Francis threw the old junk into the wagon and turned away. When he turned back to verify the images, two more men were sitting in the wheelless wheelbarrow. Francis could call neither of them by name, but he knew from the astonishment in the hollows of their eyes that they were the shopper and haberdasher, bystanders both, who had been killed by the soldiers’ random retaliatory fire after Francis opened Harold Allen’s skull with the smooth stone.
“I’m ready,” said Francis to Rosskam. “You ready?”
“What’s the big hurry-up?” Rosskam asked.
“Nothin’ else to haul. Shouldn’t we be movin’?”
“He’s impatient too, this bum,” Rosskam said, and he climbed aboard the wagon.
Francis, feeling the eyes of the four shades on him, gave them all the back of his neck as the wagon rolled north on Pearl Street, Annie’s street. Getting closer. He pulled up the collar of his coat against a new bite in the wind, the western sky graying with ominous clouds. It was almost three-thirty by the Nehi clock in the window of Elmer Rivenburgh’s grocery. First day of early winter. If it rains tonight and we’re outside, we freeze our ass once and for all.
He rubbed his hands together. Were they the enemies? How could a man’s hands betray him? They were full of scars, calluses, split fingernails, ill-healed bones broken on other men’s jaws, veins so bloated and blue they seemed on the verge of explosion. The hands were long-fingered, except where there was no finger, and now, with accreting age, the fingers had thickened, like the low-growing branches of a tree.
Traitors? How possible?
“You like your hands?” Francis asked Rosskam.
“Like, you say? Do I like my hands?”
“Yeah. You like ‘em?”
Rosskam looked at his hands, looked at Francis, looked away.
“I mean it,” Francis said. “I got the idea that my hands do things on their own, you know what I mean?”
“Not yet,” said Rosskam.
“They don’t need me. They do what they goddamn please.”
“Ah ha,” said Rosskam. He looked again at his own gnarled hands and then again at Francis. “Nutsy,” he said, and slapped the horse’s rump with the reins. “Giddap,” he added, changing the subject.
Francis remembered Skippy Maguire’s left hand, that first summer away at Dayton. Skippy was Francis’s roommate, a pitcher: tall and lefty, a man who strutted when he walked; and on the mound he shaped up like a king of the hill. Why, when he wanted to, Skippy could strut standin’ still. But then his left hand split open, the fingers first and then the palm. He pampered the hand: greased it, sunned it, soaked it in Epsom salts and beer, but it wouldn’t heal. And when the team manager got impatient, Skippy ignored the splits and pitched ten minutes in a practice session, which turned the ball red and tore the fingers and the palm into a handful of bloody pulp. The manager told Skippy he was stupid and took him and his useless hand off the payroll.
That night Skippy cursed the manager, got drunker than usual, started a fire in the coal stove even though it was August, and when it was roaring, reached in and picked up a handful of flaming coal. And he showed that goddamn Judas of a hand a thing or two. The doc had to cut off three fingers to save it.
Well, Francis may be a little nutsy to people like Rosskam, but he wouldn’t do anything like Skippy did. Would he? He looked at his hands, connecting scars to memories. Rowdy Dick got the finger. The jagged scar behind the pinky… a violent thirst gave him that one, the night he punched out a liquor store window in Chinatown to get at a bottle of wine. In a fight on Eighth Avenue with a bum who wanted to screw Helen, Francis broke the first joint on his middle finger and it healed crookedly. And a wild man in Philadelphia out to steal Francis’s hat bit off the tip of the left thumb.
But Francis got ‘em. He avenged all scars, and he lived to remember every last one of them dickie birds too, most of ‘em probably dead now, by their own hand maybe. Or the hand of Francis?
Rowdy Dick.
Harold Allen.
The latter name suddenly acted as a magical key to history for Francis. He sensed for the first time in his life the workings of something other than conscious will within himself: insight into a pattern, an overview of all the violence in his history, of how many had died or been maimed by his hand, or had died, like that nameless pair of astonished shades, as an indirect result of his violent ways. He limped now, would always limp with the metal plate in his left leg, because a man stole a bottle of orange soda from him. He found the man, a runt, and retrieved the soda. But the runt hit him with an ax handle and splintered the bone. And what did Francis do? Well the runt was too little to hit, so Francis shoved his face into the dirt and bit a piece out of the back of his neck.
There are things I never wanted to learn how to do, is one thought that came to Francis.
And there are things I did without needin’ to learn.
And I never wanted to know about them either.
Francis’s hands, as he looked at them now, seemed to be messengers from some outlaw corner of his psyche, artificers of some.involuntary doom element in his life. He seemed now to have always been the family killer; for no one else he knew of in the family had ever lived as violently as he. And yet he had never sought that kind of life.
But you set out to kill me, Harold Allen said silently from the back.of the wagon.
“No,” answered Francis without turning. “Not kill anybody. Just do some damage, get even. Maybe bust a trolley window, cause a ruckus, stuff like that.”
But you knew, even that early in your career, how accurate your throw could be. You were proud of that talent. It was what you brought to the strike that day, and it was why you spent the morning hunting for stones the same weight as a baseball. You aimed at me to make yourself a hero.
“But not to kill you.”
Just to knock out an eye, was it?
Francis now remembered the upright body of Harold Allen on the trolley, indisputably a target. He remembered the coordination of vision with arm movement, of distance with snap of wrist. For a lifetime he had remembered precisely the way Harold Allen crumpled when the stone struck his forehead at the hairline. Francis had not heard, but had forever after imagined, the sound the stone (moving at maybe seventy miles an hour?) made when it hit Harold Allen’s skull. It made the skull sound as hollow, as tough, and as explodable, he decided, as a watermelon hit with a baseball bat.
Francis considered the evil autonomy of his hands and wondered what Skippy Maguire, in his later years, had made of his own left hand’s suicidal impulse. Why was it that suicide kept rising up in Francis’s mind? Wake up in the weeds outside Pittsburgh, half frozen over, too cold to move, flaked out ‘n’ stiffer than a chunk of old iron, and you say to yourself: Francis, you don’t ever want to put in another night, another mornin’, like this one was. Time to go take a header off the bridge.
But after a while you stand up. wipe the frost out of your ear, go someplace to get warm, bum a nickel for coffee, and then start walkin’ toward somewheres else that ain’t near no bridge.
Francis did not understand this flirtation with suicide, this flight from it. He did not know why he hadn’t made the big leap the way Helen’s old man had when he knew he was done in. Too busy, maybe, figurin’ out the next half hour. No way for Francis ever to get a real good look past the sunset, for he’s the kind of fella just kept runnin’ when things went bust; never had the time to stop anyplace easy just to die.
But he never wanted to run off all that much either. Who’d have figured his mother would announce to the family at Thanksgiving dinner, just after Francis married Annie, that neither he nor his common little woman would ever be welcome in this house again? The old bat relented after two years and Francis was allowed visiting privileges. But he only went once, and not even inside the door then, for he found out that privileges didn’t extend to most uncommon Annie at his side.