Harry's World, Book 3

By Jack Underhill

Third in the saga of Harry's World. Gentle, but dangerous, these are true personal adventure stories of an original life lived at high RPM by a blind race car driver.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jack Underhill
• Release date: Jan 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9780984872053

Jack Underhill

Jack Underhill lives in Borrego Springs and Minneapolis, whichever is warmer or drier at the time. He's worked as an opal miner, magazine writer and publisher, television news director, and wood cutter and sawyer. When he was younger he ran with the coyotes at night and raised chickens by day. Till he went broke.

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Harry’s World #3

By Jack Underhill

Smashwords Edition

Copyright, 2014, Jack Underhill

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

Augusta Wind Press

ISBN 978-0-9848720-5-3

http://www.augustawindpress.com

http://www.jackunderhill.com

Preface to Harry’s World #3

Imagine an old corral out west on the plains. There’s a wild horse in there. He looks played out from all his effort in breaking loose.

You go over and open the corral gate, the horse gallops through heading for the mountains. There’s a lot of ground to cover before finding home-river valley, fences, rangers, hunters, other wild horses, and the terror of being free after all this time.

The short stories in Harry’s World deal with getting free from the corrals of mind and passed-along beliefs.

Funny and ironic, wild and compassionate, these stories deliver some ideas about personal freedom at passionate heart level.

Contents

Tina and the tire and the Gothic Girl

Cut your hair, shave, pray

Motorcycle Ride at Portage

Bad Bob the Albino

Rainbow Crow

Wrangler

Rockette-ing

Lawnmower Man

Swimming Laps Thru Life

Mozart, 78, the waterman and pussycat

Escape Claws

Ireland to Marry

Spare Change

Willow Bar Crossing, Anza Borrego desert

Joanne

Wind

Drowned day into night

Lindberg camp trip

Stalking the Wild Orgasm

The Second Coming is forever

Sitting at the rack weaving our design

Given everything

Anaphylaxis On The Half Shell

Rat Poking Around

Knees

Vast Array of Stink Bugs

Waves and Particles

No Property Train

Harry & the ’47 Ford three-quarter ton pickup

Butterfly

Maynard Dixon, Western artist

Adoption

The field

Dear Marilyn,

Genesis of a Biopic

Art book

Tina and the tire and the Gothic girl

We are at Rock Lake near the Wisconsin border on Indian land. It’s a back road campsite far and away into the woods.I came here a few days ago in the rig to write and be alone. Marilyn drove in yesterday with Pebbles. We waded out to where Pebbles stood with a stick in her mouth trying to get what she thinks is a better stick underwater. The stick underwater disappears every time she paws in the water for it and becomes reflective fragments of a stick until the water stills and it becomes whole again. She sees it again under the surface when it’s really in her mouth. She figures out that the only way to grab it is to drop the one in her mouth and snatch it up again, that way she will have the stick she already has and the one she longs for.

Marilyn wanders off to talk with some kids and their mother and I go into the Winnebago. In awhile Marilyn pokes her head in to say there is a woman out there with her kids who has a flat tire. Then she’s gone. In this way she has not called me away from my writing, if I have a heart I will do that myself. When I return two hours later I make these notes in the sweat of the moment and somehow am never able to put them together any better as a structured story:

…Tina and the tire and the gothic daughter and the big headed baby and growling son and beautiful little girl and the flat tire and the hydraulic jack and the wide rimmed under-inflated spare and the mechanics toolbox and the firewood and the cigarette lighter air compressor and the hand pump and the touch of her hand and the moment of fleeting beauty of the whole mess dancing in perfect syncopation at Rock Lake June 29 as the sun went into the forest across the lake and us huffing and puffing and rolling around on the ground positioning the jack over and over and the car on the slope coming after us when the jack’d fall over and drop the front end on us and the daughter with the cell phone not knowing her dad’s phone number to come get them and her being a dark waif of a 90 pound thing with rings on her fingers and toes and hoops and pins and grommets and washers looped to her sallow skin and glaring black eyes at Tina her mother with greenish goner eyes all clear and perfectly beautifully empty and the stink of old and deep marijuana sweat from her skinny body as we work and nothing is synching and an hour’s gone and the best part of another and this thing starts to happen and she as a girl long ago awakens and takes over and little by little takes charge and makes the right moves and knows the way and she’s remembering her brothers putting her small hands to work to reach into the places their big hands wouldn’t fit when they rebuilt engines and cars on the Rez 30 years ago and Marilyn is over there with the blazingly white baby in arms now and the black eyed wasp is telling her she can hold him but not to go out of her sight or she is coming after her with a hammer and the growling roaring son in the water with his beautiful little sister half his age splashing her away from him all this is Tina’s and one flat tire and a three hundred dollar Chrysler to take her to work in Hinkley and a too wide too soft spare in the trunk and swimmingly clear eyes and big brothers from long ago with their little sister resurrected now to save her grow-up self and get this tire changed.

Tina The Rediscovered sits cross legged at the empty wheel hub fitting the spare onto the five threaded bolts like she’s been doing this everyday since way back and the bolts clear the wheel holes without a scrape to the threads and she’s turning the nuts with her fingers with the calm of doing what she’d learned to love in the olden times of her girlhood and she’s tightening them with the spinner wrench turning like a plane prop and when she’s done the little girl of her goes away and I can tell when Tina Now starts her old Imperial and gets her kids inside and the big rock we’d put in front of the back wheel is still there and the firewood log on the other side so the bigcar won’t move and she tells her gothic daughter to get rid of them and when she can’t and won’t stop cursing her Tina gets out and moves them easily. Her gothic daughter is still on her case as they drive away. She speaks in stinging nettles…

It’s dark when I go in and Marilyn comes in with the lantern awhile later. How’d it go? I have to smile. What a family! Marilyn says she turned the little growling boy’s trying to drown his sister into a game that earned them lifeguard points when they saved each other. I taught them to swim, she says. They loved it.

What a woman. Without her I’d’ve missed Tina and her brood. I’d’ve been writing. Yep, Tina and the tire and the gothic daughter and the big headed baby…

***

Cut your hair, shave, pray?

Bob Toner was a barber back when a haircut was fifty cents and a shave two bits. He was a philosopher and freelance theologian. He loved cutting priests’ hair and arguing doctrine and considering possibilities of their coming into synch with the plight of the poor. He taught Marilyn that the people are the Church and the priesthood the servants. He taught her to fight for the rights of people who cannot defend themselves, and to dress their wounds inside and out. He insisted she argue with him over what she took issue with. He wanted passion in the exchange of ideas because he felt it’s how people learn. He was okay being wrong in an argument if it came from another’s good reasoning.

Bob was a poet and loved the poetry of Gerald Manly Hopkins. Marilyn wants to collect his poems and letters into a book for the rest of the family. I met him at a nursing home when Marilyn brought me to meet her family in Fridley our first year together. Inside was like stepping into slow motion where old character actors are working on their lines or biding time waiting for the cameraman to shoot their close-ups. When Marilyn introduced us there was a moment of happy recognition before Bob’s eyes faded back to Alzheimer empty. I knew this man. We’d been together in other times.

When he was dying Marilyn flew from San Diego and arrived when there was still some warmth