One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (5 page)

“Shit, man. You gotta help me.” Drew put his hands on my shoulders. I could see, with his arms raised, the gaps in his fancy elbow patches. They were frayed, coming loose at the seams, like Bertha’s flaking skin. I could have torn them off with one quick pull.

“Should we take her to the vet? You’re the expert, man. What do we do?”

I was the expert, and Drew finally acknowledged that. But I didn’t know anything about reptile emergencies. I knew how to thump a dead snake in the dumpster, and I knew how to feed and care for a live snake, but I didn’t know the in-between, the near death. And I didn’t want to save Bertha or Drew. It was time for me to think about myself, focus on my own survival. So I made a choice. We wouldn’t touch Bertha. We’d wait until morning and see what happened.

Before we left that night, I smashed and sprinkled some vitamin-enriched snake pellets over a mouse and dropped it in Bertha’s cage. I convinced Drew it would help. He looked hopeful when Bertha budged from her coil, her head following the mouse, tongue flicking. That was enough to get him through the night.

The next morning, Bertha was dead.

Drew came to work looking extra sophisticated, not just a blazer and jeans but a baby-blue button-up shirt, a striped satin tie, pleated slacks, and a new blazer. With how professional he looked, I thought he’d take Bertha’s death in stride, philosophize coolly—just another dead snake in a world where so many snakes have passed before, where many more will be born—but he broke down. Not just tears. He whimpered, ran up the stairs, locked himself in the bathroom.

The teacher was coming in two hours, and she’d see what a fool Drew was, how he was all phony tricks, no expert of anything. That was the real reason he cried. It wasn’t sympathy for Bertha; it was fear of his shed skin, of someone seeing the truth, the naked animal.

I put my ear against the bathroom door and heard Drew sniffle and pant. “We can still do it, Drew. It’ll be great,” I told him.

He opened the door, eyes red, lashes clumped. “You think so?”

“Sure. I’ll be here to help. We’ll make good money. The kids will love it.”

“Thanks, man. I needed to hear that.”

I never had kids, had no interest in pasting a Band-Aid over a skinned knee, a slab of frozen steak over a black eye. Drew couldn’t lull me into parental bliss, as convincing as his crying act was. If he wanted to offer up the vulnerable child, I would devour it, grow stronger.

“But what about Bertha?” He pulled at his eyes with the backs of his fists. “Bertha’s the main attraction.”

“We’ll say she’s sleeping.”

“No, man. We have to do better than that.” His eyes were dry now, but he kept pulling at them with his sleeves. “You could control Bertha. You just have to touch her.”

“She’s dead, crawling with disease.”

“You’re scared. I get it.” Drew’s eyes widened, and each bloodshot vein seemed to slither. “It’s okay if you are. Not everyone can touch the snakes like I do.”

His eyes, those damn eyes. I stared through those squirmy
blood-filled capillaries. I could do anything Drew could—possess snake flesh and reptile knowledge simultaneously.

“I’m not afraid of touching the snakes,” I said.

And Drew had a plan, a big one. He convinced me to climb into the cupboard under Bertha’s fifty-tanker, convinced me with the challenge of flesh and fear. And there I was, pretzeled into a tiny box.

The cupboard was cramped and hot from Bertha’s heat lamp. I bowed my head so low that my ear pressed against my stomach. In one ear, I heard my breakfast churning. In the other, the children upstairs tapped across the floor, hollering, probably looking at all our complicated products in wonder, with no one but Drew to fumble over false explanations. It was too bad they’d miss out on that education, but Drew said the show came first, said the snakes were most important, interest before intellect.

They’d be headed down to explore the Realm of the Reptiles soon. I lifted my hand through the hole Drew and I had cut into the glass bottom of Bertha’s cage. I watched Bertha’s slumped carcass through another smaller hole we’d cut so I could see what I was doing. But I didn’t want to see Bertha. She made my muscles twitch. Even in death, she scared me.

My fingers found her skin. It was hot but lifeless, so different from a few days ago when I’d thrown her from my body, when each scale pulsed. I wished I’d worn gloves, but Drew had laughed when I suggested them.

I groped until I found the slit Drew had made, the half-moon he’d sliced through her underbelly with a box cutter. He’d dug out a fistful of Bertha innards, just enough so I could fit my hand inside. He’d gutted her so easily, even after all those tears, all his affection for the snakes. He’d torn away pink shreds of Bertha. And now it was my turn to be even colder than Drew, better than Drew. I fingered the opening and pushed my hand forward. If Drew could do it, I could. Her flesh squished against my knuckles. Through the peephole, I saw the upraised veins in my wrist, where they ended, where the snake became my hand.

I lowered my wrist, and then there was only Bertha. Drew had sliced and gutted only a few inches from her head, had cut the hole in the glass with enough clearance so I had a decent range of motion. When I moved my hand, Bertha slithered, alive again. Bertha and me. We longed for Drew, for him to challenge us, to set us in motion.

Children’s shrieks and gasps echoed off the glass walls of the Realm of the Reptiles. I still couldn’t see them, my vision confined to the tiny peephole showing only dead Bertha and darkness beyond her bright cage. But then a face appeared, wide eyes, a mussed towhead, mouth gaping. Then more, a dozen children silhouetted by the shadows, all staring down at Bertha, at me. My fist inside Bertha’s skin convulsed. Whatever way I moved Bertha felt phony. I didn’t understand a snake’s movement, and the children looked bored, their mouths closing, eyes flitting away to see the genuine life the Realm of the Reptiles had to offer. I was losing them.

Drew appeared before the tunneled vision of my peephole. Rizzo’s snakes draped his arms, his neck, crawling and arching their heads, flicking their tongues. The children turned toward him, faces glowing with excitement again. They danced around him, and I thought of St. Patrick driving the snakes into the sea, tricking the last old serpent. Drew neared my cage, the young teacher gripping his shoulder, the children shepherded by him and his snakes. They peered into my tank again, examined the intricacies of my scaled body, my cloudy eyes now aimed at Drew, waiting.

He clicked the latch at the top of the tank. The metal vibrated through the glass, into Bertha, into me. He was coming to make us alive and real. He lowered one hand into the tank, and I stared at it, hungry for inspiration. His palms were smooth and glowing under the lights. I could almost feel their warmth, the desire to crawl into them, slide up his arm, wrap around the leather elbow patches. He waved his hand, and I followed. I used my own eyes at first, but as I began to sway, I felt Bertha, sensed those tiny black beads. He swirled his hand, and I followed again, twisting, circles,
dizzying. My cramped, overweight body below disappeared. No arms, no legs. I became sleek and strong.

Then Drew made a fist. I froze. Our eyes trained on each other, locked, bonded. The fist poofed into wiggling fingers, and I felt myself again, my neck cramping, my back aching, my hand sweating inside Bertha’s hot guts.

The children clapped, cheered. The teacher pecked Drew secretly on the cheek. He looked satisfied, his lips curling slightly at the edges. Not saved, not relieved, but satisfied. He was not a child to save or devour. Here were children, eyes big and white and empty. A python like Bertha could birth one hundred children in one pop. This crowd would mean nothing to her. But they meant everything to me, this audience witnessing my hand becoming serpent.

And he was not the professor in his blazer and tie. Here was a teacher, at his side, just as charmed by him as the children were. Drew was something else, something I’d never known, something that had hypnotized me to swirl and swoop and turn into a human pretzel.

So what was I?

I had touched the snake, violated Rizzo’s sacred commandment. But it wasn’t that simple. I had been Bertha, and I was, as she had been, one of Drew’s reptilian passengers, his cold-blooded followers looking for warmth, for the light.

The children and the teacher scattered away from the cage. Drew remained, his face illuminated in a backdrop of darkness. I tried to wriggle free from Bertha’s skin grown tight around my wrist. I shook her dead weight. Drew backed away, into the shroud of shadows. Alone, I struggled, finally shed her. I shoved Bertha’s slumped body aside and gazed through the peephole at my own hand, coated in coagulated snake blood, but, yes, my hand. I raised it higher, flailed inside the glass, hoping someone would see my bright hand, the possessor of knowledge, tricked and trapped in this tiny box, but no one saw.

At home Randall could quietly celebrate his promotion to head safety supervisor at the refinery. He pulled a cigar and book of matches from his pocket, lifted his knuckles to his nose, and smelled the oil soaked into his fingers. The match head scraped across the strike strip and fizzled white. He waved his fingers through the tiny flame, and the oil in his skin did not ignite, would not burn and turn to ash, as his job would not burn, despite the refinery announcing shutdown, despite the layoffs and thinning number of men who entered the cyclone fence at punch in. He lit his cigar. He stayed still while the big lilac bush bent toward him in the summer breeze, the small petals teasing the burning ember in his mouth. It was a good thing to stand still and let the world sway around him, especially after a long shift climbing tanks and towers, tugging the men’s lanyards, checking for gloves, making sure they weren’t smoking.

He puffed hard, made the cherry glow bright orange under a pinecone of gray ash. His little fire at home. At work everything could burn. All the petroleum would burn eventually. From his house, he could see the whip of flame spouting from the burn-off tower at the refinery, waving to him, saying, Goodbye. See you tomorrow. You’ll be back.

His twelve-year-old son, Jackson, scraped a jackknife through the bark of their maple tree. The boy’s long hair hid his face, so Randall couldn’t tell if he was scraping with anger or boredom or what. Maybe Jackson was carving a heart, his initials over some young girl’s. Maybe Jackson’s initials grooved dark and jagged above some boy’s.

Sirens blared down the street, and Jackson’s skinny arms froze. His knife dropped to the dirt. Randall’s house squatted only a few blocks from the station, and he’d grown used to the trucks’ constant whines that summer. It sounded like two trucks, maybe three. A good-sized fire. Three trucks were plenty for the few thousand homes in their small Michigan town. Homes built around the refinery, Dow Chemical, Alma Bolt, the sugar beet factory. Randall’s refinery had its own trucks, better, newer, had its own hoses and gallons of foam and shiny red extinguishers placed every few yards along the catwalks, had its own coal-filter respirators and heavy yellow jackets hung like deflated men in the break-room closet.

The fire truck lights sparked red through the fat plumage of his maple tree. Randall’s chest was bare, but he didn’t have time to go inside and get a T-shirt. He bit into the butt of his cigar and jogged to his van. He turned the key twice before the engine gurgled to life. Outside the passenger’s window, his son stared. He could see Jackson’s face now, pale with a slightly sunken chin, small nose, all framed with that long dirty-blond hair.

Randall leaned over the seat and cranked down the window. “If you wanna see this fire, you better get moving.”

Jackson lowered his head and trudged toward the van. Randall drummed the steering wheel with his fingertips as the trucks surged down their road. Finally the passenger door creaked open, and Jackson climbed onto the seat.

Randall caught up to the trucks after a few blocks. He matched their speed, slicing through red-light intersections. He smiled over at Jackson, who was looking out the window instead of watching the lights, the chrome fenders, the beast of a truck ahead of them.

“You’re going to miss all the best stuff.” Randall elbowed his son.

His boy turned toward the fire trucks but didn’t smile back, didn’t look his father in the eye. Randall had only had one kid with Celia. Jackson cost enough, they’d both agreed years ago. And Randall had worried about every outlet in the house, every stair step, every sharp corner. He hadn’t wanted to go through that terror again. But now he thought about another son, or a daughter. His promotion confirmed he could protect them, even in the dry summers like this one, where roofs spurted flames almost every night. But he worried about Jackson, how to save him from the whitewashes and swirlies and black eyes he got at school. He imagined outfitting him in a suit of muscles and calluses, like slipping a wool safety jacket onto the men at work.

“How fast do you think they can go?” Jackson pointed ahead of them. His fingernails were painted black. A mood ring strangled the knuckle of his middle finger. A row of wire twist ties adorned his thumb.

“What’s this faggy shit about?” Randall said, grabbing Jackson’s broomstick wrist.

“I don’t know.”

“You go to the beauty salon to get that done?”

Jackson’s sunken chin sucked tight against his collarbone, and Randall wished he hadn’t said anything. Maybe doing nothing was better. Jackson would survive school, would fuck girls and tell his dad about it over beers someday. Randall just had to wait.

He followed the trucks onto Amber Street and saw the smoke rolling east over moss-scabbed shingles. So close to his neighborhood, like the last five fires. The trucks groaned to a stop in front of the Leylands’ house.

Randall parked, and before getting out he grabbed his name tag from the cup holder. Etched into the polished metal, tall letters spelled his title at work. He slid the name tag into his pocket and then worked his way toward a crowd already gathered on the sidewalk around the Leylands’ new add-on. Jackson scurried in the opposite direction, across the street to the sidewalk, where it was safe, where three old ladies were gabbing.

The Leylands’ house was close to theirs but closer to the golf course, where Randall had played with borrowed clubs a few times. Mr. Leyland had a membership, until he was laid off from his position as senior quality inspector at Playbuoy Pontoons last month. The Leylands lived on the border, a line down Decatur Avenue that separated new aluminum siding from sun-blistered pine, lawns patched yellow from thick green sod. Jackson took his place on the brittle yellow side while Randall joined the crowd around the Leylands’ wilting sod.

The fire crawled up the aluminum siding. The metal already drooped, singed black. The flames swung like hair in the wind, auburn hair, shocks of bright yellow, a flash of blue springing when the gusts blew.

“That’s the goddamned baby’s room,” somebody in the crowd said. “Just built that add-on for her last year. I bet she’s still in there.” The speaker had a brown mustache, ropey arms, wore a stained yellow tank top. He was hard to recognize without his coveralls, away from the stacks, but the tattoo of Saint Florian’s Roman skirt and muscular thighs gave Vance away. Florian’s gold armor was hidden under Vance’s yellowed bandages. The refinery had fired him three weeks ago, just after Randall had caught him smoking on the catwalks. Vance had been a good worker, but good work meant nothing without safety.

“I think I hear it crying,” someone else said.

“I’m going in if that baby’s not out in the next thirty seconds,” Vance said. “The rest of you civilians should step away.”

“These boys can handle it,” Randall said. He stepped in front of the crowd, spread his arms wide, and planted them over the Leylands’ fence. “It’ll be safe.”

“Shit, Randall,” Vance said, brushing up his mustache, “I’m a full-on substitute firefighter now. It’s my responsibility to watch out for the public.”

“The public’s fine.” Randall reached into his pocket, thumbed the grooved letters of his name tag. The grooves felt shallow, the letters numb to his callused thumb.

“Twenty seconds, and I’m going in.” Vance crossed his arms, flexed the forearm that wielded Florian’s fancy skirt.

Two firemen clomped through the front door. Randall squinted at the fire knocking at the second-story window, where a baby may or may not have been. He imagined the window shattering, Mrs. Leyland clutching a blanketed bundle of screeching. She’d yell to the crowd, toss her baby through the flames as if it were a bouquet. Vance would dive too early, and Randall would catch it. No one else, because he was calm, because fire didn’t scare him. Jackson would lift his sunken chin and nod to his father.

The wind blew hard, and the fire surged toward the crowd. Someone screamed. Randall felt the heat against his chest. He gripped the fence harder, facing down the orange shoulder that jutted toward him. The hair on his knuckles tightened, curled, cowering into a sizzle.

Randall didn’t move until a fireman pushed his chest. “All the way back,” the fireman shouted to the crowd. “See that kid on the other side of the street.” He shot a gloved finger at Jackson. “He’s the only one with any sense.”

“You heard the man.” Vance slapped the fireman’s back, remained at the fence while the crowd wandered across the street, all walking backward, staring at the blaze. Randall tailed the crowd, watching them, their eyes reflecting fire, the black Os of their mouths. He outstretched his arms and waved his fingers, corralling the slow-moving crowd as Vance had neglected to do. By the time he got to Jackson, the hydrant hose had rushed to life. The fire fizzled quickly under the water and made the Leylands’ sidewalk glisten. The hydrant runoff puddled halfway across the road, but it wasn’t enough to reach the sunbaked grass on their side.

Out the front door came Mr. Leyland, one of the firemen fingering his upper back. Then came Mrs. Leyland, holding the baby. It was fat and pink and not wrapped in blankets as he’d imagined. It didn’t cry. The hose pounded the last whips of fire, and the crowd cheered.

One of the firemen tossed Vance a Polaroid camera. The flash lit
up the smoke-stained siding. Vance fired off a dozen shots, slipping each one into his back pocket. Then he turned his back to the house, aimed the camera at the crowd, and took one shot.

Randall watched Vance flick the last picture he’d taken. Around Randall, men stood shirtless, dirty nails and mussed hair, frayed jean shorts. One of them held a can of beer. Randall wished he had somewhere to pin his tag and could almost feel the sting from the hole he’d pierce through his chest.

Randall and his boy pulled into the driveway, and he noted that their brittle yellow lawn needed watering. He gripped his doorknob, which needed the right jiggle to open, which would cost precious seconds in an emergency. He worked the knob and opened the door for his son but didn’t follow him.

The air was calm, and away from his home the burn-off tower’s flame shot straight up. The waving hand had changed into one giant orange finger pointing up. But there was nothing higher to point to in Alma than this burning finger, and the fire wouldn’t stop burning, wouldn’t be put out by Alma firemen with their hydrants and Vance’s Polaroids, wouldn’t stop until Randall supervised shutdown.

Randall slipped through his front door. In the kitchen, Celia poured a glass of lemonade for Jackson. His bony fingers gripped the glass, the black fingernails looking like dead holes against his pale skin. Jackson gulped down the glass, set it on the counter, and Celia poured again.

“Another fire?” Celia ran her fingers through the boy’s hair as he sipped the next glass. Her fingernails were short and unpainted.

“Everyone’s okay. They saved a baby.”

He stared at his boy’s black nails until Jackson clunked the glass on the counter and wormed out of the room.

“The fires are all over, Randy,” Celia rinsed the glass, ran a dingy rag over the rim. “This whole town is going up.”

“We’re safe.” Randall reached above her and pressed their smoke detector. The alarm didn’t sound.

“This town just needs some damn rain. The town gets crazy when it’s just hot and dry all the time.”

“I can’t make it rain.” Randall opened the junk drawer to search for a battery.

“I didn’t ask you to.” She raised a cigarette to her lips. “No jobs, no rain, nothing anyone can do about it.”

But Randall had a job, a promotion even, and it would last until the refinery tower’s flame snuffed out. Randall rummaged through the drawer but couldn’t find a battery. Instead, he pulled out a book of matches and tore one off for his wife.

Celia ignored him and cupped her hands over her lighter. “What’d Jackie think of the fire?”

Randall wished his wife would use their boy’s legal name, Jackson, a solid name. Jackie was paper-thin, crumpled under the tongue. “What the fuck is with his nails? Is that your paint?”

“I found a quart of paint in his room. It’s your paint. The stuff you used on the shutters. You ever see my nails black?”

He remembered her nails being orange last week when he took her out to Pizza Sam’s to celebrate rumors of his promotion, rumors he’d joked about with the men on the stacks. Safety supervisor wasn’t work, but a desk and a clipboard and probably a skirt, the men had said.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Phases, baby.” She passed her cigarette to Randall. A pink smudge of lipstick ringed the filter. He waved it away. “You gotta be able to laugh about this stuff.”

“I just wish he’d bring home a girl or something. Just so I wouldn’t have to worry.”

“Jesus, he’s twelve. I’ll take black nails over some knocked-up teenager.”

Randall finally discovered some batteries at the back of the drawer. He opened the detector and found the batteries missing. He popped in the new ones.

“I found a job in the paper I might apply to,” Celia said.

“We have lots of time still. You don’t need a job.”

“Can’t pass up an opportunity. We might need the only job in town after the refinery closes.” She dropped her cigarette butt into the disposal.

“We got another year at least, probably more. And then there’s the demo. I’ll have plenty to do. I’ll be the very last one to go.”

She flipped the switch for the disposal. The blades whirred against the cotton filter, kicked smoke out of the sink. He smelled burnt tobacco and cotton. It smelled like when Vance had caught fire smoking, when Randall had known exactly what to do. The smoke detector’s alarm blared. Celia opened the window over the sink. The alarm silenced, but Randall’s ears kept ringing.

Randall had too much time on the weekends now. The refinery had cut Saturdays indefinitely. He thumbed his old baseball glove in the garage, wondered if it would still fit. He unzipped his hunting rifle, ran his fingers down the stock, zipped the bag back up. He kicked at a pile of two-by-fours, pulled his tool belt from a rusty nail. It smelled like sweat and leather and grease. Like work, real work. But behind that smell, Randall’s hands smelled like oranges. The commercial soap in his new office now overpowered the petroleum. Celia used to push him away, when he first started working the stacks. She’d push him into the shower and laugh, threaten jamming soap in his mouth to kill the fire on his breath. But she got used to the smell.