“I don’t care much for him.” She pauses. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to bias you.”
She changes her tone, brightening.
“Are you a carpenter?”
“I was.”
“Oh,” she nods—now she understands. Her eyes are dark brown, and, juxtaposed to her lighter hair, pale skin, and orange freckles, seem incredibly deep. There’s the first hint of the pull of wrinkles at their corners. Knowing her age would dramatically alter her face, aging it or making it younger.
“Would it be insulting to ask if you’d like to do extra work—for me?”
I have no choice but pretend to be puzzled.
“I phrased that poorly. Were you a good carpenter?”
“Yes.”
“Would you be willing to help me with some things in my place? I was going to ask your boss, but . . . It isn’t much and like I said—well, they’ve been working there for a long time and haven’t gotten much done. I know Beth isn’t very happy with the work—or lack thereof.”
She stops, as if she needs to check in.
“Have you met Beth?”
“No.”
“She’s the owner. She’s very sweet.”
There’s a silence between us now. A bad one, as though neither of us can make sense of what she’s just said. She points at the tray.
“You’d better get that stuff up. You don’t want to mess up—being it’s your first day and all.”
She opens the door for me.
“Thank you.”
I go in.
“So will you think about it?”
“Yes.”
“When can you come by—after work? Maybe six?”
“That’s fine.”
She starts to go, then stops. “But tomorrow—not tonight . . . I can’t do it tonight.”
She’s not quite so cool anymore. Perhaps her hair, her clothes are, in fact, accidents.
“You probably don’t want to come straight over. You might want to make it seem to them that you’re going home. I mean, I don’t want to make it difficult for you.”
“Six is fine.”
She smiles sweetly, a bit girlish.
“By the way—Helena.”
“Good to meet you.”
She waits for a response.
“Ishmael.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Great.”
She lets the door close, looking at me, then turns away before it bangs shut.
When I get back upstairs, the lads are grumpy. I’ve been gone awhile. They do their best to hide it, the guys I don’t know, because they figure that I’m stupid. The Dubliner holds up a hand of forgiveness for his forgotten banana. Chris shakes his head when he sips his tepid drink.
I sit on the other side of the loft from the rest, wondering when this steak will leave me, contemplating hunger as the flip side. KC wanders over.
“Get lost, man?”
“Long line.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“You go to the one down the street?”
“Yeah.”
“Which one?”
“Down the street.”
He thumbs eastward. I point west.
“Broome, just before Canal.”
“Yes,” he says, too excited, as though he’s a game show host. “That’s the one. They busy?”
“Incredibly.”
“Man, I’d like a spot like that.”
“I suppose they do okay.”
“Phhfft!” he blows spit. “More than okay. More than okay. And you know the owner there?”
“No.”
“The big one, behind the counter, just watching. Sometimes he’ll bag things when it’s busy. Was he bagging today?”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Yeah, sometimes he’ll bag, but most times he’s just watching. He’s always watching, making sure nobody steals from him. If it was my place—pssst—I’d be gone.”
“You’d let people steal?”
“Mon, de wouldn’t need to steal ‘cause I’d be fair with ‘em. The motherfucking Mexicans he got back there—they got to steal. He don’t pay ‘em notin’.”
“You’d pay them?”
“Pssst!” He turns away as though I’ve insulted him. “You know I do other jobs, mon?”
“I suppose.”
“You know what I pay him?” He points to Bing Bing, who has already fallen asleep on a windowsill. “A whole lot more than he make here. You got to. You got to pay for it, man. Not be cheap like this guy.” He thumbs into the air at the unseen accused. No one else seems to be paying attention to his little rant. I don’t know how it happened, but we’re friends again, better friends than we ever were before. Perhaps the rest had already heard it all and I was merely a new ear. KC shakes his head and almost as abruptly as he started, ends his sermon. He feints a move away, then, as if to catch me off guard, stays.
“What happened, man?”
“What do you mean?”
“What happened to you, man? I thought you had big plans. Why you back with us?”
“I need a check, just like you.”
“Pssst! What you talkin’ ’bout na?” He points. “I thought you was a professor or something?”
“No. Nope.”
He looks at me with a canine suspicion.
“No, huh?” He nods his head. “All right. All right.” His face closes up again, and I can’t help but think that I’ve hurt his feelings. I offer up what I can.
“It didn’t work out.” A mumble. More for me than for him. It’s too quiet, and he’s already moved to a more guarded place inside—not willing to hear my story now, even if I was fully committed to telling him. I was born a poor black boy of above-average intelligence and without physical deformity and therefore I was chosen to lead my people, but some shit happened on my road to glory and I kind of lost my way. But I came back. They gave me another chance. But somehow it was different. And I don’t know if it was because I’d sobered up or because my mother had died or because the world had changed—or because of all those reasons. Or because somewhere along the way I had become just too damaged to be of any use to anyone. And so I never finished. I never wrote that dissertation because what the fuck can you definitively say about anything unless you pretend? Act like some circus ape gesturing and mimicking for petting and treats. And so never was tenured and so became a career adjunct—an academic mercenary—drifting from class to class, school to school, and could scarcely do that until one day, you wake up and you’re nothing and nowhere. Blah blah blah. Never finishing.
KC looks at me as though he’s witnessed me escape from a burning building—frightened, I suppose—morbidly and sympathetically curious.
“You okay, man?” he asks, giving me a bit more space. “Because it looked like you were looking at something that wasn’t there.”
“I’m fine.”
“Yo, you look high—not anymore—you looked high for a second. You had that faraway look in your eye.”
All of a sudden we go back to work. My lateness has actually done them a service—compressed the time between break and lunch. But for me it marks the amount of time left in this day—not so bad if I was building something, but the life of a paint scraper is tedious, hideous. The crud comes off but in no way is it archaeological. The strata, that past, is smudged and buffed into oblivion, and voilà: a brand-new skin. This is taking too long. I need toxic chemicals.
“What happened to you, man?” I see myself in the classroom slowly pacing in front of the students with a book held in the air asking, “Whose cup trembles? Who will drink in the world’s sorrows?” And them, looking back, some wide-eyed, some dead-eyed. There was the odd white native slacker, but they were immigrants’ children mostly—some, immigrants themselves, the blacks and Latinos, almost all of whom were first-generation college students, and mostly all of whom believed in the utility of knowledge. They’d made it through the city’s abominab
le school system and were having to listen to me go on about the qualities of this one’s syntax or that one’s style, perplexed as to how this figured into possessing a marketable skill set. And me wondering what the hell it was that I thought I was doing to them—for them. Fixating. Becoming vulnerable in public by immersing myself in the words. “The bone’s prayer to God is death.” One day in some academic outpost, some student had broken the spell—raised his hand:”. . . but my copy reads, ‘The bone’s prayer to death its God.‘” And I wanted to slap him, not out of embarrassment in the fact that I’d been reading it wrong for a decade, but because of the way he’d puckered his lips, as if he was now the secret master of that line. A little smug face quietly signifying that he got it.
* * *
“That’s lunch!”
They’ve already prepared for their escape. Safety glasses and masks are off. Chris is already walking to his coat while drying his hands. I climb down off the Baker and wait in line for the sink. The steak has disappeared in form and benefit, and I feel as though I haven’t eaten in days—light-headed, weak, jittery.
The sink is mine. A sandwich or whatever else I can scrounge up doesn’t seem as though it will be enough. I need more. I figure I’ll follow them to wherever they’re going. I’m sure, having been working here awhile, they’ve sussed out the cheapest spot.
I get to the elevator just in time to see Chris look up and KC look down. The door closes and the elevator clanks down. That’s not very nice is all that comes to mind at first, but each echoing metallic bang triggers a new qualification. The statement devolves to fuck-chump bastards. Then just to what I believe to be the sensation, the feel and sound of heat in the brain. Fuckin’ bastards. I mouth it this time as though it will dispel the heat via tongue of flame, but it comes out as a mumble and a hiss. I remember to push the down button. I smack it. It doesn’t light. I smack it again and try to remember if the light had come on before. I smack it again and then am contented to believe that the bulb is out.
The elevator clanks below and then the doors wrench open. I look out the window. They go into the street—south down Greene. None of them seem to be talking. They move like an errant shoal—not quite in unison, not quite apart. What is the secret communication between them that allows them to effect a pace and direction? Perhaps it’s as simple as time and proximity—a tacit agreement, its only purpose being expedience. And they’re gone.
They’ve left the radio on and I hear the horns—trumpet and sax—it’s Sly. And the bass. “I Want to Take You Higher.” But no. It shifts. It cuts out. More synthetic drums. I try to continue with Sly’s version in my head, but it’s been corrupted, bent, and now I can’t remember the first words, the tune. I think, but the monotone babble keeps me out of the song. “I Want to Take You Higher.” “I’ll take you there”—fly away to Zion. “What we call the beginning is often the end . . .” I can still recall, quite clearly, holding my mother’s urn while standing in a birch grove, wondering where my father was. The strange minister was waving his hand as though performing some hocus-pocus ritual to cleanse, or remember, or forget. Knowing that place then: knowing that place now; the street out there on a gray day. There aren’t any trees down there, only lamp posts. Patterns on the street flicker in light’s absence like leaf shadows in moonlight. Perspective and moonlight and memory shift, and you begin again and again. And what good is that? What good would it do to take a stand, to stop the cyclical occurrences? If the hero is the explorer, then the heroic act is to explore, to find origin, before the fragmenting effects of action, experience, memory, and meaning. Yes, I can smell the pear soap Claire uses for the children’s bath, the residue on her hands, the whiff of it when she’d scratch my stubble and whisper, “Shave,” in front of the babes, pregnant with sex. The ridiculous twinning of sacred and profane, the innocent and the erotic. “It’s going to be a rough row to hoe.” Whatever you said Gruntcakes, it was so true: No progress, Gruntcakes, in this twist of birth, fate, and fire.
Nothing has moved, so I push the button again. This time it lights and I can’t help but laugh, but when it comes out, it sounds like a nasty little cackle—unfit for a prince of the world.
It’s brighter outside than I thought it would be. Even in the gray I have to squint. I follow their trail, ignoring the fact that I can’t actually track them across the slab. It’s a shame, really, how dead my senses are. I want to be able to retrace their footsteps—moisture, scent, heat—like a pit viper perhaps, create an image in my brain with other sensory devices. Although I’m not sure what I would do when I found them—envenomate one, then swallow him whole.
* * *
I find them at the deli. Everybody’s ordering the two-dollar chicken—half a scrawny bird from the old rotisserie with two sides. My crew stands by the case, single file, not talking to one another. KC is no longer my friend, I suppose. He doesn’t acknowledge me when I get on the line. I look at the case, the processed meats with their claims of quality. The slicer on the back counter is gummed up with meat and cheese residue—mad cow prions on the blade. I follow their lead and get the special. I can’t seem to convince the squat man behind the counter that I don’t want the gray vegetables or any other side. He stuffs my container with gooey white rice.
They all pay and leave without me, still not talking to each other, and they stay a good twenty yards in front of me outside. When I get back to the building, they’ve already gone up, but someone’s wedged a small piece of cardboard in the door to keep it open for me. When I get upstairs, they’re all in their sills eating. I take my place behind the Baker and inspect my lunch.
When I open the Styrofoam container, I get hit with a moist blast of ancient fleshiness. I gag. That passes and then the odor turns somewhat pleasant and I’m suddenly very hungry. I poke at the breast with my plastic fork. The skin is dark and crispy with a slight oil sheen. The knife cuts through it all with surprising ease. My stomach says something rude and impatient. I take a bite. The skin is delicious, salt, olive oil, and garlic, but the rest is awful—overcooked to the point where the first bit of flesh has fused with the skin, transformed into an additional layer of dermis. It’s hard and sharp like densely packed fingernail clippings. I swallow it anyway.
I try another tack. I cut the chicken up, discard the bones, and mix the meat in with the rice, which is close to pudding in consistency. It should ease the passage of the flesh shards down. The others have finished. Some recline in their sills. Chris is up, headphones on, but he’s not nodding. He walks to each man, offering a cigarette. He makes it to me, offers, looks at my remaining food and apologizes with a shallow bow and step backward. I close the container and he offers again. I haven’t smoked since C was born, but I want one. I go for one and then see the label on the pack. They’re menthol.
“Why you boys gotta smoke on candy canes?” coos the Dubliner from two sills over. I lean out to see him. He holds out a pack of Marlboros.
“What you like?” asks Chris. I don’t answer, but I try to bend my face into an expression of sheepish apology. He understands, takes another, deeper bow, and backs away again. “Laddie, throw that back over this way.” He flips it to Chris with a slight grin, amused by his poor attempt at an accent. Chris takes one out, hands it over, and lights me. I drag and the smoke seems to fill my head instead of my lungs and I almost pass out. I exhale, and my senses return in time to see Chris zip the pack sidearm back to its owner.
I nod to Chris, “Thank you.” He puts his hands together, bows again, and turns. I wave to the Dubliner, “Cheers.” He waves back, shaking his head. He closes his eyes. I do, too. I take another drag and try to follow the smoke in, but all I see are hands passing chickens from a dingy walk-in, up a flight of stairs, to hands that skewer them, then hands that set the skewered birds in the oven; and I wonder how many times around does a raw bird spin before it transforms into a two-dollar special. I forgot how powerful and versatile a cigarette can be: as an appetite suppressant; a digestif; time b
ender, extender, or killer; a tool you can use to swap dull dinner conversation for a quick look at the moon and stars; and perhaps functioning best as something to focus on—an extension on which you can hang and let dry your rage and sorrow. I know I’m hooked already.
KC wanders over. He looks troubled. Everyone, through lidded eyes, watches him as though he’s going to say something. He stops a few steps away from me and paws at the air in my direction.
“Hey, man?”
I don’t respond quickly enough.
“Hey, man?”
“Yeah?”
He tries to keep a straight face, but he finds whatever he’s about to say too amusing.
“I saw you outside this morning—you know?”
“Yeah?”
“I know what it was made ya took so long.” He rubs his hands together and sweeps the room to make sure everyone’s getting this.
“You was rappin’ to dat lady out there.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” Pause.
“And notin’, man. It’s fine.” He checks the room again. “She sure got some nice titties, though.”
They all fall out. For emphasis Chris rolls off his sill and onto the dusty floor. KC tries to talk over the yelps.
“Just kiddin’, man—no, really, you g’wan see—she don’t talk to none of us. You g’wan.”
Chris gets up and restores order by slowly walking back to his tool belt. He straps it on, and the rest of us follow. I catch myself smiling for no reason and gesturing at the window frames and unused sandpaper. This method will not do. I walk over to the paint supplies and find a new gallon tin of stripper, shop rags, a bag of cotton gloves, and a box of masks on which it’s plainly stated that they are to be used only for filtering dust and pollen. I get a small bucket and an old brush and set up on the Baker.
Man Gone Down Page 23
