The Four Fingers of Death Read online

  ALSO BY RICK MOODY

  Garden State

  The Ice Storm

  The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven

  Purple America

  Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited

  (coeditor, with Darcey Steinke)

  Demonology

  The Black Veil

  The Diviners

  Right Livelihoods

  Copyright © 2010 by Rick Moody

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  www.hachettebookgroup.com

  First Edition: July 2010

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  eISBN: 978-0-316-08890-9

  In Memory of Kurt Vonnegut

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Book One

  September 30, 2025

  October 7, 2025

  October 21, 2025

  November 11, 2025

  November 18, 2025

  December 2, 2025

  December 3, 2025

  December 15, 2025

  December 26, 2025

  December 29, 2025

  December 30, 2025

  January 14, 2026

  January 28, 2026

  February 11, 2026

  February 25, 2026

  March 26, 2026

  March 27, 2026

  March 28, 2026

  March 31, 2026

  April 25, 2026

  April 30, 2026

  May 1, 2026

  Book Two

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  THE FOUR FINGERS

  OF DEATH

  A Novelization, with Introduction,

  Afterword,

  and Notes

  by Montese Crandall

  Introduction

  by Montese Crandall

  PEOPLE OFTEN ask me where I get my ideas. Or on one occasion back in 2024 I was asked. This was at a reading in an old-fashioned used-media outlet right here in town, the store called Arachnids, Inc. The audience consisted of five intrepid and stalwart folks, four out of the five no doubt intent on surfing aimlessly at consoles. Or perhaps they intended to leave the store when instead they were herded into a cluster of uncomfortable petrochemical multi-use furniture modules by Noel Stroop, the hard-drinking owner-operator of the shop in question. I’d been pestering Noel about a reading for some time, months, despite the fact that Arachnids was not celebrated for its calendar of arts-related programming. To be honest, the reason for this pestering had most to do with my wife, who’d spend her remaining time on earth counseling me on just how to boost my product. “Ask Noel,” my wife said, her eyes full of implacable purpose.

  We used to see Noel at the flea market, which by now took up more than a dozen city blocks. There were more flea markets than licensed, tax-paying emporia in Rio Blanco. I had a booth there where, on weekends, I hawked old baseball cards and other sports memorabilia. In fact, I still do. Let me tell you the story.

  As a child, I was heedless of America’s pastime, which was in one of its frequent popularity downturns during which the inert of the nation turned the dial instead to golf. However, once the baseball commissioner’s office allowed without prejudice performance enhancers and began to encourage the participation of players with artificial and surgically enhanced limbs, I became a devoted partisan of our national pursuit. It had always made stars of smokers, overweight athletes, coca abusers, not to mention intravenous testosterone injectors, wife abusers, biblical literalists, and persons with tonsorial eccentricities, but once it embraced amputees, baseball became a sport that any indolent person could love. Since it had become commonplace on the broadbands of our nation to feature talk show hosts with cleft palates, homunculi, or other disfigurements, and since the advent of so-called reality telethons featuring learning-disabled persons (a rapidly growing demographic sector of the populace), it was only a matter of time before a professional sport became interested in a more democratic conception of the human physique.

  You may remember: the very first “enhanced” baseball player was a journeyman relief pitcher named Dave McClintock, of Columbus, OH. (He later became known in the press as “Three-in-One” McClintock, presumably because his synthetic parts needed lubrication to achieve maximum bionic effect.) McClintock was horsing around with his roommate after a minor league game—they were on their way to a disreputable watering hole outside Bridgeport, CT—when McClintock, according to later accounts, leaned out of the window of his roommate’s rental vehicle in order to jeer at some comely transgender streetwalkers. In the course of attempting to persuade McClintock to get back into the car, his roommate struck an oncoming military transport vehicle. This roommate was killed instantly. McClintock was thrown clear of the collision, his pitching arm sundered from him.

  Another ballplayer, deprived of this extremity, which by reason of extensive fracturing could not be reattached, would have retired to the subdivisions of southern Ohio and spent his time shooting at squirrels using high-amperage Tasers from his collection of weaponry. Dave McClintock wasn’t this kind of a ballplayer. McClintock, by his own account, “just wasn’t good at much else.” While he recovered in the ICU of the local hospital, he pondered his fate. McClintock, he later remarked in interviews, didn’t want to be a pitching coach or a scout. Despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, Dave McClintock believed that there was a future in professional sport for a man with a mechanical arm. He might need to become a position player, an off-the-bench type, at least until the technology improved. He might need to warm the bench for a time. But, he believed, he need not give up the game.

  After all, the owners and their handpicked commissioner had already determined that they could not keep ahead of the advances taking place in the demimonde of stealth performance enhancers. What was working well for athletes of the Sino-Indian Economic Compact could work for NAFTA athletes as well. It was impractical to think otherwise. Like Rosa Parks before him, McClintock saw the future clearly and knew. What was a mechanical arm but an elaborate kind of performance enhancement? Sport is entertainment, he observed in his diary entries from the hospital. Sport is not devoted to an idealized human body. Sport is not about winning, and it is not about some masculine pie-in-the-sky notion of heroism and team play. Sport is like breathing fire onstage or spitting up blood while wearing a latex devil’s mask. McClintock, with the cooperation of his agent, Phil Blank, convened a press conference on the day of his release from the Hospital for Special Surgical Interventions. Only a handful of reporters showed, and only one of them wrote a feature, but what this pimply hack from MLB.com discovered was a charming, upbeat, marketable ballplayer with a titanium arm, who, while grinning his relentlessly upbeat grin, waved aloft his bionic, or perhaps cybernetic, appendage and said, “I bet I can hit sixty-five homers a year with this thing!”

  The masses of baseball fans could be forgiven for thinking it was some kind of stunt. McClintock, however, had an unusual bond with the locals who came to watch his Triple-A affiliate. The fans loved his grit and determination. If it was abundantly clea
r that he would never pitch again (he didn’t have “feel”), a bio-engineered arm did improve his hitting, as it later did for Juan Millagro, who had two arms designed by a specialist in Vail, CO, after an accident involving farm machinery. As a bionic player, Dave McClintock had a mediocre average (.234), but when he did connect with the ball, it was invariably for extra bases. There were other advantages. Like Millagro, McClintock didn’t care if he got hit by a pitch (opposing pitchers were happy to oblige), he never had elbow problems, and from left field, where he played most often, he had a cannon for an arm.

  The following year, because of the minor league buzz, McClintock was brought up to the bigs as a platoon player for the Mexico City team. As a result, he was issued his first baseball card, by the venerable manufacturer of same, Topps, Inc. However, in a fit of misguided political correctness, the photographer shot him from the other side, so that the titanium arm was scarcely visible. This was perhaps one of those moments when the professionals at Topps were using their oracular crystal ball. Because it took a particular kind of genius, the kind that I for one possess, to know that this first “Three-in-One” McClintock issue would become one of the most collected baseball cards in the history of the game.

  In fact, collections of disabled players, for reasons that academic psychologists will argue over for the next fifty years, were generally among the most coveted of all baseball cards in those days. After McClintock came Juan Millagro, Moses Infante, Terry “Four Fingers” Callahan, and then many, many others. It was as if the NAFTA teams were somehow obsessed with the composite baseball player, the player who was willing to subject himself to the kind of technological interventions that were no longer just the province of American manufacturing. We had become a culture of hybrid biologies, and our physical contests began to reflect it.

  McClintock then, you may remember, tried to corner the market on his own baseball card. He had an army of middle schoolers, his biggest fans, buying them up. But there was one ruthless competitor who was able to thwart his evil plans. Well, I did adore the McClintock card, and the McClintock legend, and the fact that I hoarded his first card left me in a rather good position when I later opted for my present variety of self-employment. It turned out I wanted nothing more than to sit around talking to walleyed kids about who was the greatest disabled player in sports history. Oh, and did I neglect to mention that I later cajoled a haggard and hungover McClintock into signing twenty or so cards for me? At a convention? He made idle conversation, noting among other things that this was his third titanium arm, though he did nothing more strenuous with it in those days than go fly-fishing. His signature was kind of wobbly.

  This, therefore, is my business. It was here, at the flea market, according to my wife’s plans, that I screwed up my nonexistent courage one Sunday and said to Noel Stroop, who was busy selling software modules, something called a compact disc, and e-book files, “Hey, Noel, what does a guy like me, a literary innovator, have to do in this town to get some respect?”

  Perhaps you’re wondering what I have done to merit such a high opinion of my legacy. What is the nature of the Montese Crandall literary innovation? I am going to take the remainder of this brief introduction to explicate fully my response to this question. Let me then throw down the gauntlet and remark that I, Montese Crandall, MFA, write very short, very condensed literary pieces, and by short, I mean very, very short. Shorter than you have probably read in your reading life. More than one word, usually, because one word is too easy, but quite a bit more modest than five score. The three hundred and fifty pages of a novel, according to the argument I am wont to advance, are tedious elaboration. As I understand it, death, war, and adultery are the major novelistic themes, and these were all dispensed with well before Christ got nailed to his block of wood. The nineteenth-century novel, you opine? The nineteenth-century novel does have it all: attic-dwelling harridans; uncanny coincidences; advantageous marriages to strong, silent landowners; orphans; revolutions; whaling. You can’t go wrong with the nineteenth-century novel. But much that has been written since amounts to imitation, barely warmed over by writers with strange grammatical inclinations. Lovelorn women of Canada, incest on the Southern plantation, drug-using editorial assistants, the usual stuff. Yours truly, Montese Crandall, living out his pacific middle age in a college town next door over to nowhere at all, is unwilling to add more roughage to this rich diet.

  One thing the late twentieth century was good at, besides its mass-marketing: paring away. Omitting needless words. Alluding. Without overstating. Dust bunny under radiator. Cockroach on window blind. Scotch bottles. Heartbreak in the food court. Impotence. Subdivisions. Melanoma. Muffler problems. Upon the advent of the digital age, as you know, writers who went on and on and on just didn’t last. You couldn’t read all that nonsense on a screen. Fragmentation became the one true way. Fragmentation offered a point-and-click interface. Additionally, this strategic reduction blurred the line between poetry and prose, which is where I, Montese Crandall, come into the story. I, Montese Crandall, rely heavily on such strategies as alliteration, condensation, the strange, ghostly echo of metrical feet, iambs and dactyls, spondees and amphibrachs. For example, here’s a pair of amphibrachs (unstressed, stressed, unstressed) that might very well summarize my entire output: romantic objective. The phrase does have a fine euphony.

  My first groundbreaking and innovative one-sentence story occurred in the following way. I’d been working on a forty-five-page erotic novella that was loosely based on my boundless physical desire for my wife, Tara Schott Crandall. The sequence in which I performed a certain advanced delight upon her delicately canted pelvis ran well over twenty pages, and her mews and snorts of transport, as described in the text, would pierce the waxy consciousnesses of neighbors up and down the block. Her cries of delight, as described therein, were likened to the coyote howling on the mesa, the kettle shrilling on the stovetop. Sopranos in local opera companies would hang their heads, for they knew that when Tara Schott Crandall climaxed, they were out of a job.

  I am afraid I cut the entire passage. The erotic part. And not only that. Then I cut the opening. And the ending. I cut a lot of the middle. I cut the part where we were postcoitally sharing a glass of vin ordinaire. Next, I cut the astoundingly tender moment in the story where, in snappy dialogue, Tara and I revisited our assignations past: the time in the back of a minivan, the time in the woods when we got poison ivy, the time in the press box at the basketball game. For a while, a single scene remained in which the Tara character (called “Serena” in this early draft) sent me out, after lovemaking, for eggs. Eggs! So beautiful! So fecund! Likely to balance on their oblong points during the equinoxes! Symbols of fertility! Available in multiple sizes including jumbo! I couldn’t let go of this scene for a while. You know how this is. And yet after three months of wrestling with that story, I cut the entire tangle of misbegotten sentences, the whole sprawling mess, or almost all of it, leaving none, at last, but the following:

  Go get some eggs, you dwarf.

  I don’t expect everyone reading this introduction to see immediately the merit in this sentence. And yet the awakening, the unfolding, that occurred to me after a relaxed consideration of the six words that remained of my longer work, this unfolding located itself in the fact that the more I read and reread the sentence above, the better I liked it. I printed it out in various fonts. I pulled my few remaining hairs out, trying to decide whether to cut the word go. I pronounced the entirety of the story aloud to myself while walking from our ramshackle subdivision to the shipping offices where I then occasionally pulled a shift. I would intone the sentence while going past the shuttered health and beauty aids purveyor on Twenty-second and Mountain. I would say it while taking my number at the woebegone post office on Sixth. I shouted it at the beckoning doors of the gay bars on Fourth Avenue, I said it to myself at the food co-op, as if the eggs in question were an actual part of my shopping agenda. I can’t tell you how long it took me, in my ecstatical
ly creative state, to realize that, in fact, there needn’t be an exclamation point at the end.

  My wife, whose health situation had taken a rather unsettling turn, never approved of the long version of the story, though she generally supported whatever wind blew me along in my compositional hobbies, as long as I took seriously the post-compositional portion of the writer’s life and got out there to sell, sell, sell. She did, however, enjoy “Go get some eggs, you dwarf.” Where, my wife inquired, was I going to publish this story? Was I going to pit against one another some nationally recognized periodicals? And what about book publication? Had I considered a run of hardcovers? In fact, I had secured an agreement with a little web periodical called Mud Hut, where my story got an entire page to itself. No title. No byline.

  Not six months later, fresh from the victory just described, I came up with what I like to think is the second-finest narrative I’ve ever composed. And yet before I type out for you that magnificence, I should describe what I look like, because it bears on the interpretation of this second effort. I am, you should know, in my late forties or thereabouts, and it is simply being honest to note that my metabolism, which was doing wind sprints and stomach crunches throughout the dark ages of my twenties, has lately taken an ill-advised nap. I am now the site of an unmistakable sag, as if some avalanche stirred at the crest of my solar plexus and sent all the flab in my northern latitudes down toward my once noble pubic swell. With fancy holographic belt buckles do I attempt to restrain my stampeding softness. In vain. Additionally, my hair is thinning, and my skin, which once had the virtue of being free from the blemishes that trouble the young, is now mottled and flaky. Burst blood vessels lead the eye of any observer astray around my nose. I am yoked to bifocals for my ocular needs. (I cannot afford the surgeries that would correct me.) I have fallen arches, hammertoes. My only virtues, as a physical specimen, are my sideburns, which are like the pelts of rare woodland animals. My sideburns are not to be ignored.