Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

The mother of young Moose would have been brought low by the recognition of this moment. The teachers who had cared about him and who worried when he didn’t go to college would have been brought low. The neighbors, who all said of Moose, despite the rumors, that he was respectful and kept to himself, they all would have been brought low, and were, when emergency vehicles arrived, and, later, a cortege of more government vehicles than any had seen in years. Who would not have found him- or herself weeping had he or she come upon that scene, the dead boy in the pool of blood, and his learning-disabled brother chasing the arm around the room as though it were some kind of toy, forgetting, for the moment, that his elder sibling, the person who cared most about him, was toggling into the off position once and for all. The arm did nothing but spread loss and grief, it was a force for harm , but Corey didn’t really understand these things, not yet, and so once he had stabbed at the arm a few times with a plastic sword he kept at bedside, he actually opened the door for it, to watch the arm scuttle out into the hall of the Mansourian homestead, where it somehow made instinctual or rather uncanny progress toward the front door, at which point Corey, who was mostly enjoined from opening and closing doors, opened the front door, because he had learned the manipulation of locks. And when no one was looking, he sometimes contented himself by fiddling with — opening and closing — doors, and so he released his brother’s murderer out into the gravel front yard, and he stood there watching it make its way across the dusty waste; in the light of a lone solar-powered streetlamp, the arm, circumnavigating a prickly pear that was yellowing on the lawn, toppled off the curb and into the street. All this took place in the deeper part of the night, you see, when the gangs came out down on the lower part of Fourth Avenue, near to Nineteenth or Twentieth, thereabouts, and maybe the gangs would seize the murderer, the arm, as a curiosity, because gangs were the only people who could thrive in the deep night of Rio Blanco. They were the only people, besides the nomads , who took pleasure in this fragmented metropolis, with one of the highest murder rates in the nation. Corey, who stood in the xerisphere of his own front yard, gazed up, bloody plastic Excalibur in his hand. And it was here that he stood when his father was finally roused, perhaps by the commotion and perhaps by the great darkness that was at that moment sweeping over his slumbering heart. This ineffectual patriarch stumbled from his tiny little bed in the stifling upstairs master bedroom, and even the scorpions in the wall sorrowed from their hideouts, and Mr. Mansourian, arriving at the front door and seeing his more challenged son with a plastic sword covered in blood, and beholding the night sky leaking back into the insubstantial bit of creation called Rio Blanco, Mr. Mansourian cried out, What have you done? What have you done? Oh, lord! Taking the innocent boy and shaking him hard, and seeing the fear in Corey’s eyes, watching as Corey started to cry, he then instead took him into his arms. What else was there to do?

The arm went about its fell business, meanwhile, finding ways to travel from neighborhood to neighborhood. Through empty lots, tent communities, and subdivisions. Three or four more unfortunates met their fate in the process. But more important than the fatalities were the myriad limbs and extremities that the arm managed to brush against , as it served as trophy, curiosity, talisman, prosthetic limb, and, in a bodega on the South Side, one of those picker-uppers that you use to reach things on the high shelves. The arm, carrier of exotic bacteria, perhaps sensed the ways in which the laborious gravity of Earth was sapping it of its energies, and if the bacteria animated it, they couldn’t do so for long, because nothing exists forever in this place. Without some infusion of energy, the arm would eventually have to abandon its mission. If it couldn’t kill with the ferocity that would have contented it, it could, however, spread wide its contagion. All the arguments, all the Caucasian chalk circles that were drawn around the arm, in which antagonists were pitted against one another for the control of it, these were all just little data points on the Venn diagram of infection.

As indicated, by morning, the police had draped their colored tape around the Mansourian residence, and they’d congregated there, trying to ascertain what the evidence suggested in the matter of the death of Moose Mansourian, known confederate of Mexican drug kingpins, small-time, low-level operative who hadn’t been detained yet only because he didn’t give the police anyone they couldn’t get from a dozen different snitches. The only part of the story that didn’t work was the part that had to do with the learning-disabled kid stabbing Moose Mansourian to death with a plastic sword. The death was by strangulation — that was patently obvious on the body — and anyway the retarded kid seemed confused and uncertain about the whole business, which left the father, but the father had no signs of a struggle on his body. It didn’t add up.

The other thing that didn’t add up was how the Federales got wind of the whole thing so fast. They were not likely to intervene in small-town drug hits in places like Rio Blanco, not when there were dozens of other larger cities where the lawlessness was even more aggrieved. How did they know? Which way was the information flowing? All the locals knew was that before they had even finished bagging the evidence and interviewing family members, there was a whole team of federal employees pulling up at the house. Some of them were from the FBI, but others were from far more exotic agencies, including, it seemed, the Centers for Disease Control — not an agency that anyone in Rio Blanco was accustomed to encountering, except when there was that hantavirus outbreak. These guys were actually wearing Hazmat jumpsuits when they showed up, and they were urging the officers to report to a temporary quarantine station that had been set up in the university gymnasium. There they were going to be showered, given a powerful antibiotic, and then they were going to be observed for a few days. Before all that happened, the local officers were detailed to the front of the house, where they were to fend off anyone who would come along asking questions.

But one guy, one of the officers, was still in the house when a fellow with a bad comb-over who claimed to be from NASA (what NASA had to do with anything was anyone’s guess) began to try to interview the retarded kid. This was comical to watch, and the officer, Detective Paradiso, was asked by his police chief to videotape the interview between the bad-hair guy and the retarded kid, for internal use only, and so with the video camera off his tool belt, he made like he was a documentary guy, filming everything from the corner of a cramped living room.

“My name is Rob,” the guy from NASA kept reiterating. Trying to get the kid to focus. Trying to explain NASA to the kid. Space, Mars, all this stuff that was irrelevant to some kid who didn’t even really know what just happened to his brother. “Can you tell me what happened last night? Do you know what happened?”

The kid’s father was sitting next to him now, with an arm around the fucked-up kid, and the father, looking like it was all well beyond him, was crying as the kid tried to talk.

“Moose,” the kid said.

“Moose,” the NASA guy repeated. “Your brother. You were home with your brother?”

“Home.”

“Watching things on the television monitor here?”

“Waterfall.”

“You were watching a waterfall?”

The NASA guy deferred to the father, who didn’t really have anything at all to add to the account. But he had some translation skills with regard to the kid. It was really hard to understand the kid, that was for sure. He had every speech impediment it was possible to have. His big, fleshy lips were not made for the pronunciation of anything but the simplest words.