Driving Blind

“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 the hell out of all of you.”

“So that’s how 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.