Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

He looked at the Anglo guy. “I could, well, I could offer you this.”

He pointed at the arm. It wiggled its fingers.

The Anglo guy handed over the polyamphetamine tablets, guaranteed to wipe out short-term memory entirely, and as if the arm were somehow a talisman in his own private pantheon, the Anglo guy lifted the arm out of the shopping cart. This was done in such a way that Miguel never had any contact with the thing, though he’d just been rooting around in there. He would have confessed that he had a feeling that contact with it was unwise, even though he couldn’t have said why. The stuff coming out of it that looked like rubber cement was probably not the kind of thing you wanted to touch. The Anglo guy apparently had no such reservations. He treated the arm as though it were a shillelagh or other device suitable for assault on antagonists, and he disappeared into the crowd with his new prize.

There the arm was quickly passed from hand to hand: a bunch of men around a campfire passed it back and forth attempting to play the arm as though it were a clarinet or a soprano saxophone. One of them actually believed it was a water pipe with which certain intoxicants could be smoked. One man tried to arm-wrestle the arm, but he found that the arm was a disappointing competitor because it couldn’t be propped up effectively. A woman attempted to get the arm to make a fist, so that she could batter her boyfriend with it. The arm was good-natured about this. It was in a dormant period, or perhaps near its final demise, but it lacked the wherewithal to respond to any of these lighthearted engagements with unpleasantness. In the distance, Faith Roberts was shouting, in a shrill, programmatic way, Rise up! Rise up! Rise up! Rise up! And then, as if according to prior arrangement, the police began to storm Don Hummel Park.

The electroshock sidearm, or Taser, was another of the businesses that flourished in an era when almost nothing was made in North America, and when it became possible to administer the electroshock from a distance, when it was no longer necessary to get up close to the subject to persuade him with pain compliance— styled rhetoric, then the electroshock sidearm assumed unimpeachable status among law-enforcement officials. All the border patrol officers along the as-yet-uncompleted freedom wall that separated Rio Blanco and the southern part of Arizona from our trading partner South of the Border used electroshock sidearms, as it was also considered sporting to wear the night-vision shades and take down the border jumpers now and then.

Moreover, Rio Blanco understaffed its law-enforcement department, because of budgetary problems. As a result, the police relied on the electroshock devices to attempt to do the big jobs, when they had to. They entered the Don Hummel Park immediately upon hearing the rhetoric ascend to its revolutionary theatricality, hoping not to have to subdue the crowd, which numbered in the tens of thousands, while the police were but a couple hundred. They had blockaded all the corners of the park and had a number of old, dented school buses with which to round up detainees. They moved into the park, in riot gear, in a fashion that was calculated to be imposing. It was near the southwest corner of the park, in the course of mopping up, that a certain rank-and-file member of the constabulary saw a man waving a severed human arm. The officer attempted to remove the arm from the man’s grasp, calling after him that he would need to relinquish it, identifying himself as an officer and so forth, but the man with the arm, before leaping over some playground equipment, tossed the arm to another man, in a move that would perhaps, had this been an American football game, been referred to as a lateral pass , and the man who received the arm, which appeared to be waving to the crowd as it went by, faked as though to hand it off to an officer near him, but he kept the arm to himself before passing it behind his back, hotdogging, to a friend, who bounded into an encampment, a scattering of tents and lean-tos, going in one end and out another, until the police who descended on this spot were, it needs to be said, confused . The pain compliance began not long after, and as soon as the pain compliance began, the Union of Homeless Citizens ran for the hills, quite literally. No exit was without its unlucky souls, the innocents who were swept into the buses and hauled off to the penal wastes. But those who were more resourceful jumped walls and police barricades, and commandeered vehicles going by, or ran into nearby cul de sacs and rubble-strewn yards where they would not be found for days, if at all.

Into the midst of this mayhem came the rains. Violently, indiscriminately, and retributively. As if there were a reservoir that had been collecting, somewhere in the troposphere, during the months of drought, until in early fall, out of spite, some disgruntled engineer threw the lever on the trough. The majority of those ill affected by the monsoon season in Rio Blanco, as with those more ill affected by the drought in the first place, were those gathered at Don Hummel Park, in the process of being rounded up by the constabulary. There weren’t more than a pair of rain slickers in the entire rally, although the Union of Homeless Citizens was equipped with polyethylene garbage bags, which were scored for use as outerwear (you stuck your head through the perforated section). The rains, however, were violent enough that no one remembered to man the booth with the polyethylene bags, and the police, who had been given a weather forecast by dispatch (dewpoint: 58 percent, chance of thunderstorms, some severe, 65 percent), did little better. The police drew to a halt wherever they stood, with their Tasers and their nightsticks, and attempted to affix rain visors and to don high-visibility ponchos. The remainder of the crowd, well versed in dispersal, made tracks. Only the homeless citizens who were impaired or brain damaged or perhaps simply in love with the pyrotechnical display of the elements stood and watched, watched palm fronds washed into the nearby drains, watched the rivers swell in the streets, watched the few automobiles of Rio Blanco attempting to ford the rivers that had sprung up, watched one vehicle strike a utility pole, watched as lawfulness and lawlessness alike were swept away. Anything smokable was now wet, anything drinkable was now watered down in this cumulonimbus multicell in the mature-to-dissipating stage whose elapsed rainfall was, within the hour, 1.37 inches.

Larry and Faith Roberts backed out of the bandstand, slipped behind a pair of large speakers that stood there totemically. There was a bank of portable johns as well, off of which the rain pelted with such severity that the Robertses wondered if it were not genuine hail. They got between these portable johns and the stunned and watered-down police, and then, when there was an opportunity, they slipped into a van marked Union of Homeless Citizens. A glaringly obvious getaway vehicle, true, and that was why it worked so well.

A busy day for Woo Lee Koo, medical researcher, now working as a paid consultant for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, whose brief was to search the hospitals and areas in and around Rio Blanco for persons complaining of unexplained bacterial infections. He was also in search of portions of human bodies, limbless bodies, bodiless limbs, portions and fragments, hard-to-distinguish bits of tissue, DNA, blood and guts, and so forth; and, in particular, according to rumor and forensic evidence, a certain human arm. A human arm missing one finger, with two others rather badly reattached. Wearing a wedding ring. If that weren’t enough, if all that bloody responsibility were not enough, there had also been a call from his assistant Noelle, who claimed that she had some incredible news, news he wouldn’t believe, and would he please come down to the primate laboratory as soon as he was able. Despite these rather fascinating developments, either one of which would bear on his continuing researches in the area of cellular senescence, Koo found himself, unfortunately, completely preoccupied elsewhere that afternoon. He sat in the kitchen of his unit on the west side of town, slurping slowly, methodically, from a mug of ginseng tea, bewailing, if only to himself, the relationship that currently existed between himself and his son, Jean-Paul Koo.