One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (8 page)

Before I went home that night, I stocked up the van. That man with that mess of curls stuck in my head at the store, haunting me through the aisles, tugging at my pant legs, saying,
I want this. I need that
. And when I showed up the next day, I had ice-cold water and beer and sandwiches and cigarettes and, sorry, though, no solution for the bucket issue. What I did have was barber scissors, and for twenty bucks, they could eat a sandwich, drink a beer, and get their hair cut. I remember working the freight yards; by the time you clocked out, all the barbers were closed. Curly’s paychecks probably went straight to the bartender, because no one else was open.

Within a few weeks, I was banking more than I’d ever made hawking ice cream to little shits. Roger and Frida’s bank account swelled up, and I had a queue of classic videos from Lacy Stacy’s stacked on my
VCR
.

And the workers, my boys, I was so proud of them. Through the weeks of my visits, those holes in the ground bloomed. Those boys took the materials stacked in their truck beds and built full-fledged homes, easy as Lincoln Logs. They couldn’t have done it so fast without me there to hydrate and feed them, to take care of their every need. They loved me for what I provided them, and I loved them for loving me. We were happy.

One day, a few weeks in, I was trimming Julius’s brown curls, him straddling a sawhorse, me smiling over top of his lush, sawdust-filled locks. It was lunchtime, so a dozen of the other young men lounged around the van, sipping beers, licking Freedom Cones, gnawing my homemade egg-salad sandwiches. In the distance, I heard a familiar tinkling. The long-healed bruises on my skull pulsed anew. I tried to hide it from my boys, but my grinding teeth betrayed me, flashed my anxiety like an insole welt to the
forehead. They huddled around me, offered sips from their beers. Julius tipped his head back, stared me right in the eyes, and once he got a look at whatever showed on my face, he reached back and patted my arm, nodded.

The zebra van rolled into view, slowed near the finished houses. Finished but not sold, not yet full of little shits. This was still a place for young workingmen. My customers. The boys mingling around me crossed their arms, snarled their lips at the van. All except Wilson, the one who’d chased me the first day, the biggest man on-site. I couldn’t blame him for the hunger he bore deep in his endless gut. He sprinted after that zebra van, yelled, “I scream for ice cream, boys!” And the boys around me shook their heads, said, “Fuck him, Mr. Denning. That stupid fat ass can’t find his own dick, let alone a sense of loyalty.”

And I said, “I don’t mind, fellas.” Because I knew he was young. They were grown men but still boys in so many ways, still guided by flitting wants. The long term was eons away.

The zebra van slowed, parked, and Wilson ran up to the side. He spread his thick fingers across the window, peered inside, rapped on the glass. And I thought that was fine, just fine. A man can’t hold on to his customers any more than he can hold on to anything he loves in this world. If you love something, let it go, and all that.

The zebra stripes started to quaver, bounced slightly up and down. I wondered if maybe the van was rumbling on a bad engine. The stripes bounced more, and then the tires facing me left the ground for the briefest of seconds. Wilson wasn’t waiting for ice cream; he was pushing the van, rocking it back and forth. Three more boys from Wilson’s framing crew sprinted toward the van, hammers waving above their heads. They pounded against the zebra stripes, the ring of steel on aluminum drowning out the tinkle of “Camptown Races.” Soon, more boys ran toward the truck. The ones who’d stayed by me, who’d crossed their arms and rebuked Wilson, now smiled like children, sprinted toward the van, until it was swarmed by men, swinging their tools, rocking
the van with their grime-smeared arms, work boots dug in to the hot blacktop.

I thought I heard a squeal and like to imagine that was my competition inside shrieking in fear. The van stuttered forward, pushed out of the mob of my boys and out of my subdivision.

Julius leaned back on the sawhorse, pointed at the van. “We only need one ice-cream man.”

The men chased the van as far as they could, until it rolled out of sight and the air grew silent. The back of Julius’s head faced me, so he didn’t see the tears I held back. I think he knew how I felt, though, when he said, “A little more off the top, old man.”

But nothing lasts forever. The
SALE
PENDING
signs popped up, and the trucks and white vans drove onward. They didn’t tell me where they were going next, just nodded their trimmed heads and shoved off. Maybe they thought I knew where they were going. Maybe they figured the world was full of men like me who could take care of them. Providers are just supposed to be there. I tried not to resent them, tried to understand that’s just how it goes.

One crew remained, though. The painting-touch-up crew was always the last to leave. They had a final day of work left and two haircutting appointments with me. I was sure one of them would invite me to the next site, tell me how much my van meant to them, beg me to follow them forever. I hopped into the giraffe van, the morning sun gleaming up those glorious last strands of fraying hope. I smiled and turned the key, thinking about Roger and Frida and how they could be as close as a plane ticket, when I got smacked in the temple.

I came to in the back of my van, arms tied behind my back, three Jimmy Carter masks staring at me. A fourth Carter sat in the driver’s seat. It was one thing to knock me around but quite another to drive another man’s giraffe. So I kicked the closest Carter in the groin and tried to scramble to my feet. They shoved me back on my ass, and the Carter I kicked laid into my back with the ice-cream scoop.

Once he tuckered out, I said, “All right, boys, what could possibly be the problem now? I’m off your turf. I did everything you asked, much as it hurt my pride.”

“We’re claiming new turf,” the biggest one said. “We claim all suburbs. There’s no more need for your freezer-burned products.”

That got the heat burning into my face. I’d never sold a bite of freezer-burned ice cream to any customer and never would. But I fought back the anger riling inside me.

“No business there but workingmen. They hardly buy enough ice cream for me to pay insurance on my van.”

“Been selling more than that.” The Carter I’d kicked picked up my barber shears, snipped twice at the air. “And I don’t remember us giving you permission to sell products outside the ice-cream family.”

Those air snips didn’t intimidate me. I gave up asking for permission a long time ago, after my daddy died in a box of pacifiers and after I quit living in his work boots, clocking in and out of the freight yards. I rushed the Carters, slammed headfirst into that bastard snipping my barber shears. We fell to the floor, me on top, him screaming like a little shit who’d just dropped his Super Dipper Cone. I didn’t see what all the screaming was about. I’ve become a husky man, but short, not the kind of frame that could carry scream-inducing weight. A young fellow should be able to take a blow and wear a bruise like a man. My daddy taught me that lesson my whole life.

I rolled free of the screaming Carter and waited for the others to pound on me again. But they stood there, toothy Carter smiles gawking down at us. And the one just kept on whining. The orange handles of my scissors jutted from his gut, made him look like one of those toys you wind up.

The Carters hovering over us wheezed through their breathing holes. Their eyes flitted behind molds of shiny rubber. Finally, one of them nodded and then whispered into the driver’s ear. The van slowed. I stared at the stabbed Carter writhing on my van’s floor, a trickle of blood streaming toward the freezer. I only looked up once I heard the door slide open. The Carters jumped out, tucked
and rolled as if they evacuated moving vans every day. The front door popped open, and out went the driver. They all jumped ship, left their little friend to bleed out in my truck.

The van crept along unmanned. Just as I scrambled to the front seat, the van smacked into a telephone pole. I sat behind the wheel, staring at the pole, waiting for it to snap and crash down on top of us. The van had stalled out, and I listened to the cooling engine. Tick-tick-tick. The pole didn’t budge. So I had to decide what to do next. And sometimes the world is like that. Sometimes it’s not as easy as getting smashed by a telephone pole.

That bleeding bastard in the back hollered worse. He’d rolled over onto the shears and switched from shrieking to sniffling, moaning for his momma between sucking snot through his mask’s breathing holes. Why doesn’t anyone ever call for their daddy when getting stabbed with barber shears?

I started up the van. The hospital was only a few miles away. I could drop him off and still make my appointment with the painting crew, if I hurried. The telephone pole had cracked the windshield; two streaking lines shaped into a Y, two skinny arms reaching out from a center. The tinkler wouldn’t shut off, kept bleating the same first dozen notes of “Flight of the Bumblebee” over and over again. Each time it restarted, which was every two seconds, the bleeding Carter in the back howled.

I couldn’t just drop moaning, bleeding Carter at the front door of the emergency room. My busted-up giraffe kept spewing an insane flurry of incomprehensible notes. Not much of a getaway vehicle. So I pulled up to the back of the hospital, slid open the door, and rolled Carter’s slumped body to the strip of grass between road and parking lot.

Just as his body tumbled out, he got some fight back in him, said, “Fuck you, old man.”

I laughed, standing over him, me safe in my giraffe and him bleeding out in the grass. Just goes to show that the man who seeks his manifest destiny beats the man who stumbles along as a follower, wearing a mask, cowering in the crowd. You see where it
got him. Whereas, I was free to continue on, making a difference for my working boys and supporting my babies, who were no longer babies. No longer babies but full-grown people who probably called some insurance salesman named Bob, Dad.

I drove onward to my appointment with the painting boys, toward—I don’t know. Freedom, money, the American dream. A giraffe and a broken song and a van full of ice cream. Carter had called me “old man.” If I was old, how old was he? Where did he come from? Anyone could hide behind that mask. And maybe a kid with spunk like his would’ve left Bob the insurance salesman’s home and struck out on his own. Maybe he’d hit the open road, seeking to feel the hot blood of freedom pumping through his rebellious veins, that blood now dripping through blades of hospital sod.

I turned back toward the hospital, left the painting boys wearing their hair long. They’d keep building houses, keep moving, find their own needs. When I got back to the parking lot, no one had found Carter yet. It was me or nobody. I parked, left the engine running, stepped toward the crumpled body in the grass. He was still moaning but quieter now, a guttural lullaby. He didn’t swear at me when my body cast a shadow over him. I knelt, slid my arm under his neck. He was all Carter from the neck up, but through the rubber eyeholes, brown—like millions of others’ eyes but like mine, too. I slipped my fingers under Carter’s chin, felt the tight skin of a young man underneath. The sandpaper of two days of stubble, a man who didn’t care about being clean shaven, about strangling himself with a tie in a cubicle. I pulled back the rubber mask to his lips and then stopped. I would see this man’s face soon, after I took him inside, paid his hospital bill with Roger and Frida’s savings account. And then I’d know. This young man could sit in the passenger seat, learn the true meaning of freedom, see a man run his own business. He could follow my path to freedom, a path that didn’t need a past, only a will to drive down any new road, still soft with fresh blacktop, the tires sticking at first but then pulling free.

Our van swerves the subdivision curves, in and out of cul-de-sacs. The moon blares, white and shiny as our van. We are invisible in this gleaming box. We look like workers. Workers look like us. We can sneak in and steal all we deserve.

The back has no seats. Ribs and Lizzy bounce and bobble across the cold metal floor. Ribs stands, braces, pressing his palms against the walls. His long arms stretched, he looks like a skeleton Jesus, thin layer of skin and T-shirt over those jutting ribs. So many damn ribs. Lizzy’s balled in the back corner. Trying to stay so small she can’t fall.

Cal aims us square at a mailbox but pulls left just in time. Tires squeal. Van lurches. Ribs and Lizzy thud against the right wall. Cal can’t keep his big horse teeth in his mouth, laughing it up while we risk blowing cover. What the hell’s the point of finding a white van as invisible as a workingman’s van, then? Why the hell go begging Lizzy’s ex-stepdad to ask his new brother-in-law, Stew, to borrow one off his used-as-shit bad-loan lot? And Lizzy had to act all cute, leaning over his desk and flashing down her low-cut shirt and talking baby voice. That used to be her dad in a way, and that’s something just not right. But a stepdad ain’t a dad-dad—our stepkids never let us forget that.

We slap Cal’s head for wasting Lizzy’s cleavage. Time to drive straight and be hidden and aim for the houses in the back that are getting built. Ones where no people live. No families yet.

Not like that one with the light glaring upstairs and a shadow of a kid staring through lacy curtains. That kid looks like he’s looking at us. We don’t want that. We want scabbed siding, gravel lawns, garage doors like gaping black mouths. Houses where people work instead of live. Houses like where we used to work before they stopped making families to make houses to make work.

Cal parks the van. We tumble out. Ribs hurls. Lizzy laughs. Cal pisses in the moonlight. We scope out this back cul-de-sac. Four half-finished houses. We each pick one and split.

In the dark, alone, wearing all black, we wait for our eyes to adjust. Our bodies feel like nothing. Lighter than Ribs’s rail-thin frame. We cough or clear our throats or giggle or tap our teeth just to be sure we haven’t turned shadow. We rub our thighs, pinch our necks. When we’re certain we’re here, no fooling, we hunt.

We hunt closets. We hunt basements. We hunt cabinets and garages and behind the furnace. We hunt alone, but there’s Lizzy’s flashlight sparking up the basement window next door, or maybe that’s Cal’s house. Neighbors of the absent. Not so much alone as apart. Not so much apart as departmentalized, delegated, defined by what we don’t do anymore, defined by what we find. And we find lots.

We hug armloads of hand tools, shiny and Stanley. Ribs drags a compressor heavy enough to rip his sparrow bones. Cal says he’s got the motherfucking mother lode back in his master bedroom walk-in. Lizzy says screw that. She found a score under the drops in her garage. This sub has never been hit, we realize. This sub is full of trust. Workers who never had to rebuy their tools from the pawnshop. Workers who never hit famine, only feast.

Tile saw, table saw, miter saw, nailers, and two hundred squares of oak tongue and groove from Lizzy. Three cordless radios and a Honda generator from Cal. Ribs thinks he doesn’t have nothing worth taking. Ribs says his stuff is too dirty and beat-up, but
we know better. Ribs found himself a painters’ stash: Graco gas-powered sprayer,
HVLP
with two guns, buckets of brushes, enough extensions poles and ladders to extend across the sub. All of it paint speckled to hell. But Lizzy isn’t afraid of dirty. She spent three years painting for her stepdad’s best friend, Big Dave. But she got tired of him snapping her bra and peeking up her shirt when she was way up the ladder. So one day, she kicked out his ladder legs.

We pack up the van as fast as we can, because Cal is getting twitchy. He keeps scratching his neck, grinding his teeth, saying how he sure as shit won’t get popped on parole. We let him worry. Worry makes him fast, even though he loads like an angry-drunk garbageman. Crash goes a nailer. Fuck you, claw hammer. What are you looking at, Sawzall? We want to hush him, but we don’t. We know about his four hungry babies at home. About his twenty years swinging hammer and then fired and nothing. No 401(k)s for us. No pension. Not a damn thing on paper. So, yeah, fuck those bosses and these bosses and everyone who can afford these tools.

The van fills too fast, and we’ll have to ditch the oak tongue and groove. Cal heaves a last bucket of hand tools into the van, lets whatever can fit crash in the nooks, and the rest clinks to the concrete. Down the street, five houses blaze up. Families waking. Families getting wise, knowing no workers work this late. Cal slams the back doors, and when they don’t shut, he rams with his shoulder. He slides into the driver’s side door, hollers, Hurry the fuck up.

Just one seat left on the passenger side. Even the space between the front bucket seats is crammed with drill cases. A good haul. Too good. No room for us. Not all of us gonna ride tonight, Cal says. Sorry, Ribs, Cal decides. I mean, just tough luck for now is all, Cal hums. Cal’s logic: Ribs can risk. Ribs has no priors, and he can walk, and we’ll pay him when we meet up again, in Lizzy’s parking lot. Right? Cal says. I mean, right?

Ribs balls his fists, eyes wide, whites glowing in the moon. Sirens in the distance. Maybe those sirens sing for us, maybe not.

True, Ribs has no priors. But Ribs is so skinny. Ribs is gypsum
dust blowing away in the breeze. Ribs is a baby, not even twenty, and so full of poke marks and purple blotches. Too much.

Lizzy climbs in. Her van. Her spot guaranteed. Cal is revving the engine, pointing. Right? he repeats. Right? Just one spot left. I push Ribs inside, close the door. They skid off, and I hightail it through the yard. I’ve got priors. I’ve screwed up many times. But I don’t shoot up. I don’t have any habit anymore but a ten-year-old named Lucinda. I don’t have a job, but I run every day, three miles, five miles. Sometimes I just run and run around my block until my legs melt. It feels like work, something like what I used to do. And now all that running means something. I sprint into the next yard, weave saplings, hurdle bushes, hop fences. Lights flick on, but I disappear just as fast. Into another yard and another, chasing darkness.

Those sirens are for me for sure now. Coming and coming. I’m so close, nearing the edge of the houses, the road ahead. I roll into a ditch, duck, wait while the sirens pour into the sub. Ribs and Lizzy and Cal are long gone. And no one will find me. Because I left the work of stealing work. I’m here, crouched, hiding, spying my way out. Above me, that still-lighted window watches. That shadow kid gazes out of lace curtains, peeking out of his warm room and trying to imagine a world outside. And I hope that kid takes forever to figure out that what’s outside is empty, is invisible in the night, is me.