The Bastard Hand (20 page)

“What?”

“You . . . you’ve been with another woman, haven’t you?”

My heart started racing. A bad situation, and absolutely no way out of it. She could smell it on me, as clearly as she could see the signs of a struggle all over my body.

I said, “Elise . . .”

Her hand dropped to her side, and she only said, “You have. You’ve been with another woman.”

I didn’t answer, just stood there and waited to see what she would do. There was no point in lying, and I respected her too much to insult her intelligence.

She took several deep breaths, her fists clenched, then she said, “You son of a bitch. You son of a bitch.”

“Elise,” I said again.

“Charlie, you son of a bitch.”

She took a step toward me, raised her hand, and brought it hard against my face. It hurt, but I didn’t respond. I just looked at her. Spitting, “You bastard,” she struck me again, this time with the back of her hand.

Her diamond ring cut my cheek, right down to the corner of my mouth.

She took in a short, sharp gasp of breath, startled at the blood she’d drawn. I just stood there. I probably would’ve let her beat on me all day if I had to.

She looked away from me, and said, “My mother. She’s dead.”

“What?”

“She died. Last night.”

Stunned. I said, “Elise . . . I’m sorry.”

“I came . . . came to tell you.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Then she did the very last thing I expected—she took my head in her hands, and forced her lips to mine. I felt her heart beating madly under me, felt her heat building, and my body responded with a will of its own.

My hands moved under her blouse, moved up and over her breasts, and she moaned in my ear and pulled me down to the church steps.

After, she talked for a long time, and I listened. I didn’t ask her why the need for intimacy had taken her so suddenly and forcefully, and she didn’t ask me anymore about where I’d been that night. She only talked and marveled at her grief and cried a little and kissed me.

When I finally made it to bed, some little time later, I was so thoroughly exhausted I could hardly stand. I dropped onto my bed, fully clothed, and slept for thirteen hours straight. My dreams were full of falling money, blood, gunfire, and flesh, and I took them for mental leftovers of the night’s events.

I really should have taken them as omens of coming disaster.

Time rolled on, and nothing changed. May faded out, blurred into June, and the days grew hotter and hotter and the nights grew shorter and sultrier. As June ticked by and school let out, the park was swarmed every day by kids running and playing and being obnoxiously lively. Even from the church steps, you could hear them, yelling and screaming.

The Widow Garrity’s funeral took place on the Saturday after she died, and Reverend Childe delivered a very tasteful sermon, absent of any subtle statements relating to his hidden agenda, whatever that was. Things cooled between me and Elise for a few days after that—we never talked about the early morning on the church’s front steps, or what sparked her sudden need for intimate contact right on the heels of her mother’s death.

But the cooling period was temporary. I went to work for her one or two days a week, mowing the lawn or driving her down to Oxford for shopping, and each visit ended for us in each other’s arms, and it turned into a full-scale affair before I even knew it. I don’t know if Louis or Stella knew anything about our romance, but it’s hard to imagine them not catching on. It seemed pretty obvious to me.

My work for the Reverend eventually turned into a real job. Not a hard job, but a job nonetheless. Sweeping, mopping, maintenance, minor repairs.

I didn’t mind. It wasn’t hard, and my days had taken on a sort of placid normalcy that was very comforting. Everyday, I’d get up at eight, go down to the diner for breakfast, then head back to church to deal with my duties. By one or two I’d be finished, and the rest of the day belonged to me. Most of those afternoons found me either reading or taking in a movie down in Oxford or browsing the bookshop. But sometimes I would head right for Elise’s, on the pretext of seeing what she needed done that day. Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights required my presence at the church, on a just-in-case basis, but again it wasn’t anything to get worked up over.

A pretty breezy existence, really.

The only real concern came with the sudden realization one day that my brother Kyle hadn’t spoken to me in some time.

By the second week of his prolonged silence I began to grow anxious about it, mostly because in times past he never let an hour go by without babbling in my head and making a damn nuisance of himself. Truthfully. He talked more to me after he died than he ever did when blood still flowed through his veins.

But in the last few weeks, since right about the time I’d met Reverend Childe, Kyle had been virtually mum.

At first it felt like a godsend. Nice to have my head to myself again. But as the days wore on his absence started to trouble me and I wondered if I’d done something wrong. Other than armed robbery and murder, that is.

Plus side: Gone were the weird fugues and murderously glowing hands. Since the night at the crack house, the golden lava-like light that emanated from my fingertips hadn’t appeared at all. Minus side: It gave me time to think about it, about why it happened.

I’d been stabbed, that first night in Memphis. The ectoplasm-like light began then. Stoker, the useless dead bastard, had shot me in the throat. The light from my hands killed him.

Both times, I’d been dealt mortal blows. There could be no doubt about it. Well . . . stabbed in the chest, maybe I could understand living through that. Shot through the neck, though . . .

And my own subconscious filled in for Kyle: Uh, hey. You should be dead. You should be fucking dead, man.

Something had happened to me. Something I didn’t understand. And I couldn’t die.

I couldn’t die. You’d think that would be a comforting thought, but it wasn’t. It really wasn’t. It scared the fuck out of me, and now that the glowing hands bit hadn’t happened in awhile I had some time to think it out. Maybe, I thought, since the glowing hands had gone away, maybe, maybe, the “unkillable” thing had gone away too.

But of course I had no way of knowing, did I? And I wasn’t about to throw myself in front of a bus to find out. I didn’t want to be unkillable, but I certainly wasn’t ready to die just yet.

Those were the thoughts that kept my head busy, very often. Not always; just when I was alone at night in my little bed in my little room in that great big church.

In the real world, the world of daylight and people and color and motion, I had other pursuits to occupy me.

The day I knew Cuba Landing had worked it’s magic on me happened in the first week of June. I still had most of the money from the raid on the crack house, hidden away in my bag with Jathed’s Bible, and one morning I gathered it all up in a paper bag and walked down to the bank. Setting the bag on the counter, I said to the clerk, “I’d like to start an account.”

Almost thirty-three years old, and I’d never had a bank account until that day. Big moment for me.

A few days later the paperwork from the bank came in the mail, with a little checkbook that had Charles Wesley engraved on it in silver letters. It was a symbol, the first symbol I’d ever had, that I’d actually accomplished something. A small thing, but for someone like me, a small thing that gleamed with the silver promise of a future.

Starting a bank account in my own name was, of course, my first big mistake, and the move that eventually led to everything falling apart.

It made me wonder what Tassie would’ve thought if she knew what I’d done with the money. I hadn’t seen her since that fateful night, hadn’t heard from her. Then again, how could I? She didn’t know where I was. She knew nothing about me except my name—or at least that’s what I thought at the time. More than once during those long summer weeks I toyed with the idea of visiting her, seeing how she and Vinnie and Bone were getting on. But I never did. What would be the point?

Instead, I concentrated my attentions on Elise, and on devouring the words of Jathed’s Bible. The closer I got to finishing the Old Testament, the more urgent I became to be done with it so that I could finally dispose of the thing. How I would do that, I had no idea, but I knew it had to be done eventually. I sped through the Books of Moses, Numbers and Deuteronomy, then the Book of Joshua, read about the continued passage through the desert, Moses’s death just outside the walls of Jericho, and Joshua’s victorious campaign. A lot of it troubled me.

In Reverend Childe, I could see some of that Old Testament theory in action. Moral questions never troubled him. He went about his work—whatever that was—with a fascinatingly methodical dedication. It was clear that he had a master plan, and every day brought him closer to its culmination. Disharmony? Was it something as simple as that? His first not-so-subtle slap at the face of the town’s law enforcement had immediate results—Forrey and Oldfield had gone up to Moker’s Hill and arrested the Aarons brothers. The charge was possession of illegal firearms; trumped-up, I guess, but they really couldn’t get them for selling the moonshine. By the last week of June, Henry and Mack were still in prison.

Oldfield still came to church regularly, but his communication with the Reverend devolved into polite nods and tight smiles. Captain Forrey ceased his visits altogether. The two of them had taken an awful lot of heat from the community after the Reverend’s sermon, and they weren’t likely to forget it any time soon.

But their discomfort was nothing compared to Mayor Ishy’s. The mayoral election was less than a month away, and the town paper had taken to slamming him for being “lax on crime”. Ridiculous, really, since there was no crime to speak of in Cuba Landing—but there it was, just the same. More than one jab had been taken, also, at his dreamy, disconnected soliloquies as well. Is our mayor high on drugs?

By his second weekend as pastor, the Reverend’s congregation had doubled in size. And one thing was clear—the people loved him, and every word he spoke was taken to their hearts and cherished forever.

Except by Bishop Ishy.

Did I say discomfort? It wasn’t that, really. It was more like hatred. Like vile, black loathing. It showed even through his surreal demeanor.

During his first Sunday sermon, the day after Widow Garrity’s funeral, the Reverend laid a bombshell on the congregation—their beloved and odd little mayor had been a dirty draft dodger during the Vietnam War.

Of course, the Reverend didn’t present it as a Grand Revelation. He was far more cunning that that.

“Sometimes,” he said, “our duties and obligations are chains around us, dragging our hearts down to bottomless pits of fear and agony. Responsibilities, brothers and sisters, that we have not chosen for ourselves, but have had thrust upon us. Why, I myself have committed the sin of pushing away my duties—when the Lord called upon me to spread His word, I rebelled against it! What, I cried! Live for you, O Lord, and abandon myself? I cannot! No! But I took strength from Him, found the courage to take the full mantle of responsibility and do His will!”

Hallelujah. Hallelujah.

“But few things are more terrifying. Who can lay blame on the man who fears his responsibilities?”

Hallelujah.

“Who can fault the neighbor whose addiction to the demon whiskey keeps him from paying his bills?”

Amen.

“Who can lay blame on the woman whose vanity keeps her from good, charitable works?”

Amen.

“And, brothers and sisters, who can fault even our good and honorable mayor, whose natural fear of death kept him from bravely serving his country during an unpopular war?”

Amen, amen, and hallelujah.

Bishop Ishy sat in the congregation that day. I didn’t look at him. When the sermon ended he left quickly and I saw both his secretary Jeannie Angel and Mrs. Ishy looking flushed and strangely triumphant. Jeannie Angel, I knew, had already been in the Reverend’s bed, but Mrs. Ishy’s reaction I couldn’t understand.

Reverend, you bastard, I thought. You total bastard. What’s your game, anyway? What the hell are you up to? And how did you get that juicy bit on Ishy?

So, two sermons, two nuclear blasts. Bishop Ishy wouldn’t take this lying down.

And that, I guessed, was why he wanted to see me that afternoon in late June.

He sent Captain Forrey and Officer Oldfield to fetch me from the church, and I rode in the backseat of the police cruiser. “Jeez, Charlie,” Oldfield said. “Stop fidgeting like that, willya? You ain’t in any trouble. The mayor just wants to discuss some business with you.”

I smiled and nodded, but inside my nerves jangled. I’d taken more than my fair share of rides with cops, and they never ended happily.

“Must be important if he sent out the town’s only law to bring me to him.”

From the front passenger seat, Forrey grinned at me over his shoulder. “Important is right, Charlie. But it’s nothing much for you to worry about. Mayor Ishy just wants a little help from you.”

“What sort of help could I possibly be to the mayor?”

“Well, I’ll just let him tell you all about it.”

The rest of the drive they talked about a wide variety of subjects, none of them having anything to do with the mayor. Forrey asked me how some of the regular parishioners were getting on, since he hadn’t been to church in awhile. Oldfield told me about a new living room set his wife bought. That started Forrey off on a long and uninteresting story about his own wife, and a dinette set she’d spent way too much money on—an incident that had happened years ago, but Forrey still managed to get himself worked up just thinking about it. “That wife ‘a mine,” he said. “I just don’t know what I’m gonna do with her.”

Oldfield chuckled. “Amen, Captain. You said a mouthful there. Y’know, if you were like Mr. Mayor, you’d have no worries. Did you know he keeps loads a’ cash on him, all the time? Like, ten, fifteen thousand bucks. Jeannie Angel told me. Enough to satisfy Mrs. Ishy’s every financial whim.”

“That woman’s got a mouth,” Forrey said, gazing out the window. “She shouldn’t be spouting off about that stuff.”

Oldfield nodded sagely. “Yeah, but still. With tits like that, she can afford to be a motor mouth.”

They both laughed heartily at that. I sighed.

Mayor Ishy lived on Swan Road, only about a mile from Elise. Oldfield took the turn into his driveway and we rode through his densely wooded property.

The house, when it finally appeared, wasn’t as impressive as the Garrity place, but the grounds were more elaborate—a marble fountain on the front lawn trickled water down a small concrete stream, and the stream wound serenely past rows of colorfully tended flowers and plants, disappearing past a line of freshly pruned magnolia trees.

Forrey pulled up in front of the house and we all climbed out of the car. “C‘mon, Charlie,” Forrey said. “Don’t wanna keep the mayor waiting.”

I followed them up the front steps. Forrey knocked heavily, and a moment later the door swung open. Mrs. Ishy beamed out at us. “Well, hello!” she said, like our arrival was a wonderful surprise.

The mayor’s wife was an attractive woman, appealing in a sort of thick, voluptuous way. I’d noticed it that first evening we’d met at the church, but it seemed more obvious now. Elise could look like her in another ten or fifteen years, if she gave in to every impulsive whim that struck her. “How good to see you again, Mr. Wesley,” she said, taking my hand.

I said hello, remarked on how lovely she looked. She blushed dutifully, obviously used to such compliments, and invited the three of us inside. Forrey motioned me ahead, and he and Oldfield followed on my heels.

His eyes on Mrs. Ishy’s twitching rear end, Forrey said, “Why you all dolled-up, ma’am? Did we catch you on your way out?”

She smiled at him over her shoulder. “You know how it is, Captain Forrey. So much to do . . . I just have a few small matters to tend to in town.”

“Well, if you have a few minutes, Ernie and me’d be glad to drive you.”

“Don’t be silly. Who knows how long my husband plans on keeping you?”

Leading us down the long hall, through a cozy sitting room, past a dining room of mahogany wood and lace, Mrs. Ishy said, “Bishop’s waiting on the rear veranda. He’s going to be so happy you could come by, Mr. Wesley.”

“What does he want to talk to me about?”