One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (6 page)

Everyone in Alma got used to the smell of the refinery, of petroleum. But not Randall. He was ever vigilant. Someone had to be. That was Vance’s problem. The petroleum had become a part of him, a smell as familiar as his own sweat. Vance had been leaning over the catwalk, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. Randall had only started down the catwalk when Vance spun the flint on his lighter. His hands flashed, fingertips stretching in orange. Frozen, Vance had stared at his flaming fingers, as if trying to decipher refinery-stack schematics. Randall clanged across the catwalk. No dirt to smother Vance’s body with, Randall tackled him, hugged him against his coveralls. He held him there, two men clutching at
each other. A group below hollered, “Get a room.” Vance had fought against Randall’s grip until he finally slammed Vance’s head against the metal grates. The refinery was happy to have any excuse to fire him, and Vance was gone the next day, Randall promoted. Since that day, Randall carried no tool belt, never lingered on the stacks among the men for longer than it took to check their safety equipment.

Randall hung the tool belt back on the wall. Outside the dusty panes on the garage side door, Jackson was plucking crab apples. The boy squished the berries and pulled the pulp through his hair.

Randall lifted his gas can from behind the mower. Jackson had mowed earlier, even though there was nothing to cut, the lawn yellow and dead. Randall cracked the side door.

“What the hell are you doing, Jackson?”

The boy dropped a handful of crab apples. “Nothing.” They skittered across the patio concrete. “I don’t know.”

Jackson’s easy answer. A boy’s answer. Randall’s job required complete knowledge of where each thin white ladder connected to every catwalk at the refinery, how every catwalk led to stairs, to ground, to the front gate, where each man would eventually exit forever. He stepped onto the patio and felt a berry burst under his sandal.

“Why are you putting that shit in your hair?”

“An experiment, I guess.” Jackson dragged his foot over a pile of crab apples. “It’s stupid.”

“Don’t eat those.”

“I’m not dumb,” Jackson said, scraping his sneaker against the concrete, curling the berry flesh into tiny twisted fingers.

“I want to show you something.” Randall held the side door for Jackson, who passed under his arm. He could smell the bitter fruit in his boy’s hair.

Randall set the gas can in front of them, squatted, unscrewed the top. A stream of invisible waves floated out the spout, and he looked up at his boy through water, through molten glass, there waiting to learn something with crab apple experiments crushed into his long hair.

“If you’re mowing, you should know how to put out a gas fire.”

He tipped the can, let a stream puddle on the floor. He hovered over the puddle, but it didn’t burn his eyes or sting his nose. He was still immune to petroleum. His boy sniffled, wiped his nose, smearing a burgundy stain across his upper lip.

Randall dropped a match onto the puddle, and a rush of blue waved over it. Deep-orange tails spiked and split. Randall watched his boy, watched the fire. He had an urge to dump more gas, maybe toss in his old glove or his tool belt. He wanted Jackson to move close enough to feel the heat on his ankles. But his boy stayed at a safe distance.

The fire died, and only a black smudge remained on the garage floor.

“So you just let it burn out?” Jackson asked.

Randall kicked at the smudged floor until he’d made a hole of lighter gray around the black. A missing spot. Even what remained after the fire could be erased.

“No,” Randall said. “You use dirt.”

The next one happened that Sunday, and it smelled like a bonfire. Randall had felt it tingling in his fingers as soon as he woke up, knew it would happen soon. And then he smelled it from inside the house, where Celia smoked below an empty smoke detector. Her nostrils flared as she examined her cigarette. He ran to the bedroom, pulled on a pair of jeans, and buttoned up his supervisor shirt. He pinned his metal name tag to the breast pocket.

He strode down the hallway but stopped at Jackson’s closed door. He knocked, and when the boy didn’t answer, he cracked the door and watched his son through a slice. Inside, Jackson sat cross-legged on his bed with a red pincushion beside his thigh. He wore a shirt with pearl buttons and gray flowers. He was bothering one of his fingers with a pin and hid his hand once he saw Randall.

“We got another fire, Jackson. You coming?”

“I don’t know.” Jackson trained his eyes on his bare toes, his hand still behind his back.

“What’s to know? You’re coming, or you’re not.”

The fire trucks still hadn’t started their whine. If he hurried, he could beat them.

“I’m kind of busy with this.” The boy removed the hand from his back. Two needles stuck through the skin on each fingertip. They formed ten crosses on his left hand.

A grunt slipped from Randall’s chest. Jackson lowered his head. Maybe it was time the boy heard a grunt like this. He’d hear it from others. Needles and berries and painted fingernails. It was a combination that added up to nothing useful.

“I’d come,” Jackson said, “but I have to pull out my crosses.” He lifted his left hand to Randall. “It might hurt.”

“Let me see.” Randall gripped the boy’s wrist, squinted at the needles. They’d raised pale humps of crisscrossing skin, something like a star. Not a drop of blood though. “They’re just through your calluses. You can’t feel anything there.”

Randall pinched a needle head and pulled. Jackson hissed through his front teeth, and he told the boy to look away for the next one. When he pulled again, Jackson didn’t react, couldn’t even tell, and Randall smiled at his work. There was still no clamor from the fire station, but the smoke was heavier now. Somewhere a fire. Perhaps another baby surrounded by smoke or a mother or a father who didn’t know what to do. At the thumb, Randall pulled too hard, and the boy’s wrist jerked. A dot of red welled from his skin. Randall wiped it with his shirtsleeve, and his boy’s blood left a black stain.

“Sorry, Jackson,” he said.

“It’s okay.” Jackson smiled. “I didn’t even really feel it.”

They followed the wind-sliced puffs of smoke on foot. Still no sound from the station. Randall could have reported the fire, but the city should’ve known the difference between the burning leaves that sputtered and spewed gray from the black clouds of treated lumber.

Jackson chewed his fingertips as they walked down Amber. Randall tried to ignore his boy’s clicking teeth. He unpinned his name tag and polished it with the inside of his sleeve. They turned south,
and the smoke grew, veiling the burn-off tower on the horizon. Randall wanted to run, but Jackson only plodded along. The whole town seemed slow. A fire burned close, but no sirens, no hydrant rush, no screaming women or babies. Just tree leaves shuddering and the tick of Jackson’s teeth against his skin.

When they turned down Mill, they found the fire. A small shed spit flames into the air outside Vance’s house. Randall wondered if that was why the fire station hadn’t sprung to life, if being a substitute fireman offered the privacy of handling your own fire.

Vance leaned against the faded siding of his house, studying the fire as it crept across his yellow grass. He carried no extinguisher, wore no heavy jacket or wader boots. Vance’s bare torso gleamed with sweat all the way to his bandaged arm. His hair was matted on one side, as if he’d been napping.

Randall straightened his name tag. “Need some help?”

“I have a shovel, but it’s in the shed,” he nodded to the door, “and that’s kind of fucked now.”

“Could spread to the house.”

“It’s under control.”

Vance stepped closer to the fire between them. Randall readied himself for the flames to spring up Vance’s arms, and then he’d wrestle this man, naked to the waist, into the dirt in front of his son. They’d both be filthy, soot covered, his name tag and button-up shirt unrecognizable. And then the fire would spread to Vance’s house, down the street, dancing across rooftops, northbound.

Jackson stepped away from his father, toward the fire, and Randall wanted to reach for his boy. He didn’t know if he could wrestle two bodies to the ground, if he was strong enough to clunk Jackson’s head against the earth until he submitted.

Jackson reached Vance and dug his hands into the dirt, worked an arcing trough around the fire. Randall felt hot in his shirt. He rolled up his sleeves. Down the street, no crowd approached to gawk, so he watched his son, watched as Vance slowly circled around his house and returned carrying a two-by-four, which he plunged into the dirt. He dug alongside Jackson, thrusting the board with his good hand
and steadying it with his fist full of bandages. As Vance worked, the bandages slipped up his arm, past the tattoo of Saint Florian’s fancy skirt, exposing the golden breastplate. Randall sweated under his shirt. It was just the heat of the day. It was just the weight of his uniform. It was just the distance of his son, the length of Vance’s yard, the fire that could leap across the brittle grass.

After a half hour, Vance and Jackson had circled the shed with a dirt trough. The walls of the shed collapsed and huffed a swarm of sparks at Jackson, but he didn’t run, didn’t scream, kept working the dirt, until the shed smoldered into a pile of black ash. Vance dropped his two-by-four and reached his hand out to Jackson. They shook, both their hands thick with dirt and sweat.

“Shame about your shed,” Randall said, and wished he had something better to say, something about bandages and catwalks and how no one would be walking them soon.

“Nothing we could do.” Vance scratched his chin, left fingerprints of dirt. “Thanks for lending me a helper.”

“How’d it start?”

“This whole town’s burning up,” Vance pulled his dirty bandage back down over Saint Florian’s armor. “Not much anyone can do but sign insurance checks.”

Jackson returned to his father’s side, and when Randall looked down at his boy’s hands, the little white stars of raised skin were covered by a layer of dirt. They were still there, though. It would only take a little water, a little scrubbing, and his boy’s stars would return.

On their way home, the skies turned gray for the first time in weeks. They walked past yards spitting flames. The citizens of Alma were dumping gas and turpentine and lighter fluid onto piles of old brush, dragging discarded lumber through their brittle grass to the flames, racing to beat the rain. At one house, a family circled their fire, tossed broken toys onto their burn pile. Three children danced and laughed as a red tricycle shriveled and spewed black smoke.

The smells of sweat and petroleum twisted through the cool breeze. Salt and petroleum. It was a bad mix. Not much you could
do with the two together. Bury it. Bury contamination and hope no one finds out. And they wouldn’t until demo, until the stacks and tanks were felled, until they tilled up the earth and found a useless, dangerous patch of dirt.

Randall wanted to run, get home, lock the doors, and phone the police to report all the illegal fires that could sprint across the dry earth at any moment, collide at his front door and shoot into the air as tall as the burn-off tower. But Jackson slowed him, stopping every few yards to pick up a stray stick or wilting dandelion and weave it into his hair. His hands twitched with the urge to slap all the twigs out of Jackson’s hair. The heat in his cheeks dripped under his work shirt, collected around the pin of his name tag. He imagined the metal around his name, his title, turning orange, the engraved letters melting away into an illegible script. How would others read that he was the one watching over their safety? Soon enough, no one would know, when the refinery was just a plot of dirt caged by cyclone fences.

Jackson dipped to slip another dandelion behind his ear. Randall felt the townspeople staring through their fires at his boy, calling him queer under the crackles of brush. He wondered if Vance would tell people how Jackson had saved his house, Randall his life, or if the only story told would be of the two men who’d violently embraced on the refinery catwalks.

Randall jogged away from his boy toward a pair of men drinking cans of Pabst in front of a burning pile of siding that was already spreading through the grass to their sandaled toes. The men looked familiar, might have worked at the refinery once. He bent down, plucked a dandelion from their yard, and slipped it underneath his name tag.

The men laughed. The heat under his shirt cooled. He felt the breeze blowing harder, from the west, where the heavy gray clouds grew to drown the yellow grass of his neighborhood and sizzle the remains of Vance’s smoldering shed, of all the burning junk of Alma. With the clouds, the fires would end. His son would be safe in a town where everything could no longer burn.

The stonemasons’ left arms turned green in the morning, black by lunch, and then fell off like chewed cherry stems near quitting time. I watched through the window and hugged my cutting pot, nearly dropped my paintbrush, when all those blackened twists dropped from the scaffold, rolled onto the lush sod. The stonemasons cut out early, went home to their wives and sons. No one went to Jiffy Quick Care to see Doc Robby.

But I went. Doc Robby examined my arm, told me I had a fine shoulder. I had him examine my forearm, my bicep, squeeze each of the calluses on my fingers. Everything checked out A-okay. He said stethoscopes weren’t for arms, but he listened. Sounds like an arm, he told me. But I had to be sure. If something happened to me, where would my family be?

The next day, the stonemasons returned with one giant brown wing sprouting from each of their left shoulders where their arms had died. Each flapped his one gigantic wing and gripped a trowel in the other arm. They flew around the subdivisions, bouncing off the freshly shingled roofs, zigzagging from one cul-de-sac to the next. Even though they flew mostly in drunken circles, they didn’t need ladders for the facades anymore. They were faster, better, and the new wings smelled clean like turpentine.

“How do you like that,” I said to Martha, my wife, who was also the cleaning lady. But she’d already slipped upstairs to spritz blue stuff at the new windows. Betsy, her daughter, heard me. She was scrubbing the brand-new downstairs toilet. The contractors weren’t supposed to use the new toilets, but we did. Beat the Port-a-Johns, beat staring into that cave of chemicals filled with withered and castoff stonemason arms.

“I don’t like it much at all,” Betsy said, “but this is how we pay rent.”

“I meant the stonemasons, hon,” I said to no one, because the new toilets were clean and Betsy had joined her mother upstairs. I stood in the spotless living room, surrounded by my immaculate white walls, alone with my two good arms.

Us painters are always the last ones to leave a new house. There’s always touch-up to do, even after the cleaning. Everybody mucks up my work. Hell, even Martha’s and Betsy’s brooms leave black scuffs against the baseboards, and I have to paint it all nice and white and shiny again. With my caulk and spackle and paint, I fix every flaw, cover every sign that anyone worked here.

The trim carpenters followed the stonemasons. It started with Fred buzzing off his index finger with the circular. Made a damn mess for Martha and Betsy. They went through three paper-towel rolls. We looked all over for Fred’s finger, but he eventually told us to forget it. Not worth the trouble. I wanted to argue and peeked inside my cutting pot, because you never know. Just paint, though. Just white. Like every house in the subdivisions.

I told Fred to go see Doc Robby at Jiffy Quick Care. He grunted, curled his lips, said maybe he’d take the rest of the day off. And then his helper, Stanley “High Standards” Thompson, interrupted our conversation by zipping off his index finger with the same circular. Three more paper rolls. No sight of fingers. Not even in my cutting pot.

Turned out, all three of the trim-carpenter crews at the subdivisions had the same issue that day. All drove home at two o’clock, shooting past Jiffy Quick Care, crimson-stained paper towels wadded over their fists.

I made it to Jiffy Quick Care when I wrapped up around seven. I parked right next to Doc Robby’s Taurus, nodded at his license plate, which read
INAJIFF
. This time, I had him check my legs, my toes, especially the toenail that’d been split for two years, ever since I kicked a full five-gallon bucket when I found out Betsy had started dating that roofer. Nothing new there. I dropped my pants, asked him if that was a hernia. He apologized for cold hands. “Anything you notice, Doc?” I asked. “Anything at all.” He checked some boxes on my chart, pushed some trial Ameliorex pain pills with a knowing smile. On my way out, I tossed them to a fellow wearing a Hooter’s apron in the waiting room.

Next day, the trim carpenters showed up on-site wielding scabbed stumps. The missing fingers showed up, too. They’d worked through the whole night and now worked alongside their previous owners. They were emancipated but cheap labor, accepted a fraction of minimum wage relative to their physical size. Those fingers did fine work and proved more useful detached and freethinking.

I was brushing some trim, watching a group of index fingers ahead of me feel out the baseboards for the shiners that used to piss me off when I had to set them. Three indexies lugged a hammer and thumped a nail head home. I called to Betsy, “Aren’t those indexies a nice lot?”

But Betsy wasn’t there. I hadn’t seen her all day. She was growing up quick from the freckled seven-year-old with mismatched socks I met when Martha and I started working together. Betsy used to conduct weddings for Martha’s spray bottles—now presenting Mr. and Mrs. Windex-Bleach. She was a young lady now, wielding spray bottles that couldn’t exchange vows. Could have been twenty-five with her own cleaning crew and an armful of baby the next time I blinked my eyes.

Martha said, “I wish some of you boys would take your shoes off.”

I turned from my window trim to see Martha on her hands and knees scrubbing at a sooty boot print in the berber. Must have been from the heating-and-cooling guys, who were bursting into flames every ten minutes.

“Do you think it hurts?” I said to Martha’s back. “I never see blisters or boils or burnt flesh or boo-boos of any form. But it’s gotta hurt.”

“The floors are filthy.”

“I suppose there’s that.”

“Everyone makes a mess.” Martha sprayed more stain remover on the berber. It foamed bright like spilled white paint.

“I don’t make a mess.” I lifted up my feet to show her the paper booties I’d graciously slipped over my sneakers. Martha didn’t look. “The carpet guys are pretty clean, too.”

“Well, it’s their carpet.” Martha whistled when she wiped the foam away and the boot print was gone. “They still put their hands all over the windows, piss all over the toilet seat.”

“And don’t forget what they do to my walls.”

Martha swish-swished her broom up the stairway. I could have followed her, and perhaps I should have because it was our anniversary, married twelve years. I hoped she’d find the love letter on the wall in the master bedroom. But I wrote it with the touch-up paint, and it blended perfectly into the wall. At least the white walls would make her think of me.

I thought about the carpet guys. We were the same men we’d always been, nothing new, just doing our jobs and then trying to forget about them once we got home and watched baseball or played solitaire or stitched a new teal square into our quilts.

Across the road, through the big bay window, I saw Hank the head carpet layer kick through a front door, a giant roll of padding slung over his shoulder. I headed to the house across the street and followed his banging through the hallway, tracked his path of gouges and scrapes on my walls. He looked the same as always. Hank was just Hank, until another Hank walked through the door, a slightly smaller Hank with an armload of tack strip. More Hanks knocked through the entryway. Each one a little smaller. They were identical, wore the same stonewashed jeans with smaller and smaller holes in the knees. The same brown mustache covered their lips, the same uneven sideburns. Just smaller. Altogether,
there were twelve, the tallest one Hank’s original size, the shortest standing up to midshin. They scuffed my walls at every height.

“Did you get hurt?” I asked a Hank who stood as tall as my waist. “Tell me how it happened.”

“Ask the boss.” The midsized Hank nodded under the weight of his half-sized padding roll.

“Just point to where it hurts,” I told full-sized Hank. “Did you see a doc?”

But it turned out who I thought was full-sized Hank was 91.66667 percent–sized Hank, and he pointed an elbow to another Hank, who sipped a thermos full of coffee in the corner.

Full-sized Hank said, “Who needs a doc? You need to stop worrying about me and us and our treacherous run-in with carpet glue and start worrying about touching up these walls. They’re a mess.”

Full-sized Hank took a long sip. So long I thought he’d drown. He finally lowered his thermos and breathed. He folded his arms and smiled at all the smaller-sized Hanks hard at work, bolting the tack strips to the subfloor, leaning over less than Hank used to have to lean. His back problems would be no more.

I went to lunch, to Ivan’s Bread and Brew, down the street from the subdivisions where we all worked. The store squatted like a scab against a background of new white houses. I could see every nail in the sun-faded brown clapboard. Big nail heads pounded by healthy contractors who’d made sure their work would last and didn’t care how it looked. I wondered if anyone who lived in the A-frame ranches and split-levels would go to Ivan’s after we finished construction and disappeared. But where were we going? There was a world of soybean fields and forests and clapboard to tear up and cover with white walls and sod.

I ordered my usual turkey and cream cheese bagel sandwich at Ivan’s. I needed something the same, because I was scared. Betsy was pregnant. Martha was excited to be a grandma. But what would I be? Still a step-something-or-other or something real? I wanted Betsy to at least consider her options. She could go to trade school, earn a journeymen’s license, do something besides clean houses.
But if the right accident happened to me, then maybe Betsy could quit next year. We could buy one of the subdivision houses, and she could stay at home, never have to bring the kid to work, where it would make paintbrushes and carpet scraps and bent nails into pretend families.

I tossed the rest of the sandwich and then dug around my truck bed until I found a tin of turpentine. I twisted off the lid, poured it down my arms, cupped it in my hands. My skin sizzled. The fumes burned my nose, and my stomach cartwheeled. I thought about what Hank had said about carpet glue, and I let the turpentine soak in until my skin blazed pink. I hopped back into my truck and drove to Doc Robby’s without a seatbelt.

Doc Robby said he thought he’d fixed me up last time. I told him about the turpentine accident. He smiled and ushered me to the sink. We rinsed. So I told him my side hurt, maybe an exploding appendix. He said no, offered more Ameliorex. What about my lungs? Who knows what I’ll cough up sucking so much paint. He said lungs were more resilient than most docs like to let on. They totally regenerate every seven years. But maybe—He said no.

Back at the subdivisions, I drove past one of the plumbers roughing copper in a trench. The trench walls started to cave in around him, and he winked at me, shrugged as the silt and clay enveloped his face. I kept on driving. The cream cheese and turkey roiled inside my belly. I punched my dash. Tomorrow he’d be able to walk through walls or spit copper pipe of perfect length. Things would be easier. I would just have the same miraculous regenerating lungs everyone else had.

The stonemasons careened across the sky and then gathered in a perfect V line. They were getting used to their wings. I sped to a cul-de-sac at the back of the sub, where the houses were finished and I could have some time alone to think among my white walls. But a truck was parked out front, and that meant there’d be handprints everywhere. Inside, I found Martha. From the entryway, I watched her over the half wall up the stairs. In one arm, she held a baby, and in the other, a spray bottle of blue cleaner. She squirted
it at the window, and then the baby dabbed at it with its blanket. The baby left streaks.

“That baby’s no good at cleaning windows,” I said.

“He’ll learn,” Martha said. “This is his first one.”

So he was a boy. A blank-slate baby boy. He could do any trade, master any tool. Maybe he’d paint with me. I’d be his mentor of all things white and wall. The thought helped me forget about Betsy, who’d forgone her options.

“Where’s Betsy?” I stepped up one stair, closer to my wife and her grandchild.

“She left,” Martha said. “Your shoes are filthy.” The baby nodded his pink head.

I didn’t have any paper booties, so I kicked off my shoes, lifted one up to investigate the bits of earth packed into the tread. They weren’t that dirty.

“You know that ladders used to be the twelfth leading cause of injury in America?” Martha said.

“What changed?”

“Mostly extension ladders, though.” She lifted the baby so he could reach the top of the window. He squeaked as if he was going to cry, scrunched up his face, but then found his smile.

“I mostly use stepladders.” I peered inside my shoe for spots of blood, missing toes, anything.

Martha set the baby on the floor while she finished up. Her brown hair looked paler, and her few gray hairs blazed through the streakless window. The sun’s stark shadows cast her worry lines deeper.

A stonemason flapped by and darkened the room.

Free from Martha’s arms, the baby crawled for the stairs. It was a good thing I was at the bottom to catch him, and when I did, I’d let him hold my paintbrush. Before he had a chance to dive, a parade of trim-carpenter index fingers blocked the baby’s path at the top of the stairs. They curled up and down, up and down, like a dance or some kind of warning. The baby raised one chubby pink hand and opened and closed it, opened and closed it.

I was never any good at reading body language. What I did know was those indexies weren’t allowing my grandbaby to explore his world. If he wanted to go down the stairs, he had a damn right. He knew the risks: tumble and bump and crash. And he could clearly see me there waiting, no matter what decision he made, painter or plumber, electrician or roofer. If he fell and busted up, I’d take him somewhere better than Doc Robby.

The fingers curled faster. I wanted to jog up the steps and kick them all away. The baby swiped one up in his pink hand and jammed it into his mouth. All the other indexies inched away. The one in his mouth squirmed.

I opened up my arms for the baby to tumble into, but he just sucked that finger, gazing over my head at the flawless entryway wall I’d painted. It was perfectly untouched, as if no one had ever been there. That was me, my mark of nothing. I hoped the baby wouldn’t choke.