One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist

by Dustin M. Hoffman

  I got paired with him on the south side of the house. Franco and me on thirty-foot extension ladders. I pulled mine up first, right above a window to the peak. We always start from the top, left to right, just like reading. There’s logic in that. While climbing my first rungs of the day, I smelled something like cherries burning. Franco had lit a Swisher Sweet. I watched him swing up his ladder to the right of mine. Bad form, to start from the right. He rattled up that ladder, barely using his hands for balance, smoking, his cutting pot clanking behind him, the black licorice traded for a brown cigar puffing in time with his steps. He settled in just below me with the angle of the eave, hung his pot on a rung, and mashed his brush inside.

  “Paint a lot of exteriors?” He ashed his cigar into his cutting pot.

  “Every day. Unless it’s raining and until it starts snowing.”

  “But how long we talking?” A cherry cloud floated out of his question. “Few months, few years? You’re a young guy. Can’t be too long.”

  “My second summer.” It didn’t sound like much when I said it. But I knew the job, felt it in my callused palms, in my fingers that curled into a brush grip in my sleep.

  “A little green to painting then.”

  “Yeah. I guess.” I reached far away from him, mashing my brush to the soffit.

  “Not too green, though. I see it wearing off. You’ve got a painter tan coming in, red in the neck and calves.” He smiled, but I wasn’t looking fully at him, only out the corner of an eye.

  “This is a nice job. By the beach. Probably get a breeze. Maybe spot a honey in a two-piece.” He had his eye on his work now. I checked to make sure he wasn’t milking the job, watched the thin spot on the top of his head bob to his brushwork. “Always like the view from up here. Like home for me. How about you? Ladder work give you a little tingle in the undies?”

  “I do what the boss says.” I mashed my brush harder over Franco’s head, hoped I’d nail that balding spot with a few green drips.

  “So,” he dipped his brush, slapped it against the inside of the pot, “I got a story for you.” He kept slapping the brush, like a bird flapping its wings, natural, smooth, ready for takeoff. “I was working on this house once. Big Victorian monster, navy-blue body with red trim and yellow detail. Beautiful project. Had to use a dainty one-inch brush for all the yellow and red. Soft hands, you know. Laser eye. I was an hour into this trim around a spired add-on. Looked like a castle, this part. Like Rapunzel might throw down her hair at any moment. And I’m thinking this very thought about Rapunzel, working toward a window by my ladder, when the window creaks open. So I finish my section, go down, and slide my ladder right over top this open widow. I climb back up to my dainty detail work and can’t help but take a peek inside. The sight I saw, goddamn, man. This beautiful Betty is inside lying on this bed, one of those things with lace canopies. And she’s completely naked. She pulls up her knees and then spreads her legs, staring straight at me through those velvety thighs. She looked like a princess, a real Rapunzel, but with brown hair, maybe a little shorter. It’s dark inside, but I can tell she’s got bedroom eyes, not just because they’re in a bedroom. I’m thinking, Just keep working, Franco. Ignore her. But she lifts an ankle and waves for me with these purple-painted toes. And now, hell, I can’t think of anything else. The tiny brush in my hand won’t move. I swing my leg around the ladder into the sill. Inside, I realize how sweaty I am, how my whites are filthy. But she don’t care. She pulls me onto the bed. And I’m wrapped in satin sheets, never felt anything so soft. Fifteen minutes later, I’m back painting yellow, with a new appreciation for ladder work.”

  When Franco stopped talking, I woke up. That’s what it felt like. I’d breezed through my section of siding, without remembering a single stroke. “So what happened next? What happened with your princess?”

  “What happened is I painted that princess’s tower perfect. Those lines were crisp. You couldn’t see a wave or a holiday with binoculars. Totally unnecessary, but I couldn’t help it. I had to do it right.”

  “But what about when her husband got home or her old man or whatever? What happened then?”

  “Oh, him. He thought my work was perfect, too, even shook my hand.”

  I climbed down to move to a new section of green. A few steps down, I glanced into the window in front of me and my ladder. The sun glared hard off the pane. It made an opaque reflection of myself framed by aluminum rungs: skinny, shirtless, a five-day beard, red baseball cap spilling greasy curls. No princess, just me. “You know, Rapunzel was a fairy tale. Not real, not even close. Like perfect exterior painting,” I said, descending.

  “Shit, kid, you just need to spend more time on the ladder.”

  The top section of the house went quick. I was in rare form, sped up by the new old guy, like a lap horse. But Franco kept gaining. Every time I moved my ladder, his would clang up next to me in shorter and shorter intervals. We knocked out the top floor of the lake-facing south side in about two hours. And then we were on stepladders, then ground. Grass is a nice break after being on a ladder. Soft and even all around, no rungs pressing into the arcs of your soles. That’s when I really whip through a job. And I was going fast, practically running with my brush on each row of siding: top to bottom, left to right, whole lengths at a time. Franco put down his brush and pot and picked up the nine-inch roller frame. He rolled out my rows, right on top of me, finishing all I started. He was killing me.

  I’d taken the siding down to waist height, still flying, when I tripped. My cutting pot sailed out of my hands, plunked the ground, spilling paint onto the grass. Franco stood over me.

  “That’s irony for you.” He lit another Swisher Sweet.

  “What?” I braced myself, ready to take guff for my spill.

  “Green paint on the green grass. Better yet, green painter spilling green paint on green grass.”

  “That’s more like coincidence than irony. Or maybe a tongue twister.”

  He laughed in a loud shot. “Whatever you call it, it’s not too bad. Don’t even have to clean anything up.”

  I headed for the hose around the corner. I sprayed out the grass where I’d dumped the paint. The water made it foam light green. Otherwise, you couldn’t tell.

  “Imagine five gallons of bright-white enamel oozing down concrete stairs.” Franco smoked, watching me spray, as if he thought my mistake meant break time. “I’ve done worse. That’s for sure. You can’t just hose off concrete. Too gritty. Have to scrub with wire brushes.”

  “I kicked over a full gallon of red stain last summer,” I said. My toes curled secretly in my sneakers. “All over a brand-new wood deck.”

  “That had to hurt.” Franco retrieved his roller, slopped it in the pan. “They give you some shit for that?”

  I’d been trying to forget that story since it happened. “Not too bad, since we were staining it that color anyway. Actually, they all cheered right after it happened, slapped me on the back for thinking up a faster way to stain a deck. Sarcastic assholes.” It felt different than I thought, telling it to Franco. It had felt like an open wound inside me, but right then, I could tell it had closed up. Maybe still a bit red, old and healed enough to be impressive though, some scar to show your friends.

  I dumped more paint in my pot and got back to the siding. We were moving well again. My brush glided under each clap of siding. When I got to where Franco rolled, he’d hop out of the way like leapfrog.

  “I got one for you.” He didn’t stop rolling. I didn’t stop cutting. I knew what was coming. “We’re driving down I-75 in this rusted-out pickup, this crew I used to work for, Painting Expressions. I’m in the front between the boss’s oldest son and his youngest. We got a full bed filled with five-gallon buckets for this job south of Detroit. My forehead’s practically touching the rearview, so all I’m seeing is backward. Through the mirror, I see a five go sliding off the bed, real smooth, like it might just keep floating. But then it hits the pavement, splatters everywhere in t
his huge streak of yellow. I turn to the oldest, the driver, Bruce or Bob or something, who doesn’t even realize what just happened, and say, ‘Shit! We just lost a bucket.’ Before he registers what I’m telling him, another one goes, splashing yellow hell all over the road. Well, Bob or Bruce, he gets what’s happening now. The road’s pretty clear ’cause it’s early, except for this semi bearing down on us. He’s honking, flashing his headlights, as if we don’t know. So what does Bob or Bruce do? He stomps the gas. He’s thinking we gotta lose that semi before it reads our plate. And big surprise, another five shoots out, this time with some trajectory. It rails right into the grille of that semi, squashes like the fattest june bug you ever saw, full of yellow blood. Not just the grille, it’s everywhere, plastering the lights, speckling the windshield, even flecking the side-view mirrors. I swear I saw a splotch on the driver’s arm. Now that’s some painting expression. He pulls onto the shoulder. We take the next exit and stick to the back roads.”

  Franco rolled out the last section just as he finished his story. I was standing there, just watching him. I couldn’t remember if I’d even cut that last section.

  “What about the semi? Bob or Bruce, he get busted?”

  “Never heard a peep about it.” He tossed the roller into the pan, plucked a piece of licorice from his front pocket, and snapped his teeth around it. “All they had to worry about was stretching materials since they were now fifteen gallons down.”

  It seemed like there had to be more. I wanted some kind of ending where Bob or Bruce faced the consequences. Some fistfight between burly truck driver and wiry painter. Or the boss’s son getting fired by his dad. I wanted Franco’s stories to be more than just a way to kill time. Where was the moral, the meaning?

  “Did they stretch it?” I said.

  “Hell no!” Franco smiled at me. “They wasted half a day waiting for another order at the paint store.”

  Maybe it was a lesson about patience or wastefulness. I guess it didn’t matter so much, because he could spin a fine story. He’d topped mine about the stain. But I had more.

  “Last year, we were painting a cookie cutter in one of those new subdivisions,” I said. “You know the type, where every house matches, as if God just dropped them right into perfect little squares of green sod. Perfectly spaced. Shiny and new. Like big boxy babies from the same litter.” I cleared my throat. Wanted to make sure every word was crisp. “The one we were working on looked the same, too. But the homeowners wanted to make it stand out with a new color. Some kind of beige to Brunswick Blue or Breakwater Blue or some fancy blue. Who names those paint colors anyway? That’s gotta be the easiest job in the world.” I looked over at Franco.

  He was nodding his head. “I hear you. Dream job, inventing colors.”

  “Yeah, yeah. So this house, it wasn’t like it needed a paint job. Just some people got so much money they can afford to get sick of looking at the same color. The first day, we had the whole front side painted. But the homeowner, the husband, he gets home from work, steps out of his silver BMW, looks at our work, and runs inside. He runs back out with a paint swatch, slaps it against what we’d painted, and starts stomping his feet. He says we painted it the wrong color. We’re off by two and a half shades. It’s our fault even though we don’t tint the colors. All the work we did that day, all for nothing. We have to reorder the right paint. Boss is pissed. He has to eat it, pay for all that extra wrong-colored blue. But he doesn’t want it. No room to store it and hope someone wants that exact color in the future. So he has me dump it down the sewer grate, like thirty gallons.”

  Franco cut in, “And now Michigan’s drinking water is bluer than ever, thanks to you.” Franco stretched his arm, pointed his roller at the lake. “That’s boss man for you. They leave the dirty work for their guys. Clean hands to sign the checks with.”

  “No. That’s not it.” My skin felt hot, burning inside my tan. “I like my boss okay. It wasn’t his fault.”

  “But those rich homeowners, they’re a picky bunch.”

  “Not them either. It’s just,” I took a deep breath, “all that blue. Wasted, you know?”

  He sucked up the last bit of licorice dangling from his mouth. “When do you guys eat?”

  My story had fallen apart. I couldn’t get my hands around it. The shape of that blue. If Franco hadn’t kept interrupting, I could’ve found the point to the whole thing. It was right there, like that last dull section of siding surrounded by a fresh coat.

  After lunch, I had a chance to look over our work. His side of the house was full of holidays, the underside of his boards all pale green where his brush had skipped. That was how he’d gone so fast, been able to keep up with me. If the boss had seen his work, Franco would’ve been on his way home. But quality control wasn’t my job. I was just a brush swinger.

  We moved to the next side, where a pea-stone driveway skirted the house. Franco and I stayed paired up. This time, I let him set his ladder first, and he chose the second-story peak. After he climbed a few rungs, puffing a fresh Swisher Sweet, I set up on the far left side. We had some distance between us, twenty feet or so, our work no longer overlapping. Now I knew Franco wasn’t the painter he said he was, but I needed to see what I had, prove I could beat even a cheater.

  Over lunch, the bristles of my brush had hardened. I’d left my brush in the pot, in shade, even covered it with a rag, but nothing could hide from the cooking noon sun. I stood at the top of my ladder, picking globs out of the bristles, while Franco eased into an early lead.

  “It’s a hot one,” he said. “But not the hottest I’ve seen. I spent a couple of years in the Keys, painting hotel fronts. Now that was hot. Your brush could brick up in minutes.”

  Green paint covered my fingertips, but at least my bristles moved again. “The Keys, huh?” I let him tell me another one. Talking would slow him up.

  “Yep.”

  “What was that like?”

  “Not much to say about that. People think it’s this magical place. And maybe it was once. Hemingway house, six-toed cats, every reel taut with a marlin, beaches, palm trees, all that shit. I saw hotels. All those bright colors, you’d think they’d be fun to paint. After a while, they made me sick. The whole place did. Didn’t see my wife for months at a time. She was way back home. And when I got back, she wasn’t. But there’s not much story in that.”

  He stopped brushing to squeeze out the cherry of his Swisher Sweet between his fingers and pocket the butt. The brown and burnt tobacco shavings sprinkled to the ground. He dug in his front pocket for another piece of licorice. All this gave me time to get farther ahead with my siding. The mention of his wife gave him reason to pause, to refill his mouth with something else, slow him up.

  “What was your old lady like?”

  He turned and squinted at the sun, his face all crinkled. “Definitely no fairy tale. She was a hard woman, pushy, hot tempered, with a light mustache she refused to do anything about, and she was always too busy with something else to be busy with me. But goddamn, could she cook. The smell of her kitchen was home for me. I remember one time I was working on painting the inside of this grocery store. We were spraying white dryfall into the steel girders. Ever used it? Awful stuff. It’s supposed to be easy to clean up, the overspray drying into flakes before it hits ground. It’s weird, changing from mist to crud in midair. That place looked like a blizzard once a few sprayers were running. I wore a respirator, but it kept getting clogged up. I’d take off my mask and bang out the filters every ten minutes. By the end of the day, all I could taste was oil in the back of my throat. White covered me from head to toe. Like a snowman or a ghost. Pure white. When I got home, Aggie, that was her name, swung at me with this huge oak crucifix we kept by the front door. Probably thought I was her grandpa returning from the grave. I almost broke my arm stopping her swing. She could defend herself. It made me proud. Bruised, too. Anyway, she’d cooked up the meanest batch of enchiladas I ever smelled. I like mine hot, and these ones bu
rned my nose from the doorway. I didn’t even clean up. Sat my ghostly self down at the kitchen table and ate right out of the pan. All I tasted was oil in the back of my throat, though. Aggie’s hottest sauce couldn’t burn through. That was the only lie I ever told, telling her they were delicious. That day, I felt like a ghost. Couldn’t find my way home.”

  He stopped painting and wiped his forehead with his shirt. I was going to ask more about her—why she left. I was waiting for him to stumble over his story as I had, trying to make sense of that blue paint. But Franco’s ladder interrupted. It made a grinding noise on the pea stone below us, kicking out, slipping down two claps of siding with a thunk, thunk. Franco’s body jerked, and he grabbed the eave of the roof. Time froze. We stared at each other, and he made this face to me that said, What’s next?

  The ladder kicked out the rest of the way. It slid down a few more claps, shuddered, and slammed sideways against the ground. I watched it fall, couldn’t help myself. When I looked back up, Franco dangled from the peak by one hand. In his other hand, he held his cutting pot and brush. I shot down my ladder, glancing up every few rungs, and there was Franco, legs dangling, his face turned toward the siding. I got to the ground and swung my ladder over. But before I got it under him, I looked up and stopped—Franco had put his brush to the siding, guiding it along while he balanced his pot in his hooked pinky finger. That was a sight, a ladderless painter, as if he were floating. He never quit painting, and I guess that was how I took him by surprise. I’d meant to get my ladder just under him so he could step down, be saved. But I moved too quick, miscalculated, skimmed the ladder against his legs. He flinched when the aluminum kissed his calves. He lost his grip, became airborne. It might not have been too bad a fall if not for the ladder I placed. His foot caught in the rungs, somersaulting his body, rotating him downward then rightward again, flipping, the green paint from his pot showering around me. He landed in the pea stone feetfirst, like some kind of acrobatic stunt landing. But then he crumpled, fell to his knees.