And, Jesus off the cross and running rings around us, wouldn’t you know as we made the fifth lap, panting, tasting blood, here came Harry Hands, fresh as a potted daisy, jogging along, nice and easy, passing us and adding another lap to prove he was tireless.
By the end of the second day he had no friends. No one even tried to be one. It was hinted that if anyone took up with this Hands guy, we would beat the tar out of them next time we did laps and were out of sight of our coach.
So Harry Hands came and went alone, with a look of the insufferable book reader and, worse, book rememberer, he forgot nothing and would offer data if someone paused, stuttered, or broke wind.
Did Harry Hands see his crucifixion coming? If he did, he smiled at the prospect. He was always smiling and laughing and being a good chum, although no one smiled or laughed back. We took our homework home. He did it in class in the last five minutes of the hour and then sat there, mightily pleased with his intellectual strengths, moistening his vocal chords for the next recitation.
Fade out. Fade in.
We all went away to life.
After about forty years it got so I only thought about Harry Hands once every two years instead of once every two months. It was in the middle of a sidewalk in downtown Chicago where I walked when I had two hours between trains, on my way to New York, that I met this stranger coming toward me, unrecognizable, and he had almost passed when he froze in midstride and half turned to me and said:
“Spaulding?” he said. “Douglas Spaulding?”
It was my turn to freeze and I mean I turned cold, for I had this ungodly feeling I was confronted by a ghost. A whole flock of geese ran over my grave. I cocked my head and eyed the stranger. He was dressed in a beautifully tailored blue-black suit with a silk shirt and a reticent tie. His hair was dark and moderately gray at the temples and he smelled of a mild cologne. He held out a well-manicured hand.
“Harry Hinds,” he said.
“I don’t think …” I said.
“You are Douglas Spaulding, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“Berendo Junior High School, class of summer 1935, though I never graduated.”
“Harry,” I said and stopped, his last name a stone in my mouth.
“Use to be Hands. Harry Hands. Changed it to Hinds, late spring 1935—”
Jut after you climbed down, I thought.
The wind blew around one of those Chicago corners.
I smelled pee.
I glanced to left and right. No horses in sight. No dogs.
Only Harry Hinds, aka Harry Hands waiting for me to open up.
I took his fingers as if they contained electric shocks, shook them quickly, pulled back.
“My goodness,” he said. “Am I still poison?”
“No, but—”
“You look well,” he said quickly. “Look as if you’ve had a good life. That’s nice.”
“You, too,” I said, trying not to look at his expensively manicured nails and brightly polished shoes.
“I can’t complain,” he said, easily. “Where are you headed?”
“The Art Institute. I’m between trains. I have almost two hours’ layover and always go to the museum to look at that big Seurat.”
“It is big, isn’t it, and beautiful. Mind if I come partway?”
“No, no. Please, join up.”
We walked and he said, “It’s on the way to my office, anyway, so we’ll have to talk fast. Give me your resume, for old times’ sake?”
We walked and I told. Not much for there wasn’t much to detail. Fair life as a writer, nicely established, no international fame but a few fans across country and enough income to raise a family. “That’s it,” I said. “In a nutshell. End of resume.”
“Congratulations,” he said and seemed to mean it, nodding. “Well done.”
“What about you?” I said.
“Well,” he said, reluctantly. It was the only time in all the years, then and now, I ever saw him hesitate. He was looking sidewise at a building facade which seemed to make him nervous. I glanced over and saw:
HARRY HINDS AND ASSOCIATES
FIFTH AND SIXTH FLOORS
Harry caught my gaze and coughed. “It’s nothing. I didn’t mean to bring you here. Just passing—”
“My God,” I said. “That’s quite a building. Do you own the whole thing?’
“Own it, built it,” he admitted, brightening somewhat, leaning toward the old young Harry of forty years back. “Not bad, eh?”
“Not bad at all,” I said, gasping.
“Well, I’d better let you get on to the Seurat,” he said, and shook my hand. “But hold on. Why not? Duck inside for just sixty seconds. Then I’ll let you run. Yes?”
“Why not,” I said, and he took my elbow and steered me, opening the door ahead of me and bowing a nod and leading me out into the center of a spacious marble lobby, an area some sixty feet high and eighty or ninety feet across, in the center of which was an arboretum with dense jungle foliage below and a buckshot scattering of exotic birds, but with only one singular dramatic piece in the middle.
It was a single tree of some forty or fifty feet in height, but it was hard to tell what kind of tree it was, maple, oak, chestnut, what? because there were no leaves on the tree. It was not even an autumn tree with the proper yellow and red and orange leaves. It was a barren winter tree that reached for a stark sky with empty twigs and branches.
“Ain’t she a beaut?” said Harry Hinds, staring up.
“Well,” I said.
“Remember when old Cap Trotter, our gym coach, used to make us go out and run around the block six or seven times to teach us manners—”
“I don’t recall—”
“Yes, you do,” said Harry Hinds, easily, looking at the interior sky. “Well, do you know what I used to do?”
“Beat us. Pull ahead and make the six laps. Win and not breathe hard. I remember now.”
“No, you don’t.” Harry studied the glass roof seventy feet above. “I never ran the laps. After the first two I hid behind a parked car, waited for the last lap to come around, then jumped out and beat the hell out of all of you.”
“So that’s how you did it?” I said.
“The secret of my success,” he said. “I’ve been jumping from behind cars on the last lap for years.”
“God damn,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” he said, and studied the cornices of the interior court.
We stood there for a long moment, like the pilgrims at Lourdes waiting for the daily miracle. If it happened, I was not aware. But Harry Hinds was. He pointed with his nose and eyebrows up, up along that huge tree and said, “See anything up there?”
I looked and shook my head. “Nope.”
“You sure?” said Harry.
I looked again and shook my head.
“The highest branch on the tree?” said Harry.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Funny.” Harry Hinds snorted faintly. “How come I see it clearly?”
I did not ask what it was he was seeing.
I looked up at the bare tree in the middle of an arboretum in the center of the lobby of the? Harold Hinds Foresight Corporation.
Did I expect to see the phantom outlines of a pair of pants way up there on the highest branch?
I did.
But there was nothing there. Only a high branch and no clothing.
Harry Hinds watched me looking at the tree and read my thought.
“Thanks,” he said, quietly.
“What?” I said.
“Thanks to you, to all of you, for what you did,” he said.
“What’d we do?” I lied.
“You know,” he said, quietly. “And thanks. Come on.”
And before I could protest, he led the way to the men’s and raised his brows, nodding, did I need to go? I did.
Standing at the porcelains, unzipped, Harry looked down as he watered the daisies.
“You know,
” he smiled, “there isn’t a day in my life, when I do this, that I don’t remember that day forty years ago and me up the tree and you down below and me peeing on all of you. Not a day passes I don’t remember. You, them, and peeing.”
Standing there, I froze and did nothing.
Harry finished, zipped up, and stood remembering.
“Happiest day of my life,” he said.
A Woman is a Fast Moving Picnic
The subject was women, by the singles and in the mobs.
The place was Heeber Finn’s not-always-open but always-talking pub in the town of Kilcock, if you’ll forgive the implication, in the county of Kildare, out along the River Liffey somewhat north and certainly beyond the reach of Dublin.
And in the pub, if only half full of men but bursting with talk, the subject was indeed women. They had exhausted all other subjects, hounds, horses, foxes, beers as against the hard stuff, lunatic mother-in-laws out of the bin and into your lives, and now the chat had arrived back to women in the pure state: unavailable. Or if available, fully dressed.
Each man echoed the other and the next agreed with the first.
“The dreadful fact is,” said Finn, to keep the converse aroar, “there is no single plot of land in all Ireland which is firm or dry enough to lie down with purpose and arise with joy.”
“You’ve touched the bull’s-eye and pierced the target,” said Timulty, the local postmaster, in for a quick one, there being only ten people waiting at the post-office. “There’s no acre off the road, out of sight of the priest or out of mind of the wife, where physical education can be pursued without critical attention.”
“The land is all bog,” Nolan nailed it, “and no relief.”
“There’s no place to cavort,” said Riordan, simply.
“Ah, that’s been said a thousand times this night,” protested Finn. “The thing is, what do we do about it?”
“If someone would only stop the rain and fire the priests,” suggested Nolan.
“That’ll be the day,” cried all, and emptied their drinks.
“It reminds me of that Hoolihan tragedy,” said Finn, refilling each glass. “Is that remembered?”
“Say it, Finn.”
“Well, Hoolihan wandered this woman who was no Madonna, but neither was she last year’s potatoes, and they passed a likely turf which seemed more flatland than swamp and Hoolihan said, Trot on out on that bog. If it holds, I’ll follow. Well, she trotted out and turns around and—sinks! Never laid a hand on her. Before he could shout: No! she was gone!”
“The truth is,” Nolan obtruded, “Hoolihan threw her a rope. But she slung it round her neck instead of her waist and all but strangled in the pulling out. But I like your version best, Finn. Anyways, they made a song of it!”
And here Nolan began, but everyone put in to finish the verse:
“The sinking of Molly in old Kelly’s bog
Is writ in the Lord Mayor’s roll call and a log
Poor Molly went there with the Hoolihan boy
And sank out of sight with one last shriek of joy.
He took her out there for what do you suppose?
And was busy at ridding the lass of her clothes,
But no sooner deprived of each last seam and stitch
Than she wallowed and sank and was lost in the ditch.
The ducks they all gaggled and even the hog
Wept Christian salt-tears for Moll sunk in the bog—”
“It goes on from there,” said Nolan. “Needless to say the Hoolihan boy was distraught. When you’re thinking one thing and another occurs, it fair turns the mind. He’s feared to cross a brick road since without testing for quicksand. Shall I go on?”
“No use,” cried Doone, suddenly, no more than four foot ten inches high but terrible fast plummeting out of theaters ahead of the national anthem, the local Anthem Sprinter, as everyone knows. Now, on tiptoe, he boxed the air around the pub and voiced his protest. “What’s the use of all this palaver the last thousand nights when it’s time to act? Even if there was a sudden flood of femininity in the provinces with no lint on them and their seams straight, what would we do with them?”
“True,” admitted Finn. “God in Ireland just tempts man but to disown him.”
“God’s griefs and torments,” added Riordan. “I haven’t even wrestled Adam’s old friend Eve late nights in the last row of the Gayety Cinema!”
“The Gayety Cinema?” cried Nolan in dread remorse. “Gah! I crept through the dark there once and found me a lass who seemed a salmon frolicking upstream. When the lights came on, I saw I had taken communion with a troll from the Liffey bridge. I ran to commit suicide with drink. To hell with the Gayety and all men who prowl there with dreams and slink forth with nightmare!”
“Which leaves only the bogs for criminal relief and drowned in the bargain. Doone,” said Finn, “do you have a plan, you with that big mouth in the tiny body?”
“I have!” said Doone, not standing still, sketching the air with his fists and fingers as he danced to his own tune. “You must admit that the various bogs are the one place the Church puts no dainty toe. But also a place where a girl, representing the needy, and out of her mind, might test her will to defy the sinkage. For it’s true, one grand plunge if you’re not careful and no place to put her tombstone. Now hear this!”
Doone stopped so all might lean at him, eyes wide, and ears acock.
“What we need is a military strategist, a genius for scientific research, in order to recreate the Universe and undo the maid. One word says it all. Me!”
“You!” cried all, as if struck in a collective stomach.
“I have the hammer,” said Doone. “Will you hand me the nails?”
“Hang the picture,” said Finn, “and fix it straight.”
“I came here tonight with Victory in mind,” said Doone, having slept late till noon and gone back to bed at three to adjust the sights and rearrange our future. “Now, as we waste our tongues and ruin our nervous complexions, the moon is about to rise and the empty lands and hungry bogs await. Outside this pub, in boneyards of handlebars and spokes, lie our bikes. In a grand inquest, should we not bike on out to peg and string the bogs for once and all, full of brave blood and booze, to make a permanent chart, map the hostile and innocent-looking flats, test the sinkages, and come back with the sure knowledge that behind Dooley’s farm is a field in which if you do not move fast, you sink at the rate of two or three inches per minute? Then beyond, Leary’s pasture in which his own cows have the devil’s time grazing quick enough to survive the unsteady turf and live on the road. Would that not be a good thing to know for the rest of our lives so we can shun it and move to more substantial grounds?”
“My God,” said all in admiration. “It would!”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Doone ran to the door. “Finish your drinks and mount your bikes. Do we live in ignorance or at last play in the fields, as it ‘twere, of the Lord?”
“The fields!” The men drank.
“Of the Lord!” they finished, plummeting Doone out the door.
“Time!” cried Finn, since the pub was empty. “Time!”
No sooner on the road, with coattails flying as if heaven lay ahead and Lucifer behind, than Doone pointed now here, now there with his surveyor’s nose:
“There’s Flaherty’s. Terrible quick. You’re out of sight, a foot a minute and no one the wiser if they look the other way.”
“Why, Christ himself,” said someone in the sweating biking mob, “might not make it across!”
“He’d be the first and last and no one between!” Finn admitted, catching up with the team.
“Where are you taking us, Doone?” gasped Nolan.
“You’ll see soon enough!” Doone churned his sprockets.
“And when we get there,” asked Riordan, suddenly struck with the notion, “in the penultimate or final sinkage tests who will be the woman?”
“True!” gasped all, as Doone veer
ed the path and sparked his wheels, “there’s only us.”
“Never fear!” said Doone. “One of us will pretend to be the poor put-upon maid, maiden, courtesan—”
“Hoor of Babylon?” volunteered Finn.
“And who would that be?”
“You’re looking at his backside!” cried Doone, all elusive speed. “Me!”
“You!”
That almost swerved them into multiple collisions. But Doone, fearing this, cried, “And more surprises, if all goes well. Now, by God, on with the brakes. We’re here!”
It had been raining, but since it rained all the while, no one had noticed. Now the rain cleared away like a theater curtain, to reveal:
Brannagan’s off-the-road-and-into-the-woods pasture, which started in mist, to be lost in fog.
“Brannagan’s!” Everyone braked to a stillness.
“Does it not have an air of the mysterious?” whispered Doone.
“It does,” someone murmured.
“Do you dare me to be brave?”
“Do that,” was the vote.
“But are you serious, Doone?”
“Jesus,” said Doone. “It’ll be no test for judgments and sinkage tests if someone for starters doesn’t do more than jog about the territory like mindless bulls. There must be two people making tracks, beyond. Me, playing the woman for sure. And some volunteer amongst you.”
The men inched back on their bike-seats.
“Ah, you and your scientific logic will be the death of brewing and the burial of gin,” said Finn.
“But Doone, your verisimilitude, if there is such a word. It’ll be hard for us to conjure you up as a female.”
“Why not,” offered Riordan, “go fetch a real lass here? A gal from the nunnery—”
“Nunnery!” cried all, shocked.
“Or one of the wives?” said Doone.
“Wives?” cried all, in worse shock.
And they would have driven him like a spike into the earth, had they not realized he was yanking their legs to steer them crooked.