“I meant the stonemasons, hon,” I said to no one, because the new toilets were clean and Betsy had joined her mother upstairs. I stood in the spotless living room, surrounded by my immaculate white walls, alone with my two good arms.
Us painters are always the last ones to leave a new house. There’s always touch-up to do, even after the cleaning. Everybody mucks up my work. Hell, even Martha’s and Betsy’s brooms leave black scuffs against the baseboards, and I have to paint it all nice and white and shiny again. With my caulk and spackle and paint, I fix every flaw, cover every sign that anyone worked here.
The trim carpenters followed the stonemasons. It started with Fred buzzing off his index finger with the circular. Made a damn mess for Martha and Betsy. They went through three paper-towel rolls. We looked all over for Fred’s finger, but he eventually told us to forget it. Not worth the trouble. I wanted to argue and peeked inside my cutting pot, because you never know. Just paint, though. Just white. Like every house in the subdivisions.
I told Fred to go see Doc Robby at Jiffy Quick Care. He grunted, curled his lips, said maybe he’d take the rest of the day off. And then his helper, Stanley “High Standards” Thompson, interrupted our conversation by zipping off his index finger with the same circular. Three more paper rolls. No sight of fingers. Not even in my cutting pot.
Turned out, all three of the trim-carpenter crews at the subdivisions had the same issue that day. All drove home at two o’clock, shooting past Jiffy Quick Care, crimson-stained paper towels wadded over their fists.
I made it to Jiffy Quick Care when I wrapped up around seven. I parked right next to Doc Robby’s Taurus, nodded at his license plate, which read INAJIFF. This time, I had him check my legs, my toes, especially the toenail that’d been split for two years, ever since I kicked a full five-gallon bucket when I found out Betsy had started dating that roofer. Nothing new there. I dropped my pants, asked him if that was a hernia. He apologized for cold hands. “Anything you notice, Doc?” I asked. “Anything at all.” He checked some boxes on my chart, pushed some trial Ameliorex pain pills with a knowing smile. On my way out, I tossed them to a fellow wearing a Hooter’s apron in the waiting room.
Next day, the trim carpenters showed up on-site wielding scabbed stumps. The missing fingers showed up, too. They’d worked through the whole night and now worked alongside their previous owners. They were emancipated but cheap labor, accepted a fraction of minimum wage relative to their physical size. Those fingers did fine work and proved more useful detached and freethinking.
I was brushing some trim, watching a group of index fingers ahead of me feel out the baseboards for the shiners that used to piss me off when I had to set them. Three indexies lugged a hammer and thumped a nail head home. I called to Betsy, “Aren’t those indexies a nice lot?”
But Betsy wasn’t there. I hadn’t seen her all day. She was growing up quick from the freckled seven-year-old with mismatched socks I met when Martha and I started working together. Betsy used to conduct weddings for Martha’s spray bottles—now presenting Mr. and Mrs. Windex-Bleach. She was a young lady now, wielding spray bottles that couldn’t exchange vows. Could have been twenty-five with her own cleaning crew and an armful of baby the next time I blinked my eyes.
Martha said, “I wish some of you boys would take your shoes off.”
I turned from my window trim to see Martha on her hands and knees scrubbing at a sooty boot print in the berber. Must have been from the heating-and-cooling guys, who were bursting into flames every ten minutes.
“Do you think it hurts?” I said to Martha’s back. “I never see blisters or boils or burnt flesh or boo-boos of any form. But it’s gotta hurt.”
“The floors are filthy.”
“I suppose there’s that.”
“Everyone makes a mess.” Martha sprayed more stain remover on the berber. It foamed bright like spilled white paint.
“I don’t make a mess.” I lifted up my feet to show her the paper booties I’d graciously slipped over my sneakers. Martha didn’t look. “The carpet guys are pretty clean, too.”
“Well, it’s their carpet.” Martha whistled when she wiped the foam away and the boot print was gone. “They still put their hands all over the windows, piss all over the toilet seat.”
“And don’t forget what they do to my walls.”
Martha swish-swished her broom up the stairway. I could have followed her, and perhaps I should have because it was our anniversary, married twelve years. I hoped she’d find the love letter on the wall in the master bedroom. But I wrote it with the touch-up paint, and it blended perfectly into the wall. At least the white walls would make her think of me.
I thought about the carpet guys. We were the same men we’d always been, nothing new, just doing our jobs and then trying to forget about them once we got home and watched baseball or played solitaire or stitched a new teal square into our quilts.
Across the road, through the big bay window, I saw Hank the head carpet layer kick through a front door, a giant roll of padding slung over his shoulder. I headed to the house across the street and followed his banging through the hallway, tracked his path of gouges and scrapes on my walls. He looked the same as always. Hank was just Hank, until another Hank walked through the door, a slightly smaller Hank with an armload of tack strip. More Hanks knocked through the entryway. Each one a little smaller. They were identical, wore the same stonewashed jeans with smaller and smaller holes in the knees. The same brown mustache covered their lips, the same uneven sideburns. Just smaller. Altogether, there were twelve, the tallest one Hank’s original size, the shortest standing up to midshin. They scuffed my walls at every height.
“Did you get hurt?” I asked a Hank who stood as tall as my waist. “Tell me how it happened.”
“Ask the boss.” The midsized Hank nodded under the weight of his half-sized padding roll.
“Just point to where it hurts,” I told full-sized Hank. “Did you see a doc?”
But it turned out who I thought was full-sized Hank was 91.66667 percent–sized Hank, and he pointed an elbow to another Hank, who sipped a thermos full of coffee in the corner.
Full-sized Hank said, “Who needs a doc? You need to stop worrying about me and us and our treacherous run-in with carpet glue and start worrying about touching up these walls. They’re a mess.”
Full-sized Hank took a long sip. So long I thought he’d drown. He finally lowered his thermos and breathed. He folded his arms and smiled at all the smaller-sized Hanks hard at work, bolting the tack strips to the subfloor, leaning over less than Hank used to have to lean. His back problems would be no more.
I went to lunch, to Ivan’s Bread and Brew, down the street from the subdivisions where we all worked. The store squatted like a scab against a background of new white houses. I could see every nail in the sun-faded brown clapboard. Big nail heads pounded by healthy contractors who’d made sure their work would last and didn’t care how it looked. I wondered if anyone who lived in the A-frame ranches and split-levels would go to Ivan’s after we finished construction and disappeared. But where were we going? There was a world of soybean fields and forests and clapboard to tear up and cover with white walls and sod.
I ordered my usual turkey and cream cheese bagel sandwich at Ivan’s. I needed something the same, because I was scared. Betsy was pregnant. Martha was excited to be a grandma. But what would I be? Still a step-something-or-other or something real? I wanted Betsy to at least consider her options. She could go to trade school, earn a journeymen’s license, do something besides clean houses. But if the right accident happened to me, then maybe Betsy could quit next year. We could buy one of the subdivision houses, and she could stay at home, never have to bring the kid to work, where it would make paintbrushes and carpet scraps and bent nails into pretend families.
I tossed the rest of the sandwich and then dug around my truck bed until I found a tin of turpentine. I twisted off the lid, poured it down my arms, cupped it in my
hands. My skin sizzled. The fumes burned my nose, and my stomach cartwheeled. I thought about what Hank had said about carpet glue, and I let the turpentine soak in until my skin blazed pink. I hopped back into my truck and drove to Doc Robby’s without a seatbelt.
Doc Robby said he thought he’d fixed me up last time. I told him about the turpentine accident. He smiled and ushered me to the sink. We rinsed. So I told him my side hurt, maybe an exploding appendix. He said no, offered more Ameliorex. What about my lungs? Who knows what I’ll cough up sucking so much paint. He said lungs were more resilient than most docs like to let on. They totally regenerate every seven years. But maybe—He said no.
Back at the subdivisions, I drove past one of the plumbers roughing copper in a trench. The trench walls started to cave in around him, and he winked at me, shrugged as the silt and clay enveloped his face. I kept on driving. The cream cheese and turkey roiled inside my belly. I punched my dash. Tomorrow he’d be able to walk through walls or spit copper pipe of perfect length. Things would be easier. I would just have the same miraculous regenerating lungs everyone else had.
The stonemasons careened across the sky and then gathered in a perfect V line. They were getting used to their wings. I sped to a cul-de-sac at the back of the sub, where the houses were finished and I could have some time alone to think among my white walls. But a truck was parked out front, and that meant there’d be handprints everywhere. Inside, I found Martha. From the entryway, I watched her over the half wall up the stairs. In one arm, she held a baby, and in the other, a spray bottle of blue cleaner. She squirted it at the window, and then the baby dabbed at it with its blanket. The baby left streaks.
“That baby’s no good at cleaning windows,” I said.
“He’ll learn,” Martha said. “This is his first one.”
So he was a boy. A blank-slate baby boy. He could do any trade, master any tool. Maybe he’d paint with me. I’d be his mentor of all things white and wall. The thought helped me forget about Betsy, who’d forgone her options.
“Where’s Betsy?” I stepped up one stair, closer to my wife and her grandchild.
“She left,” Martha said. “Your shoes are filthy.” The baby nodded his pink head.
I didn’t have any paper booties, so I kicked off my shoes, lifted one up to investigate the bits of earth packed into the tread. They weren’t that dirty.
“You know that ladders used to be the twelfth leading cause of injury in America?” Martha said.
“What changed?”
“Mostly extension ladders, though.” She lifted the baby so he could reach the top of the window. He squeaked as if he was going to cry, scrunched up his face, but then found his smile.
“I mostly use stepladders.” I peered inside my shoe for spots of blood, missing toes, anything.
Martha set the baby on the floor while she finished up. Her brown hair looked paler, and her few gray hairs blazed through the streakless window. The sun’s stark shadows cast her worry lines deeper.
A stonemason flapped by and darkened the room.
Free from Martha’s arms, the baby crawled for the stairs. It was a good thing I was at the bottom to catch him, and when I did, I’d let him hold my paintbrush. Before he had a chance to dive, a parade of trim-carpenter index fingers blocked the baby’s path at the top of the stairs. They curled up and down, up and down, like a dance or some kind of warning. The baby raised one chubby pink hand and opened and closed it, opened and closed it.
I was never any good at reading body language. What I did know was those indexies weren’t allowing my grandbaby to explore his world. If he wanted to go down the stairs, he had a damn right. He knew the risks: tumble and bump and crash. And he could clearly see me there waiting, no matter what decision he made, painter or plumber, electrician or roofer. If he fell and busted up, I’d take him somewhere better than Doc Robby.
The fingers curled faster. I wanted to jog up the steps and kick them all away. The baby swiped one up in his pink hand and jammed it into his mouth. All the other indexies inched away. The one in his mouth squirmed.
I opened up my arms for the baby to tumble into, but he just sucked that finger, gazing over my head at the flawless entryway wall I’d painted. It was perfectly untouched, as if no one had ever been there. That was me, my mark of nothing. I hoped the baby wouldn’t choke.
Ice-Cream Dream
Many ice-cream trucks trolled the streets of Defiance, Ohio, but mine was the only modified 1986 Astro van painted beige with brown spots. My customers liked buying ice cream from a man popping his head out the side of a giraffe. They ran down the street, chasing my bumper, and I kept coasting at seven or eight miles an hour, my boot kissing the gas every now and then. A trail of kids lured more kids, who lured parents screaming for them to get out of the road. That mess made a crowd, and crowds meant business, and business meant I made rent and paid the electric bill and the gas bill and maybe even bought a new old movie from Lacy Stacy’s Adult Boutique. But before I paid any of that, I’d drop fifty bucks into Roger and Frida’s bank account. They came first, and they always will. Even if I never see them. Even though I can’t pay child support, because their mother ran off with them when they were just learning to wobble on their stubby legs. A father doesn’t stop loving his kids, no matter how long they don’t know who the hell he is.
But as for all the boys not named Roger and all the girls not named Frida, they’re all just little shits. Sometimes when I had five or six kids chasing the van, weaving in and out of my side-view mirror, I hovered my boot over the brake pedal. The pedal beckoned my foot, and I’d imagine hearing five or six kids pinging against the bumper. They’d get a big bite of steel. That would teach those little shits, who shoved sweaty crumples of money through the window, blocked the line while they jammed sweets down their throats, and then flicked their push-up sticks into my face. Some of them would take their Hippo-sicle and jet without paying. I wasn’t fooled by a big smile missing two front teeth or mussed up golden locks or happy squints pocked with an adorable mess of freckles. There’s no telling who’s going to fuck you over.
My second week of ice-cream selling, I was driving down this real prime suburb just after dinner. Usually I’d have a dozen little shits chasing my bumper as I circled the cul-de-sacs, but all was silent. No kids playing on a single one of those sod lawns. Just me and the ice cream and my van tinkling “Flight of the Bumblebee.” Every door was shut tight, every air conditioner humming away. Not an SUV creeping along the fresh blacktop. I was waiting for a goddamn tumbleweed to roll across the road.
Instead, in my side-view, a zebra-striped van appeared in the distance. I stuck my arm out the window, waved hello to my brother in arms, and he sped up, worn-out muffler roaring. The zebra van tinkled out “Camptown Races.” Its tinny notes clashed with mine as it sucked up to my bumper. I pulled my arm back inside, kept driving, wondered if he needed to borrow some Sea Urchin Sammy Cream Pops. Just as I was counting inventory in my head, planning out a real nice gesture of sharing, another van appeared in my mirror, this one painted up like a dalmatian. It sped past the zebra van and sidled up next to me. It was tinkling some tune too, but at this point, I couldn’t pick out one tune from another. It just sounded like a big pile of tinkles, like a swarm of fairies having an orgy. The dalmatian stayed tight on my side, and I waved again. I couldn’t see inside the van, the side window tinted black as a missing tooth in a six-year-old’s smile.
I sped up, tried to break away from these vans closing me in, mucking up my “Flight of the Bumblebee.” The zebra behind accelerated right along with me, closer than ever, and the dalmatian to my side swerved into me until my rims ground the curb. I thought of Roger and Frida when they were toddlers. If their ball had skidded into the road, well, shit, there’d have been Roger and Frida pancakes. As much as I hated little shits, I couldn’t live with their deaths caused by all us vans filling the street, flying through the suburbs at twenty-three miles per hour.
The su
bdivision exit appeared up ahead on my left, and soon I’d be on the main road and then the freeway and then back in my studio apartment watching Selma Slams St. Louis on my twenty-one-inch. I was ten yards away, when another van pulled out from behind a house, this one painted up like a cow and barreling straight at me.
They had me. Boxed me in and brought me to a stop. Next thing I knew, they’d yanked me out of my van and were kicking me in the head, pummeling me in the gut with ice-cream scoops. They worked quick and wore Jimmy Carter masks, so I couldn’t get an ID on any of them. And I should’ve been figuring out how I’d survive this, but instead I wondered, just as the shortest Jimmy Carter ground his sneaker against my nose, where the hell they found Jimmy Carter masks. Nixon masks, sure. Reagan masks, no problem. But Jimmy C. didn’t seem like a face that would demand a factory mold. I voted for him the day after Roger was born. We were busy with the new baby and scared as shit because we were just babies too, nineteen years old. But I made time to vote. Jimmy said he was going to make the country “competent and compassionate.” A sweet baby like Roger needed competence and compassion. He deserved all of that. Frida came a year later, and two years after that, my ex stole them both away to Idaho. All the compassion in the world was sucked away, and I was left with a president who couldn’t get a couple of his boys out of Iran. I was stuck working a shit job at the same go-nowhere freight yard where my father worked until he collapsed on a crate of duck-shaped pacifiers, dead instantly from a blood clot in his brain.
That scrawny Jimmy C. mask wearer gave me a final kick to the jaw. Of course the smallest guy would have to end things. It made me hope Roger had grown up to be a monstrous man who didn’t need to prove shit, six and a half feet of confidence.
Those Jimmy Carters told me that I was entrepreneurializing on Scream-a-Dream Ice Cream turf, infringing copyrights with my unregistered animal van. They zip-tied my hands behind my back, jammed a map into my pocket. Then they tied me to a mailbox and pulled out knives. I’m not a man who’s easily scared, but I’m also not an idiot who thinks he has a body made of steel and would talk shit to a glinting blade. I knew I could bleed, so I kept my mouth shut, watched silently when they slashed my tires and spray-painted STAY OFF SCREAM-A-DREAM TURF on the side of my van.
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