Just before we finished the crown-molding, Will Watkins cut off his finger with the miter saw. He jumped back, his scream piercing like an attacking eagle, and swung his arm all around. Blood mixed with sawdust and metal chips, turned the floor into a Jackson Pollock painting. Because he was hemophobic, Hank scuttled away from the scene and tripped over the circular saw, which knocked that down, which sent the blade chewing through the wood, which fell into the first floor of the house, which scared the shit out of Paddy the Foreman, who proceeded to knock over the 20-lb sledge and send that through two adjoining walls, taking out half the wiring in the kitchen. I watched in abject disbelief, as one fucking finger set us back more than ten days.

I knew I shouldn’t have gotten out of bed that morning.

With a tee-shirt rapidly turning red around his hand, Watkins shuffled into the truck, and one of the day laborers sped towards Hopkins hospital. I just sat there, shaking my head, sipping from the thermos of iced tea Amy packed. I imagined us reading in bed this morning, her long blonde hair spilling over the pillow like liquid sunshine. My watch said it was four-thirty, so I guessed she was already halfway through her yoga class. I could’ve been lying on the floor of her studio, watching her stretch and contort, listening to her instruct the haus-fraus with a voice like wind through tall grass, watching the sinew and muscle striate, smelling the sweat on her tank top, watching the skin of her slight hips turn white as bones pressed against it. Instead, I was sitting on rebar, sipping tepid tea and drawing shapes in the coagulated-blood-and-wood paste with the tip of my boot. Paddy’s feet came into my line of view. I looked up. He pursed his lips and shook his head, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Beer?” he said.

I nodded once. “Beer.”

The November sun tried to warm us, but the gauze of grey clouds choked it to little more than a diffused pallid orb. Leaves crunched under our feet like harvest-colored tin foil. At the crosswalk, I scraped my boot against the curb to remove the glass of a crushed vial. The Baltimore wind licked at our exposed necks like a lizard’s tongue. Ash hung in the air, yard waste or a row home burning somewhere close. Amy said she’d meet us after her class, and it’d be a beautiful evening to walk home.

Paddy lit a Black and Mild. “Kind of funny when you think about it.”

“How so?”

“I mean, we was worrying about jobs running out. Now we got this one for another two weeks.”

“They going to pay for another two weeks, especially if it’s because we screwed up?”

He shrugged. “I’ll think of something.”

Clapping my hand on his shoulder, I said, “Paddy, I’ve never doubted the revisionist tendencies of your creative beancounters.”

“Damn right.” He opened the door to Santo Sangre. Smoke smacked us in the face like a glove woven with steel wool, the mariachi horns weaving around the wounds. “Hey, first round’s on me.”

​We were halfway through our beer when he told me about the contract.

“Some hotshot–Idunno–lawyer or some shit. Lots of Yankee dough. Bought one those fixers by the Park and wants us to remodel it.”

I shrug, look over his shoulder for Amy. Two wrinkled women played touch-screen poker on the machine at the end of the bar, a few silver streaks in their otherwise shadow-black hair. A stack of quarters sat next to their overflowing ashtray.

“Was gonna have Watkins watch out over it while I finished up the fingertrap house, but seeing as how he’s outta commission, I’ll do it for now. But I want you to plan the job.”

“Sure. Whatever.”

“Guy says he wants it aesthetically pleasing. You watch all that artsy-fartsy shit, figure you’re the one for him.”

He tipped his mesh-hat to the back of his head, scratched at his scalp. Bits of dirt and sawdust fell like snow. Thumbing a Marlboro to the top of the pack, he put it between his teeth and struck a match.

“Something not right bout them two, though.”

“What two?” The door opened, Amy walking in on a gust of wind. She scanned the bar for us, ponytail swishing like a pendulum.

“The hotshot and his wife. Like–” he snapped his fingers in the air,
“–what’s that one with the bastard with the chainsaw?”

I waved my hand to get her attention. I thought it was a good sign that, after eighteen months of being together, her smile still turned my knees to water. Paddy’d told me that the honeymoon ends two weeks after you put the golden shackle around each other’s finger, but it’d been two months and we still said I love you each time we parted company.

“Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” I said as an afterthought.

She came over to where we were sitting. Cotton jacket zipped to her throat, cheeks still flushed from class. Her yoga pants halted just below her knee, showing enough leg to stir my blood.

“Hi, baby,” she said with a kiss. Her sweat could be bottled as an essential oil.

“Hey, girl.” Paddy raised his hands over his head, made the Walk Like an Egyptian motion. “I might could learn you something.”

She just smiled. Hair fell in ringlets like flaxen tornados. “Hey, Paddy.”

“What would you like to drink?” I slid my hand under her jacket. The small of her back was damp to the touch.

“Just a water.” She pulled out a stool and plopped down with a sigh.

I flagged down Consuela the bartender, pointed at mine and Paddy’s glasses and asked for agua con limon. A few months ago, after we finished a total rehab in under a week, Paddy told all the guys on the job that he’d get them drunk, to show his appreciation for our hard work. The brother of one of the day laborers owned a bar, so we took our business to him, and we’d been drinking there ever since.

Hand squeezing Amy’s thigh, I said, “Class okay?”

“It was great. Picked up something for you.” She nodded at my now-empty glass. “How many is that?”

I put up a finger. Consuela set down our round. I put up another finger.

“Just be careful,” she said, sliding a hand over my crotch. “We need this later.”

I opened my mouth to say something when Paddy belched, slammed his glass on the bar and announced that there was a fire somewhere he has to put out with his pink fire hose. He kicked the stool back and stomped to the bathroom.

A pack of men walked in the front door, lined up on stools. Their dusty flannels smelled of concrete and sawdust.

I lit one of Paddy’s matches, watched the flame until it touched my fingers, then blew it out. “What’d you want to do tonight?”

She shrugged. “Make dinner, smoke a joint and fuck?”

I tipped back half of my drink, wiped my mouth and stood, arm extended to her.

“Shall we, then?”

She curtsied, wrapped her arm in mine, and as I stepped through the door, someone collided with me, almost at a jogging pace. I stumbled into Amy. The man caught himself with the door. Ashen wool hat, styled like a newsboy fromthe 40s. A thin mustache crawling across his upper lip. Eyes uneven, as if one was perpetually squinting. He tipped his hat to me. My skin turned gooseflesh, a nail boring into my spine. He spun and was gone around the corner.

“What a dick,” Amy said. “He didn’t even apologize.”

I adjusted my jacket.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.” I swallowed the aftertaste of copper. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

She lay naked and bent at the waist, right knee kissing her nose, left leg extended. Closed eyes and measured breathing. Every thirty seconds, she alternated legs. Theory was that the sperm would exert less energy travelling to her baby center and thereby have more energy to make said baby. I told her that idea seemed too familiar, so Hollywood that it couldn’t be true, but it hasn’t dissuaded her yet. She also tried douching with soda water before sex, using egg whites as lubrication and drinking six or seven cups of green tea daily, so my advice usually drifts away like smoke. I alternated between hoping I was sterile, so she wouldn’t have to carry any of the childless guilt, and imagining her uterus as a frozen tundra, so there’d be one less thing I did wrong.

I pressed on my eyes, watching the rainbow circles swirl on my flesh while she counted to thirty in whispers. Four or twenty-two minutes crept by. I lit the roach, took a few drags and offered it to her.

“Once I’m done.” Still in whispers.

Balancing the joint on a book on my night table, I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Water beat down on my body, temperature fluctuating when other people in the building flushed their toilets. Ash and dirt and concrete dust turned the water at my feet light brown. I stayed in until the water was a torrent of white-hot needles and my skin was bright red. The scar stayed the same, though, like a mangled prune, a wormhole through my stomach.

Two years ago– before I met Amy, before I came to Baltimore, before I fled Boston–I was drinking my way around a party in Kenmore. Bald men in tuxes crowded around the Red Sox game on the television in the kitchen, spilling cask-aged scotch over the marble floor when the Sox got a hit. I remembered thinking that scene was profound in some ridiculous way: no matter which strata of society made up the gathering, the party always ended up in the kitchen. I was working as an organizer for Chance Miller. His sister, Delilah, had just given me the most exquisite blowjob in the bathroom and my body, unable to reassemble itself, left me sprawled on the couch, watching how the velvet curtains would swish whenever someone brushed past them. They looked so soft and I only wanted to rub my face on them.

A few men were deep in conversation, sitting in the chairs surrounding the couch. They used vague terms like product,assets, distribution chain and acceptable loss, but the gold piled on their necks said they’d never read shit about Milton Friedman and free-market theory. Maybe I wanted to assert my status in the room, or maybe my brain was drifting somewhere in a post-ejaculation haze, or maybe I was just drunk and stupid. Whatever the reason, I said something–to this day, I still don’t remember what it was–and apparently dropped Chance’s name in mixed company.

Ten minutes later, as I lit a cigarette in the hallway of his building–Chance wouldn’t allow smoking inside his apartment–one of the guys in the security division passed by me. A flash of light at his side, then electric fire burst through my stomach. A stain like oil spread across my white shirt. My hands were sticky with blood.

I left Boston the next day.

As the shower fell silent, I could hear Amy counting twenty-eight, twenty-nine, and thirty through the door. I wrapped a towel around my waist and lay on the bed next to her. Her hair was piled on her head like an abstract sculpture.

“I got you a present,” she said.

“I thought it was six-to-eight weeks before you’d know.” I pressed my hand to her stomach.

She smacked my shoulder and called me an asshole. She grabbed a tin the size of my palm from her yoga bag and took off the lid.

“I got this from one of the ladies in my class.” It smelled like pine trees and burning insulation.

“Very pungent.”

She scooped some out with her fingers and pushed me onto my back. “It’s supposed to break down scar tissue. I thought you’d like it.”

“Thank you,” I said. The salve felt like frozen Vaseline with bits of sand and glass.

“You’re pretty lucky, you know. A lot of people end up worse.” She spoke slowly, words seeping out as she concentrated on covering the area.

“What do you mean?

“This is pretty clean. If there was a jagged edge, it could’ve torn you up pretty badly. You didn’t get tetanus or some other crazy infection. Who knows?” She rubbed in the last bit with a quick pat and looked up. “You got off lucky. Rebar can be some nasty shit.”

#

The sun slashed through the gaps between buildings. It reflected in serrated prisms off oil-slick puddles. It tinged leaves a lurid color, as if about to be set aflame. It turned the dark windows of apartments into mouths of a bottomless void.

The guy had done his research. The house’s brick exterior showed only slight cracks, no evidence of a sinking foundation. I guessed sixteen-foot ceilings in the first floor, probably a vaulted-cathedral atrium inside the door. Judging by the width of the block, I figured they had four rooms on the second floor with the possibility of putting another in the basement and still having a lounge area. It was the kind of house Amy and I would pause in front of when we went for walks, cupping our palms to our foreheads as we were voyeurs, peering in the house. We’d plan out how to redo the houses, which walls to knock down, which colors to keep.

Paddy’s truck sat on the curb. Next to it was a Jaguar. Opalescent blue like the infinite sea at sunset. Seats made from the flesh of a dozen baby cows. Chrome rims, almost menacing in their sheen. Voices echoed inside the house. I helped myself to some coffee from his thermos and went inside.

“Hello?”

Footsteps in the dust tracked up the stairs. Above me, wisps of cobweb hung from the chandelier like ghostly Spanish moss. One of the dining room walls featured a gaping hole that might’ve been a thrown chair. Sixteen-foot ceilings, like I’d thought. Voices trickled from the second floor.

None of the stairs creaked. Solid construction; this job might’ve been easier than Paddy thought. The top of the stairwell overlooked the entranceway. Looking at the long chain suspending the chandelier, I almost got vertigo. Dark wood and dust motes everywhere.

Five doors in the hallway. Four rooms and a bathroom, and all of them closed except the one at the end. Paddy laughed and I heard a dull smack. I pictured him clapping the shoulder of this yuppie, already yukking it up so the guy wouldn’t notice Paddy’s hand on his wallet. Half-recessed brass light fixtures lined the walls. They’d be beautiful once they were polished. Faded mauve paint made the hall feel like a necrotic birth canal. I sipped my coffee and it tasted of smoke.

“I think this was a good decision,” the voice said.

Paddy laughed. “You ain’t never find a place like this, sir, notround here. Just you wait til we get her done and you won’t even recognize her.”

The man stood by the window, looking over the neighborhood like a hawk in its nest. Slicked hair hugged his skull, so black I thought he used oil for pomade. One ear slightly smaller than the other. Invisible hands wrapped around my head. Paddy checked his watch. I cleared my throat and startled him.

“There he is.” He rushed over to me. “We been waiting for you to start going over some plans.”

“Sorry I’m late.” I set the coffee cup on the floor. A thousand bugs gnawed on my fingertips.

“I’ll introduce you two.” He grabbed my elbow and pulled me towards the man. “This here is Cole. He’ll be designing the house for you.”

The man spun on his heels. Black, oiled leather shoes. The tips of a white collar-shirt peeked from under his olive green peacoat. A thin mustache crawled across his upper lip. One eye squinted. Hornets smacked against the inside of my skull.

“Cole, this here is Mr. Miller. You’re going to be designing his house for him.” Paddy nudged me forward to shake hands. “Mr. Miller, this is Cole.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Miller.” I extended my hand; his was like sharkskin.

“The pleasure is all mine.” He smiled like a wolf slinking away from a henhouse, covered in blood. “And please, Cole, call me Chance.”