Fuzzy Navel

9:22 P.M.
JACK

“DAMMIT, HARRY! PUSH!”

“Hold on. I need to hydrate.”

Harry reaches in the refrigerator for another beer. I’ve been in life-and-death situations with him before, and being flip is Harry’s normal MO. He lacks the ability to recognize the severity of his position. Either that, or he recognizes it and chooses to ignore it. I suppose the attitude has served him well so far, because despite the efforts of many people, Harry McGlade isn’t dead yet. But I don’t want to get my head blown off because he thinks everything is one big joke. Harry might have delusions of immortality. I don’t.

So I take the beer from his hand and shove it back in the fridge.

“Stop acting like an idiot and let’s push this thing. On three. One… two… three!”

I half expect him to reach for the beer again, or shoot me with the squirt gun, but Harry knuckles down and pushes. The fridge is a high-end model, the rollers heavy-duty. It moves easily on the kitchen linoleum. But when we get onto the carpet, every inch becomes a battle. The hallway isn’t long – no more than twenty-five feet – but it might as well be a mile. We strain and shove and grunt, putting our weight into it, digging our heels in. In less than a minute we’re both winded, and the fridge hasn’t moved down the hallway more than three feet.

“Do you need help?” Mom, from the bathroom.

“Hell yeah!” Harry says.

“Mom, stay where you are.”

“She wants to help, let her help.”

“She’s not-”

The bullet punches cleanly through the refrigerator door, and I feel it tug against my jacket’s shoulder pad. I drop onto the ground, hugging the floor, thinking, Oh my God, that wasn’t a soft point.

“Uh-oh,” Harry says.

He kneels next to me, but his mechanical hand prevents him from lying down. Another bullet hits the fridge, a few inches above his head. I consider crawling down the hall, back into the kitchen, but that would leave Harry stranded in the hallway, an open target.

“Run, Jack!”

I can’t believe it. Harry isn’t the heroic, self-sacrificing type.

“Run in front of the bullets!” he yells. “Shield me!”

I stand up, put my palms on the refrigerator door, and scream at him, “Push!”

We push. And we’re surprisingly effective. Funny how someone shooting at you can give you extra motivation. We move the fridge two feet, then four, a bullet barreling through the door only two inches from my hand, then we get some momentum going and we’re really making headway. Then another shot rings out and Harry falls to his knees and cries, “I’m hit!”

We’re less than a foot away from the bathroom. If we make it there, we can duck inside and dodge the gunfire. But Harry is useless, clutching his shoulder.

I suck in a big breath, find some deep, hidden reserve, and put everything I have into pushing that refrigerator another two feet, Harry on his knees and barely able to keep up. I reach the door, then help Mom drag Harry into the bathroom, to safety.

Harry sits on the floor, his metal hand still holding on to the refrigerator door. Mom takes another pair of scissors from the medicine cabinet and begins cutting off his shirt, looking for the bullet hole. True to his name, Harry has the hairiest chest I’ve ever seen. It looks like he’s wearing a brown and gray sweater. Mom cuts all the way up to the shoulder, but Harry refuses to take his hand away from the wound.

“I don’t want to look,” he says, hyperventilating.

My mom pats his head. “It’s okay.”

“If I die, I want you to make the funeral arrangements, Jack.”

“I will.”

“I want strippers there.”

“Okay, Harry.”

He removes his hand, reaches out for me. I hold it. Mom pulls away his shirt and reveals-

“It’s a scratch,” I say.

“Don’t sugarcoat it,” Harry moans. “I can handle the truth.”

I release his hand and peer at the thin red line. I’ve given Latham worse injuries with my fingernails.

“It’s not even worth a Band-Aid, McGlade.”

“You got a mirror?”

I hand him the tweezing mirror from the vanity. He holds it on an angle and looks.

“We cut my shirt off for this? I paid sixty bucks for that shirt.”

I sigh, stand up. Mom, however, stares down at Harry with a strange look on her face.

“Mom, you all right?”

“Harry… McGlade is your last name, right?”

“Yeah. Harrison Harold McGlade. I see you’re loving my chest hair. The ladies think it’s cute. I go into bars, ask them if they want a fuzzy navel. Then I lift up my shirt and jiggle. If it gets a laugh, I ask them if they’d like something stiffer.”

Mom seems transfixed.

“Is that a birthmark on your chest?”

“Port-wine stain. Looks like a fish, doesn’t it?”

Harry uses his fingers to part the gray, giving us a better view. His birthmark is several inches long, and indeed shaped like a fish, with an ovalish body and a triangle-like tail.

“Yes, it does,” Mom says. “It’s very distinctive. How old are you? Forty-nine?”

“Yeah. But the doctor says I have the body of a thirty-year-old, if the thirty-year-old was really unhealthy and close to death.”

I don’t like where this is going. My mother seems way too interested in Harry. “Mom?”

She ignores me. “Were you born in March?”

Harry’s eyes narrow. “On the twenty-ninth. How did you know that?”

Mom’s knees begin to shake, and I put my arm around her for support.

“Mom? What’s wrong?”

“One last thing,” Mom says to Harry. “Were you adopted?”

Oh my God, no. A thousand times no.

Mom had told me that before she met my father, she had a baby out of wedlock. A baby boy. With a sailor she had a one-night stand with when she was a teenager. When I became a cop, I’d tried to track my half brother down, tickled that I had a sibling out there. But I never thought that my brother could be someone like…

“No,” Harry says.

Thank Christ.

“I was raised by the state,” he continues. “In an orphanage.”

Mom’s jaw hangs limp. So does mine. Harry puts two and two together and says, “Are you saying that I might be your son?”

Mom nods.

Harry grins, his smile as wide as a canoe.

“Mom! Sis! It’s so good to be home!”