Uta returned at five and enthusiastically inspected my work. The melted paint chips had hardened and littered the floor, as crisp and curled as Fritos. She scooped up a handful, running them through her fingers like a pirate discovering a chestful of golden doubloons. “Hey, Mr. Sharpie, are you sharp or what? Old Uta made a smart move signing you on, didn’t she!” She stamped her feet upon the fallen chips, turning in a circle and snapping her fingers.
It occurred to me that she might be drunk, but Uta was the sort of person who didn’t need alcohol in order to make a spectacle of herself. I had apparently passed her test and was invited to report back to work on Monday morning, when I could meet “what’s-his-hootle, the colored guy.”
What’s-his-hootle was a tall, solidly built fellow in his early thirties who went by the name of Dupont Charles. In his moments of repose, his eyes were hooded and sensually sleepy, peering out from a handsome face the color of the dark walnut stain Uta planned to use on the woodwork. In the presence of authority, his expression would change completely. As if his features were activated by an invisible pulley, his eyes would bulge from their sockets and his lips would stretch to comic proportions, revealing a smile of frightening intensity.
“Well, I have a feeling you’re a pretty sharp guy,” Uta said to Dupont as I entered the room. “And that’s just what the doctor ordered. Yes, sir, I need all the sharp guys I can get. What do you say, sharp guy, are you with us?”
“Oh, Miz Uta,” he said, “you know I is. I bees wit chu every stepa da way! You can’t find no harder worker than Ole Dupont, less you puts ten regular mens together an’ beats ’em wid a whip.”
He rubbed his hands together and grinned in a way that made my jaws ache. Uta introduced us to each other and stood to watch as we got started.
“You best be careful not to be holdin’ dat heat gun too close to the wood,” Dupont instructed me. “Elseways all this pretty lady’s dreams be goin’ up in smoke and we sho’ don’t want dat happnin’, do we?”
“No, Dupont, we certainly don’t,” Uta said. “You keep on top of him and show him what’s what.”
“I sho’ will. Lord, I must be doin’ somethin’ right to have got me this fine job workin’ fah a nice lady such as yo’self. I waked up dis moanin’ jus’ prayin’ you be haf as nice as you already is. Now here I bees workin’ longside you and this tiny little man — oh, you done made me one happy fella, Miz Uta. One happy, happy man.”
Uta chuckled, brushing the hair away from her eyes. “You are an absolute treasure,” she said. “Both of you are just as sharp as tacks. I guess I’m just one lucky somebody, aren’t I?”
“Pretty too,” Dupont added. “You bees jus’ as lucky an’ pretty as you can be.”
“You keep that up, mister, and I’m liable to get a swelled head.”
“Oh no, Miz Uta. Your head bees jus’ right. T’aint too big or small. Your head bees perfect. I wished I had me a right-sized head like yours. ’Stead mine be all swolled up an’ lumpy.”
“Well, it’s supporting a nice big brain,” Uta said. “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, Dupont. You both do.”
Dupont beamed and I held my fingers to my throat, attempting to hold back the rising tide of vomit induced by this conversation. Either he had been preserved in a block of ice for the past sixty years or this was some sort of an act. I prayed in favor of the latter possibility, as I could not see myself having to spend eight hours locked in a kitchen with Stepin Fetchit.
When Uta finally left, Dupont stood at the window waving as her car disappeared into traffic. “Sayonara, fathead.” His voice had changed both in pitch and timbre, and he no longer spoke with an accent. After turning on the radio, he took a seat on the radiator and lit a cigarette. “You ever been to Tijuana?” he asked. Most of Dupont’s stories began with a question and ended with an insatiable woman, buck naked and begging for more. In Tijuana it had been the dark-eyed innkeeper’s daughter who reportedly shouted out the words “bueño!” and “grande!” as he took her from behind. Afterwards he had visited a nightclub where, for no cover charge and a two-drink minimum, he had witnessed a prostitute get it on with a braying donkey. “For real. After the show the club owner offered me the girl for free, but I said no because she was all stretched out. Say, you ever put a saddle on a fat girl’s back and ride her until she drops?”
Dupont lived with his girlfriend on the north side of town. He said that being white and Jewish, she was so desperate for a real man that she not only paid the rent and bills but also provided him with a clothing allowance. There were, he said, some pictures he’d show me after his brother got through with them. “Have you ever gotten two sisters pregnant in the same month?” he asked.
Uta’s car pulled up later that afternoon, and Dupont scrambled to collect his cigarette butts before turning on his heat gun. “Dat’s how come I bees workin’ so hard,” he said to me as she entered the room. “I dreams a goin’ off ta college some day and maybe bein’ a doctah or lawyah. Oh, hey, Miz Uta. You go get yo’ hairs done? It sho’ be lookin’ pretty.”
Uta said no, she’d just run a comb through it, nothing special. “What’s this garbage on the radio?” she asked, referring to the station Dupont had settled on after she’d left.
“Is dat da radio I been hearin’? Sound ta me like two cats clawin’ they way outta a bag. When jew turn on da radio, Mistah Dave? Lord, I guess I bees workin’ so hard I ain’t had da time ta hardly notice it.”
“Well I do and it’s giving me a big fat headache,” Uta said, resetting the dial to a classical station.
“Oh, I likes dat!” Dupont sang. “Dat dere bees the exact typo music I listens to at home.” He waved and glided his hands through the air as if he were conducting a symphony, his heat gun shooting helter skelter and singeing the hair on my arms.
“Oh, Dupont, you are certainly one very special person.”
It was my habit to stop for a cigarette once every hour, and I saw no reason to stop just because Uta was around.
“That, mister, is one nasty habit,” she said. “You ought to do like me and quit cold turkey. It was hard, sure it was, but I toughed it out and now I can finally see just how disgusting it really is.”
“It smell bad, too,” Dupont said, as if he could detect anything over the stench of burning paint. “It stink up da vironment and cause folks ta get cansah, too.”
“That’s telling him,” Uta said.
“I don’t wanna get me no cansah, Miz Uta. No ma’am, I don’t want nothin’ preventin’ me from achievin’ my goals. I mona go to medical school and learn how to be a doctah.
Then I mona go to anotha school an be a lawyah, and then I ain’t stoppin’ till I bees the president of da YOUnited States!”
“You see there,” Uta said. “Speaking on behalf of a doctor, lawyer, and the future president of the United States, there will be no more smoking in this apartment.”
I carried my cigarette out onto the back porch, listening as Dupont promised Uta a position as his secretary of health. His health was something he definitely needed to worry about, as I planned to kill him as soon as possible.
“Don’t think I’m not docking you for that little cigarette break, mister,” Uta said when I returned. “It was Dupont’s idea, and I think it’s a good one. Why should he work like a dog while you sit on your duff puffing away like a chimney? Maybe a dent in the old pocketbook will be the very thing that leads you to quit. Some people just have to learn the hard way.”
“Dat’s right!” Dupont said.
I asked him later why he bothered going through that foolish routine. He lit a cigarette and shrugged, explaining that he needed the money. I said that I needed the money, too, but there was more than enough work to go around. Why bust my chops and act like a moron when it wasn’t necessary?
“She likes it,” he said. “Big deal. If you want her to like you, maybe you should try a little harder, sharp guy.” He wiped the tips of his sneakers with a paper towel,
saying, “Hey, did you ever fuck a stout frecklefaced girl while her boyfriend was passed out in front of the TV?”
I enjoyed Dupont’s stories in part because I never quite believed them. It wasn’t, say, his seventh-grade math teacher measuring his erect penis with a slide rule that captivated me, rather it was the notion that he thought I might be impressed. He knew I had a boyfriend, yet he persisted with his questions. “When was the last time you poured motor oil on a college girl’s titties?” Like the act he presented for Uta, this seemed tailored to accommodate his notion of what he thought I expected him to be. To the landowning business-woman, he was the grinning minstrel, standing upon an overturned bucket to deliver his hopeless State of the Union Address. To what he considered a sex-crazy homosexual, he was the indefatigable stud, roaming from haystack to canopied bed to service his ever-expanding flock of enthusiastic bitches. I suppose we all bend ourselves to what we perceive as other people’s expectations, but to go so far as to outlaw smoking suggested a serious personality disorder. Who was he to his mother? To his girlfriend or father? In his attempt to be all things to all people, Dupont had succeeded in being one of the most mysterious people I’d ever met. Coma patients reveal more about themselves than he did.
For lunch we usually took forty-five minutes and ate cheeseburgers from a stand down the street. When Uta was around, Dupont suddenly switched to eating rice cakes and a cup of plain yogurt, her personal favorite as she was trying to work off the weight she’d gained since calling it quits with cigarettes. He’d shovel it down in five minutes, wipe his lips with the sleeve of his shirt, and return to work, regarding me as if I personified everything that was wrong with shiftless, fat-dazed America.
“I likes to eat da natural things what God set upon the plate of Adam an Eves,” he’d say. “Don’t take much ta make me happy, no ma’am; the littler I eats, the happier I bees.”
“That’s because you’re like me,” Uta would say. “You’re a sharp person who eats smart.”
We’d been at it for close to three weeks when finally it was time to switch off our heat guns and move on to the next phase. Uta had a system for stripping wood that involved using sawdust rather than steel wool. We painted the chemicals onto a patch of woodwork, packed it with sawdust, and scrubbed the area with a brush, removing the varnish to expose the natural oak that probably hadn’t seen the light of day since Uta’s friend Hitler was a young boy in lederhosen. Her method was quicker than using steel wool — cheaper, too — as the sawdust was given away free by the neighborhood lumberyard. The problem was that the sawdust had a way of infiltrating any unguarded part of the body, coating our hair and settling into the ears and nostrils. It crept through the eyelets of my shoes, into my socks and pockets, and clung to the sweat of our faces so that by the end of the day we all looked frighteningly alike. With our matte, beige faces; red eyes; and plush, dusted hair, Uta, Dupont, and I could have easily passed as members of the same grotesque family.
Uta was away one morning, visiting her accountant, when Dupont asked, “Have you ever loaned pictures of your girl-friend to your brother and gotten them back all covered with stains?” The answer was clearly so obvious, he did not hesitate for a reply but rather handed me a stack of Polaroids wherein a washed-out, naked, and bored-looking white woman posed upon a brown corduroy sofa, clutching a variety of household objects in her vagina: a flashlight, a hair-brush, a family-sized tube of toothpaste, and what looked to be a bottle of either shampoo or dish detergent. “That’s my girl!” Dupont said proudly. It was his hope to get the pictures published in what he referred to as “one of the magazines.” Toward the bottom of the stack were portraits of Dupont, sitting on a rattan throne and wearing nothing but pale blue socks and a pair of aviator sunglasses. His face was twisted into a sneer, and he was leaning forward, propping his chin upon the handle of a cane carved to resemble the head of an angry lion.
In situations like this I tend to comment on the details that might allow me to walk away as quietly as possible. “That’s some chair,” I said. “Where did you get that picture you’ve got hanging on the wall there? It always cheers me up to see a kitten sleeping in any kind of a basket.”
“You ever fuck a Jewish girl up the butt with the tip of a cane?” he asked.
We had finished stripping all the woodwork and were preparing to apply the stain when Uta announced that following this next stage of the game, she would no longer be needing us both. Her friend Briggs would drive in from Michigan to lend a hand when it came time to apply the finish. “I’m sorry, guys,” she said. “You’re both as sharp as you can be, but Briggs is practically family and has a lot of experience with polyurethane.”
“Jus’ like me!” Dupont said. “I bees experiencin’ with polyuratain all my life. Mistah Dave complain that it gives him a headache, but it bees like a tonic for me.” He paused to tap his brush against the rim of the can. “I’s jus’ hopin’ that, seein’ as you can’t afford to keep us both on, you’ll at least let me stay on and work fo free as a volunteer.”
Uta said she appreciated the gesture but wouldn’t think of having someone work for no pay. “Besides,” she said, “what makes you think I’d be letting you go?”
“It jus that, well…” He hung his head. “You know how it bees for people like me. Bein’… a colored man the way I is.”
“I understand it’s very hard for you people,” Uta said. “You get all kinds of flak from the southern rednecks and now I read in the paper where you’re getting it from the Jews to boot.”
“They’se the people who kilt Jesus!” Dupont said. “Hung him up on a cross and poked him wit sticks.”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind poking a few of them with a stick,” Uta said.
“Me neither.” Dupont looked my way and smiled.
Over the next few days he shifted into high gear, pointing out my countless flaws while pretending to share an interest in Uta’s many views and hobbies. Every few hours he would ask a question about crochet or ice-skating, but mainly he stuck to the Jews. “Las’ night I got to thinkin’ about how you said the Jews was tryin’ ta take ovah the world banks, Miz Uta. An’ it don’t hardly seem fair to me, seein’ as how them peoples already gots so much already.”
“Well, Dupont, some people are just plain greedy. It’s in their genes. I guess they’re just born that way.”
“I reckon you’se right. Some folks like Mistah Dave be born jus’ to show up late, even when he ain’t wearin’ jeans. Other folks come into dis whorl jus’ wantin’ to have ever-thang they can get they hands on. Me, I jus’ wish everybody be borned like you, Miz Uta, wantin’ to be sweet an’ pretty an’ fair-minded ’stead of bein’ late and tryin’ ta take ovah da world banks. When I bees elected to president, I mona pack them Jews an’ lazy folks off to wherever they come from and have me a country dats got somethin’ for everyone!”
“Well, you’ve got my vote,” Uta said.
The closer we came to the end of the week, the more ruthless Dupont became. I was returning from lunch, changing back into my work pants, when I heard him delivering what he hoped might be the final nail in my coffin.
“Miz Uta, did you know David be sick?”
“What, does he have a cold or something? I haven’t noticed anything.”
“Nome, I mean he be sick… in here.”
I couldn’t see anything but imagined he was pointing to the space between his ears.
“He tole me that he likes to go with mens, Miz Uta. In bed, I mean. Said he been doin’ it all his life. Said now he be livin’ wit another man, the two of ’em together like a regulah man and wife. And it… it jus’ ain’t right. No, ma’am, it jus’ is… wrong. T’aint natural in the eyes o’ God or the eyes of me neither. Way I see it, people like that be preyin’ on youngsters an’ ruinin’ folks’ lives just like the Jews be doin’, don’t you think?”
“I think it’s time for you to stop sticking your nose into other people’s business, that’s what I think,” Uta sa
id. “David can do whatever he wants to do after he leaves this apartment. We’re not here to discuss anyone’s private life; we’re here to stain this wood, do you understand?”
“It jus’ that… well, it make me uncomfortable, the way he bees lookin’ at me sometimes, Miz Uta. Make me feel all spooky. It like… he can see right through my clothes or somethin’. I don’t know how he do it.”
“It’s not all that difficult to see through you, Dupont,” I heard her say. “Take my word for it, the hard part is listening to you.”
Stunned, he spent the next few hours trying to regain her good graces. In his haste to please her, he overturned a can of stain. “That’s coming out of your pocketbook, my friend,” Uta said.
He ran to her with a cigarette butt he’d found in the pantry. “Miz Uta, somebody done been smokin’ in the apartment again. I tole him it was dangerous on account of the fumes and all but he said…”
“Oh, for the love of Pete,” Uta snapped. “Could you please shut your stupid mouth for just five minutes!”
Friday quietly came and went. Dupont returned on Monday morning with the pocket of his jeans slashed. “You ever been robbed, Miz Uta?” He said it happened on his way home from church. “I usually goes to church with my Moms, but she got carried away to the hospita’ Saturday night wiff a turrible pain in her stomach. Doctor tole her that a tumor done settled in there and like to eat her whole kidney clean off unless she have herself a operation.”