One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (11 page)

He’s running through his romantic dream lines again. Every piece of rubbish Alton finds stores some secret power of Jamaica. Tonight, he’s close enough to shore to stand, and over his bony shoulders his skeleton fingers grip and shake the necklaces around his neck. I’m so used to seeing only his head and his white beard that I’m surprised to see a body of twigs. So skinny, I wonder how he keeps going. His flicking tongue and giant dentures are the thickest parts of his body.

“Don’t you love the way he talks, Toby,” Mrs. Truman says. “We should have him get a drink with us.”

“How about it, friend?” Mr. Truman says. He pulls a few dollars from inside his Speedo, and I’m surprised he can fit anything else in the fabric stretched tight over his crotch. “You look like you might want a drink and a bite to eat.”

Alton scratches a long fingernail against his dentures. “Fe dem beads?”

“We want you to have a drink with us,” Mr. Truman says again slowly, like he’s talking to a toddler. “Maybe we’ll find him a date, a soul mate. We’re pretty good at that. Right, babe?”

“Me sell beads, but can nyam wid yu.” Alton pulls the necklaces
off his neck and holds them out to Mr. Truman. “No wan’ banggarang fe carry-go-bring-come lakka me.”

“He wants to, right?” Mr. Truman looks my way, smiles. He aims the money at me. “You could join us, too. You’re both our friends here now.”

I take the money, just like Alton would. But my pockets are so stuffed it won’t fit. “We’re not really supposed to do that, sir, Mr. Truman.” I wad the bill into a little ball about the size of one of the beads on Alton’s necklace.

“Yu ’av’ a twang dem get. Fe me dey sayin’, ‘No send, mon.’” Alton strips the necklaces from his neck, hands them over. “Tell dem ginnals me no mawga dawg. Tell dem I jus’ sellin’, not beggin’.”

I hold the Trumans’ money and Alton’s necklaces. They’re made of coffee beans and watermelon seeds needled through with nylon. I’ve seen thousands of these. I’m holding everything, but no one will get what they want. Maybe Alton, if I decide to toss this tiny ball of dollars, and then he’ll take the Trumans’ wadded crotch money and let the sea wash away their sweat as he wanders down the shoreline. He’ll drag his bones for a mile, until he reaches land not owned by one hotel or another, where he can step to the sand and not worry about trespassing. If I could, I’d follow him to that nowhere beach. I’d slip into the night and forget about the Trumans waiting at the bar for me to speak without my twang. But I can’t. I must join them while Busha Paul watches and the bartender pours me a drink that I won’t drink. They’ll talk and I won’t talk about my boys and Adina. The Trumans don’t need to know about Alton’s callused feet or my drip-drip roof. And once they get home, open their luggage, the seeds and beans will have broken from the string. The conch’s tongue will be all dried-up and dead.

I met Franco Simms in the summer. Exterior job—boss says I’m too messy to work on interiors, but I’m fast—a faded green two-story house on one of the hundred lakes that dot central Michigan, a beach-house rental we were painting with a new coat of green. Greener. Greenest. It was Franco’s first day with us, but I found out later he’d been painting for years, decades, his whole life, came out his mother on a ladder with a brush in his hand the way the guy talked about it. I could tell from the start the guy was a talker.

It was July, right after the Fourth, fresh from a long weekend. Back to painting green, and tired, most of us hungover. Franco drove up in the morning, black licorice hanging from his mouth. He had short black hair, a bushy mustache, dark eyes, but everything else was white: pale skin, painter whites from shoes to shirt, all brand-new and spotless. The rest of the crew and me wore jeans and tank tops we’d shuck in a few hours. We were tan, pocked in green paint smears. Boss started Franco out with painting—no scraping, no spackling, no sanding, all the sweaty, dirty work done for him, right into a green cutting pot. Boss had told me I’d meet a real painter, a guy who could teach me how to swing a brush. But Franco was just another one of those old guys who thought they
knew everything, set in their ways. I say, show me any old real painter, and I’ll paint circles around him all day.

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 this 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.