One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist

by Dustin M. Hoffman

  “Hey, Dave,” Ramon says, when he finally pivots around to face him, “I was just setting the shiners for you.”

  “Should I thank you for doing your job?”

  Ramon laughs, and I shoot a few more nails home, make sure to leave the heads gleaming. “We’ll be out of here in a few hours,” I tell Big Dave. “And then you can get to painting.”

  “That’s all right.” He digs his canine into a can of nail filler and cracks it open. “I don’t mind getting chummy with the hardest-working guys in the sub.”

  “I never said we worked the hardest,” Ramon says, but gets cut off when Big Dave starts whistling. I think it’s a Rush song. We need to buy a radio. A silent house is a tryout for the amateur talent show. Big Dave whistles through a whole set list, not unlike what I’m sure is playing in the other houses: more Rush, Steve Miller Band, AC/DC. He hits the high notes so loud I expect the contact cement to curdle and the laminate on the counters to curl. I pop out twice as many nails as the trim needs, just so the compressor kicks on more often. I cut each board twice, three times, four. Big Dave whistles through the compressor rumble, syncs his notes with the saw’s whine, as if I’m his backup.

  Ramon sings along. Quiet and falsetto. Ramon is trying to make nice. My, sir, you might not work as hard as a Smiley, but your whistling is infectious.

  I finally head upstairs and leave the lovebirds to jam it out. I’m only up there an hour before I hear Ramon yelling. He has a high and light singing voice, but he roars like someone punched nails through his spine. Now I know why his neighbors in his wife’s apartment complex phoned the cops. It must’ve sounded like a bear loosed in Ramon’s unit when they called in those domestics. I never believed he really had it in him. My skinny kid. Even a small Smiley T-shirt looks too big on him.

  I hustle downstairs and Ramon is covered in white primer. He stands in the middle of the room, arms outstretched, eyes closed, chest heaving. Some fancy breathing pose he learned in anger management. The primer drips from the hem of Ramon’s shorts and tap-taps against the subfloor. Big Dave smirks, and Ramon’s face glows red against the primer. He shakes his finger at Big Dave’s cleft chin, and Big Dave bites at it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Big Dave’s diet consisted of carpenters’ fingers. Ramon crams his finger into a fist, says, “Five thirty, in the middle of the cul-de-sac, I’m gonna rip your ass off.”

  I wish people would choose their threats more carefully. That’s the heat of anger. And, I don’t know, maybe someone could rip an ass off. Maybe Ramon has done it. Maybe his teenage bedroom in his mama’s basement was lined with torn asses, hung on his wall like bearskins. I wasn’t around for that, wouldn’t know.

  “You got it,” Big Dave says, and then swipes up all his tools in the curls of his fingers, jangling them along as he moseys out the front door. Ramon kicks the primer can, splatters the last of its paint against the wall. He grits his teeth, flashing his perfectly straight incisors that I spent all that child support on. Joni thought a nice smile would help him in life, but his name’s not even Smiley. He changed it to his mama’s name when he was fourteen. Ramon Bayer. Anyway, I did okay with my chipped tooth.

  Ramon slaps his forehead, pulls back his hair, which is already thinner than my own. They say a kid gets his hairline from his mother’s side. A father shouldn’t ever have to see his son go bald first. I buzz a few baseboards through the saw to give him time to stew.

  He shakes his hands out, and a few strands of his hair flutter to the OSB, where they’ll be covered with carpet next week, under homeowner toes in a month, and then for however long it takes a family to grow.

  “Now would be a good time to cut out early,” I say to the saw.

  “You were right about tomorrow. I’d still have to deal with him then.” Ramon slips the primer-drenched Smiley shirt over his head. It slaps wetly against the OSB. Ramon kicks at the pile of shirt, and there’s my logo, smiling mouth now crinkled into a grimace, looking up at me like a ghost through all that white. Ramon’s bare torso is so thin, as if God ran him through the planer. “Fuck assertive problem solving. I’m gonna fight that bastard.”

  I head out to the van and open the back door. Above the scrap particleboard, I keep a shelf full of Smiley shirts. It used to be full. Now there’s one left, and it’s an XXL. I never found anyone to work for me who would fill out that size, even though most of them ask for a shirt one size too big. Everyone pretends they’re bigger than they are, and they end up looking smaller, buried in their too-large shirts. That’s probably why Big Dave can’t find any clothes his size. All those guys wishing for bigger, and all the big guys wishing they could find a shirt that fits.

  Back inside the house, Ramon snaps a piece of casing over his knee. He busts it in half and then picks up one of the halves and busts that one over his knee, too. The shards of casing get so small I think it will be impossible for him to break another, but he does. Ramon is hiding strength in those spidery hands, that bony knee. I throw the XXL over his shoulder.

  He pulls the shirt on, and the hem lines his kneecaps. It looks like a dress on my son. He looks like a child, like when he was five and Joni bought him Superman and the Incredible Hulk pajamas. He never wore them, preferred my old work shirts reeking of dried sweat and sawdust. I used to think he’d grow up to be a fine carpenter. Joni wanted him to wear cute pajamas, to go to college, become a lawyer or something like that. She couldn’t even afford a lawyer when Ramon got busted with blow back in high school.

  “Dave’s not so big,” Ramon says, looking out the window. The oversized Smiley logo on his back flashes an absurdly wide grin at me. “And he sucks at his easy job.”

  I look out the window, too. Big Dave’s in front of the house across the street, where one of the other painters has straddled his shoulders and is reaching up to slap white on the top of a porch column. Dave’s pushing a roller up to the other guy’s cut. It’s quite a sight, this two-headed smattering of white paint, Big Dave getting bigger and smarter, hurrying to beat the rain that’s surely coming now. The sky is nearly black, though not a drop has fallen.

  “He’s a better ladder than a painter,” Ramon says.

  Ramon never sat on my shoulders. My back is all kinks and spurs. On his sixth birthday, I took him to the zoo. This other kid was sitting on his dad’s shoulders so he could get a closer look at some tamarin monkeys perched on a tree branch. Ramon asked to sit on my shoulders, and I pretended I couldn’t hear him. It was either that or explain to my kid that the job his dad did, the one he wanted to slip into like his Smiley-shirt pajamas, had warped his spine into a hook. Then that kid on his dad’s shoulders screamed. The tamarins had snatched a fistful of this kid’s hair through the fence and wouldn’t let go. The dad tried to reach up and wrestle the monkey’s pencil-thin arm. He couldn’t reach, just flailed his arms at that tiny monkey. I smiled to Ramon, but he looked worried, like he wanted to help. That’s what they get for being stupid, underestimating that monkey just because he looked like a fluffy toy. He was still in a cage. They only put wild things in cages.

  Ramon lugs a stack of base upstairs, and I should follow him. But I linger at the window, keep my eye on Big Dave spreading white, making those fat porch columns glare against the black sky. Ramon pounds up and down the stairs, dropping off base with pencil lines scratched where he wants me to miter. I do this for him. I cut his boards quick so he always has something to nail, work to keep his mind off quitting time.

  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 the
y 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 TVs, 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.

  Can Picking

  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 can
s 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.