One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (4 page)

The sky punctuates five o’clock by ripping a thunderclap that rattles the windows. I answer the sky by shooting my last nail home. It’s nice when we finish a house at the end of a day, but it means little since there’s always more to do, since there’s Big Dave outside my window boxing the first fat drops of rain. He swings high and heavy, jabs low, obliterating the drops before they touch ground. It feels like Big Dave’s sparring shakes the whole house, but it’s just the thunder. The other painters scurry around him, stretching masking plastic around the porch columns so they won’t get wet. A loose piece of plastic blows away. Big Dave uppercuts his sledge of a fist at the plastic, and I imagine the plastic smashing into pieces, reverting back to oil and splashing onto the tarvy. His blow hardly makes a difference, the plastic so light, and it floats upward, over the houses, into the road and then the cornfields. Might not stop until it strangles a crow pecking a rotting husk or until it finds another road, plasters itself across a windshield, and sends a car hurtling into a ditch.

Ramon creaks upstairs, double-checking our work. I pop a squat on the stairs and wait. There’s no rush. And maybe Ramon will diddle around up there all night, do some meditative breathing, skip his date with Big Dave. But Ramon hops down the stairs, his oversized shirt flouncing around his thighs. “Ready to go, Pap?”

“Big Dave’s still out front. Slip out the back and cut through the cornfields. I’ll pick you up in the van.”

He approaches the window, runs his fingers over our casing.
Lightning flickers against his pale skin, and I wait for the next big boom to tell me how far off the real storm is.

“Those are some tight miters. Could hardly fit any of Big Dave’s caulk in there.” Ramon thumbs my cut, the casing he nailed. “Wish he’d recognize the kind of work we do, how we make their job easier.”

“It’s junk particleboard. Doesn’t mean much.”

“Let’s go see that big fucker,” he says, and his back is the hugest Smiley I’ve ever seen sliding through the front door.

I step on the van’s gas once Fondly Lane comes into view, but Ramon points a scabbed finger left instead of right. To the cul-de-sac instead of the exit for the subdivision, where Fondly Lane turns onto 43, where a real road with a number could take us home.

“We did that one, and now someone’s living there,” Ramon says, nodding at a ranch with green siding. “What other ones did you do on this street?”

“All of them.”

If I straightened out all the hallways and rooms, merged the window frames and door jambs and baseboards, into one straight line, how far would it go? All the way to Oklahoma, where Ramon spread his mama’s ashes two months ago? Farther, I bet. If it went straight down through the cemetery where Joni and I bought two plots when we weren’t more than kids, that endless line of trim would make it all the way to the molten center of earth, and then on and on and on. Hell is a hallway of trim that never ends. When my back gives out, Ramon will step over my collapsed shoulders and go right on sawing and nailing. I won’t find an end, and if my son ever gets there, he’ll have to go back to the beginning and set all our shiners.

No one lives in any of the five houses surrounding the cul-de-sac. They aren’t selling this deep in the sub yet. Big Dave is waiting in the rain, five other painters, some electricians and plumbers, the garage-door installer. They’ve formed a half circle around Big Dave, who’s stretching his arms behind his back.

“There’s nothing to prove here,” I say.

Ramon pops open the door. I hop out and follow the thinning spot on the back of his head, glistening with sweat or rain. Big Dave jogs in place a little, cracks his knuckles. Ramon tugs the shirt over his head and tosses it to me. His bare toothpick frame makes him look taller, defines each vertebrae knuckling through his skin. Ramon doesn’t do any stretches, doesn’t grin at me like Big Dave does to his half circle. His chest heaves faster and faster. His spine bounces up and down. I can’t hear him because of the rain, but if I could, he’d sound like a cat hissing, a dog growling, some mad animal.

Big Dave finally notices my boy’s grinding teeth and gasping lungs. He says, “How cute that both father and son Smiley showed up.” He points to his chin. “Go on. I’ll make it easy for you and give you a first swing.”

Ramon swings so fast he hits Big Dave’s finger still pointing at his chin. He swings again, mashes Big Dave’s nose. He keeps swinging, stretching his thin arms high as they’ll reach to connect with Big Dave’s face. Big Dave chuckles between blows, but Ramon shuts him up by digging a knuckle into his teeth. Big Dave probably expected a shoving match, where he’d knock Ramon on his ass and that would be it. They could go to the bar and laugh about it, over a beer and a shot.

That’s not what Big Dave gets. Ramon won’t hit anywhere else but Big Dave’s face, and he doesn’t slow down. Big Dave’s lips and cheeks swell. He pushes Ramon away, but Ramon keeps on coming. The half circle of guys gawk. They won’t step in, and Ramon’s fists keep wailing until Big Dave falls sideways, clunks his head on the tarvy. No splash, even with all this rain, because the tarvy guys are good, smoothed their work fine, bowed it just right so no water collects in the middle. No break for Big Dave’s huge head, which hits just as the thunder booms again. I forget to check for lightning. I’m watching my boy straddle a huge chest, pound Big Dave’s motionless head against tarvy. I’m waiting for Big Dave to spit nails from his belly, to stand up and hurl Ramon onto the freshly shingled roofs.

But that won’t happen. Big Dave is big, but Ramon smashed three of his wife’s
TV
s, bit a policeman on the neck, huffed a pint of turpentine when he was fourteen, wore Smiley shirts his whole life and dreamed of sawing wood and pounding nails, and now he growls like a starved wolf.

Ramon stops swinging for a moment, faces me. I don’t know if his perfect teeth are smiling or grinding. I run my tongue over my tooth, the broken edge that’s dulled down over the years. Ramon’s straight teeth look sharp enough to slice his tongue.

I could step in, yank my son off Big Dave before he gets himself into real trouble. Hell, I could just tell him to stop. But it’s Ramon’s fight, and sometimes a father has to let his kid figure things out on his own. Or sometimes a father is afraid of someone he doesn’t recognize. I twist the
XXL
Smiley shirt in my fists and wish for workers sleeping in closets. That’s a problem I can deal with, work easier than watching your son turn into something wild, something made of blood and guts and fire. Joni would have known what to do, but all I can think about is the worthless trim I cut into perfect miters, how when Ramon gets out of jail this time, I won’t have any more Smiley shirts left.

We heave creaking hefty bags over our backs. Bags that look the size of baby elephants or oily engine blocks. But we aren’t that tough. Bags of dried syrup and spit. And aluminum—hidden shimmers of red, white, and blue and lime green. Ten cents a can in Michigan. We got your Cokes and Pepsis and Faygos, your smuggled Pabsts, and you won’t get them back. You kicked them down the bleachers when State took the lead in the second quarter. You jumped in the air and shrieked. We smoked Winstons on the tailgate of Murray’s
F
-150 and didn’t give a damn about your cheering, except for the hollow pings and pangs that followed. We bit our butts to the sound of sprinkling dimes, eyed the exits, and planned how to best sneak in. Alibi of orphaned umbrella on the bleachers, lost purse, stranded child.

Now we play the song of rescued treasure. Crinkle, groan, and crunch when we stuff our bags. Keep it a hum or get caught. A hundred shuffling cans full of air when we hike down the bleacher stairs. Dump them and stack them in the back of Murray’s rusted bed. Baby Trudy weighs two hundred pounds and isn’t a baby anymore at ten and in a training bra. She jumps off the roof of the cab, belly flops onto the Hefty bags so we can cram more. Her daddy, Two-Tooth Linus, is scared she’ll smack the rails, ruin her
pretty face. That’s all she’s got to win a man since her body’s so big. Murray’s boy, Wilfred, tells him not to worry. Baby Trudy’ll make a fine bus driver or bull dyke. Hell, if she keeps growing like that, she could be the bus.

We rest syrup-stained palms on Linus’s bunched-up shoulders. Not worth another back-of-the-cruiser joyride. Wilfred is just a baby, even though he’s seventeen. Let him be a fool, and let Baby Trudy do her work. She pretends she’s having fun, dreams herself away, diving into a rich man’s swimming pool. Or maybe a fountain lined with coins, like she did last week, skimming enough coins to earn us a pizza and a case of Coke.

We turned those coins to food, and we’ll turn these cans to coins. The money keeps on coming. Until the cleaning crew shows up. We know where they start, over on the west-side bleachers, and we got there first. Half their job done for them. All those cans all gone. Just soggy paper cups and half-eaten hotdogs squishing under their sneakers. Poor students and Latinos working the cleanup shift like suckers for $7.40 an hour. That’s seventy-four cans. Nothing. And then the government snags a dozen of their cans. Murray’s boy can sneak that into a Hefty in five minutes, and no
IRS
man’ll ever dig his starched cuffs into our sticky bags to count.

We know those cleaners are jealous, so we work faster, smarter, covert, when they show up across the field of groomed grass. We slink beneath the bleachers, blend black like our Hefty bags into the shadows.

Wilfred is fed up with hiding. He pangs up while we tiptoe down. His face gleams in the halide lights, painted like a clown, all white with black eyes, a stretched-out black mouth. He sprints from one can to the next. Wilfred wants us to call him Spike, hates what he calls his slave name, but he’s as white as Two-Tooth Linus’s snaggletooth incisors. His face ain’t painted like the can droppers’ faces, like those bleacher people’s cheeks smeared green and white or blue and yellow. Wilfred doesn’t paint his face for the team but for some rap group. Not just music but a revolution, he says. But revolution never comes. We know that from when our granddaddies chucked
lug nuts at cops in Flint and the
GM
factories still closed on us, from the building bust when we pawned our power tools. Nothing changes for good. And the only music that matters is the crunching of an almost-missed can under our boots. It sings to us and then plink-tinkles into the Hefty.

Wilfred is taunting fate, a backtracking race to the top bleachers, where he spies a tallboy sparkling. The sucker cleaners spot him, beep their walkie-talkie. Security men on their way. He don’t care, hollers to them that they can’t keep him down. They huddle around the talkie, point, and chatter. Bright under the spotlights, Wilfred drops his pants, flops his dick at them, swings his Hefty in the air. And nothing them suckers can do but cower and report.

We know what’s coming. We keep our heads down. Bending and plucking. Our Hefty bags bulge, but we keep jamming. No time for no more Baby Trudy drop-offs now. Still so many glints around us. Our fingers not fast enough. A damn shame Wilfred’s so dumb. Dropout, spray-can huffer, lanky brain-dead motherfucker. A thirty-bag night fades into a fifteen-bagger.

But we try, rush for what’s left. Linus splits his finger on a Mello Yello. Bleeding so much he’s dropping cans. We keep going, wait for the bellows of barrel chests, the failed linebackers who now wear navy blue and scurry across the field. They’re reliving that last day of glory, that quarterback sack when they made a shinbone snap. They blitz our way, fingering mace and zappers.

Worthless Wilfred already hightailed it back to his daddy’s truck. We count down, watch their glowing legs slicing through the bleacher struts. Past the forty, the thirty, twenty-five. Five yards a can, we figure. Maybe ten for Linus and his dripping finger, spouting more now that the blood’s pumping. Past the end zone, and that means they’ll hunt the bleacher shadows, means quitting time for our seam-splitting Hefties.

We make for the truck. Fast but smooth so we don’t jostle our paychecks too much. One hole and we got an aluminum leak. Linus can’t keep up, so we sling his bags over our shoulders. To the gates, out the fence, and Murray’s got the engine hot in the parking lot.
We peel out, and those security boys’ll be left with full mace cans and adrenaline. If only they looked at their feet, saw what we see. We wonder if the cleaners will save those cans or toss them, not worth the time to sort it out. That time of theirs that’s hardly worth nothing. We wonder if everyone forgot that promise Michigan made to us: our trash always worth a dime.

In Murray’s bed, we grip the rails with one hand, hug our Hefty bags with the other so they won’t fall out. Inside the cab, Murray swats Wilfred backside the head, yelling something. Wilfred takes off his shirt and gets to wiping away that paint. Linus finds Baby Trudy faceup, arms and legs spread securely over our bags. She’s watching the streetlights whip past like falling stars. He’d stroke her dirty, blonde hair, but one hand’s bleeding and the other holds the bags tight.

We weren’t supposed to touch the snakes at Rizzo’s Reptile Emporium, but I knew Drew was doing it. That was how he earned so many Realm of the Reptiles Bonuses, how he scored Iguana of the Month his first three months in a row. It had nothing to do with his college degree. I’d only graduated high school, but I was smarter. And it wasn’t that Drew was a foot taller than me and half my age. Looks and vitality fade. Customers see through that. Reptile expertise was the key to success at Rizzo’s, and I had ten years’ experience, knew every detail about each product we carried, from the Mojave tank murals to the Ultra-Health Heat Rocks. When he’d started here, I’d thought Drew would be my prot
é
g
é
, someone to take under my wing and mold. I wanted to share everything I had, pass my knowledge like bloodlines. But Drew took the easy way.

I was talking heat lamps with this fourth-grade teacher, telling her how ceramic was the way to go, would outlast glass, distribute tropical temperatures evenly for her classroom’s pet turtle. She wanted only the best, and that’s what I did. I went to retrieve a lamp from storage, giving a nod to the big sign proclaiming Rizzo’s number one rule:
DON’T
TOUCH
THE
SNAKES
. Rizzo left us this
sign in his absence, gone for a week at the International Repti-Mania Conference, leaving me in charge. Me and the sign.

When I returned to the showroom, the teacher was gone. I scanned the aisles from the front of the store. The evening sun bled orange through the massive wall of windows, casting my elongated shadow over the golden shimmer of shrink-wrapped boxes and tempered-glass tanks. It was late, and we’d had a slow day, the teacher being only my fifth customer. Once that evening sun struck me, I felt sluggish, ready to slink home, microwave a salisbury steak, and then curl up for a nap.

I finally found the teacher giggling with Drew behind the turtle-care aisle. I ducked behind a stack of turtle food. I wanted to catch Drew in the act, find out what he was doing to steal my customers and get all those bonuses. Hidden behind bottles of Vitamin C–Enriched Turt-lets, I watched Drew dance in a little circle, swaying his hips, waving his arms, and slapping the leather elbow pads on the blazers he always wore to make himself look smarter than me, professorial. He halted, swung his arms out in a ta-da gesture. The teacher smiled with dimples and wide eyes. From Drew’s right shirtsleeve, one of our adolescent boas poked its head, then slithered around his forearm, flicking its forked pink tongue at his palm.

I could’ve busted him right there, barged into his show, maybe used one of Rizzo’s snake-handling poles to hook him by the nostril. But I wanted more than just grounds for a write-up. I wanted him gone, so he could make way for new blood.

The teacher dug through her purse for the five-dollar admittance to go to the basement, where we housed the Realm of the Reptiles exhibit. I hurried ahead of them, down the steps behind the sales counter, where I could hide among the reptiles—the perfect place to strike.

It wasn’t much of an exhibit. A ramshackle version of the reptile house at the zoo. Ten- and twenty-gallon tanks cluttered the walls, crammed the hallway so that my arms brushed the glass, felt the skittering vibrations of lizards darting away to hide in their
plastic shrubbery. I pushed through the hallway. The smell of frying cockroaches and regurgitated mouse scalp hung thick in the basement. I hated being down there, the darkness only broken by the massive fifty-tanker at the end of the hallway, glowing in the main room of the exhibit.

A secret I revealed to no one: I was terrified of the snakes.

I was an expert on all manner of reptilian products, but that didn’t mean I wanted to drape a constrictor around my shoulders. Salmonella gathered for orgies on snake skin. Imminent sickness. Slow death. One touch and your skin would be infested.

Drew’s boots clomped down the wooden stairs behind me, the teacher’s giggles echoing over the hum of the
UV
lights. I squeezed into the glowing main room. In the main tank, Bertha, our mature black-tailed python, glared at me, her beady eyes sinister under the dark V on her brow. Ten feet of glossy, spotted skin uncoiled slowly. She made me shiver, my muscles contract, convulse. Like waking from a nightmare, where you don’t remember why you’re afraid but you feel it, the cold sweat, the rattling heart. That’s caveman kind of fear, instinctual, evolutionary, necessary. I sucked in my gut, tightened my arms against my sides, and slid into the one good hiding place in the main room, right next to Bertha’s tank.

Bertha was riled up, having sensed me. She wanted dinner, mice, rats, something exotic, like when Rizzo found baby raccoons in the attic and tossed the screeching infants in the tank. She engulfed those innocent babies, one after the other until they became bulges in Bertha’s skin.

I felt Bertha’s head smack her side of the glass, striking at the fake panorama of field grass pasted there. I winced each time she struck. My shirt had ridden up in my squirming, and the glass warmed my skin. I imagined her teeth digging into my soft flesh, her speared nose driving into my navel, glossy scales wrapping my intestines.

When Drew entered Bertha’s room, he started dancing again, humming a slow, high-noted tune. He moved toward Bertha’s tank. I heard the metal scratch of the latch lifted. From my vantage, I
couldn’t see what Drew was doing, but I guessed, swallowed dryly. And in a few seconds, Drew waltzed into the center of the dimly lit room with Bertha vining his shoulders. He offered his hand to the teacher. She took it, and the two of them danced with Bertha. Rizzo would have his head. We could go back to the old days when customers were won with expertise instead of good looks and flashy acts.

Drew leaned toward the teacher. Their lips touched, torsos pressed. The teacher hooked her leg around the back of Drew’s knee. Bertha slithered off his shoulders, plunked onto the stained carpet. She’d done her part and wanted to hunt, seek out the escaped mice that often roamed the basement exhibit. Her tail swished the carpet.

Bertha must have smelled my sweat. She twisted toward me, her tongue snatching molecules of hot fear like a child catching snowflakes. I should have jumped out then, put Drew in a half nelson, muscled him to the floor, but I didn’t. Bertha’s eyes hypnotized me. Snake charming in reverse. I stared until her head disappeared into the shadow at my feet, then her body, then the tapping of her nose against the pleat of my slacks.

The teacher slammed Drew against a wall of chameleon cages, sucked his lower lip. Drew’s fingers slipped beneath her shirt, climbed her belly, and fumbled with a breast. I felt myself growing. I didn’t intend to watch—I was no pervert voyeur—but I needed to keep my mind off Bertha, all ten feet of her, which now wrapped around my leg, up my thigh, and was twisting higher. When I flexed my leg, her body squeezed. I tried to relax. She’d be to my midsection soon, squeeze tighter, strangling liver, then lungs. I wondered if she could fit my body inside her mouth if she really tried. I’d seen her jaws stretch, like when Rizzo finally found and trapped the raccoon mother. He’d tossed her in Bertha’s cage just to see. And Bertha proved how much she could swallow—the burly mother raccoon was no match, just another lump under her skin. Surely I’d be more of a challenge. The weight I’d put on over the years, up to 250 pounds now, was for once a good thing, a defense.

Drew was lean, tall and skinny. The teacher had to reach her arms
high over her head to wrestle the T-shirt off his body. He was hairy. All mammal. My chest and stomach only grew sparse sprigs of hair. I was mostly smooth, naturally so, sleekly so. If only I could talk to Bertha, I could convince her how much better of a meal Drew would make: easier to stretch into her jaws, better meat, worth the hairballs. I couldn’t talk sense into Bertha, though. She was twisting through my legs, flexing over my erection. It had been so long since a woman had touched me. Bertha pulsed, pangs of serpentine pleasure I tried to ignore. Before us, the teacher grinded against Drew, the young college graduate, the handler of snakes, the tall and lean and desirable.

I couldn’t take it, our paralleling embraces. I stomped onto Bertha’s body. She tightened around my legs, strangling my erection until I thought it would pop. I ground my heel. We both strained, reacting to one another’s struggle, fighting for our lives of lonely comfort, warm light and small cages.

The teacher went to pull up her shirt, but Drew stopped her. He led her away, probably out to his car or into Rizzo’s office. Their footsteps scurried up the staircase. I grunted, leaned into my heel. Bertha slackened. I burst from the shadows, grabbed her head, and threw it to the floor. She zigzagged, banging into the walls, trying to scale them. I had to touch her, despite Rizzo’s rule, a damn good one. I heaved her over my shoulders, struggling to drop her back into the tank. Under the bright lights, her body slumped, oozed blood from my footprint. There was no helping her, not that I wanted to.

Bertha had cursed me into having something in common with Drew. We’d both touched the snakes.

I headed upstairs and found Drew counting the till. He wasn’t with the teacher, who had disappeared. I scanned for any last customers, locked the front doors.

“Did you see that chick?” Drew said.

“Where’d she go?”

“Bought three of our best heat lamps, a crate of turtle chow, and went on her way.” He licked his fingers, shuffled through the bills.
“She’s a teacher. What a looker, too. Wish we had about a hundred more customers like her.”

“Did you give her a Realm of the Reptiles tour?” I pulled the counted till from Drew’s hands, started recounting. It was my job.

“You know it.” Drew punched my shoulder. I didn’t return the smile spreading stupidly across his face. “In fact, she’s bringing her whole class on Monday. Thirty kids.”

“How the hell you gonna fit that many people downstairs at once?” I lost count of the till, the green bills blurring. I started over.

“That’s where you come in. You can tour them around up here, teach them about reptiles and shit, while I give small group tours.”

“You mean, while you screw around with their teacher?”

“What?”

I dropped the till, let it flutter in a messy pile on the counter. “While you touch the snakes?”

“I don’t touch snakes.” Drew looked up to the ceiling, scratched his chin. “I know Rizzo’s rule.”

“You don’t know rules. You don’t know reptiles. Just because you touch these snakes, you think you’re king shit.”

“Look, man,” Drew put his hand on my shoulder, “I don’t touch the snakes.”

“Bullshit.” I grabbed Drew by his blazer lapels, shook him.

“Wait. Wait.” Drew squirmed, pushed his palms in my face. I released him, saw the frightened child in his eyes. He was just a kid playing games, didn’t know any better.

He stumbled away from me. From each pocket of his blazer, he pulled a snake, another from his jeans. He held up his finger for me to wait while he dropped them into an empty tank. He had them everywhere, fearless of their coiling bodies.

“So, yeah, I touch the snakes. I touch them like you can’t.”

I wanted to correct him, lecture him about their bacteria-ridden skin. But I didn’t get a chance. Drew cracked his knuckles, crouched into a wrestling stance, circled me. It was something like the dance I’d seen him do for the teacher, his shoulders bobbing, hips swaying. Rhythmic and natural.

“If violence is all you understand,” Drew said, “so be it.”

Drew pounced.

Our fight didn’t last long. Drew was quick, swatted my ears, but I smothered him quickly, put him in a sleeper until he knelt on the tile floor. I didn’t let go until he stopped squirming, until I lay on top of him, my body engulfing his. For a moment, I thought my sleeper hold had actually made him fall asleep. But he spoke.

“I’ll give you one hundred. Two-thirds split from the teacher’s class.”

“What about Rizzo’s cut?” I released Drew from the hold but remained on top of him.

“Rizzo will never know.” He lay still under my belly, acquiesced to my weight. I was finally in control, like Drew with the snakes. “Fuck Rizzo’s cut.”

“Stop touching the snakes and we have a deal.”

Drew didn’t say anything. I didn’t release him. Not yet. Not until I was sure he couldn’t steal any more of my customers.

“I have to touch the snakes for the kids,” Drew said to the floor. “Just this one last time, and then I’ll never touch them again.”

I leaned into Drew, felt his back tense, resisting my advantage, and then give in. I had him where I wanted him. This was better than catching Drew in the act, reporting him to Rizzo. His fingers would tremble when he passed the snakes in the weeks to come, but he couldn’t touch them. He made a promise.

Work went smoothly the rest of the weekend. I raked in the sales, and Drew was helpless without his snakes. Every time a pretty girl or a group of kids walked in, he’d dig into his blazer pockets, then hang his head and slump back to the stockroom, where I hoped he was taking long, hard looks at Rizzo’s sign. No one went downstairs, and Rizzo’s was my domain once again, the showroom filled with shiny boxes, where expertise was king, instead of dark hallways cluttered with mystery, the touch of scaly skin and broken rules. That lasted until closing on Sunday, when Drew went to clean and feed the snakes downstairs.

“Something’s wrong with Bertha.” Drew’s face had turned pale, his forehead creased.

We both made our way down, and I tried to look surprised when I saw Bertha’s wound, the size of my footprint. It had blackened, and pus seeped from cracks in her skin, which had begun to prematurely shed. I didn’t feel guilt. It was Drew’s fault. He’d touched the snakes.

“The kids are coming tomorrow, man.” Drew plucked at his leather elbow patches. “They can’t see her like this.”

“Did you touch Bertha?”

Drew’s head drooped. He took a deep breath, tried to say something, but only let out a few choked sighs. When he lifted his head, I saw tears. He was playing the scared kid again. I didn’t trust the tears. Last time, that scared kid pounced.