Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories (12 page)

When the trial was over, members of the jury expressed their disgust with the witness, whom they characterized as irresponsible at best, and at worst guilty of some sort of crime himself. The foreman, who had been sitting closest to the witness during the trial, even confessed to a desire to physically harm him, and said that he would have done so had the two not been separated by the walls of the jury box and witness stand.

Sixty Dollars

All the money I ever found, I found during the same year, in the same town, at exactly the time I most needed it, when I had little income and few prospects for more. I was working part-time at a supermarket and living in a large house with four other recent college graduates, where we subsisted primarily on pasta and beans and cheap beer, and I had begun to pine for a better life, free from incessant worry about my expenses, which at the time included a large credit card debt and a substantial student loan.

The first time I found money, I was walking over a bridge and stopped to gaze down on the river below. After doing so, I happened to look at my feet and noticed that I was standing on a twenty-dollar bill.

The second time, I went into a bank to withdraw twenty dollars from my savings account and saw a twenty-dollar bill lying on the floor. Since the bank had just opened and no other customers were around, I kept it.

The third time, I checked a book out of the library and found twenty dollars pressed between the pages.

Though the sixty dollars might have had the power to change my life—I could have quit my dead-end clerk’s job and found something worthwhile—I squandered each of the twenty-dollar bills on expensive restaurant meals. In fact, all three of the meals came out to more than twenty dollars, so I ended up spending money of my own that I would otherwise have saved. I seemed to believe that since the money had been found, not earned, it would somehow be taken from me if I didn’t spend it fast. But the result was that I developed a taste for good food and drink, and my near-poverty became all the more difficult to bear.

I now recognize this year as a turning point, but whether it was for the better or the worse remains unclear.

The Pork Chop

My father managed apartment buildings for a living, and every June, when the university students left town, he went through each vacated apartment to clean and repair it for the coming school year. Often he found items left behind: radios, shower supplies, an electric typewriter with the price tag still on it. These things would be given to my sister and me, or, in the years after we moved out of the house, sold at an annual yard sale.

Among the tasks on my father’s list was to defrost and wipe clean the refrigerators and freezers. In those days, most freezers tended to accumulate furry mounds of rock-hard ice, which had to melt before my father could complete the job. Consequently, he would spend one day removing all the moldy food, and then the next cleaning the kitchens and their defrosted refrigerators.

Entering an apartment one cleaning day, my father was overwhelmed by a terrible odor. He reasoned that it could not be coming from the refrigerator, as he had purged it of food the day before, so he searched elsewhere—under the oven, inside the cabinets, down the heating ducts—for the dead mouse or squirrel he figured was the source of the smell. Eventually, doubting his memory, he checked the refrigerator once more, and that is when he found the pork chop.

It had been sitting in a plastic bag, sealed into a ridge of freezer ice. Now, to my father’s astonishment, it was crawling with maggots. He couldn’t understand how the maggots had gotten into the bag so quickly, but there was little time for contemplation: the odor was intensifying. He removed the plastic bag and dropped it into another bag, which he wrapped, double-knotted, in still a third bag. He threw this bag into the dumpster.

Inside the apartment, the smell would not diminish. He lit candles, placed air fresheners everywhere. When he got home, the smell was on his clothes. My mother washed them, but they contaminated the rest of the load. My father showered and brought the smell into the bathroom, where it lingered for weeks. He drove the ruined laundry to the dump and the smell adhered to the trunk of the car, and then leaked into the passenger compartment. Months later, despite my mother’s ministrations, the smell could still be discerned in their house. Meanwhile, the apartment was professionally cleaned, twice, with bleach, yet my father still could not rent it for the new school year. The following fall, he was only able to rent it to a woman with a severe cold, who complained incessantly once she recovered, and moved out before the semester was over.

My father, always stoic, rarely mentioned the incident. But my mother talked incoherently about the pork chop on her deathbed. She called me by my father’s name and begged me to take it away, to get it out of her hospital room. Not wishing to disobey, yet reluctant to explain the truth, I pretended to toss something into the trash, then moved the metal can into the hallway. After that, however, and up to the moment my mother died, I thought I was able to smell the pork chop myself.

Tool

Though many have expressed doubts about the wisdom of our society’s dependence on computer technology, our acquaintance, a computer programmer, was always quick to defend the machines that had made his career possible. Technology, he would say, was never of unambiguous value; every negative effect a new technology precipitated was balanced by some positive change. Computers might not be the answer to every problem, he admitted, but they were certainly the solution to some.

Nevertheless, he suffered a crisis of faith at the height of his career. Computers, he realized, had taken their toll upon him: he suffered from acute back problems, severe eyestrain and poor nutrition, and he had alienated himself from his wife and children with his frequent all-night sessions of programming and Internet use. He decided to take a month’s leave from his job to engage in some unmediated personal experience. With his family, he hiked and camped; he studied the lives of birds and plants and learned their names. He took up jogging, and bought himself a workbench and a set of tools.

It was the tools, one tool in particular, that would prove our acquaintance’s undoing. In the last week or so of his vacation, he began knocking together some crude wooden items: a toy chest for his son, a stool for his daughter, a coat rack. Especially satisfying to him was the hammer. Though he enjoyed measuring and marking boards, or sawing them to the right length, no activity proved more stimulating than fastening the boards together with his hammer. After a day of hammering, he would lie awake in bed, his mind racing with the shape of the hammer, the sound it made, the sensation of pounding nails into wood with it. In a few days he was coming to bed later and later, and his basement workshop soon filled up with ugly wooden items, many of them of no practical value, nor of any resemblance to recognizable objects. Indeed, he was gripped by a kind of madness, an addiction. When it was time to return to work, he called in sick, and against the objections of his family locked himself in the basement with his beloved tool.

Inevitably, the time came when our acquaintance had to choose between the hammer and the computer. The choice ought to have been obvious: with the computer, he could make a living which would support some abbreviated version of his carpentry habit. But if he chose the hammer he would lose everything.

In the end, the very nature of the tools in question seemed to force his hand. In a fit of despair over his indecision, he used the hammer to destroy his computer.

Since then, his hammer has not done him much additional good; his family is straining to make ends meet with the meager income provided by the woodworking trade, a trade for which he has little natural aptitude and the market for which, in our lively rural milieu, is glutted with skillful practitioners. But when asked if he regrets his decision, he replies that he does not. He stands by his hammer, which he holds up against the computer as a sturdier and more enduring, and thus, in his opinion, superior, technology.

Last Meal

Our many trips to a local diner have resulted in our acquaintance with its short-order cook, a man in his late thirties whose intensive self-training and obsessive attention to detail have resulted in an uncanny ability to make, from such rudiments as eggs, potatoes, meatloaf and cold cuts, rough-hewn delicacies of surprising originality and variety. So pleased does he seem while at work, and so satisfied with his creations, that we were once given to ask if he’d ever made a meal he didn’t like.

After some thought, he told us that he had once been employed as the head chef at a state prison, where one night he was asked to cook a last meal for a murderer who had been condemned to death. The murderer had requested a porterhouse steak, medium rare; french fries; a bowl of raspberry sherbet; and a glass of iced tea. As per state prison regulations, it was also required that he be served a green salad. The prisoner was to be executed at midnight and would be served dinner at 7:30 p.m., after the other inmates were through eating.