The Red Right Hand

by Joel Townsley Rogers

  There was the refugee painter-musician-scene-designcr Unistaire as well, half monkey and half faun, who was in his studio a mile and a half farther on, devising a surrealistic dance before his mirror to a composition of his own upon the phonograph, dressed in a leopard skin, a feather duster, and a chiffon nightgown, when Corkscrew drove that big gray car in off the road, and around the circular drive, fast and desperately— having mistaken Unistaire’s drive for a side road, it would seem, and then realizing his mistake—with a squeal of tires and a scream of brakes, crashing down the wooden easel frames which Unistaire had set out on the drive with all his paintings on them—to impregnate them with the night dew, according to some theory of freshness in art he had—and back out onto the road again, and on up it, with a blare of wailing horn, as Unistaire went rushing out to see.

  There was MacComerou himself, with his big old brain, working in his garden here three miles farther on, who saw him driving by red-eyed, with grinning pointed teeth, and recognized St. Erme as the man beside him who looked so white and ill. And though MacComerou hadn’t seen enough to know that it was murder then, he had known that something wasn’t right.

  They all saw him. He was not invisible. After striking John Flail, he turned off down the Swamp Road. He abandoned the car at the end of the road, down beyond Flail’s house. He had to pass me by to get there. There was no other way.

  Q. [To Dr. Riddle] And you were at the Swamp Road entrance all during the murder hour, Dr. Riddle?

  A. I was.

  Q. And you didn’t see the car pass you?

  A. I didn’t see it.

  Q. And you didn’t see this little sawed-off man we are speaking of as Corkscrew—this man with the red eyes, this man named Doc?

  A. I did not see him. I have never seen him.

  Q. And you are sure he didn’t pass you?

  A. Nothing passed me at all....

  I am back there. At that thing which has no answer. Why I didn’t see him.

  I must find the answer to that. Before the answer to why he did it. Even before the answer to where he is now. For without the answer to that, he will continue to remain invisible. Near as he is to me, and quiet as he is, now.

  I must start from there. From where I was myself, at every moment during the hour of twilight last evening, which was the murder hour.

  I had been driving down from John R. Buchanan’s place in Vermont in this old coupe, on my way back to New York.

  I had been summoned up there yesterday morning, Wednesday, suddenly, to operate on the old man for the brain malignancy of which he had been dying. It had been a big feather in my cap, maybe, that I should have been called in, instead of an older man. I had gone up with some hopes of performing some miracle.

  But it had been a foredoomed failure; at his age, seventy-nine. He was already dying when I got there. His respiration and his pulse had stopped before I could begin my trepanation, on the table that had been set up for me. I looked at the white-starched anesthetist standing by, and pulled off my rubber gloves, and began to gather up my tools again.

  “Don’t take it so hard, Doctor,” she said to me. “You look like a little boy whose pet kitten has been run over. There are always more cats.”

  She was one of these arch motherly souls. It was probably her stock phrase to all doctors in a like futile situation. I put my tools away.

  I don’t like corpses. I never have. To some people, I have found, it seems an odd quirk in a doctor. But I always remember that Pasteur fainted more than once as a student during dissections, and I respect him only the more for it. One has to learn, and that is the only way. As a student myself, I had stiffened my lip, and learned. But a doctor’s business is with life, with living tissue. When it ceases to be alive, I’m through.

  “Where are you going?” she said to me.

  “Home,” I said. “I’m through.”

  I had come up by special chartered plane, procured for me by Buchanan’s New York office. But there had been no arrangements made to take me back. I asked Buchanan’s housekeeper, or chatelaine, or whatever she was, about trains; but there was none, she told me, till near midnight, and this was only afternoon. She wanted to know how soon I needed to be back in New York, and I told her not for twenty-four hours necessarily, as I had made arrangements to be away that long, but that I just wanted to get away now. That I wished I had driven up.

  She told me then that she had a car which she wanted to get down to New York. It belonged to her boy, who was in the air service. He had driven up in it to see her last month before he went across, and had had to leave it, having received his wire. Before coming up, he had made arrangements to sell the car to a New York dealer whose advertisement he had seen in the papers, and he wanted her to get it down to the dealer to make his word good, and also to get the money and have someone have the use of the car. It was an old car, and she didn’t know whether I would like to drive it down or not, but it would oblige her. She had enough gas saved up.

  She was a fine woman, intelligent and understanding, as well as efficient, as she had to be, managing that big place and twenty servants. I don’t know her name, although I was probably told it; unless it is on the card she gave me. Maybe she knew how badly I felt, and just wanted to help me get my mind off it, by giving me some small responsibility to carry out. Or maybe she really wanted to get the car down for her son. Or maybe both.

  It was an old Draco coupe, when she showed it to me, in the garage with the dozen other cars, about ten years old, with battered fenders and torn upholstery, but its tires were good. I had had a Draco coach of that same vintage, which I had bought secondhand when I first started practice, before I got my Buick. It would be a lot pleasanter to get started back right away in it, I thought, instead of having to wait around at the house here, or at the station, for the train, and perhaps stand in a crowded coach for a good part of the night. The drive down on the main highways would be through pretty scenery all the way, and the driving alone would help to take my mind off it. I ought to make New York by midnight, or maybe even ten o’clock.

  “Here’s the dealer’s card with his name on it,” she, told me. “Tell him I’ll mail him the bill of sale when he has sent his check. And here’s your own fee or honorarium, do you call it, Doctor?”

  “Wage,” I said. “When I earn it. If I’d earned it, I would send a bill. I can’t take anything.”

  “Mr. Buchanan always liked to pay his obligations promptly,” she told me. “It was one of the last instructions that he gave, about you. He knew that you would do your best, if anything could be done. If nothing could be done, you had still earned it. Please take it. If you won’t, I would feel—dreadful.”

  The old man’s death had cut her up, of course. With me, it was a professional failure. But with her, it was the severing of a relationship.

  “I have been with him twenty years,” she said. “He would not want to see his last bill unpaid.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “In that consideration, I’ll take it.”

  She gave me the card of the dealer to whom I was to deliver the car, and an envelope that had some bills in it. The old man, it seemed, had been one of those who like to pay in cash, not by check. I stuck them into my pocket, without looking at either of them. When I got down to the city I could see who the dealer was, and phone him to pick up the car at 511 West, or take it around myself tomorrow morning, if his place wasn’t too far away. I didn’t want to look at the money at all until I got it to my bank, the Lexington Trust on Forty-seventh, and deposited it with young Sawyer, the teller I generally did business with there. I didn’t even want to think of it.

  So that was how I happened to be driving down. I stowed my surgical case and the overnight bag I had brought along in the trunk compartment, and started out.

  The anesthetist, I think, would have liked to have come along with me. She hinted at it. I wonder, if she had, whether she would be dead now, too.

  It was just about sunset when I turned off
onto this side road, to get over from Route 49A to Route 7 as a short cut on my map.

  I had not entirely shaken off my sense of depression over my failure, it may be. However, I cannot assume that it was in any subconscious mood of flight that I turned off. It looked shorter on the map, and I wanted to save time and gas.

  The place where I turned off was called Stony Falls. It was just a little general store and a few houses. The road ran over to Route 7 at a place called Whippleville. It cut off about fifteen miles. But it was a terribly narrow, winding, up-and-down stony road, I found when I got on it, and I had to slow down and drive carefully to save the tires.

  I kept on, hoping it would get better soon. But it didn’t. It was practically an abandoned road. There were only two or three dilapidated farmhouses that I passed in the next nine or ten miles, and none of them appeared occupied. On both sides the road was lined with old stone fences, overgrown with great ropy vines of poison ivy with glistening warty leaves that must have been a hundred years old. Beyond the fences there were only woods, deserted fields, boulder-strewn hillsides, and more woods. It was the kind of road one drives along in a nightmare. I had been going along it about half an hour when the engine stalled.

  It just choked and died. The car rolled on a few yards more, and stopped. About a half-hour after sunset. I didn’t look at my watch, but there was red still in the sky.

  The place where I had stopped was right at the junction of a dim side road going off to the left. A half-rotted signpost with three arms stood there beside the road. There were old hand-molded lead letters on the arms, and lead pointers shaped like hands, which might have dated back to Revolutionary days. One of them pointed back the way I had come, saying “Stony Fa 9 M”; and one pointed down the road ahead, saying “Whipl’vl’ I0 M”; and one pointed off down the road beside me, saying “Swamp Rd. 1 5/8 M to Flail’s Saw Mill.”

  It was only the shadow of an old wagon road, its deep ruts overgrown with purple asters and yellow daisies and other weeds. It didn’t look as if a wheel had passed over it for the past forty years. It was the first side road of any kind, though, that there had been since I left Stony Falls. It went along for about two hundred yards in sight, and then was lost in deep hemlock woods.

  I saw the figure of a man walking away from me near where the road vanished in the woods, in that moment as I came to a stop. He was a black-haired man, without a hat, wearing khaki pants and a blue denim shirt that was dark with sweat over his shoulder blades, and was carrying his coat slung over his shoulder. He seemed to be a powerfully built man, above medium height, and he was walking with a soft shambling stride, flat-footedly, like an Indian.

  He didn’t turn around when I began grinding the starter. He merely went shambling on, down the weedy road two hundred yards away from me, and in a moment had vanished among the trees....

  It is possible, I acknowledge, that he did not exist. That he was only a hallucination. Hallucinations are not impossible with anyone, given a certain light and a certain absent state of mind. And though I am not imaginative, it is possible that he existed only in my mind, shambling along the weedy road there away from me, with his coat thrown over his sweat-stained back, and vanishing into the dark woods.

  The problem is not of the phantasm of a man I saw who did not exist, however. The problem is of a murder car I did not see, which did.

  I stepped on the starter, and the engine caught. But before I could let in the clutch, it died again. It caught again when I stepped on it again. And died.

  It was one of those teasing and exasperating things, where every moment you think you almost have it, and so keep on. I had half a tank of gas still, so it couldn’t be that. I tried the choke. I tried it with switch on, and off. I wore down the battery, starting it that way, and then having it stall on me. When it wouldn’t turn over any more, I got out and cranked.

  I may be obstinate, but I don’t like to be licked. I would cut the switch, and swing the crank over half a dozen times to suck a charge in, and then go back to the instrument board and turn the switch on, and back to the crank and snap it over, hard. Each time the engine would catch, and then after a couple of kicks would choke and die away; and I would have to do the same damned thing all over. By the tenth or fifteenth try I had grown a little tired or careless, and didn’t have the crank engaged properly when I gave it the starting snap. It flew out and went whirling past my head. If I hadn’t ducked, it would have brained me. It nicked the lobe of my left car, drawing a little blood, as it was. But the cartilage didn’t seem torn, when I felt it.

  I must have tried it twenty times or more, getting more sweaty and dirty and red-eyed. I’m not a truck driver in build, a hundred and forty pounds, but my arms are plenty wiry, and I have strong hands, as a surgeon must. Still I got played out at last, with a ripping headache down my skull.

  The evening was so hot and still. Even after the last sunset glow had disappeared and the twilight shadows were gathering over everything, the stones of the road still gave forth their stored-up heat. If it had been midday I might have got a sunstroke, and in that case conceivably could have drawn a blank for a few minutes without knowing it. But the sun had gone down. A mild heat prostration was what I had, with a bad headache, but not any blackout.

  I remember thinking in the back of my mind that I ought to push the car off the middle of the road, if anybody should come along, because I was blocking it. But I didn’t bother to do it, because nobody came along.

  Once, while I was cranking, I did think I heard the wail of a far-off horn behind me, and the hum of a car coming up the road. I straightened up and looked around, wiping the sweat from my face. But nothing came up the road. The eerie wail might have been only a railroad train off in some valley, and the humming some airplane over the hills and out of sight.

  A kind of whirling little heat gust came spinning up the road while I stood there, looking. It brushed against me as it passed, and went brushing on. I could watch how it went, though I couldn’t see it. It veered away, after brushing me, and went off down the Swamp Road, bending the weeds and grasses and turning the undersides of them to silver, and skirling up a little sandy dust in the ruts like the smoke of a car going fast. But it wasn’t a car. Not anything visible. It was just a little whirl of air in motion.

  It was while I was following it with my gaze that I saw the yellow rattlesnake. It was lying in one of the ruts of the Swamp Road about twenty feet away from me, staring at me with motionless eyes in its flat head.

  A timber rattler, about four feet long, the color of dead grass, with pale milk-chocolate markings—a female, if it’s true, as is sometimes said, that the lighter-colored ones are females. I don’t know how long it had been there when I saw it. But the probability would be that it had been there all the time, or I would have seen it crawling. A moving snake catches the eye; and this one was lying yellow and still, mingled with the yellow roots of the heel-rut grass.

  There was nothing strange in a rattler lying there on the old dead road. There are plenty of them in tire hills all the time, and particularly out on old roads in August. They like to lie in the heat of the sun-baked dust and stones, to shed their skins. They are apt to be more or less blind at that time, and anything that comes along may run them over. The only thing at all unusual about this particular yellow snake that I noticed was the color of its eyes. Most rattlers have mottled golden eyes. But this one’s were red as fire. That may have been due to some last shred of infrared sunset still lingering in the sky, beyond the range of my spectrum, but not of its, and reflecting on its hard, lidless eyes with that burning color.

  I wasn’t sure but that it was dead. It might have been run over. But I jerked out the crank handle and hurled it at it, anyway. The iron hit the stony ruts with a whirling thud, right where that broad motionless fanged head had been. But there was nothing there now. It had not been dead or blind. All the time lying there, maybe hours, maybe days, but still whip-quick at the flash of danger. At my gestur
e it had slid instantly, and was gone.

  That figure of a man vanishing down the road, and the whirling little gust that came up behind me and turned off and went brushing down the road, and the yellow rattlesnake lying in the ruts, were the only things I saw during the time I was stalled there at the entrance to the Swamp Road.

  I didn’t clock the time, but I was there from a little after sunset till twilight was falling, a period of a good hour, at least. I was nearly ten miles away from Dead Bridegroom’s Pond.

  The crank had bounced off into the tall grass at the edge of the old road. I didn’t bother to go and retrieve it for the moment. It wouldn’t do me any good if I kept cranking all night, unless I located what the trouble was. I lifted up the hood, to see if I could diagnose it.

  I’m not an expert mechanic, by any means. But a car’s internal machinery is like a man’s, in one way, which is that there are just so many different organs, and just so many ways in which they can go wrong. I had to study the engine, trying to figure what each thing was for, where a garage repairman would have known at sight, and how it was all put together. Maybe if a garage repairman should try to do an anatomical section for the first time, he would be just as stumped, and have to figure it out. Still, if he had any brains at all he ought to be able to see how the joints and tissues were put together, in a fashion, after a while, by using his common sense; and I should hate to think that I wasn’t as bright, at his trade.

  It must be some dirt that had got into the intake feed line of the vacuum. That was the only thing which could make it keep choking off that way. It couldn’t be anything else. I remembered I had had the same trouble once with my old Draco coach, with an engine like this; only, on that occasion there had been a mechanic handy to diagnose the difficulty and straighten it out for me before I had cranked myself dizzy.