“What do you think, Pop?” He winked at Pop. “You figure if we wrap it up in a hamburger box, the judge’ll give us five hundred for it?”
Pop’s eyebrows twitched and he gave another suck on the pipe.
Mrs. Harley hurrumphed on her bench. Old Woody’s wife whewed and put her feet back up. Joe Harley winked at Pop again and stuffed the hand into his bucket to take to Joe Junior’s boy, who already had a rubber chicken nailed to his bed.
Old Woody shuffled the cards. Pop watched a duck paddle by.
“Will somebody please tell me,” the ranger said finally, “who is Harry Elbow and why did Mrs. Woodrow think she’d caught his hand?”
Pop took the pipe from his teeth and peeped at the ranger through his eyebrows.
“Do you mean,” Pop said, “you haven’t met Harry Elbow yet?”
“No, I haven’t, Mr. Torda.”
“Down under the bridge beside the drinking fountain? Fellow dressed in flowered shorts and ankle-length fake fur coat? Stringy grey hair down to here?”
“No, sir, I haven’t seen him.”
“Carries a lawn chair around with him? A real nice double-weave Sears lawn chair with attached pillow?”
“You old fool,” Mrs. Harley hollered across Old Woody’s wife’s head. “Can’t you see we’re trying to eat a ham sandwich over here? The ranger doesn’t want to hear that old story anyhow.”
Joe Harley winked.
Pop shrugged and picked up his cards.
The duck squawked.
“A double-weave plastic lawn chair?” the ranger said. He put his shiny new ranger shoe up on the stone retainer wall and leaned on his knee, grinning like he knew he was about to be hoodwinked.
“With attached pillow,” Pop said. Pop nodded at Joe Harley. Joe Harley winked. Old Woody grinned and made himself comfortable on the wall. Pop nodded again and peeped at the ranger through his eyebrows.
“Seems like yesterday,” he said, “but I figure it’ll be more like three years come August since old Harry Elbow first showed up. But without the lawn chair, of course; the lawn chair came later. As I recall, it was the truants who first passed the word there was some skinny old bum making himself at home down under the bridge beside the drinking fountain, eating out of the garbage cans and poking around in the river for hidey holes. You remember, Joe Harley, those boys complaining how old Harry could drink up that wine quicker than they could hide it? Always left half, though, they said. Those boys all graduated last spring, one of them went to the Marines, they say. Well, sir, it wasn’t but a couple of weeks and we started seeing him up this way. I remember the first time I saw him walk straight up to that trash can there and sort it out. Aluminum cans in one pile, newspapers in another pile, for the collectors, you understand. Every time he came to a moldy french fry, he’d pop it into his mouth, close his eyes, and smile like it was a piece of dark chocolate fresh in the mail from his long-lost love. Wore a plaid suit in those days, Harry did. With no shirt and a pair of plastic thongs. And one day around mid-September he straightened what was left of the seams in that old suit and walked over here stinking to high heaven with his hair slicked back behind his big ears and offered me his hand.
“ ‘My name is Harry T. Elbow the Third,’ he said. ‘How do you do?’
“So I shook his hand and told him folks call me Pop Torda and offered him part of the bench. We sat there a while, him watching the mallards bob for shadows, and me thinking how, for a bum, Mr. Harry T. Elbow had real quiet hands. You’ll notice how not many men these days seem at peace with their hands, and if you find one who does, he’s either too honest to talk to or he’s been bad so long the guilty fidget’s been burned out of him. When out of the blue, Harry says, ‘Mr. Torda, it has come to my attention—’
“Even back then Harry had to slip his words out real quiet around that bad tooth.
“ ‘It has come to my attention,’ he said, ‘that the position of park bum is vacant.’
“ ‘Well, sir,’ I said, ‘I suppose it is.’
“ ‘I’m your man. I’m your man,’ Harry said, and he shook my hand in both of his like I’d just offered him tenure at eighty thousand a year with full benefits. I never saw a man so pleased to accept his lot.
“You remember that, Old Woody? Well, sir, you can imagine the rumors that are going to fly around a man like that. The truants made him out to be a narc, of course. Old Ranger Asel, bless his soul, swore it was just a matter of time before he came across Harry’s face on a missing persons notice from some ritzy loony bin out East. The salmon fishermen figured him for one of those that, when he died, it’d turn out he’d left half a million cash to a parakeet. Not that any one rumor wasn’t half true, but the whole time there’s Harry down under the bridge getting skinnier and smellier, but generally thriving, and more than willing to tell you his truth when you asked.
“ ‘Harry T. Elbow the Third, and proud of it,’ he’d say.
“It was that tooth, you see. Maybe we should’ve asked him to write it out, but when a man stands in front of you in mismatched galoshes eating a moldy Twinkie and telling you his name is Harry T. Elbow, you pretty much let him say it and go on about your business. Especially when he’s chasing the Twinkie down with cheap wine out of a plastic Bugs Bunny baby bottle. Well, sir, to make a long story short—”
“Hah!” Old Woody’s wife called over. The ranger grinned at her.
“Harold C. Alborough the Third. That’s what Harry’d been saying all along,” Pop said.
“You’re getting ahead of yourself, Pop,” Old Woody said.
“Am I?”
The ranger chuckled, shook his head, and reached for a handful of Old Woody’s popcorn.
“As I was saying,” Pop said. “Harry was generally thriving down there under the bridge. But even a life that suits a man to a T will start to wear on him after he reaches a certain age. Harry never complained, mind you, but you could see that, after a couple of winters huddled up under that concrete bridge, his back was starting to hurt him some. He was bending up out of the garbage cans a little slower and leaving the truants’ wine bottles a might less than half full.
“So one day toward the end of May last spring, here comes Harry with his hair slicked back asking to use the phone behind the counter in the bait shack. Oscar told him to go ahead, and Harry tells the operator he wants to make a collect call to Mrs. Harold C. Alborough the Second at One Alborough Circle, Shaker Heights. Oscar said you could’ve knocked him over with a frog’s feather when the lady came on the phone and Harry called her mommy.
“ ‘Mommy?’ Harry said, and asked after her rosebushes just like he’d been calling her every day at noon all along.
“The rosebushes, Harry’s mommy said, were the same as they were when he left and what did he want? Then Harry asked after Old Grandfather out in the koi pond and his mommy said a fish was a fish and would Harry get to the point? So Harry said he’d be most appreciative if she would send somebody down to the bait shack with one of the spare reclining deck chairs from the attic of the pool house.
“ ‘I have never in my life given a good deck chair to a bum and I don’t intend to start now,’ Harry’s mommy said, and hung up.
“Harry stood there a minute, Oscar said, staring at the orange soda, and then he asked to use the phone again.
“ ‘Go right ahead,’ Oscar said.
“Harry placed another collect call, asking to speak to Mr. Richard or Mr. Thomas Alborough of Alborough Bros., Inc., whichever one was available, and darned if the operator didn’t put him right through.
“ ‘Harry? Is that you, Harry?’ said Richard or Thomas, Oscar couldn’t tell which. ‘Harry, why don’t you just come home, everybody misses you, everybody’s been worried sick, you know that, don’t you, Harry? We’ll get you the best doctor, you can have your old office back, Harry. Your name is still on the business stationery, do you realize that? We’ll—’