THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU
4
THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU
Joel Hines thought back to the moment in his life when he emerged from obscurity.
The obscurity had started at birth. He came into the world without much trouble, but his mother died a few days later due to complications of the birth, and he never forgave her.
His father was a logger who drank himself into a stupor every evening. Hines remembered the long nights curled up on one end of an old, ratty, puke-green couch—the only furniture in the living room—watching his father drink on the other end. His father would drink and demand Hines give him his undivided attention. He’d quote lumber mill statistics one moment, spout gibberish the next.
You know how many lumber mills there are in this country? He’d point the bottle at Joel. Maybe five hundred. Six. Fuck if I remember for sure. Guess what state produces the most lumber?
He didn’t know.
Guess.
He guessed Washington.
Shit no. Alaska.
He wasn’t surprised.
Oregon and California are next.
His dad quizzed him whenever he could, never expecting a correct answer.
You know Russia has the largest forest area of any country? But the U.S. of A. knows what to do with it, by god. Hell, we’ve got thirty percent of the world’s forest.
So, he’d almost make sense like that, and then before Hines knew it, he was on to something else. Something he didn’t understand a word of.
His father never said a word about Hines’ mother. Never. And, for all his drunken nights, he never touched Hines, and rarely yelled at him. He rose every morning to work in the woods, where a single stupid move could kill or seriously maim him. Hines decided early on that nothing in that house—not even his father—belonged to him, and he left it all behind when he turned sixteen. He kept his legal name for when he needed it, but a few years after leaving, he changed his last name from Walters to Hines.
He survived for years on the streets, pulling odd jobs in the woods, sometimes retail jobs in town, and peddling anything he thought he could sell to make a buck. When he was twenty-four, he bought a trailer—a fifth wheel—and moved around Gray’s Harbor, never settling down anywhere for long.
Fucking ten years of that life. He figured his dad was dead by now. Drank himself to death, or maybe a tree had fallen on him. Hines never heard anything, never saw an obituary. He was still angry about his mother leaving him, and he had a strong desire to wish her back among the living and reunite with her. Ask her why. Why the hell?
Hines started dealing on the streets. Made himself known. Didn’t get on the manufacturing side of things, like cooking Crystal or that sort of thing. He sold it though. Not right away. First just weed, then Molly, then Oxy. Later he hit on the idea of moving cocaine, and that got him into a couple of rings that kept Aberdeen and the rest of Gray’s Harbor feeling good.
He was comfortable, but also footloose and fancy free. He had clients, he had his fifth wheel, and enough money so that he didn’t live like a bum.
He was thirty years old now, and he’d been hanging out at the local taverns, gawking at women, certain one of them would remind him of his mother, but he didn’t have anything to go on, so it was mostly an exercise in futility. He especially liked Duffy’s, and just tonight he’d seen the dark-haired girl sing again. Kat. Introduced as Kat Gregory. When he saw her dance on nights she came to listen to the bands, he stared at her longingly, her movements like self-contained miracles, but when she was up on stage and sang . . . Now that was something. Her voice moved him and frightened him at the same time.
Didn’t remind him of his mother in the slightest, but he could mess with her head.
She left with her friend—he knew her name, too—and that was that. Bye-bye for now, Kat and Serena. He decided to take the long way around to his truck so he could walk in the rain. He’d unhitched the truck from his fifth wheel, as he usually did, the fifth wheel parked out of town.
He was getting drenched, but he didn’t mind. His ballcap helped some. Trusty old cap. Cutting through the alley behind Duffy’s, he walked north to take a circuit around the block. Before he was halfway around, however, he decided to head east and cut through an apartment complex, weaving his way around side streets and alleys until he came out on another street that had old houses, some trailers, and very few working streetlights.
The night was welcome. The rain, too. The unfamiliar surroundings. Kat, he thought. What am I going to do with you? Are you a dark angel barring my mother’s way back?
He heard something faint. Far away, like an echo. That was weird. There was a voice. It was—singing. How strange. What a soothing sound. It came and went, though. There. Not there. There. But always as if from somewhere else. He had a shitty singing voice, and couldn’t hold a tune, but he tried to hum a couple of the tones he could center on.
Then the music stopped.
“Huh,” he said.
He tried a few times to replicate the song. Most of it. Didn’t think it was so bad.
Before he realized it, he’d left the street and stood in a small clearing amid some evergreen trees. A little park he’d never come across before. No one else came here either, he suspected. There was a rusted grill top over a fire pit, and that was about it. The park was eerily silent.
He took off his cap.
He looked up and the rain wet his face.
A wind blew suddenly. He liked the sensation of it against his skin. Wind. Wind. There was power there.
It whispered to him, said, “Hey, look out,” and with the warning came fast-approaching footsteps on the slick grass. The next whisper was a jacket rustling behind him and at once he felt a pinch in his side, but a pinch with a metal claw.
He fell, turned onto his back, and the attacker was on him, knee on his chest. A big man, bald head gleaming in the rain. Long overcoat—what Hines could see of it. He held a knife, and its serrated edge already had blood on it.
Hines recognized him but couldn’t remember his name.
“What—?” Hines managed to say. He raised his head to glance around, see if anyone might help him. He put a hand to his side and grimaced when he found the wound.
“A message and a farewell,” the man said. His voice was deep, like an organ’s pedal notes. “From Bill Hand.”
Oh shit.
Oh shit oh shit oh shit.
Bill Hand was a career criminal who’d left Chicago to build a drug ring in the Pacific Northwest. A ring Hines had joined, doing sales on the streets. Hand was frustrated with rings moving in on his territory, so he took on new sellers to escalate business.
There was one thing Bill Hand hated more than anything.
“Unless you have that five thousand on you,” the bald man said, “the message starts now.”
“I was going to get it back to Bill,” Hines said. He remembered the man’s name now. Jake. Jake someone. “Honestly, Jake, I was. Look, take what I have. It’s not much but—”
“Skim and you pay the price,” the man said.
Hines thought that the funniest thing he’d heard all week. He lay his head back in the grass and laughed.
“Fucker, what’s so funny?”
“Is that the message? Skim and you pay the price? Really?”
Jake frowned. “It’s not the message. It’s an—admonition.”
“My. Fancy word, Jake, but I don’t think it’s an admonition.”
“Then what is it?”
“Maybe an aphorism.”
“Aphorism? What’s that?”
“A saying? Moral? An adage?”
“I don’t care what the fuck it’s called. The message is, you don’t ever skim from the Hand that feeds you.” Jake brandished the blood-covered knife. “Farewell, Joel.”
It happened so fast that Hines didn’t have a chance to fight it. There was all that joking around about vocabulary, and then violence. Jake brought the knife down into his gut, stabbing him deep. Before Hines could shout out in surprise, the pain seared through the wound, and Jake’s knife jabbed into his stomach again, and again. There was pain like he’d never felt, but he could only think about the blood that coated his hands when they fumbled around and found the stab wounds.
Jake stared at him a while, nodded as if satisfied, then took his knee off Hines’s chest, stood, and ran from the park.
Leaving Hines for dead. Yes. He was going to bleed out in less than half an hour. He would die without treatment. If he hesitated at all, he’d be dead for sure. His insides felt wrong amid the excruciating pain. Probably sliced up his intestines. Damaged skin, nerves, blood vessels, muscles, organs. He turned his head side to side in the wet grass, but no longer saw Jake. No one else either.
Get up.
He’d read somewhere that a stab wound could kill a guy in fifteen minutes, but someone else in fifteen hours.
Don’t be that first guy.
With a painful surge, he rolled onto his unwounded side. Pins and needles everywhere now. He was almost numb to the pain, but that might not last. He brought his knees up, curling into the fetal position, then used his arm to elbow himself up. In what seemed like an eternity—no, fifteen minutes could kill me—he stood, hunched over, his hands now covering his stomach. Not that he could stop the blood flow. Not that it would do any good.
He felt dizzy and cold. He knew what was happening. Shock.
His dad had lost two fingers in the woods on the job once. He remembered the doc talking about shock in the ER and this was happening now. Hines’s pulse rate was up, blood pressure probably down, and his skin felt cold, and not from the rain, which had started to lessen.
Quick, while he could still think. Which way?
Hobbling back the way he came, he hoped to reach a street with traffic. A street with some goddamn light. If he’d only just gone straight to his truck after Duffy’s. The young woman had clouded his judgement.
He zeroed in on a streetlight in the distance. Blood seeped through his fingers. Cold. Very cold now.
Thoughts swirled even as he reached the light: He deserved this. Jake was right; Bill Hand was right. He hadn’t got away with the theft. He had no one to blame but himself. And, well. His mother. The woman who brought him into this world and didn’t stick around to help. His father’s drunken stories hadn’t helped much either, but Hines didn’t care about him.
Where was everyone? The light seemed overly bright, but it didn’t matter. He fell to his knees, numb and cold. He wasn’t going to make it.
He crumpled to the sidewalk, and that hurt like hell. He lay on his back, the rain coming straight down, bathing his face. He hummed a couple of those echoed tones he’d heard earlier. Repeated them, off key. Felt tired. He tried again to get sounds out, but all that was left was his raspy breath. That was all he could do. All, that is, except close his eyes and die.