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.