Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories Read online

  Pieces for the Left Hand

  Also by J. Robert Lennon

  Castle

  Happyland (published serially in Harper’s)

  Mailman

  On the Night Plain

  The Funnies

  The Light of Falling Stars

  Pieces for the Left Hand

  100 Anecdotes

  J. Robert Lennon

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2005 by J. Robert Lennon

  First published in 2005 by Granta Books in the United Kingdom

  Publication of this volume is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota; and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art. Significant support has also been provided by the Bush Foundation; Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-55597-523-4

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-004-8

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2008935605

  Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter

  Cover art: Paint-By-Numbers Collection, Archives Center,

  National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

  for Steve Murray

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. Town and Country

  Dead Roads

  Election

  The Current Event

  Claim

  Opening

  Copycats

  Town Life

  Rivalry

  Get Over It

  Composure

  Silence

  The Pipeline

  Leaves

  2. Mystery and Confusion

  Shortcut

  Witnesses

  Switch

  The Wristwatch

  Underlined Passages

  The Mary

  Intruder

  Trick

  Crisis

  Twilight

  Familiar Objects

  Fingers

  Plausible

  Lucid

  Virgins

  Twins

  Indirect Path

  The Bottle

  The Hydrangea

  A Dream Explained

  3. Lies and Blame

  The Manuscript

  The Belt Sander

  Film Star’s Dog

  Justice

  Encounter

  The Letters

  Ex-Car

  Almost

  Treasure

  The Bureau

  The Cement Mailbox

  Trust Jesus

  Kevin

  Terrorist

  Directions

  Distance

  4. Work and Money

  Sixty Dollars

  The Pork Chop

  Tool

  Last Meal

  Too Well

  The Expert

  The Uniform

  Master

  Money Isn’t Everything

  5. Parents and Children

  Lost

  Wake

  Expecting

  The Mothers

  The Fathers

  Sons

  Different

  The Denim Touch

  Mice

  Tea

  Deaf Child Area

  The Branch

  Kiss

  Coupon

  6. Artists and Professors

  The Obelisk of Interlaken

  The Nuns

  Short

  Conceptual

  Two Professors

  The Hollow Door

  Impostor

  Mikeworld

  Meteorite

  Lefties

  7. Doom and Madness

  Scene

  Monkeys

  The Names

  Crackpots

  New Dead

  Koan

  Shelter

  Big Idea

  Live Rock Nightly

  Intact

  Spell

  The Mad Folder

  Sickness

  Unlikely

  Smoke

  Flowers

  Heirloom

  Brevity

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  The author of these stories is forty-seven years old. He lives in a renovated farmhouse at the edge of a college town somewhere in New York State, with his wife, a professor at the college. He is unemployed, and satisfied to be unemployed, and spends an inordinate amount of time looking out the windows at the road and woods and the orchard at the bottom of his hill. He shaves once a week, is always showered before 8:00 a.m., and takes long walks daily, regardless of the weather. He cooks all the meals and does all the cleaning; indeed, he believes he is a better cleaner than the professional one he dismissed when he lost his job. He considers his solitude to be a great and unexpected gift to his life, and in fact occasionally finds himself regarding it with a kind of moral superiority, which he swiftly quashes, but not without a moment of amusement at his own vanity. The author is often amused by his faults.

  What he did for a living isn’t important—if you were to talk with him for a hundred years, he would never even bring it up. It was the kind of job most people would call tedious, and so would the author, except that its particular tedium appealed to him, insofar as it busied his mind and protected it from worry. It supported his family when his wife was in graduate school, and now that it is gone, he doesn’t think about it at all.

  Instead, he walks. Some days he walks for hours, cutting through fields and forests, hiking along the shoulders of roads. Local people, initially wary at his appearance, have grown used to it, and now they smile and wave when he passes. He enjoys imagining what they must think of him, this idle member of the middle class. He likes to think that they find him odd, though he is aware that there are too many people like him in this town for anyone to think that.

  Some time ago, these walks began to shake things loose in the author’s mind. Dark memories of his childhood—his mother’s misery, his father’s death. He began to remember events he had witnessed, stories he had heard, thoughts he had had that he couldn’t let go. Things that happened to his neighbors, to his wife’s colleagues. Things he read in the paper. Every day, for many months, he sifted through the growing pile of memories, until he had begun to tell them to himself, as stories. I once knew a man, the stories began. A woman I know. In our town. The stories accumulated, forming a script in his mind, a repertoire. Some of them are true. Some have been embellished, or fabricated entirely. If he had to, the author could get up on stage and recite them all, but this isn’t the kind of thing it would occur to him to do, or that he would enjoy. What he enjoys is being alone, telling himself stories.

  The stories are there now, in his mind, as he walks. He is happy with them the way they are: ephemeral, protean. In time his mind will move on to other things, and he will forget them, or most of them. Eventually the author will probably find a job—he isn’t bored, but he senses that he will be, and he would prefer not to taint with boredom these excellent days.

  JRL

  1. Town and Country

  For more than a century, the main street in our town was named after a founding father of
our state, a man who, in a recent revisionist essay, was revealed to have been a corrupt, bigoted philanderer who beat his children and disliked dogs. After a string of protests disrupted rush hour traffic, our mayor took down the street signs and promised to rename the street. But loyalists protested the removal, and the signs were restored. Further protests again eliminated the signs, and the battle has moved to the courts. Meanwhile, our town’s main street has no name at all, confusing visitors, complicating mail delivery, and making us the butt of vicious joking from other, less volatile neighboring towns.

  Dead Roads

  It is not unusual in our area for a road to fall into disuse, if the farm or village that it serves should be abandoned. In these cases, the land may be taken over by the state for use as a conservation area, game preserve or other project, and the road may be paved, graveled or simply maintained for the sake of access to the land.

  But should the state find no use for the land, the road will decay. Grass will appear in the tire ruts. Birds or wind may drop seeds, and tall trees grow; or a bramble may spring up and spread across the sunny space, attracting more birds and other animals.

  In this case, the road will no longer be distinguishable from the surrounding land. It can then be classified as dead, and will be removed from maps.

  Election

  Our town’s electorate, generally quite active in, even obsessed with, local politics, was silenced during this year’s mayoral race, in which the two prominent candidates, an incumbent Republican and a Democratic challenger, conducted campaigns of such a vituperative and vengeful nature that few city residents bothered to show up at the polls. Life might have gone on as usual afterward had not a nineteen-year-old college freshman, a hotel management major with no political experience, entered the race in the eleventh hour as an independent, registered six thousand students to vote, covered our town with cheaply xeroxed campaign posters reading STOP THE BULLSHIT, and published an editorial in the newspaper advocating the elimination of a city ordinance forbidding the sale of alcohol before noon on Sundays. The student’s victory was a landslide.

  It all seemed like a good joke until I saw our former mayor, disheveled and dark-eyed, buying a six-pack of beer at a neighborhood grocery one Sunday morning. After that, my own failure to vote seemed a terrible mistake, and I was filled with a shame and dread that linger still.

  The Current Event

  When I was young, our quiet city suffered the most painful disaster of its history: fourteen teenagers fresh from a party secretly boarded a boat belonging to one of their parents, brought it out to the middle of the lake, became drunk aboard it and, in the sudden storm that followed, capsized and drowned. The subsequent public grieving, underage-drinking crackdown and lake-safety campaign were covered in our local paper with sensitivity and insight, by a reporter whose fine writing and acute perceptiveness of current events I had known when we attended high school together.

  When recently three fishermen drowned in a similar boating accident, the same reporter covered the current event as skillfully and thoroughly as he had covered the previous one. I happened to encounter the reporter around this time, and commended him on his efforts, which commendation he seemed pleased to receive. But when I pointed out the parallels between this incident and the other, he grew puzzled and asked me which incident I meant. Surprised, I reminded him of the drowned teenagers, and at last he nodded in recognition.

  I could not resist telling him that it seemed odd that he would not remember, while reporting on a boating accident, the worst boating accident in the history of our town, which he himself had reported on at the time. In reply he only laughed and said that the previous incident, tragic as it had been, was presently “off his radar.”

  Claim

  A local Indian tribe, irritated at the state’s reluctance to issue it a permit to open a gambling casino, dug deep into its historic archive and unearthed a long-forgotten treaty granting it a large parcel of land which consisted not only of the area generally recognized as their territory, but also of a small spur, bounded by and including two creeks, on which our beloved three-term Democratic senator happened to own a summer cabin. The tribe’s announcement of their intention to reclaim this land was met at first with puzzlement, then derision, as many state residents owned land there and enjoyed hunting, fishing, cross-country skiing and snowmobiling within its borders. Nevertheless, a respected state judge declared the treaty legal and binding, and in a terrific political victory for the tribe, the state reconsidered its permit refusal. Ground for the casino was soon broken, and tribal leaders made a verbal agreement not to act on their land claim.

  The casino was a smash success, drawing tourists from hundreds of miles away, and the controversy died quietly. Then, during an election-year stump speech near the reservation, the senator out of nowhere berated the tribe for its now-moot threat, and declared that only over his dead body would any greedy Indians wave their tomahawks upon his family’s land. The statement’s overt belligerence, coupled with its reckless ethnic stereotyping, rekindled tribal interest in the land. This time, however, tribal leaders were backed by a number of liberal political groups and a considerable fortune in casino profits.

  The treaty became the focus of a political campaign characterized by endless sniping and overblown rhetoric, and when the election was over, the senator had lost his seat to an anti-tax conservative with broad appeal over an ethnically diverse constituency. The tribe immediately began legal proceedings to win back their land, and within six months had recovered more than 70 percent of it, with the state paying minimal compensation to displaced landowners evicted from their homes. The senator is now roundly despised statewide, and lives anonymously with his family in another part of the country.

  When asked, while walking down the state house steps mere days after the election, what had made him issue his fateful statement, the senator could not answer. In a now-famous gesture, he shielded his eyes from the sun and shook his head ruefully, then slowly let fall his hand until it covered his face, and refused to remove it until reporters left his presence.

  Opening

  A discount department-store chain hoped to open a retail outlet in our town, and identified a site, on the edge of the city, where it preferred to build. The site lay at a bend in a creek, opposite a popular town park prized by both naturalists and recreationalists for its broad shade trees, clean water and abundant wildlife.

  The town council, eager to bring new jobs to the area and stimulate economic activity, immediately agreed to allow the chain to build, on the one condition that they choose a different site for their store. The park, the council explained, was too valuable to the community to mar its beauty with commercial development. The chain took offense at this condition and called in its legal team, who filed a series of suits, tying up the town’s attorneys and emptying its coffers with breathtaking speed. Ultimately the town gave up and issued the chain its permit, and the store was constructed quickly, using contractors from a neighboring state and laborers trucked in from the city.

  For its opening day, the new store ordered several thousand butterflies to be released on the site, as a means of generating publicity and demonstrating its commitment to the natural environment. However, it was July, and the air conditioning in the van that was to deliver the butterflies broke down. The van driver, a temporary worker ignorant of the insects’ needs, thought nothing of the problem and arrived uncomfortable but on time at the new store.

  The company’s CEO had taken a particular interest in this store, and now spoke in the parking lot to a crowd of reporters and eager consumers about the company’s virtues. Then, with a wave of his arm, he ordered the butterflies released.

  Sadly, the butterflies had suffocated in the blistering summer heat. Undaunted, the CEO sent his employees into the store for fans, which were unboxed, plugged in, and deployed within minutes at the edge of the parking lot. These employees, mostly local teenagers, scooped handfuls of the insects from the
ir plastic bins and flung them into the path of the fans, where they fluttered artificially for some seconds before coming to rest on the hot pavement.

  The few customers who entered the store after this debacle tracked butterfly innards down its aisles, leaving long green stains on the white tiles. Those who left were forced to use their windshield wipers to clear the butterflies from their cars. The entire spectacle was captured in words and pictures by the journalists present. Nevertheless, the store has been an enormous success, as it has been in most towns, and many regard the CEO’s performance with the fans as a perfect example of the resourcefulness and creativity that have made him the retail giant he is.

  Copycats

  Our town is famous for its deep, beautiful mountain gorges spanned by one-lane bridges, and it is from these bridges that local would-be suicides typically jump. On a recent bright October morning, a young man, a student at the university, was found dead at the bottom of a gorge by two hikers. Police discovered in the student’s dormitory room a torn scrap of paper on which were scrawled the words

  can’t

  go on

  and the death was ruled a suicide. This news was a great shock to the student’s friends and family, who knew him as fun-loving, even hedonistic, and much was said about how you can’t truly know anyone, and how each of us, ultimately, is alone in the world.

  In the days that followed, a rash of copycat suicides ensued, each with his own scrawled suicide note explaining that he too could no longer go on, and that it was only the first student’s decisive act that convinced him there was a way out. Further misery and mourning overtook the community and high fences were promptly erected atop the bridge railings.

  Not long afterward, the original suicide’s roommate returned from a vacation and presented to police the rest of the paper that the suicide note had been torn from. Restored, the