Driving Blind

That was the first crime.

His second crime, worse than the first, was he didn’t do a better job of hiding it.

It reminds me of an actor friend who a few years ago drove up to the front of my house in a brand-new super-powered XKE twelve-cylinder Jaguar and yelled at me, “Eat your heart out!”

Well, Harry Hands, in effect, had arrived at our schoo

l from somewhere back East—hadn’t we all?—and flaunted his IQ from the first hour of day one. Through every class from just after breakfast to just before lunch to last afternoon bell his arm was permanently up, you could have raised a flag on it, and his voice was demanding to be heard and damn if he wasn’t right when the teacher gave him the nod. A lot of collective bile was manufactured that day under all our tongues. The miracle was we didn’t rip his clothes off on that first day. We delayed because it was reported that in gym he had put on the boxing gloves and bloodied three or four noses before our coach told everyone to run out and do six laps around the block to lance our boils.

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.”