One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (12 page)

We moved to the next side, where a pea-stone driveway skirted the house. Franco and I stayed paired up. This time, I let him set his ladder first, and he chose the second-story peak. After he climbed a few rungs, puffing a fresh Swisher Sweet, I set up on the far left side. We had some distance between us, twenty feet or so, our work no longer overlapping. Now I knew Franco wasn’t the painter he said he was, but I needed to see what I had, prove I could beat even a cheater.

Over lunch, the bristles of my brush had hardened. I’d left my brush in the pot, in shade, even covered it with a rag, but nothing could hide from the cooking noon sun. I stood at the top of my ladder, picking globs out of the bristles, while Franco eased into an early lead.

“It’s a hot one,” he said. “But not the hottest I’ve seen. I spent a couple of years in the Keys, painting hotel fronts. Now that was hot. Your brush could brick up in minutes.”

Green paint covered my fingertips, but at least my bristles moved again. “The Keys, huh?” I let him tell me another one. Talking would slow him up.

“Yep.”

“What was that like?”

“Not much to say about that. People think it’s this magical place. And maybe it was once. Hemingway house, six-toed cats, every reel taut with a marlin, beaches, palm trees, all that shit. I saw hotels. All those bright colors, you’d think they’d be fun to paint. After a while, they made me sick. The whole place did. Didn’t see my wife for months at a time. She was way back home. And when I got back, she wasn’t. But there’s not much story in that.”

He stopped brushing to squeeze out the cherry of his Swisher Sweet between his fingers and pocket the butt. The brown and burnt tobacco shavings sprinkled to the ground. He dug in his front pocket for another piece of licorice. All this gave me time to get farther ahead with my siding. The mention of his wife gave him reason to pause, to refill his mouth with something else, slow him up.

“What was your old lady like?”

He turned and squinted at the sun, his face all crinkled. “Definitely no fairy tale. She was a hard woman, pushy, hot tempered, with a light mustache she refused to do anything about, and she was always too busy with something else to be busy with me. But goddamn, could she cook. The smell of her kitchen was home for me. I remember one time I was working on painting the inside of this grocery store. We were spraying white dryfall into the steel girders. Ever used it? Awful stuff. It’s supposed to be easy to clean up, the overspray drying into flakes before it hits ground. It’s weird, changing from mist to crud in midair. That place looked like a blizzard once a few sprayers were running. I wore a respirator, but it kept getting clogged up. I’d take off my mask and bang out the filters every ten minutes. By the end of the day, all I could taste was oil in the back of my throat. White covered me from head to toe. Like a snowman or a ghost. Pure white. When I got home, Aggie, that was her name, swung at me with this huge oak crucifix we kept by the front door. Probably thought I was her grandpa returning from the grave. I almost broke my arm stopping her swing. She could defend herself. It made me proud. Bruised, too. Anyway, she’d cooked up the meanest batch of enchiladas I ever smelled. I
like mine hot, and these ones burned my nose from the doorway. I didn’t even clean up. Sat my ghostly self down at the kitchen table and ate right out of the pan. All I tasted was oil in the back of my throat, though. Aggie’s hottest sauce couldn’t burn through. That was the only lie I ever told, telling her they were delicious. That day, I felt like a ghost. Couldn’t find my way home.”

He stopped painting and wiped his forehead with his shirt. I was going to ask more about her—why she left. I was waiting for him to stumble over his story as I had, trying to make sense of that blue paint. But Franco’s ladder interrupted. It made a grinding noise on the pea stone below us, kicking out, slipping down two claps of siding with a thunk, thunk. Franco’s body jerked, and he grabbed the eave of the roof. Time froze. We stared at each other, and he made this face to me that said, What’s next?

The ladder kicked out the rest of the way. It slid down a few more claps, shuddered, and slammed sideways against the ground. I watched it fall, couldn’t help myself. When I looked back up, Franco dangled from the peak by one hand. In his other hand, he held his cutting pot and brush. I shot down my ladder, glancing up every few rungs, and there was Franco, legs dangling, his face turned toward the siding. I got to the ground and swung my ladder over. But before I got it under him, I looked up and stopped—Franco had put his brush to the siding, guiding it along while he balanced his pot in his hooked pinky finger. That was a sight, a ladderless painter, as if he were floating. He never quit painting, and I guess that was how I took him by surprise. I’d meant to get my ladder just under him so he could step down, be saved. But I moved too quick, miscalculated, skimmed the ladder against his legs. He flinched when the aluminum kissed his calves. He lost his grip, became airborne. It might not have been too bad a fall if not for the ladder I placed. His foot caught in the rungs, somersaulting his body, rotating him downward then rightward again, flipping, the green paint from his pot showering around me. He landed in the pea stone feetfirst, like some kind of acrobatic stunt landing. But then he crumpled, fell to his knees.

I stared at the top of his head. The balding spot glared from the sun shooting through the breaks in the oak leaves. The shiny spot on his head pointed up. I followed its direction to the siding we’d been working on. This side, unlike the other, was perfect. Not a single faded patch on his half or mine. His earlier work would have gotten him fired. But now this! And his grace, hanging by the eave. I would’ve chucked my pot and held on with both hands. Who wouldn’t?

Later, my boss drove him to the hospital but didn’t stick around. He left Franco in the emergency room. I never heard about him again. I never asked. But I’ll always remember him floating. How his body tumbled against the rungs. His perfect landing, the way his knees caved. How he didn’t make a sound after it happened, just braced his hands against his thighs until we carried him to the work truck. The last patch he’d painted was still shiny, still wet, but drying in blotches. Maybe I imagined the shoddy work he’d done earlier. Maybe he’d just noticed me paying attention, knew he couldn’t get away with bullshitting me. But then that meant he had it in him all along. And how could I compete with a real painter with real stories? No matter now. This story’s mine and Franco’s. And I’m the one who gets to tell it.

The boys weaved through the darkness, hiked through demolition rubble to the mounded base of the abandoned powerhouse, where they tilted their necks to the tallest walls in the neighborhood. Almost every window was broken, but Topper and Sloan threw stones anyway, just to hear them plunk and echo inside the cavernous tower. They both loved the top of the rubble hill where the powerhouse stood, towering high enough that they could see both of their fathers’ houses, watch cop cars creep in and out of alleys, see whose lights were on at midnight. The liquor store’s yellow neon sign glowed, a nightlight for winos. Rusted slides and playground structures spidered the elementary school, its cracked red bricks. Up at the powerhouse, they felt different than their neighbors and their daytime selves. They were free from all of it, escaped from their mothers past midnight in summer.

The city of Kalamazoo had demolished most of the old paper mill, all but the powerhouse, which loomed four stories over the boys’ neighborhood of two-story houses, peeling paint and sagging porches. Jagged concrete slabs and boulders littered the vacant field surrounding the lone building. Topper imagined exploring the powerhouse like breaking in and out of Alcatraz. He wondered if Alcatraz was anything like the jail his older brother spent last
year in. Sloan—the younger of the two by four months, not yet fifteen—thought of Kilimanjaro, the harrowing rock inclines Mr. Bendele showed him pictures of at school. A challenge, a quest, only halfway completed at the summit.

Sloan heaved a hunk of concrete the size of his head at the powerhouse. It thunked against the first-floor wall, landed with a dead smack against the ground.

“You trying to take the whole place down in one throw?” Topper laughed, slapping his fingers against his thighs.

“I’m taking a stand.” Sloan rubbed the sting out of his palms, much smaller, but more callused than Topper’s long hands and bony knuckles.

“You against the world.” Topper threw another stone high up to the third story. He just missed one of the few panes still holding glass.

“Hell yeah, man.”

“That shit never happens. People get sick of trying. Give up.”

“Not me,” Sloan said, and it was mostly true. He did all his homework, finished every book and filled Topper in on endings, and most middles, and reminded him how they started. He’d completed three World War II battleship model kits, used every piece, even hand painted waving officers in the tiny windows. He mowed the cramped lawns in the neighborhood and weed whacked all the tight spots. But there was that father-son bowling team he quit. And then, of course, the ant farm. He’d found the shiny, black corpses piled on the topsoil, an ant cemetery. Even the last survivor must have limped over and collapsed on the paling thoraxes of its neighbors.

“Hey, sometimes quitting is good. Like me. I’m quitting smoking.” Topper pulled out the newest pack of Virginia Slims he’d stolen from his mom’s carton. “Starting next week.”

Topper had smoked for two months and felt like he was getting an addiction. Only adults had addictions. He probably wouldn’t quit. He’d quit quitting. Topper was an excellent quitter. He’d had three jobs already—babysitting for the Hoskas, painting houses for
his cousin in the summer, sweeping the stockroom at his uncle’s store—and quit every single one with grace and promptness. Why string anyone along if the mood wasn’t right? Better to break off clean. He’d dated five of the best-looking girls in the ninth grade and one in the tenth, and he ended each relationship with a long-stemmed rose and a cursive note saying how he’d always cherish their love. The world was full of opportunities.

“Smoke up, man.” Topper slid another smoke out of the pack and offered it to his friend.

“Not out here where everyone can see,” Sloan said.

“Who cares?” Topper put both cigarettes in his mouth and lit them. “No one’s watching.”

“Never know. I don’t want my parents finding out I smoke.”

“You’ll have to grow up someday, dude.” Topper walked away from Sloan into the shadows of the powerhouse, smoking two cigarettes at once. His face disappeared, but the two cherries glowed through the darkness like a set of wild eyes.

Across Belford Street, Millie Bliss rummaged through her dead husband’s footlocker and found his binoculars so she could watch the boys close-up. She pressed the dusty eyecups against her skin and knelt at her attic window. The powerhouse rocketed over the crooked pine treetops and roofs with flaking-scab shingles. Even without the bustle of industry, the powerhouse still had strength, exclaimed to the neighborhood,
I made you
, even if no one listened.

She saw Topper fade into the powerhouse’s shadow. Before it swallowed him, she recalled his smooth black skin, his tall frame, his quick-talking charm. She’d watched him and his brother grow up. They were both beautiful boys bound for trouble, always laughing, sprinting down sidewalks as children, and then skipping school and strutting down the grassy median. She spotted Sloan next. He kicked up a gravel cloud and then followed, disappearing into the same shadow. He wasn’t near as good-looking with his acne and mixed lighter skin, but he made up for it with hard work,
mowing her lawn every Saturday. And he was smart, his name always printed in the newspaper’s honor roll.

They were small silhouettes next to the building, and then they were gone, pulled into its mystery. She hoped for bright futures for these boys with chances, said prayers every night to bless them.

She caught the boys last month when investigating suspicious sounds at the powerhouse. She thought drug addicts or Jehovah’s Witnesses might be planning to squat the abandoned lot. Her flashlight had flooded the wall of broken windows, the mouth of shattered gaps. But the boys were quick and evaded her light. She waited until two in the morning for the boys to leave, hiding herself behind a slab of concrete with jutting rebar ribs. They passed close enough for her to recognize their faces. Not junkies. Not solicitors of religious crank. Just kids.

Since that night, she’d been leaving gifts from her dead husband’s footlocker for the boys in their clubhouse: her husband’s jackknife, a flask half-filled with rum, an illustrated copy of
Huck Finn
, a 1945 military-issued map of New Delhi, a taxidermy ferret, the month of July torn from a pinup calendar featuring a cowgirl in hat and chaps hugging her breasts. Every few nights, she’d chuck an item through the windows of the old factory building and imagine the wonder the boys would have in finding these artifacts. They shared these secrets. But the boys wouldn’t know it was her. They’d think these items were left behind. They were archaeologists. Historians. Discovering the culture of this neighborhood, even if it was inaccurate. They had to have interest, or it would be forgotten.

Someone had to want to know.

Sixty years ago, when Millie was the age of the boys, a neighborhood barely existed here. The whole area spouted smoke stacks. Factories for everything: Kellogg’s cereal city, yellow Checker taxicabs, Upjohn pharmaceuticals, Gibson guitars, and paper and paper and paper. Paper mills consumed the city. Her father had built them a house next to his job at the mill, making them one of the first black families of the factory village. Boilers rumbled through the streets, engines growled. Men in overalls grunted, laughed, while
coal burned and brought the biting odors of chlorine and sulfur. She lived in that house all her life. Her father left it to her husband after her husband returned from the war. But the neighborhood grew quieter every year. So few of the factories remained. By the time her husband died, the city was skeletal architecture, phantom industry. And the mill buildings, too, slowly collapsed under snow, orange fangs of arson, crunched in backhoe jaws. Soon only the powerhouse remained. Then the lights went out. Then nothing but a shell. With the treasures she left the boys, she might teach them, help them stumble onto the strength of the paper-mill men.

She rose from her knees and clicked off her record player spinning Jimmy Rushing. She pulled a chair to the window to sit in darkness and silence, waiting for the boys of this new neighborhood to learn manhood.

Topper jumped up and grabbed onto the windowsill above him, a low window they’d been using for weeks to sneak inside. Sloan heaved Topper’s sneakers from below, and Topper tumbled in. There was a barricaded door to the powerhouse, but if they kicked it down, others would know what they knew, that this was a place for explorers, and they’d lose their island tower.

“Nearly broke my leg, tough guy,” Topper said, yanking Sloan up into the building.

The streetlights projected a grid of broken windows against behemoth boilers inside. Everything was bigger in the factory. The boilers stretched upward into the highest floors toward an endless ceiling. Massive bundles of piping chased the catwalks. Topper scooped a handful of gravel from the concrete floor and hurled it against one of the boilers. A shower of pelting gravel erupted into the high ceiling and echoed thunder back to the boys. It sounded great from outside, but inside was even better. Sprinkle to downpour. Pebbles to boulders.

Alex stirred from a daze. She’d been crashed out on the top floor, but the thunder below brought her back, budged her iron eyelids open.
She didn’t hear the initial noise. She felt it from under, rumbling her bones. The feeling of bones again. Bones humming, resonating, in reaction to something she had witnessed in half sleep, like the sense of a stranger in a dark room. She tried to yell but couldn’t open her mouth, and the sound pushed through her teeth in a growl. She stomped the bones of her foot against the floor.

She hated being reminded of bones, of body. She wanted to slam her fist against the plywood floor. The thought stung her knuckles. The warmth of imaginary bleeding. She conceded to the stranger somewhere—ghosts in a squat, ghosts everywhere you go. There was nothing she could do about that.

She was too stoned, had been shooting more heroin, because she’d been getting more money. Down below, in the giant room with the boilers and sprawling pipes like a thousand copper snakes, just after sunset, treasures appeared. She kept finding things, good things, that she could sell. Knives, silver, old calendars—who knew? The remnants of paper making. The old mill, such an odd place. And pawnshops paid money for these things, which meant less money she had to earn by pleasing men, her head shoved down by sweaty hands in the front seats of strange cars. Every day, she marveled at what she’d find, what someone would pay for something other than drugs or sex. The treasures of ghosts appeared every few nights. And when she’d crawl down from the crow’s nest at the top of the powerhouse, down the rusted iron ladder to find treasure, she’d get fucked up. A short walk to Hayes Park to buy as much as she could and then crawl back to her fortress at the top with the big windows, where she hunted stars.

Only there, hovering over streetlights and city halo, Alex was sure she’d find them. She had to climb, despite her plum-bruised forearms, to find a place farthest from light. This area of the city was easy to find drugs in. But she’d found more. Her white skin stuck out in this neighborhood, and the darkest skies made for the brightest stars. She felt special, rare, like a diamond, sparkling.

Time taught her how dully she glowed, though, how stars wouldn’t shine like she’d hoped. She couldn’t find Cassiopeia,
Orion, Virgo, just disembodied specks. She could never go far enough for stars. The city made them bland. Washed out the dark. Blended and blurred the intricate millions. So she settled for moon burn paling her motionless skin. Instead of finding herself against the dark, maybe she would fade into the powerhouse. She was ready to give up, blink out. She was high, and that was enough.

“Did you hear something?” Sloan asked.

Topper lit a fresh cigarette off the cherry of the one he’d been smoking. “You’re paranoid, man.” He exhaled a curl of smoke into a square of streetlight. The smoke looked like a dragon devouring its own tail. “Nobody goes inside this place. Just us.”

“No. I heard something above.” He pointed into the endless ceiling. “Up there.”

“Hear this.” Topper grabbed a damp piece of lumber from the floor and swung it against a boiler. “I’m mad as hell, and I’m gonna break some shit.”

This time, they both heard a muffled growl from above, and they held their breaths. They slipped into a shadow space between two giant boilers. Topper stepped out first, chuckling to cover the sound of his heavy breaths.

“You think someone’s here?” Sloan asked in a low voice.

“If there is, I want to know how they got up there and why
we
haven’t figured it out yet.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“No way.” Topper tilted his neck back, allowing his vision to swim in the darkness above. “We gotta find out.”

“It’s nothing that matters,” Sloan said.

“It’s something.” He bolted up the nearest catwalk, his shoes clanking against the grates. “Let me know when you grow a pair.”

“I got a pair. I got a brain, too, and it’s telling me to go home.” Sloan stepped out of the shadows but still spoke low. “Anyway, I got lawns to mow tomorrow.” He headed for the window they used as an entrance, soon to be his exit.

By the time Sloan had his leg over the sill, Topper had spotted a ray of light whiter than the yellowed streetlights that gridded the inside walls. Following this light, he spotted rungs like train tracks against the wall, leading from the catwalk to the ceiling. Topper knew the maze of almost every pipe and catwalk, except for one path—from outside a crow’s nest set at the top of the powerhouse. The boys had never discovered the route from inside. Now he knew why: the first few rungs had been demolished, camouflaging the path. The city didn’t want them up there. Too close to the top. But like much of their efforts to safeguard the neighborhood, the few missing rungs wouldn’t stop anyone willing. Topper had enough desire and the luck to find it. Everything aligned just right, the moon strong and bright outside to reveal the path, a growl like a beacon to lure him. “We must be blind to have missed this. It’s the fucking top of the neighborhood.”