Mr Hands Read online

  The Reverend grinned. “A regular Algonquin Roundtable are we three. Why doesn’t it surprise me that both of you have—oh, never mind. The point is there is a line from Kersh—I’m not sure from which novel or story—that goes: ‘There are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armor, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment.’”

  “That about covers it,” said Grant. “There’s something about this guy that’s seriously hurting, and it’s kind of scary.”

  Jackson signaled for a refill. “Only kind of? You called us both up here and away from our jam-packed social calendars for kind of scary? Sorry, Grant—no one pulls me away from an all-night Gilligan’s Island marathon for ‘kind of’ scary.”

  The Reverend turned toward Jackson. “That may be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard come out of your mouth.”

  “Oh, bite my bag, Reverend. You forget I’ve seen those boxed sets of Green Acres DVDs you have stashed back in your room. You got no room to pass judgment on taste.”

  “That’s true,” said the Reverend. “After all, I chose the two of you for friends, didn’t I?”

  Grant laughed as he slapped a five-dollar bill onto the bar. “First zinger of the evening, Ted. Pony-up time.”

  Jackson slipped his wallet from his back pocket and pulled out a five. “I suppose that whole ‘bite my bag’ thing doesn’t count?”

  “No,” said the Reverend, holding out his hand. “Though it was a refreshing change from your standard ‘Lick my left one,’ so heartiest congratulations on further expanding your repertoire—and in my defense, I’d like to add that Arnold the Pig remains one of the wisest and most articulate characters in the history of American television.” He snapped his fingers. “Grace the palm, grace it now.”

  Grant and Jackson handed him their money; as they did so, the door to the men’s room opened and the guy from earlier emerged, washed and shaved, wearing a fresh shirt, and smelling of Old Spice. Grant went over to the pass-through and retrieved the guy’s dinner (just up) and set everything down in front of him.

  The guy looked from Grant to Jackson (his gaze dwelling for a few moments on the gun dangling from the sheriff’s hip) and then to the Reverend. He nodded a wordless hello at them, and then turned his attention down toward the food.

  He ate his meal in silence, his eyes never coming up to meet anyone else’s gaze, and then ordered some cheesecake for dessert. After that came his third drink of the night; he was now two away from the Hangman’s limit.

  Holding up the empty plastic bowl near his corner of the bar, the guy cleared his throat and said, slurring a few words here and there, “Could I get some more popcorn, please?”

  “Sure thing.” Grant took the bowl, filled it with a fresh batch from the machine, and set it down just as the guy asked for another gin & tonic.

  “This’ll be your fourth drink, friend,” said Grant. “I realize I’m probably way the hell too late in asking this, but are you driving?”

  The guy shook his head and then stuck out his thumb. “Hitching. I caught a ride with a trucker in New Jersey and got out at the truck stop at Buckeye Lake.”

  Jackson leaned forward. “You walked here from the truck stop? That’s got to be at least, what? Eight miles?”

  The guy shrugged. “It’s a nice evening.”

  “You could’ve eaten there,” said Grant. “The food’s pretty damn good—hell, they’ve even got pay-showers you could’ve used instead of having to wash up in the sink.”

  The guy smiled but there wasn’t a lot of joy in it. “I heard the food’s better here.” He took a few sips from his fresh drink, set the glass down on the bar, and then removed a prescription bottle from his pocket, popped one of the tablets into his mouth, and chased it with another sip.

  “Is that a good idea?” asked Jackson. “I’m not an expert, but it seems to me taking any kind of medicine with alcohol isn’t high up on anyone’s ‘Smart Things To Do’ list.”

  “I never claimed to be smart, Sheriff, but I also don’t believe I’m breaking any laws, so if you don’t mind…” The guy reached for his drink again but Grant was faster, pulling it from the bar and setting it on the sink.

  “Look,” said Grant, “I don’t have many rules here, but there are a couple that I won’t compromise for anybody. The first one is, no one gets more than five drinks over the course of the evening. And the second one is, I reserve the right to lower that number if I’ve got a good reason.”

  The guy shook his bottle of pills. “And these would be your ‘good reason’?”

  Grant nodded. “Afraid so. You walk out of here with your pills and my liquor in your system and anything bad happens, it’s my ass that can legally be held responsible. This might not be the fanciest place of its kind, but it’s been in my family for four generations and I won’t risk that for anyone.” He pointed at the pills. “Especially someone who mixes prescription meds with booze. You wanna play Russian Roulette with liquor and pills, do it somewhere else.”

  The guy stared at him for a moment, and then gave a slow, sad nod. “I’m not trying to hurt myself. Really, I’m not.”

  “Then why mix your meds with booze?” asked the Reverend.

  “Because every once in a while, neither one works well enough on its own.” He reached into his backpack once more and removed a small object that he looked at for maybe two seconds before closing his hand around it.

  “Did’ya ever wonder,” he said to Grant, his slur worsening, “why it is that all the bad stuff that happens to us we equate with the hand?”

  Grant shook his head. “I’m not sure I follow you, friend.”

  “Every time something goes wrong, every time there’s a natural disaster or a bunch of people get killed when a balcony or bridge or something like that collapses, you always hear folks talk about things like ‘the Hand of Fate,’ or ‘the Hand of Destiny.’ When someone dies they say, ‘the Hands of Time stopped running for them.’ Stuff like that.”

  “Sure, I’ve heard those phrases.”

  “D’ya know why they use those phrases?”

  “No idea.”

  With the index finger of his right hand he traced the ball of his left thumb. “This area of the hand, it’s what’s called the ‘Mount of Venus.’ The first phalange symbolizes will-power, the second, logic.” He then touched the base of his index finger. “This is the ‘the Mount of Jupiter’ and it symbolizes...what? Ah, hell, you’d think I could remember what…”

  “Arrogance, haughtiness, and pride,” said the Reverend.

  Jackson shook his head. “Figures you’d know that.”

  The guy was only half-listening to them as he pointed toward other areas of his hand, talking aloud, seemingly, to reassure himself he remembered everything. “The Mount of Saturn, the digitus infamis of the Romans…fate and destiny, that one. The Mount of Apollo at the base of the third finger stands for music and imagination and art…see how weak mine is? Bull-shit I imagined all of it. But I’ve got a pretty strong Mount of Mercury, that’s for learning, so maybe there’s some untapped potential there.”

  He continued tracing patterns across the Mount of the Moon and the Mount of Mars, both at the heel of the hand. “These symbolize violence and lightheartedness, respectively.” He pointed this out to Jackson, in particular. “They’re both equally as strong in me. You think maybe that’s something we need to worry about?”

  Jackson made no reply, only exchanged a quick, worried glance with Grant.

  “If you look at the line on the heel of my hand,” the guy continued, “you’ll see it joins the line of life and runs parallel to the line of the heart. The Line of Fate runs up the center of the palm, and parallel to that on the heel side of the hand is the Line of Fortune. Mine don’t intersect very well, do they? That’s the odd thing about the lines in the hand; sometimes lines that should intersect come nowhere near one another, while other lines that shouldn’t intersect run straight into each other. See—i
f you look closer, you can see that Fortune crosses over into Violence, and Fate meets with Lightheartedness. Those lines don’t usually intersect.”

  “And this means what?” asked the Reverend. “That your destiny is to become a rich middleweight boxer who can tell a good joke and play a mean Moonlight Sonata? How fickle is the universe.”

  For the first time, the guy genuinely laughed, and then moved his fingertip along the curved line that ran from below his little finger to the base of the first. “This one’s called the ‘Girdle of Venus.’”

  “In my case,” said Jackson, “it’d probably be more of a truss—but why get picky this late in life?”

  “Where did you learn all of this?” asked Grant. “I mean, I don’t know that I’ve ever had someone come in here who knows this much about palmistry.”

  “A woman I once knew. She had the most exquisite hands. Long, delicate fingers, smooth fingertips, and her skin, especially on her palms, was so thin and soft it felt like tissue paper. She used to tell me that a person’s hands were the sexiest part of their body. And she was right.” He leaned in, lowering the volume of his voice. “I know it sounds weird, like maybe there was some kind of fetish thing going on, but her fascination with hands, with their power and their complexity, their dexterity and grace, it gave me a...a mystery, I’d guess you’d call it, to carry with me for the rest of my life. A person needs one unsolvable mystery to carry with them to keep life interesting, don’t you think? Consider the hand. It can touch, it can grasp, it can add dimension, it can kill with tenderness, it can save or end a life, and it’s usually the first thing that comes into direct physical contact with another human being. I’m sorry, it’s just that I—and please don’t laugh at this or—”

  “I won’t laugh,” said Grant. “I promise.”

  “None of us will,” added the Reverend, whose presence—as Grant had been hoping—seemed to be having a calming effect on the guy.

  “It’s just that...I used to love the hand. Even the idea of the hand excited me. Look at it. The miracle of the whole thing. Your whole life is mapped out in the lines and curves and ridges and whorls, all the answers are right there—even those hidden within the lines that shouldn’t intersect—but you’ll never have the time to find all of them. So many sentient sensations enter the body through the hands, y’know? A baby grasping your finger, that crackle of electricity when you first touch someone you hope will become important in your life, cupping them together to splash cold water over your face when you come inside on a hot day...” He shook his head. “But that’s all ruined now. I look at this thing at the end of my arm and all I feel is…scared.”

  Jackson moved even closer to the guy. “Why’s that?”

  The guy leaned back, almost whispering. “Because of Mr. Hands.”

  Jackson’s hand began to slide down toward either his holster or handcuffs; the Reverend caught sight of this and quickly—but subtly—gripped the sheriff’s wrist, shaking his head.

  Grant gave a slight nod of thanks to the Reverend and then turned back to the guy at the bar. “Okay…?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “About some guy named Mr. Hands?”

  He stared at Grant for a moment before answering. “Huh-uh, not a guy. A thing. A monster. A demon.” He placed the object in his hand on the bar.

  For a moment, Grant thought it was some kind of plastic toy that fast food places put in their kids’ meals, a promotional tie-in for an animated movie, because the thing on the bar was so silly-looking it had to be from some kind of movie or cartoon; but as he leaned over to get a closer look he realized two things: it was not made of plastic, but hand-carved from a piece of wood; and once you got a good look at it, it definitely wasn’t silly.

  “Makes an impression, doesn’t it?” asked the guy. Grant could only nod, unable for the moment to find his voice.

  It stood about four inches tall, a gourd-shaped figure that had only stumps for legs, long arms, and almost ridiculously large hands with lengthy, skeletal-thin fingers. Its head was semi-rounded, with two deep chasms where eyes should have been, no nose, and the too-wide rictus grin of a mummified corpse. The detail was all the more remarkable because it was so hideous, and Grant couldn’t help but wonder what sort of a mind came up with such a thing.

  “Did you make that?” he finally managed to ask.

  The guy at the bar shook his head. “No. It was a gift.”

  Grant reached out and touched the top of the thing’s head; why, he wasn’t sure. Maybe to make certain it was just a lifeless figure.

  As soon as his finger touched the top of the thing’s head, it moved.

  Startled, Grant pulled his hand away and took a stumbling step backward. The guy at the bar waved an apology, then also touched the figure’s head. It moved again.

  “It’s got something to do with the kind of wood that was used to carve it,” he said. “This thing probably doesn’t weigh three ounces, it’s really delicate.” He turned toward Jackson and the Reverend. “See how it’s standing just on its fingertips? Yet it somehow manages to stay perfectly balanced.” He touched it once more, and once more it moved—glided, to be exact. “I guess it’s because of the pressure, y’know? You touch its head, and that creates a small amount of pressure all the way down to the fingertips, and when you pull your hand away and the pressure’s relieved, the fingertips kind of act like a spring.”

  Jackson shook his head. “Sorry, friend, but I was watching. You hardly touched it. Grant hardly touched it.”

  “Like I said, it doesn’t take much. It’s real delicate.”

  Grant quickly scanned the customers to make sure none of them had seen him jump away from the figure like a spooked little kid. Satisfied that no one had noticed, he moved toward the corner of the bar once more. “So what’s it supposed to be, anyway?”

  “Mr. Hands.”

  “Really?” asked the Reverend. “This is your monster, your demon? The one that’s responsible for ‘the Hands of Fate’ and all the rest of it?”

  The guy shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s responsible for everything bad, but it’s done some serious damage. I know. I’ve seen it.”

  Despite his rising anxiety, Grant smiled. He’d been hoping the guy was leading up to an interesting story. He turned away to pour himself a cup of coffee before getting comfortable, but the guy must have thought he was turning away in disgust or pity because his hand shot over the bar and grabbed Grant’s arm. “No! You gotta listen to this! I have…have to tell someone. Please? I…have to.”

  Jackson was on his feet at once, gripping the guy’s shoulder. “Take it easy, there, buddy, hear me?”

  The guy nodded his head, took a couple of deep breaths, and tried to compose himself. “I know how it sounds, I do. Even if you don’t believe it, just…just listen, okay? I’ve been trying to get someone to listen for most of my life, but the doctors and everyone else tell me I must have imagined it, or that my mind turned it into something else…they tell me what I’ve got is…oh, what’s it called?”

  “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” said the Reverend. It was not a question.

  The guy nodded. “Yeah, but…but they’re wrong, you understand? I mean, okay, yeah, maybe that’s part of it, PTSD or whatever in the hell it’s called—that’s what I have to take all the fucking pills for but they don’t always work on their own, you understand?” He faced each man in turn. “So please, please, even if you think I’m full of shit, even if you think I’m nuts, would you just please listen?”

  Grant covered the guy’s hand with his own and gently pulled it from his arm. “Settle down, friend. I was just going to pour myself a cup of coffee and pull up a chair. Would you like to have some coffee with me? It’ll be on the house.”

  The guy stared into Grant’s eyes for a few seconds. “You really want to hear it?”

  “Sure do. Whole thing, beginning to end. And I don’t think you’re crazy—no more so than half the people who come through that door
with a story they want to get off their chests.”

  The guy looked unconvinced. “But I said it’s a demon, a monster.”

  “I heard you the first time.” Grant poured two cups of coffee, set one down in front of the guy, and then pulled up the chair he kept behind the bar. “I make a good pot of java, if I do say so myself. And before you start quizzing me again about everything you’ve said up to this point, you need to understand that I’ve seen some seriously weird shit in my day.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” said Jackson.

  The Reverend only nodded, and for a moment the three of them looked up toward the shelf that ran above the length of the bar, a shelf with an odd but eye-catching assortment of items, knickknacks, and bric-a-brac, among which could be seen a hand-made model of a lighthouse with a clipper ship crashed upon the shore, an old harmonica, and the highly polished broken neck of an acoustic guitar. Each of these items held a special meaning for the three men, each had its own story, and every story, as Grant had told the guy at the bar, contained its own element of “…seriously weird shit.”

  “So,” said Grant to the guy, “if someone walks in here and wants to tell me a story about a demon or a monster, I don’t shake my head or pass judgment or jump to the worst possible conclusion. Now, why don’t you drink some of my unjustifiably un-famous coffee and get on with it?”

  The guy took a couple of sips. “I, uh…sorry, no one’s ever asked me to tell the whole thing before. At best I get about halfway through before someone whips out a prescription pad and starts scribbling.”

  Grant said nothing. This was a guy who desperately needed to talk to someone. If Grant waited in silence long enough, the guy would get the idea that he wasn’t going anywhere and begin wherever he needed to begin.

  “You’re right,” the guy said. “This is really good coffee.” He took another sip, set down the cup, and pulled in a deep breath as he steadied himself and his hands. “Wow. Somehow I thought it’d be easy to start this, y’know?”