One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (15 page)

Sal squirms into a tissue-paper jumpsuit. He clicks on the flood lamps, makes the gloaming outside turn black. Dreams of sun disappear. He smiles with thin teeth as tight as Ivan’s rock crushers. Time for texture means this mother is almost done. It means we must soon leave these walls for walls at home. Apartments and duplexes and Gordy’s two-story rental. Can’t touch the walls at home. Lease states this clearly. We’ve checked. Page 5, right after the part about running a meth lab. These walls, we can touch. These ones may save us from stealing the painters’ five-gallon buckets of paint thinner so we can start meth labs.

Sal sprays white hell from the hopper, pretends he’s firing an automatic from the hip, then pretends the hose is his dick. Bubba doesn’t laugh. He sits on the scaffold while Gordy kneels below him to fiddle with the stilt’s rusty notches. We remember how hard it was to tie our shoes in first grade, how we almost flunked because of the tie-your-shoe test. The terror of flunking, of next year being taller than everyone else. Billy Cobin charged us a quarter to retie our shoes if they came undone during kickball. Gordy doesn’t charge a thing. He notches down Bubba’s stilts. Shorter so Bubba can work the giant plexi knock-down knife. Bigger knife means shorter Bubba. Shorter Bubba means he’s closer to standing on the subfloor with his own dirty sneakers, caked in drying mud, gazing up at all the walls he’s finished.

Bubba grips the rusty metal frame of the scaffold while Gordy
slides up his struts below. Bubba’s palm turns brown, but he doesn’t notice. When he rubs his brow, a swatch of rust smears his forehead. No water to clean the rust away. The rust will stay until we’re done.

How long until we’re done?

Gordy wants to ask, but he knows better.

Done when we walk out the front door, when we win against the boys from Mexico. But winning is walking through another door. Through our own doors to more walls. Walls we didn’t build together. Walls that surround us, each one.

Indications: for the temporary relief of ten-hour days, including demoing triple-layer shingles, spreading felt and nailing shingles, or spreading tar or rolling rubber. Will ease shame of your denied raise, neglect of your grids’ perfect symmetry. Paychecks will miraculously appear without scabbed kneecaps and a kinked spine, sunburned scalp and aching ankles. During daylight, you can wear sweatpants or underwear or nothing at all, instead of jeans hardened in tar. You will decrease proximity to the sun, and daylight will become full of opportunity. More time, time, time.

Directions:
A hammer will do. A hammer balanced on top of your ladder ready to fall when you hoist it against your chest. Or stand atop the second-to-last step, or allow the feet to slide, or use that hammer to bash the safety stop. These are just a few ladder options. Here’s another: Prolong stares at your coworker Camille while she straddles the peak, stretching to nail cap, revealing the olive skin on her lower back. Daydream about fucking against hot shingles, bending her over the fresh porcelain in the half bath, lifting her body against the cinderblocks of the basement. Relax, remember to breathe, and let the ladder do the rest.

Active Ingredients:
Gravity, cudgel, fear of
OSHA
, disorientation, daydreams and fantasies, aluminum, mineral spirits, nailer, worn sneaker tread, desire.

Side Effects:
Days may appear longer at home. Too long. Vitamin D intake drops when your blinds are always closed. Paranoia induced by the man wearing the hard hat who drives slowly past your window, who snaps pictures when you peep through the slats. You cannot understand why he wears a hard hat while driving. Try blinking to make sure your vision is clear. He may be out to catch you, he may be out to kill you, he may become something like a coworker if you bring him coffee. But remember to suck air through your teeth, clutch your side. Or just stay inside and think of Camille. Think of her knocking on your apartment door, begging you to come back because no one else asks about her big plans for the weekend, about her six-year-old son’s T-ball game. No one else can make her happy. But only consider; don’t envision. Avoid hallucination. Avoid hallucinating hard hats.

Directions:
Stepping on a nail is not enough. Prolonged disablement is your goal. But not permanence. The balance between lasting and forever is delicate but essential. The eave borders are easy to forget when working backward, a quick slip over fascia and soffit. Your fall must appear accidental, but remember to plan. Combine falls with pine trees or shrubs, compost piles or full dumpsters. Land on legs and not your neck. Practice on your mother’s gabled ranch that your father built but didn’t have time to reshingle before dying. When the time comes, a one-story roof will not be enough, and three stories are too much. Remember to cry for Camille when you land. Remember to groan. Use your diaphragm. Choke and gurgle through your punctured lung.

Consult Doctor:
If erections last longer than four hours. If Camille never appears at your threshold but never leaves your mind. Seek holistic treatment: lubricant, callused grip, Camille’s
kerchief, magazines, movies. You have time now. Go to the bar and drink and drink. Go to the bar and buy drink after drink for the woman who will lean on your shoulder, squeeze your bicep, sneak you into the women’s bathroom. If ejaculation does not erase desire, do not return to work. Several days and shifts and weeks and months may pass before you lose feeling. You have plenty of time for Camille to fade. Consider compounding your claim into emotional distress.

Side Effects:
The man in the hard hat will drive by and snap pictures at dawn, your old punch-in time. He creeps up to your front door. You watch him through the peephole, and all you see is hard hat. It is white, a sticker of the American flag pasted on the stubby bill, part of it scratched away to fuzzy gum. When you open the door carrying Pop-Tarts, he has disappeared. Only the white hard hat sits on your front step, and you have no use for that. He will not be your friend. You realize you’re not as close to your coworkers as you thought. They do not call, do not visit. You will long for their voices bounding over the ridge, will long for the swoon of a fresh bucket of tar, for the flesh of plywood turned black and sparkling, for the simple clarity of chalk-line grids. Resist. Resist these small satisfactions from the time when you worked for the hour. Enjoy your clean fingernails, your peeling skin, the paleness underneath. Seek distraction. Get a hobby. Boats in a bottle, astrophysics, sea monkeys, pottery, but no roofing.

Storage:
Keep in a cool, dry place. Avoid direct sunlight or even the indirect sunlight squeezing through the cracks of your blinds; you’ve earned shadows. Stay away from windows and hard hats. Remain indoors. Sign up for direct deposit, an option before impossible when you cashed the wrinkled checks your boss scratched out in his third-grade cursive, numbers the bank teller squinted at, asked her manager to confirm, too much cash to place in your grease-stained palms. Avoid interaction, questions, chitchat, and philosophy. You and Camille talked about starting your own roofing
outfit and supernovas and circumcisions and underwater caves and skipping out of work just as you used to skip out of high school. You and her, crawling across the felt, swinging your legs over the rake and onto the ladder, then off to the beach to fry. Forget the conversations that made you sweat. Replace with the rattle of your air conditioner.

Indications:
Your pottery is lopsided, but don’t call it failure. You’ll learn to enjoy the higher arts. Reassess the caving lid on the vase you name Mother, the lopsided plate you title Father before kneading it back into a ball, the sunbaked ashtray shaped like a diamond you consider leaving at Camille’s front door. You know she smokes, but you don’t know where she lives. Now you have time to gain real knowledge. Improve your mind. Read the encyclopedias your father bought when you were five that still consider Pluto valid, that end the presidents at Ford. You’ve lugged them to every new home, and now there is time. Don’t visit your mother or succumb to the guilt of her leaking roof. Guard your precious hours and blame your spine, your fractured shin, your sprained wrist, your emotional distress. She may be the root. Just look at that caving vase. Crush that ashtray. Don’t think about Camille. Stop trying to face the man in the hard hat.

Directions:
A hand slipped in hot tar is a start, but the whole cooking bucket dumped across your legs is more effective. Avoid your lap, which may lead to erectile dysfunction. Pass, for once, on drinking the cans of Coors that Camille doles out after lunch. Your claim could be threatened by inebriation. Listen to the empties plink over the eave and fight your dry tongue. Drink water. Chug your gallon warm as piss from sitting in the sun. Your gallon that once held milk, then water, the jug that looks identical to the one where your boss stores mineral spirits. Drink mineral spirits. Your nights at the pub, shots of Jameson lined up across the oak bar, they were all practice for this. Open your throat, swallow, and then hack. Blame improper storage. Unlabeled spirits that burned the
tar off your hands and now burn your esophagus. You won’t need your voice when you have time.

Side Effects:
Rectal bleeding, uncontrolled vomiting, a liquid diet. What goes in must come out. Difficulty swallowing, like shingles in your throat. Swollen tongue, oral blisters, inarticulation or complete inability to speak. But silence is not all bad.

Excuse:
It’s not that you won’t answer your mother’s calls about the mold, the puddles in her carpet; you can’t.

Excuse:
If you found Camille’s home, showed up at her door, it’s not that you wouldn’t know what to say; your tongue can’t form the words.

Exclusion:
When the man in the hard hat whispers through your vents at night, quizzes you with his questionnaires, you don’t have to lie. You shake your head, shiver and blink, curl your fingers and toes, but he can’t read what you mime. He can’t see through the blinds and the garbage bags you duct-taped over the windows. He relies on his ears sprouting from under his hard hat, and you can’t explain.

Consult:
Dead father, sodden mother, pretend lover. They will not hear you. There is only you and the man in the hard hat, who has taken to sleeping in his van in your parking lot. His hard hat has changed to blue, bobs over his brow as he breathes deep. You strain a whisper through your gravelly throat, through the slice of his cracked window, coax him, the power of somnambulistic suggestion. You are ready to return to work, to Camille, to ladder rungs and rooftops. You plead. But have you had enough time? He checks boxes in his sleep, his pen waving over his clipboard to the rhythm of his gentle snoring. Three more months of compensation. You beg for a stack of shingles balanced over your shoulder, but you will remain weightless. Why can’t you just enjoy extra time?

Side Effects:
You were advised to ignore your mother’s mossy shingles, but here you are, lugging your cast over the peak. The
trouble is the ladder, how long it takes you to carry up shingles, to carry your broken body. The trouble is the silence of working alone, no distraction, time flattening out and spreading like rolls of black felt. The trouble is no Camille. You take three times as long to secure the drip edge, to sculpt the valley, to bend the flashing. And you can’t discover the leak, the weakness left by your father. You slog on, cooking your new pale skin. Your mother pushes sunscreen; you’ve never needed it before. How many red blisters must sprout before the man in the hard hat drives by and sees you are able? He abandoned his stakeout at your apartment complex, and he doesn’t show up here, at the home your father built, the shed with the single forty-five degree slope where he aimed the
BB
gun at your thigh to show you how the neighbor’s dog felt. Shot in the leg, and you still had to mow the lawn. No escape from work. Now no man in the hard hat to see your work, to send you back.

Directions:
The nail gun provides accuracy. Stigmatic left hand or foot looks bad but heals quickly, and there’s always the right. Disengage safety catch so nails can fire without surface pressure. Camille will do one of her pretend holdups: “Gimme all your flashing, or else.” You raise your hands to the sun and smile. She squints, shakes away strands of loose bangs, quick draws the nailer, and aims for your chest. Without the catch, the nail releases. You watch its painfully slow trajectory. Enough time for Camille’s eyes to pop, lips to spread. Three inches of galvanized steel buries into your chest. Three inches are plenty to pinprick an organ. Ignore the Spanish that spills from Camille like a sparrow shrieking in a cat’s jaw. Ignore the creases in her forehead, her quivering hands, the dropped nailer that somersaults over the eave, the sound of plastic shattering on concrete. Camille has freed you. Camille’s fingers feel you, squeeze your breast, press a blue kerchief into your wound.

Inactive Ingredients:
Safety catch, calluses, trust in the tools you know, guilt, prayer, emergency room, the doctor’s pliers so much shinier than any tool you’ve ever held, your sunburned body.

Storage:
Rest in soft places. Seek comfort. Couch to recliner to bed replaces truck bed to five-gallon bucket to roof cap. At the end of your last fourteen-hour shift, you and Camille collapsed on the freshly shingled roof, watched, on your backs, dusk paint the clouds pink. No pitch could tip you. After so many hours on tilted ground—thirty degrees, forty-five, sixty—gravity changes; bodies acclimate to angle. Impossible to fall. Now you require zero degrees. Flat and soft and alone, and yet you worry this flat world will swallow you.

Symptoms:
Have you forgotten all that time can do for you? You drag the utility blade across your cast, sprinkling the carpet with white flakes all evening. At twelve dollars per hour, you would have made forty-eight dollars, but why are you calculating? You no longer work for hours, time cards, crinkled personal checks, don’t need to. Your leg underneath the cast is pale, shrunken, streaked in blood where you pushed the knife too deep. You tear the bandages from your chest, scrape the blackened scab, long for the shiny nail head Camille planted there. You drink a beer because you are thirsty and you’re sick of water and milk. Your throat burns. You call your own answering machine and practice listening—to your own voice, to any voice, saying, I feel better. I’m ready. I’m sorry. You play the message over and over and wonder if those tin-can words are really yours.

Interactions:
The man in the hard hat no longer stalks you, but you’ve tracked him down. Your gift of time was spent this way, circling, hunting Camille. And when you couldn’t find her, you found him, the man in the hard hat’s van parked on a hill. He is not inside, but two hard hats lie stacked on the passenger’s seat: a white one, his blue sleeping hat. You lean on his bumper and stretch your arms, pink and raw from reshingling your mother’s roof. Your skin betrays you, leaks heat, and fall is here, then winter and snow and no more roofs. The hill overlooks a new subdivision on one side. On the other side, the flat, black-rubber roof of apartment complexes.
Homes and houses. Leases and mortgages. All the roofs you can see are fresh, perfect. But a roof must be rotting somewhere.

The man in the hard hat appears through the pine trees. Binoculars and a camera tangle on straps around his neck. His hard hat is bright red. He doesn’t see you until he is yards away. He raises his binoculars, gazes off at a framing crew in the subdivision over your shoulder, ants to you, busy and industrious and swinging hammers, climbing ladders, shooting nailers. You pick up a pebble from the road, throw it at the man’s red hard hat. It plinks, and he keeps peering through the binoculars. You throw more pebbles. Nothing will stop his search, his work. You try to yell at him and choke. You try to charge him and stumble. Your chest stings at each palpitation.