He brushed his teeth, leaning up against the lavatory. The sleek pressure of the cold enamel delighted his rod and groin. As he looked down to spit, though, he saw that his belly ballooned out over the lip of the sink. Goddamn beergut, he was going to pot. He stared glumly at that pale bag, shaggily coated with curly black hair. Another sign of the bad times. All he did now was drink beer and sometimes pick up some middle-age stuff in one of the joints. They had to know a lot of tricks or he couldn’t even pop off, he was so depressed. He had to get out of here. Nearly all his buddies who graduated with him last year were gone now, and the ones who’d stayed were in worse shape than he was. The new high school kids looked like little babies, like that bitchy little runt of a sister of his, and the upper-class girls acted scared of him. Jesus, he was looking like an old man, that’s what. He sucked in his gut and whacked it hard with the butt of his hand. Have to toughen up, goddamn it! He whacked it a couple more times, then looked away irritably as it sagged again.
He pulled on his clean T-shirt and repeated the ritual of the comb. Couple of his buddies had joined the Marines. Shit, that sounded pretty stupid, but maybe he ought to, too. Something to tide him over until he found his way to the top. If he hung around here any longer he was going to go off his nut. By God, why not? He’d do it, he’d join the goddamn Marines and get away from his old man and his old lady, away from the bitching and nagging and away from the mines and West Condon and God and all his fucking paraphernalia. He flashed the smile. Yeah, man. Then, reluctantly, he pulled on his shorts.
Thou didst crush the head of the wicked,
laying him bare from thigh to neck…
One difference between Nathan Baxter and his father, now the Reverend Abner Baxter of the Church of the Nazarene, was that while his father believed in the eventual redistribution of all property equally to all people (or anyway all saints), no matter how it had to be accomplished, and as Jesus Christ, he preached, had intended, Nat Baxter recognized no property rights at all. “Whatever the eye sees and covets, let the hand grasp it.” At the high school gymnasium the Sunday of the mine disaster, Nat’s eye saw and coveted a beautifully gnarled black hand that lay, carbonized and unattached, among the bodies and other refuse, and, covertly, his hand grasped it, stuffed it in a paper sack.
For a long time before, he and his little brother Paulie had played Batman and Robin, flying dangerously through the trees, destroying wild beasts, and doing God’s will amongst the ungodly. Bad guys were not always easy to come by, of course, and sometimes, to keep the game going, Robin himself had to display a streak of perversity, so he could be dealt with by the hard arm of the law, but there were usually some little kids in the neighborhood they could catch and tie up and bring to proper retribution. Or, if not, they could almost always talk their sister Amanda into it. She was ten and bigger than Paulie, but so weak that Paulie — Robin, that is — could usually catch her and pin her down by himself. The trouble was, she sometimes tattled, but that only added danger to their game, and whenever she did, she always knew she would get it double next time.
Paulie had grown a little too smart, though, about playing Robin; he seemed to consider that it was even better than being Batman. So one day, as a lesson, Nat had shot a real robin with his beebee gun and had made Paulie watch it die. “Me, Batman,” he had said, standing over the bird. “You, Robin.” The bird was still blinking its heavy gray lids, but it had stopped trying to fly. As Paulie, scared, squatted down close to see where the bird had been hit, Nat had placed his foot on the bird’s head and slowly crunched its skull in. That had stopped Paulie being cocky about the part he played, but also it had almost stopped the game altogether. Paulie was too big a baby all the time.
But finding the hand had solved all that. That Sunday, when he came home, he put on his sweatshirt, and pulling his left hand up into the sleeve, carefully fitted the left cuff around the wrist of the dead hand, holding it inside by the bone that stuck out. He left a note where Paulie would be sure to see it: Beware the Black Hand! and then waited until he had him alone in the bedroom to spring it on him. Paulie screamed and nearly fell into a frothing fit. Nat could hardly keep from giggling. Lowering his voice in imitation of their father’s, he warned Paulie to keep quiet about it; if he said anything to anybody, the Black Hand would get him. When, later that evening, Paulie got his peter whopped by their father’s razor strop, Nat told him it was God’s punishment because he had acted so scared he had almost given it all away. But, Nat said, he had proven himself, and now he could be the assistant to the Black Hand. What did he want to call himself? Paul suggested the Black Finger, but Nat rejected the idea: if they painted it black with ink, everybody would see it and ask about it. Paulie said, what about the Black Peter? That was where God had hit him, and you couldn’t see that. Nat agreed, provided Paulie would promise to be careful and wash it off every time before their mother gave them their baths.
So, after that, the Black Hand and the Black Peter stalked the neighborhood. It was a million times better than being Batman and Robin, because now they were on the other side, and they could do whatever they wanted to. They stole and put poop on porches and tortured victims and broke bottles and burned birds they shot in gasoline and one night they strangled Widow Harlowe’s cat. With ink, Nat drew pictures of the black hand on little pieces of paper, which they left behind whenever they completed a really good job.
They began making plans for initiating Amanda, but their father was home almost all the time now, what with the mine closed and the sermons he was always having to prepare, and they were afraid about her tattling. She was their father’s favorite, and he could get pretty rough if he thought she was being victimized. But then, one Sunday night early in February when he’d had the hand just about a month, both their parents had to attend some important church meeting called by Widow Collins in some man’s house, a wop man named Mr. Bruno, and they left Franny in charge. Nat now had the idea that his father did not like Widow Collins anymore, so he put her on the list for future visitations. Once their parents had left, their big brother Junior wandered off to town to play the pinball machines, and then one of Franny’s girlfriends came by and they went for a walk, so Paul and Nathan had Amanda to themselves. An opportunity like that could not be passed by. Pitilessly, the Black Hand and the Black Peter struck.
6
A month of anguish and ordeal. A month of hope. Oh, the upward straining! Oh, the despair of nonfulfillment! Rarely had conviction so wholly failed her. Struck down, Clara Collins wept. Hardship afflicted though her life had been, always there had been something, or someone, to comfort her, to guard her from grief’s last defeat. Always in crisis — even at the worst a month ago when Ely got killed, and earlier when Harold died in the war — she had discovered, through her enduring faith in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, new inner rivers of resolve. But now, in this strange house, in inexplicable legion with these strange persons, at this strange and empty hour — emptier than she had ever conceived an hour could be — of midnight, the midnight that cleft the eighth of the month of February from the new ninth, as Abner Baxter hurled his implacable curses and all her friends walked out on her, Clara suffered a total collapse of strength. Everything just dropped out. Even faith failed her. She could not pray. It was as though they had walked out taking her very spirit with them, and now the hollow shell of her could but sit, utterly powerless and forsaken, in this bewilderingly darkened Italian living room lit only by its irreverent television — sit whimpering like a lost child.