Man Gone Down (27 page)

“Well, well.”

KC's at the door. KC and Bing Bing. The others don't greet them, and they disappear behind a soffit and reappear again. By 8:30 everyone's ready to go.

“You're with us, professor.” KC beckons me to the paint supply. There's not much I hate more than painting—not so much the actual rolling, but the prep, the cleanup. He points at the Baker, sucks his teeth, then points vaguely at the first few windows.

“We have to set this thing up,” he says, more to himself than to anyone else. Because it's not a direct order, Bing Bing ignores it. He goes to the middle window and leans against it. He looks across at the other building—the apartments above the jeans store. Some of them are being renovated, as well, but they aren't nearly the size of this one. A squat white man with a thick mustache and a very young black man work on a countertop.

“What you doin', man?” KC barks. Bing Bing turns slowly and shrugs.

“Wa d'you won?”

“Set up the ting, mon!”

Bing Bing sucks his teeth, though not nearly as loud as KC, and waves me to him.

“C'mon, mon.” I go. We circle the broken-down scaffold and then stop. We both reach for the same side at the same time and both pull back. I let him pick it up. I'm not sure how he wants to go about putting it together—and a Baker isn't complicated at all. You can look at one and intuit how it should work: two vertical steel sides, like ladders, with slots in them; two horizontal lengths with ends that pocket into the slots; a metal-edged sheet of plywood to fit as the platform. It's the hesitation that gets us, the uneasy hierarchy that keeps us both staring at the section he's holding.

“Get dat a won.” So it's been decided. Bing Bing's lord of this particular fiefdom. And because we have a leader, things move smoothly. We put the Baker together and wheel it over to the first window by the front. Bing Bing starts back to the supply pile. I try to follow, but he raises his hand to me like he's a crossing guard. He doesn't pick up his feet, and his boots are only laced to the ankle. The tops fan out and his jeans are stuffed into them. They remind me of Eskimo boots, or what I've imagined Eskimo boots, if there are such things, to look like—hides and pelts wrapped tightly but seeming to be loose around feet and ankles. He shuffles back atop the sawdust and gypsum-coated floor with a box of sandpaper. KC meets us beneath the window.

“She likes these, you know. Yeah, she likes them like this.” He waves up at the window. “Yeah, don't touch anything—she says.” He sucks his teeth again. The window frames are metal—old stainless or tin—it's hard to tell because they're so worn, gummed up and over with dirt and soot and grease and little chips of old lead paint.

“Yeah, mon, we burned that shit off,” says KC. I guess he caught me studying the paint. “Three days with a torch—fuck.” He steps away from the sill as though the memory of the task is too hot itself.

“Yeah, she don't like no paint on no trim. Everything natural. Everything raw.” He smiles. “But she likes this. She come up yesterday and she just smiled. She likes this.”

Bing Bing and I both nod our heads involuntarily.

“Okay,” says KC softly. “Clean it up.”

Bing Bing aligns the Baker with the window.

“You bring a putty knife?” asks KC.

“Everything but.”

“There's some in the gang box. There's some WD-40, too. Boy,” teeth suck, “I don't know how you g'wan clean dat.” He shakes his head. “But that's the way she wants it—like it was when it was new. New, but still lookin' old.”

He takes the sandpaper from Bing Bing.

“Lemme see dat ting.”

He rubs it on the metal and cranes his neck back to get some distance. He shakes his head.”

“I don't know, boy.”

He takes one swipe at it, stops, turns to Bing Bing.

“G'wan get ma d'oil na.”

Bing Bing complies and KC continues to survey the frame, looking up the vertical then down the wall to the others. There are seven. My gaze drifts with him. Seven double-hung giant windows with nine lights each. Four hundred and sixty-eight linear feet of metal to buff. Bing Bing returns.

“Good. G'wan, gimme dat.” KC takes the oil and sprays a small patch, careful not to create too large a test area. He's always been careful. We used to call him the finisher or the fixer—the carpenter's buddy—with his twelve-inch blade and mud, patching holes, taping and plastering gaps, smoothing out everyone's fuckups, burying the mess and blunder of a bunch of half- and quarter-breed malcontents. I used to look at his work after he'd painted, touched up, and cleaned for the bulge, gap, or wiggle that I knew was there and at some point he'd slink up behind me and say,
“You don't see nothing, do ya?”

KC buffs the oil blotch. He starts nodding. “Yeah, that's the way—yes.” He studies it again, angling his torso away this time—moving his head slightly to the left, then to the right—studying. Finally, he straightens.

“Here.”

He holds the paper and the oil out for me. I take them.

“Okay,” he waves generally at the windows, then points at the patch he cleaned. “Like that. She'll like that.”

He starts to walk off, then calls for Bing Bing.

“Come on, boy.”

There's really nothing to contemplate, but I move the Baker out of the way so that I can, at least, pretend to be formulating a plan—Top to bottom? Bottom to top? Frame first or stops? I look closer at KC's spot. There seems to be a pattern engraved in the metal. Now I
see it everywhere on the surface, but instead of the slightly whitish tint in the clean spot, the untouched flowers are outlined by the dark crud. I wonder if KC noticed this or if “she” would want her old-new window frames so ornate—adorned by whimsical flora.

Someone turns on the table saw. Someone else turns on a radio—the former comes alive with a snarl and metallic whirl, the latter with a walkie-talkie squawk, then a commercial in which someone is screaming, like an electronic barker trapped in the little box. The person on the saw begins to cut plywood—feeding it too fast. The blade slows and the motor sputters, then, no sound.

“What the fuck?”

“Hold up.”

I find myself waiting for the song to come on. There are so many sounds on a job site, some intermittent, some rigidly patterned, some constant, and the random ones—a dropped tool or material, a curse, or something from outside like a siren or a sudden burst of laughter—which let you know there's a world beyond your allotted space and task. It's always struck me as somewhat sad, not crushingly, but enough to make me drift to memories, projections, remiss. I remember the job site, like a bar really, just without the stools and the liquor and the talk. The men are there—the men and the malaise and whatever sounds to which you attach yourself to keep from drifting inside too far, before the point of any real reflection, because in a bar, too far, and you're babbling your secrets (and how many secrets do you have left since you've already revealed that you're a drunk?) too far inside and—
Out! Out!
—there's your blood on the floor.

The saw's back on. I should tell him, whoever it is, not to force the wood on the blade, but you can't tell a man on a job how to do that job—it would be like telling a man alone in a bar that he's drinking too much.

The radio stops barking. Now there is music, drums at least, then some bass. I don't know the song, of course. Drums, how strange: They wouldn't let us play our drums and now that we can, we won't. The not-drum accompanied by the not-bass. It's actually catching,
certainly better than the shriek from ill-cut wood, KC's teeth sucking, or the idiot rasping of me endlessly sanding metal.

The crud doesn't come off easily, so I roll the paper around my finger and bear down. This method works better, but now I'm sanding a much smaller area. And the window frame seems to expand, rise through the ceiling, extend through the south wall, and out to Broome.

There are people walking the streets, some in coveralls, some in suits, different kinds of women—dressed down, dressed up—moving north and south. I wonder if they're natives or transplants. Why did they come—foolish question. Everyone comes to be a star, but the numbers don't bear out—winners versus losers. I suppose that one could say we were winning, Shake, Gavin, me, even Claire—having escaped our fates: artless concrete toil, drunken wife, and child-beating, brick-dry republican husbands. Death. Made so many dreadful mistakes and escaped many of them with impunity. And we were all still alive, relatively optimistic—trying to do something every day. But the
lucky to be alive
line doesn't mix well with the rasping, the banging, and all the people below moving with so much self-assurance. Yes, I made it through almost a year and a half—a free ride—in Cambridge, flamed out, came back in the city with the others. And we had some peace—writing, singing, staying sober, leaning on each other. Then I met Claire. Then Shake went insane, and soon after, Gavin fell off. Brian. Fucking Brian. Calling from across the world to wish me luck and say that
“a centipede bit me on the testicles.”
Where had he picked up that little English accent?—Ah, there but for the grace of God . . . It sounds hollow, even unuttered, a coward's mantra or some duplicitous line—like a malt liquor slogan on a ghetto billboard. It's the conspiracy of the haves—
How do you keep a good man with a wee problem down?
Keep him thanking his lucky fucking stars he's got what he's got.

I was supposed to have been somebody. I was full of promise.
“What happens to a dream deferred?” “How can you mend a broken heart?”
What if you don't keep your promise? But who made
it for you? If not you, then why is it yours to keep? I was supposed to have been somebody—not anybody—somebody who mattered and to whom things mattered. I was born a poor black boy of above-average intelligence and without physical deformity. I was born a poor Indian boy of above-average intelligence and without physical deformity. I was born a poor Irish boy of above-average intelligence and without physical deformity. I was born a poor black boy of above-average intelligence and without physical deformity, and therefore I should lead my people. It didn't work out that way. Even my father felt he could shake his head at me.
“When you were a little boy you were so full of light
. . .” People have spoken of the light: finding it, holding it, keeping it alive by torch or a memory of flame—the sun, a burned image on the mind-slate to be remembered until the next day, 'til rising. Or will memory eclipse it? What do we remember? What do we now see? I don't remember an exchange of vows. Who had passed that light to me? All that light he said he'd once seen? It hadn't come from him, Daddy Bing Cocktail, at least I thought not. It hadn't been passed down in backwash beer or hopeless baseball teams or hep and cool cats—the vacuum he'd left, nothing had rushed to fill it. Nothing displacing nothing—and so on.

Lila had told me there was a light. I've pieced it together over the years, why she left the South, why she drifted and wound up in Boston—some star she saw. We'd just moved out of the city to Newton. She was tired. She'd been lying to the school about our address, sneaking me across the border to the suburban public school. I suppose that I'd been kicked out of the private one I'd been attending. They'd revoked my scholarship—or that's how I put it together—for fighting perhaps. And I say perhaps because other boys fought, fought often, and were allowed to stay. I'd watch them fighting over things that seemed silly—cupcakes, candy, the rules for games—they'd tear and kick and curse and cry and have to be dragged apart, still crying and kicking. I didn't do that—at least, that's what I believe.

One boy had said to another that my mother was
“funny looking.”
Not so great a slight, but in another light, an enormous one. And they
whispered it back and forth, giggling.
“Ugly freckle face,”
turning to look at me. Giggling, whispering for what seemed to be a long time. There seemed to be no one for me to appeal to—to make them stop. Our teacher, who was usually so quick to halt any disobedience, either hadn't heard them or hadn't cared. I don't think she cared much for me, the quiet boy who never spoke out of turn, who answered her questions, who looked up at her blankly—stoic little black boys must be unnerving to old white ladies—as though she was Bull Connor: not strident, nor with defiance, but without any discernible fear—the face of infinite cheek to turn once and again, again.

“You are the light of the world,”
Lila had said. It wasn't fair when I hit the boy closest to me—the boy who'd started it. We'd lost the house the year before, moved to an apartment, been evicted from that, and had just moved into some dark little shithole. My mother, whose freckle face was odd, had picked up her pace of drinking to perhaps counteract the burdens of money and parenting and whatever else failing people go through. So it wasn't fair. I had rage held in waiting, and I channeled it via my fist into that little pink face.

I think that, much as many Christians don't really know the beatitudes, most people don't really listen to or understand the blues. Most people don't understand, or have never experienced rage. It isn't singular, random, episodic. It's cumulative, with a narrative thrust like a black-iron locomotive. It's always there or on its way, started initially by some unseen engineer, some fireman wraith endlessly shoveling endless coal into the fire. Hot locomotive rage. Inexorable. And you can keep switching that train, switching it, keep it on the long runs of rail through your wastelands until one day when that rage is closing in, you don't switch. You let it run. And for an instant it feels so good—the smack-thunk of skinbone on skinbone, feeling youself strike something and having it give. And what it looks like—brown fist on white face. It makes sense—to me at least. We've reached the end of the line, and for a moment it all makes sense. Even in the screaming, the chaos. Even when the station collapses. Even the casualties. The body count makes sense, until of course you realize that this isn't your stop—you're not
supposed to be here.
“I wish I was a headlight, on a northbound train . . .”
But it's too late for that. Now your little classmate's on the floor, chair and desk toppled. Snot and tears and blood. The smeared, dislocated face huffing, gagging for air with an intermittent shriek each time he finds his breath. Then gasping to find some more. And Mrs. Kline taking my wrist and leading me to the office. I remember waiting. It seemed like a train station. And when the balding white man (there always seemed to be one) opened his door and looked at me as though I should feel guilt and shame, I knew I was in the wrong place, the wrong time—that I should've died long long before or long to have yet been born. I didn't say much then. I just answered his questions, but I know what I'd have asked him if I knew then what I know now: “Tell me how long the train's been gone.” The other one I was supposed to be driving. Although he probably wouldn't have known.