Knucklehead & Other Stories (5 page)

“Here's to Danny,” I said. Toasted with Bob and drank the beer down in a swallow. Bob did the same. Mine backwashed a bit into my nose. Terri came and took the last quarters from the table. “Any requests?” she said. She went to the jukebox. The Stones, “Dead Flowers.”

We'd never really had a conversation in the year I'd worked at the warehouse, so Stinky Bob and I sat without saying much. We watched guys shoot pool. Watched the television where a soap opera played without sound. Watched the hand on the clock sweep through the seconds over the cooler behind the bar. The clock's face plastered with the logo of a beer that they didn't make anymore. Watched Tattoo Terri move through the room. Talking to one, then another of the regulars. For about the thousandth time I wondered how many different tattoos she had, where they might be. I'd seen a half a dozen—the roses, the parrot, the butterfly, a mushroom on her shoulder, a vine around her ankle. What designs were on her breasts? Her back? Her butt? What might be engraved on the inside of her thighs, in the well of her navel?

Stinky Bob hunched forward and drew me into the thick of his smell. He belched and the release of recently-consumed beer gases was refreshing. “Twenty-seven,” he said.

“Huh?” I said.

“Terri,” he said. “Twenty-seven tattoos.”

At first I wanted to ask him how he knew what I was thinking. Asked instead, “How do you know?” Bob didn't answer, sucked another glass of draft. I persisted: “I mean, did you count them or something?” I could've kicked myself. I couldn't lose the image of Stinky Bob in his green work shirt, counting tattoos on Terri's naked body.

Stinky Bob licked his upper lip real slow. I had an attack of the willies. I could feel the beer working on my empty stomach. Heat flushed my face. My trousers felt like they were full of pink fibreglass insulation. I squirmed. “What do you suppose?” he asked. The smell from Bob nauseated me. Each word oozed, dropped from his mouth like a fish flopping on the bottom of a boat. Flopping and bleeding and dying. Stinking. But it was me whose mouth moved like a fish. Opening and closing, no words.

Stinky Bob laughed. A single “Hah!” full of beery bad breath. He dunked his fingers in a glass and flicked drops of beer in my face. “Snap out if it, Walter. Should I call a doctor?” Laughed again. “I didn't count any of Terri's tattoos. I asked her, same as you would.” I probably looked like I'd just eaten a hot pepper. Sweat beaded on my forehead. My eyes burned. I shook my head a little bit. Bob repeated, “I asked her, Walter. I asked Terri how many tattoos.” He went into a fit of laughing. Kind of a bark at the back of his throat, with a snort each time he breathed. It broke down into a series of sneezes. His laugh smelled like compost.

I started to laugh along. The kind of half-laugh where you don't really get the joke. I had to think about turning the corners of my mouth up. I hoisted a beer and drank. Tried to take it all in one pull. Stinky Bob blew his nose into a blue and white handkerchief, wiped at his eyes. “You're quite something, Walter. Like a spring lamb you are.” He looked into his handkerchief, examined what was there. “Now Danny,” he went on. “He might have known more about those tattoos.” I coughed beer back into my glass and up my nose. Bob looked at me, grinning. “Of course if he did, he took his secrets with him. Eh, Wally?” I drank another beer, lit up a smoke. I hated it when anyone called me Wally.

Tattoo Terri came back to the table and slid into her chair. “You guys look like you were having a time.” She reached for my cigarettes on the table. I covered her hand. “No,” I said. “No, no, no. For once buy your own goddamned smokes. I'm sick and tired of you mooching off me. Listening to ‘Walter can you bum me a fag,' like I'm some queer. Get your own fucking fags.”

Tattoo Terri pulled her hand from under mine. Held it close to her, like I'd hurt her or something, which I hadn't. Then she relaxed. Regained her cool as always. “A little testy, are we?” Her voice was smooth as ice cream. She was mad, I could tell. The three of us looked at different things. Not each other. We waited in silence. Drank the last of the round.

“Aw shit,” I said finally. “Have a cigarette. I hate it when a girl sulks.” I tossed the deck over to her. “Have the whole damn package. I quit.”

Terri drew a smoke from the box, tapped it on her thumbnail a couple of times to tamp it. Stinky Bob waved Mitzi to bring more beer. “I'm hardly a girl, Walter. And I certainly never sulk,” Terri said. But she was smiling and I did too. Flipped her Zippo open and lit the cigarette. Handed the rest back to me.

“No,” I said. “Keep 'em. I quit. This is my last one.” I blew a stream of smoke to a ceiling fan going around and around above my head.

“Really,” Tattoo Terri said. “You quit. Just like that.”

“Sure. Just like that. For Danny. Like a tribute to Danny. He hated smoking. I mean, he smoked like a chimney, but he was always trying to quit.” I felt kind of stupid saying this. But proud at the same time. I had a sudden urge to talk, to say anything about Danny. “You know,” I said. “Danny had nicknames for all you guys.” Stinky Bob drank. Tattoo Terri shrugged, took the pack of cigarettes and put them in her bag. “He did,” I went on. “For everybody. Rose with the Nose. Soupy Campbell. Fat Pat. Attilla the Hank.” I took the last drag off the last cigarette I would ever smoke. Dropped the butt in an empty glass.

I looked at Terri. She looked back. “He called you Tattoo Terri. I mean, I guess, sure. What else would he call you, right?” I nodded to Bob. “And, well. He called you Stinky Bob. No offence. He just called you that. A nickname.” The two of them were smiling. Bob looked at the beer in his hand. Terri looked over at the pool table.

Bob said, “He had a few for you too.”

“Me?” I said.

“He called you Wimpy Walter,” Terri said. “Or just Wimpy.”

“Sometimes Wild Walter,” Bob said.

“But usually Weird Wally,” Terri finished. Mitzi brought a dozen more beers. Bob paid, tipped her two bucks. It was twenty-six minutes after noon. “We'll be late today,” Terri said.

“To Danny,” Bob said. “Dead Danny.”

“Dead Danny,” Terri said, raising a glass.

“Dead Danny,” I said. We all drank.

Industrial
Accidents

Four men sit in the lunchroom of a chemical plant.

Andy has a pen in each hand. He is doing two crosswords at once. The newspaper he reads has two sets of clues for the same puzzle. With the right hand, blue ink, he answers the cryptic clues in the bottom right corners of the blanks. With the left, red, he answers the quick clues in the top left. He hopes one day to complete both simultaneously.

Meanwhile, Jason struggles with a different puzzle in the tabloid daily. He asks, “What's a six-letter word for pan-liner, starts with a T?” His grime-etched fingers are knotted around a pencil he's sharpened with his knife.

Asleep on a chair in the corner, Bruce makes a sound in his throat, not quite a snore.

With a pocket screwdriver, Ditmar scrapes the leavings from his pipe onto the lunchroom table. He breaks up the cold dottle, separating the ash from bits of tobacco that are merely scorched. He brushes the ash to the floor, then scoots the rest into his tobacco pouch.

“Teflon,” Andy says without looking up. Three puzzles at once, he thinks.

“Teflon,” Ditmar repeats. “Teflon is a killer.”

Jason puts the pencil behind his ear, opens his paper to the page with the photo of the bikini-clad Beauty Of The Day. Teflon thighs, he thinks. He uses an Exacto knife to cut out the picture. He folds it carefully, minding where the creases are, and tucks it into the breast pocket of his coveralls. Later, at the end of shift, he will add it to the stack of pictures in his locker clipped from the last two years' of papers.

“It's true,” Ditmar continues. “Researchers at a chemical factory very much like this one. Trying to make a synthetic lubricant. They mixed some formula, it didn't work.” Ditmar checks his watch.

“Really,” Jason says. Andy scribbles on newsprint.

Bruce dreams of trout.

Ditmar pinches a clump of tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. “Then they sat down to lunch, just as we are doing now.” A thin chain tethers a cigarette lighter to the leg of the lunchroom table. Ditmar pulls it towards him and clicks the flame to life. How sad, he thinks, as he does each time: a pipe should be lit with a wooden match. Regulations prevent him and all workers from bringing personal matches or lighters into the plant. “But one of them left it on the burner. A terrible oversight, or perhaps brilliant.”

“Really,” Jason says. He runs the Exacto blade under a thumbnail.

“Truly,” Ditmar says. “The stuff brewed and bubbled while they ate.” The tar in the stem of his pipe gurgles as he puffs. “The fumes killed them, every one.” He lets the smoke curl from his lips to wash over his face. “When the rescue team found them, it was like a still life, only dead. Sitting at a laboratory bench, sandwiches in hand. And the beaker of solution baked into the famous non-stick coating.”

“Really,” Jason says.

“Urban myth,” Andy says, both a response to Ditmar, and an answer to a clue.

“One of them, they say, was slumped over a crossword puzzle.” Ditmar places his pipe in the ashtray chained to the table.

Bruce rouses himself from his slumber. I will paint my boat blue, he thinks.

Noises

She had just finished throwing up when she heard the doorbell. Beverly reached for a hand towel from the built-in linen closet in her mother-in-law's bathroom. The thick textured fabric rubbed roughly against her lips as she wiped her mouth. She ran water in the sink to wash down the bits of regurgitated grapefruit pith, toast and mucous, then rinsed the cloth and held it to her forehead. Her post-puke fog left her enervated yet relieved. The tension in her neck and shoulders had eased, the sour wedge in her gut had disappeared. Morning sickness — morning, noon and night. She felt best those few minutes right after vomiting.

The doorbell rang.

Beverly caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the sink, and was surprised at the reflection. Despite nausea, she looked good. Everyone said, you absolutely glow. Her short brown hair, although dishevelled, shone with a hint of a wave and body it hadn't had before. Her complexion was clear and silky. Colour flashed on her cheeks. She looked terrific, but felt like shit. Six-and-a-half more months of this?

The doorbell rang.

She brushed her teeth. She was careful not to probe too deeply with the brush—that provoked a gag reaction. The roof of her mouth and the back of her throat felt like they were coated with a thick paste, and she suddenly retched—just once, bringing nothing up—thinking of wet papier-mâché.

The doorbell rang.

“Hold your horses or go away,” she muttered as she went downstairs.

The visitor stood close to the townhouse, inside the drip line of the eave. He was reaching to ring the bell again when Beverly opened the door. She said nothing, just looked at him through the screen. The rain had plastered his thinning white hair to his scalp. A few drops hung in his bushy brows. His skin was very pale. He looked fifty, maybe sixty years old. Beverly thought of a potato, and with his blue eyes swimming in his face, decided he should be Irish.

“Mary and Frank aren't in,” the man said, nodding his head towards the front door of the neighbouring condominium, ten feet away. A pair of hedge clippers, red wooden handles opened like an X, and a long-handled spade were on the patch of grass that passed for lawn beside the shared sidewalk. The morning's downpour had slackened to a drizzle, and the tools seemed varnished by wet. Beverly remembered the poem she had read in college about a wheelbarrow. So much depends.

She didn't speak.

“Mary and Frank aren't home,” he started again. “I sometimes go there for lunch when the weather's bad.” He reached a hand inside his windbreaker—an old-fashioned one, Beverly noticed, probably rayon, collarless with frayed corduroy trim and a dulled brass zipper—and he pulled out a wrinkled brown paper sack. The shoulders of his jacket were dark with rain, even his lunch bag looked damp. “They let me use their microwave. For my lunch.”

Somewhere in the neighbourhood, a beep-beep-beep signalled that a truck was backing up, then it stopped. Beverly stared through the mesh of the screen, looking at a point over the man's left shoulder, as if she were doing sums in her head. Finally, she said, “I don't know why you're telling me this.”

The man sidled over to invade her gaze, and looked at her with a real in-the-eye look. He smiled. “I thought I'd see if Gladys was in. She sometimes comes over when I eat with Mary and Frank.” There was a quaver in his voice, as if he were trying to prevent his teeth from chattering. He shrugged. “But I guess she's not home either.”

“Gladys,” Beverly said. For a second she didn't know who he was talking about, then it clicked. Nobody called her Gladys. She was Gaddie. Her mother-in-law, Colm's mother. They were house-sitting for Gaddie while she spent six months in Africa with Christian Helpmates International.

The man's khaki pants were faded to a gloss, his work boots scuffed and cracking. One steel toecap poked through a hole in the leather. She glanced at the spade and clippers. Had Gaddie said anything about the gardener? Beverly couldn't remember—really, she had stopped paying attention to the woman. She and Colm had settled in only a week ago. It was Gaddie's idea, cooked up when she found out Beverly was expecting. After all, she had said, Beverly and Colm were starting their family late, starting everything late (“Most of my friends had four or five babies by the time they were your age!”). They had all those student loans, had spent all that time in school and travelling everywhere, living in apartments. If they stayed until the baby came, paid off their debts, maybe they could save the down payment for a house of their own. Besides, someone had to look after the condo.