todd of tacoma

Jon Rainbow was six months sober and three weeks into his new job. He hadn’t lost a fight in twelve years.

This one needed a phone call.

First thing, he had to tell his wife it wasn’t Thomas Bowman all over again. Jon didn’t start this one. It was the kid that started it. The Thomas thing was a Drunk Jon thing. Drunk Jon’s been dead six months and counting. 

I know, she’d say, but the thing is to let him go, you’re grieving him all the time, do you know what I mean?

Not trying to, Jon would say to her.

Then this. But it wasn’t Thomas Bowman all over–

“Babe.”

“Hey, what’s going on? It’s not break time yet, is it?”

“I’m going home early.”

“They can’t make you go home just because there’s no freight.”

“They can send me home.”

“What time is it?”

He looked for a clock in the break room but there was none. He didn’t check his phone because he was too old to have that impulse, or because he wanted it pressed against his ear, wanted her pressed against his ear.

“Baby?”

“There’s cameras all over.”

Until now, he hadn’t really admired the fullness of their coverage. No space was unwatched but the bathrooms and the deepest recesses of the docked trailers. He should have taken the fight to a trailer. He’d have won if no one was watching. That’s how fights should be, man to man, all things equal.

This fight, holy shit, everyone watched it. It was recorded, too.

He was beginning to appreciate the fullness of the event.

“I hope no one was recording. They’re not supposed to have phones on the floor. They could get fired if they were recording. They take that shit seriously.”

“Recording what, Jon? What happened?”

“The kid fucking swung at me. Over nothing. And you know I get my PTSD, I get my PTSD and shit. You know, you pick up my medication! I haven’t looked at my face.”

“Breathe, baby.”

“I didn’t just do nothing.”

“Who’s this kid?”

“Goth looking faggot fucker. He was in my training group. Just a little baby fucker, hasn’t seen shit, you know? Moth tattoo on his forehead. Everybody’s tattooed. Probably got ink on his little dick, too. Hasn’t seen shit.”

“How old?”

“Little shit fought dirty. Clawing, driving his knee up, bam! in my crotch. He’s lucky I seen the people all around.”

“Do you need me to pick you up?”

“Fifty pounds on him, easy.”

“Do you need me to pick you up?”

“I don’t know what happens now. HR or some shit. I hope they look at the cameras.”

“Jesus.”

“If they look at the cameras, no way they’ll fire me. He just come out and pop! out of nowhere, and my PTSD.”

“You can’t fight at work, babe.”

“I hated this job, anyway.”

“They’ll want to interview both of you and make sure you got rides, I bet. Are they with you now?”

“I’m up front.”

“They already talked to you?”

“In the, the break room.”

“They’re going to talk to you.”

“And I’m supposed to, what, incriminate myself?”

He was thinking of Horsepower

Thomas Horsepower was the name they gave Thomas Bowman. He was a third Native American and you couldn’t tell unless he told you but he told you all the time. Horsepower was meant to be offensive but Thomas ran with it. Probably because it smelled All American, smelled like diesel, football, bald eagles. It screeched and vroomed. Thomas had sixty pounds on Jon, and a palm nailer. But there were no cameras on their construction site, where Jon prevailed.

The Rainbows were squirrely fighters, squirrely being a euphemism for dirty, and Jon denied they fought dirty, said they fought to win, conversation over. He and his brothers, there were two, and his sisters, there were five, all eight could list an expulsion on their CV, some of them two.

Jon could list six.

The perfect song

“Oh, perfect! Now, the song,” Jon said to his wife when he thought he heard the song.

“What song, baby?”

“It’s gone.”

It wasn’t ever really there. He was searching for it because that would be poetic, but it wasn’t there, it wasn’t poetic. There were three televisions, one arcade machine, the warehouse behind him, its PA system playing pop radio edits, and a silent wind Jon also thought he heard, but poetry is never there.

At the Eastern Washington job, Jon and Horsepower traded control of the DeWalt boombox. Every other day the other got it, or else there’d be pandemonium. Some of the other guys wondered why they didn’t get a day themselves, but they never grumbled out loud.

Jon would make playlists at night and really take his time, crew morale top of mind. He would lose sleep, not too much, just an hour here and there, sometimes up to four hours on Thursdays, creating perfect hour-long mixes for roofing, cement work, siding, framing walls, sheetrock, and painting, respectively. Their crew did it all, foundation to lighting design. He would write the name of the job in Sharpie on top of each CD. He brought a stack of fifty blanks with him.

The trouble came one day when Jon drunkenly asserted, drunk was always when he asserted, asserted that the DeWalt boombox played MP3s, too, so he could get up to ten days’ work on one CD.

They laughed at him.

That night, the night they took two bottles of Jack to Bluster Burgers and got tanked and Dansen took one bottle and chucked it at Harley and they laughed at that, that night Jon didn’t sleep. That night he stayed up with a thunderstorm and adderall and burned a CD so full of perfect songs it rose like bun in an oven. He labeled it Interior.

They were working on the interior. You’d be surprised how long you’re working on the interior.

“What you got for us, Jonny-o?” one of the Samoans said.

“Just you wait. I heard his laptop humming all fucking night.”

“Better be good. I didn’t sleep for shit listening to you jerk off over the shit.”

“Let’s get those MP3s spinning, huh, Jonny!”

The Samoans erupted, and when they erupted the whole crew erupted.

Jon was silent.

He was bent over the DeWalt.

“It’s anti-skip, so don’t don’t skip around it, guys. You can dance, just don’t skip.”

More laughter.

Jon wished the DeWalt was on a table so he could stand up.

He unfolded two sawhorses and laid a six-foot beam on it and put the DeWalt on it.

“He’s getting serious!”

He wondered if maybe the battery power was low so he rolled out the charger cord and plugged it in.

“Maybe if you saw it in half, Jon!”

He shook it.

They laughed almost to weeping when he got like this. You couldn’t help yourself.

And now he heard the songs.

All the songs at once. 

Like if a bulldog screeched. A speaker popping like a fart and then a hundred banshees with a hundred songs at once, all at once all songs. He was confused and so so mesmerized.

Horsepower touched his shoulder on conciliation.

“I think you owe me fifty. That’s what I remember. You remember, guys?”

They all remembered aloud.

Jon was trance-broken now and all his blood was mercury-hot and he wanted the song back, the hundred songs’ song, but it was Horsepower’s now.

“Pay up,” said Joseph, the younger Samoan.

Standard disclaimer. All names appearing in this blog are fictitious. Well, the names aren’t fictitious, the characters are. Not all aspects of them are, though, now that I think of it. The traits that you see gathered and shaped here to resemble who might live as written indexed under each name that I have chosen, that whole mess is fictional. Joseph’s real name was mispronounced so many times that he had to go by something easier to pronounce for your average brick-laying American. His real name is a work of fiction not mentioned here.

It seemed to him in the moment, Jon told a mental health professional at Grant County Jail, seemed to him he had control over one arm but not the other when he hit Joseph first. He had spun Horsepower’s general direction but took a side street to Joseph’s jaw first. Had nothing to do with what the Joseph said.

When he got to Horsepower, though, both hands were in it to win like a Rainbow.

Horsepower’d been finishing up the joist hangers with galvanized ticos, so he was clutching a palm nailer in front of him like it was the Aegis but his grip wasn’t so tight and he wasn’t so focused on what might come next because who would be?

Jon drove his knee into Horsepower’s crotch and wrestled the palm nailer from him and knocked him to the ground with it. The magnetized nailer tip still held a tico in it because those magnets are pretty strong on the late-generation Freemans. He whacked Horsepower upside the head again, and that’s when the nailer shot the tico in his ear, in Horsepower’s ear.

The air compressor had lost a good deal of pressure, since Horsepower works so damned fast on those hangers, and after a couple of weak pft, pft, pfft, pfffts from the nailer in Horsepower’s now deaf ear the air compressor fired on, just as Joseph was conscious enough to restrain the much smaller Jon.

I have no idea what was said next because it was so loud.

Ticos

I know what you’re thinking. They’ve got a roof overhead so why are they using galvanized ticos on the joist hangers?

That’s all they had on site, galvanized. That’s all.

Hail insurance

The guys put Jon in the company truck and waited for the cops and EMTs. They let him roll the windows down a crack but that was about all they let him. They were certainly not letting him touch the stereo.

Lost that privilege for life.

With the truck windows cracked he could smell it was one of those rare mornings where you can smell rain from sixty miles off, that Eastern Washington kind of rain that wreaks of wheat and alfalfa and wind whipped seed potato fields. There was panic, too, in it. You can smell that even if you don’t know what it is. But Jon knew, knew it from a job in what now seemed like a previous life. It was farmers dialing their insurance agents to get hail coverage, starting yesterday.

It never rains right

“You might want to think about construction again.”

It never rained. That day, it never rained.

He told the cops everything, he told the judge everything. The more truth he told, which is what they asked for, just tell the truth, the more he told, the worse it got for him.

Why is it like that?

“I’m not thinking of construction again.”

“You liked it.”

“Not this time of year I didn’t. It’s always raining.”

“The money’s better. You’re less anxious when the money’s better.”

He turned, as if she were behind him, like they were talking in the kitchen, him at the sink, her in her pajamas and holding a tea.

“I’m less anxious when I don’t forget my meds.”

They appeared in the doorway, management and HR did. They couldn’t touch him, he knew that, they weren’t allowed to, and they couldn’t make him stay, either. Everything was kind of up to him now.

“Did you forget your meds today?”

That superpower you have when you’re surrounded.

“They’re here,” and he turned away from them.

Outside was some rain, he finally noticed, a fucking squall, actually. After the interview they’d probably make him wait outside for his wife.

“Who’s here?”

He could not hear the rain. He could only hear directly above him the scrit scrit scrit of basketball sneakers on hardwood. A Celtics game. He hadn’t watched the Celtics since Garnett, Pierce, and Allen, greatest trio of all time.

Tough argument to make and a long one to defend. But he would fight anyone who–

“I can’t pick up a hammer again. It triggers my PTSD.”

“Pays better.”

“Under the table. I need work I can document, for the courts.”

“You’ve known B a long time. He owes you, right? All the times you’ve saved his ass. Maybe just temporary on the books.”

“Can’t.”

“Did he keep Thomas on?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

A big man’s a big asset to B’s construction company. When it came to passing beams and rock and shit, Horsepower never tired.

“It’s pissing out.”

“I thought we were gonna lose power.”

All Jon’s life rain meant he could go home. Can’t roof in the rain. Can’t move pipe and don’t need to. Can’t trench wire because you can’t set glue. Can’t clean windows, can’t caulk siding, can’t paint trim. All the exterior stuff.

“I don’t think those pussies are gonna come get me.”

He could hear that Joel Emiid passed Chamberlain.

“Jon?”

Most points for a 76er.

“Mm?”

“Lots of other places you just have to take a piss test. Lexica’s down the road and they’ll hire anybody.”

She was googling jobs and was out of her pajamas.

“Fucker triggered my PTSD.”

“Don’t make me wait in the parking lot.”

This job was the first drug test he’d passed in twelve years.

“Love you, babe.”

“Jon.”

Silence, the rain.

From his phone, the rain.

“Just tell them what happened, okay?”