SAMUEL GEE
Hookhand
A
lright. I’ll tell you how it happened. His father did it to him. He saw him take the deaf girl out to the woods and sign to her. They were friends. The boy took the flashlight and through the kitchen window the father saw the boy’s hands moving in and out of the yellow glow between the black trees. The night cold as a Russian sentence, no money for the heat, the liquor bottles empty and the wine the father kept for emergencies missing, and the father’s breath fell into the sink and pooled in the drain. The father saw the flashlight swim under the deaf girl’s dress. She glowed like a lamp with an old shade. Her mouth stretched and her moan powdered in the frigid air and swirled around the boy’s blond hair, and her moan fell around their feet where the boy shivered in his sneakers with no socks, and her moan turned dandelion and jasmine in the light from the flashlight, and where the boy, on his knees by now, drank it up. The father gripped the edge of the sink with one hand. With the other he plugged a cigarette in his mouth and burned his lips two, three times before he found the end. He stood there smoking, watching them, until the flashlight’s batteries sputtered out and the deaf girl walked back through the woods to the boarding school. When the boy came back in he did it with a bread knife. The boy was young, his wrist skinny. It didn’t take long. The father was sober. The boy wasn’t. When he was done he tied a tourniquet with the bailing twine he found in the boy’s sweatshirt pocket. The bailing twine was looped around a cheap bottle of wine. So you got her drunk first, he said. Where’d you put the rest? and the boy went to wave towards the window, and seeing no right hand, sobbed louder, then pointed with the other towards a tarp lean-to he’d built last week with the girl. The father left, his coat askew on his shoulders, fumbling with the hood. The boy called 911 on his father’s cell phone. He never remembered to take it with him. The boy slipped out the front door and met the ambulance at the end of the street. I don’t know what happened in the in-between. Institutions. No, not that kind, not at first. The one for wards of the state. Foster homes. Foster home to home to home. Medications I can’t pronounce. At eighteen, first institution. That kind. They kept him for two weeks, then three, then two months. They passed five hundred volts through his brain. He got better. They put him on day leave. It’s when you’re not all okay, but you’re there enough to walk to the CVS and buy a Coke if you want, or just wander around the parking lot. They don’t call
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