Harry must have been the sweet and ever-smiling type, his thoughts his own but Ovaltine mild. No. You have to stir Ovaltine, and I doubt Harry was ever stirred. Hard-working and unhurried and shy around ladies, all the well-scrubbed virtues of the lonely midlife bachelor. Harry must have gleamed with them. The sort of man a widow or maiden aunt invites over for an early dinner but still feels safe and knows the neighbors won't talk. That must have been Harry. But when I was about five or six, I preferred to think of Harry as flint-eyed killer.
My grandparents were only in their early sixties then and still in the large house where they'd raised their daughters. Their youngest was wrapping college when I sprang on the scene to be fed, quieted and kept away from open flames. They became second parents to me just at the beginning of their retirements. Vital enough to discipline, mellow enough to love as only grandparents can. I was too fortunate by half. Next door to them lived my great-grandparents. My own house was one street over, where the other set of great-grandparents lived on the floor beneath me. All off the boat Italians, save one. Those that were off the boat had disembarked seventy years earlier but their accents were as fresh as if it were yesterday, or as if Chico Marx gave elocution lessons. Anyway, I had two homes.
But Harry was there and was not of us. He was a tenant. Harry lived on the second floor apartment in the back of my grandparents' home, accessible from an exposed wooden staircase painted white. He was always there, even when unseen, but not of us. I couldn't figure it. I hated it. He scared the shit out of me. He fascinated the shit out of me.
It was simple. They should have known better. They never should have answered me when I asked what Harry did for a living.
"He drives a school bus."
"No he doesn't."
"Yes, he does. He drives a school bus."
"He doesn't drive mine."
"There are other buses going to other schools than yours, Eric."
"..."
"Oh yeah, but then I think when he's not a bus driver, Harry is a private detective."
Bomb blast. In my brain.
I got sent outside "for air".
The backyard wasn't that sprawling and the grass uneven. There was a creaky tool shed and a very tall tree with a tire swing. Plenty of ambient scenery for whatever leaped to mind. But any make-believe setting I could graft onto that backyard, those were all cardboard embarrassments. Harmless enough in passing the time, but they were still flimsy and once caught you froze in that mortified way of children whose imagined places have just melted like spun sugar.
But those stairs, those exposed wooden stairs painted white. They had a fresh menace. No convenient third-act wrap up of a tv show here. This was leaner, uncertain, real. People got hurt, on purpose, that's who he dealt with. Nothing thrilling about that. Except it was. A private detective. A real one. Those stairs climbed to... well, who knew? Harry was an intruder whose presence was tolerated by everyone but me. That was bad enough. He had been plastic knife at a nice dinner. Now he was a switchblade.
And then the day when he he appeared at the top of the stairs, locked his door and started coming down. That day, Harry wore a hat. A fedora, snap brim not porkpie. Harry came down the white stairs with care, maybe a little gently at the knees and forearms doing the awkward hinge swing around his gut. I was rooted to the spot, dead center of the backyard. I didn't blink. Without pulling my eyes off Harry and his hat I knew I was too far from any cover. Sitting duck. My stomach hollowed out.
That's what I remember. What I wish now is that I'd been a different sort of boy. One in whom fear meant forward. I never spoke to Harry, not once, ever, and certainly not that day with the snap brim fedora. I turned on my heels and ran like hell. I hid behind the tire swing tree. The tree was cover, but cover means you can peek from safety and if Harry wore his hat, that meant shit was about to get real. Bad guys, a concealed .45, beautiful women who burst from their clothes while motionless.
My right hand reached out and laid on the bark while I eased myself out just the width of one eye. Harry's Florsheims made even thuds on the plank steps. When he landed at the paved path, I studied him. It was a bulky suit, nearly black or murky brown, and the snap brim hat much lighter. A hat he wore with several suits, or the two he owned. He had a happy, earned sort of gut so I doubted he could move that quickly but it lived on him well.
Harry's face surprised me. Pink, almost scalded pink, as if he'd just had an old-fashioned shave and they finished with a hot towel, or he fell asleep in the sun. What I could see of his hair was chalk white and trimmed at the sides and back with the tell-tale exactitude of the barbershop. I couldn't see his eyes, only the fleshy squints, but they seemed tame. His face was full and round and uncomplicated. There was a light smile sloped across it as he turned. I guess if every time you step out of your apartment there's a kid who bolts in terror to watch you from behind a tree, you learn to find the humor in it. Or maybe he was smiling at something else.
Harry shuffled along the path and hooked a right down the driveway, and that's all I remember of him. I wondered at the time if he'd seen me, hoping he had, hoping like hell he hadn't, expecting he must have or he was a lousy detective and would get shot on a case in no time. I looked for the shape of a gun under the suit jacket and found none, but expected I just didn't know the secrets of the trade. More than anything I wanted to know where Harry was off to. He never wore the hat to drive school buses, that I knew. Who had hired him? Was he scared? Did he ever leave thinking he wouldn't come back?
When I imagine now where he went that day, the scene is different: Mid-afternoon, a weekday, the sun is still high and hot and streets mostly empty. The bar and grill is dim and a little damp with horizontal blinds mostly shut and the game on in the corner but just a murmur and there are only one or two other grey half-moon faces hovering over a Daily News. Harry gets cozy over a couple Miller High Life's, in a glass not a can, and the foam on his lip he wipes off with the back of his hand. He doesn't smoke, makes him cough. There's a jukebox but who cares. There's a pool table that's lit up so the dust shows, flecking the air. It smells of weak beer and yesterday's Camels and the quiet fading of men. There's a bartender who's used to the long hours, never gets antsy or need to chat. I think of Harry as someone who wanted to be around others but be left alone.
I also think that Harry only ever wore the hat when it was time to be a private detective. Being a school bus driver must have made him his regular money, but the detective gig? He wore the costume. He had that little smirk.
I think Harry and I shared a knack for hiding and watching people, then for telling ourselves stories that were more fun than what was really there.
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