Not waiting for a response, he turned around and walked out. I waited for the door to slam behind him and went to the window. He hurried down the drive to his cruiser, putting on a pair of sunglasses, got in the car and sped off, leaving a wake of dust and gravel behind him.
As soon as he was out of sight, I turned around, walked into the foyer and up the stairs.
At the landing, the hallway opened up and stretched out and all the oak-paneled doors along its length were closed. No decoration, no art or tables or vases, except for a single green plant at the far end. Its leaves stirred in the tepid breeze, straining through the open window next to it.
Jeannie Angel’s voice: “You have to push, Bishop. Hold it down or I can’t do a thing!”
And the mayor: “Stop the goddamn jawing and strap it! Jesus Hinky Christ, woman, you’ve done it a hundred times!”
“Yes, Bishop, and so have you. Why do I have to do all the work?”
I moved down the hall in the direction of the voices. The farthest door on the left was cracked open. I peered inside.
Jeannie Angel sat on the bed, facing Ishy, who stood in front of her. His pants were half-down but it wasn’t what it looked like at first glance. His right hand was in his pocket and poking through a hole and Jeannie Angel was strapping his wrist to his thigh with a thick leather cord. Trying to, anyway. The hand kept jerking spasmodically away from his thigh before she could tighten the strap.
“Did you even take your pills, Bishop? I can’t help you if you—”
“Of course I took my goddamn pills, what sort of stupid question is that?”
“Well I ask because you—”
“It takes a few minutes for them to start working, you know that!”
“You mean you only just took them? Oh, Bishop, what if someone—”
The mayor’s hand interrupted her, jerking free of the strap again. It fluttered around like a spastic white bird, until he grabbed it with his left hand, cursing, and pushed it back through his pocket hole and held it fiercely against his thigh.
“Hurry!” he said. “Strap the goddamn thing!”
She looped the cord around his leg and tried again. Gently, I pushed open the door and said, “Howdy, Mr. Mayor. Hiya, Jeannie Angel.”
Jeannie Angel froze, staring horrified and dumb. Ishy, too, was statue-still for a moment, looking at me blankly. Then his kingdom collapsed in grand and epic style.
First he said, “Wesley! What the high holy fuck—” and then the hand broke free again, balled into a fist, and slammed him in the nose.
He grunted and blood splashed along his cheek. His left hand made a valiant effort to thwart it, but the right hand faked it out, veered away, shot in again and caught Ishy in the throat.
“Motherfucker!” he choked, fell back on the bed. The crazy hand kept pummeling him while the left hand tried to stop it. “You cocksucking son of a whore! Wesley, you pestilent sack of bile! I’m going to—” Whack, in the mouth, his lip busted. “When I get my hands on you, you goddamn mother—” Whack, in the right eye, staggering him. “Yousa . . .” Speech slurring. Whack, in the nose again. Whack, the jaw. Whack. Whack, whack.
I stood there staring while the mayor of Cuba Landing beat himself to a pulp, and Jeannie Angel, who’d slid off the bed and onto the floor, finally sobbed and got up and ran past me out the door.
Ishy lay on his back on the bed, still cursing me and anything that sounded like me. The left hand was down for the count but the right hand still had something to prove, apparently. It punched Ishy in the face over and over again, and the mayor’s eyes, both turning black and purple, glazed over. “Wesley . . . sumbitch . . .”
Whack.
I tore myself away and left the mayor to himself. Whatever it was I thought I needed to tell him seemed pretty damn insignificant just then.
Jeannie Angel sat at the kitchen table and didn’t look at me when I came in. Not crying anymore, but still giving the occasional sniffle, her eyes still red.
I leaned up against the counter, by the sink, and said, “So. What the hell did I just see?”
“You didn’t see anything.”
“The hell. He just beat the crap out of himself. What’s the matter with him?”
Still not looking at me. “It’s . . . it’s hard to explain, Mr. Wesley. Bishop has an . . . illness.”
“What sort of illness?”
Finally, she looked up at me. Mascara smeared along the bridge of her nose, but she still managed to look tentatively defiant. “It’s called Alien Hand Syndrome.”
“You’re pulling my leg.”
“He had a car accident when he was a kid, about seventeen. It damaged, I don’t know, a nerve center in his brain or something and now he needs medication to control his hand. It’s like it’s got a mind of its own or something.”
I said again, “You’re pulling my leg,” and laughed before I could stop myself.
“It’s not funny. It’s a serious problem. Very much like Tourette’s Syndrome, but much more . . .”
She couldn’t find the right word, so I helped her. “Bizarre?”
“Bishop has dealt with it with dignity and grace for many, many years.”
“He’s on medication for it? That explains some things.”
Sharply, “It happens sometimes. You have to understand, Mr. Wesley, Bishop walks a thin line every day. He’s got a great deal of responsibility and he’s a decent man, he really is. For public functions, he has to be sure that his . . . his problem won’t flare up.”
“Could be embarrassing. But which is worse? Beating the shit out of yourself in front of everyone, or rambling on about rhubarb pie?”
“You mean that question rhetorically, but I think the answer is clear.”
I shrugged, and she looked at me hard for a second and said, “Don’t you judge him, Mr. Wesley. Don’t you dare judge him.”
“I’m not in a position to judge anyone.”
“That’s right.”
“He knows about you and Reverend Childe.”
For a moment I thought she hadn’t heard me. She looked at her hands on the table, as if one of them would suddenly go mad and start beating her up if she didn’t watch it. Then she said, “What . . . what about me and Reverend Childe? There’s nothing—”
“Please.”
She swallowed hard. Then she laughed, short and sharp and bitter, and said, “Bastard. Manipulative bastard.”
If she meant the Reverend or Ishy or me I didn’t know for a moment. Her mouth twisted and her fists clenched and she said, “That son of a bitch. He knew. He knew. For how long?”
“Since the beginning, I guess.”
“That son of a bitch. How did he know?”
I shrugged.
She said, “All the time carrying on like everything was perfectly normal. Smiling at me. Calling me his ‘li’l Angel’. The manipulative bastard. I hate him.”
“I have to go. Good luck, Jeannie Angel.”
I started out of the kitchen and she said, “Mr. Wesley. Did Reverend Childe tell him?”
“I doubt it.”
She nodded. “Of course he didn’t. Phinneas wouldn’t do something like that. He’s too kind and gentle, he’d never hurt anyone.”
I laughed, thinking, poor Jeannie Angel.
She turned her anger on me. “You laugh at the strangest things, Mr. Wesley. Does everything strike you as funny? Even other people’s pain?”
“Sometimes.”
“You’re just like him. Just like Bishop. Cold and cruel and manipulative. God, I hate him so much.”
I moved toward the door and was almost through it when she said my name again. I turned around and looked at her and her eyes were wet and pleading.
“I don’t,” she said. “I don’t hate him. Please don’t tell him I said that, Mr. Wesley? I don’t hate him.”
“Okay.”
“And . . . and if you see Phinneas, please tell him to call me? Would you do that for me, Mr. Wesley?”
It happens like this:
The big clock in the sitting room rings in at midnight, and the house is still and somber. Louis and Stella have been sent out, I don’t know where, I don’t care. Elise sits by herself in the kitchen, maybe sipping at a vodka tonic because she drinks more these days. Outside, gravel grumbles under the wheels of the Malibu and a moment later Elise hears the car door chunk closed and the Reverend’s footsteps up the walkway to the back door.
She’s there, opening the door before he knocks, and he grins at her, that big grin that means absolutely nothing and probably even the Reverend can think of nothing to say right then.
She lets him in. He nods, says something homey, enters.
About an hour of conversation then, the Reverend testing the waters, maybe hardly believing that he’s really going to get away with this. Comments growing more and more suggestive, without protest, and he’s finally thinking, well I’ll be damned. She’s all mine, sure as hell.
And it’s a reward, it’s God laying His divine hand on the Reverend’s shoulder and blessing him for all his years of service and faith. Because God loves us, yes He does. God holds our hand and rocks us to sleep at night and He never ever lets anything bad happen. Don’t fret, sinner, about that single goddamn set of footprints, because no, you haven’t been alone all this time.
God is good. God is great. And if you believe that God is insane, then you deserve His punishment. You deserve to be stricken with immortality and terrifying power.
When Elise finally goes upstairs, the Reverend following, another book of the Old Testament is uncovered, the Book of Childe, and Saint Augustine would say, Now that, that’s something I can relate to, brothers and sisters. Can I get an amen?
The last part, that’s the part I saw with my own eyes. On videotape, about an hour later. By then it was anti-climactic because I already knew the ending. I already knew that God stayed Abram’s hand before he could kill his son and I knew that Daniel lived through the lion’s den and I knew that Job came through his suffering with a new family and wealth. I didn’t need to see it.
I’d set up the video camera in the closet while I waited in the spare bedroom. I fell asleep at some point, woke up only when Elise’s bedroom door opened across the hall and Reverend Childe finally left. She walked him downstairs and I made a point of not listening, of shutting off all senses. I didn’t want to hear what she had to say. I didn’t want to speculate on what she felt or what was going through her head. If the whole experience had been painful or traumatic for her, it would be painful and traumatic for me. If she’d actually enjoyed it, well . . . selfish bastard Charlie would find that even more painful.
I went into her bedroom, grabbed the camera and the little tape inside it. I could hear them in the kitchen, the conversation between them a murmur. I went downstairs and left the house through the front door, quietly.
Elise would expect me to wait for her upstairs, to comfort her after her Martyrdom, but I wouldn’t be there. Being Mary Magdalene, that was woman’s work, praise God, and I was on the path to true divinity now, I was doing Jesus’s work. Callousness is next to Godliness.
About two miles up Swan Road, I pulled the Rover off to the side and rewound the tape and looked at it through the viewfinder. I watched them getting undressed and the Reverend pulling her to him, and then I fast-forwarded, stopping occasionally just to make sure both of their faces were easily recognizable.
Then I rewound it again, pulled it out of the camera. In a sudden surge of rage I rolled down the window and threw the tape into the ditch.
I smoked a cigarette.
Then I got out of the Rover and searched for the tape, found it after two minutes. I climbed back in the vehicle, shut the door, put the tape in my jacket pocket. Then I threw the camera out the window.
Put the Rover in gear. Drove to Ishy’s house.
It was about two-thirty in the morning and no one existed but me. The mayor’s house was silent and dark and I turned off my headlights and cut the engine and coasted up to the front driveway. I left the Rover’s door open and went to the front door of the house and slid the tape through the mail slot. I heard it clatter on the floor inside and hoped vaguely that it wouldn’t wake anyone up.
Then I climbed back in the Rover and started the engine and drove away as quickly as possible.
And then it was done. I had committed the most vile, evil act of my entire life, and it was done and all I felt was a dark sense of clarity and purpose. I was wrong to kill that cop, yes, but I was even more wrong to think of it as a horrible mistake. It had happened for a reason, sure as the sun rises and sure as the flesh is weak. The young law officer way up in Seattle, he was the first step on my journey, so long ago; he existed solely for me and my spiritual awakening.
Doing Jesus’s work, yes indeed. Doing the Devil’s work. I was my Father’s bastard hand, so I had to do both.
That was fine, just fine. No problems. At least this way, I always knew what the competition was up to.
I spent the night in Maxwell Park, spread out on the grass and looking up at the Captain’s stone face and not feeling anything. The sun came up stealthily and when the sky started going orange I finally stood up and looked across the park at the church.
Nobody yet. Sunday morning, though, so only another hour or two before God’s sheep began arriving. I stretched my achy muscles and strolled over to the diner.
No Gloria this morning; I didn’t know the waitress who served my coffee and eggs. Without her, the diner seemed alien—but that was fine, really. The whole world would be alien to me now, probably, the whole universe strange and disconnected. I couldn’t make up my mind whether I’d gained something or lost everything.
Eating leisurely, I managed to kill an hour and a half and by the time I finished, the diner was beginning to fill up. I dropped money on the table, left, made my way to the church.
The church, the Cuba Landing Free Will Baptist Church. Cars were pulling in, the congregation arriving steadily, and the Reverend stood out front by the doors, greeting his flock. He looked the same as ever, big smile, warm handshake, as if he didn’t know that the world had changed.
He grinned at me as I approached. “Good morning, Charlie,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder.
“Morning, Reverend.”
“Glad you could make it, ol’ son. You hanging in there all right?”
“Couldn’t be better.”
“Fine, that’s fine,” he said. Some more people came up the walk, and he greeted them affably, exchanged a few pleasantries. He turned back to me as they entered the church. “It’s gonna be just like old times, ain’t it, Charlie? I surely did miss having you around.”
“Like old times, sure. Soon as I get that Bible back from you.”
He laughed. “You’re getting down-right practical minded these days, ain’t you? Don’t fret none, I got it right here.” He patted the pocket of his black coat.
“The sooner you give it to me, the sooner it’ll be just like old times.”
He nodded. “I reckon so. But—”
Some more of the congregation, two or three families at once, coming up the walk. The Reverend did his thing, ushered them inside, and turned back to me. “This ain’t exactly the best time and place to hand over the Bible, is it? What with folks coming in.”
“I can’t think of a better time and place to exchange a Bible than Sunday morning, in front of a church.”
He laughed. “That’s a damn good point. Can’t argue.” But still he made no move to hand it over.
I said, “You seem reluctant. We made a deal. You aren’t planning on welching, are you?”
He looked at me sharply, but the grin didn’t leave his face. “I ain’t never welched
on a deal in my life, Charlie, and I ain’t about to start now. But there’s other things need tending to first. I got a—”
“If you don’t give me that Bible right now, I’ll take it from you. Right here, in front of everyone.”
He shook his head. “That’d be a nice way to attract attention neither of us want. ’specially considering—” He nodded toward a group of people just coming up the walk, “—that the mayor’s wife is coming our way.”
Amid a cluster of her friends and acquaintances, Belinda Ishy approached us. She wore a dark green sleeveless dress, low cut to compliment her considerable bosom, and a dark look passed over her face when she saw me. To the Reverend, she said, “Good morning, Reverend, how wonderful to see you.”
“Ladies,” he said warmly. “Mrs. Ishy. Good to see you all this morning, so glad you came.”
He hurried them inside, and if a furtive glance passed between him and the mayor’s wife, I missed it. When they were away, he said to me, “Damn, that’s a fine specimen of womanhood. And speaking of choice female flesh, how’s our tasty little Garrity girl this morning?”
“I haven’t seen her.”
He raised an eyebrow. “No? Well, that’s odd. Everything stable on the home front?”
“Everything’s fine. I just haven’t seen her.”
“Well that’s just a shame. I can see now why you been so damn hot and bothered for her. She’s a regular wildcat, ain’t she? Scratched up my back but good. And the way she smells, you know, in the heat of the moment. . . . Lord have mercy, she was a handful.”
Trying to provoke me. The way he spoke of it, too casually, like it was nothing at all, just a little tryst. What’s a little illicit carnality between friends?
But he didn’t know, he didn’t know me anymore. He didn’t know that I was Jesus. Me, not him. He was Lucifer. He was the flipside of the coin.
“Reverend,” I said. “The Bible.”
He nodded. “You have a right to it now, sure as Hell. But I’m gonna have to ask you to wait, just a bit. Until the sermon is over. I got something real grand planned. It’s an important day, you know.”
The Bastard Hand Page 24