The Bastard Hand

by Heath Lowrance

  “Apparently. Let me in, Rev. We need to talk.”

  He said, “Okay, then,” and stepped back far enough to let me into the room.

  He was bare-ass naked, his semi-erect penis slapping at his thighs. In his bed, holding the sheets up to her neck, Belinda Ishy stared at me with a kind of terrified wonder glinting in her eyes.

  I said, “Howdy, Mrs. Ishy.”

  Numbly, she raised a hand in greeting, then let it drop back down to the bed.

  Scratching distractedly at his stomach, the Reverend said, “Now what the hell is so all-dang-important that you gotta barge right into my room when I’m in the middle of entertaining a guest?”

  “Well,” I said, leaning against the doorjamb, “it’s been a good while since you and I have connected, Rev. I thought it was long overdue.”

  He looked at me, as if waiting for more, then gestured at me with an open palm, like a television host presenting the next act. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for the amazingly annoying Charlie Wesley! “And?” he said.

  “And I decided it couldn’t wait.”

  “You decided . . .” He stared at me unbelievingly, then glanced at Mrs. Ishy. She was slowly reaching toward the floor for the dress that lay crumbled there. He pointed at her, said, “Uh-uh. Don’t even think about it, darling. I like you much better without clothes on, don’t you know that?”

  She stopped, the horror on her face edging toward panic. “But, Reverend . . .”

  “But, nothing. You just wait.” He turned back to me. “And this, what you say . . . connecting . . . can’t wait, huh?”

  The sheet covering Mrs. Ishy had slipped, exposing one heavy breast. It was smooth and round, the dark nipple going soft. I looked away. “No. It can’t wait.”

  Suddenly, he laughed. A loud, hard sound, not the carefree laugh of a good-natured Southern boy at all. He said, “Ah. Okay, I getcha. You wanna patch things up, right? Charlie, there ain’t nothing to patch up. We ain’t had much of a chance to talk lately, but that don’t mean something’s wrong, does it? We both been busy is all.”

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “It’s not?” he said, eyeing me keenly. “Then pray tell, Charlie. What is it exactly?”

  I started, “It’s . . . it’s just . . .” But I didn’t know how to finish. The bedsprings creaked as the mayor’s wife shifted her position. Of their own volition, my eyes strayed over to her, took in the way the sheets lay across her legs. One foot stuck out from the edge of the bed. The toenails were painted red.

  He looked at me, followed my gaze to Mrs. Ishy. Then he smiled at me, and I saw his penis twitch, very slightly. He said, “Okay, Charlie. You wanna patch things up? You wanna make things right between us, do you?” He took a step toward me. “Then let’s do that. Let’s get everything out in the open and kick our friendship into high gear again, what d’ya say?” He nodded his head at Mrs. Ishy, said, “You don’t have no objections, do ya, darling?”

  Mrs. Ishy tilted her head at him. Nerves making her voice shaky and breathless, she said, “Wh . . . what do you mean?”

  “I mean, Charlie is my friend. And friends share everything, don’t they? How’s about, as a token of my friendship, the three of us get to know each other a little better?”

  Mrs. Ishy’s feelings on the subject were a mystery. I pulled my gaze away from her, looked at the Reverend. His private parts gave away how he felt about it, and I tried not to notice the fact that his penis was intimidatingly large.

  To my annoyance, my own body responded in much the same way. I hadn’t thought much about Belinda Ishy in the carnal sense until then, but at that moment I was painfully aware of her more sensual features, the wide curve of her hips under the thin blanket, the arc of her white foot sticking out.

  The Reverend moved back toward the bed. He pulled the sheets away from her, revealing her body in all its soft fullness. “C‘mon, Charlie. You said you wanted to make amends. Well, trust me, this is the best way to do it.”

  None of this was working out the way I’d hoped. Just once, I wanted him to be good and pure. Just once, so that I could be the martyr and feel good about something, even if it did mean my own existence would be destroyed. But he wouldn’t do it.

  “Rev,” I said. “Goddamnit, Rev . . .”

  “Charlie. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times. Don’t blaspheme.”

  I stood still. Belinda Ishy looked at me frankly, a new fire burning in her eyes. Her chest and neck were flushed. Gently, she drew one hand over her breast, toyed playfully with the nipple.

  I had to do something, I had to make some sort of move to break the spell. Finding my voice, I said, “So, Mrs. Ishy . . . does your husband know you’re here?”

  A hypocritical, sanctimonious thing to say, I knew, but I had to say something to pull myself away from it. And it worked.

  She shot up in the bed, nearly knocking the Reverend to the floor, and screamed, “You shut up! Shut your fucking mouth, you hear me?”

  “Whoa!” the Reverend said. “Calm down, now! Charlie didn’t mean nothing by that, did ya, Charlie?” He looked at me intently.

  I said, “No, I didn’t mean nothing. Just that I can’t stand to see so-called decent women catting around like twenty dollar whores.”

  Screaming, she nearly jumped out of bed and rushed me. The Reverend grabbed her around the waist, held her back, and she spit venom and fire at me: “You hypocritical bastard! You got some nerve, calling me a whore! If you’re so goddamn pure, what the hell were you doing visiting my husband this afternoon?”

  Everything stopped. The Reverend looked at me sharply, then said to her, “What? What did you just say?”

  She smiled, knowing she’d gotten me good. Relaxing a bit against his arms, she said, “That’s right, Reverend. He was out to my house this very afternoon. Sitting around with Ernie and Lionel and my husband. Prob’ly drinking iced tea, plotting the way they’d fuck you over.”

  “Charlie,” the Reverend said, “is that true?”

  “I was out there today. That’s true. He asked to see me.”

  He stared at me long and hard. I noticed his erection slowly fall to low-ebb, like the Hindenburg crash-and-burning.

  “I see,” he said. “Doing what exactly, Charlie? Plotting against me?”

  “Ishy has some ideas about you, Rev. Most of them are true.”

  “Uh-huh. And he’s recruited you, has he?”

  “It’s not—”

  “Shut up, Charlie. Just shut your mouth.” He shook his head. “After everything I done for you. After pulling you up out of the gutter, showing you the Glory of God’s Light! This is what you do for me. I ask you . . . is this the action of a good, God-fearing man?”

  Any shame or regret I may have had evaporated then. A good, God-fearing man? I was not a better human being than him. I was not above lying or cheating or stealing, or even, God help me, murder. But the one difference between us, the one defining characteristic feature separating us, was a big one. And I held onto it with all my might.

  Quietly, I said, “Hypocrite.”

  He caught his breath, his naked chest swelling like a territorial baboon. He pointed one long finger at the door, boomed, “Judas! Get out!”

  Without another word, I turned around and left. Belinda Ishy laughed bitterly, an ugly predatory laugh that sounded like a vengeful hyena. The Reverend cursed and stomped his feet, babbling some Biblical bullshit about thirty pieces of silver and the tragedy of men’s souls.

  I could still hear him, even from the parking lot outside.

  Dimly, I was aware of the fact that I was now unemployed. Again. I would have to come back to the church at some point for my things, but I didn’t want to think about that. The Malibu—which I’d been using more than the Reverend had—was also a thing of the past. I kind of liked that Malibu.

  Welcome back to the bottom, Charlie! Been a long time, where ya been? Pull up a chair and take a load off.

  Back to
square one. Can’t say I missed it.

  There was too much anger churning around in my gut to make room for feelings of sorrow or loss. It wasn’t an anger directed at any one person, but a big and nasty emotion, mammoth enough to cover just about everyone. I was furious with the Reverend, and with Bishop Ishy and Ishy’s wife, with Forrey and Oldfield. I was even furious with Elise, for seeing and understanding the inevitability that I was blind to.

  It was all screwed up. They were all screwed up. And they were screwing me up right along with them. Bastards. Fucking parasites, bleeding me dry.

  I stalked up Main Street, away from the church, cursing and wishing they would just leave me alone, leave their slimy little hands off my life. Every single one of them deserved a little slice of hell. They deserved anything that happened to them.

  I stopped walking. The hole that had opened up in me earlier was now filling up, filling up with vile ugly blackness. Hate. So much hate and anger, I was sure it would never end. I stood at the edges of that great big hole, shoveling like mad, sweating with rage, shoveling, shoveling, filling the hole. The dirt, the vile ugly black dirt, kept piling up beside me, faster than I could chuck it into the hole. I would go insane before I ever filled it, because it was bottomless.

  For the first time in weeks, my hands began to ache. I looked at them and wasn’t surprised to see the deadly amber light surrounding my fingers.

  I had to stop.

  But they were all against me. They wanted to destroy me. They were toying with me, watching to see how much I could take. . . .

  “Stop,” I said out loud. Not a scream, not like the way I felt, but softly, firmly. A middle-aged man jogged past, eyed me as if I was a big stray dog shitting right there on the sidewalk. He kept jogging, not even looking back at me.

  A change was happening, somewhere deep in my head. I felt its pressure against my skull, pushing, stretching against the gray matter of my brain, demanding to be acknowledged. I couldn’t stop it from breaking out. I was scared of it, because I knew it boded bad, bad, bad. It wasn’t a fugue and it wasn’t a bout of mania and it wasn’t anything I’d ever felt before.

  Then it was free and I went belly-up and collapsed on the soft grass of the park under the sad sanctity of a weeping willow and I wasn’t scared anymore.

  Tears still blurred my eyes, but I was laughing. The hate was gone and I felt better, I felt strange, a kind of strange I’d never felt before, and suddenly everything was clear.

  I was going to do what I had to do, and goddamn the consequences. We were all just fish, and Cuba Landing was a tank. Bishop Ishy wanted to be the big fish. So did the Reverend. Me, I didn’t give a shit. I would be the fisherman.

  I walked the whole way back to Elise’s house, about a thirty-minute trip. Just like the old days, when I would walk and walk and walk for hours, pushing steadily southward, with the ugly highway stretching behind and before me without end. After I’d left the hospital—“released myself on my own recognizance” as Mayor Ishy put it—I had gotten to the point where walking incredible distances became second-nature and I wouldn’t have thought twice about an uninterrupted stroll of eight or nine hours. But the easy life of the last month had spoiled me, not to mention the beating, and by the time I made it to Elise’s, I was ready to drop.

  “I assume you went to see him today. Didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I did.”

  She looked at my chest and said quietly, “Why?”

  “To give him a chance. To see if he would do something to make me want to stick by him.”

  “Did he?”

  I shook my head. “No. Not even close.”

  “You’ve made up your mind, then.”

  Her green eyes went big and soft, like one of those porcelain figurines old ladies go crazy over. The charms, though, weren’t working on me right at that moment. It was unlikely that any appeal to my emotions would have any sort of effect at all, because my emotions had ceased to be a factor in anything. My psyche was stripped down to basic parts, an engine and four wheels. I said, “Yeah. I’ve made up my mind.”

  But there was so much more to it than that, so much more than simply making up my mind. There was no heavenly reward at the end to spur me on. I wasn’t doing it for Elise, I wasn’t even doing it for myself, because I didn’t believe in the happy ending. I wasn’t doing it out of revenge against Reverend Childe—after all, what was there to revenge?

  No, none of that mattered.

  If Elise could read any of my thoughts, she didn’t show it. She snaked her arms around my neck and kissed me.

  “Charlie . . .” she said, her breath warm on my cheek, “Charlie . . . I know I shouldn’t say this. We haven’t been together long, but I feel it. Charlie, I—”

  Before she could say it, I took her chin in my hand and kissed her. She struggled half-heartedly against my lips, trying to speak, but I wouldn’t let her. She gave up, moved my hands up over her breasts, began working at the buttons of her blouse.

  “How, Charlie?” she said later.

  “How what?” Half asleep, and the words jarred me.

  “How are you going to do it?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  Silence for a moment, her head nestled on my chest, her hair tickling my chin.

  Then, “It would have to be something big, Charlie. Something the town would never forgive him for.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Something a preacher isn’t supposed to do.”

  “Long list. And the Reverend does them all.”

  Her head moved against my shoulder, nodding. “We could never trick him into showing up drunk in public, could we?”

  “No. Not a chance. He’s too bright for that.”

  “Sex?”

  “In public?”

  “No, Charlie. On film, maybe. Pictures.”

  I thought that idea over, then said, “Hard to pull off. I don’t see how we could get a camera in his room without him knowing about it.”

  She eased up on her elbow, looked at me. “No, Charlie. Not in his room.”

  “Well, where, then?”

  Her eyes blinked fast. She said, “I think I have an idea, Charlie. I don’t know if you’re going to like it, but I think it might work.”

  By the time night came, I was on my feet again, walking around the property outside the house and thinking about the things Elise said. Some sparse woods spread out behind the Garrity home, and as darkness settled over them I found it harder and harder to resist their lure. I finally gave in and stepped into the darkness.

  The temperature dropped at least ten degrees as soon as the trees surrounded me. I walked along a makeshift trail, knotted with roots, littered with fallen branches and leaves dead and disintegrating into the earth. Night birds called to each other mysteriously, plotting their little bird schemes over my head. On all sides, there were sounds, faint, unobtrusive, stealthy, the rustling of leaves and the creaking of branches, as snakes and possums and mice stalked each other, escaped each other, died in each other’s jaws.

  I walked.

  I’m the one, she had said. The town tramp. The whore of Cuba Landing.

  And I’d said something stupid, something about the state of her reputation.

  What reputation? It’s already gone. And it doesn’t matter. When it’s all over, we’ll leave this ugly place, we’ll go somewhere better. Just you and me.

  No, no, no. Can’t do that.

  Don’t you see it doesn’t matter? Charlie, none of it matters.

  And that was true. None of it mattered.

  It was sex. Reverend Childe’s greatest weakness. A woman’s supple form, raw, naked, writhing in the pure abandon of ecstasy and pain. And it meant nothing.

  Nothing except the downfall of Cuba Landing.

  An amazing thing happened. After analyzing it from every angle I could think of, a sudden realization came to me.

  I didn’t really care anymore.

  And that made it so much easier.

&nb
sp; So early Friday morning I drove to town in her “other car”—a well-worn Land Rover—with an untroubled mind and an unburdened heart. Really, I almost felt good. The Reverend would be expecting me to pick up my things, of course, but that was only a pretense for a more serious task. Somehow, I had to get back in his good graces—even if it meant lying my ass off.

  I found him in the small front yard of the church. He labored in the dirt, planting little yellow flowers along the shrubs and distractedly humming a gospel tune under his breath.

  I parked at the curb and watched him for a moment. It was the first time I’d ever seen him doing anything even resembling manual labor, but he looked natural doing it. Jeans and a black t-shirt had replaced his usual dark suit and white collar, and it only took me a second to recognize the clothes as my own. Dirt streaked his lean face, partially obscured by the locks of black hair hanging over his forehead, and the rays of the blistering June sun had already reddened the back of his neck.

  He noticed me when I climbed out of the Rover and began making my way up the walk. Craning his neck, he peered at me through squinted eyes. “Well,” he said. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”

  “Wonder no more. Here I am.”

  “Mm.” He stabbed his tiny spade into the dirt, stood up brushing the soil off his knees. “Come for your stuff, I reckon.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. You know where it is.”

  For long seconds, we stood there in silence, the tension between us stealing my breath and pushing on my chest, and for a moment—just for a moment—I felt some of the old affection for him and hated everything that had happened. We were like two flies encased in the same amber block, visible to each other but denied touch.

  But then that feeling left me, and I got down to business. “We need to talk.”

  “Ain’t nothing to talk about.”

  “But there is.”

  “Well, then, let me put it this way—nothing I wanna talk about. Is that clearer?”