Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

“Well, well.”

KC’s at the door. KC and Bing Bing. The others don’t greet them, and they disappear behind a soffit and reappear again. By 8:30 everyone’s ready to go.

“You’re with us, professor.” KC beckons me to the paint supply. There’s not much I hate more than painting — not so much the actual rolling, but the prep, the cleanup. He points at the Baker, sucks his teeth, then points vaguely at the first few windows.

“We have to set this thing up,” he says, more to himself than to anyone else. Because it’s not a direct order, Bing Bing ignores it. He goes to the middle window and leans against it. He looks across at the other building — the apartments above the jeans store. Some of them are being renovated, as well, but they aren’t nearly the size of this one. A squat white man with a thick mustache and a very young black man work on a countertop.

“What you doin’, man?” KC barks. Bing Bing turns slowly and shrugs.

“Wa d’you won?”

“Set up the ting, mon!”

Bing Bing sucks his teeth, though not nearly as loud as KC, and waves me to him.

“C’mon, mon.” I go. We circle the broken-down scaffold and then stop. We both reach for the same side at the same time and both pull back. I let him pick it up. I’m not sure how he wants to go about putting it together — and a Baker isn’t complicated at all. You can look at one and intuit how it should work: two vertical steel sides, like ladders, with slots in them; two horizontal lengths with ends that pocket into the slots; a metal-edged sheet of plywood to fit as the platform. It’s the hesitation that gets us, the uneasy hierarchy that keeps us both staring at the section he’s holding.

“Get dat a won.” So it’s been decided. Bing Bing’s lord of this particular fiefdom. And because we have a leader, things move smoothly. We put the Baker together and wheel it over to the first window by the front. Bing Bing starts back to the supply pile. I try to follow, but he raises his hand to me like he’s a crossing guard. He doesn’t pick up his feet, and his boots are only laced to the ankle. The tops fan out and his jeans are stuffed into them. They remind me of Eskimo boots, or what I’ve imagined Eskimo boots, if there are such things, to look like — hides and pelts wrapped tightly but seeming to be loose around feet and ankles. He shuffles back atop the sawdust and gypsum-coated floor with a box of sandpaper. KC meets us beneath the window.

“She likes these, you know. Yeah, she likes them like this.” He waves up at the window. “Yeah, don’t touch anything — she says.” He sucks his teeth again. The window frames are metal — old stainless or tin — it’s hard to tell because they’re so worn, gummed up and over with dirt and soot and grease and little chips of old lead paint.

“Yeah, mon, we burned that shit off,” says KC. I guess he caught me studying the paint. “Three days with a torch — fuck.” He steps away from the sill as though the memory of the task is too hot itself.

“Yeah, she don’t like no paint on no trim. Everything natural. Everything raw.” He smiles. “But she likes this. She come up yesterday and she just smiled. She likes this.”

Bing Bing and I both nod our heads involuntarily.

“Okay,” says KC softly. “Clean it up.”

Bing Bing aligns the Baker with the window.

“You bring a putty knife?” asks KC.

“Everything but.”

“There’s some in the gang box. There’s some WD-40, too. Boy,” teeth suck, “I don’t know how you g’wan clean dat.” He shakes his head. “But that’s the way she wants it — like it was when it was new. New, but still lookin’ old.”

He takes the sandpaper from Bing Bing.

“Lemme see dat ting.”

He rubs it on the metal and cranes his neck back to get some distance. He shakes his head.”

“I don’t know, boy.”

He takes one swipe at it, stops, turns to Bing Bing.

“G’wan get ma d’oil na.”

Bing Bing complies and KC continues to survey the frame, looking up the vertical then down the wall to the others. There are seven. My gaze drifts with him. Seven double-hung giant windows with nine lights each. Four hundred and sixty-eight linear feet of metal to buff. Bing Bing returns.

“Good. G’wan, gimme dat.” KC takes the oil and sprays a small patch, careful not to create too large a test area. He’s always been careful. We used to call him the finisher or the fixer — the carpenter’s buddy — with his twelve-inch blade and mud, patching holes, taping and plastering gaps, smoothing out everyone’s fuckups, burying the mess and blunder of a bunch of half- and quarter-breed malcontents. I used to look at his work after he’d painted, touched up, and cleaned for the bulge, gap, or wiggle that I knew was there and at some point he’d slink up behind me and say, “You don’t see nothing, do ya?”

KC buffs the oil blotch. He starts nodding. “Yeah, that’s the way — yes.” He studies it again, angling his torso away this time — moving his head slightly to the left, then to the right — studying. Finally, he straightens.

“Here.”

He holds the paper and the oil out for me. I take them.

“Okay,” he waves generally at the windows, then points at the patch he cleaned. “Like that. She’ll like that.”

He starts to walk off, then calls for Bing Bing.

“Come on, boy.”

There’s really nothing to contemplate, but I move the Baker out of the way so that I can, at least, pretend to be formulating a plan — Top to bottom? Bottom to top? Frame first or stops? I look closer at KC’s spot. There seems to be a pattern engraved in the metal. Now I see it everywhere on the surface, but instead of the slightly whitish tint in the clean spot, the untouched flowers are outlined by the dark crud. I wonder if KC noticed this or if “she” would want her old-new window frames so ornate — adorned by whimsical flora.

Someone turns on the table saw. Someone else turns on a radio — the former comes alive with a snarl and metallic whirl, the latter with a walkie-talkie squawk, then a commercial in which someone is screaming, like an electronic barker trapped in the little box. The person on the saw begins to cut plywood — feeding it too fast. The blade slows and the motor sputters, then, no sound.

“What the fuck?”

“Hold up.”

I find myself waiting for the song to come on. There are so many sounds on a job site, some intermittent, some rigidly patterned, some constant, and the random ones — a dropped tool or material, a curse, or something from outside like a siren or a sudden burst of laughter — which let you know there’s a world beyond your allotted space and task. It’s always struck me as somewhat sad, not crushingly, but enough to make me drift to memories, projections, remiss. I remember the job site, like a bar really, just without the stools and the liquor and the talk. The men are there — the men and the malaise and whatever sounds to which you attach yourself to keep from drifting inside too far, before the point of any real reflection, because in a bar, too far, and you’re babbling your secrets (and how many secrets do you have left since you’ve already revealed that you’re a drunk?) too far inside and— Out! Out! — there’s your blood on the floor.

The saw’s back on. I should tell him, whoever it is, not to force the wood on the blade, but you can’t tell a man on a job how to do that job — it would be like telling a man alone in a bar that he’s drinking too much.

The radio stops barking. Now there is music, drums at least, then some bass. I don’t know the song, of course. Drums, how strange: They wouldn’t let us play our drums and now that we can, we won’t. The not-drum accompanied by the not-bass. It’s actually catching, certainly better than the shriek from ill-cut wood, KC’s teeth sucking, or the idiot rasping of me endlessly sanding metal.