His Father's Son

by Bentley Little

  Halfway through Fountain Valley, traffic started to slow, and while on a railroad overpass, he saw the bright red of braking taillights for miles ahead, winding through the commercial/industrial section of the city. The slow lane seemed to be moving the fastest, so when he could, he switched over until he was eventually all the way to the right. This start-and-stop traffic continued on for the better part of an hour, and the freeway narrowed to two lanes as they reached the source of the slowdown: an accident in the far left lane between a motorcycle, a car and a pickup truck. The car, Steve noted with some satisfaction, was the red Corvette that had sped past him earlier, and while it was difficult to tell the extent of the damage in the dark, in the rain, with the distorted reflections of police lights on puddles, it looked to him as though the Corvette had gotten the worst of it.

  At that he smiled. Sherry invariably expressed worry, concern and sympathy as they drove past auto accidents, but Steve was generally pretty happy whenever he slowed down to look at the wreckage. More often than not, the vehicles involved were ones that had passed him earlier, driving recklessly, heedless of the conditions, and he felt no small degree of pleasure when he came upon the site of their downfall.

  If anyone in that accident had been injured or killed, he hoped it was the driver of the red Corvette.

  The freeway opened up after that. Steve continued on to Long Beach, exiting at the off-ramp that led to the VA hospital. He had no umbrella and was forced to park far away, so he was drenched by the time he dashed into the building’s front entrance. He wasn’t sure he would be allowed into the hospital like this, but no one stopped him and he took the elevator to the second floor.

  His father looked worse than he had on Thursday, if that was possible. His skin was sallow, his face gaunt, and he had not been shaved. The rough white stubble on his chin made him look not only much older than he actually was but dumber and less successful, like some alternate-world version of himself. Underneath closed lids, his eyes moved spasmodically, his hands twitching like the paws of a dreaming dog. There was a time, not so long ago, when Steve would have been happy to see his dad like this. Standing over this broken version of his father would have been a dream come true, and he could admit now what he had never admitted before: He had hated the man. But something had happened. Maybe his true feelings had emerged or maybe he had evolved, but whatever the reason, he now felt sorry for his dad.

  He wished his father were awake, alert and functioning on all cylinders, so he would know and understand what his son had done for him.

  He sat down in the chair and waited by the bedside, hoping his father would awaken but not wanting to disturb him. The air in the room felt warm and stuffy, too stuffy, and after several moments had passed, Steve’s eyes began to close. Though he tried with all his might to keep them open, his lids felt heavy as the lack of sleep finally caught up with him. He had to go home and get some rest, and he was about to reach over and shake his father’s arm to wake him up when, with a sharp, startled yelp, the old man jerked, eyes flipping open, his body pushing against the straps constraining him.

  “Dad?” Steve said.

  His father settled down, eyes focusing. He said nothing, but even this level of contact could mean that he was in one of his lucid periods, and Steve checked to make sure the man in the next bed was out, looked around to make sure no one else was nearby, then quickly explained how he had gone to Copper City and met Jessica and Hazel and Lyman, how Lyman had figured things out and was going to try to blackmail him, and how the only way to put a stop to it was to put a stop to Lyman.

  He paused, waited for a response, received none.

  “So I did it, Dad,” he said wearily. “I took care of it.”

  The old man smiled up at him with a complete lack of comprehension. “Futon,” he said. “Gold bouillon beef.”

  Nine

  The Hand of God

  She fell in love with his hands.

  He was a welder at the plant, and before she even saw his face, she saw his hands. They were strong and brown, the fingers blunt but graceful, and they manipulated the plates of metal in front of him like an artist molding clay. There was something sensual about the way they moved, the way they brought continual freshness to what should have been rote work. He was covered very nearly from head to toe, a welder’s mask concealing his face, heavy boots on his feet, blue standard-issue coveralls hiding everything else, but for some reason there were no gloves on his hands, nothing protecting his fingers and palms at all, and she was grateful for that, because it was his hands that made her stop.

  She was late for a meeting already, but she paused between the yellow safety lines of the walkway to watch him. Her gaze was so focused, she was paying such rapt attention to the movements of his fingers, that it was only when they stopped working for a moment that she noticed he was looking at her.

  She reddened, feeling the flushed heat in her face, and he pressed a button on the panel next to his workstation and flipped up his mask. She saw only the small central portion of his face—eyes, nose, mouth, no forehead, cheeks or chin—and it looked kind, intelligent. It fit his hands.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  She shook her head, shifted the clipboard and reports in her hand, and continued on her way.

  But, knowing his station on the floor, she looked up his name and position on the computer—Jim McMillan, senior welder—and cross-referenced his hours, arranging to “accidentally” meet him in the lunchroom at the beginning of his noon break.

  He believed even to this day that their meeting had been accidental. She’d never told him how she’d seen him and stalked him and claimed him for her own before he was even aware of her existence. But by the end of his lunch hour, she had manipulated him into asking her out for dinner.

  And she had given herself to him that night because she’d known he was the one.

  She’d had other beaux before, of course. Rough, fumbling teenagers who attempted to feel her up in the backseats of their fathers’ cars. And it was that stage of the relationship that she’d always enjoyed the most: when their hands would touch her breasts or unbutton her pants and try to slide between her legs. She struggled against it like she was supposed to, but they knew and she knew that it was only a pose, only perfunc tory, and each time their fingers found their way inside her, her tight jeans making anything but rudimentary movement all but impossible, she closed her eyes and rode on the waves of sensation, blocking out all thought of her surroundings, her partners, their faces, concentrating on the hands that were working on her, imagining how their white palms looked against her black pubic hair, seeing in her mind a lap’s-eye view of the proceedings. Tony Livesey was the best of the bunch, an otherwise unassuming kid with long, slender fingers and the gentle touch of a practiced masseuse, and he was the only one she had continued to see. He was not her true love, she knew that, but he was competent in a journey-man way, and he did not demand anything else from her. He was content to remain where they were, and she saw him each week and allowed him to engage in what was euphemistically referred to as heavy petting, and if she was feeling particularly good she would reciprocate and give him what was commonly called a hand job.

  But Jim was totally unlike anyone else before. His hands, his glorious hands, were skilled and assured, manly yet tender. They felt as good as they looked, were as wonderful as she’d known they’d be, and she allowed them to do what she’d never allowed anyone else’s to do before: take off her blouse, take off her bra, pull down her pants, pull off her underwear.

  Even as he entered her from behind, as she braced herself on her hands and knees, he was cupping her breasts, his strong fingers pressing into her flesh in a way that did not hurt but aroused. His thumbs flicked her nipples, and she bucked against him, pulling him in deeper, bringing him to climax as he clutched her body for all he was worth.

  Two months later they were married.

  Ten years later they were still married.

 
His hands, if anything, had become more accomplished over the years, better able to satisfy her needs and urges, and it was because of this that their sex life had remained as vibrant as ever, that they made love as often now as they had those first few months.

  People liked to talk about the head or the heart as if they were the most important parts of a man. But it was hands that translated thought into action, that set down the words composed in the poet’s brain, that sculpted or painted the forms imagined in the artist’s mind, that played the music born in the composer’s soul. Hands were the intermediary between the ethereal and the material, the celestial and the base, and nowhere was this truer than in the realm of love. There was a maneuverability in hands that was not found in the penis, an ability to perform multiple movements at once. The penis could only grow soft or hard, could only move in its function as an appendage to the pelvis, but the possibilities of the hand were endless. Often, as she orally pleased her husband, he would insert thumb and forefinger in both of her holes—vagina and anus—and massage her that way. She could feel the two parts of his hand through the thin membrane of tissue separating them, and it never failed to bring her to climax.

  The penis could only be what it was, but the hand was endlessly varying and multifaceted. It could be as small as a pinkie inside her, as big as a fist. It could do anything and everything she wanted: rub, penetrate, pinch, stroke, tickle. Even after all these years, hands had not lost their attraction for her, and it was her secret fantasy to be groped by a group of men, to be on her hands and knees in a box filled with holes through which the hands of many men felt her and squeezed her and slapped her and entered her. She wanted hands on her tits, hands in her hair, fingers in her mouth, fingers in her pussy, fingers up her ass. She wanted to be kneaded and prodded and poked, and it was this fantasy that brought her to orgasm each time she masturbated, as her own hands rubbed herself, and it made her climax in a way that had never happened with traditional intercourse.

  Hands could hurt or heal, and there was something in that duality that appealed to her. The nature of humankind was expressed in those two appendages more eloquently than they could ever be by any other part of the body.

  She remembered, as a child, seeing a horror movie: The Hands of Orlac. It was about a surgeon who grafted the hands of a killer onto the arms of a pianist who had lost his own hands in some kind of accident. Was that possible? she wondered. After Jim died, could she save his hands and have them sewn onto another man’s arms? She knew she could have them bronzed or plaster cast, but it was their movement and flexibility that made them so special, that she loved, not their static shape or form. Maybe they wouldn’t be the same even if they were grafted onto someone else’s arms, because the movements would not be the same as the ones ordered by his brain, and any attempt to re-create them would be merely a copy of the original, a false reenactment of an actual event.

  That was her biggest fear: losing his hands to death. And she prayed each night for them to both live a long and healthy life, but for God to take her first so she wouldn’t be forced to live without Jim.

  And his hands.

  Even now, after all these years, he did not know her feelings, did not know her mind. Sex for him was focused on the genitals. Pussy and cock. Hands were for foreplay, a necessary evil, the mechanical preparation needed to make him hard and her wet so that true sex could begin.

  But coitus for her was a form of cuddling, a relaxing breather after the orgasmic rigors of hand sex. She would lie there as he entered her, feeling the diminishing waves coursing through her body as he began pumping. It was a favor she did for him, though he did not know it, and she allowed him his mistaken belief, let him think that it was his cock that turned her on, that it was his manhood that drove her to heights of ecstasy.

  Ironically, her own hands he found too rough. He liked to be stimulated orally, liked her to fellate him, to use her hands only to hold still the base of his penis. He did not like to be stroked, and when she attempted it, he invariably said, “If I wanted that, I’d do it myself.” He’d then press a light hand against the back of her head and push her face into his lap. “Use your mouth,” he’d say.

  She’d take him into her mouth happily, accept his semen and swallow it, but her hands felt useless, ignored, and that was the only part of their lovemaking with which she was not completely satisfied.

  It happened sooner than she’d hoped, sooner than she’d thought, even sooner than she’d feared.

  She was at work, in her office, and she received a call from his supervisor that he had collapsed on the line and was being taken to St. Jude’s Hospital. The supervisor was vague in his description of Jim’s status, too vague, and she didn’t press him because she was not yet ready to hear what she knew she would. Instead, with a feeling of panic, she sped to the hospital, where she learned that he’d been pronounced dead on arrival, the victim of a massive coronary.

  The next week was a blur, and at the end of it, she was sitting alone by his newly bermed grave, crying, missing him. She looked down at the ground, and when she thought of him lying in the coffin, hands folded uselessly across his chest, she was filled with a sadness so deep and profound that it seemed only her own death could relieve it. She would never find another man like Jim, never find hands like his, and she knew that her life had nowhere to go from here.

  She contemplated suicide many times over the next few months, always chickening out at the last minute, and she had finally decided to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills, when she saw a movie that changed her life.

  A children’s movie.

  A Dr. Seuss movie.

  The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.

  In the surrealistic world of the film, a mad piano teacher imprisoned five hundred boys, all of whom were required to wear on their heads a beanie atop which sat a realistic rubber hand. It was the sight of all those hands sticking up proudly from the young boys’ hats, waving around as they ran, that caused a tingling sensation between her legs, a feeling that spread outward to the rest of her body through electric nerves that hadn’t been used since Jim’s death.

  She checked the cable guide to see if the movie was on again—it was—and she set the timer on her VCR as well as programming her TiVo. The film was recorded while she slept, and she awoke feeling not only refreshed but enthusiastic.

  She watched the movie again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Seeing the film, with its plethora of hands and tacit understanding of the importance of the five-fingered extremities, gave her courage and hope, and each viewing was like another tug on a lifeline pulling her back from the brink. Years ago, before meeting Jim, she remembered reading about a tribe, somewhere in New Guinea, she thought, that wor shiped a god whose form was that of a hand. She’d cut out the article and saved it, and now she practically tore apart the house searching for the yellowed scrap of newsprint. She found it in the place she least expected—between the pages of a cookbook, next to a piece of lined paper containing a friend’s recipe for lemonade pie—and immediately after rereading the article, she went to the library to look up more information about the tribe and its god.

  The problem was that there was no more information. Aside from that one article, she could find no mention of the subject in any book or periodical, or on any Web site. The article did, however, have a dateline, and on impulse she went home, picked up the phone, and booked a complicated series of interconnecting and increasingly smaller plane flights that eventually led to Port Moresby, New Guinea. From there, she figured, she should be able to find someone who knew of this tribe and could take her to its village.

  The reality was slightly more complicated, but three days later she was on a jeep in the jungles of Papua with a driver and a translator, heading for a remote canyon that was supposed to be the home of the Lingbacao people. The road turned into a trail, the trail into a path, and after they’d driven several slow hours along the increasingly narrow and erratic track
, the underbrush grew too thick to continue, and they were forced to abandon the jeep and continue on foot.

  The first sign that they were getting close was a detailed painting of a hand on the open face of a rock cliff. It was gigantic, and obviously only recently completed. Surrounding it were smaller, much older handprints, and the impression given by both together was of a parent with its children, or a king with his subjects.

  Or a god with his followers.

  She stared at the rock face, enraptured. Even if the god did not exist, here was a people who understood the divinity of the hand, who appreciated its significance and importance in all things, a realization that was reinforced when they finally came upon the village and were met by a man who said, “We are honored by your presence in our community. New hands are always welcome here.”

  She turned to the translator after he repeated the greeting in English and asked him to relay her own message: “I, too, worship the hand. It is why I am here.”

  The man nodded, smiling, and spoke rapidly after the translator had finished speaking.

  “It is hands that till the field, hands that hunt the deer, hands that gather the fruit,” the translator said in English. “It is our hands that hold us together. It is our hands that keep us alive.”

  The Lingbacao man said something else, then pointed across the length of the village.

  “God,” the translator said, “lives in that building.”

  It was a shack only slightly larger than a storage shed.

  She did not know what she had been expecting. Something like the Judeo-Christian God, she supposed, a vague unseen presence to which the people gave fealty. She had not been expecting a physical being in a defined location, and she looked toward the shack, not sure if the emotion that filled her was excitement or fear.

  This was why she’d come here, however, and she asked the translator to ask the man if she could go into the building and see God.