Hookhand / samuel gee

Hookhand

Alright. 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

anyone unless you don’t come back before eight. On his first day leave he went on a walk. It was summer. He just kept walking.

I don’t know how he got the hook. He never had a prosthesis. They never fitted him for one, he could never pay for it. But it’s not what you’re thinking. It doesn’t look like that. It’s not that big. It’s no bigger than your thumb to the first knuckle. It’s a fishhook. There’s no black velvet cuff, no long scythe attached to his stump. It’s a fishhook. He tied it around his wrist with fishing twine. The blood came from a trout, they tested it.

I don’t know how he got it, but here’s what I think happened next. He just keeps walking, right? The man just keeps walking all day. He smells, he’s sweating heavy, he sweats through his shirt and he smells like onions and spam. He walks to the park with the river and then walks along the river so far the park ends and the river branches into all these muddy fingers heavy with reeds and plastic bottles. Mosquitoes dip in and out of the bottles, in and out, and iridescent licks of motor oil circle in brown pools of rainwater. Maybe he’s shirtless, it’s a hot evening, he’s humming a song and trying to remember how another one goes, maybe he tosses his shirt up into the air and that’s when he sees it. Caught on a tree branch, glittering in the light and the wind. He pulls it down and bites the line and ties it around his wrist with his mouth. Laughing a little to himself. He likes how the hook looks and he likes the sound it makes when he drags it behind him, how it jingles on pebbles and roots and sounds like a waterfall made of silver scraps. He likes that, you know. It’s been a long time since he’s heard something nice, seen something he likes and been able to reach out and take it.

He finds them by accident. All night he heard sirens, but he never guesses they’re for him. He’s stayed off the main roads anyway. The noise of the cars scares him. He’s still humming that same song, the hook still dancing off his wrist. He finds them by accident. They’ve left the dome light on, the one above the rearview mirror, and in the yellow light he sees the boy and the girl dipping in and out of each other’s faces. When the boy lowers his head he sees the girl’s face. Her mouth reminds him of something, but he can’t quite place it, something about the way her mouth looks, the way it stretches, and then her moan like water flows through the gap in the passenger side window and he remembers. Her low moan. The deaf girl’s moan that she never heard. Not her nor his father, just him out there in the woods, the only thing in his life that was ever meant for him alone. The man shakes a little, thinking about it. He steps out of the trees and goes for the passenger door. The boy throws the car into reverse. The hook snaps off the man’s wrist. The police find him four hours later. The man hasn’t moved.

I’m not saying that’s how it happened. I wasn’t there. I can see you rolling your

eyes, okay? You weren’t there either. I’m saying that’s what I choose to believe. Look – can you imagine what he must have felt, standing there in the heat for four hours? Have you ever felt anything like that? Has anyone?