Chance

D

The following day was Saturday and he made his way to Allan’s Antiques upon rising. He found the building even more dimly lit than on previous visits and so quiet as to appear deserted, although the front door was open to the sidewalk off Market as always. He went in. He did not hear Carl’s voice nor could he find him. He’d half expected to see the crack-smoking leather boy around somewhere but he was absent as well. He went to the big table where they’d looked at the computer images of his furniture, called a tentative hello to no response, then moved on to the back of the building.

A flickering blue light came from the hole in the wall that led to Big D’s work area. Approaching this and looking in, he was able to see Big D himself at work with some kind of handheld torch on a shining piece of metal. Chance waited for a bit, watching as D worked. The scene had about it some archetypal aspect Chance found satisfying to observe and was reluctant to disturb, the big man at work amid the tools of his trade, intent upon the task before him. There was something in the absolute physicality of it. It spoke, Chance thought, of another more rudimentary and therefore, perhaps, simpler time. Though it occurred to him as well that simpler times were surely more a function of longing than of history, that life on planet Earth had never been all that simple.

Chance waited till D had paused in his labors then knocked on the wall to get his attention. D placed the thing he was working on atop a bench and came to the window, using a heavily gloved hand to push a darkened pair of safety glasses to his forehead as he walked. “Doc Chance,” he said. His face was flushed from the labor and the sweat ran from his cheeks but his voice was flat and matter-of-fact, as though Chance’s being there was of little or no surprise.

“Hello, D,” Chance replied. He was hoping to sound upbeat. “Is Carl around?”

“Stayed home today.”

“Is he well?”

“Little under the weather,” D replied.

The big man was dressed as he had been the day they’d met, minus the jacket, allowing for the observation that the sleeves had been cut from the shirt to make way for arms the size of Chance’s legs. The shirt’s lettering was now legible as well—The art of the blade, in bloodred script.

“Ah.” Chance hesitated, thinking it over. “Well, I guess maybe you’re the guy I’d probably need to talk to anyway, at least to get things started. You remember the furniture we looked at?”

“I do. You decide you want to make it right?”

Chance smiled at the big man’s phrasing. “I guess that’d be one way of putting it. I’d need to know what it would cost, if I’d have to pay up front or if there would be a way of settling when the stuff was sold.”

“Payment, you’d have to talk to Carl.”

“Of course. Do you think he’ll be back anytime soon? Not serious, I hope, what’s wrong with him?”

“He’ll be okay. I’d expect him back in a day or two.”

“I guess what I’m wondering,” Chance said, “is if I shouldn’t take steps… Just get the stuff down here. I’m sure we’ll be able to work something out.” Now that he’d been confronted with some minor obstacle, it came to him just how badly he wanted to sell. “I’d need help moving it,” he added. “Carl must have someone he uses for that kind of thing.”

“He’s kind of between those people right now.”

“Does he keep a truck of some sort, here maybe, at the warehouse?”

“He did.”

Chance nodded. He could see that D was not one to elaborate on the mundane.

“I’ll tell you what,” D said after a moment or two had passed. “Go to the U-Haul or someplace. Rent yourself a truck big enough so that we can do it in one trip. I can help you get the stuff down here.”

“Really?”

“Do it today, you find a truck.”

Chance gave it a beat. “Shit,” he said. He felt compelled to make a show of patting himself down. “Phone’s in my apartment. Is there one here I can use?”

D nodded to the door.

Chance made his way into the workroom.

The place was quite expansive once inside, with lots of benches and blocks and vises and tools. There was also a cot in a far corner with a wooden crate placed on one end to form a kind of nightstand with some personal items arranged neatly on the top. There were a number of books scattered about the floor at the cot’s foot and some cardboard boxes stacked neatly along one wall. A large mirror set into a freestanding wooden frame, almost certainly borrowed from Carl’s collection, appeared as part of this arrangement, as did a large piece of plywood affixed to the brick wall upon which someone had drawn a more or less life-sized outline of a human torso in black ink with numbers drawn on it to indicate what Chance could only imagine to be targets. The overall impression of the place was such that Chance was willing to take it for D’s living quarters as well as his workplace.

As Chance studied his surroundings, D dug a well-worn San Francisco directory out of an aging school desk from which a good deal of the finish had been scraped away before pointing him to an ancient black telephone mounted on a wall. “Knock yourself out,” he said, and went back to doing whatever it was he had been doing when Chance showed up.

There was a U-Haul place in Noe Valley. It was not the closest but they had a truck ready for that afternoon. Chance told them he would take it then called for a cab and joined D at his workbench.

“We good?” D asked.

“Cab’ll be here in fifteen, or so they say. I’ll be back with the truck. I appreciate your doing this.”

D nodded. He was once more at work on the piece of steel but had traded the torch for a small hammer with which he was tapping at the edge of the thing.

“Mind if I ask what that is?”

“You can ask.”

Chance smiled. Big D, apparently not without a sense of humor, held the article up for him to see. Chance asked if it was a hatchet.

“Tomahawk,” D told him.

“I didn’t know there was a difference.”

“Hatchet’s a tool. Tomahawk’s a weapon.”

“In this day and age?”

“You’d be surprised,” D told him.

“Is it for you?”

“Buddy of mine… Keeps going back to Afghanistan.”

Chance recalled their first meeting, the military jacket with the Army Rangers insignia. “Is that where you were?”

D nodded. “What I was doing here, when you came in, was using the torch to temper the blade, same as you would with a knife. You want it thin enough to cut, hard but not brittle.” He held up the tomahawk once more. “I’ve been working out a design with this guy for his past two tours. He lets me know how it works, how he thinks it might work better. I modify it accordingly.”

Chance was a moment in imagining what the particulars of such an exchange might actually be like. “I better go out and meet that cab,” he said.

It all took longer than expected and the truck a piece of shit with blown shocks and springs poking through vinyl seat covers and the late light drawing out the shadows in Chance’s neighborhood by the time he and D came finally bouncing up from the Great Highway in the ancient rig, one of many as the afternoon rush hour he’d been hoping to beat lurched into full swing with lines of cars at each and every intersection and jaywalking children with backpacks and cell phones and Chinese workmen unloading fish trucks at competing corner groceries and tattooed teenagers with funny hats on clattering skateboards. There was even a guy carrying a surfboard, headed in the general direction of Ocean Beach but looking a trifle lost, when, as if on cue, the old truck backfired by way of announcing their arrival.

Big D started as if he’d been shot at and Chance laughed. He couldn’t quite help himself. “It’s like the Joads,” he said.

“Fuck are the Joads?”

“The Grapes of Wrath? ”

D just looked at him.

“The great novel of the Great Depression; wasn’t a bad movie either. John Ford, Henry Fonda. Joad was the name of the family, farmers fleeing the Dust Bowl for California, everything they owned strapped to the back of an old truck. I drive around in a rig like this, that’s what I think of, the Joads.”

“That’s just great,” D said, but he didn’t sound all that happy about it.

There was of course no suitable street parking left anywhere near Chance’s apartment. Nor was there, given the truck’s height and width, any chance of gaining access to the small basement garage he shared with his downstairs neighbors. He nosed the truck into the apartment’s scrawny driveway as far as he was able, set the brake and hazard lights as a warning to such traffic as would now be forced to evasive maneuvering, and got out.

He could hear D behind him, huffing and puffing, as they made their way up the narrow stairs. By the time they reached the apartment to stand looking at the furniture, the big man was once again red faced and sweating as he had been in his workroom, and Chance was beginning to worry that the stairs in concert with the heavy lifting might prove too much, that given the man’s weight and apparent lack of conditioning, his rush to get all of this taken care of today may have been a mistake. A hypertensive stroke did not seem out of the question. “Would you like a glass of water?” he asked. He was thinking the guy might like to sit for a moment, that and trying to recall the last time he’d been called upon to administer CPR.

“Forget about it,” D told him, “you get that.” He nodded toward a chair while advancing upon the desk, the largest and heaviest piece in the set and which, without waiting a reply from Chance, he tilted against his thighs, found his grip, brought the entire piece flat to his chest as though it were of no more consequence than a fold-up card table, and headed for the exit. Chance followed, watching as D wrestled the big desk down the difficult staircase, turning it first one way and then the other, at one point, in exiting the building, going so far as to heft the entire thing above his head. When he’d gotten it into the back of the truck he turned to Chance, still in possession of his chair. “You want to get this shit wrapped and strapped, I’ll get the rest.”

And that was how they did it. By the time Chance had wrapped the desk in a mover’s blanket and secured it to a wall of the truck with a canvas strap, D was back with the bookcase. By the time he was done with that, D was back with the remaining chair, no more winded and no less so than when they had begun.

At some point, while Chance was still in the truck, some guy had started honking. The traffic was always slow here and the position of the truck was making it more so, effectively squeezing what was usually a two-lane, two-way street into a single lane as motorists were forced to take turns getting around the rear corner of the truck. This was not an unusual occurrence for anyone used to the neighborhood. But horns were not so unusual either, and one guy in particular seemed intent upon taking umbrage at the situation. He was driving a gunmetal-gray BMW, one of the big ones with tinted glass, and he started honking about three car lengths back from the truck. What he hoped to gain by all of this was unclear, but there he was, honking away. The honking inspired two or three other malcontents to join in.

Chance went once to the rear of the truck, where he and the driver of the BMW, a capable-looking young man in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled above his wrists, were able to make eye contact. Chance held up his hands, palms out and up, as though to ask, “What do you expect me to do? This is what it’s like here.” It was that kind of gesture. The driver responded by flipping him off. Chance went back to wrapping furniture.

The BMW had drawn almost even with the rear of the truck, its driver now taken to punctuating his honks with the occasional shouted epithet by the time D returned with the last chair. D set the chair in the back of the truck and, as the driver’s turn had finally come and he was about to move around the truck, stepped very matter-of-factly into the street in front of him, effectively blocking the BMW’s path. The car came to an abrupt stop. The driver honked and gesticulated and worked his jaw. D just stood there staring at him. At some point the guy seemed to get the picture. A profound silence settled upon the street. The driver sat waiting as several cars in the opposing lane went on by, then tried backing up as far as the fifteen other cars behind him would allow and cranking his wheels as if a wider turn into the street would somehow effect his escape. D responded by taking one step toward the car and one to his right. The driver’s position was by now painfully and wonderfully obvious. His options were roughly three in number. He could run over the man in front of him, undoubtedly the dictate of his heart, but this was impractical as there were witnesses and really, given the traffic, no way to go very far very fast. He could of course get out of his car. Or, finally, he could sit there and shut up till it had been made manifest to any and all concerned just how thoroughly he’d been made a cunt of. Not surprisingly, he opted for door number three. After some seemingly appropriate amount of time had passed, D moved and the guy went quietly on, hands atop his wheel, eyes dead ahead.

Chance had by now finished with the furniture. He went up the stairs once more to take a last look around and locked the door. D was waiting in the passenger seat of the truck when he came back down. Chance got in behind the wheel. They drove for a block without speaking.

“That was pretty good,” Chance said finally. He was referring to what had happened in the street. The fact was, he was having some difficulty in repressing a deep sense of exhilaration.

D nodded, resting his head against the metal grate behind his seat, and closed his eyes. “Shit like that makes my day.”