Mr Harris

The man’s name was Mr Harris. He called back every day. If he thought he’d get my father on the phone, he didn’t because my father was always at work. He tried once to get my mother into it, but my mother told him it wasn’t her problem to deal with, that if it had been her she would have waited for the police. Then she passed the phone to me.

Mr Harris explained to me that his wife didn’t want $400, she wanted $1,000 because she had whiplash. He said that if I didn’t get them $1,000 by the end of the next week, they were going to call their lawyer. Because, Mr Harris told me, us people up in Park Ridge weren’t the only people in the world who had lawyers. Because they had lawyers on the West Side too. And not only did his wife have whiplash, but his cousin and his cousin’s kids had whiplash, too. So for $1,000 I was getting off easy.

I don’t know why, but after the initial day of it, I wasn’t scared by him. I knew it would be a thing of money, that a sum would be agreed and paid and that it would come to an end. I don’t know how I knew it, but I knew as well that if I decided to not pay him anything, I could get away with that, too. I knew Mr Harris couldn’t come to our house in Park Ridge in that beat-up car of his without getting one of our neighbourhood cops on his tail. I knew he couldn’t come up where we lived without getting arrested. Because a black man in a tattered suit had come to our door soliciting once when I was young. My mother had told him ‘no’ and looked out the drapes at him as he left. She said to me, ‘He’s not going to make it three more doors before they call the police on him.’ Ten minutes later we heard the sirens and when we went out to look, they were handcuffing him up against the trunk of an oak tree while all the mothers and their kids stood in the doorways to see.

After a dozen more calls, Mr Harris and I settled on $400. I would get him a money order and mail it to him so that I wouldn’t have to go down there, and so that I could have a receipt, like my mother said. My mother gave me half the money; I took the rest out of my account. When the teller asked me who to make it out to, I told her ‘Mr Harris’. Then I put the envelope in the mailbox outside the bank and was done with it. School was starting again in two more weeks. Early golf team practices would begin that weekend; I still had summer league tennis matches to play at our club. I’d learned a valuable lesson about messing around in the city and that was it. I wouldn’t mess around like that again.

Except that wasn’t the end of it. From his side of the city, Mr Harris called me the next Saturday in the afternoon and he was angry. He said he was at the cheque-cashing place and they wouldn’t cash the money order because it was made out to Mr Harris. He said, ‘Who makes out a cheque to somebody like that? Mr Harris. Mr Harris. Don’t you know that people have two names?’

Mr Harris put the cheque-cashing lady on the phone. She was also black. She said to me, ‘Are you Anthony?’ ‘I’m Anthony,’ I said. She said, ‘Anthony, is this the Mr Harris you meant to give this money order to?’ ‘Yes it’s him,’ I said. She didn’t say anything for a long moment and then she said, ‘I can’t cash this cheque for him this way. You have to come down here and write his first name on the money order and initial it.’ Then she put Mr Harris back on the line. He said, ‘You have to come down here Anthony.’

‘I’m not coming down there,’ I told him.

‘How am I supposed to get my money? How am I supposed to get my money?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why would you put Mr Harris?’

‘You didn’t tell me any other name.’

‘Why wouldn’t you ask?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You have to come down here and do this.’

‘I’m not coming down there.’

‘You’re the one who hit me.’

‘I’m not coming down there.’

‘Man you have got to come down here. Man please. I’ll give you a hundred bucks back.’

He told me where he was at. I took the Kennedy, then the Ike. The city loomed up at me on the way down and then it passed. I got off at Racine. It was a nightmare world down there. Burnt-out buildings, burnt-out cars, dogs running loose, gangsters on the corners. I pulled into the gas station where Mr Harris was waiting, and there was the car I had hit, the crappiness of it, the peeling paint. The bumper was again attached by wires. There was another black man with Mr Harris in the car and he was drinking from a brown-paper bag.

Mr Harris got into my passenger seat. His face was older than I remembered, his eyes yellow, his hair speckled with lint; his hands were ashy and worn, he smelled of alcohol and cigarettes. He put the same money order that I had sent to him on the dash; now it was smudged with fingerprints. He said to me, ‘Write Michael Harris on this.’

‘Who writes Mr Harris on a cheque?’ Mr Harris said to me as I wrote. Then he said to me in a relieved voice, ‘It’s okay now. It’s over. Just follow us to the place so I can give you the hundred bucks.’ Then he got out of my car, into his, started it, pulled away. I didn’t follow him.