pose he learned in anger management. The primer drips from the hem of Ramon’s shorts and tap-taps against the subfloor. Big Dave smirks, and Ramon’s face glows red against the primer. He shakes his finger at Big Dave’s cleft chin, and Big Dave bites at it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Big Dave’s diet consisted of carpenters’ fingers. Ramon crams his finger into a fist, says, “Five thirty, in the middle of the cul-de-sac, I’m gonna rip your ass off.”

I wish people would choose their threats more carefully. That’s the heat of anger. And, I don’t know, maybe someone could rip an ass off. Maybe Ramon has done it. Maybe his teenage bedroom in his mama’s basement was lined with torn asses, hung on his wall like bearskins. I wasn’t around for that, wouldn’t know.

“You got it,” Big Dave says, and then swipes up all his tools in the curls of his fingers, jangling them along as he moseys out the front
door. Ramon kicks the primer can, splatters the last of its paint against the wall. He grits his teeth, flashing his perfectly straight incisors that I spent all that child support on. Joni thought a nice smile would help him in life, but his name’s not even Smiley. He changed it to his mama’s name when he was fourteen. Ramon Bayer. Anyway, I did okay with my chipped tooth.

Ramon slaps his forehead, pulls back his hair, which is already thinner than my own. They say a kid gets his hairline from his mother’s side. A father shouldn’t ever have to see his son go bald first. I buzz a few baseboards through the saw to give him time to stew.

He shakes his hands out, and a few strands of his hair flutter to the
OSB
, where they’ll be covered with carpet next week, under homeowner toes in a month, and then for however long it takes a family to grow.

“Now would be a good time to cut out early,” I say to the saw.

“You were right about tomorrow. I’d still have to deal with him then.” Ramon slips the primer-drenched Smiley shirt over his head. It slaps wetly against the
OSB
. Ramon kicks at the pile of shirt, and there’s my logo, smiling mouth now crinkled into a grimace, looking up at me like a ghost through all that white. Ramon’s bare torso is so thin, as if God ran him through the planer. “Fuck assertive problem solving. I’m gonna fight that bastard.”

I head out to the van and open the back door. Above the scrap particleboard, I keep a shelf full of Smiley shirts. It used to be full. Now there’s one left, and it’s an
XXL
. I never found anyone to work for me who would fill out that size, even though most of them ask for a shirt one size too big. Everyone pretends they’re bigger than they are, and they end up looking smaller, buried in their too-large shirts. That’s probably why Big Dave can’t find any clothes his size. All those guys wishing for bigger, and all the big guys wishing they could find a shirt that fits.

Back inside the house, Ramon snaps a piece of casing over his knee. He busts it in half and then picks up one of the halves and busts that one over his knee, too. The shards of casing get so small
I think it will be impossible for him to break another, but he does. Ramon is hiding strength in those spidery hands, that bony knee. I throw the
XXL
over his shoulder.

He pulls the shirt on, and the hem lines his kneecaps. It looks like a dress on my son. He looks like a child, like when he was five and Joni bought him Superman and the Incredible Hulk pajamas. He never wore them, preferred my old work shirts reeking of dried sweat and sawdust. I used to think he’d grow up to be a fine carpenter. Joni wanted him to wear cute pajamas, to go to college, become a lawyer or something like that. She couldn’t even afford a lawyer when Ramon got busted with blow back in high school.

“Dave’s not so big,” Ramon says, looking out the window. The oversized Smiley logo on his back flashes an absurdly wide grin at me. “And he sucks at his easy job.”

I look out the window, too. Big Dave’s in front of the house across the street, where one of the other painters has straddled his shoulders and is reaching up to slap white on the top of a porch column. Dave’s pushing a roller up to the other guy’s cut. It’s quite a sight, this two-headed smattering of white paint, Big Dave getting bigger and smarter, hurrying to beat the rain that’s surely coming now. The sky is nearly black, though not a drop has fallen.

“He’s a better ladder than a painter,” Ramon says.

Ramon never sat on my shoulders. My back is all kinks and spurs. On his sixth birthday, I took him to the zoo. This other kid was sitting on his dad’s shoulders so he could get a closer look at some tamarin monkeys perched on a tree branch. Ramon asked to sit on my shoulders, and I pretended I couldn’t hear him. It was either that or explain to my kid that the job his dad did, the one he wanted to slip into like his Smiley-shirt pajamas, had warped his spine into a hook. Then that kid on his dad’s shoulders screamed. The tamarins had snatched a fistful of this kid’s hair through the fence and wouldn’t let go. The dad tried to reach up and wrestle the monkey’s pencil-thin arm. He couldn’t reach, just flailed his arms at that tiny monkey. I smiled to Ramon, but he looked worried, like he wanted to help. That’s what they get
for being stupid, underestimating that monkey just because he looked like a fluffy toy. He was still in a cage. They only put wild things in cages.

Ramon lugs a stack of base upstairs, and I should follow him. But I linger at the window, keep my eye on Big Dave spreading white, making those fat porch columns glare against the black sky. Ramon pounds up and down the stairs, dropping off base with pencil lines scratched where he wants me to miter. I do this for him. I cut his boards quick so he always has something to nail, work to keep his mind off quitting time.