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

through the grain of oak or cherry in over a year. Sometimes I imagine all the good trees have been used up.
    “Maybe,” Ramon says to the baseboard, “Big Dave won’t come back to the sub if it’s raining.”
    “That could be.” I look through my window trim at gray clouds rolling over the fresh shingles across the street.
    “Maybe Big Dave’s so big he’s scared of storms. So big he gets hit by lightning.”
    Thunder rattles the panes. Instead of lightning, Big Dave jumps in front of the window. A thin layer of glass separates our faces. He’s painting trim outside while we put it together inside. Big Dave and I stare at the same wall on our respective sides, would be shaking hands if not for the Sheetrock and studs and siding between us.
    Ramon is right about Big Dave being big. Big Dave’s arms are so wide they split shirtsleeves, we guess, because we’ve never seen him wear sleeves. I feel my trim shake against the pressure of his mashing brushstrokes. Big Dave’s so big he can’t find a pair of pants that fit him, flashing ass crack when he bends to jam his four-inch barn brush into the cutting pot. And Big Dave’s so tough he chews a bent nail to help him quit smoking. I see it through the window, flickering between his lips. The flicker disappears, and since I don’t see him spit the nail out, I’m pretty sure he swallowed it, has a stomach like a porcupine.
    “I’ll just stay out of sight.” Ramon doesn’t look our way. I hear him rip another hole through the base. “Give him time to cool down and deal with it tomorrow.”
    “What will you do tomorrow?” I watch Big Dave bite off a few bent bristles from his brush.
    There’s always tomorrow, another house, another quarter-acre plot, another slippery tentacle of cookie cutters made of plastic and glue and vinyl, so little metal and wood like the old days, when I was doing renovations and Ramon’s mama, Joni, was changing his diapers. Ramon used to chew up the handles on my tools. Ramon’s mama didn’t like that, and I didn’t like his spit rusting up my good hammer. Joni punched me one night, drove my jagged tooth through my lip, after I slapped a Stanley measuring tape out of Ramon’s mouth. I didn’t last much longer as a father after that night.
    Now Ramon has got two kids he never sees, two grandkids as imaginary to me as pink ivory wood. Judge wouldn’t even dare an every-other-weekend situation. He has child support to pay, a background that’ll never check out clean since he got busted with a one-cook two-liter bottle for meth snuggled into his kid’s empty car seat. Then there’re the bullshit anger-management classes for biting that cop’s neck after they cuffed him. That’s what Joni told me the newspaper said the next day, but they exaggerate. Ramon has always been small, was a quiet and shy kid when I had him on my weekends. Now construction is the only job he can get, and I’m the only dope who would hire him. I needed someone reliable, someone I could count on every day, and he has proven to be a decent nail bender for the last three weeks. And Ramon needs me, this job, his last option.
    Ramon rises from the corner and stretches his back. Big Dave spots him through the window and stabs the butt of his brush against the pane. He gives Ramon the finger, but since Ramon doesn’t see it, I’m the one who has to face that giant finger pressed against the glass.
    “You shouldn’t have talked shit about the painters,” I say.
    Telling Ramon what he shouldn’t have done today is as useless as when I told him last week that he shouldn’t mix making babies and making meth. I apologize to Ramon for that one by nailing my window casing home, filling the silent room with the roar of the compressor that drowns out Big Dave’s knocking. Once the compressor dies out, Big Dave has disappeared. The window shows nothing but gray clouds bunched together like knuckles.
    “That stupid asshole just swings his brush around out