We thought maybe Rex was just pissed about the glitch in the pump that kept the fountain silent as his mouth. Rex kept his head down, digging through the dirt to find the lost connection. Once Al finished his perfect lines, he tried to help, dug alongside Rex with a scrap piece of pipe. He was standing behind Rex’s bent waist, plowing with his schedule 40, when Tommy said, “Looks like Rex is curious. Give him a few thrusts and see if he likes it.”
Rex jumped up, knocked Al’s pipe clinking to the pebble bed. Their shirtless bellies collided in Rex’s attempt to scuttle out of the hole, and that got Tommy going even worse. We tried not to laugh, but we couldn’t help it when Rex tripped over the outcropping, ran to his shirt, crumpled and baking in the sun, yanked it over his hairy back. His fat lips twisted over his clenched teeth.
Rex slunk to his truck. He sat in the cab for the next two hours, his cell phone jammed against his ear, his mouth still unmoving. Close to quitting time, he headed back to the yard and stabbed his spade into the pebble bed, into the dirt beneath, as if he were hunting magma. He dug hard and deep, shoving elbow and swinging fist. None of us dared go near him. We moved up the fountain, dodging flung pebbles. His gray shirt darkened to sweat-black.
We hauled in the last of the two-man granites. Each cost more than we would earn that day. Rocks too smooth for proper grip. Rocks variegated with bolts of pink quartz and sparkles of blue and green. Rocks that sucked sweat from our hands. We carried in twos up the downgrade, shoulders leaning toward our partners, foreheads pulled together under the weight. An assembly line of shirtless hardscapers. Stas jerked and budged, adjusted each boulder a quarter inch here and there, didn’t ask Al for his aesthetic opinion, didn’t ask any of us, same as any other gig. And Tommy ran out of jokes, as he always did, his jaw tired as our arms. But Rex kept digging deeper into the gash in the earth filled with slate steppers and pebbles and boulders and shirtless men and Al.
Just before we finished sprinkling the rest of the Mexican River Rocks, before the sun turned purple and then smashed into dusk, Rex gave up digging. He paced the fountain, stopped at the top, and leaned against one of Stas’s perfectly adjusted rose rock boulders. The dying sun lit up the pinks, cast Rex’s crinkled forehead in purples. We smoked cigarettes on the sod while Al recoupled the flex lines. It was the last touch of the gig, something only Al knew how to do, so we waited. Waited until Rex winked at Tommy, aimed the point of his spade down at Al. Rex said to Tommy, “Here’s a way to make a fag rock hard.” Then Rex pushed the rose rock, a two-man boulder disturbed by one man. Tommy ran toward Rex. We exhaled smoke in their direction, our bodies lurching. But we couldn’t stop falling rocks. No one can.
We heard the smacks, the sickening sound of a two-hundred-dollar rock snapping slate shards, busting itself into useless fragments. Al held his glued flex too long, jumped too late. Rose rock careened, a deadened landing on shin. Snap of bone or rock. And then Tommy was gripping Rex’s collar. The torn cotton shrieked. Rex laughed, scanned our faces, waited for us to join. He kept laughing when Tommy shoved him to the ground, kicked him in the kidney. And Tommy, our joker, he couldn’t stop the laughs. Couldn’t silence silent Rex. We bit through our filters, dropped our cherries onto the pristine sod.
Al crawled out of the pebble bed, and it was then that we saw the dark around his left shin. Blood. Stone blood from Rex’s rock. The two-man, two-days’-pay rock that smashed into worthless shards.
We wanted to lift him, haul his broken body. That’s what we knew how to do. But that seemed stupid now. Al sucked air and squinted up at us through the burned-out dusk. We wished we knew how to handle him, didn’t want to give him to some EMT kid who could lift that rock-bleeding leg. Stas fumbled for his cell phone, dropped it into the fountain. The phone clacked, battery popping out and disappearing into crag shadows. We dug through our pockets, through sweat-soaked denim for our own explodable phones. All but Tommy. Only he knew how to touch broken Al. He reached out his hand, interlaced fingers, pulled. Tommy heaved Al’s arm over his bare shoulders and lugged him to his Honda Civic, the smallest car for the biggest guy on our crew. Panels scratched, front door dented from that night when Tommy drank too much and had to slam an even bigger man’s head into the door. His piece-of-shit car whined and gurgled every morning before the sun eked up over the sod of the suburbs. But on this night, Tommy’s Honda glimmered as it serpentined out of the cul-de-sac.
We slept restlessly, next to snoring wives and silent girlfriends and all alone. We rolled into the divot of worn-out springs, dreamed of suffocation, reawoke. Where was Rex tonight? Still driving his rusty Dodge, afraid to pull into his driveway, beside the lawn we had no hand in sodding or seeding?
On one of our dozen trips out of bed, hands fumbling against leaden shadows where we knew there was once a light switch, we gave up, slid down the wall to a squat. We couldn’t bring on quiet dreams by jerking off or drinking milk or chewing two o’clock salami sandwiches. We carried our cell phones in the waistband of our underwear, waiting for a call. On his way home, Stas bought a new phone at the shop next to the hospital where Tommy and Al sit in the emergency waiting room. No insurance, so no rush. Stone blood hardly life threatening. Stitches and tetanus needles, some bandages cleaner than Tommy’s sweat-hardened T-shirt wrapped tight around Al’s shin. An x-ray and some valium in waiting. Waiting for results, for the bright-white bone sparking across black film. Waiting with Tommy, who keeps patting Al’s back, asking if there’s someone he should call. Parents? Sisters or brothers? Tommy’s hand circles around Al’s shoulder blades, across muscles tense and taut like his own. He pulls his hand away when the old man across the room turns his one good eye toward him, the other hidden behind a handful of bunched-up white panties stained with brown-dried blood.
No, no one, Al says through his teeth.
Your boyfriend? Tommy whispers, and thinks of denim crotches pressing together, can’t find the joke that should be there.
No boyfriend, Al says. Don’t bother him with this shit.
And Tommy thinks of the time he smashed that bigger man’s head into his door panel, which was after Tommy called that bigger man a fag at the bar. Just a joke, like at work, but the bigger man didn’t get it like his rock-slinging boys. They always got it. Until Rex didn’t. And that bigger man at the bar wouldn’t stop shoving and swinging until Tommy clunked skull to metal. He wonders if that bigger man told his wife that night. Tommy wouldn’t tell those jokes outside work no more. Tommy didn’t tell his old lady he dented his car with a skull that night, and they didn’t fuck from behind like she likes. He said he was too tired, and she just flicked off the lamp. But he felt her staring all night.
Tommy pours coffee for Al into a chipped Styrofoam cup. Al takes a sip, passes it back. And it’s probably burned, cooked on the hot plate for the last six hours, but it smells good, like earth and warm, and the emergency room air-conditioning is blowing hard. Not like the comfort of sweat, of day, of lawns and stones, of hauling rocks and spreading sod with his boys, with us, who want to be us, but we can’t find the light switch and can’t get to sleep because we’re wondering about Tommy and Al and Rex. We hate that old man and his bleeding eye and his bunched-up panties who won’t stop glaring at Tommy even though his good eye probably isn’t worth a shit, all pale and milky.
But Tommy forgets about him, and the old man turns as invisible as the crinkled fashion magazine under his seat, opened up to a spread on bikini season where a page has been torn away, stashed into the pants of an eleven-year-old who was waiting for its mama to get her blackened, busted-up eye sewn for the twenty-second time. Tommy takes a sip, puts his lips where Al’s pressed, and it doesn’t mean a damn thing to Tommy. We finally fall asleep.
We got to the fountain early, before sun, full of coffee and nicotine, sitting in our running cars and waiting to see who showed. We twisted the radio knob, skipped past morning shows, one DJ’s belching laugh bleeding into the next one’s. We rechecked our phones, cycled through miss
ed calls, but there was nothing missed from missing Tommy and Al and Rex. And what if Rex showed? We gripped our steering wheels, dirt-crusted nails digging into rubber.
Boss Stas arrived late for the first time ever. He stepped out of his truck, phone pinched between ear and shoulder. His neck looked broken through our rearview mirrors. We got out to steal the words he hummed into the receiver: “Sorry, honey. We’ll get new rocks. I need them for this gig. No. No word from the guys yet.” Nothing that told us everything we wanted to know.
Stas cracked his tailgate, and inside was a stack of slate steppers and one two-man rose rock, a rock like any other rock. Like the rock that stomped Al’s shin. Like the rock we wanted to toss into the gash of earth after Rex crawled inside, and we would close our eyes and say a joke like a prayer. But this rock wasn’t like any other. It blazed up all kinds of quartz and sparkle. This rock was Stas’s young old lady’s cherry-picked perfect rock, transplanted from his own home.
Stas climbed onto his truck bed, leaned into the rose rock, budged it inch by inch, rock screaming against steel. He worked it to the edge, and then we cradled it. That two-man rock turned into a many-man rock, and we carried it all the way up the downgrade, to the gap-toothed outcropping.
The cul-de-sac rattled, backfired. Tommy’s Honda swerved down the blacktop, squealed to a stop behind Stas’s scraped tailgate. Al exited Tommy’s Honda, rapped on the hood, hollered, “Not done yet, boys?”
Tommy slid out next, and the two of them staggered up the downgrade. Al wore yesterday’s jeans but with the right leg hacked to thigh. And we were all wearing yesterday’s jeans, because there’s no point washing away the sweat we’d make again today and tomorrow. A bright-white cast wrapped his leg where the jeans were missing. Tommy and Al grinned like motherfuckers, reeked like Friday’s shots lined across the bar.
“Are you two drunk?” Stas gripped Al’s shoulder.
“What else do you do after getting out of the emergency room at four in the morning?” Tommy kicked at the new rose rock. It stayed put like it’d always been there.
We burned through the morning, replacing the chipped slate, careful not to shift every other stone, topple our precious puzzle. Every rock, pretty side up for the ugliest boys in town, shucked shirts and smeared dirt and beer guts and Tommy’s appendicitis scar winking like a stab wound. The only thing to worry about was Rex’s Dodge popping through the houseline. But he didn’t show, and he never did find that lost connection. Tommy found the frayed wire by chance, between him and Al betting quarters on where that son-of-a-bitch splice could be. Al slapped the quarter in Tommy’s palm while we filled the fountain bed, diluted Al’s blood that was down there somewhere, dried and brown, now drowned. By lunchtime, the drunk was mostly worn off of our missing boys, and they recoupled the last of the flex.
Stas fired up the fountain, and it pissed a perfect stream. Tommy stood barefoot in the middle of our new steppers. He swayed, but our rocks didn’t. Solid like one hundred knuckles packed into a single giant fist.
Sawdust and Glue
While we’re taking lunch with the painters, my son Ramon tells Big Dave his job is easier than ours. Something you don’t say to any workingman and certainly not to Big Dave. When I was a twenty-three-year-old dumbshit like Ramon, I sat down with my crew at a Denny’s for an 8:00 p.m. Moons over My Hammy, after a ten-hour day of framing. A scraggly bearded Mexican bussed our table, and I told him not to strain himself carrying dishes for real workingmen. My crew laughed through two more coffee refills and three more cigarettes that we smothered into our empty mugs. That Mexican ambushed me in the parking lot, busted one of my teeth. I landed a jab on his right eye, kicked his gut when he fell. I got in my truck and drove home, and that guy went back to work.
But he was small. Big Dave is not. And now Ramon is so worked up he can’t hit a shiner with his nail set, keeps slipping and pounding deeper holes into the baseboard. It’d be painful to listen to him cracking through the wood, except it’s particleboard. All sawdust and glue mitered together to look like nice houses instead of the cookie-cutter junk that fills the subdivision. I haven’t sunk a nail through the grain of oak or cherry in over a year. Sometimes I imagine all the good trees have been used up.
“Maybe,” Ramon says to the baseboard, “Big Dave won’t come back to the sub if it’s raining.”
“That could be.” I look through my window trim at gray clouds rolling over the fresh shingles across the street.
“Maybe Big Dave’s so big he’s scared of storms. So big he gets hit by lightning.”
Thunder rattles the panes. Instead of lightning, Big Dave jumps in front of the window. A thin layer of glass separates our faces. He’s painting trim outside while we put it together inside. Big Dave and I stare at the same wall on our respective sides, would be shaking hands if not for the Sheetrock and studs and siding between us.
Ramon is right about Big Dave being big. Big Dave’s arms are so wide they split shirtsleeves, we guess, because we’ve never seen him wear sleeves. I feel my trim shake against the pressure of his mashing brushstrokes. Big Dave’s so big he can’t find a pair of pants that fit him, flashing ass crack when he bends to jam his four-inch barn brush into the cutting pot. And Big Dave’s so tough he chews a bent nail to help him quit smoking. I see it through the window, flickering between his lips. The flicker disappears, and since I don’t see him spit the nail out, I’m pretty sure he swallowed it, has a stomach like a porcupine.
“I’ll just stay out of sight.” Ramon doesn’t look our way. I hear him rip another hole through the base. “Give him time to cool down and deal with it tomorrow.”
“What will you do tomorrow?” I watch Big Dave bite off a few bent bristles from his brush.
There’s always tomorrow, another house, another quarter-acre plot, another slippery tentacle of cookie cutters made of plastic and glue and vinyl, so little metal and wood like the old days, when I was doing renovations and Ramon’s mama, Joni, was changing his diapers. Ramon used to chew up the handles on my tools. Ramon’s mama didn’t like that, and I didn’t like his spit rusting up my good hammer. Joni punched me one night, drove my jagged tooth through my lip, after I slapped a Stanley measuring tape out of Ramon’s mouth. I didn’t last much longer as a father after that night.
Now Ramon has got two kids he never sees, two grandkids as imaginary to me as pink ivory wood. Judge wouldn’t even dare an every-other-weekend situation. He has child support to pay, a background that’ll never check out clean since he got busted with a one-cook two-liter bottle for meth snuggled into his kid’s empty car seat. Then there’re the bullshit anger-management classes for biting that cop’s neck after they cuffed him. That’s what Joni told me the newspaper said the next day, but they exaggerate. Ramon has always been small, was a quiet and shy kid when I had him on my weekends. Now construction is the only job he can get, and I’m the only dope who would hire him. I needed someone reliable, someone I could count on every day, and he has proven to be a decent nail bender for the last three weeks. And Ramon needs me, this job, his last option.
Ramon rises from the corner and stretches his back. Big Dave spots him through the window and stabs the butt of his brush against the pane. He gives Ramon the finger, but since Ramon doesn’t see it, I’m the one who has to face that giant finger pressed against the glass.
“You shouldn’t have talked shit about the painters,” I say.
Telling Ramon what he shouldn’t have done today is as useless as when I told him last week that he shouldn’t mix making babies and making meth. I apologize to Ramon for that one by nailing my window casing home, filling the silent room with the roar of the compressor that drowns out Big Dave’s knocking. Once the compressor dies out, Big Dave has disappeared. The window shows nothing but gray clouds bunched together like knuckles.
“That stupid asshole just swings his brush around out there,” Ramon says. “You gotta agree they got the easiest job in the sub. Anyone can push paint.”
“Why’d you lock the front door?” I say.
“Let’s keep working. Maybe he’ll just piss off.”
Locked doors are for homeowners. Seven to seven, these doors are open to anyone lugging a tool. So I open up, and Big Dave fills the threshold, hands full of rollers and brushes, sandpaper strips curling out his pockets, gallon cans hanging from each pinkie. His eyebrows look like they’re trying to collide, creases in his forehead small rodents could hide inside.
“Should have known it was the Smiley crew,” Big Dave says. “Locking up so you can take naps in the closets?”
And, yes, I named my business Smiley Carpentry, because that’s my name and it sounds friendly. Smiley guys are the type of guys you let in your house, maybe even leave them a spare key. But, no, I’ve never napped in a closet, and every one of my guys I caught sleeping in a closet got sent home permanently to sleep in his own bed. That’s the good thing about Ramon. He never sleeps, out late every night and still can swing hammer for fourteen hours. Even when he’s in bed, he growl-snores all night through my paper-thin apartment walls. I don’t let myself worry. Smiley Carpentry will work out for him, and he’ll have his own place and real sleep soon.
Big Dave stomps toward Ramon, and Ramon shrinks back to the base, smacking away, pretending he didn’t notice anyone come in. Big Dave plunks his paint cans behind Ramon, and Ramon flinches each time one drops on the OSB. We pop nails and buzz trim all day. He should be plenty used to loud noises.
One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist Page 3