Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories (11 page)

Trust Jesus

A local teenager was caught spray-painting on an abandoned railroad bridge above a busy two-lane highway. Her graffito, which had nearly been finished when she was apprehended, read:
TRUST JESUS
.

When her case came before our judge, he asked the teenager why she had done what she did. She apologized, telling him that she “thought it would help.” When he asked what it would help, the teenager had no answer, and only reiterated her original statement.

The judge levied a five-hundred-dollar fine and sentenced the girl to repaint the entire bridge, even the portions she had not defaced. Those who suggested to the judge that this was an extreme punishment were met with angry stares.

For some weeks after the ruling, the girl could be seen suspended on a platform above the road after school, painstakingly erasing her original handiwork. She has become something of a local hero and is said to be considering a run for a seat on the town council. Meanwhile, the repainted bridge has become a prime target of vandals, and is now covered with vulgarisms and rude slogans.

Kevin

While eating lunch at a restaurant in the city, I paused to visit the men’s room. I like to wear loose-fitting, comfortable pants, and I had discovered that, when I pushed them down to use the toilet, my wallet often slipped out onto the floor. Consequently I developed the habit of removing the wallet from my pocket before I sat down and resting it on the edge of the sink, to protect it from contact with filth. On this particular occasion, since the sink was out of reach of the toilet, I set the wallet on a child’s high chair the management had stored in a nearby corner. When I was through I pulled up my pants, washed my hands and departed, leaving the wallet behind.

Ten minutes later I finished eating and offered to buy my companion, an old friend, his meal. It was then that I discovered my wallet was missing. Immediately I remembered where I had left it and went to the men’s room to retrieve it. But by now the wallet was gone.

My friend, a keen observer of men, provided an enticing clue. Only one person had entered the men’s room after me, and he had been carrying a hammer. Armed with this evidence, we approached the restaurant’s owner and told him that my wallet had been taken by a man carrying a hammer. To our surprise, the owner told us that this man was named Kevin, he was a handyman and had been doing repairs in the kitchen.

When my friend and I insisted that it was Kevin, then, who had my wallet, the owner shook his head. He refused to give us Kevin’s last name or address, and maintained that Kevin would never do such a thing. He was honest, the owner told us, and would have turned in the wallet had he found it, but Kevin had done nothing of the sort.

Dejected, I left my friend’s phone number, imploring the owner to ask Kevin if he had found any “lost” items in the men’s room. The owner promised to do so, but I had little hope, and my sympathetic friend agreed to put me up for the rest of my stay in the city, and lent me enough money to enjoy myself.

Thus resigned, I was shocked when Kevin called me at my friend’s apartment that night to report that he had the wallet. He explained that he owned a leather-bound notebook that he carried with him on the job, which he used to jot down his ideas and inspirations. This notebook was identical in appearance to my wallet. Apparently he did the same thing I did in men’s rooms to keep the notebook clean. What Kevin found extraordinary was that he had forgotten, on this particular day, to bring his notebook to work, an omission he could not recall ever having made before, and this happened to be the same day he found a wallet that looked just like it, sitting in exactly the place he would have put it, had it been his notebook. He wondered aloud if the wallet/notebook shape had some deeper significance, some mystic connection to the place he had found it in, and if some greater power had forced me to leave the wallet, as a stand-in for his notebook. That said, he agreed to leave the wallet at the restaurant the next morning, and when I went to pick it up I found it at the counter, its contents fully accounted for. I never met Kevin.

In the car home from the city I wondered, in the wake of his cryptic comment, what ideas and inspirations the handyman might be writing down in his notebook, and what might have caused him to forget it while I was in town.

Terrorist

In my second year of high school, I attempted, along with two other boys, to drive mad a fourth boy, L., who was the shyest and most awkward member of our small group of social outcasts. The three of us called ourselves the ITO, or Independent Terrorists’ Organization, and tortured L. in a variety of ways, including the mailing of anonymous threats, the vandalizing of his car, the dedication to him of hit songs on the local FM radio station, and all manner
of obscene and disruptive telephone calls. We invited him to meet us in the middle of a park, arrived early, deposited at the meeting place a cardboard box containing a cow’s heart with his name seared into it with a soldering iron, then hid in some nearby trees and took surveillance photos of the event, which photos we subsequently mailed him; we set afire in his yard a small but extremely detailed effigy of him that we had constructed from chicken wire and papiermâché and soaked in kerosene; we issued an invitation to a nonexistent formal party at the home of a girl he secretly loved, which he dutifully attended, carrying a bouquet; we placed an order at the drive-up window of the fast food restaurant where he worked and came to the pick-up window in a borrowed car, wearing plastic Richard Nixon masks. Though our true identities could never have been far from his discovery, he never accused us, as we three were his best, if not only, friends; and in fact he confided his anxieties to us, and we dutifully promised to help him identify his torturers and punish them in some way once they were unmasked.

This went on for about four months, and ended at my request. In the space of those months, my braces had been taken off, and I was prescribed contact lenses and began dating a girl; and it was in imagining how to explain my behavior to her that I realized how awful that behavior was, and I begged my friends to come clean.

In retrospect, I see that this desire was purely self-serving, and that identifying ourselves was the cruelest trick of all, for there could be no deeper blow for L. than to be confronted with our betrayal, and with the knowledge that, if he reacted appropriately—that is, with anger—he would have no friends left. When we finally revealed ourselves, it was by telegram, and we made sure we were all at his house when it arrived.

His response convinced me that I was a coward, a conviction I still hold to this day. He unfolded the yellow paper, read it aloud, and then laughed as long and as hard as we did.

Directions

The daughter of old friends had decided to attend college in our town, and was to visit the campus with her boyfriend, a pre-med student at a university in another part of the state. As a favor to her parents, we agreed to provide the two with dinner when they arrived, and answer any questions the young woman might have about life in the area. We had not seen her since she was a little girl.

We prepared a lavish meal, eager to help our friends’ daughter, and to ease any fears she might have about her new independence.

To our surprise, the couple arrived nearly an hour early, and in a strange condition. They were dressed with extreme informality, their T-shirts soiled and blue jeans stained and torn. Both were personally unkempt, their hair knotted and oily, and they reeked of cigarette smoke. The pre-med student had a pinched, impoverished look about him, as if he had been awake studying for days on end with only coffee to nourish him. Most alarming was the fact that our friends’ daughter appeared to be at least seven months pregnant.

Despite our shock, we struggled to make a go of the evening. The couple were obviously hungry, so in lieu of the unfinished meal we made them cold sandwiches, which they ate in huge, anxious bites. We told our friends’ daughter about life at the college, which information she received silently, occasionally nodding to indicate she understood. Meanwhile her boyfriend’s eyes wandered around the room, as if our modest possessions were priceless items in a museum. At one point they asked if we had anything to drink, and they polished off two brimming glasses of milk each, allowing it to spill over their faces and onto their clothes.

Not much later they rose to leave, so we wished them luck and told them they should feel free to come by anytime. In response, they asked us for directions to a free medical clinic downtown, which we gave them. They thanked us quietly and drove away in a dilapidated Buick that emitted blue smoke.

For some minutes we considered what we would say to our friends, particularly on the subject of the pregnancy, about which they had not warned us. It was during this discussion that a knock came at the door. We opened it to find the real daughter and boyfriend, dressed, respectively, in a yellow designer sundress and a shirt and tie. They apologized for being late and presented us with a bottle of sparkling cider and a plastic container of cupcakes. The daughter kissed our cheeks and the boyfriend shook our hands.

We told them our oven had broken down and took them out to a restaurant. Both talked incessantly and with smug confidence about the careers they had plotted for themselves and the country estate where they planned to live when they graduated. My wife and I found them extremely annoying.

For months afterward we expected, even hoped, to be visited again by the first couple, but they never came back.

Distance

A witness to a prominent local murder fell under close scrutiny during the trial, when it was revealed that, directly after the killing, he had wandered around aimlessly for an hour and a half before reporting the crime to a policeman who happened to be walking by. Asked for an explanation for his behavior, the witness explained that he had been sitting high in the bleachers of the empty football stadium where the murder had taken place, and had seen the shooting, which occurred beneath the goalposts at the opposite end of the field, from a great distance. Though his view of the murder was clear and the sound of the shot quite loud, the witness found it difficult to believe in something that had happened so far away. Upon further questioning, the witness confessed that, had he not encountered the policeman by chance, he might never have reported the crime at all.