Trenton Makes

by Tadzio Koelb

  Kunstler himself came close on occasion to exchanging blows with the others, but with the closing of his fist he would recall the sound it would make against another man’s skull, the knock of bone on bone, and that remembered echo brought him back to himself, caused him to retreat. Even contained, though, the violence was there, it was contagious, so even the girl would sometimes fill with it, brew her own quiet form of savagery, his hidden anger calling somehow to hers like a siren song until they would fight.

  Once in their kitchen she threw her drink at him, but so weakly that she failed to break the tumbler. Kunstler picked it up from the floor. He checked for cracks and then wiped the outside with his palm. Then, standing in the puddle of gin and vermouth, he filled it again: more gin, more vermouth. He said, “Well,” quietly, and then paused, and then put the refilled glass on the table in front of her again. He walked back to the bedroom and a moment later the girl Inez followed, and when she got there she called him a bastard and pounded him on the shoulder a few times and then hit him on the chest, which hurt more, until finally Kunstler pushed her to her bed where she stayed and cried.

  In the kitchen he found her glass still on the table but empty. He filled it again and started back and on second thought turned to take the bottle, just the gin, which he drank straight while she sipped mournfully. Later she cried some more and he held her; then came the moment when she stripped and lay on her side, an offer to his hands although that wasn’t what she preferred.

  * * *

  ·

  It couldn’t have worked while the dance hall was still open. The girl was simply too unhappy there, and always on her guard, careful of the men who paid to grope her, the managers who were always breathing down her neck. They needed the money, so she wouldn’t quit, but still she complained about it, the same gripes as ever: that the booze was watered, the band out of tune and lazy and on orders to play everything so fast that each song was a grinding trot. Worse than anything else was the other girls, who disliked her so much they stopped talking when she went to the powder room between sets.

  They wouldn’t change the subject, she told him, or pretend they hadn’t been catting about her: she knew, and they knew, and to try to hide it was a lie they wouldn’t go far enough to attempt. They just weren’t going to let her hear the actual words. Instead, to the sound of the girl’s urine hissing in the bowl and the muffled bar noise from past the beaverboard wall they struck matches and fixed their lipstick and slipped off shoes so they could massage their feet. As she left their voices started up again. She didn’t complain, but at home he watched her through an eye half hidden in factory grime as she tried artlessly and with bravery to conjure the whole of custom by herself, the mysterious liturgy of female social interaction, gossip and laughter and knowing talk passed around in a coffeepot and divvied up with sugar tongs. This was how she would briefly conceive a whole and different existence, the kind she seemed to think belonged by rights to someone with a man and a home, a woman with hot running water and matched twins on layaway, who proudly bought doilies and aperitif glasses and flowered teacups with saucers. The thought of it erected in Kunstler a disgust that was also fear: he hated to think of her driven by this low ache to seek something not already contained in the apartment.

  When the dance hall closed for good that year, Kunstler had worried that the girl would be forever and irretrievably finished with dancing, but in fact she never seemed to tire of it. It began the moment in the morning that Kunstler, washed and fully dressed, his face carefully and generously lathered, turned the short crescent grip of the lock and swept open the bathroom door to let the shower’s steam escape. While he shaved, Inez brushed the previous night’s gin from her teeth to the sound of the radio—jazz or swing, no dull symphonies conducted by some long-hair—and honored it in gestures concentrated to suit the space.

  The radio came with them to the kitchen. The combined heat of summer and stove as she made breakfast would turn her slip into a clear cascade of sweaty cotton through which he could admire her soft white breasts and thighs, the rosy flowering of her nipples, the blue vein that rose to under her arm. Even seated across from him while he ate, her bare feet on one of the other chairs, she waved her hand to the music, choreographing the smoke from her cigarette.

  It was there, in the dance she performed in the morning in their home, that Kunstler first perceived the beautiful complexity of it, as if someone had snatched away a panel to reveal the intricate pattern of cogs beneath: the advances and retreats, the range of motions, the fluidity, the relationship to the music. Seeing her dance later with the men he found for her, he was able to admire the control and skill, the command of the human machine. In every movement, in the angle of her head or wave of an arm, in every contraction and release of her body in the tight dress, the very flexing of her fingers, he saw operation, manipulation. Even her wildness, even her drunken rocking, was dexterity, a variant she cultivated, and he wondered at how unconscious it appeared, the spectacle of a bird in the air with no thought for the miracle of flight. Still it was a miracle he understood best in the reduced and limited dance she performed barefoot in the confines of their kitchen, a revision, a scaling, each gesture intentional, controlled, engineered. In the bars he was too distracted, maybe: always hunting for the right face, the right look. He stood at the bar and drank while she danced, his job to see to it she always had enough booze in her to be flirty, to giggle, to jump in a way that shook the meat in her thighs and made her eyes flash at the sound of the horns. The men all watched, and from within his blind, Kunstler watched them back, observing, judging, looking at them with the scrutiny of a breeder—but also through them, waiting for the one who would be the lens by which he could see the future.

  To the enduring and perpetual dream of the factory he thus added this new vision, one that for the time had its own requirements, made its own demands in the form of long nights and music and alcohol. Just as his body and his will were one thing, the visions, the new and the old, both necessary now, were pieces ill fitted but nevertheless parts of the same engine, pieces that grated uncomfortably against one another in the mornings where their edges met. He knew this, of course, although maybe he didn’t know just how dangerously they rubbed, how loud was the grinding of the gears as they fought to change speed, until the day Cowie, the new floor man, called to him, “Kunstler, over here,” and when Kunstler nodded in recognition but kept working as if to finish what he had started, said, “Close that, come on,” with a tone of almost satisfied aggravation in his voice, one in which the resentment of all the others that lay fallow but ready was present and eager.

  Kunstler let fall the top on the stuffing box and without haste walked the ten feet to where Cowie stood. It was typical of him, Kunstler thought, to make someone walk over.

  “You’re working with no gloves now?” Cowie said. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Oh.” Kunstler shrugged. He didn’t even look down at his hands. There was a pause before he said, “Guess I forgot them. I’ll go put them on now.”

  Cowie made a face. “Oh my Jesus, Abe. You stink of booze. Are you drunk?”

  “I went out last night. I’m just sweating it off a bit.”

  The manager passed a hand over his heavy red face, then took the little man by the arm. Kunstler let Cowie lead him across the floor and through the far door into the concrete stairwell. Cowie held up a silencing finger, and threw a glance up the rising coil of stairs. He stood very close to Kunstler and without whispering, exactly, said in a small, hard voice, “You can’t come in here like this, Abe. You’ll get yourself killed. Worse, you’ll get some other guy killed—me, with my luck. You have to go home.”

  “So I forgot my gloves, what’s the problem? Come on.” He made as if to walk back to the floor, but Cowie blocked him.

  “No, come on nothing. I’ve looked the other way too much as it is. Yeah, that’s right: I know you’re hungover half the time. That’s bad enough. Now you’re dr
unk, because last night ended sometime this morning, right?” He moved his head around in a failed attempt to catch Kunstler’s eyes. “You’re going home, Abe.”

  “Bullshit. I’m fine. Get the hell off my back.”

  Cowie didn’t raise his voice; instead he stepped closer to Kunstler so that their bodies were pressed together, leaning down so he could set his mouth hard to Kunstler’s ear. “First, you’re not fine, and second, screw you, you little fucking prick. I should report this. If I get caught letting you work in this condition, I’ll lose my job. I don’t know how the last guy ran things, but with me, showing up juiced on the floor is not okay.” He eased away a little, and glanced up the stairs again. Then in a tone that was almost casual, he said, “If they found out I let you off without making a report, even if you only worked a goddamn minute in this condition, I’ll be up a creek. You’d lose your job, too, by the way. So be grateful I’m not writing this all up, and punch out, Abe. Punch out right now.” He moved over so Abe could get by. He said, “I’ll look after your machine until this reel’s through the blocks,” but Kunstler didn’t move.

  “Don’t be an asshole, Abe. You were in the army, right?” Cowie said. “Remember the army? It’s just like that: I’m giving you an order. The order is, Go home. Go home and be happy I’ll even consider letting you punch back in tomorrow.”

  Kunstler nodded. He punched out, and changed, not rushing, making sure to do it just the same as he would any day, although it took two tries to get his tie right. Of course Jacks had a lot of dumb questions when he saw Kunstler heading back towards the offices in his suit, but Kunstler said nothing, knowing Jacks would never dare to wander too far from his bucket while on the clock. From the factory Kunstler drove his car straight downtown to a bar. After having a drink to clear his head, he called Inez to come meet him, straightened his tie in the bottle-flocked mirror, and ordered another. The hell with Cowie, he thought. He’d figure it out. It was springtime. There was work to do. It was best to get started.

  “Don’t I know you?” the older man in the hound’s-tooth asked. Kunstler’s heart jumped sideways in his chest, but he didn’t let himself move because just beside the man stood Inez with the other one, the stranger called Price, who was too right, too perfect, and—since for hours Kunstler had been feeding him booze—too expensive a prize to let slip. Giddy with happiness and a paycheck’s worth of Kunstler’s whiskey, Price had been dancing almost ceaselessly with Inez through the bar’s violet smoke. Here perhaps was the one, the man he had been searching for. It was a chance from which Kunstler would not allow himself to be turned, so he took the other man’s hand in a firm grip, sticky with the summer heat, and pumped it hard, and slapped the hound’s-tooth shoulder.

  “Know me?” said Kunstler. “Sure, you know me.” He spoke the words just the way he had practiced in his imagination: his voice like metal filings loud but not too loud, accompanied by a broad smile and eyes forced wide. “Hell, everybody knows me—I’m the Lindbergh baby.” The man laughed. Jacks and Inez laughed, too.

  “Hey, you might be. It’s been nagging at me since I walked in,” said the man. “I feel so sure. I’m Joe Dixon, by the way.”

  “It doesn’t ring a bell, but why don’t you let me buy you a drink, anyway, just in case? Who knows, I might owe you one. Whiskey and soda?”

  “Oh, well, then…Bourbon and water.”

  Kunstler told the barman and then leaned back against his stool. “So let’s see now,” he said to Dixon. “Where were you in forty-five?” He didn’t listen to the answer. He was too busy watching the stranger Price talk to Inez, and Inez smiling, laughing at something he told her, too busy estimating how long it would take until they were ready, until he could leave with them for the safety of the apartment. He was sweating in the heat. Dixon was, too, but he didn’t take off his jacket. That’s how Kunstler had known right away he would have been the wrong type: anyone who wouldn’t stand in a low-rent bar in his shirtsleeves in this weather was no good for what Kunstler needed, could never be a part of the plan no matter how drunk you got him. It didn’t matter anyway, he thought. I don’t need any of these others if I can just get Price. He said to Dixon, “I guess it wasn’t there, then. How about thirty-eight?” He took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

  Dixon spoke again, something about the Pacific, and Kunstler nodded pensively, his mind still wrestling with his urgent, desperate desire for departure. Between glances at the girl he found himself looking again and again at the door. The barman came back. Kunstler put money on the counter and passed out the drinks and forced a big smile, forced it so hard he thought his jaw might crack under the strain. He said, “Oh, brother. I think I would remember being there, so I guess I wasn’t. You went to college?”

  “Oh yeah, you’d remember all right.” Dixon laughed in a way that wasn’t quite funny. “College? Well, sure—after. On the bill. Kansas State.”

  “Wasn’t that, then. I never set foot in Kansas. Or a college, truth be told, except to drop a girl off after a date, once or twice. Is that where you’re from, Kansas? Where else might it have been?” Dixon told him places he had worked and lived, and Kunstler nodded from time to time and smiled, one eye on the prize, the plan he had engineered, the other on the exit. He bought another round; the machinery was running fine, it seemed, but Kunstler hated to leave anything at all to chance, and so made sure to lubricate the works now and again, just as he would again soon for Inez and Price.

  “And that’s when I moved back up here,” said Dixon. “Maybe not the nicest city, specially when it gets this humid, but home is home, I suppose.”

  “Damn it,” Kunstler said. “I don’t know that I’ve ever visited any one of those places. Let me ask you something, Joe: Are you sure we even live in the same country?” They laughed again, and Kunstler lit them both cigarettes out of his shirt pocket.

  He almost wished now that he could thank the girl from the bus. He had hated her at the time, had wanted to strike the inquiry from her face, grind the polite curious pointed questions into the dirt, but in fact she had helped him: Kunstler was never caught off guard by the same thing twice. He said to Dixon, “Well, I guess you didn’t know me before, but you sure know me now, don’t you?” and told him his name, the story of his being: Abe Kunstler.

  While they shook hands again Kunstler looked Dixon in the face, really looked and for the first time that evening saw, absorbed, and it was a mistake, a terrible error, for he found or imagined he found or in his drunk panic forced himself to find hidden within the older features their earlier form, and thought, suddenly and against his will as if he were being carried head high by a mob, about an alleyway where washing was hung, and on the ground, one on top of the other, joined in a taut bucking, a writhing insistence, two people so young they were hardly more than children, and of something the boy gave the girl afterwards that each of them would have thought of and called not a wage but a gift. Hurtled into the memory and caught there as in a trap for a moment that rattled with terror, Kunstler wondered what it had been, the thing that passed between them, cupped his palm that had once been the palm of a girl in an alleyway in an attempt to imagine again the shape of it, but all he could conjure was the movement of the hands, a gesture of transferral. It wouldn’t have stayed there long, whatever it was. Anything that wasn’t already money went straight to the pawnbroker.

  Kunstler’s throat filled again with the desperate urge to push past the others and leave, a sensation that came from his gut and through it rose to the very top of his chest like a wave of vomit waiting in his stomach. He wanted only to take the girl and retreat to their apartment, or better yet drive screaming in the car, the voice within his throat as open and throbbing and impenetrable as the engine, the sharp white spur of the high beams cutting his path into the dark road at night, but just over Dixon’s shoulder the one called Price was again dancing with Inez, who was drunk enough now that between bouts of joyful abandon her movements were sometimes hardly
more than a gentle swaying. Kunstler watched the waving of her body in the music’s underwater, the meaty promise of her thigh rocking as the stranger’s palm skipped across it. He reminded himself what this might mean. He needed to concentrate, if only to tie the one knot in the rope that would let him climb, and so he fought the sudden impulse that was almost a longing to reach into Dixon’s face and beat the younger self from it with his fists. Instead he forced himself to think of all the bars they had visited, all the men, if they were even old enough to be called men, who he had met and loaded with booze and hints, the few that he had even gotten as far as the bar door before they sensed somehow the terrible inflexibility of his desire and recoiled. Kunstler felt hot. “But this time, maybe,” he said in a breathless quiet.

  Dixon asked, “What was that?”

  “Oh, nothing,” said Kunstler, surprised to find he had spoken out loud. He shook Joe Dixon’s hand again, a sweaty, nervous, angry shake this time, and manufactured for him again the same smile, trying hard not to think or recall so the panic and the impulse shouldn’t rise further, shouldn’t grow in his chest and explode into violence. “Well, I suppose it’s nice to have met you finally after all these years of missing each other in Kansas and the Pacific and where the hell ever. I need to go talk to my friends, but say—do you know Jacks?”