Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories (5 page)

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.

The other roommate sheepishly admitted that he had seen a white man in glasses fire a semiautomatic out the window of a rusted blue Volvo without plates of any kind, which had gone straight down the street through several lights before vanishing into traffic. He also said that he himself had screamed, which may have accounted for the noise our friend heard.

The discussion metamorphosed into an argument, which in time would evolve into a web of grudges that would never be forgiven.

When our friend, a year later, left the city to return to our town, he told us that he had done so not out of concern for his safety, as many assumed, but because he was tired of not knowing what was going on.

Switch

One night, while our cat was curled up on my lap, placidly purring, I noticed that his collar was somewhat crooked, and in the process of righting it I happened to catch a glimpse of the identification tag that hung from it. The tag, a worn stamped-metal disc, told me that the cat’s name was Fluffy.

Our cat, however, was named Horace. Reading further, I discovered that the tag bore not our permanent address, but an address on our old street in a faraway town we had lived in temporarily.

I gave the matter some thought, and concluded that there were two possible explanations. One was that, while we were living in the faraway town, our cat’s collar was switched with another cat’s, perhaps as some kind of prank. The other was that we had accidentally gotten hold of someone else’s cat and abandoned our own.

Initially I dismissed the second possibility, as it had been five years since we lived in that town, and this cat had very much come to seem like ours, and the town we lived in permanently his rightful home. But as I reflected, I realized how very unlikely a prank the switching of collars was; and simultaneously I began to recall changes in our cat’s personality around the time of our move which, quite naturally, we assumed to be consequences of the move itself, but which now suddenly seemed like the consequences of his not being our cat.

On impulse, I got up and called the phone number printed on the tag. A woman answered. I asked her if she had lost a cat named Fluffy, and after a long pause she replied that yes, she had, many years ago, and did I have some information about him? I told her that I had found his collar, unconnected to any cat. Did she want me to send it to her? After a dramatic pause, the woman told me to go ahead and do so, and I did the next day. I also ordered, through a pet supply catalog, a new tag with the name Horace printed on it.

Though I no longer consider this to have been a cowardly act, I went through several weeks of self-doubt at the time. As for now, I can only hope that the original Horace was taken in by a kind family.

The Wristwatch

While walking, on a cool day in late spring, over a bridge spanning one of our town’s mountain gorges, I checked the time. At that moment, my watch band broke, and the watch tumbled from my grasp and out of sight.

Three weeks later, a pair of acquaintances invited us to go canoeing. We drove to their weekend cabin on the lake just north of town, where we shrugged on our life jackets and readied a pair of boats for launch. While paddling through calm water along the shore, I spotted something shining in the mud beneath the surface. Convinced it was my watch, I leaned over to grab it, nearly pitching my wife and myself into the lake. But my effort was successful, and I soon held the object, rusted and caked with silt, in my palm. It was a bottle cap.

That evening we all sat around a campfire, chatting and enjoying the fresh air. When the chill of night set in, I put on my sweatshirt and found the watch in the front pocket. It had fallen there, not into the creek.

Underlined Passages

While visiting a used bookstore, a man who had suffered a run of bad luck bought a paperbound work of philosophy, hoping that a new paradigm for looking at the world would help him turn his life around. He brought the book home and studied it carefully, underlining key passages with a ball-point pen. The new ideas were indeed helpful, and he grew happier in both his marriage and his work, rediscovering skills he had forgotten he possessed and generally changing his outlook for the better.

One evening, while gathering old items for a yard sale, he discovered in a dusty cardboard box a stack of books he had read years before, when he was a student. Among them was another copy of the very work of philosophy he had recently bought and that had changed his life. When he opened the older book, which he had no recollection of ever having read before, he realized that he had underlined exactly the same passages that he had in his new copy. It occurred to him that if he had absorbed these ideas in the past, and they eventually gave way to the miserable period that had preceded reading them the second time, then it was inevitable that he would enter another, similar, period of ill fortune and despair, and in fact at that moment he began to sink into a depression that would only widen and deepen in the months to come.

Eventually he and his wife grew apart and they filed for divorce. Over several wordless days they separated the possessions they had shared for so many years, and soon he moved into an apartment.

Shortly before the divorce was to be finalized, the man discovered that he had somehow retained both copies of the fateful book, and in the process of throwing them out noticed that the older copy bore his wife’s name on the inside front cover. He realized that the dusty box had not contained his books from college, but his wife’s, and that he could not recall reading the book the first time because, in fact, he hadn’t.

He quickly phoned his wife and they agreed to call off the divorce. They are now in counseling, working to understand their new circumstances.

The Mary

A job I had one spring could be reached easily on foot through parks and residential neighborhoods, and so, in the months I held the job, I saw the same scenery twice daily, and came to enjoy imagining the lives of the people whose houses I passed. One house gave me particular pleasure, as in its backyard stood a weather-beaten white statue of the Virgin Mary, balanced on top of a round red picnic table. I liked the slapdash presentation of the Mary, and fancied that the house’s inhabitants were pious in a rough-edged, practical way, unconcerned with the trappings of high-minded, pompous religiosity. In my mind, these were people of substance, not of fashion, which is how I liked to see myself in those days.

But this impression was shattered when summer came, and when passing the house I saw that the Mary had been replaced by a large canvas umbrella, and the table covered with empty beer cans and snack bags. In the same mental breath that I registered this change, I realized that there had been no Mary, only the furled umbrella whose folds, in my self-aggrandizing mental state, I had mistaken for the draped vestments of the Virgin. The house was not owned by a religious family, but more likely rented by a group of sloppy college students.

After this epiphany, my menial office job no longer seemed like the honest living I’d convinced myself it was, but a humiliating waste of time without any redeeming features. It was not long before I quit.

Intruder

When we came home, I sensed a difference in the house. A book I had been reading on the sofa now lay on the kitchen table. There was the smell of a candle lit, then blown out. A bottle of beer I’d finished drinking but left on the desk was now standing in the sink.

My instinct was that there had been an intruder. But I dismissed the possibility: we had not been gone long, and those items that had been upset were not the sort of things that would have interested an intruder. More likely, I had upset them myself and forgotten.