The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  This night represented the fourth or fifth visitation of Smitty. A bounty of appearances. Though Smitty didn’t like talking about himself, he did idly remark this night that his parents were long since dead, as with many of his acquaintances from home. Likewise that he’d tried to make good on an apartment in Rio Blanco but had come up a little short in the department of finances. Smitty’s expression was anguished during this recitation of the facts; his demeanor was far from the laughing coyote face that Bix perhaps erroneously associated with the trickster and his narratives. Smitty, in his anguish, didn’t ask Bix Rafferty for cough syrup, wasn’t one of those freeloaders who came around kissing your wrinkled-up posterior solely for the purpose of sharing what you had. Smitty simply appeared, apparitional, as if to signal the persistence of a spirit world.

  “Smitty,” Rafferty offered, “I am touched by your candor. I am touched that you would share your story. And I would like to reward you with this,” whereupon Rafferty generously passed him the Sea Breeze. “Let me just say that, yep, another day has come and gone, and not an ingot of any kind has been unearthed from the metric tons below. The water for the operation, in a time of regional drought, is already damnably unaffordable. Not to mention the rest of the overhead. Should I keep on?”

  “Huh?” Smitty said.

  “Let me answer a question with a question,” Rafferty said. “Does this desert land ultimately reward, or does this desert finally just take away, so that any civilization that perches itself hereabouts, any scattering of buildings and schools and granaries, will be wiped out whether by fire or flood or by the relentlessness of the sun?”

  “Not sure I totally catch what the hell you’re talking about,” and then Smitty said, “excepting that it’s hard not to worry about drought.”

  “There’s a rectitude to your tramps. There’s a poetry to the likes of you coming and going out here in the Sonoran Desert for many centuries. Things that have gone on, like the military hardware, you know these things better than most people. What’s best for the land, what is appropriate to the land.”

  “A man hates to run into barbed wire.” The discomfort of Smitty was such that Rafferty himself could very nearly perceive it through the haze of cold-relief products and Sea Breeze. “You got to be real careful out late at night. A cow can do some awful damage to a vehicle. Buddy of mine hit one. The cow pretty much won that particular contest.”

  Many things were inferred by Bix Rafferty in the next silence. Silence is a thing onto which meanings can be projected. For example, in a silence you might believe, with the proper balance of chemical reagents, that a radical depopulating of the desert landscape is called for, in which the white man and all of his ways, his preposterous medical clinics with their radiological devices, and his steroid-enhanced, lacrosse-playing übermen, should be deforested, by whatever means there was for deforesting the white men, and the only people who would be permitted to stay were the kinds of people who had a right relation to the land, and by that Rafferty meant people who appreciated the use of firearms, and who mined for the things under the ground, which were the things that the Old Spirits approved of and wanted harvested for the greater glory, and it was acceptable to the Old Spirits, Rafferty thought in the silence, if some of the men who remained were white men, because they were self-reliant believers. What wasn’t needed was a lot of conversation, he realized now, and this was the way in which Smitty, who was a holy man, was teaching Rafferty a lesson, by indicating that silence was just as important as conversation, and while Rafferty, who had once been a night school student back in the day, knew and understood that there was a so-called Socratic kind of instruction, which was all about the Q and the A, this was a completely different kind of instruction, the kind from Smitty, which embodied the inevitability of silence.

  The two of them looked up into the desert sky, as afternoon gave way to evening, and in one direction were the Santa Catalina Mountains and in one direction were the Santa Rita Mountains, and on the western faces of both of these was the big bloodstain of afternoon falling away. In the sky behind them rose the mysterious iris, and in the opposite sky, where the two men looked, the holy man and the miner, there was something else altogether. There was something else. There was some other thing in the sky. It could have been a military object, because there was always military hardware in the sky. But if this was military hardware, then this was some kind of exploding military hardware, because whatever it was, it was a thing falling from the sky, exploding from the sky, falling from the heavens, this piece of hardware. Rafferty had seen this kind of thing before, had seen the explosions of the Strategic Defense Initiative and so on. He was used to things falling not exactly in his backyard but close enough to his backyard that he’d cover his head now and then.

  And yet this felt different. An involuntary oath of some kind escaped from Rafferty, and he realized the singularity of the explosion, the vast, accelerated trajectory of its missile, because the explosion drove even Smitty up onto his feet, the Navajo holy man, and Smitty was looking at the explosion like it was just the worst thing he’d ever seen, which did not sit well with Rafferty, who after all was depending on Smitty to be the guide to the other world. And Smitty said, “Goddamn is that not right!” Because a big calved-off hunk of metal, some constituent piece of metal came down not a hundred yards from where the two men were sitting on the porch of the shack, like some horribly final punctuation mark, furrowed up a stand of cacti, flaming, and set some trees on fire from the impact.

  Just what Rafferty did not need! A fire in the part of autumn in which the wind had blown up to a howl. Conflagration might strike again at great speed across this valley known for its merciless flames.

  “What the hell was that?” Smitty asked.

  “Some kind of military fuckup or other,” Rafferty replied, but he was not as sure as all that. “And I am interested in what kind of military something or other. But I think first we got to get out there and do something about that fire while we can, before it gets worse.”

  Smitty said, “I’m not going anywhere near that. Certain kinds of things I’m going to leave to the Federales.” And thus Rafferty realized that the Navajo man was afraid. Smitty was retreating even as Rafferty was making plans.

  “Come on, friend, we’ll just drive the truck out over that way and we’ll put a little bit of the chemical extinguisher thing on that while we call for the fire department. Can’t you help me out? Some kinds of solitary activity are unwarranted.”

  But the reply was definitive. A couple of steps off the porch, a flicked cigarette butt stamped with a worn heel. The Navajo gentleman vanished into the onset of night. Without further discourse. And that perhaps was the reply of the ancients to a future of space junk. There was so much space junk that most of the space shots they attempted these days involved trying to fend off dilapidated satellites, stray bits of capsules, and other hardware. The orbits of outmoded space exploration were decaying, and that shit was falling down, for example, onto the house of a family in Ottawa, who were just sitting down to some venison stew when the garage was stoved in by a communications satellite from some Sino-Indian technology giant. Rafferty got in the truck by himself, a truck that barely had enough algae left in her to make it to the crash site. Made sure he had a couple of chemical fire extinguishers. And he gave himself over to cogitating on why a holy man like Smitty would come all the way out here to give him the message of silence, to give him the future of the white man in the desert, only to fail to participate in this moment of history, this moment when Rafferty found some prime Sino-Indian space junk right in his backyard. Because you know you could melt those satellites down, the housing, and that material could fetch a pretty price, and maybe the fellows over at the military base would be interested in having the navigation equipment, or maybe there were parabolic dishes on the satellite that Rafferty could use to improve reception at his house, or maybe he could use some of the Sino-Indian space junk for listening in on whatever tho
se Asian running dogs were planning for the hard-luck, post-imperium West. Smitty was just going to miss out on it all, feckless Indian, when Rafferty would gladly have cut him in on the take, for being the catalytic spiritual being that brought this Sino-Indian tin can here to his homestead.

  Sure enough, paloverde and greasewood were burning up pretty good, and greasewood had that not terribly pleasant industrial reek, and Rafferty was eager to gaze upon his prize, to know that the Old Spirits had sent him this wonder because he had suffered much and was deserving of booty. But before he availed himself of the prize, he had to put out the fires, which somebody must have called in, because he could already see in the distance beacons coming this way. From the military base? If there were pieces of the satellite that he wanted, he would have to get the fire out so that he was harder to find in the brush, and he would have to try to get the hardware into the truck with the winch before the guys from the base made it over.

  Rafferty used up an entire extinguisher on the shrubs, and thus at last he was done with putting out the fires and had the leisure to look at what the heavens had showered down.

  And what had the heavens brought him? This was a question, in point of fact, that he could not immediately answer. Because the streaked, scorched, black hunk of metal before him was impossible to identify. It had no markings left on it; neither did it have the communications array, the antennae, the parabolas, the reticular webs for receiving from the beyond that Bix associated with the modern satellite. Whatever this was, or had been, it was quite a bit larger than that. It was a size, he believed, that could contain man. Now: of the objects from the sky that could ferry a man, there were passenger jets; little two-seater prop planes, popular out here in the desert; jet packs, naturally, lots of jet packs; and then there were things that came from space. Rafferty was uncertain about his certainty, his notion that this was a piece of a space capsule of some kind.

  There were any number of Sino-Indian space explorations taking place just then, including yet another landing on the moon, and a family that was intending to orbit the planet Earth for five years, the longest that earthlings had yet spent in space. Still, Rafferty had a hunch, and the hunch was the Mars mission. Anyone with a head on his shoulders knew that the Mars mission was a disaster, and if the Old Spirits had intended for man to be on Mars, then there would be space for parking, inexpensive refueling options, and plenty of arable land, but the Old Spirits intended no such thing, and that’s why, Rafferty knew, the Mars mission was an unprecedented failure. A piece of the Mars mission, therefore, would have collectors’ value, even if he was unable to find a taker for it as scrap metal. Well, besides the scrap, there was some computer equipment—spirals of wires, a few motherboards, a profusion of chips here and there, some insulation, some polyurethane insulation, some exterior housing.

  The sirens in the fields of cholla and saguaro were drawing ever nearer, and Rafferty had to make a decision on what he could spirit away. The computer systems looked mostly intact, and these he placed in the back of his truck. The material was dangerously hot, from the reentry, from the fire, nearly scalding him right through his heat-resistant gloves. He swept his flashlight around the debris to look for anything else, and it was only when he decided he had finished the job that he thought he heard something in the midst of the debris. Not that there wasn’t a lot of rustling in the desert at night, what with the rats and coyotes and peccaries. But he would have been surprised if there were an animal that wanted for the smarts necessary to get the hell away from this particular reentry zone. He chased after the rustling with the beam of his flashlight, and that was when he saw something. Something gory, red, and foul that seemed to have come down with the wreckage—and that was a severed human arm.

  An arm. A human arm. An awfully hairy arm, the arm of a really hairy guy, some guy with really unflattering, bristly black hair up and down his arm. The arm was severed at the elbow, or just below, and a bit of bone protruded from the end, as if to remind Rafferty that there had once been even more at the other end of the thing. Oddly enough, meanwhile, the hand at the end of the arm was missing a finger. Not from impact, he suspected, because the missing finger had healed over. The middle finger. This simian guy from space had been missing a finger for a while. And the fourth finger had a ring, a standard-issue gold band. White gold, Rafferty surmised, because he knew his precious metals. Rafferty began broadcasting the light from his deluxe flashlight, looking for other pieces of the body that he now associated with the Mars mission. But he could see nothing else, not in this cursory examination.

  A pivotal and reckless idea then came to him rather suddenly, and that was the idea that he might take the arm. Before the military arrived. It would go well with some animal trophies he kept, for example, and it would be an indisputable conversation starter if, someday, he felt he could allow it out into the light. Maybe it was the chemical reagents talking, but he liked the idea of having the arm, having the souvenir. Or maybe the decision was much more primitive than this. Maybe it was just that the arm was so rich with implications. Maybe it somehow seduced him into caring for it. Whatever the particulars of this decision, Rafferty managed to wrap the arm in an old advertising circular from the Rio Blanco free paper, and set it on the passenger seat in the cab of his truck.

  He was still standing there, looking neighborly, when the fire trucks arrived on the scene.

  Of great interest to epidemiologists and medical historians later was this question: How much could the severed limb know on its own? Sundered from its nerve center, in much the way that the ERV was sundered from NASA at the crucial moment of its own descent, in much the way that the Earth, that orbiting hunk of cosmic rock, was flung off from the maelstrom of gases and clouds that formed the universe, the arm was no longer in possession of the story of its origin. It didn’t know where it was, it didn’t know what it was, it didn’t know when it had known these things, if ever. The arm could smell nothing, taste nothing, see nothing, hear nothing. It had no concrete memory of what these other senses, with which it once acted in concert, did. It would be easy to compile a list of negations as to the skills and abilities of the severed arm. It would be easy to forecast what it could not or would not be able to do, without brain or blood supply. But that would be to overlook evidence of its unsettling accomplishments.

  Historical accounts suggest that in fact the arm, the hand, the thing, to give it the name that people who stumbled on it gave it under most circumstances, had, despite appearances, a reservoir of desire. The arm, and the hand connected to it, had muscular recall, and the muscular recall was of certain kinds of activities once performed routinely, such as grasping, releasing, drumming fingers, snapping fingers, practicing pianistic scales, exposing fingernails for cursory examination, shaking of hands, making a thumbs-up gesture, making an A-okay gesture, signing the deaf signing alphabet, clapping, waving, catching objects, throwing objects, caressing objects, depressing buttons, unlatching latches, turning doorknobs, writing things, cleaning the outer part of the ear canal, picking the nose, scratching the posterior, pouring things, picking up silverware, cracking knuckles, and so forth. These muscle memories are too many and varied to list beyond this partial catalogue, but they were all there, and the arm knew how to perform them, and more than knowing how to perform these muscle memories, the arm delighted in performing them; it lived (after a fashion) to perform them, especially now in the twilight of its being, and thus, whereas a conventionally severed arm, a severed arm in the limited bioethical atmosphere of the planet Earth, is known to do nothing at all (it may flop for a couple of seconds before coming to rest), the severed arm from Mars, the one infected with a certain pathogen, continued to experience its muscle memory, and experienced an almost frenzied need to act in the dreamy thrall of these memories. This is a kind of desire. The arm longed, that is, for its past, for a time of action, when it had more opportunities. In an absence of stimulus, it began to run through many of its former activities, trying to fin
d something, some way out, some other way of being. Anything but dormancy.

  People have said that the arm knew what it was doing when it began its destructive spree, but these people were and are wrong, because the arm was just an arm, and an arm, no matter how animated with a space-borne pathogen, cannot be a brain. And yet despite its uncertainty about what it was doing, it still had an agenda, and that agenda involved making use of its range of motion in order to express its catalogue of memories. Sometimes this longing was so intense, so excruciating, that it was intolerable for the arm. Or that is the theory. Other times, fresh from some recent activity, the arm, exhausted perhaps, rested, becoming to the casual eye a severed arm of the routine sort.

  Because the arm could not tell specifically what happened in most cases when it was left alone with various persons, it is impossible to re-create beyond reasonable doubt what took place in these instances. Except under circumstances where a person was involved briefly with the arm and managed to escape to alert others, there is little information. In the case of the miner called Bix Rafferty, there were no witnesses. And yet in all likelihood, we can ascertain the outline of the story. Rafferty, after his encounter with the military at the ERV debris site, climbed into the cab of his truck. Of the dialogue just preceding this moment, as given by the personnel from the base, we have highlights. The military personnel indicated to Rafferty that the spot where he was parked was now going to be redesignated a completely secure possession of the federal government of the United States, and that his lease from the Bureau of Land Management would be subject to review. This area, he was told, was no longer safe. He needed to evacuate to a perimeter of at least three miles. When the preliminary cleanup was completed by the Hazmat-suited military professionals, Rafferty would be contacted, and a thorough discussion of the value of his business would be undertaken. In the meantime, Rafferty needed to evacuate. Oh, and he was asked by a certain captain who was present there whether he had found anything at the site that was of interest to him. Would he please, at this juncture, return the item or items.