One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (16 page)

The man in the hard hat aims his binoculars directly at you, and now is the time to show him your hammer, how you can still swing it, lift shingle stacks, climb any ladder. But you are too close. You are a blur crouching on the ground, coughing up blood.

Overdose:
Watch for the symptoms. Listless shifting from couch to bed. You carry your hatchet hammer, pound nails into the apartment walls, yank them out. Experience agnosia. More and more black holes pierce the white walls, but there is always more white. Snow outside, snow mounded on your mother’s roof, probably mounded on Camille’s roof, wherever she lives. You touch yourself but can’t remember her skin over the shingles: anorgasmia. All the white and soft drowns the sound of hammer throws, of your mumbling, of your wanting to clink up the ladder and return to a work that is hibernating. The pleasure of time may lead to avolition, anhedonia, Antarctica, and another hour, and another. Turn on the
TV
, relax your fingers, and let your hammer go. Ignore the mute thump of steel hitting carpet.

Jerry’s new frames pinched his nose and dug a red welt behind his left ear, and he realized, after an hour of staring in the rearview mirror, they were designed for girls. Too small for his face and flared a bit on the sides, they were definitely air force–issued girl glasses. So he hid them under a rock. In Wisconsin, where he was from, he could’ve chucked them into a leafy pile or a pond or stomped them into the mushy earth or buried them in a snow drift. In Texas, there were rocks. Rocks and thirsty dirt and hardly any cacti. He felt cheated on the cactus front when he arrived a year ago. He was over that. He had progressed to despising the stunted mesquite trees. Their naked arms twisted blackly. They were hunched skeletons sprouting sprigs of sickly green, like balding, broke-backed crones. Pathetic excuses for trees. He didn’t need new glasses to see them any better. Certainly not cat-eyed, welt-inducing frames.

He’d driven to the outskirts of town, a sandy freeway overpass, far enough from his dorm on Goodfellow, where no one could find them. He hardly knew this town outside the base walls. San Angelo. This nothing place with its nothing trees where the air force had sent him to train as a fireman. His
ASVAB
scores were abysmal. So this was his fate. He spent his days spraying foam at burnt-out
busses and helicopter husks. He was a glorified fire extinguisher. He was an idiot, and the base optician had further confirmed this by letting him select these terrible girl’s frames.

Without his glasses, the red and yellow grit at his feet blended into fuzz. He wouldn’t be able to spot any snakes or fire ants or whatever other hellish tortures lurked in Texas. Just as well. He only needed to survive the night, and then the air force would issue him new frames. They had to. Their fire extinguishers had to be able to see. So he had this one night of near blindness to suffer through. He wouldn’t even be able look at porn on his laptop without jamming the screen against his nose. Reading was all that was left, and he’d already read the new issue of
Field and Stream
cover to cover twice. The glittering streams and camouflaged shoulders and brag photos of limp-necked bucks just made his heart ache. His brother had mailed him
The Idiot
by Dostoyevsky. He vaguely remembered Lawrence blabbing at Thanksgiving about how much his students had enjoyed being idiots, his corduroy-blazer cuffs flapping along with his excited hands. Turned out he’d said
reading The Idiot
, which was a giant book. Jerry knew his brother believed him to be dumber than his students, too dumb to even read a book about an idiot. Jerry would read it. Jerry would show him. He’d read it, and then he’d set it on fire and take pictures of the flaming pages and not put the fire out and send pictures of an eternal idiot fire to his brother.

On his way back to his rented Camaro, he stubbed his toe. He looked down and saw a mush of orange gray. The sun was setting. If he didn’t make it back to his Camaro soon, night would blind him. It would be impossible for him to drive. Safely. But he didn’t care about anyone in this town. Without his glasses, they all looked like the same blurs of camouflage and flesh. He’d just wanted one weekend of driving fast, wind whipping his bare chest, cruising past girls and revving a rented six-cylinder engine so loud they could feel it under their skirts. Now that plan was dead.

He skimmed his foot over the ground until he found the offending rock. It felt lighter than he had expected in his hand. Powdery
and dead dry like everything else. He touched it to his nose. Just a fog of yellow. Not like the stones he’d find in Lake Michigan, green and red and stamped with ancient shell prints and bolts of quartz. This stone looked like nothing. Earth fuzz.

He heaved it toward where he imagined the road ran. It landed with a hollow thunk. And he supposed he was glad he didn’t throw it in the road, didn’t cause some car to careen into the ditch and burst into a ball of fire. He was so sick of fires.

“You should be more careful with your target practice,” a woman’s voice called from the rock’s direction. “Almost noggined me.”

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.” Jerry’s back shot straight. His hand almost cocked into a salute. But he stopped himself. He was off base, off duty. He couldn’t know if this woman was an officer. He couldn’t know if she was anything. He couldn’t even locate her silhouette against the dimming gray-red dusk.

When his brother dropped him off here after basic, he’d told Jerry that you probably couldn’t throw a rock without hitting an airman. So he better be careful not to do anything stupid even off the base. Lawrence was nineteen years older, the goddamn-know-everything professor, and he loved pretending to be Jerry’s dad. Their dad was dead. But Lawrence was right. This town was crawling with flightless airmen.

“I come most nights to watch,” she said. “Usually from my car, but then I saw you tonight. You look confused.”

“Watch what, ma’am?” Jerry stepped toward the voice, the shadow. He was getting closer.

“You joking?” She sounded older, maybe in her early forties. The age of his brother’s wife. They were both professors, and she was always asking what he was going to do next. “You seriously don’t know, guy?” But maybe she had one of those sexy husky voices sometimes attached to girls who smoke too much and watch too many black-and-white movies and want guys to see their retro garter clips. “You’re in for a treat.”

He kept approaching her voice. He’d have to get so close to be able to know exactly how old she was, how blue her eyes were, how
gentle the slope of her nose, how smooth her skin. He just needed her words to guide him.

“Are you alone?” Jerry asked.

“I come here almost every night. I usually stay in my car,” she repeated.

Jerry was sure he had her now. The voice crystalized, each word crisp and smoky. A whiff of something citrus trailed to him and then disappeared. Just a trace. He’d know more soon. He just had to beat twilight and its total blindness.

“That’s close enough,” she said. Her arm rose toward him. She seemed to be aiming.

“I don’t know what that is,” Jerry said.

“You don’t want to find out.” She kept her arm raised.

He took another step, and her blurry arm jagged upward. Could be mace or a Taser or pistol, or a fucking banana for all he knew. Damn that goddamn optician for telling him he looked really cool in these frames. Just before, Jerry had asked him what it was like to work under a twentysomething with a sweet ass. Did he ever tap that? The optometrist was an officer and a woman. The optician was enlisted and a man. Where was the camaraderie? That shithead optician had screwed him over good.

Jerry charged toward her, reached out, but didn’t make it farther than his sprinted third step before he tripped and tumbled through the bone-sharp tallgrass.

“What I can’t tell is,” the woman stood over him now, “whether you need help or you’re a crazy idiot.”

“I don’t need help.” Jerry lay on the dry earth. He squinted at her shoes, sneakers, black Converse Chucks with fraying laces. No socks. There wasn’t enough light to see if her skin was wrinkly or had stretch marks. She could be retro or vintage.

“So you’re a crazy idiot,” she said. “That’s not really the preferred choice here.”

“I’m not an idiot.”

“And choosing crazy’s not really the better choice either.” The sneakers shuffled backward. They blended back into blur.

Jerry’s right elbow stung. He rolled over on his side and grabbed it. Then his lower back screamed out a similar sting. He yowled. And then he caught himself. Another stinging pinch popped, and he screeched.

“Crazy is getting confirmed,” she said to his writhing body.

“Fucking fire ants,” he said, “ma’am.” He jumped to his feet. They were all over his back. Their tiny legs skittered across his skin, a sweet tickle that made their bite all the worse. This was the hell that was Texas.

“Stay calm and brush them off,” she said. “Stop jerking around like a crazy asshole.”

Jerry swatted, in spite of the woman’s advice, in spite of Texas. He punched at his back, stomped the ground, clawed at his arms. He screamed. A hand clasped his shoulder, and he stopped flailing. No one had touched him in six months. The last person had been his brother, who tried to hug him when he dropped him off. Jerry had gone limp in his brother’s arms and then disappeared into his dorm while his brother was still dabbing his eyes with some fancy silky kerchief.

The woman lifted his T-shirt over his head. She swiped the shirt over his back, and the stings crumbled away. Then she wiped his stomach and chest. She kept her head lowered. He couldn’t see her face, only the top of her head, short hair, a side part. She moved closer, and he thought he could see lighter roots against her scalp. Natural gray or just dying for fun. He wanted to lift her face so he could see her skin, her expression, read what she really thought of him. He reached down quickly. His fingers butted into her breasts. She kneed him in his crotch, and Jerry keeled over.

“It’s mace, so you know.” She was away from him again, a blur again, and aiming again. “Fire ants are gonna feel like love nibbles. This is gonna burn like a motherfucker.”

“Please, don’t,” Jerry said. He realized he was crying. Just a little. Just like his brother had faked to make him feel like shit. It was easy. It was just enough to put out this lady’s fire.

“You don’t go grabbing a nice lady’s tits and get no payback for it.”

“Sorry about that. I really am. I can’t see anything is all.”

“You’re not blind, and even if you were, that don’t give you a free tit-grabbing pass.”

Behind him, where the freeway bridged over the bald earth, a wind picked up. It sounded like wind, a high-pitched whine, and he waited for the breeze against his bite-sore back. It didn’t come. The wind was never a relief here. Always more hot.

The woman didn’t mace him. Her arms lowered. The wind grew louder, higher. It sounded like a cheering crowd, like when Jerry played baseball in high school, that time he screamed a line drive through the gap and scored Iggy Templeton from first. Everyone loved him for a moment, and then no one cared. This crowd cheered microscopically, tiny lungs and pin-thin bleating throats. He turned to face them. They laughed at him, squealed. They seemed just overhead. He grabbed upward.

“Most people don’t try to touch them,” the woman said from behind him. “Most people get creeped out first time they see them.”

“What are they?”

“Bats. A goddamn million of them. A lot of people think they’re birds or bugs at first.”

“I can’t see them.” He wanted to. They sounded like a wall, a blanket of screeching. The stagnant, arid air whirred. A thousand-wing thrum. Jerry’s head buzzed. He’d never wanted to witness anything so much.

“You’re not bullshitting me? You really can’t see them?”

“I hid my glasses under a rock.”

“Well, that sounds really fucking stupid.”

“Idiotic.”

The bats continued to scream overhead. Daylight was a sliver to the west. There would soon be nothing to see but dark.

“And you can’t see me?” the woman said.

“Legally blind since I was ten. Coke bottles, they used to say.”

“You still don’t get to grab tits willy-nilly.”

Touch seemed so far away from him now. Sight was only a slice of fading light. Even the dry heat and the burning mesquite seemed muted. Texas reduced to a wall of bats screaming into the night sky.

“Don’t move,” the woman said. Jerry wondered if she had the mace out again.

The woman’s footsteps crunched. He lost track of her steps. He tilted his head upward and let the screeching seep into him. For a second, he worried they might shit or piss on his face. He didn’t care. Maybe he’d get rabies and be discharged. Go mad, animalistic, ravenous and wild. He’d go home and stomp on his brother’s brainy bifocals and touch his brother’s wife’s breasts, and no one would be able to fault him. He’d be done learning about jet-fuel fires. With his disability pay, he could buy the house he grew up in, the house where his mom died of cancer and his dad had a heart attack, and he could burn that fucker to ash.

“Hold still,” the woman said, behind him again. Her fingers fumbled at his temples, slid smooth plastic onto his nose. And then he could see. The bats streamed in a line, much thinner, he was sure, than that blanket of screeches he’d first heard. Off to the south, it looked like a black cloud. The bats were prowling.

“My husband’s. He was blind as a bat, too.” The line of bats strangled off until it was just three or four tumbling after one another. “I don’t know why I still keep them in the glove compartment.”

“They’re good,” Jerry said, and they felt right.

“They sleep under the overpass. Come out every night to eat. Come home every morning.” The woman’s voice was quiet over his shoulder. Every word was clear and breathy. He heard the flick of a lighter, smelled smoke. And the bats looked like that, off in the distance. Smoke from the mesquite fires. Smoke from this lady’s lips.

“It’s not a million of them. Only like a hundred thousand. But have you ever seen that many of anything?” She stayed close. The cigarette smoke burned bitter in his nose. He felt her body hovering like a shadow, a smoke-cloud swarm of bats. So close to touching, but something you couldn’t hold. He could turn around and look and see how old she was now. He could find out what kind of
woman she might be. Maybe she’d be beautiful and want to fuck, or she could spray him in the eyes and take back her glasses and leave him here until the bats returned in the morning light and he was late for another day of burning helicopters.

Jerry didn’t turn to her, didn’t find out. He kept watching the bats. Just a couple more lonely stragglers over him now, estranged from their group. They tripped foolishly through the electric-blue twilight. Even with the lady’s glasses, they were becoming invisible. They blended into the nothing of night with perfect invisibility.