BULFAMANTE SMELLED like oil of wintergreen. I swear he greased back his gray curls with the stuff. He had a chunky head and cauliflower ears and carried a ball-peen hammer everywhere, as if it were the key to unlock his days. That hammer: a dainty object of brass, so small it disappeared inside his fist. He’d been a boxer in the French navy, he said, and carried his shoulders scrunched high, as if warding off imaginary blows to his ears. On weekends starting the summer before my junior year of high school and continuing through winter break, I worked for Mr. Bulfamante sanding floors: worst job in the world. Most of the floors we sanded were in new houses, their Sheetrocked walls unpainted, no electricity, no water. We drank and washed our hands from a two-gallon water keg Mr. Bulfamante kept in the back of the van, next to the drums of varnish and sealer. Mr. Bulfamante liked me to call him Sugar, as in Sugar Ray Leonard or Sugar Ray Robinson, one of those sweetly named boxers.
