Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 32, No. 13, Mid-December 1987

The Ransom of Harry Elbow’s Hand by Su Fidler

Old Woody’s wife caught what appeared to be Harry Elbow’s other hand on a 4 lb. test line while fishing for trout off the stone retainer wall between the boat ramp and the bait shack. She’d have been almost as surprised if it’d been a fish. She only came down to the river of an evening to rest her feet in the fresh air, and that particular evening she was sitting on the bench with the sun in her eyes trying to explain pacemakers to Mrs. Harley, who was thinking of having one put in Joe Harley, when she felt the tug on her line. Figuring it to be another old shoe, Old Woody’s wife went right on quoting the microwave sign at 7-11 and reeled the thing in without even looking. So it was Mrs. Harley who screamed first.

The hand was pointing its swollen, trembling finger upriver when Old Woody’s wife finally got it focused through the top of her bifocals. She let go a yip and flung the hand, rod and all, in the direction of the pinochle bench. Old Woody scrambled off the bench to save the rod from going over the ledge. Joe Harley nabbed the hand in his net. And Pop Torda peered at it from under his bushy white eyebrows, then gave three loud sucks on his pipe. By the time the new ranger got up from the bait shack to check on the screaming, it was over.

Joe Harley pulled the scabby, warty rubber monster hand out of the net and held it up by the thumb to drain.

“What do you think, Pop?” He winked at Pop. “You figure if we wrap it up in a hamburger box, the judge’ll give us five hundred for it?”

Pop’s eyebrows twitched and he gave another suck on the pipe.

Mrs. Harley hurrumphed on her bench. Old Woody’s wife whewed and put her feet back up. Joe Harley winked at Pop again and stuffed the hand into his bucket to take to Joe Junior’s boy, who already had a rubber chicken nailed to his bed.

Old Woody shuffled the cards. Pop watched a duck paddle by.

“Will somebody please tell me,” the ranger said finally, “who is Harry Elbow and why did Mrs. Woodrow think she’d caught his hand?”

Pop took the pipe from his teeth and peeped at the ranger through his eyebrows.

“Do you mean,” Pop said, “you haven’t met Harry Elbow yet?”

“No, I haven’t, Mr. Torda.”

“Down under the bridge beside the drinking fountain? Fellow dressed in flowered shorts and ankle-length fake fur coat? Stringy grey hair down to here?”

“No, sir, I haven’t seen him.”

“Carries a lawn chair around with him? A real nice double-weave Sears lawn chair with attached pillow?”

“You old fool,” Mrs. Harley hollered across Old Woody’s wife’s head. “Can’t you see we’re trying to eat a ham sandwich over here? The ranger doesn’t want to hear that old story anyhow.”

Joe Harley winked.

Pop shrugged and picked up his cards.

The duck squawked.

“A double-weave plastic lawn chair?” the ranger said. He put his shiny new ranger shoe up on the stone retainer wall and leaned on his knee, grinning like he knew he was about to be hoodwinked.

“With attached pillow,” Pop said. Pop nodded at Joe Harley. Joe Harley winked. Old Woody grinned and made himself comfortable on the wall. Pop nodded again and peeped at the ranger through his eyebrows.

“Seems like yesterday,” he said, “but I figure it’ll be more like three years come August since old Harry Elbow first showed up. But without the lawn chair, of course; the lawn chair came later. As I recall, it was the truants who first passed the word there was some skinny old bum making himself at home down under the bridge beside the drinking fountain, eating out of the garbage cans and poking around in the river for hidey holes. You remember, Joe Harley, those boys complaining how old Harry could drink up that wine quicker than they could hide it? Always left half, though, they said. Those boys all graduated last spring, one of them went to the Marines, they say. Well, sir, it wasn’t but a couple of weeks and we started seeing him up this way. I remember the first time I saw him walk straight up to that trash can there and sort it out. Aluminum cans in one pile, newspapers in another pile, for the collectors, you understand. Every time he came to a moldy french fry, he’d pop it into his mouth, close his eyes, and smile like it was a piece of dark chocolate fresh in the mail from his long-lost love. Wore a plaid suit in those days, Harry did. With no shirt and a pair of plastic thongs. And one day around mid-September he straightened what was left of the seams in that old suit and walked over here stinking to high heaven with his hair slicked back behind his big ears and offered me his hand.

“ ‘My name is Harry T. Elbow the Third,’ he said. ‘How do you do?’

“So I shook his hand and told him folks call me Pop Torda and offered him part of the bench. We sat there a while, him watching the mallards bob for shadows, and me thinking how, for a bum, Mr. Harry T. Elbow had real quiet hands. You’ll notice how not many men these days seem at peace with their hands, and if you find one who does, he’s either too honest to talk to or he’s been bad so long the guilty fidget’s been burned out of him. When out of the blue, Harry says, ‘Mr. Torda, it has come to my attention—’

“Even back then Harry had to slip his words out real quiet around that bad tooth.

“ ‘It has come to my attention,’ he said, ‘that the position of park bum is vacant.’

“ ‘Well, sir,’ I said, ‘I suppose it is.’

“ ‘I’m your man. I’m your man,’ Harry said, and he shook my hand in both of his like I’d just offered him tenure at eighty thousand a year with full benefits. I never saw a man so pleased to accept his lot.

“You remember that, Old Woody? Well, sir, you can imagine the rumors that are going to fly around a man like that. The truants made him out to be a narc, of course. Old Ranger Asel, bless his soul, swore it was just a matter of time before he came across Harry’s face on a missing persons notice from some ritzy loony bin out East. The salmon fishermen figured him for one of those that, when he died, it’d turn out he’d left half a million cash to a parakeet. Not that any one rumor wasn’t half true, but the whole time there’s Harry down under the bridge getting skinnier and smellier, but generally thriving, and more than willing to tell you his truth when you asked.

“ ‘Harry T. Elbow the Third, and proud of it,’ he’d say.

“It was that tooth, you see. Maybe we should’ve asked him to write it out, but when a man stands in front of you in mismatched galoshes eating a moldy Twinkie and telling you his name is Harry T. Elbow, you pretty much let him say it and go on about your business. Especially when he’s chasing the Twinkie down with cheap wine out of a plastic Bugs Bunny baby bottle. Well, sir, to make a long story short—”

“Hah!” Old Woody’s wife called over. The ranger grinned at her.

“Harold C. Alborough the Third. That’s what Harry’d been saying all along,” Pop said.

“You’re getting ahead of yourself, Pop,” Old Woody said.

“Am I?”

The ranger chuckled, shook his head, and reached for a handful of Old Woody’s popcorn.

“As I was saying,” Pop said. “Harry was generally thriving down there under the bridge. But even a life that suits a man to a T will start to wear on him after he reaches a certain age. Harry never complained, mind you, but you could see that, after a couple of winters huddled up under that concrete bridge, his back was starting to hurt him some. He was bending up out of the garbage cans a little slower and leaving the truants’ wine bottles a might less than half full.

“So one day toward the end of May last spring, here comes Harry with his hair slicked back asking to use the phone behind the counter in the bait shack. Oscar told him to go ahead, and Harry tells the operator he wants to make a collect call to Mrs. Harold C. Alborough the Second at One Alborough Circle, Shaker Heights. Oscar said you could’ve knocked him over with a frog’s feather when the lady came on the phone and Harry called her mommy.

“ ‘Mommy?’ Harry said, and asked after her rosebushes just like he’d been calling her every day at noon all along.

“The rosebushes, Harry’s mommy said, were the same as they were when he left and what did he want? Then Harry asked after Old Grandfather out in the koi pond and his mommy said a fish was a fish and would Harry get to the point? So Harry said he’d be most appreciative if she would send somebody down to the bait shack with one of the spare reclining deck chairs from the attic of the pool house.

“ ‘I have never in my life given a good deck chair to a bum and I don’t intend to start now,’ Harry’s mommy said, and hung up.

“Harry stood there a minute, Oscar said, staring at the orange soda, and then he asked to use the phone again.

“ ‘Go right ahead,’ Oscar said.

“Harry placed another collect call, asking to speak to Mr. Richard or Mr. Thomas Alborough of Alborough Bros., Inc., whichever one was available, and darned if the operator didn’t put him right through.

“ ‘Harry? Is that you, Harry?’ said Richard or Thomas, Oscar couldn’t tell which. ‘Harry, why don’t you just come home, everybody misses you, everybody’s been worried sick, you know that, don’t you, Harry? We’ll get you the best doctor, you can have your old office back, Harry. Your name is still on the business stationery, do you realize that? We’ll—’

“Harry put the phone down on the glass top of the counter and walked off, leaving Thomas or Richard’s voice to fog up the lures.

“And Oscar didn’t think any more about it till the next Thursday when here comes Harry wanting to use the phone again. He smells like a wino’s grave, Oscar says, but he’s got his hair all slicked back again and he seems to have gone to some trouble to pick the burrs out of his fur coat. He rummages down in this cracked two-gallon goldfish bowl he’s got with him, takes out a bunch of old rags and a dented can of antiseptic spray, and finally finds a quarter stuck with a wad of gum to the chipped blade of a Boy Scout hatchet he’s got. Harry offers Oscar the quarter for the call. Oscar takes it. You spend as many years as Oscar has with your hands in a worm bucket, you begin to understand something about self-respect. So Harry calls himself a cab, then he carries his fishbowl out back behind the ladies’ latrine.

“Here comes the cab.

“Here comes Harry out from behind the latrine. He’s got his left hand wrapped up in the rags and he’s looking a little pale, but in high spirits. He takes an old Styrofoam hamburger box out of the pocket of his fur and hands it to the cab driver along with a Hershey wrapper, and he tells him to deliver it to the Honorable Ms. Madeline Westerton Alborough-Belle up at the courthouse, who’ll take care of the fare.

“ ‘Is he crazy?’ the cab driver asks Oscar.

“ ‘Harry might be crazy,’ Oscar tells him, ‘but Harry doesn’t have a boat laying on the bottom underneath the pumps which the ranger kept trying to put an abandoned sticker on, not to mention the overdue dock tab, like a certain driver.’

“So the cab driver drove on up toward the courthouse and Harry sat down on that rock over there to wait.”

“You forgot the note, Pop,” Old Woody said. “Tell what the Hershey wrapper said.”

“Don’t encourage the old poop,” Mrs. Harley said.

“The note said,” Pop said, “ ‘I am holding your brother Harry, whose little finger is enclosed, for ransom; said ransom being spare deck chair from the pool house; or $9.95 cash, which sum shall buy a plastic chair from the Sears spring catalogue. Please reply via return taxi. Sincerely, Harry.’

“So Harry’s sitting on that rock there. And an hour later here comes an ambulance with Harry’s finger in a cooler, and a doctor wanting to stick it back on for him.

“ ‘No lawn chair?’ Harry says.

“The doctor says nobody told him anything about a lawn chair, and asks the ambulance driver if he’s sure they have the right address. Oscar says they do.

“Harry says, ‘Why bother to reattach a finger of so little apparent worth, eh?’ Then, Oscar said, he takes a hit off his Bugs Bunny bottle and ambles off toward the bridge with this weird little smile on his face.

“Well, sir, summer came and went, and it was a beautiful fall, as you’ll recall, but it got cold early. First of October, the ground was already hard and that concrete bridge was collecting a chill. The truants started complaining Harry was raiding their hidey holes so often it wasn’t worth them skipping school. Joe Harley here had the idea of pulling his old army cot out of the attic and hauling it down to the bridge along with a stack of quilts. But Harry wouldn’t hear of it. It wasn’t the chill in the ground that was making him cold these days, he said.

“And sure enough, right before Halloween, here comes Harry with his hair slicked back again, except this time he was too drunk to find his quarter. Oscar told him he didn’t care diddly-twit about the quarter but Harry couldn’t use the phone if he meant to cut off his finger again. But like Oscar said, you got a man who you know to be honest and generally at peace with the world standing in front of you with a hatchet in a fishbowl and wearing a pair of pink fuzzy house slippers, how are you supposed to know what rules to apply to him? So Oscar lets him use the phone. Harry calls himself a taxi, then goes round back of the latrine.”

“Pop! I’m warning you!” Mrs. Harley said.

“Leave out the gory part, will you, Pop?” Joe Harley said, “or else I won’t get my supper.”

“Except when the cab pulls up, Harry doesn’t come out. Oscar and the cab driver go round back of the latrine. And there’s old Harry passed out in the weeds. He’s holding a hatchet in his remaining attached hand and, in the fingers of the now-detached aforementioned gory part, a note addressed to the Honorable Ms. Madeline Westerton Alborough-Belle which read: ‘Please advise whether enclosed hand is worth a deck chair.’

“Oscar called the ambulance, and we didn’t see hide nor hair of Harry till the next spring. Day after Mother’s Day, wasn’t it? Harry comes walking down the hill from the bus stop sporting a shiny two-pronged hook where his hand used to be, a wad of crisp cash, and the new Sears catalogue.

“Turns out he’d spent the winter tied to the couch of the TV room of some fancy recuperation hospital out East. Come Mother’s Day weekend, his doctor walked in and declared him dried out, rested up, and mentally competent. And his sister the judge said, ‘What’ll it be now, Harry? A lawn chair or a new name plate for the office door?’

“Harry said, ‘A lawn chair, thanks.’

“The doctor said maybe there was some mistake. But the judge said, ‘Or maybe not,’ and handed Harry five hundred dollars cash. Which, as Harry said, wasn’t a lawn chair, but it was as close as Her Honor was likely to get to a fair and practical settlement, given her sensibilities.

“So here’s Harry back at the river with his wad minus the eighty cents for the bus and the four dollars for the catalogue. Mrs. Harley there and Old Woody’s wife helped him pick the orange and green double-weave plastic recliner with three positions and its own attached plastic head cushion out of the catalogue. Harry gave Joe Harley here the full price of thirty-nine ninety-five out of his wad, then bought a round of orange pop for everybody and left the change from the five hundred dollars on the counter in the bait shack. Oscar declared free soda till the wad ran out as long as nobody told the truants.

“Old Woody and Joe drove out to Sears in Old Woody’s truck, bought the lawn chair fully assembled, and hauled it down to the bridge. Harry picked it up and put it down in half a dozen spots before he found just the right patch of weeds to set it in. Pickier than Mrs. Harley, Joe Harley said.”

“Joe Harley!”

“And I never saw a more contented sight,” Pop said, “than that first day when Harry T. Elbow took off his hook and shoes, tossed his new teeth in the river, and stretched himself out under the bridge on that new lawn chair. Makes you wonder. Yes, sir, it sure does make you wonder.”

“I’ll tell you what it makes me wonder,” the ranger said, grinning at the women. “What it makes me wonder is, how true is that story?”

Pop gave the ranger a look.

“True as it’s going to get,” he said finally.

Joe Harley winked at the ranger. The ranger winked back at him, chuckled, and checked his watch.

“Still, it does make you wonder,” Pop said again as if he hadn’t heard himself the first time. He shook his head, sighed, and reached down to haul in the bait chain that ran over the stone wall into the water. Joe Harley went cross-eyed winking at Pop, Old Woody, and the women all at once. The chain cleared the ledge. A six-pack of orange soda dangled from the end of it, caught in the clasp of a one-handed man’s shiny two-pronged hook.

“Got time for a cold soda, ranger?” Pop said. “As I said before, it’s free. More or less.”