Mr. Harold stood looking at the blind man. He was on the couch on all fours looking in Mr. Harold’s direction. The muted light from the towel-covered lamp hit the blind man’s dark glasses and made them shine like the eyes of a wolf. His bared teeth completed the image.
Mr. Harold went back to bed. Mrs. Harold snuggled close. She wanted to be friendly. She ran her hand over his chest and down his belly and held his equipment, but he was as soft as a sock. She worked him a little and finally he got hard in spite of himself. They rolled together and did what he wanted to do earlier. For the first time in years, Mrs. Harold got off. She came with a squeak and thrust of her hips, and Mr. Harold knew that behind her closed eyes she saw a pale face and dark glasses, not him.
Later, he lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. Mrs. Harold’s pussy had been as wet as a fish farm after her encounter with the blind man, wetter than he remembered it in years. What was it about the blind man that excited her? He was a racist cracker asshole who really knew nothing. He didn’t have a job. He couldn’t even work a weed-eater that good.
Mr. Harold felt fear. What he had here at home wasn’t all that good, but he realized now he might lose it, and it was probably the best he could do. Even if his wife’s conversation was as dull as the Republican convention and his son was as interesting as needlework, his home life took on a new and desperate importance. Something had to be done.
Next day, Mr. Harold got a break. The blind man made a comment about his love for snow cones. It was made while they were sitting alone in the kitchen. Mrs. Harold was in the shower and the boy was playing Nintendo in the living room. The blind man was rattling on like always. Last night rang no guilty bells for him. “You know,” said Mr. Harold, “I like a good snow cone myself. One of those blue ones.”
“Oh yeah, that’s coconut,” said the blind man.
“What you say you and me go get one?”
“Ain’t it gonna be lunch soon? I don’t want to spoil my appetite.”
“A cone won’t spoil nothing. Come on, my treat.”
The blind man was a little uncertain, but Mr. Harold could tell the idea of a free snow cone was strong within him. He let Mr. Harold lead him out to the car. Mr. Harold began to tremble with anticipation. He drove toward town, but when he got there, he drove on through.
“I thought you said the stand was close?” said the blind man. “Ain’t we been driving a while?”
“Well, it’s Sunday, and that one I was thinking of was closed. I know one cross the way stays open seven days a week during the summer.”
Mr. Harold drove out into the country. He drove off the main highway and down a red clay road and pulled over to the side near a gap where irresponsibles dumped their garbage. He got out and went around to the blind man’s side and took the blind man’s arm and led him away from the car toward a pile of garbage. Flies hummed operative notes in the late morning air.
“We’re in luck,” Mr. Harold said. “Ain’t no one here but us.”
“Yeah, well it don’t smell so good around here. Somethin’ dead somewheres?”
“There’s a cat hit out there on the highway.”
“I’m kinda losin’ my appetite for a cone.”
“It’ll come back soon as you put that cone in your mouth. Besides, we’ll eat in the car.”
Mr. Harold placed the blind man directly in front of a bag of household garbage.”You stand right here. Tell me what you want and I’ll get it.”
“I like a strawberry. Double on the juice.”
“Strawberry it is.”
Mr. Harold walked briskly back to his car, cranked it, and drove by the blind man who cocked his head as the automobile passed. Mr. Harold drove down a ways, turned around and drove back the way he had come. The blind man still stood by the garbage heap, his cane looped over his wrist, only now he was facing the road.
Mr. Harold honked the horn as he drove past.
· · ·
Just before reaching the city limits, a big black pickup began to make ominous maneuvers. The pickup was behind him and was riding his bumper. Mr. Harold tried to speed up, but that didn’t work. He tried slowing down, but the truck nearly ran up his ass. He decided to pull to the side, but the truck wouldn’t pass.
Eventually, Mr. Harold coasted to the emergency lane and stopped, but the truck pulled up behind him and two burly men got out. They looked as if the last bath they’d had was during the last rain, probably caught out in it while pulp wooding someone’s posted land.
Mr. Harold assumed it was all some dreadful mistake. He got out of the car so they could see he wasn’t who they thought he must be. The biggest one walked up to him and grabbed him behind the head with one hand and hit him with the other. The smaller man, smaller because his head seemed undersized, took his turn and hit Mr. Harold. The two men began to work on him. He couldn’t fall down because the car held him up, and for some reason he couldn’t pass out. These guys weren’t as fast as Sonny Guy, and they weren’t knocking him out, but they certainly hurt more.
“What kinda fella are you that would leave a blind man beside the road?” said the bigger man just before he busted Mr. Harold a good one in the nose.
Mr. Harold finally hit the ground. The small-headed man kicked him in the balls and the bigger man kicked him in the mouth, knocking out what was left of his front teeth; the man’s fist had already stolen the others. When Mr. Harold was close to passing out, the small-headed man bent down and got hold of Mr. Harold’s hair and looked him in the eye and said, “We hadn’t been throwing out an old stray dog down that road, that fella might have got lost or hurt.”
“He’s much more resourceful than you think,” Mr. Harold said, realizing who they meant, and then the small-headed man hit him a short chopping blow.
“I’m glad we seen him,” said the bigger man, “and I’m glad we caught up with you. You just think you’ve took a beating. We’re just getting started.”
But at that moment the blind man appeared above Mr. Harold. He had found his way from the truck to the car, directed by the sound of the beating most likely. “No, boys,” said the blind man, “that’s good enough. I ain’t the kind holds a grudge, even ’gainst a man would do what he did. I’ve had some theology training and done a little Baptist ministering. Holding a grudge ain’t my way.”
“Well, you’re a good one,” said the bigger man. “I ain’t like that at all. I was blind and I was told I was gonna get a snow cone and a fella put me out at a garbage dump, I’d want that fella dead, or crippled up at the least.”
“I understand,” said the blind man. “It’s hard to believe there’s people like this in the world. But if you’ll just drive me home, that’ll be enough. I’d like to get on the way if it’s no inconvenience. I have a little Bible lesson in braille I’d like to study.”
They went away and left Mr. Harold lying on the highway beside his car. As they drove by, the pickup tires tossed gravel on him and the exhaust enveloped him like a foul cotton sack.
Mr. Harold got up after five minutes and got inside his car and fell across the seat and lay there. He couldn’t move. He spat out a tooth. His balls hurt. His face hurt. For that matter, his kneecaps where they’d kicked him didn’t feel all that good either.
After an hour or so, Mr. Harold began to come around. An intense hatred for the blind man boiled up in his stomach. He sat up and started the car and headed home.
When he turned on his road, he was nearly sideswiped by a yellow moving van. It came at him so hard and fast he swerved into a ditch filled with sand and got his right rear tire stuck. He couldn’t drive the car out. More he worked at it, the deeper the back tire spun in the sand. He got his jack out of the trunk and cranked up the rear end and put debris under the tire. Bad as he felt, it was quite a job. He finally drove out of there, and off the jack, leaving it lying in the dirt.
When he got to his house, certain in his heart the blind man was inside, he parked next to Mrs. Harold’s station wagon. The station w
agon was stuffed to the gills with boxes and sacks. He wondered what that was all about, but he didn’t wonder too hard. He looked around the yard for a weapon. Out by the side of the house was the blind man’s weed-eater. That would do. He figured he caught the blind man a couple of licks with that, he could get him down on the ground and finish him, stun him before the sonofabitch applied a wrestling hold.
He went in the house by the back door with the weed-eater cocked, and was astonished to find the room was empty. The kitchen table and chairs were gone. The cabinet doors were open and all the canned goods were missing. Where the stove had set was a greasy spot. Where the refrigerator had set was a wet spot. A couple of roaches, feeling brave and free to roam, scuttled across the kitchen floor as merry as kids on skates.
The living room was empty too. Not only of people, but furniture and roaches. The rest of the house was the same. Dust motes spun in the light. The front door was open.
Outside, Mr. Harold heard a car door slam. He limped out the front door and saw the station wagon. His wife was behind the wheel, and sitting next to her was the boy, and beside him the blind man, his arm hanging out the open window.
Mr. Harold beckoned to them by waving the weed-eater, but they ignored him. Mrs. Harold backed out of the drive quickly.
Mr. Harold could hear the blind man talking to the boy about something or another and the boy was laughing. The station wagon turned onto the road and the car picked up speed. Mr. Harold went slack and leaned on the weed-eater for support.
At the moment before the station wagon passed in front of a line of high shrubs, the blind man turned to look out the window, and Mr. Harold saw his own reflection in the blind man’s glasses.
By Bizarre Hands
This story was the namesake of my first collection.The title for the story came first. I had either heard something about someone having bizarre hands, or it just came to me out of the blue, I’m uncertain, but the story developed from the title. I just felt my way into it. When I was a kid, there were bums who went to houses, knocked on doors, and asked for food, or asked for work they could do to pay for food. Often, they claimed to be preachers. I guess, in their minds, this gave them more identity than a bum.
My mother was a sucker for this sort of thing, and she often fed them, no work involved. I think she did this because she enjoyed their stories. We were poor, but these folks were worse off than we were, and maybe there was a certain joy in that. That business about, “I may be bad off, but this poor sonofabitch has it worse.” It makes your position look better.
When my father heard about these folks coming by (he heard them from me because I always blabbed), he insisted my mother watch herself.
In fact, he wanted her to leave them alone. Not because he was heartless, but because he feared who they might be, though fear of serial killers, robbers, and the conventional murderer was not as high as now. Knowing my mother, however, he insisted if she had to feed them, she give them something to go or let them eat on the porch.
This didn’t make much difference, but sometimes my mother would hand them food, then lock the screen door and talk to them. They generally had stories of woe, and my mother always felt sorry for them and sometimes even gave them money. Considering we had very little ourselves, this shows how generous she was, and I loved her for it.
Still, most of these guys were just assholes who didn’t want to work.
And as I said, many of them claimed to be preachers. What they were doing mostly, or so it seemed to me, were hiding behind religion. When the title By Bizarre Hands began to grow in my mind, and a story gradually began to sprout from it, these wandering preacher bums came to mind, the bit of fear and tension they produced was remembered, and gradually this story developed.
Oh, I liked the idea of the lady of the house referring to mass murderers as “mash” murderers. I once heard an older woman use this term, having misunderstood what someone was saying on a newscast. I guess she was relating it to someone who killed their victims by mashing, or perhaps she just thought that was a broad term for these kinds of murderers.
Anyway, this story has also been adapted to play form. As a play, I found the old ending didn’t work as well. Not because there was anything wrong with it, but because I couldn’t make it play as well as I wanted. The play was supposed to be for a series of plays in the Grand Guignol tradition, and therefore it needed a kicker ending. It reads pretty good, but I still prefer this version.
WHEN THE TRAVELING PREACHER heard about the Widow Case and her retarded girl, he set out in his black Dodge to get over there before Halloween night.
Preacher Judd, as he called himself—though his name was really Billy Fred Williams—had this thing for retarded girls, due to the fact that his sister had been simple-headed, and his mama always said it was a shame she was probably going to burn in hell like a pan of biscuits forgot in the oven, just on account of not having a full set of brains.
This was a thing he had thought on considerable, and this considerable thinking made it so he couldn’t pass up the idea of baptizing and giving some God-training to female retards. It was something he wanted to do in the worst way, though he had to admit there wasn’t any burning desire in him to do the same for boys or men or women that were half-wits, but due to his sister having been one, he certainly had this thing for girl simples.
And he had this thing for Halloween, because that was the night the Lord took his sister to hell, and he might have taken her to glory had she had any bible-learning or God-sense. But she didn’t have a drop, and it was partly his own fault, because he knew about God and could sing some hymns pretty good. But he’d never turned a word of benediction or gospel music in her direction. Not one word. Nor had his mama, and his papa wasn’t around to do squat.
The old man ran off with a bucktoothed laundry woman that used to go house to house taking in wash and bringing it back the next day, but when she took in their wash, she took in Papa too, and she never brought either of them back. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the laundry contained everything they had in the way of decent clothes, including a couple of pairs of nice dress pants and some pin-striped shirts like niggers wear to funerals. This left him with one old pair of faded overalls that he used to wear to slop the hogs before the critters killed and ate Granny, and they had to get rid of them because they didn’t want to eat nothing that had eaten somebody they knew. So, it wasn’t bad enough Papa ran off with a beaver-toothed wash woman and his sister was a drooling retard, he now had only the one pair of ugly, old overalls to wear to school, and this gave the other kids three things to tease him about, and they never missed a chance to do it. Well, four things. He was kind of ugly too.
It got tiresome.
· · ·
Preacher Judd could remember nights waking up with his sister crawled up in the bed alongside him, lying on her back, eyes wide open, her face bathed in cool moonlight, picking her nose and eating what she found, while he rested on one elbow and tried to figure out why she was that way.
He finally gave up figuring, decided that she ought to have some fun, and he could have some fun too. Come Halloween, he got him a bar of soap for marking up windows and a few rocks for knocking out some, and he made his sister and himself ghost-suits out of old sheets in which he cut mouth and eye holes.
This was her fifteenth year and she had never been trick-or-treating. He had designs that she should go this time, and they did, and later after they’d done it, he walked her back home, and later yet, they found her out back of the house in her ghost-suit, only the sheet had turned red because her head was bashed in with something and she had bled out like an ankle-hung hog. And someone had turned her trick-or-treat sack—the handle of which was still clutched in her fat grip—inside out and taken every bit of candy she’d gotten from the neighbors.
The sheriff came out, pulled up the sheet and saw that she was naked under it, and he looked her over and said that she looked raped to him, and that she had been killed by b
izarre hands.
Bizarre hands never did make sense to Preacher Judd, but he loved the sound of it, and never did let it slip away, and when he would tell about his poor sister, naked under the sheets, her brains smashed out and her trick-or-treat bag turned inside out, he’d never miss ending the story with the sheriffs line about her having died by bizarre hands.
It had a kind of ring to it.
· · ·
He parked his Dodge by the roadside, got out and walked up to the Widow Case’s, sipping on a Frosty Root Beer. But even though it was late October, the Southern sun was as hot as Satan’s ass and the root beer was anything but frosty.
Preacher Judd was decked out in his black suit, white shirt and black loafers with black and white checked socks, and he had on his black hat, which was short-brimmed and made him look, he thought, exactly like a traveling preacher ought to look.
Widow Case was out at the well, cranking a bucket of water, and nearby, running hell out of a hill of ants with a stick she was waggling, was the retarded girl, and Preacher Judd thought she looked remarkably like his sister.
He came up, took off his hat and held it over his chest as though he were pressing his heart into proper place, and smiled at the widow with all his gold-backed teeth.
Widow Case put one hand on a bony hip, used the other to prop the bucket of water on the well-curbing. She looked like a shaved weasel, Preacher Judd thought, though her ankles weren’t shaved a bit and were perfectly weasel-like. The hair there was thick and black enough to be mistaken for thin socks at a distance. “Reckon you’ve come far enough,” she said. “You look like one of them Jehovah Witnesses or such. Or one of them kind that run around with snakes in their teeth and hop to nigger music.”
“No ma’am, I don’t hop to nothing, and last snake I seen I run over with my car.”
“You here to take up money for missionaries to give to them starving African niggers? If you are, forget it. I don’t give to the niggers around here, sure ain’t giving to no hungry foreign niggers that can’t even speak English.”
High Cotton: Selected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale Page 18