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 thehellout of all of you.”
“Sothat’show 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.”
“Yousure?” 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.
1997
The end
