One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist

by Dustin M. Hoffman

  I stared at the top of his head. The balding spot glared from the sun shooting through the breaks in the oak leaves. The shiny spot on his head pointed up. I followed its direction to the siding we’d been working on. This side, unlike the other, was perfect. Not a single faded patch on his half or mine. His earlier work would have gotten him fired. But now this! And his grace, hanging by the eave. I would’ve chucked my pot and held on with both hands. Who wouldn’t?

  Later, my boss drove him to the hospital but didn’t stick around. He left Franco in the emergency room. I never heard about him again. I never asked. But I’ll always remember him floating. How his body tumbled against the rungs. His perfect landing, the way his knees caved. How he didn’t make a sound after it happened, just braced his hands against his thighs until we carried him to the work truck. The last patch he’d painted was still shiny, still wet, but drying in blotches. Maybe I imagined the shoddy work he’d done earlier. Maybe he’d just noticed me paying attention, knew he couldn’t get away with bullshitting me. But then that meant he had it in him all along. And how could I compete with a real painter with real stories? No matter now. This story’s mine and Franco’s. And I’m the one who gets to tell it.

  Strong as Paper Men

  The boys weaved through the darkness, hiked through demolition rubble to the mounded base of the abandoned powerhouse, where they tilted their necks to the tallest walls in the neighborhood. Almost every window was broken, but Topper and Sloan threw stones anyway, just to hear them plunk and echo inside the cavernous tower. They both loved the top of the rubble hill where the powerhouse stood, towering high enough that they could see both of their fathers’ houses, watch cop cars creep in and out of alleys, see whose lights were on at midnight. The liquor store’s yellow neon sign glowed, a nightlight for winos. Rusted slides and playground structures spidered the elementary school, its cracked red bricks. Up at the powerhouse, they felt different than their neighbors and their daytime selves. They were free from all of it, escaped from their mothers past midnight in summer.

  The city of Kalamazoo had demolished most of the old paper mill, all but the powerhouse, which loomed four stories over the boys’ neighborhood of two-story houses, peeling paint and sagging porches. Jagged concrete slabs and boulders littered the vacant field surrounding the lone building. Topper imagined exploring the powerhouse like breaking in and out of Alcatraz. He wondered if Alcatraz was anything like the jail his older brother spent last year in. Sloan—the younger of the two by four months, not yet fifteen—thought of Kilimanjaro, the harrowing rock inclines Mr. Bendele showed him pictures of at school. A challenge, a quest, only halfway completed at the summit.

  Sloan heaved a hunk of concrete the size of his head at the powerhouse. It thunked against the first-floor wall, landed with a dead smack against the ground.

  “You trying to take the whole place down in one throw?” Topper laughed, slapping his fingers against his thighs.

  “I’m taking a stand.” Sloan rubbed the sting out of his palms, much smaller, but more callused than Topper’s long hands and bony knuckles.

  “You against the world.” Topper threw another stone high up to the third story. He just missed one of the few panes still holding glass.

  “Hell yeah, man.”

  “That shit never happens. People get sick of trying. Give up.”

  “Not me,” Sloan said, and it was mostly true. He did all his homework, finished every book and filled Topper in on endings, and most middles, and reminded him how they started. He’d completed three World War II battleship model kits, used every piece, even hand painted waving officers in the tiny windows. He mowed the cramped lawns in the neighborhood and weed whacked all the tight spots. But there was that father-son bowling team he quit. And then, of course, the ant farm. He’d found the shiny, black corpses piled on the topsoil, an ant cemetery. Even the last survivor must have limped over and collapsed on the paling thoraxes of its neighbors.

  “Hey, sometimes quitting is good. Like me. I’m quitting smoking.” Topper pulled out the newest pack of Virginia Slims he’d stolen from his mom’s carton. “Starting next week.”

  Topper had smoked for two months and felt like he was getting an addiction. Only adults had addictions. He probably wouldn’t quit. He’d quit quitting. Topper was an excellent quitter. He’d had three jobs already—babysitting for the Hoskas, painting houses for his cousin in the summer, sweeping the stockroom at his uncle’s store—and quit every single one with grace and promptness. Why string anyone along if the mood wasn’t right? Better to break off clean. He’d dated five of the best-looking girls in the ninth grade and one in the tenth, and he ended each relationship with a long-stemmed rose and a cursive note saying how he’d always cherish their love. The world was full of opportunities.

  “Smoke up, man.” Topper slid another smoke out of the pack and offered it to his friend.

  “Not out here where everyone can see,” Sloan said.

  “Who cares?” Topper put both cigarettes in his mouth and lit them. “No one’s watching.”

  “Never know. I don’t want my parents finding out I smoke.”

  “You’ll have to grow up someday, dude.” Topper walked away from Sloan into the shadows of the powerhouse, smoking two cigarettes at once. His face disappeared, but the two cherries glowed through the darkness like a set of wild eyes.

  Across Belford Street, Millie Bliss rummaged through her dead husband’s footlocker and found his binoculars so she could watch the boys close-up. She pressed the dusty eyecups against her skin and knelt at her attic window. The powerhouse rocketed over the crooked pine treetops and roofs with flaking-scab shingles. Even without the bustle of industry, the powerhouse still had strength, exclaimed to the neighborhood, I made you, even if no one listened.

  She saw Topper fade into the powerhouse’s shadow. Before it swallowed him, she recalled his smooth black skin, his tall frame, his quick-talking charm. She’d watched him and his brother grow up. They were both beautiful boys bound for trouble, always laughing, sprinting down sidewalks as children, and then skipping school and strutting down the grassy median. She spotted Sloan next. He kicked up a gravel cloud and then followed, disappearing into the same shadow. He wasn’t near as good-looking with his acne and mixed lighter skin, but he made up for it with hard work, mowing her lawn every Saturday. And he was smart, his name always printed in the newspaper’s honor roll.

  They were small silhouettes next to the building, and then they were gone, pulled into its mystery. She hoped for bright futures for these boys with chances, said prayers every night to bless them.

  She caught the boys last month when investigating suspicious sounds at the powerhouse. She thought drug addicts or Jehovah’s Witnesses might be planning to squat the abandoned lot. Her flashlight had flooded the wall of broken windows, the mouth of shattered gaps. But the boys were quick and evaded her light. She waited until two in the morning for the boys to leave, hiding herself behind a slab of concrete with jutting rebar ribs. They passed close enough for her to recognize their faces. Not junkies. Not solicitors of religious crank. Just kids.

  Since that night, she’d been leaving gifts from her dead husband’s footlocker for the boys in their clubhouse: her husband’s jackknife, a flask half-filled with rum, an illustrated copy of Huck Finn, a 1945 military-issued map of New Delhi, a taxidermy ferret, the month of July torn from a pinup calendar featuring a cowgirl in hat and chaps hugging her breasts. Every few nights, she’d chuck an item through the windows of the old factory building and imagine the wonder the boys would have in finding these artifacts. They shared these secrets. But the boys wouldn’t know it was her. They’d think these items were left behind. They were archaeologists. Historians. Discovering the culture of this neighborhood, even if it was inaccurate. They had to have interest, or it would be forgotten.

  Someone had to want to know.

  Sixty years ago, when Millie was the age of the boys, a neighborhood barely existed her
e. The whole area spouted smoke stacks. Factories for everything: Kellogg’s cereal city, yellow Checker taxicabs, Upjohn pharmaceuticals, Gibson guitars, and paper and paper and paper. Paper mills consumed the city. Her father had built them a house next to his job at the mill, making them one of the first black families of the factory village. Boilers rumbled through the streets, engines growled. Men in overalls grunted, laughed, while coal burned and brought the biting odors of chlorine and sulfur. She lived in that house all her life. Her father left it to her husband after her husband returned from the war. But the neighborhood grew quieter every year. So few of the factories remained. By the time her husband died, the city was skeletal architecture, phantom industry. And the mill buildings, too, slowly collapsed under snow, orange fangs of arson, crunched in backhoe jaws. Soon only the powerhouse remained. Then the lights went out. Then nothing but a shell. With the treasures she left the boys, she might teach them, help them stumble onto the strength of the paper-mill men.

  She rose from her knees and clicked off her record player spinning Jimmy Rushing. She pulled a chair to the window to sit in darkness and silence, waiting for the boys of this new neighborhood to learn manhood.

  Topper jumped up and grabbed onto the windowsill above him, a low window they’d been using for weeks to sneak inside. Sloan heaved Topper’s sneakers from below, and Topper tumbled in. There was a barricaded door to the powerhouse, but if they kicked it down, others would know what they knew, that this was a place for explorers, and they’d lose their island tower.

  “Nearly broke my leg, tough guy,” Topper said, yanking Sloan up into the building.

  The streetlights projected a grid of broken windows against behemoth boilers inside. Everything was bigger in the factory. The boilers stretched upward into the highest floors toward an endless ceiling. Massive bundles of piping chased the catwalks. Topper scooped a handful of gravel from the concrete floor and hurled it against one of the boilers. A shower of pelting gravel erupted into the high ceiling and echoed thunder back to the boys. It sounded great from outside, but inside was even better. Sprinkle to downpour. Pebbles to boulders.

  Alex stirred from a daze. She’d been crashed out on the top floor, but the thunder below brought her back, budged her iron eyelids open. She didn’t hear the initial noise. She felt it from under, rumbling her bones. The feeling of bones again. Bones humming, resonating, in reaction to something she had witnessed in half sleep, like the sense of a stranger in a dark room. She tried to yell but couldn’t open her mouth, and the sound pushed through her teeth in a growl. She stomped the bones of her foot against the floor.

  She hated being reminded of bones, of body. She wanted to slam her fist against the plywood floor. The thought stung her knuckles. The warmth of imaginary bleeding. She conceded to the stranger somewhere—ghosts in a squat, ghosts everywhere you go. There was nothing she could do about that.

  She was too stoned, had been shooting more heroin, because she’d been getting more money. Down below, in the giant room with the boilers and sprawling pipes like a thousand copper snakes, just after sunset, treasures appeared. She kept finding things, good things, that she could sell. Knives, silver, old calendars—who knew? The remnants of paper making. The old mill, such an odd place. And pawnshops paid money for these things, which meant less money she had to earn by pleasing men, her head shoved down by sweaty hands in the front seats of strange cars. Every day, she marveled at what she’d find, what someone would pay for something other than drugs or sex. The treasures of ghosts appeared every few nights. And when she’d crawl down from the crow’s nest at the top of the powerhouse, down the rusted iron ladder to find treasure, she’d get fucked up. A short walk to Hayes Park to buy as much as she could and then crawl back to her fortress at the top with the big windows, where she hunted stars.

  Only there, hovering over streetlights and city halo, Alex was sure she’d find them. She had to climb, despite her plum-bruised forearms, to find a place farthest from light. This area of the city was easy to find drugs in. But she’d found more. Her white skin stuck out in this neighborhood, and the darkest skies made for the brightest stars. She felt special, rare, like a diamond, sparkling.

  Time taught her how dully she glowed, though, how stars wouldn’t shine like she’d hoped. She couldn’t find Cassiopeia, Orion, Virgo, just disembodied specks. She could never go far enough for stars. The city made them bland. Washed out the dark. Blended and blurred the intricate millions. So she settled for moon burn paling her motionless skin. Instead of finding herself against the dark, maybe she would fade into the powerhouse. She was ready to give up, blink out. She was high, and that was enough.

  “Did you hear something?” Sloan asked.

  Topper lit a fresh cigarette off the cherry of the one he’d been smoking. “You’re paranoid, man.” He exhaled a curl of smoke into a square of streetlight. The smoke looked like a dragon devouring its own tail. “Nobody goes inside this place. Just us.”

  “No. I heard something above.” He pointed into the endless ceiling. “Up there.”

  “Hear this.” Topper grabbed a damp piece of lumber from the floor and swung it against a boiler. “I’m mad as hell, and I’m gonna break some shit.”

  This time, they both heard a muffled growl from above, and they held their breaths. They slipped into a shadow space between two giant boilers. Topper stepped out first, chuckling to cover the sound of his heavy breaths.

  “You think someone’s here?” Sloan asked in a low voice.

  “If there is, I want to know how they got up there and why we haven’t figured it out yet.”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  “No way.” Topper tilted his neck back, allowing his vision to swim in the darkness above. “We gotta find out.”

  “It’s nothing that matters,” Sloan said.

  “It’s something.” He bolted up the nearest catwalk, his shoes clanking against the grates. “Let me know when you grow a pair.”

  “I got a pair. I got a brain, too, and it’s telling me to go home.” Sloan stepped out of the shadows but still spoke low. “Anyway, I got lawns to mow tomorrow.” He headed for the window they used as an entrance, soon to be his exit.

  By the time Sloan had his leg over the sill, Topper had spotted a ray of light whiter than the yellowed streetlights that gridded the inside walls. Following this light, he spotted rungs like train tracks against the wall, leading from the catwalk to the ceiling. Topper knew the maze of almost every pipe and catwalk, except for one path—from outside a crow’s nest set at the top of the powerhouse. The boys had never discovered the route from inside. Now he knew why: the first few rungs had been demolished, camouflaging the path. The city didn’t want them up there. Too close to the top. But like much of their efforts to safeguard the neighborhood, the few missing rungs wouldn’t stop anyone willing. Topper had enough desire and the luck to find it. Everything aligned just right, the moon strong and bright outside to reveal the path, a growl like a beacon to lure him. “We must be blind to have missed this. It’s the fucking top of the neighborhood.”

  Sloan paused, looked back toward his friend. He knew he’d have to go, make sure Topper didn’t do something stupid. The greatest heights meant the greatest powers, the greatest dangers. And it meant knowing every place of the powerhouse. He had no choice. It was finishing in a way. He imagined his shoes crunching the stones on top of Kilimanjaro.

  “Where are you?”

  “See this?” Topper flicked his lighter.

  Far above, Topper’s sparks lit up the room. Sloan followed the flashes up and around the catwalks until he found his friend already scaling the ladder they’d never found, always missed. Topper easily jumped the gap in the ladder and scrambled up the wall. The sound of his sneakers climbing the metal rungs made a ting ting.

  This time, Alex knew someone was there. The tapping of metal, the head sprouting from the floor. Then his shoulders. Here he comes. They found her. Ghost. Then two ghosts. Ghosts look
ing like boys with moonstruck wide eyes and hair cropped close to shiny heads. Factory workers from a previous time, must be, returned to recover the things she’d stolen and sold. She thought they’d be older. She’d been waiting for them. They’d absorb her in place of their treasures, suck her into their black-sky history.

  That could be, she supposed. There could have been child labor, like Blake’s little chimney sweeps. Fingers lost in pulp presses, ears dulled by mechanical roar, skin sliced by endless paper cuts. She smelled the grease and paper and blood. Oily red iron and pulp-caked steel. If it’s ghost children, so be it. They have the right to haunt just like any other. They worked hard to die.

  One stared down at her, wearing the crumpled brow of an older man. He was asking something of her. She felt her ether evaporating into a cloud, yellow, curling, pulling toward him. Her body was collapsing into human slush, puddle flesh. It was warm, quiet, soft, dark. Easy to go. She closed her eyes.

  “Think she’s dead?” Sloan asked his friend.

  Topper prodded her thigh with the toe of his shoe. Nothing. He kicked her softly. Her leg twitched. “Nope. Fucked up is what she is.”

  Sloan bent close to her and listened for breathing. “Are you sure?” He could smell her hair. Like dry dirt. Like the crushed concrete that circled the lot outside the powerhouse, the smell of their secret freedom.

  “She’s not dead, but she sure as hell ain’t here.” Topper picked up one of her arms and waved to Sloan with it, the limp fingers flopping hello. “She’s on Jupiter, man. Maybe fucking Pluto.”

  “That’s not cool. She might be in trouble.” He grabbed her limp hand from Topper, rested it gently in her lap. “We should call an ambulance or something. What if she’s ODing?”