The Four Fingers of Death (115 page)

“I love the scene at the soda shop, or is it a diner, with the two girls, where there’s some kind of doo-wop music playing in the background that the teenagers are attempting to dance to. The proprietor of the store comes in and indicates that there should be no dancing in the burger joint, no dancing, and of course it always reminds me of Cotton Mather’s injunctions against Terpsichore, you know,
young people dance and go down to hell
. The scene proceeds,” I went on, “and we get our first shot of the leading male, Paul Lawrence, and he has a sort of sullen, learning-disabled aspect to him, which makes his later bacterial infection seem all the more convincing, and as he and his girlfriend, Marta, are about to leave for the beach, the jukebox kicks in with ‘The Bird’s the Word,’ by the Rivingtons, later reconfigured into that classic of early rock and roll ‘Surfin’ Bird.’ ”

“Why—”

“Still, the best sequences in the film are those in which the arm
attacks
people. I just love that stuff. There are two different ways to film the arm. Or this is how I reconstruct it. In general, the black-and-white horror film is, I’d agree, completely superior to its Technicolor relative, which was already, by 1963, edging out the competition. So anyway, the two ways to film the arm are, first, with a live actor just out of frame, where the arm can wiggle its fingers, you know, and then, second, there are the sequences with the rubberized severed arm that the actors need to hold flush to their own throats as they mime strangulation. The rubber arm is great in the case of Mrs. Hotchkiss, the woman who rents out Paul Lawrence’s room to him,” I explained. “She gives a wooden, monotonous performance, especially in the delivery of her lines, until the moment when the arm somehow
jumps up
from the floor in order to attack her. Then she sputters and flails around before falling to the ground so that they can cut between the rubberized arm and the live actor’s arm. Mrs. Hotchkiss gives the performance her
all
. A memorable bit, right? The filmmakers get down to business. It’s not like
The Blob
, where you have to wait so long for the blob to turn up.”

You’ve just got to trust me!

If this is what I think it is,

It could be very important for me!

A number of strategic exchanges had taken place on the chessboard, and I must confess that the rather long time between moves made it hard for me to concentrate effectively. This was perhaps Tyrone’s only path to victory, to bore me sufficiently. This match should not have reached the endgame stage, I warrant, because Tyrone was mistaken about his talents, but I wanted to allow Tyrone to believe that he had been in the hunt for a long time, not simply plowed under, so that I would appear to have won the novelization fair and square. This required skillful playing. As I say, I offered a few pieces. He couldn’t have known, however, that we were coming to one of my favorite endgames, the bishop and pawn endgame.

It was for chess-related reasons that the conversation took a turn into a kind of terrain that I would refer to as
provocative
, or mean-spirited, even mildly
abusive
, and I suppose it did so because when competition rears its head, when the loser perceives that he is the loser—in the ghastly moment of
zugzwang
, the moment in which any move is a bad move
—
then it is axiomatic that the outcome can no longer be delayed. The hand-to-hand begins, the mano a mano. Thus it was that Tyrone said:

“What makes you think you’re going to be able to write the novelization anyway? It’s not like you have any experience.”

The blackout had begun again, as I say, and now Ho Chi Minh had all but emptied of its excessively tanned and underemployed counterculturalists and university dropouts. The musty smell of snuffed candles was much in the air, a smell that anyone can love. I might have riposted to the dinosaur that I had written plenty of things, that the implications of my kind of story went beyond the margin of the page into my spectacularly boiled-down evocations of psychology. But what I said was:

“The same thing that probably makes you think that you are a fine chess player.”

What was it that Tyrone wanted? The interloper? As he blew a move with his bishop that would have, were he more adept, perhaps kept my king from heading boldly to the center of the board. Did Tyrone not want me to massacre him? Was there not some wish to be laid low by such as I, a small white man, with modest expectations for the last couple of decades of his life, in a forgotten corner of NAFTA? Tyrone could have done many things, he was brilliant, he was affable, he was usually sharply turned out, he’d had a spectacular education. Was he, too, just another one of the people who never managed to turn promise into anything concrete?

He held his great, dark brow in his hands as though it were made of crystal, as if the position of his men would somehow shatter his very brow. I had no conviction about where, when his hand flew from his temple, it would alight. But as it swept toward the king, his white king, my heart lifted up, and I felt in myself a great lofting into the skies, as he toppled the king onto its side.

And then the cocksure exterior that Tyrone had exhibited over the weeks seemed to vanish away. He became almost mute, he murmured a few syllables that I couldn’t make out, and then he reached into his valise, the valise he had brought to the café, claiming that he would soon have to fly anyway, and produced the flash drive containing the screenplay, entitled
The Four Fingers of Death
. He fetched it out like it was just a trifle—without any sense of what the thing meant to me.

“One of us goes away with the prize,” Tyrone said, “and one of us goes back to the airport, and flies on to, uh, Dayton.”

“Well, I want to say,” I told him, “that this has been a very agreeable transaction.”

I sure could use a beer…

Me, too, but we can’t stop now.

I bet there’s one in the kitchen.

What I was, in fact, feeling then, I think I should say, was some apprehensiveness. I didn’t
want
the struggle over the script to be over so quickly. Now that the attention, whether good or ill, that I had commanded during the plot against the McClintock card was about to come to its end, what to do? Thus I felt a need to keep Tyrone from exiting the Ho Chi Minh café. Suddenly, I was willing to do whatever needed to be done, for example, some gentle prodding in the direction of a drink. Did he want a drink? No, he no longer drank. Just one more cup of hickory coffee substitute? He didn’t think so. Well, then, I asked Tyrone, had he ever considered exactly what the arm represented? In
The Crawling Hand
? Had he ever considered that the film was really about a certain kind of human labor? Had he considered that it represented the surplus value with which labor imbued the commodity, had he ever had any thoughts along these lines? Here it was, this arm, and it could do very little but grasp and choke. Maybe, I told Tyrone, the arm represented the
alienated labor
that was the trade union movement being crushed, the beginning of the era of strikebreaking, the end of the influence that labor had had in the 1930s and 1940s; maybe the arm represented the end of that sense of community of workingmen and -women together, forging a nation.

And what about the cats at the end of the film? Had Tyrone heard about the cats? They offered the most difficult moment in the film for the casual interpreter. I found, I told Tyrone, as he fiddled nervously with his surgically implanted digital minder, as though he couldn’t be bothered to listen, the cats in film, the moments when cats just appeared by chance or were compelled (in some drugged state, no doubt) to perform for the cameras, incredibly moving. For example, Mrs. Hotchkiss had a cat in the film, I told Tyrone, and there was a very tender moment, after her death, when the sheriff was visiting her house, in search of leads, and he paused to
scritch
(the proper word, I believe) behind the ears of Mrs. Hotchkiss’s cat, as it stood on the counter, having its way with a saucer of dairy product. Okay! I told Tyrone. That’s one cat who appears in the film, Mrs. Hotchkiss’s cat, who stands in as a sign for wildness, the wildness that is often the necessary obverse of the civilizing impulse, correct? Cats are innocents, but they are also wild, I told Tyrone, and humans are crazy enough to believe that they can somehow
control
the wildness of the cats. This particular cat, who could just as easily run off, comes back to the house for handouts, and so it’s a complex image, this image of the cat in Mrs. Hotchkiss’s house; it’s a beloved cat, but then again, it could also be a cat that has somehow been attacked by the crawling arm. Because that arm has been crawling around the house, has been getting into all the shelves, into all the cupboards, into all the recesses that the cat gets into, and so there has been some kind of consorting between the arm and the cat—
it has to be
, I told Tyrone; it couldn’t be otherwise—and later in the film, the cat cries some strangulated cry (off camera) that leads one to suspect that the cat is now
contaminated
, but there is no definitive information on this point, I said, after which the scene relocates to the final chase between Paul and the sheriff (the latter of whom went on to appear in the popular
Gilligan’s Island
program), and Paul heads off, as if for the water, because all of this story takes place next to the ocean, that repository of North American mythologies, and maybe he intends to return the arm to the crash site of the capsule, or maybe he simply intends to fling it into the ocean, we don’t know, but we do know he ends up ditching his car in a junkyard, somewhere beside the sea.

In this spot, the arm is
killed
by Paul, though what it means to kill the arm is unclear.

It was an arm

Lying in the sand.

A human arm.

Which is to say: he puncture-wounds the arm a few times with a piece of shattered bottle. Why that is more effective in dispatching the
entity
than being blown up in a space capsule, as first befell it, we just can’t say, and why this subsequent “death” of the arm should have any impact on the space infection that is apparently manipulating Paul’s teenage consciousness, causing him to behave as if he has testosterone pumped by the gallon into his circulatory system, anyway, this is all beside the point, I told Tyrone. The point is that in the junkyard there are, as you’d expect,
junkyard cats
. There is no better place to see cats than in a trash heap, a junkyard, a resource-management site, both the little and the large, the slow and fat, the Manx, the tuxedo, the calico, the Abyssinian, the mau, the Maine coon. In this particular junkyard, the cats immediately begin wrestling with the arm. There’s plenty of meat there, I explained to Tyrone.

“They love that the arm moves and halts and wiggles its digits. This just makes the cats want to use their very primitive hunting instincts on the arm, and so the cats begin tearing into the meat on the arm, and it’s almost as if the film used genuine feral cats for this sequence, hungry ones, because they really fight with one another, and they really struggle to get the
upper hand
, so to speak. Maybe they glued some meat onto the rubberized arm, some tuna, for the cats to fight over.”

“Monty, I know this is important—”

“One more second, I have something to give you, but let me tell you about this last little bit, and then I will…”

His turn to sigh, a purely theatrical sigh—the one entitled
Prima Donna
.

“Why are the cats in the sequence? The next-to-last sequence in the film? Theoretically, we are only interested in the human characters. Right? We’re interested in Paul, and we’re interested in whether he’s going to recover fully from the affliction that has beset him. Why the cats? Are they meant to indicate that the infection from the arm is now loosed on the natural world? This reminds me—”