One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist Read Online Free PDF

them for this gig. No. No word from the guys yet.” Nothing that told us everything we wanted to know.
    Stas cracked his tailgate, and inside was a stack of slate steppersand one two-man rose rock, a rock like any other rock. Like the rock that stomped Al’s shin. Like the rock we wanted to toss into the gash of earth after Rex crawled inside, and we would close our eyes and say a joke like a prayer. But this rock wasn’t like any other. It blazed up all kinds of quartz and sparkle. This rock was Stas’s young old lady’s cherry-picked perfect rock, transplanted from his own home.
    Stas climbed onto his truck bed, leaned into the rose rock, budged it inch by inch, rock screaming against steel. He worked it to the edge, and then we cradled it. That two-man rock turned into a many-man rock, and we carried it all the way up the downgrade, to the gap-toothed outcropping.
    The cul-de-sac rattled, backfired. Tommy’s Honda swerved down the blacktop, squealed to a stop behind Stas’s scraped tailgate. Al exited Tommy’s Honda, rapped on the hood, hollered, “Not done yet, boys?”
    Tommy slid out next, and the two of them staggered up the downgrade. Al wore yesterday’s jeans but with the right leg hacked to thigh. And we were all wearing yesterday’s jeans, because there’s no point washing away the sweat we’d make again today and tomorrow. A bright-white cast wrapped his leg where the jeans were missing. Tommy and Al grinned like motherfuckers, reeked like Friday’s shots lined across the bar.
    “Are you two drunk?” Stas gripped Al’s shoulder.
    “What else do you do after getting out of the emergency room at four in the morning?” Tommy kicked at the new rose rock. It stayed put like it’d always been there.
    We burned through the morning, replacing the chipped slate, careful not to shift every other stone, topple our precious puzzle. Every rock, pretty side up for the ugliest boys in town, shucked shirts and smeared dirt and beer guts and Tommy’s appendicitis scar winking like a stab wound. The only thing to worry about was Rex’s Dodge popping through the houseline. But he didn’t show, and he never did find that lost connection. Tommy found the frayed wire by chance, between him and Al betting quarters onwhere that son-of-a-bitch splice could be. Al slapped the quarter in Tommy’s palm while we filled the fountain bed, diluted Al’s blood that was down there somewhere, dried and brown, now drowned. By lunchtime, the drunk was mostly worn off of our missing boys, and they recoupled the last of the flex.
    Stas fired up the fountain, and it pissed a perfect stream. Tommy stood barefoot in the middle of our new steppers. He swayed, but our rocks didn’t. Solid like one hundred knuckles packed into a single giant fist.

Sawdust and Glue
    While we’re taking lunch with the painters, my son Ramon tells Big Dave his job is easier than ours. Something you don’t say to any workingman and certainly not to Big Dave. When I was a twenty-three-year-old dumbshit like Ramon, I sat down with my crew at a Denny’s for an 8:00 p.m. Moons over My Hammy, after a ten-hour day of framing. A scraggly bearded Mexican bussed our table, and I told him not to strain himself carrying dishes for real workingmen. My crew laughed through two more coffee refills and three more cigarettes that we smothered into our empty mugs. That Mexican ambushed me in the parking lot, busted one of my teeth. I landed a jab on his right eye, kicked his gut when he fell. I got in my truck and drove home, and that guy went back to work.
    But he was small. Big Dave is not. And now Ramon is so worked up he can’t hit a shiner with his nail set, keeps slipping and pounding deeper holes into the baseboard. It’d be painful to listen to him cracking through the wood, except it’s particleboard. All sawdust and glue mitered together to look like nice houses instead of the cookie-cutter junk that fills the subdivision. I haven’t sunk a nail