Chapter 3: The Collar Hand

Chapter Three
The Collar Hand

Voss read her phone, set it down on the table screen-up, and pushed it away from herself an inch, the way you push away a plate you’re finished with.

Nobody said anything. Outside, the generator changed pitch and changed back. Rain came off the trailer roof in singles now, spaced out, each drop landing on the aluminum step with a small flat knock.

The man in the fleece—Quarles, she’d called him Quarles twice since the meeting started—leaned over and read the screen. He had an ID on a lanyard and a burn hole in the left sleeve of the fleece. Theo could not have told anyone what the man’s face looked like. The burn hole was plenty.

Then the woman with the camera bag read the screen, and then somebody turned the phone around, and Theo was looking at a photograph of himself.

He didn’t recognize himself for a second. He recognized the jacket. It was the blue one with the paint on the cuff, and it was on a body standing in a crowd in front of the church hall, with one of the sealed faces pushed up on top of his head like a man who’d forgotten he was wearing a hat, and his hand on the corner of a banner.

Under it, in the visitors’ bureau’s own font:

Visitors pose with masks from the Marsh family collection.

Visitors pose with Cynthia Marsh and family.

Visitors pose with the masks and Cynthia Marsh and family.

“Okay,” Theo said.

Voss scrolled.

“Is that the historical society page?” Theo said. “They run that every year. They run it in the spring, too.”

“It’s the county’s. It’s on the front. It’s the second item under Fall in the Valley.” She turned the phone back around, but she didn’t put it down. “There’s a message. It came in at six and I didn’t see it, because I was in here.” A pause with some work in it. “Somebody at the regional office wrote: You’re looking for the Marsh family? Cynthia Marsh hasn’t worked a case in twenty years. She does demonstrations. The county pays her.”

“Not much,” Theo said.

“There’s more.”

“There’s always more.”

Voss read it out flat, the way she’d read a case number. “Did nobody think to check.” Then, after a moment, “Your file is from 1974.” She set the phone down again. “There’s a little yellow face at the end of it. I’m not going to describe the little yellow face.”

Theo rubbed his thumb along the edge of the table, where the laminate had lifted. “My mother’s been on that website since March. She was on it before March. She was on it in the winter. They put her next to the pancake breakfast.”

“Mr. Marsh.”

“She likes the pancake breakfast.”

Voss took her glasses off and held them, and looked at the table, and did not put them back on. Somewhere behind Theo the woman with the camera bag said, quietly, “Oh,” which was not the sound a person makes about a pancake breakfast.

Somebody had scrolled further. There was a video now, a local news clip, forty seconds, and Voss turned the phone so he could see it, because it was about his family and there was no way around that.

A lawn. The bandshell behind it, the white one with the bad acoustics. Two hundred people on the grass, mostly women, mostly over sixty, in sneakers and windbreakers, all of them stepping on the two and the four. His mother was at the front with her back to them and her arms up, working the whole crowd like a choir.

Theo hadn’t known she’d done it again this year. She would have told him. She would have told him twice, and the number would have gone up between tellings.

“Last year it was a hundred and forty,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Voss put her glasses back on. “So when you told me you do the parade.”

“I do the parade.”

“The parade.”

“Somebody has to. It’s four miles and it takes five hours and there’s a drum.”

She looked at him for a while. It was not a hostile look. It was worse; it was the look of a person rearranging a page in her head. “I stood in a school office and told an assistant principal that my office was consulting on the tradition elements. Do you understand what I’m going to have to write tonight?”

“Write that you got the wrong kid.”

“That’s not what I’m going to write.”

“Then write that you got the right kid and he does the parade.”

She laughed once, through her nose, and let it go. “I owe you a ride home and an apology. In that order.”

“It’s four miles.”

“It’s four miles and it’s raining.”

“It stopped.”

“It’s thinking about it.”

Theo stood. He got his jacket off the back of the chair and had one arm in it when Quarles said, “Before you go.”

“Sir—“

“Two questions.”

“You said that four questions ago.”

“These are about the figures.” Quarles wiped the table with the flat of his sleeve, first one side, then the other, and then laid the photographs out the way you’d lay out something that could tear. “The report calls them attendants. That’s the word we use when we don’t know what else to call a thing.”

There were four of them, in two pairs, on a dark surface with dust fanned out in front like snow drifted against a door. The photographs were good—flat gray light, a scale bar, pencil numbers along the border—the kind of care that costs somebody an hour a picture.

Somebody had knocked the faces off. The paint everywhere else was still bright: red and black checks, the sett, angle to angle, which in that valley had gone for a hundred years on everything that had to be recognized from across a field. One figure wore a coat in fine lines that came up close into feathers. And the faces were gone, chipped away or worn away or simply never finished, and the mouths were still cut in. Whatever had taken the faces had left the mouths.

Theo put his finger on the first pair. “That one’s got his hands up at his chest, wrapped like he’s holding a drum. That one’s got his arm out straight. That’s a release. He’s shooting.”

“At what?”

“Whatever’s coming. They’re set with the beasts—the two carved animals at the threshold.”

“The report calls those zoomorphic guardians.”

“The report can call them whatever it wants.” He moved his finger. “These two are the beasts’ crew. One drives them, one shoots. That’s the whole job at the door.”

Quarles wrote something down. Voss did not.

“The other pair,” Theo said. “The near one’s walking.”

“Walking where?”

“It’s a step.” He turned the photo slightly, as if the angle were the problem. “Heel first, toe turned out, weight back. My mother calls it the crossing. You take it going in.”

“Going into what?”

He stopped, because the only way he knew how to say it was from the road to the door, and that sounded worse out loud than it did in his head. “It’s a step,” he said. “There’s a step and there’s a shape and you do them together. That’s all a hand form is.”

“And the other one’s hands.”

“Look at the fingers.”

“They’re damaged.”

“They’re not damaged. That’s carved on purpose. The index goes behind, the middle comes over, the little finger hooks, and the thumb crosses the top.” Theo shrugged. “It’s called the Collar. That’s just what it’s called.”

Quarles’s pen had stopped. “Collar.”

“It holds. That’s the whole of it. It doesn’t put anything into anybody and it doesn’t take anything out. It holds you where you are.”

Hollis, from the door, said, “Holds you how.”

“Still,” Theo said. “Like—“ and he lifted his hands without thinking about it, the way you’d show somebody how to hold a tennis racket.

“Wait,” Voss said.

“It’s a photograph. It’s in the photograph.”

“Do it again. Slower.”

“Why?”

“Because I am going to have to write a sentence tonight and I’m not going to write the boy moved his hands.”

Theo’s ears went hot. He said, “Write the boy described a hand position.”

“Mr. Marsh.”

He did it again, slower, and he did it wrong, because the ring finger would not go where it had to go, the way it never goes. His mother’s voice arrived from somewhere behind his own teeth, patient and unbearable: no. The ring finger goes behind.

He put the ring finger behind, and the middle came over, and the little finger hooked, and the thumb crossed the top, and it was easy. It had always been easy, and he thought, there, the way he always did.

“And the ring finger goes behind the middle one,” Quarles said, writing.

The phone rang.

Voss picked it up. “Voss.” She listened. She turned her shoulder to the room, which meant something, and then she turned back and pressed the speaker. “Say that again.”

The voice on the other end was thin and hurried, and it came with a corridor’s worth of noise behind it, a page turning, a machine beeping on a slow interval. “His hands,” the man said. “It’s been about ten minutes. The nurse went to straighten his fingers and she couldn’t get them open.”

“His hands are clenched.”

“That’s what I’d have said, but they’re not. They’re not a fist. The fingers are—“ A pause with a lot of noise in it. “There’s a shape in them. There’s a shape in them, Delia, and the nurse has been at it for ten minutes with oil and she can’t get them out of the shape.”

Nobody in the trailer moved. The generator went through its cycle and the lights dimmed a half step and came back.

Quarles picked the photograph up off the table and held it at arm’s length, and then he put it down very carefully, and then he pressed both palms flat on the table. “The man in the hospital,” he said. “That’s what he’s doing with his hands. I’ve been looking at that photograph for two days and I didn’t see it until this kid put his fingers together.”

“Gerald—“

“Something’s got him and it isn’t letting go.”

“That’s not a diagnosis,” Voss said.

“No. It’s a description.”

Theo’s right hand was fine. He had pulled his fingers apart with his left when they stuck, and there had been a click in the knuckles, and now the hand was fine, and he was holding it against his thigh under the table.

“I made a shape with my hands,” he said.

The room turned.

“That’s all I did. I copied a photograph.” His voice came out higher than he wanted and he dropped it. “You should be checking him for parasites. There’s a lab that does it, the state hospital runs the panel, it’s a blood test. And if that’s negative, get the air in that chamber sampled, because it’s been closed since before anybody thought to open it, and there’s mold down there and there’s animal waste down there, and there are fungi that do things to people’s nervous systems that nobody can explain until somebody explains them—“

“Mr. Marsh,” Hollis said.

Theo stopped.

“The last one,” Hollis said. “You haven’t said what he’s doing.”

Theo looked down at the fourth photograph because it was easier than looking at anyone, and because he was, at that moment, extremely grateful to be asked an easier question.

“The coat’s got a bird on it,” he said.

“Feathers with eyes in them,” Quarles said. “The young woman who did the textiles for a living called the eyes a repeating motif.”

“They’re eye-spots. That’s the bird. In the burial set the bird is the one that goes up. It isn’t decoration, it’s a direction. It’s which way you’re sending the person.”

“Sending them where?”

“Up,” Theo said. “Over. Out. Pick a word.”

“And the hands?”

“He’s holding something. Except he isn’t.” Theo tapped the picture. “There’s a gap there, between the fingers, and it’s carved for a reason. He’s holding something that isn’t there.”

“There was nothing in the room with him,” Quarles said. “I’ve been through those photographs twice. There was nothing on the floor and nothing in the box.”

“Then the thing he was holding is missing.” Theo sat back. “They work in pairs. One of them carries the thing and the other one works the form, because you need two hands for a form and you can’t do both. So one of the pair is empty-handed and the other one is holding something nobody’s found yet.”

Hollis said, “And the pair is aggressive.”

“They’re at the back of the room, they’re paired with a form that holds you still, and one of them’s carrying a tool that isn’t there. I wouldn’t call it friendly.”

Hollis nodded slowly, as though Theo had passed him something and he was checking the weight. Then he said, “There’s an old answer to this.”

“Which is?”

“Find the thing. Work it. Put it under.”

Quarles looked up. “Put it—“

“Under. In the ground. Where nobody picks it up again.”

There was a pause in which the rain stopped entirely.

“It’s not out of the ground,” Quarles said.

“No.”

“It’s not out of the ground, and it’s worth more than my house and yours put together, and if it comes up out of that chamber it goes into a case in Pittsburgh with a guard on the door and a card that says do not touch.”

“Then we can’t put it under,” Hollis said. “Not yet.”

Quarles stood up. He took his glasses off the table, put them on his forehead, took them off his forehead, folded them, and put them in his shirt pocket, and then he said, “I’ve been down twice. I know where they were set. It’s not far past the first room, and I can find it with my eyes shut, which is more than I can say for anybody else in this trailer.”

“Gerald, that’s—“ one of the two from the state office started.

“Difficult. Yes.”

“And Professor Nye went down once,” Voss said.

“Yes. Thank you, Delia.”

“It’s a genuine concern.”

“I deadlift three hundred pounds,” Quarles said. “I’m sixty-one and I don’t sit down for a living.” He pulled his jacket off to prove it, and there were arms in there, actual arms, and then he put the jacket back on and did not look at anyone.

Voss said nothing at all, and wrote something down.

They settled it in six minutes. Quarles, the two from the state office, two men from the contractor’s security outfit with sidearms and cards and the bored look of men who had spent a week guarding a fence, and Hollis. Voss: “I’m paper. I stay on top.”

They went out to the cut, and Theo went with them because nobody told him where to stand.

The capstone was where the road project had found it, cracked from the northeast corner, and at the middle of the crack it was wide enough to drop a boot through. They had taken out as little as they could and shored the rest with timber and steel, and somebody had bolted a bracket over the top of that so the whole thing looked like a mouth with braces.

Hollis had a small brazier and a bundle of slips, and he crouched by the crack and burned one. He didn’t use a lighter. He snapped his fingers and the paper took with a flash and a puff of sweet smoke, and then he fed the rest in one at a time.

Theo had his hands in his pockets. “Rosin,” he said.

Voss, beside him, said, “What?”

“Rosin dust in the air and a punk stick between the fingers. It’s a trick. They did it at the fourth-grade assembly and the whole gym screamed.” He nodded at the flash. “Old one. Very old one. My mother could do it with a cigarette.”

Voss got out her notebook and wrote one line and underlined it, once, and then closed the notebook and put it in her coat, and Theo could not see what it said, and he was fairly sure he did not want to.

They harnessed up. The two from the contractor’s outfit went first, which was the only sensible order and also the order that made everyone feel worse. Quarles went third, with the rope squeaking through the bracket, and he was down and out of sight in nine seconds, which was faster than Theo expected a man to disappear.

Hollis went last. He paused at the lip with one hand on the timber and looked back at Theo, and said, “You don’t have to be here for this part.”

“I know.”

“Then you can go home.”

“Okay,” Theo said, and did not move.

The radio clicked. Static, and then Quarles’s voice with a lot of the chamber in it: “We’re down. Roof’s holding. Moving to the first room. All good.”

Voss set the radio on the tailgate of the truck and pulled two stools over, and that was how Theo ended up doing a worksheet on momentum at nine o’clock at night in a parking area behind a fence with a state archaeologist’s team somewhere under his feet.

He got the first problem right and the second one wrong, twice, and the second time was arithmetic, which was worse.

The young one with the trowel had been handed a video camera by somebody and was filming everything, and after a while he filmed Theo, and the camera came in and held on him for a long four seconds, and Theo turned his face toward the fence and put his pencil down.

“Sorry,” the kid said. “Record’s the record.”

“I know.”

“There might be a documentary.”

“There isn’t going to be a documentary.”

“No,” the kid agreed, and went back to filming the crack.

Voss had her own camera out, an old thing with a dent in the body, and she was shooting the crack too, then the truck, then her own boots, then the crack again. “Look at this,” she said, showing Theo the back of it. “Ten years old. The county won’t buy us new ones. Everybody else on God’s earth has gone to mirrorless and we’re shooting on a body that eats batteries.”

“It’s fine,” Theo said.

“It’s not fine. That’s not the point. The point is I’ll get back and all eleven of these will be soft.”

She put the camera down and sat for a moment with her hands on her knees, and said, “You don’t believe any of this. Not one bit.”

Theo held up his hand, thumb and forefinger nearly touching. “About that much.”

“And yet you knew the hands.”

“I know the parade.”

“That’s not the parade.”

“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”

“He’s in a hospital being fed through a tube, and your answer is parasites.”

“It’s a good answer. It’s got a lab behind it.” Theo turned his pencil over. “Congress holds hearings about this stuff. Televised ones. In a big room, with better stationery than yours. It doesn’t make it mine.”

Voss was quiet a second. “No,” she said. “It doesn’t.” Then she said, “Fine. Treat it like an excavation. That’s what everybody else here is doing.”

“I’m going to finish this problem and then I’m going home.”

The air over the crack was warm.

He noticed it when he stood up to put his pencil in his jacket, and then he stood there, because it was not a small warmth. It came up out of the ground in a steady column, warmer than the night, warmer than anything, and it smelled like the inside of a wet basement and, under that, something sweet.

Rustling. Fine and dry and continuous, the sound of a broom on concrete three rooms away, or a hundred small things moving over one another.

Theo looked around. The kid with the camera was checking the battery. One of the two from the state office who had stayed above ground was eating something out of a plastic bag. Voss was back on her camera, tipping it toward the floodlights to see how badly it flared.

“What’s that sound,” Theo said.

“What sound?”

He listened. It stopped.

“Never mind.”

He looked down into the crack.

Black, and the black was not empty, it had a bottom to it somewhere a long way down, and he could see one edge of the timbering and nothing else. The warmth came up past his face. Then the rustle started again, and while he was looking, something round went past the gap, low, fast, catching the light—yellow-orange, like a coin, like a lamp behind a door, like an eye without a body, and he could not have said afterward which one it was.

His arms went cold. Not cold—wet. Something on him, along his forearms, across the back of his neck, a thin clinging film, water in a place that had no water, and the feeling of standing in a room where the conversation has stopped because everyone has turned to look.

He straightened up.

“Voss.”

She was looking at the back of her camera. “Hm.”

He looked at the three of them again. The kid’s battery went in and the kid’s thumb found the button. The man with the bag folded the top of it over and put it in his coat. Voss tipped the camera at the lights and swore at the flare. Nobody turned around. Nobody wiped the back of his neck.

So he folded the worksheet in half, and then in quarters, and put it in his jacket.

Voss pulled the two pages out of her bag—the ones from before, the ones with the two lines at the bottom for two signatures—and set them on the tailgate in front of him with a pen across the top.

“Read it on your own time,” she said. “If you’re going to be here, you’re a consultant, and consultants get the paper. Don’t lose it.”

Below them the radio clicked twice, and Quarles’s voice came up out of the ground, half eaten by the chamber: “—at the door. All good.”

Theo picked up the pen. The crack breathed warm on the back of his neck, and nothing else came out of it, and the rain began again.