Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

“I saw you outside this morning — you know?”

“Yeah?”

“I know what it was made ya took so long.” He rubs his hands together and sweeps the room to make sure everyone’s getting this.

“You was rappin’ to dat lady out there.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” Pause.

“And notin’, man. It’s fine.” He checks the room again. “She sure got some nice titties, though.”

They all fall out. For emphasis Chris rolls off his sill and onto the dusty floor. KC tries to talk over the yelps.

“Just kiddin’, man — no, really, you g’wan see — she don’t talk to none of us. You g’wan.”

Chris gets up and restores order by slowly walking back to his tool belt. He straps it on, and the rest of us follow. I catch myself smiling for no reason and gesturing at the window frames and unused sandpaper. This method will not do. I walk over to the paint supplies and find a new gallon tin of stripper, shop rags, a bag of cotton gloves, and a box of masks on which it’s plainly stated that they are to be used only for filtering dust and pollen. I get a small bucket and an old brush and set up on the Baker.

The stripper is an amber translucent gel, which becomes more viscous as I whisk the brush around in it. The vapors penetrate the mask and shoot up my nose like cold fire and I’m instantly high and stupid. I lean away from the bucket until part of me returns — enough at least to begin.

By the time I’ve covered all the metal of this window, it’s ready to come off. I wipe the tin down with the rags, and the crud comes off easily. What’s left behind is gleaming tin and the clear image of etched daisies. It takes less than an hour to knock off one window.

I notice the radio again — horns and “. . ooo ooo oooo!” Then static. I hear myself call out.

“Hey!”

Chris replies, “What’s up?”

“Turn that back.”

“Oh, shit. My bad.” He listens for a moment. He calls back, “Who this?”

“Mayfield — The Impressions.”

“Sweet. This is sweet.”

“Yes.”

“All right.” He glides back to the kitchen area. Snaps twice on the beat and disappears. The saws stay off. Now there’s only the intermittent drill-whine, hammer-bang, or KC’s scraping from the bathroom. “This is my country . .” We have our anthem for the day — community and soul. I’ve always found Curtis’s voice enchanting. He could’ve sung just about anything in that falsetto, and I would’ve obeyed. The afternoon unwinds and the hits keep coming. Not all of the songs match the message, the elegance, but they all have the same effect — lulling this crew to joy. And this isn’t the roughest bunch, but I know they’ve all seen and done questionable things between here and Dublin or Kingston or Miami or Brooklyn, but there’s something tender even in the rogue at worship of his work and his song. Even up on the Baker with my stained toxic rags I rock internally to our collective groove. I make sure to keep the glass clean — work the rags into the joints. Progress. I’m well into the second window before I notice I’m being watched.

She’s been in the middle of the room for some time. I can tell by how she stands, anchored, on her heels. She’s wearing a large-brimmed hat that hides her face from me. Her long white and gray wavy hair tumbles out of it onto her back, mimicking the watermarks on her green overcoat. She looks from side to side and then heads for the kitchen. As soon as she disappears, Chris sings out over the music. He rushes to turn it down.

They speak in low tones — mostly him, but I can tell from his tone that he’s answering her questions. They come back to the living area. Her heels sound odd — cutting through the dust, sounding out against the subfloor. Chris leads her to the middle of the loft and leaves her there. The two-dollar chicken repeats on me — comes up from the depths with such force I can’t hold it back. It rushes out silently — not even a hiss — hits the mask and spreads in the air gap between it and my face, then reregisters itself as taste. Dog food is the first thing that comes to mind — salty chicken like dog food — but isn’t dog food described on the commercials and on the can as being remarkably succulent? The makers never refer to it as gamey or raw, but only in terms a hungry dog probably couldn’t care less about. Outside the window the red label from an Alpo can flashes for an instant and I know I’ve poisoned myself with the fumes and the food, and I wonder why this mask won’t allow toxic vapors to pass out but only in.

She heads for the bathroom, where KC and Bing Bing are, and they call out to her much in the same way Chris had, excited, an octave higher than they should. They murmur in the same way, but their voices echo off the tiles, the pipes, and the porcelain. Then KC escorts her out, back to her original spot. She’s looking up now, not at me but at the windows — studying them closely. She has a deep tan, like the one on Edith’s supple leather face. Now she looks at me, not my face but my tool belt and the big framing hammer hanging uselessly at my side. She speaks.

“Those look lovely.”

I suppose that “thank you” is the proper response, but I can’t bring myself to say it, not to her, not for this. I’m dizzy. I feel the need to hold on to one of the vertical poles. And the moment seems to call for me to utter from this height a benediction, curse, or even a spell, but what comes to mind are the mutated greetings the men had cooed to her. She stays there, still looking up at me. Occasionally her eyes flit nervously away to the tin. KC finally saves the day for both of us.

“Yeah, Ms. Crane, we’ve been working on those a bit. They all right?”

“Oh, yes,” she answers. She hesitates in turning to him, but manners compel her to finally do so. KC grins broadly. He wipes his knife with a clean rag. They look around the loft together. He follows her lead, as though he hadn’t noticed some aspect of the job until she’s discovered it.

“Oh, look, flowers — daisies.”

“Yeah, I just started noticin’ them today. I was wondering if you was gonna like them.”

“Yes, I do.” And then — softer, “Is he new?”

“Here, yes.”

Then up to me, “I appreciate your thoroughness.”

I press the rag into the metal, focus hard on the task at hand. She gives up, says something pleasant to KC, and goes. KC stays where he is. He watches her leave, smiling at her back, then her absence. When he hears the elevator doors close, he loses his grin, puts his hands on his hips, and looks up at me.

“That was the client — Ms. Crane.”

“Oh, yeah?”

He hisses through his teeth and shakes his head a few times. He gives up, too, and goes back to the bathroom. I start to go back to my work, but I just spin the rag like a propeller, looking for a clock. She crosses Greene, takes a quick look at the jeans store, and turns east up Broome. I whip the window with the rag, but there’s no crack to it. I ball it up and let it drop down to the dust. I notice the fumes again. I taste them this time, all the way down in my belly. My shoulders and neck start tingling but not much more than skin deep, like some sympathetic reaction to the arid bird I ate, the bird’s revenge, or both — the story in which the ghost fowl doesn’t accept my apology. Then I see chicken tracks on the windowpanes — random chicken tracks — hopping the stops, disappearing into the frame, and reappearing on another sheet of glass.

I hang the bucket on the old gas nipple, sit down on the board, push off from the wall, and ride the Baker away from the window. Before I take the mask off I burp again: salty chicken like dog food. Breath like Grendel. Was it Grendel — the Midgaard? I don’t remember — too many toxins to the brain — a taluine concussion. I remember forgetting many things. It feels as if I’ve forgotten entire languages, philosophical tracts, volumes of myth and story—“Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age to set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort. First, the cold friction of expiring sense. .” That is the conspiracy: to move a warrior to where he no longer remembers his rage, confused to the point of indecision, sword sheathed, wondering, Am I the fiend?