One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist Read Online Free PDF Page A

trips out of bed, hands fumbling against leaden shadows where we knew there was once a light switch, we gave up, slid down the wall to a squat. We couldn’t bring on quiet dreams by jerking off or drinking milk or chewing two o’clock salami sandwiches. We carried our cell phones in the waistband of our underwear, waiting for a call. On his way home, Stas bought a new phone at the shop next to the hospital where Tommy and Al sit in the emergency waiting room. No insurance, so no rush. Stone blood hardly life threatening. Stitches and tetanus needles, some bandages cleaner than Tommy’s sweat-hardened T-shirt wrapped tight around Al’s shin. An x-ray and some valium in waiting. Waiting for results, for the bright-white bone sparking across black film. Waiting with Tommy, who keeps patting Al’s back, asking if there’s someone he should call. Parents? Sisters or brothers? Tommy’s hand circles around Al’s shoulder blades, across muscles tense and taut like his own. He pulls his hand away when the old man across the room turns his one good eye toward him, the other hidden behind a handful of bunched-up white panties stained with brown-dried blood.
    No, no one, Al says through his teeth.
    Your boyfriend? Tommy whispers, and thinks of denim crotches pressing together, can’t find the joke that should be there.
    No boyfriend, Al says. Don’t bother him with this shit.
    And Tommy thinks of the time he smashed that bigger man’s head into his door panel, which was after Tommy called that bigger man a fag at the bar. Just a joke, like at work, but the bigger man didn’t get it like his rock-slinging boys. They always got it. Until Rex didn’t. And that bigger man at the bar wouldn’t stop shoving and swinging until Tommy clunked skull to metal. He wonders if that bigger man told his wife that night. Tommy wouldn’t tell those jokes outside work no more. Tommy didn’t tell his old lady he dented his car with a skull that night, and they didn’t fuck frombehind like she likes. He said he was too tired, and she just flicked off the lamp. But he felt her staring all night.
    Tommy pours coffee for Al into a chipped Styrofoam cup. Al takes a sip, passes it back. And it’s probably burned, cooked on the hot plate for the last six hours, but it smells good, like earth and warm, and the emergency room air-conditioning is blowing hard. Not like the comfort of sweat, of day, of lawns and stones, of hauling rocks and spreading sod with his boys, with us, who want to be us, but we can’t find the light switch and can’t get to sleep because we’re wondering about Tommy and Al and Rex. We hate that old man and his bleeding eye and his bunched-up panties who won’t stop glaring at Tommy even though his good eye probably isn’t worth a shit, all pale and milky.
    But Tommy forgets about him, and the old man turns as invisible as the crinkled fashion magazine under his seat, opened up to a spread on bikini season where a page has been torn away, stashed into the pants of an eleven-year-old who was waiting for its mama to get her blackened, busted-up eye sewn for the twenty-second time. Tommy takes a sip, puts his lips where Al’s pressed, and it doesn’t mean a damn thing to Tommy. We finally fall asleep.
    We got to the fountain early, before sun, full of coffee and nicotine, sitting in our running cars and waiting to see who showed. We twisted the radio knob, skipped past morning shows, one DJ ’s belching laugh bleeding into the next one’s. We rechecked our phones, cycled through missed calls, but there was nothing missed from missing Tommy and Al and Rex. And what if Rex showed? We gripped our steering wheels, dirt-crusted nails digging into rubber.
    Boss Stas arrived late for the first time ever. He stepped out of his truck, phone pinched between ear and shoulder. His neck looked broken through our rearview mirrors. We got out to steal the words he hummed into the receiver: “Sorry, honey. We’ll get new rocks. I need