One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist

by Dustin M. Hoffman

  “Then a dopehead dies. You think they give a shit about that, man? She’s hopping planets to us, but she’s definitely dead to them.”

  “Who’s them?”

  “You’re such a dolt.” Topper blew a cloud of smoke into her face. “The Man, man. The Man don’t care about her. The Man don’t care about us.”

  Sloan had heard this sermon before. Topper picked it up from his brother, who hated the world. Topper was crazy about his brother, and since his brother hated the world, Topper did too, found more reasons every day. It was stupid. The world was too big to blur all together.

  “Well, I’m not the Man, and I do care,” Sloan said.

  “You certainly are not a man, my friend, but that’s beside the point.”

  He ignored the insult. Sloan didn’t need to prove himself with a lip of soft hairs like the ones Topper grew on his lip, trying to look like his brother—the ultimate man, the righteous rebel. Sloan’s actions would make him a man. Just like Teddy Roosevelt, whom Mr. Bendele had taught him about. A rough-riding motherfucker who could still be a teddy bear.

  Sloan slid his hand under her legs, his arm rubbing against her buttocks. It made him tingle, and he felt warmth, wet. She was pissing on him. But heroes aren’t stopped by a little piss. He reached his other arm behind her neck, bent his knees, his face close to hers. Her jaw and lips were sunk, and it made her look like she was puckering. She was kind of pretty. A crooked nose in a pleasing way, short bangs that curled into her eyes. The way her eyes hid under those bangs intrigued him. Maybe she’d see him someday. Thank him. He struggled to stand with her in his arms.

  “What the fuck?” Topper laughed. “Here goes the tough guy again.”

  His friend tottered for a few steps with the weight of a woman in his arms. Topper thought she looked like a squashed spider, thin, lifeless limbs dangling. There was no way Sloan could go anywhere with this except into trouble. Topper’s aunt smoked meth. She’d sit on the couch for hours, disassembling alarm clocks and television remotes in a trance. She had no understanding of the precise arrangement of circuit boards and wires and plastic casings, but she carried on, taking everything apart and leaving electronic guts everywhere she went. Her face fell apart within months. She stopped being a woman. Stopped being a person. More like the jumbled mess of dissected electronics than any person. When she finally got busted, Topper’s dad had come to her defense, pleading with the cops. His silhouette became blank and black against the backdrop of blue and red lights flooding the street. They made his dad lie face down on the sidewalk, hands behind his head, while Topper and his brother watched from the porch. His aunt, a waste, had done this to his father. Kalamazoo was full of junkies. They were all just waiting to leech, suck the life out of people. And now Sloan carried one like she was Sleeping Beauty.

  Sloan wasn’t strong enough to do it alone, though, so Topper grabbed on to the legs of the woman for his friend’s sake. Her middle slumped toward the floor. They toted her like this to the ladder.

  “Okay, genius, how do we get her down?” Topper asked.

  “I don’t know.” Sloan peered through the access hole to the catwalk ten feet down and the continuing blackness below. “We lower her, like with a rope or something.”

  “Ah shit, I happened to pick this day to leave my utility belt at home.” He adjusted the weight of her legs higher up into his arms. “Where you gonna get rope?”

  “She’s pretty light. It’s not like we need heavy-duty rope or anything.”

  “Your ideas suck, man.” Topper spit his cigarette down the hole. The orange cherry bounced through the catwalk into the black below. “This is going to suck.”

  Rough plywood pushed against Alex’s lower back, her bare forearms, the back of her head. The two child ghosts stood above her. They slipped off their shirts like skins of white. Their chests reflected moon, waning and waxing pectoral as their bodies shifted. Maybe they weren’t ghosts. Instead of from the powerhouse below, maybe from above, from the sky she watched all nights, let burn into her own skin. They removed their pants, and their white shorts were the brightest sight she had ever seen. Like one of those constellations she could never find. She’d forgotten how amazing it was to put the pieces together. For specks to manifest heroes.

  “It still won’t be enough,” they said. They looked down at her, summing up the variables, calculating her deflated, gelatinous body. What else did they want? How could she be enough? “We’ll need hers, too.”

  Something of hers. They wanted to take it. Excavate. Salvage for parts. She wouldn’t stop them. She’d stolen their history, sold it to the pawnshop. She would compensate with body.

  “You do it.” One knelt near her head. She clenched her eyes tight.

  Her T-shirt lifted over her stomach, her breasts, bunching in the back. Fingers slid between her skin and jeans, fiddling with her buttons. Over her hips, knees, feet. Denim and cotton ebb. Everything soft gone. Every part of her cold. How could she resist the sky coming to her tonight? She could be Leda to see the sky so close, in the form of ghost children.

  “Congratulations on getting your first girl naked,” Topper said.

  “Fuck you. You can’t take anything seriously.” Sloan worked alone, knotting the woman’s clothes they’d removed to their own. He didn’t want Topper to notice the piss on her jeans. He’d make a big deal, give up. Sloan needed him. He was nervous around her. Topper never was. “She’s still got on underwear.”

  “All the same, credit where credit’s due,” Topper said. “This is completely fucking nuts, by the way.”

  Sloan wrapped the legs of his pants under the woman’s arms, crafting a makeshift harness. He tugged at the knots.

  “Now what?” Topper asked.

  “I think we’re ready to lower her.”

  “Down the fucking rabbit hole.” Topper tugged the woman’s legs toward the access hole where the ladder descended to the catwalk.

  “Slow down.” Sloan waddled behind, struggling to keep her head from skidding across the floor. “Stop. Stop.”

  “What, man?”

  “You can’t just drop her down. We have to do it right.”

  “Taking your time. You’re such a romantic.”

  Under Sloan’s direction, Topper wound the rope of clothes around his back, bracing himself. Sloan lowered her body, an inch at a time, through the hole. The rope jerked as she slipped over the brim, and Topper struggled to ignore the sting of the noose around his back. Sloan wrapped the rope around one arm and slowly let the knots strain through his palms. There went Topper’s black T-shirt, then Sloan’s tan cargo pants, the woman’s piss-soaked jeans. These knots strong enough to save a woman ground into the boys’ skin, forcing the same welts to surface on both of their bodies.

  Alex began a slow spin. She was sinking now. Lowering into a new place. Darkness, then squares of yellow light came and went and came again. Her shoulders felt heavy, armpits pulled and stretched. Legs lost already in an eddy of shadows. She couldn’t feel them. Would she ever find her legs again? Somewhere at the bottom? Hell’s a shoe closet full of toes and tendons and achilles heels. Body parts strewn about. Impossible to sort. You are stumps. You are pieces. She realized now she could not face dismemberment, being salvaged for parts, becoming a part of these ghosts’ world. She raised her arms, attempting to swim the air, birth herself upward from gravity. But she couldn’t break the knots they’d tied.

  They were getting close now. If Sloan’s palms held out, if Topper’s torso didn’t split, she’d land on the catwalk soon. And after that, Sloan thought, they would save a woman’s life. But in front of them, the fabric hissed, the sounds of failure. Sloan gripped tighter, slowed the rope’s drop. He could see it, the woman’s T-shirt, caught on a shard of metal over the access hole. The fabric was too weak; the powerhouse’s metal bones, too sharp. He tried to go faster now, yelled to Topper to let out more line. The rope burned harder into their skin, dragged them across the plywood. The rope snapped. Below,
they heard the woman’s body clang against the catwalk.

  They watched her through their rip in the universe, the one she’d fallen through. Their words bled down on her.

  “That was the dumbest fucking idea.”

  Alex could feel them. Legs again. Impossible discovery. Throbbing, pumping, but nothing in her left foot. No toes. Swept away.

  “Are you still alive, lady?”

  “What makes you think she’ll answer you now?”

  Alive? No way to tell. Hell hurt, right? She tried to move a hand to pinch herself. Or was that only for dreams? Her fingers lifted like boulders. She gave up, left them wherever they were.

  “Sloan, why do I smell like piss?”

  She smelled it, too. Those distant, hollow voices above commanded her senses.

  “What do you think we should do now?”

  “Hey, you’re the man with the plan,” one of them said. “I still smell piss.”

  She smelled it more acutely now. Ammonia pangs. What color would clouds of ammonia be in a nebula? Great curling fangs of blue or yellow? Torrent gaseous knuckles of brilliant green? No. Lower. Back to this world. Not a smell anymore. Something to feel. Feeling again. A well of shocking nerves from her left ankle just above her missing foot. Where was her foot? She lifted her head. The brightest white. Brighter than child ghosts’ bleached shorts. Her own little star gnashing bright through the darkness. This star was hers.

  Sloan made his way down first, deftly jumping the gap in the rungs. Topper followed now. He descended slowly, prolonging his feet planting on the metal grates of the catwalk. He didn’t want to see. He was all about ladies in their underwear, but he didn’t want to see how they could be damaged. When he finally reached the floor, his stomach lurched. A tiny, sharp bone jutted through the arch of her foot. It glowed, slick from blood in the moonlight. Like a star. They were hard to come by. It had been since last summer that he’d been far enough out of the city to see stars. His girlfriend at the time, she was sixteen and drove a Firebird, the younger sister of one of his brother’s girls, had taken him to a golf course in Augusta. No streetlights, no orange glow in the sky, only stars and blackness as they lay on their backs against a finely mowed putting green. He never knew how littered the sky was with stars, bright pin pricks. He made it to third base that night. Warm, dark places and brilliance.

  But it was obvious that this woman was in a bad way. She was mumbling now. When he got himself to look at her again, her breasts, covered in a black bra, were invisible, camouflaged in darkness. Her waist gone in black, too. But that tiny bone was so white. It’s what stopped her from being swallowed.

  “I said it before, man, and now it’s really time,” Topper said. “We gotta jet.”

  “We can’t leave her.” Sloan touched the woman’s forehead, feeling her temperature with the back of his hand as his mother might do. He scooped the bangs from her eyes. “We did this.”

  “No, man. She did this to herself. We should’ve left her where we found her.”

  “Then I’ll just call an ambulance. The cops maybe.”

  “Are you hell-bent on fucking yourself? Bad shit will happen to us if you call the cops.”

  “Help me get her out of here, or I won’t have a choice.”

  “Then what?” Topper cinched up his shorts. He was getting cold. He wanted to put his clothes back on. It was this lady, this damn junkie, who had him standing there stripped. And now she threatened to expose them further. He’d be paraded through the neighborhood in his underwear, highlighted by flashing blue and red, face down in shadows like his dad. Or like his brother, who’d gone to jail for a white woman. His brother couldn’t have hurt a woman. He loved women, just as Topper did. The wrong place with the wrong people and you got assumptions, court dates, rulings, permanent records. Nothing you did after could erase. This woman wasn’t worth it. He wished Sloan wasn’t so stupid. He wished Sloan wasn’t so good. “I can see how this is gonna turn out, and all of it ends with fucking me over.”

  “It’s not all about you.”

  “You’re a straight-A student.” Topper made a circle with his thumb and index finger and puckered into it. “A little ass kiss. Clean record. They’ll pin this shit on me. So, yeah, it’s all about me.” It was half-true. Half to save his ass, but the other half was for Sloan, his stupid friend and his perfect grades.

  “We were trying to help.”

  “Yeah, and I bet that’s exactly how they’ll see it,” Topper said. “You’re so blind. Two black kids strip a white woman and bust her up. Junkie or not, she’s white. White is right, man.”

  “Will you stop with that shit?”

  “Don’t leave me,” the woman said.

  The boys’ eyes darted to her body, a dripping puddle on the catwalk, tapping echoes onto the hollow boilers below. Her eyes and mouth were still closed. It seemed impossible for her to speak, like a baby sister’s first words.

  “What do you want us to do, lady?” Sloan asked.

  “Don’t make me dust. I want more stars.” She trailed off.

  “See, man. She’s crazy,” Topper said.

  “Let’s get her out of here.”

  The boys carried her by thighs and arms over and down the labyrinthine catwalks, toward the window on the second floor. They retied the clothes rope around her. Topper climbed out first to help from the ground. It was cold and late. He stood in front of his sleeping neighborhood, wearing nothing but shorts. He thought about bolting, felt his legs throb full of adrenaline. It would be so easy to leave it all in Sloan’s hands. He might not get in much real trouble. He couldn’t risk screwing up Sloan’s life, though, abandoning the pride of their neighborhood—exemplary student, mower of lawns, half-white—which had so little to be proud about. He hated his friend for making him care too much.

  Millie Bliss leaned her elbows on her knees. She’d been waiting an endless hour for boys to emerge men.

  One of the boys darted out a window of the powerhouse, slicing through the night in white shorts. Another body, gleaming with yellow streetlights, spilled through the same window. It didn’t move with the nimbleness of the boys. It floated like an angel. Where there was whiteness on the boys, blackness. Blackness across the waist and chest, refusing the yellow glow. This was no angel. Something sick and evil. The humid attic air caught heavy in her chest.

  She couldn’t stand the weakness of her night vision, the weakness of distance that the cold lenses of her dead husband’s binoculars could not cure. The toes of her boots tapped against each other. She pulled at the wrinkles in her neck. Angels with black waists and one missing boy promised a disaster. She knew it.

  In her husband’s closet, she found a black overcoat. She slipped a metal flashlight into one of the long pockets. Down the steps, she grabbed from the wall the small crucifix with the ivory Jesus; she’d need faith to face black angels. Near her front door, she grabbed her house keys, some matches, a photo of her husband in uniform holding an ice-cream cone—a man and a boy all in one. She put everything she could find into those pockets. Everything she might need to save the boys and the neighborhood: a handful of red-and-white mints, a hairbrush, a screwdriver, a hand towel, two spoons, her orange bottle of codeine. She swept through the door and across Belford Street. Past the houses and through the chain-link fence surrounding the powerhouse lot.

  Millie Bliss flattened against a wall of the powerhouse. She peered around the side. The hunched angel, at this point, was landing in the fingertips of one of the boys. She was no angel. A young woman in her underwear, the boy in his shorts. The flying, merely a dangle of clumped, knotted fabrics. It was all parlor tricks. Deception led to sin. Sin, to disaster. All the important things in her pockets felt heavy. This would be a matter of subtraction, not addition. She needed to remove the sin, save the boys.

  “Okay, I got her.” Topper’s whispers hissed alongside a lonely car rushing by on the street. “Get down here and take your woman.”

  Sloan tossed the rope of clo
thes and then jumped down. He felt so close to finishing now. He’d done the search, the rescue, now what? He took the lady from his friend’s arms.

  Topper picked up the rope and worked at the knots. To get his jeans free, he had to untangle Sloan’s T-shirt and the woman’s pants. To get his shirt, he had to loosen the knuckles that bound it to Sloan’s cargos. Everything was so fucking connected. A mess of knots. Why didn’t Sloan care about the tangles? The neighborhood could wake at any moment. All he wanted was to get his clothes free and get this thing over with. He felt small in his shorts and cold. The early a.m. chill of the late summer tightened his balls into an infant’s fist. He only had one leg of his pants free. The knot connecting to Sloan’s shirt refused to give.

  “Boys your age shouldn’t be out so late,” Millie Bliss said, walking toward Sloan.

  Topper yanked at the one pant leg he had free. He thrust his other foot into the hole still knotted tight, but as hard as he pushed, he couldn’t pull the pants to his waist. He stumbled to a standing position, gripping his jeans with tensed fingers. The clothes rope tailed at his feet, a shadow he couldn’t escape. But the intruder in their night paid little attention to Topper. She spoke to his friend.

  “Sloan, how are your parents?”

  “Fine, Mrs. Bliss.”

  “You better get home to them, or they won’t be so fine.”

  “Mrs. Bliss, it’s not what it looks like.” Topper stepped between the two of them, still struggling to keep his knotted pants up. “Sloan, and me too, we were trying to help. You don’t need to tell our parents, get anyone else involved.”

  She nodded and smiled, as if he were someone she’d known all her life. The recognition made him shudder.

  “Who else should be involved?” she asked. “I’ll bring my car around and take care of this mess.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Bliss.” Topper swung the tail of clothes rope over his shoulder.