The machine was gentler than it used to be under an Irishman named Reilly. They sailed down the midnight streets together, through little streams of water ahead of them to dampen the trivia before combing it into its gullet. It was like a whale, with a mouth full of bristle, swimming in the moonlight seas, slaking in ticket minnows and gum-wrapper minnows, feeding and feeding in the silvery school of confetti that lived in the shallows of the asphalt river. Mr. Britt felt like a Greek god, even with his concave chest, bringing gentle April showers with him with the sprinklers, cleansing the world of dropped sin.
Halfway up Elm Road, whiskers bristling, great mustache hungrily eating of the street, Mr. Britt, in a fit of sport, swerved his great storm machine from one side of the street to the other, just so he could suck up a rat.
“Got him!”
Mr. Britt had seen the large running gray thing, leprous and horrible, skittering across under a lamp flare. Whisk! And the foul rodent was now inside the machine, being digested by smothering tides of paper and autumn leaf.
He went on down the lonely rivers of night, bringing and taking his storm with him, leaving fresh-whisked and wetted marks behind him.
“Me and my magical broomstick,” he thought. “Me a male witch riding under the autumn moon. A good witch. The good witch of the East; wasn’t that it, from the old Oz book when I was six with whooping cough in bed?”
He passed over innumerable hopscotch squares which had been made by children drunk with happiness, they were so crooked. He sucked up red playbills and yellow pencils and dimes and sometimes quarters.
“What was that?”
He turned upon his seat and looked behind.
The street was empty. Dark trees whirled past, swishing down branches to tap his brow, swiftly, swiftly. But in the midst of the stiff thunder he had thought he heard a cry for help, a kind of violent screaming.
He looked in all directions.
“No, nothing.”
He rode on upon the whirl-away brooms.
“What!”
This time he almost fell from his saddle the cry was so apparent. He looked at the trees to see if some man might be up one, yelling. He looked at the pale streetlights, all bleached out with so many years of shining. He looked at the asphalt, still warm from the heat of the day. The cry came again.
They were on the edge of the ravine. Mr. Britt stopped his machine. The bristles still spun about. He stopped one rotary broom, then the other. The silence was very loud.
“Get me out of here!”
Mr. Britt stared back at the big metal storage tank of the machine.
There was a man inside the machine.
“What did you say?” It was a ridiculous thing to ask, but Mr. Britt asked it.
“Get me out of here, help, help!” said the man inside the machine.
“What happened?” asked Mr. Britt, staring.
“You picked me up in your machine!” cried the man.
“I what?”
“You fool; don’t stand there talking, let me out, I’ll suffocate to death!”
“But you couldn’t possibly have gotten into the machine,” said Mr. Britt. He stood first on one foot, then on another. He was very cold, suddenly. “A thing as big as a man couldn’t fit in up through the vent, and anyway, the whiskers would have prevented you from behind taken in, and anyway I don’t remember seeing you. When did this happen?”
There was a silence from the machine.
“When did this happen?” demanded Mr. Britt.
Still no answer. Mr. Britt tried to think back. The streets had been entirely empty. There had been nothing but leaves and gum-wrappers. There had been no man, anywhere. Mr. Britt was a thoroughly clear-eyed man. He wouldn’t miss a pedestrian if one fell.
Still the machine remained strangely silent. “Are you there?” said Mr. Britt.
“I’m here,” said the man inside, reluctantly. “And I’m suffocating.”
“Answer me, when did you get inside the machine?” said Britt.
“A while ago,” said the man.
“Why didn’t you scream out then?”
“I was knocked unconscious,” said the man, but there was a quality to his voice, a hesitation, a vagueness, a slowness. The man was lying. It came to Mr. Britt as a shock. “Open up the top,” said the inside man. “For God’s sake, don’t stand there like a fool talking, of all the ridiculous inanities, a street cleaner at midnight talking to a man inside his machine, what would people think.” He paused to cough violently and spit and sputter. “I’m choking to death, do you want to go up for manslaughter?”
But Mr. Britt was not listening. He was down on his knees looking at the metal equipment, at the brushes under the machine. No, it was quite impossible. That opening was only a foot across, under there, no man could possibly be poked up into it. And anyway he hadn’t been going fast. And anyway the rotary brushes would have bounced a man ahead of the machine. And anyway, he hadn’t seen a man!
He got to his feet. He noticed for the first time that the top of his forehead was all perspiration. He wiped it off. His hands were trembling. He could hardly stand up.
“Open up, and I’ll give you a hundred dollars,” said the man inside the machine.
“Why should you be bribing me to let you out?” said Mr. Britt. “When it is only natural that I should let you out free, after all, if I picked you up I should let you out, shouldn’t I? And yet, all of a sudden, you start offering me money, as if I didn’t intend to let you out, as if you knew that I might know a reason for not letting you out. Why is that?”
“I’m dying,” coughed the man, “and you debate. God, God, man!” There was a fierce wrestling and a pounding inside. “This place in here is full of dirt and leaves and paper. I can’t move!”
Mr. Britt stood there. “It is not possible,” he said, clearly and firmly, at last, “that a man could be in my machine. I know my machine. You do not belong in there. I did not ask you to be in there. It is your responsibility.”
“Bend closer …”
“What?”
“Listen!”
He put his ear to the warm metal.
“I am here,” whispered the high voice, the sweet high fading voice. “I am in here and I wear no clothes.”
“What!”
He felt his hands jerk, his fingers twitch in on themselves. He felt his eyes squeeze up almost to blind him.
“I am in here and I have no clothes,” said the voice. And after a long while, “Don’t you want to see me? Don’t you? Don’t you want to see me? I’m in here now. I’m waiting …”
He stood by the side of the great machine for a full ten seconds. The echo of his breathing jumped off the metal a foot from his face.
“Did you hear what I said?” whispered the voice.
He nodded.
“Well then, open the lid. Let me out. It’s late. Late at night. Everyone asleep. Dark. We’ll be alone …”
He listened to his heart beating.
“Well?” said the voice.
He swallowed.
“What are you waiting for?” said the voice, lasciviously.
The sweat rolled down his face.
There was no answer. The fierce breathing that had been in the machine for a while now suddenly stopped. The thrashing stopped.
Mr. Britt leaned forward, put his ear to the machine.
He could hear nothing now but a kind of soft inner squeaking under the lid. And a sound like one hand, cut off from the body perhaps, moving, struggling by itself. It sounded like a small thing moving.
“I climbed in to sleep,” said the man.
“Oh, now you are lying,” said Mr. Britt.
He climbed up on his silent machine and sat in the leather saddle. He put his foot down to start the motor.
“What are you doing?” the voice shouted from under the lid suddenly. There was a dull stir. There was a sound as of a large body again. The heavy breathing returned. It was so sudden it made Mr. Britt almost fal
l from his perch. He looked back at the lid.
“No, no, I won’t let you out,” he said.
“Why?” cried the failing voice.
“Because,” said Mr. Britt, “I have my work to do.” He started the machine and the whisking thunder of the brushes and the roar of the motor drowned out the screams and shouts of the captured man. Looking ahead, eyes wet, hands hard on the wheel, Mr. Britt took his machine brooming down the silent avenues of the night town, for five minutes, ten minutes, half an hour, an hour, two hours more, sweeping and scouring and never stopping, sucking in tickets and combs and dropped soup-can labels.
At four in the morning, three hours later, he drew up before the vast rubbish heap that slid down the hill in a strange avalanche to the dark ravine. He backed the machine up to the edge of the avalanche and for a moment cut the motor.
There was not the slightest sound from inside the machine.
He waited, but there was nothing but the beat of his heart in his wrists.
He flipped a lever. The entire cargo of branches and dust and paper and tickets and labels and leaves fell back and piled in a neat pile upon the edge of the ravine. He waited until everything had slid out upon the ground. Then he flipped the lever, slamming the lid shut, looked back once at the silent mound of rubbish, and drove off down the street.
He lived only three houses from the ravine. He drove his machine up before his house, parked, and went in to bed. He lay in the quiet room, not able to sleep, from time to time getting up and going to look out the window at the ravine. Once he put his hand on the doorknob, half opened the door, shut it, and went back to bed. But he could not sleep.
It was only at seven in the morning as he was brewing some coffee, when he heard the sound, that he knew any relief. It was the sound of young Jim Smith, the thirteen-year-old boy, who lived across the ravine. Young Jim came whistling down the street, on his way to the lake to fish. Every morning he came along in mists, whistling, and always he stopped to rummage through the rubbish left by Mr. Britt to seek dimes and quarters and orange bottle caps to pin to his shirtfront. Mr. Britt moved the window curtains aside to peer out into the early dawn mists to see little Jim Smith walk jauntily by carrying a fish pole over one shoulder, and on the end of the line at the top of the fish pole, swinging back and forth like a gray pendulum in the mists, was a dead rat.
Mr. Britt drank his coffee, crept back in bed, and slept the sleep of the victorious and innocent.
The Highest Branch on the Tree
I often remember his name, Harry Hands, a most unfortunate name for a fourteen-year-old boy in ninth grade in junior high in 1934, or in any other year, come to think of it. We all spelled it ‘Hairy’ and pronounced it with similar emphasis. Harry Hands pretended not to notice and became more arrogant and smart-ass, looking down his nose at us dumb peasants, as he called us. We didn’t see at the time that it was our harassment that made him pretend at arrogance and display wits that he probably only half had. So it went with Hands and his incredible moniker Hairy.
The second memory is often of his pants up a tree. That has stayed with me for a lifetime. I have never for a month forgotten. I can’t very well say I recalled his pants up a tree every day, that would not be true. But at least twelve times a year I would see Harry in full flight and us ninth graders after him, myself in the lead, and his pants in the air flung up to the highest branch and everyone laughing there on the school grounds and a teacher leaning out a window and ordering one of us, why not me, to climb and bring those pants down.
“Don’t bother,” Harry Hands said, blushing there, revealed in his boxer BVD underwear. “They’re mine. I’ll get ‘em.”
And Harry Hands climbed up, almost fell, and reached his pants but did not put them on, just clutched to the bole of the tree and when we all gathered below the tree, knocking each other’s elbows and pointing up and laughing, simply looked down at us with the strangest grin and …
Peed.
That’s right.
Took aim and peed.
There was a mob flight of indignant teenagers, off away, but no one came back to climb up and drag him down, for when we started to come back, wiping our faces and shoulders with handkerchiefs, Harry yelled down:
“I had three glasses of orange juice for lunch!”
So we knew he was still loaded and we all stood thirty feet back from the tree yelling euphemisms instead of epithets, the way our folks had taught us. After all, it was another time, another age, and the rules were observed.
Harry Hands did not put on his pants up there nor did he come down even though the principal came out and ordered him to leave and we backed off and heard the principal shouting up at Harry that the way was clear now and he could come down. But Harry Hands shook his head: no way. And the principal stood under the tree and we yelled to him to watch out, Harry Hands was armed and dangerous and hearing this the principal backed off, hastily.
Well, the long and short of it was, Harry Hands never came down, that is, we didn’t see him do it, and we all got bored and went home.
Someone later said he came down at sunset or midnight, with no one around to see.
The next day, the tree was empty and Harry Hands was gone forever.
He never came back. He didn’t even come back to protest to the principal, nor did his parents come or write a letter to lodge a complaint. We didn’t know where Harry Hands lived, and the school wouldn’t tell us, so we couldn’t go find him, perhaps with the faintest notion that maybe we should apologize and ask him back. We knew he wouldn’t come, anyway. What we had done was so horrendous, it could never be forgiven. As the days passed and Harry Hands didn’t show, most of us lay in bed at night and wondered how we would feel if someone had “pantsed” us and threw our pants to the highest branch of some tree in front of God and everyone. It caused a lot of unexpected bed tossing and pillow punching, I don’t mind saying. And most of us didn’t look up at that tree for more than a few seconds before turning away.
Did any of us ever sweat over the dire consequences? Did we perspire on the obvious that perhaps he might have fallen just at midnight, to be harvested as broken bones at dawn? Or did we imagine he might have lurched himself out in a high-jump of doom, with the same shattered consequence? Did we think his father might lose his job or his mother take to drink? We wrestled none of these or if we did, shut our traps to preserve our silent guilt. Thunder, as you know, occurs when lightning sucks back up its track and lets two handsful of white-hot air applaud. Harry Hands, whose parents were never seen, withdrew to a bang of thunder that only we ninth-grade second-rate criminals heard while waiting for sleep, which never came, to arrive.
It was a bad end to a good year and we all went off to high school and a few years later, going by the schoolyard, I saw that the tree had got some sort of disease and had been cut down, which was a relief. I didn’t want some future generation to be surprised at the ghost shape of a pair of pants up there, hurled by a mob of apes.
But I run ahead of my story.
Why, you ask, why did we do that to Harry Hands? Was he some sort of super-villain who deserved our Christian persecution, a dumb sort of semi-crucifixion to appall the neighbors and ruin school history so that in the annals of time people would say, “1934, wasn’t that the year that—” And fill in the blanks with Look, ma, no pants, no Hands.
What, in sum, was H.H.’s crime sublime?
It’s a familiar case. Happens every year, every school, everywhere at one time or another. Except our case was more spectacular.
Harry Hands was smarter than anyone else in the whole school.
That was the first crime.
His second crime, worse than the first, was he didn’t do a better job of hiding it.
It reminds me of an actor friend who a few years ago drove up to the front of my house in a brand-new super-powered XKE twelve-cylinder Jaguar and yelled at me, “Eat your heart out!”
Well, Harry Hands, in effect, had arrived at our schoo
l from somewhere back East—hadn’t we all?—and flaunted his IQ from the first hour of day one. Through every class from just after breakfast to just before lunch to last afternoon bell his arm was permanently up, you could have raised a flag on it, and his voice was demanding to be heard and damn if he wasn’t right when the teacher gave him the nod. A lot of collective bile was manufactured that day under all our tongues. The miracle was we didn’t rip his clothes off on that first day. We delayed because it was reported that in gym he had put on the boxing gloves and bloodied three or four noses before our coach told everyone to run out and do six laps around the block to lance our boils.