“Harry put the phone down on the glass top of the counter and walked off, leaving Thomas or Richard’s voice to fog up the lures.
“And Oscar didn’t think any more about it till the next Thursday when here comes Harry wanting to use the phone again. He smells like a wino’s grave, Oscar says, but he’s got his hair all slicked back again and he seems to have gone to some trouble to pick the burrs out of his fur coat. He rummages down in this cracked two-gallon goldfish bowl he’s got with him, takes out a bunch of old rags and a dented can of antiseptic spray, and finally finds a quarter stuck with a wad of gum to the chipped blade of a Boy Scout hatchet he’s got. Harry offers Oscar the quarter for the call. Oscar takes it. You spend as many years as Oscar has with your hands in a worm bucket, you begin to understand something about self-respect. So Harry calls himself a cab, then he carries his fishbowl out back behind the ladies’ latrine.
“Here comes the cab.
“Here comes Harry out from behind the latrine. He’s got his left hand wrapped up in the rags and he’s looking a little pale, but in high spirits. He takes an old Styrofoam hamburger box out of the pocket of his fur and hands it to the cab driver along with a Hershey wrapper, and he tells him to deliver it to the Honorable Ms. Madeline Westerton Alborough-Belle up at the courthouse, who’ll take care of the fare.
“ ‘Is he crazy?’ the cab driver asks Oscar.
“ ‘Harry might be crazy,’ Oscar tells him, ‘but Harry doesn’t have a boat laying on the bottom underneath the pumps which the ranger kept trying to put an abandoned sticker on, not to mention the overdue dock tab, like a certain driver.’
“So the cab driver drove on up toward the courthouse and Harry sat down on that rock over there to wait.”
“You forgot the note, Pop,” Old Woody said. “Tell what the Hershey wrapper said.”
“Don’t encourage the old poop,” Mrs. Harley said.
“The note said,” Pop said, “ ‘I am holding your brother Harry, whose little finger is enclosed, for ransom; said ransom being spare deck chair from the pool house; or $9.95 cash, which sum shall buy a plastic chair from the Sears spring catalogue. Please reply via return taxi. Sincerely, Harry.’
“So Harry’s sitting on that rock there. And an hour later here comes an ambulance with Harry’s finger in a cooler, and a doctor wanting to stick it back on for him.
“ ‘No lawn chair?’ Harry says.
“The doctor says nobody told him anything about a lawn chair, and asks the ambulance driver if he’s sure they have the right address. Oscar says they do.
“Harry says, ‘Why bother to reattach a finger of so little apparent worth, eh?’ Then, Oscar said, he takes a hit off his Bugs Bunny bottle and ambles off toward the bridge with this weird little smile on his face.
“Well, sir, summer came and went, and it was a beautiful fall, as you’ll recall, but it got cold early. First of October, the ground was already hard and that concrete bridge was collecting a chill. The truants started complaining Harry was raiding their hidey holes so often it wasn’t worth them skipping school. Joe Harley here had the idea of pulling his old army cot out of the attic and hauling it down to the bridge along with a stack of quilts. But Harry wouldn’t hear of it. It wasn’t the chill in the ground that was making him cold these days, he said.
“And sure enough, right before Halloween, here comes Harry with his hair slicked back again, except this time he was too drunk to find his quarter. Oscar told him he didn’t care diddly-twit about the quarter but Harry couldn’t use the phone if he meant to cut off his finger again. But like Oscar said, you got a man who you know to be honest and generally at peace with the world standing in front of you with a hatchet in a fishbowl and wearing a pair of pink fuzzy house slippers, how are you supposed to know what rules to apply to him? So Oscar lets him use the phone. Harry calls himself a taxi, then goes round back of the latrine.”
“Pop! I’m warning you!” Mrs. Harley said.
“Leave out the gory part, will you, Pop?” Joe Harley said, “or else I won’t get my supper.”
“Except when the cab pulls up, Harry doesn’t come out. Oscar and the cab driver go round back of the latrine. And there’s old Harry passed out in the weeds. He’s holding a hatchet in his remaining attached hand and, in the fingers of the now-detached aforementioned gory part, a note addressed to the Honorable Ms. Madeline Westerton Alborough-Belle which read: ‘Please advise whether enclosed hand is worth a deck chair.’
“Oscar called the ambulance, and we didn’t see hide nor hair of Harry till the next spring. Day after Mother’s Day, wasn’t it? Harry comes walking down the hill from the bus stop sporting a shiny two-pronged hook where his hand used to be, a wad of crisp cash, and the new Sears catalogue.
“Turns out he’d spent the winter tied to the couch of the TV room of some fancy recuperation hospital out East. Come Mother’s Day weekend, his doctor walked in and declared him dried out, rested up, and mentally competent. And his sister the judge said, ‘What’ll it be now, Harry? A lawn chair or a new name plate for the office door?’
“Harry said, ‘A lawn chair, thanks.’
“The doctor said maybe there was some mistake. But the judge said, ‘Or maybe not,’ and handed Harry five hundred dollars cash. Which, as Harry said, wasn’t a lawn chair, but it was as close as Her Honor was likely to get to a fair and practical settlement, given her sensibilities.
“So here’s Harry back at the river with his wad minus the eighty cents for the bus and the four dollars for the catalogue. Mrs. Harley there and Old Woody’s wife helped him pick the orange and green double-weave plastic recliner with three positions and its own attached plastic head cushion out of the catalogue. Harry gave Joe Harley here the full price of thirty-nine ninety-five out of his wad, then bought a round of orange pop for everybody and left the change from the five hundred dollars on the counter in the bait shack. Oscar declared free soda till the wad ran out as long as nobody told the truants.
“Old Woody and Joe drove out to Sears in Old Woody’s truck, bought the lawn chair fully assembled, and hauled it down to the bridge. Harry picked it up and put it down in half a dozen spots before he found just the right patch of weeds to set it in. Pickier than Mrs. Harley, Joe Harley said.”
“Joe Harley!”
“And I never saw a more contented sight,” Pop said, “than that first day when Harry T. Elbow took off his hook and shoes, tossed his new teeth in the river, and stretched himself out under the bridge on that new lawn chair. Makes you wonder. Yes, sir, it sure does make you wonder.”
“I’ll tell you what it makes me wonder,” the ranger said, grinning at the women. “What it makes me wonder is, how true is that story?”
Pop gave the ranger a look.
“True as it’s going to get,” he said finally.
Joe Harley winked at the ranger. The ranger winked back at him, chuckled, and checked his watch.
“Still, it does make you wonder,” Pop said again as if he hadn’t heard himself the first time. He shook his head, sighed, and reached down to haul in the bait chain that ran over the stone wall into the water. Joe Harley went cross-eyed winking at Pop, Old Woody, and the women all at once. The chain cleared the ledge. A six-pack of orange soda dangled from the end of it, caught in the clasp of a one-handed man’s shiny two-pronged hook.
“Got time for a cold soda, ranger?” Pop said. “As I said before, it’s free. More or less.”
Like Kin
by Brendan DuBois