Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories Read online

  note now read:

  Midterms over, dude! I totally can’t

  wait for this party. You can go on

  without me if I’m late.—B.

  Around this time police also discovered the suicide’s hat caught in the branches of a tree growing in the gorge, and a scrap of fabric caught in a bramble which matched the suicide’s ripped pants. They theorized that the student had attended a party, gotten drunk, lost his hat in a gust of wind and fallen to his death attempting to retrieve it.

  Though still in mourning, the young man’s family was consoled to hear that their relative had not been so unknowable after all. However, the parents of the copycats have sued the police department and are expected to be awarded more than fifteen million dollars in damages.

  Town Life

  A small town not far from here gained some small notoriety when a famous movie actress, fed up with the misanthropy and greed of Hollywood, moved there with her husband, children, and many dogs and horses. In an interview published in a popular national magazine, the actress said that she was sick of being recognized by tourists on the street, approached by scheming strangers at restaurants, and generally restricted in her activities by her own popularity. The nearby town, she said, offered ample privacy and a beautiful natural setting; most importantly, she added, she would not be bothered there by slimy, self-interested people more concerned with what she represented than who she was.

  Hearing this, the denizens of the small town resolved to make her residence pleasant, and agreed they would welcome her in the same way they would welcome anyone who moved there; that is, the chamber of commerce sent her a package of advertising circulars, her neighbors engaged her in lively debates about the borders of her property, the police solicited her for tickets to the annual charity ball, and she was encouraged in town to apply for shopping club memberships, coffee punch cards and home improvement loans.

  Respectful of her fame and her unwillingness to acknowledge it, the townspeople averted their eyes when she passed them on the street and made no mention of her films, which everyone of course had seen. When her new movie debuted, the town filled up with reporters and photographers, but all requests for comment on the actress were rebuffed, and a few dedicated townspeople even claimed to be unaware that she lived there. The local paper printed no articles about the national press presence, and ran only a short wire-service review of the new film.

  Not long after, a terrible scene erupted in the diner when the actress threw down her utensils in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable meal and shouted something to the effect that the townspeople were the unfriendliest bunch of stuck-up bastards she’d ever encountered. Within weeks she had sold her enormous house in the hills and returned to California.

  The nearby town is still baffled by her strange behavior. As for the actress, she has said nothing about her experience in our area, except that she was unaccustomed to town life and was glad to be back where she belonged.

  Rivalry

  Autumn, once the most popular season in this town of tall trees, is now regarded with dread, thanks to the bitter athletic rivalry between our two local high schools. The school in the neighborhood commonly called the Flats is attended by the children of the working class, who are employed by the town’s restaurants, motels, gas stations and factories, and who live in those low-lying areas most frequently plagued by pollution, flood and crime. The school in the Heights, on the other hand, is populated by the children of academics and property owners, who live on wooded hillside lots that offer panoramic views of our valley. Students at the Flats consider students at the Heights to be prissy, pampered trust-fund halfwits, while Heights students regard Flats students as mustachioed, inbred gas huffers. Historically, these class tensions were brought to bear in the annual football game, played at our university’s enormous stadium the last weekend in October.

  Five years ago, however, some Heights players spray-painted ethnic slurs on the dusty American sedans of several Flats team members, and the Flats players retaliated by flinging bricks through the windows of the shiny, leased sports coupes of their rivals. Four years ago a massive mêlée at a fast-food restaurant landed players from both teams in the hospital. Three years ago the much-painted “Seniors’ Rock” in front of Flats High was rolled into a nearby creek, and the brand new sciences wing of Heights High was set on fire. Two years ago each coach was kidnapped by still-unidentified members of the opposing team and traded on Friendship Bridge at midnight of game day; and last year the Flats’ beloved mascot, the Marauding Goat, was disemboweled before the war memorial in Peters Park, while not a mile away the starting quarterback for the Heights was partially paralyzed in a hit-and-run incident outside a drive-up bank. The subsequent game was canceled.

  This year’s game has also been canceled, but for a different reason entirely. A steep drop in the population of our town has made the existence of both high schools fiscally untenable, and beginning with the fall semester the two will be combined into a single entity, to be called Area High. It remains unclear how the rivalry will play itself out, but many seem convinced that the solution lies in targeting a common enemy, such as the students of nearby Valley High, thought by all to be buck-toothed hicks, or those of faraway City Regional, who everyone knows are greasy-haired gang-bangers. Meanwhile the peace here in our town remains uneasy, and we await with trepidation the turning of the leaves.

  Get Over It

  Eager to escape the pressures of life in a large town, we spent the night in a village between the lakes, at a bed-and-breakfast we had selected from a travel brochure and which, in all its particulars, seemed to suit us perfectly. But when we spoke with its proprietor, an elderly man with dyed black hair, we found him extremely unpleasant. His manner was lethargic, and he mumbled, and seemed caught in the grip of a deep depression.

  When we ventured into the streets, we encountered other villagers as grim and uncooperative as our host: the man at the newsstand failed to respond to our greeting and gave us the wrong change; the waitress at a lunch counter ignored us for quite some time, then sighed loudly as she served our food; and a police officer refused to direct us to a pay telephone.

  At last we discovered an ice cream parlor, its corner storefront brightly painted with whimsical designs, which was attended by a cheerful young man in a paper hat. We made small talk with the young man, and after a few minutes asked him why everyone in town seemed so glum. He told us there had been a fire that had claimed the lives of eleven schoolchildren, and that the village, consequently, was in mourning. He himself was from a neighboring county and hadn’t been around for the fire.

  This information cast a pall over our weekend in the country, and we returned to our bed-and-breakfast tired and dispirited. In the morning we felt bad for condemning our host and his foul mood, and so, while checking out, we apologized, promising to return at a less trying time.

  Our host seemed puzzled. It didn’t matter when we came, he said; the fire had happened forty years ago. When we asked him why everyone was still so miserable, he became angry and asked us to leave.

  Driving home, we too became angry. Forty years, we decided, was more than enough time to get over it. Today the village strikes us as weak and stubborn, and we have not returned.

  Composure

  Our recently unseated mayor is again in the news, now that a certain incident related to his failed campaign has come to light. During the last month before the election, in a highly publicized and truly ambitious stunt, the mayor visited every house in our town, distributing pamphlets and soliciting questions and comments regarding his past term of office. In a neighborhood near the university, our newspaper reports, the mayor encountered a young woman, a graduate student in semantics, who asked him in, offered him a piece of cake and a cup of tea, then invited him to her bedroom, where, she contends, she locked the door and began to berate him about his suburban development policy.

  According to the student, the mayor had already unbuckled
his belt and was beginning to unzip his trousers when she made clear her true intentions. The mayor denies that he had begun to undress; he insists that he only went upstairs to help the student find some photocopied environmental impact reports she had misplaced and which she needed in order to make her point. At any rate, the result of the student’s ploy was a noisy argument heard by several neighbors, which, according to the student, ended in the mayor’s physically assaulting her, and, according to the mayor, ended with his agreeing to address her concerns in an upcoming zoning board meeting, and her grudgingly releasing him from the room.

  The case is now under investigation, and public opinion, though not at all supportive of the student’s tactics, is nonetheless in favor of her version of events. My own sympathies, for partisan reasons, are also with the student, though I recall that the mayor canvassed our neighborhood that same day, and that I spoke to him less than two hours after the alleged encounter took place. I remember him having been perfectly composed, answering my questions clearly and with genuine interest. Whether this composure was evidence of a clean conscience or of a monstrous emotional detachment and moral corruption remains to be seen.

  Silence

  A friend from the city lived for some years in a basement apartment situated directly over a busy subway line. Because of the excessive noise, our friend’s rent was very low, and over the years he grew accustomed to, even enamored of, the trains’ deafening rumble as they passed during the night.

  Recently the city undertook a massive subway reconstruction program, and the tunnel beneath our friend’s building was retired from regular use. Soon his landlord caught wind of the change and promptly raised the rent to a level far outside our friend’s meager budget.

  However, our friend tells us that he is relieved to have been ousted. The silence in the apartment, coupled with the knowledge that an empty tunnel lay mere yards from his bed, terrified him; and when, after the reconstruction, he would hear the scrabbling of a rat, the dripping of water after a storm, or the rustlings of a vagrant, the import of the sound was absurdly magnified and seemed to represent an urgent threat. He is presently seeking a new apartment in the vicinity of some other subway line, so that he might again have, at long last, a decent night’s sleep.

  The Pipeline

  Our local university, faced with the problem of prohibitive summer cooling costs, announced a curious solution: water, they suggested, could be pumped from the perpetually cold bottom of our town’s famously deep lake, diverted two thousand feet through a giant pipeline to the hilltop where the university stands, and run through a series of smaller pipes in classroom ceilings, where it would cool the air before flowing back into the lake. The project would be called WACA (WAter-Cooled Air) and was slated for completion within two years.

  Dozens of protests from environmentalists and recreationalists ensued, with scientists from both sides of the issue debating the possible effects of the project. But the university had deep pockets, and the project went through against all objections. Enormous trenches were dug in the hillside, disrupting traffic and marring the serenity of many local neighborhoods, and massive pipes four feet in diameter were laid and connected.

  It was not long, however, before a small group of undergraduate hydrologists examined the pipelines and discovered that the campus end, which was not yet connected to the series of pumps that would bring water to the buildings, lay exposed and open behind a chain-link fence near the cafeteria; and that the lake end, which had not yet been connected to the submerged section of pipe, lay exposed and open about ten feet above the lake’s placid surface. The implications were obvious. The students rigged a fleet of wheeled pallets, donned helmets and swimsuits, and embarked upon a series of high-speed joyrides down the pitch-black pipeline that culminated in violent and exhilarating ejection into the water below.

  This behavior continued undetected until the students, nine of them altogether, vanished from their summer classes. They had been missing several days when a fellow student, privy to their pipeline antics, suggested that police check the WACA sites. As it happened, WACA contractors had sealed off the bottom of the pipeline, at last connecting the submerged section to the section buried in the hillside. The students’ bodies were discovered lodged in the main pump, five hundred feet below the lake surface.

  The tragedy has stopped the WACA project indefinitely, and window-mounted air conditioners are once again visible jutting from the ivy-covered walls of campus buildings.

  Leaves

  We live in a profusely and variously foliated area, and our trees are large and old, cultivated here by an excellent public works department, so it is not surprising that our town draws tourists from far away come fall, when the leaves change color. They drive through our residential streets with their out-of-state license plates, pointing out to one another the extraordinary colors, from the stunning reds of the red maple and black oak to the orange of the birches and radiant yellow of the gingko, a streetside specialty here. Occasionally a visitor will pull over and compliment us on the beauty of our leaves, but none of them ever thank us—for fertilizing the soil, for keeping insects at bay, for treating the wounds caused by storms, and droughts, and old age.

  And then, when the tourists return to their own towns, our leaves grow drab, they fall off our trees and into our yards and gutters, and if we don’t get rid of them they sit there and turn black and wet under the snow. Nobody comes to look at them then. We walk through them in our boots on the way to our cars and try to forget what’s happened, and we endure the winter, and eventually the city comes and takes the leaves away. We do our best to put them out of our minds, to enjoy the bleak view of the valley between the bare branches of the trees.

  The one saving grace of all this is the spring, when new leaves arrive. They’ve never yet failed to do so. They start out tiny and green, like mint candies, and for a short time they are ours alone, and nobody else’s. And then in summer, even when wind and rain and hail tear through them, even then they stay right on the trees and make a sound like applause, all summer long. As if they are thanking us for spending this time with them before the tourists come and take them away.

  2. Mystery and Confusion

  Owing to the inefficiency of our plumbing, I am obliged not to wash the dishes while my wife is taking a shower. And because we have only one telephone line, I am unable to make calls while my wife is corresponding via e-mail. Therefore, today, when my wife was in the shower, I felt that I should not use the phone.

  Shortcut

  One night, when I was young, I fell asleep while driving down a Midwestern two-lane county highway and woke suddenly to find myself on a wide, empty interstate in a powerful thunderstorm. I pulled off the road and waited until the rain stopped, then drove to the next exit, where I found a motel and checked in for the night. I was met the next morning by bright sunlight and a feeling of disorientation, because, although the sleep had refreshed me, I had no idea where I was. A glance at the telephone book in my room reminded me that I was in Iowa. This mystery solved, I went out to the cafeteria adjoining the lobby of the hotel and sat down to eat breakfast.

  Seats were scarce, so when a young woman asked if she could join me, I was happy to oblige. I engaged her in conversation and soon realized we were headed in the same direction. Since she had been stranded here by a bout of engine trouble, I offered to drive her the rest of the way. She accepted.

  By the end of our trip, the young woman and I had fallen in love, and within a year we were married. Now we live together in another part of the country, our children moved out and nearing the age we were when we met. The story of our meeting in the Iowa motel is told often to guests, and occasionally we retell it to one another, for sentimental reasons.

  That morning, as we climbed into the car together, I recalled the sudden change in the highway and weather the previous night. When I’d gotten settled behind the wheel, I consulted my map to see where I’d gone wrong. I was at first puzzled, then
horrified, to discover that the road I’d been driving on was practically parallel to the one I’d exited after the storm, with as many as sixty miles separating the two. In order to switch from one to the other, I would have had to make several connections on unfamiliar country roads, which might have taken more than ninety minutes. I had no memory of this drive, and could not have known how to accomplish it without careful study of the map. Nonetheless, I appeared to have done so while sleeping.

  When, years later, I finally told my wife, she dismissed out of hand my version of events and insisted that I must simply have found a shortcut.

  Witnesses

  Our friend moved to the city and took an apartment with two acquaintances in a rough but inexpensive part of town. On the day he arrived, he witnessed, along with his new roommates, a drive-by shooting. A vehicle pulled onto their street, a gun was pointed out its window, and a young man on their block, a recent inductee into a street gang, was shot in the leg.

  The police arrived and brought the three to the station for questioning. Each was taken alone into an interrogation room and later released. When they were able to meet again, our friend expressed his relief that they had gotten such a clear look at the incident; the perpetrators were almost certain to be caught. He then reconstructed the incident as he had seen it: a black Pontiac Firebird with out-of-state plates pulled onto their street, the African-American driver leveled a handgun at the young man and fired it, then the car squealed down the block and made a left turn, out of sight.

  However, one of our friend’s roommates objected strenuously to this version of events. He insisted that the car was a red sport utility vehicle with a bent rear fender and in-state plates, that the race of the shooter could not be determined, that the gun was in fact a hunting rifle, that the car turned right, not left, and that the squeal of tires our friend had heard was actually a scream of pain from the victim, who lay bleeding on the sidewalk.