Unspoken(25)
“The sledgehammer? You knock shit down with it, like a baseball bat.”
“No, dumbass, your house flipping.”
“Oh.” Finn laughed. “You buy an unrenovated house in good neighborhood for low amounts of money, put a lot of sweat equity into it and not a lot of materials, and sell it for a sweet profit four weeks later.”
“Like what kind of profit?”
“I bought this crackerjack box of a house for fifty grand and most of the houses along this road sell for ninety or more. I’ll put maybe fourteen grand in upgrades into this place and pocket the rest.”
I gaped at him. I had no idea it was so profitable. “You have to pay anyone?”
“Yeah. My crew and my realtor.” Finn placed a round white bucket on the floor and pulled out a tool belt, buckling it around his waist. “I used to have a great one, but then Adam slept with her. Now she won’t talk to me.”
“Ouch.” When he shook his head at me, I asked, “What?”
“You and Adam are a lot alike.”
“How so?”
“You both have a hard time keeping it in your pants. I know what Adam’s problem is. He’s trying to live up to his father’s legacy. What’s yours?”
What was I doing with all those women? I hardly knew anymore. “Trying to forget my father’s legacy.” That was the best truth I could come up with. Sunk deep in the soft embrace of a woman or feeling the sick give of a man’s flesh against my fist were the best ways to forget that I spawned from the gene pool disaster that was my dad. I didn’t want to talk to Finn about the fact that the only way I knew how to cope was to fight or fuck. It sounded bad enough when I thought about it. Verbalizing it would only make me look like a two-dimensional caricature.
“You do one a month?” I asked, changing the subject.
Finn cocked his head and eyed me curiously, but answered my question. “Right now, but I hope to be doing four or more a month once I get a few crews running for me. No one else will show up before nine, so for the next three hours, it’s just you and me.”
Finn showed me the supports he’d jacked into place to hold the ceiling up when the walls came down. “Take the tip of the sledgehammer and poke it through the sheetrock carefully, like you’re doing a virgin. Look for wires or ducts. If there’s something there, leave it alone. If it’s all clear, bang the shit out of it.”
“The walls are female?”
“Anything you push a long hammer into is a female,” Finn replied, his voice fading at the end as he went down the hall.
When I swung the sledgehammer into the walls, the impact and resulting destruction felt awesome. Almost as good as hitting someone in the face. Definitely not as good as sex. I made quick work of the wall and bellowed for Finn.
“Geez, aggression much?” He inspected my work from the other side. I could see directly into the opposite room, only vertical slats of wood separated the two of us.
“Now what?”
“Now you knock down that wall.”
“The boards?”
“Yup.”
This demo was the shit. After knocking down the wall, I realized how much larger the house seemed. Before, it was a rabbit warren, with tiny closed-off spaces. Now, I could envision relaxing and having a beer without feeling as if I was going to be crushed like a can in garbage compactor.
We took down one more wall, which required the both of us because on the other side were appliances and stuff that had to be moved first.
“Are some of the houses you flip totally rotten? Like nothing can be salvaged?” I asked him as we wrestled a refrigerator away from the wall.
“No, most houses just need cosmetic work. A new bathroom. A new kitchen. Sometimes new flooring.”
“But sometimes the house’s foundations are destroyed?”
“Some homes have termites or mold or stuff and require some structural work, but there are few that can’t be salvaged.”
“But some of them, right, should just be razed to the ground?” I pressed.
“No, Bo, most of them can be salvaged,” Finn said quietly, seriously. “Almost all of them can. They may have been put together by shoddy builders, but they can almost always be saved.”
That was in Finn’s estimation, but I heard what he was trying to say, just as he had accurately interpreted the meaning of my question. Am I salvageable?
Chapter Nine
AM
I RECEIVED ANOTHER NASTY HATE note from Clay and avoided campus for the rest of the week. The commons confrontation left me feeling uncertain and a little afraid, which I absolutely hated. My only solace turned out to be biology. Bo acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. I was still acutely aware of his presence next to me in the classroom, but his broad shoulders acted like a buffer between me and the rest of the students. No whispers reached us. No cutting remarks were cast my way. He waited for me outside the classroom and walked me down to our shared table. After class, he escorted me out.