Dead Man's Hand

by Otto Penzler

  I've never seen you so dedicated to something, she said, more than once. Proudly. And she'd look at me like I was just a little kid again, not a wild child with long hair and a bad goatee and sadness trailing the both of us like trash following wind through a gutter.

  I felt like a new man, it's true. Before the guitar, I used to sit and listen to my headphones and not do shit. After, though, I came home from school with my heart beating hard and heavy, my fingers already flicking around in the air. I rushed to Mephisto. Tuned it, strummed it. At night I dreamed about playing. My white fingers against the black rosewood of the fretboard. The precise gleaming grid of steel strings over frets. Scales. Solos. I dreamed myself making music.

  Before I got the guitar, I'd never dreamed anything that didn't seem to live a thousand years away, on some icy island.

  Then, two months after Mephisto came to live with me, my mother said, Daryl, I'm going to fly to California to visit your Aunt Sarah. Do you want to go?

  I'd better not, I said—imagining the house to myself, imagining a whole weekend with the guitar: empty rooms, high volume. Maybe a Pitch Black rehearsal in the living room. It was getting cold outside at night, and playing in Dook's barn was getting more and more uncomfortable. I told Mom, I've got trig to study for.

  My boy, she said, and kissed my head. Well, she said. Have the boys over, if you want—but no drinking, and don't play too loud. Mr. Pritchett doesn't like it.

  And herein lies another epic, quickly told.

  We lived in an old farmhouse, miles from anything. The house sat in the middle of a vast three-acre lawn. (Which I spent my summers mowing endlessly, thank you.) To the south, east, and west were mile-wide cornfields.

  Our only neighbor lived to the north, and that was Mr. Pritchett. Old Billy.

  His land was the same size as ours, except it was the exact opposite: Our house was white, shining, clean, restored, sitting square in the middle of our expertly mowed lawn. Billy's three acres were forested, like some fairy-tale thicket, wherein ogres kept a lair. His house crouched in the middle, barely visible, but I knew—Dook and I had sneaked up to it one afternoon, when Billy had driven his groaning pickup to town—that it was crumbling, gray from lack of paint, barely a place a man could live.

  We almost never talked to Billy. He was—my mother's words—a troubled man. He'd fought in World War II, and was, according to everyone, badly shell-shocked.

  What this meant was that, every now and again, Billy would see things. And when he saw things, deep in his thicket, he'd shout at them. And then sometimes he would try to shoot them.

  Once, two years before, just after we'd moved in, my father sent me out to repair the fence between our yard and Billy's. It may have been Billy's fence—no one knew for sure—but it had come apart, and my father, figuring Billy would not take care of it, decided I'd spend an afternoon restringing the barbed wire and digging new postholes.

  This I did, cursing and listening to Helloween on my Walkman. Then, near dusk, I looked up and screeched: because there was Old Billy on the other side of the fence, framed by the grasping trees of his woods, staring at me, and holding a rifle.

  He was a squat block of a man, wearing torn overalls and unlaced boots, his hair yellow-white. He smelled like the inside of a barn—a barn where pigs live. He had binoculars slung around his neck. He held the gun at port arms against his shoulder. It had a scope. I imagined myself in its sights.

  Hello, Daryl, said Billy.

  Hi there, Billy, I said. I'm just fixing the fence here. Hope you don't mind.

  Billy looked down at the fence, as though surprised. Thank you kindly, he said. I was getting around to that.

  Yeah, I said. No trouble.

  We stared at each other.

  Well, Daryl, Billy said. Just thought I'd let you know. I'm going to go hunt the spirits tonight.

  I probably stopped smiling. The spirits?

  Yep. They been doing recon out here. I seen 'em. I know they want me, but I'd hate for 'em to come up on you or your Mama.

  Yeah, I said, We don't want that.

  Maybe you'd best head back to the house.

  Thank you, Billy, I said, and turned right then and there, abandoning the tools.

  That night we listened to the gunfire from Billy's woods. We sat on the front porch—on the other side of the house from Billy's line of fire—huddled under a blanket. We listened to the shots, and then to Billy's furious high-pitched scream:

  Goddamn it! It's nineteen eighty-five, you leave me alone!

  And after that, gunshots, one after another, and a final shriek, a sound that didn't even try to become words.

  The next day my father went to the sheriff.

  The sheriff said, That Billy, he's a good old boy. I drive out and check on him. He takes his pills and he keeps his guns clean.

  But the shooting, my father said.

  As long as a man shoots on his own property, I've got no problem with him. I imagine he thinks he's protecting you.

  My father protested some more, but the sheriff finally said, Fred, Old Billy's got a Silver Star and a Purple Heart I hear he was one of the first Americans to see Dachau. His kids leave him to rot. He wants to keep fighting the war, I'm inclined to let him do it.

  That was Billy. He'd told Mom—she often brought him vegetables from the garden—that he knew already about my guitar. He heard it some nights, he said. Daryl's a good boy, he said. But I'll be gol-darned if that music of his don't hurt my head.

  Remember, she said. Low volume.

  Gol-darned if I turn it up, I said, and made a face, so at least she'd leave smiling.

  2. Parly at Foul's

  With my mother on her plane to California, on a Friday night, I called Dook and Paulie. Come over, I said. I've got the place to myself.

  While waiting for them, I set up my amp in the middle of my father's old upstairs study, now bare and echoey. I slung the Ibanez's strap over my shoulder. What my mother didn't know was that when she was gone, I took the full-length mirror that hung from the inside of her closet door and leaned it against the study's wall and watched myself play: dressed in black, like my axe, my hair falling over my eyes. I sneered at myself. My stage name was going to be Lord Foul, after the villain in some fantasy novels I'd started reading but had never finished. The hero in those books was called The Unbeliever, which was cool, but not as cool as Lord Foul. I needed some pale makeup, but I hadn't had the guts to go shop for it yet.

  I turned the amp up until I could feel my jawbone humming. Louder than I'd ever taken it before. Something in me was afraid of the sound I'd make. I pushed that something down. I lifted my pick and brought it down onto a perfect power chord.

  The sound was almost a wind, almost a push in the back. The mirror rattled in its frame; the picture of sneering me shuddered, distorted. It was like I'd done it with my mind.

  Dook arrived an hour later. I hadn't heard him. He walked up the stairs.

  Dude, he said, when I'd stopped playing. Billy's shooting.

  I turned off the amp and we opened the study's windows. Outside it was dusk. We listened, until we heard the pop of Billy's rifle. I waited for shouting, but it never came.

  How loud was I? I asked.

  Not too bad, Dook said. Then he busted out laughing. I could totally hear you from the car.

  I pulled the blinds down. Just in case, I said.

  Dook set up his bass, and the two of us played for a while. Paulie was late, as usual. We talked, as we often did, about how if Paulie didn't play the drums so well, we'd have to kick his fucking ass. We drank a couple of beers that Dook had smuggled from his father's refrigerator.

  It was ten at night when things seriously changed.

  We were sitting cross-legged in the middle of the study, trying to work out a riff, when we heard a car horn from the drive near the front of the house. We crossed the hall into my room and looked out into the drive. There we saw a car we didn't recognize: a black Firebird. It pulled up ne
xt to Dook's Torino and the horn sounded again, and then the doors opened and four people got out. Paulie was one of them. The other three we didn't know.

  Paulie saw me at the window and held up two paper sacks that, judging from the look on his face, held liquor. Then he pointed at the other people with him. Two were girls, I could see. The other was a big man with long blond hair.

  What the fuck? I said.

  Got me, Dook said.

  Paul shouted something. It was Party! Then he made metal horns in the air with both hands.

  Paulie didn't go to our school. He was from Westover, which was what passed, in our parts, as a city. He went to Westover High with the gangs and the reprobates, and we didn't entirely trust him. He'd asked us, once, if we'd ever gone out cowtipping. Apart from being dumb, he was annoying and hyperactive and spent so much time assuring us he wasn't on speed that we just assumed he was.

  The other people had to be Westover kids, I figured, friends of Paul's. Like any good cowtipper, I knew to be afraid of them.

  Dook might have had the same misgivings, but he turned to me and said, Booze and chicks, man. That rocks.

  This was true.

  We went downstairs. Paulie was staring through the window of the kitchen door with the same bugged-out maniac eyes he'd been practicing for Pitch Black's first album cover. Then he giggled like a girl.

  I opened the door. Paul held out his fist and I smacked it. Dude, he said. Party time at Foul's.

  Paulie, I said. I looked past him at the others. I recognized the man, and in my head—and almost out loud—I said, Oh, shit.

  Dook looked past me and saw what I saw. Fuck me, he said.

  I believe you gentlemen know Lars, Paul said. And this is Bethany, and this is Toni.

  Lars. We knew Lars, oh yes we did. He shambled into the house, and he didn't smile at me or even look at me—he just pushed past me into the kitchen. Lars Van Der Velde, a.k.a. the Red Baron. The Baron was six foot six, maybe two-sixty. Probably all still muscle. Dressed in a black leather vest, black jeans, with studded wristbands and giant buckled boots. He was six years older than us. He'd played O-line for Westover until they kicked him off the team after an assault conviction. Then he went to juvie for pot possession. He spent several years in exile. Then he came back to Westover and started a metal band: Whorefrost. The Red Baron was the singer and rhythm guitarist. Except he didn't sing. He and his guitar roared, like animals in unison, the Baron's throat so sandpapered it made the air in front of his amps seem misty with blood.

  Dook and Paulie and I knew this because a month before we had snuck into Whorefrost's last show of the summer, at a warehouse on the edge of Westover, after an elaborate operation to convince our parents we'd gone camping. There was no question we had to do this. The Baron had spent the first ten years of his life in Sweden, before his father came to Indy to work at Eli Lilly, and the years of his exile, too. It was common knowledge among the metalheads of Sharpe County that the Baron was part of Sweden's black metal scene; he knew, it was said, the guys in Mayhem. Mayhem! We'd heard that he'd once partied with Hellhammer himself, that he'd been allowed to touch Hellhammer's necklace, made of fragments of human skull. It was said the Baron had helped burn churches.

  The metal bands of Westover—of all northern Indiana—were posers. But not Whorefrost. Everyone knew it. The warehouse crowd knew it. The Baron made them real, dangerous. We stood in the warehouse with a hundred other long-haired guys and leather chicks, all of us staring at each other with joy and terror. Then the Baron and the rest of the band stalked onstage.

  Fuck you fuckers, said the Baron into his mike—the last intelligible thing he said till after the show. He spat into the crowd and then screamed and began to pummel the guitar.

  Whorefrost, live, was a literal assault. The crowd started fighting the moment the bass drums started churning. I was struck in the head almost immediately and hit someone else in retaliation. My nose bled and I think my ears did, too. In the big echoing warehouse, I couldn't even hear the guitarists' chords; different songs were more like changes in air pressure. The Baron thrashed his guitar—a black, battered Flying V—with his bare muscled arms bulging, his legs spread, his hair stuck to the sweat on his face. He had a swastika tattooed on one bicep and the SS insignia on the other. If he'd bitten the head off a groupie—and there were groupies who would have let him—none of us would have been surprised.

  The police came and shut everything down after four songs, and we were lucky we hadn't been drinking. While I was waiting to be breathalyzed, I saw the Baron leering at a big beefy-necked cop. The cop stood impassively while the handcuffed Baron roared and stuck out his tongue and wagged it obscenely and growled, Piggy Piggy Piggy. They maced him and put him in the paddy wagon.

  And here he was. The Red fucking Baron stood in my kitchen. He looked angry—but then I'd never seen him look anything but angry. His hands were in the pockets of his vest, and he smelled like ten years' worth of cigarettes and booze. His eyes were red, the lids around them puffy and bleary. On his hip was a large leather knife case. A tattoo of a clawed red devil hand reached out of his collar and circled half his throat, his Adam's apple bulging just above the joint of the thumb, like Hell itself was choking him, pulling him down.

  Hey Lars, I said. How's it going?

  This is not a party, he said. His voice was deep and growly and had a Europe-y rubber-band bounce to it. For my own safety I tried not to think of the Swedish Chef going bork bork bork.

  I had to be cool.

  Now that you guys are here, I said, it is.

  The Baron sneered at me. Don't suck my dick, he said. Then: You, Paul, give me that fucking whiskey.

  The Baron was so impressive that for two or three minutes, even after they'd filed into the kitchen behind him, I'd neglected to check out the girls. But then I noticed what Paulie and Dook had already: They were impressive, too.

  One was tall and blond and old, by which I mean not in high school. Or maybe she was, still, at Westover, where they weren't afraid to fail the failures. She looked twenty. She was dressed in a leather jacket and leather boots and a black skirt, and her legs were in torn fishnets. Her lips were very red and a little smeary. Her hair was teased out like a firework exploding. Her breasts pushed dangerously out of her jacket. She smiled at me, but not with her eyes.

  Paul—so proud I thought he might rub his hands together—said, This is Bethany.

  You introduced us already, she said to Paul. Her eyes flicked over him and then away. She stood by the Baron, and the Baron—who had found a steak knife in the dish drainer and was cutting at the wax seal on his bottle of whiskey—casually reached down and squeezed one of her buttocks.

  The other girl stood closest to me. She smiled and said Hey. Toni, I remembered. She was in boots and a skirt, too, but was smaller, younger—probably younger than me and Dook. Her hair was dyed black and she had on little glasses and wore a choker.

  Toni's from Alaska, Paul said.

  I'm Bethany's cousin, Toni said to me, like she needed to explain her way into the house, like she'd gone somewhere cool, and not a farmhouse in the exact geographical center of BFE.

  No problem, I said. I might as well play the expansive host. Glad you could make it.

  This isn't a fucking party, the Baron said again. Toni winced a little. Paulie stared openly at her breasts, which were, admittedly, under a tight black sweater and amazing.

  Paul, I said, come here for a second.

  I took Paul to the living room. Behind me I heard Dook pick up the slack: Dude, we totally caught your warehouse show—

  Dude, Paulie whispered, call over some guys, quick.

  What the fuck, Paulie? The Baron?

  I know I know. I was totally putting a move on Toni down at the park—and she's so fucking hot, oh my fucking God—and then she introduces me to her cousin, says, This is my cousin Bethany and I'm like oh fuck that's the Baron's girl. And then the Baron's right there! And we all like talked for
a while? And then I passed around a joint you know to like chill everyone out? And then I remembered your mom's gone—right?

  Fuck, I said.

  So we've got to make this a party, he said.

  No no no, I said. Not the Baron. Not here. Seriously. He'll torch the place when he sees how fucking hopeless we are. And we'd deserve it.

  Dude. Paul did everything but grab my hand. Think about it. Okay? Tonight! Whorefrost! with opening act Pitch Black...

  I stared at him, and he stared back, nodding.

  He was right. Little twerp or not, Paulie'd found an opportunity and capitalized on it. Whorefrost was the only metal band in the entire northern half of Indiana that had any sort of future. If the Baron chose to help us, we were made. We could either bounce around like dumbfucks in his audience or we could make a play for his stage.

  I'll get on the horn, I said.

  Another thing you should know: I didn't have many friends. I was skinny and intense and didn't like to speak much in groups. I wanted instead to stand up in front of groups and play my guitar and let my hair hide my eyes. To be sound, a force, a metal god. To that end I spent all my time inside my room, practicing the guitar. Or with Dook, who I'd known since I was six, back before I knew what bravery was. I wanted groupies to pile on top of me backstage, but in the meantime I was generally too frightened of any woman not my mother to do much other than gawk. I know this isn't really unusual. But it goes a way toward explaining why, at sixteen years old, I couldn't get on the phone and summon twenty party-minded teenagers to my mother's empty house.

  I tried the numbers of everyone I knew. Almost all of them were gone. It was a Friday night; they were probably all out drinking at the Westover park where Paulie'd met the Baron. The fifth number I called with trepidation; it belonged to a fat metalhead kid we all knew, who sat with us at lunch and not much else. He answered and in the background I heard Ozzy's wail. When I told him that the Baron was in my house he told me I must be as high as he was.