The Hose Thief

New bicycle, huh, kid? Well, that's great. We've got great weather for it right now, too, you'll have a great time. No, I don't wanna come out and see it, sorry, kid. This is silly but I'm kinda scared of getting too much sunlight these days. You young folks get cancer like it was measles now, but my skin's a bit thinner and I figure I've soaked up enough mutagenic radiation for one lifetime. Hey, do I look like a dictionary? Leather bound indeed, you have one mouth on you, kid. I got a sandwich for you, yeah, knuckle sandwich, hehe.

Well, seriously, that lady in the next room, don't know if you knew her, but they had to cut a big tumor off the top of her head and just a week later she died. Oh, the nurse says we should say "passed on". Don't tell her I said the word "died". Of course the old coot "passed on" of something else not skin cancer and she had it coming anyway, ninety-four years old, nobody's got a right to live as long as that, but still, it kinda made me less enthusiastic for soaking up the rays, you know?

This morning the nurse asked me if I wanted to go outdoors and I said, no, I don't want to be in the sun, and she offered to let me rest under the shade tree. I said no thanks, because you never know when one of those fruits is gonna suddenly come ripe and I figure if I have another heart attack these days it'll be my last and you can plant me in the ground. I guess the nurse thinks I'm senile because she just said "Oh" and left. But I'm not quite that bad yet, am I kid? Hey, I can still beat you at Scrabble, and I saw that report card. You're doing pretty good, kid. Good kid.

I did take a peep out the window, though, to try and get a glimpse of the shade tree. It's been years and years since I saw one, in fact I never did see any but just the one in Mr. Chatterjee's yard. I was sad when I did see it because I saw that it wasn't really a shade tree at all. It was just a shadow tree, with big leaves that block out the sun so it casts a dark shadow and you can sit under it and cool off. A real shade tree is much different and much better, too. I wish there was one around this place, even if it did give people the occasional heart attack it'd be good for them. A lot of these people ought to have died, sorry, "passed on" years ago anyway.

Did I ever tell you about Mr. Chatterjee? He was this man who lived on my street in a big old house all by himself. He was pretty old, but not as old as I am now. I was only ever in his house once, he didn't like visitors much, but it was full of the neatest old stuff from Africa and India and places like that. Mr. Chatterjee was from a place like that himself, but I don't know just where and I'm not sure anyone did know. His skin was a little darker than most people's but not like a regular black person's skin. He spoke perfect English, but slowly, just a bit of an accent. Sometimes he would go away in his big old station wagon and come back a few weeks later with something new and wonderful.

One Spring he came back from one of these trips and a bunch of us kids who were hanging around on the sidewalk chewing gum there saw him open the back of the station wagon and take out what looked like a big stick with a few straggly greyish leaves, thrust into a canvas-covered ball. He left it there in the front yard while he went indoors to fetch a shovel. Then he dug a hole in the middle of his yard and planted the little tree, because that's what it was.

Some of the kids thought Mr. Chatterjee was strange and didn't want to go near him, but I went up and asked him what he had there. "It is a shade tree, small boy," he said. "I have planted it here and will let it grow, and it shall be the only shade tree in town. Good God! Won't it be grand?" Mr. Chatterjee talked like that, he said "shall", and "Good God!" a whole lot. He called me "small boy". If anyone else had called me that I'd have slugged them, but from him, it was all right.

Mr. Chatterjee had a huge big garden in back and he sold the vegetables. I think he had money already, though, because I don't think he could have lived on just the gardening. Still, he seemed to be pretty serious about being a small-time farmer. All the time he'd be out in his backyard weeding or hoeing or whatever. When he wasn't working in the garden or resting on his porch he'd be out in his front yard watering the tree, or standing there looking at it. Sometimes I think he was mumbling prayers in his own language, whatever that was, but he didn't mumble too loud because this was a good Christian town, everyone had to go to church. Even Mr. Chatterjee went to church although I don't imagine he believed in it any more than I did.

Sometimes he'd leave the hose trickling water onto the little shade tree's roots while he went in back to do some weeding, or into the house to make a cup of tea. He made his own tea from herbs that he grew. We all knew that he was taking a big risk when he did that, though, because there was a hose thief in town. Half the people who had once had hoses had had them stolen, and the others were forced to keep them under lock and key and even then they would mysteriously disappear. The hardware store in town couldn't keep any in. Some people tried to buy them in other towns, but the thief seemed to always know who had a brand-new hose, and it'd be gone in under a week.

It was no joke, either, because in those days a rubber garden hose cost a penny a foot for the regular kind, or five cents for four feet for the deluxe. Folks couldn't afford to keep buying them just to get them stolen. People would water their window boxes with pitchers and buckets; folks with big gardens, including Mr. Chatterjee, would dig irrigation ditches right up to their outdoor taps and run the water in that way. But he didn't want to deface his front yard. "Good God!" he said, "not that. I shall water my shade tree in the conventional fashion and damn the hose thief."

Mr. Chatterjee's enemy was Mr. Henrick. This was before anyone used the word "racist" but that's what Mr. Henrick would be called now. He didn't like black people, and he didn't like Polish people, and if he saw your mother he'd hate her, too. Mr. Henrick didn't like Mr. Chatterjee, and Mr. Chatterjee didn't like Mr. Henrick. I didn't like Mr. Henrick either because Mr. Chatterjee was my friend and any enemy of my friend, sort of thing. Also, Mr. Henrick said it was a sin to chew gum, and if he ever caught one of us kids doing it he'd grab us by the ear and force us to spit it into a Kleenex, which he'd fold up and put in his pocket.

I think there was some kind of bad blood between Mr. Henrick and Mr. Chatterjee besides just the general fact that Mr. Chatterjee was foreign and Mr. Henrick didn't like foreigners. I think, some time years back before I was born, there had been some kind of disagreement over a prize squash at the county fair. But nobody would ever tell me the whole story, they kept it kind of hushed up.

If you had asked me whether Mr. Henrick was a criminal of course I'd have said yes, just on general principles, but if you had asked me why, I wouldn't really have been able to come up with anything actually illegal I knew he had done. Certainly, neither I nor anybody else suspected that Mr. Henrick was the hose thief. Really, we ought to have put two and two together much sooner. He was always polite in that sticky way some people are that doesn't really make you feel like they're being polite at all, and everyone knows a hose thief has good manners. I don't know why people still say that because nowadays nobody knows what a hose thief is anymore, it's been years since there were any, but nonetheless, I'm sure you've heard the saying, kid, right?

Mr. Henrick didn't seem to have a job, and yet he always had money. At church every week he'd sit in the front and put a handful of quarters in the collection plate as it came by and then glare around like a poker player daring anyone to call. Although I'm sure he never ever played poker; he'd have said it was sinful. Mr. Henrick would actually have said playing Old Maid was sinful.

The Summer wore on, and sure enough, pretty soon Mr. Chatterjee had his hose stolen. I walked by on my way to the library and he was standing looking at the tree and wringing his hands. Yes, he was the sort of person who really would wring his hands when he was upset. You don't see it done very often now. He said, "Good God! Now my tree will surely die, and it cost so much money, too. Small boy, what shall I do?"

But he still wasn't willing to dig a big ditch in the middle of his yard. So pretty soon the tree died. Its few grey leaves fell off and there was just this dead stick sticking up in the middle of the yellow grass. If it had been mine I'd have removed it, but I guess in order to put new grass or plant some flowers in the hole, Mr. Chatterjee would have had to have a way to water whatever he put there, and he didn't have his hose anymore, and if he just took the tree out without planting anything there he'd have a big hole that would be even more unsightly than what was left of the shade tree. So he just left it for dead.

School started and I had to walk past every morning, and Mr. Chatterjee would be sitting there on his front stoop drinking tea and staring morosely at the shade tree. I'd usually stop and chat with him for a while. He always had good stories to tell. One day around the start of October, as I was walking down the sidewalk he rushed out of his front yard and clasped my hand excitedly. "Small boy, come see! Good God!" I followed him into the yard and saw that a little green leaf was growing from one of the shade tree's branches. It had somehow survived the hot dry Summer even without being watered.

As the leaf got bigger it turned grey, and more leaves grew on the other branches until the tree was covered with them. You'd have thought it was trying to catch up on all the growing it had missed while it was dead. Mr. Chatterjee was all smiles now, and he told me happily that soon the tree would bear fruit. He wouldn't tell me just what kind of fruit to expect from a shade tree, but he said he was sure I'd be pleased. "Maybe it will even be bearing in time for Halloween, think of that, small boy!" he said.

It didn't bear fruit in time for Halloween, but it had made a good start. The flowers were well open by then. I suppose I should tell you just what a shade tree looks like so you can picture it properly. It is the most amazing kind of tree. The bark is coal black and it cracks horizontally like birch bark, showing white pulp underneath. The leaves, as I mentioned, are greenish grey. They're kind of round with a rectangular bit sticking out and the veins make a pattern on the bottom. Mr. Chatterjee, some years later when the tree was much bigger, once showed me a leaf he had picked that looked exactly like a little skull.

There are two kinds of flowers, male and female I guess. One kind is white and the petals are kind of like little nets with a lot of holes in them, the pollen comes from that kind. The others are big, maybe six inches across, and they have lush round petals that start out bright red and then dry up and go brown. The flowers smell really bad and attract huge iridescent green and blue flies that pollinate them. Oh, a full-grown shade tree is a beautiful sight. The foliage is dense enough that you can use it for a shadow tree, too, if you're brave enough.

Anyway, after the tree had bloomed for a few weeks, it was late November or so. The white flowers had all crumbled away, and the red flowers had gone brown and then faded to whitish grey and become tattered from the rain. It looked like someone had hung bits of soggy toilet paper in the tree. There had been seven of the big red flowers and Mr. Chatterjee said that meant we could expect the tree to bear seven fruits, barring incident. He still wouldn't tell me what kind of fruit you get from a shade tree. "Good God, small boy," he said, "of course it must be a surprise!"

It turned out to be even more of a surprise than he said. In fact, the whole town was surprised when the shade tree's first fruit helped us catch Mr. Henrick the hose thief. You see, every year there was a church picnic in the community field, which bordered on the back of Mr. Chatterjee's market garden. It was as they say the social event of the season.

The year that Mr. Chatterjee planted his shade tree, the church had rented a couple of those portable outhouses, the big fiberglass things, which were a brand new thing then. These ones were so new you could still smell the formaldehyde coming out of the plastic. Yeah, we probably all took a few months off our lives whiffing that.

Well, we had the baseball game and the sack race and all the stuff we always had, and Jenny McGuiness took me out behind the bleachers and let me kiss her and that was the biggest story of the day for me, but what most people remember was that after the wienie roast the grown-ups were mostly drinking beer and the kids were drinking lemonade or lemonade mixed with beer all according to their ages. Mr. Chatterjee had something in a little brown bottle that he had made himself. He let me have a little tiny sip and it made my head spin.

But Mr. Henrick was ostentatiously drinking lemonade, oh, that's a five-dollar word, isn't it, kid, "ostentatiously" I mean, not "lemonade", it means like show-offy, and anyway he was quoting the Bible about drunkenness at anyone who would listen. Not many people did. Brother Wilson the minister was drinking beer like anyone else, and Brother Wilson's interpretation of sin was a lot more generally popular in our town than Mr. Henrick's interpretation.

The drinking wasn't what people remembered, people always eat and drink all the time anyway. What people remembered was that the lemonade finally caught up to Mr. Henrick just as it started to get dark. He must have gone into one of the outhouses. Nobody really remembered, but he was probably in there for several minutes before there was this absolutely hideous bone-chilling kind of scream. The door shot open with a bang, and Mr. Henrick kinda staggered out, pulling up his pants.

His hair had gone pure white, gospel truth, kid. He wasn't very clear about what had happened, but he had obviously taken a big scare. He was yelling something about a white thing like a kid in a bedsheet that had come floating up through the hole in the outhouse. He had a lot to say about the wrath of God. They sat him down and gave him some lemonade with a little of Mr. Chatterjee's drinking stuff in it, without telling him what it was, and he quieted down some, but his mind had snapped and they had to send him off to New York, permanently.

That was pretty much the end of the party. Mr. Chatterjee and I cut through his back garden because that was the fastest way home for both of us, and before I left we had a little talk about the night's events. Of course, neither of us was too sad about Mr. Henrick getting scared out of his wits, but it seemed pretty strange to me. Mr. Chatterjee said it was perfectly clear: Mr. Henrick had sampled the fruit of the shade tree, unawares. "They are not always so good for adults," he said, "especially self-righteous adults who think they know everything, like our friend Mr. Henrick." Sure enough, when we checked the tree we found that one of the toilet-paper flowers had fallen off and been ground to dust. Mr. Chatterjee said that maybe if I was lucky, another one would be ripe soon. "I shall try to save it for you, small boy."

Before I tell you about that, let me finish up about catching the hose thief. It was when they broke into Mr. Henrick's room at the boarding house, to collect his personal effects, that they figured out where he got his money. As well as several brand-new garden hoses, all packed up in a box ready to mail off, they found copies of his coded correspondence with the D.H.C. I helped the police break the code, kid, and the D.H.C. tried to sue me over it but they couldn't because I was just a kid and the Justice Department was on their trail already anyway. I was always good at that sort of thing.

Did they teach you in school about the D.H.C., the Delaware Hose Conglomerate? I guess not, the government suppressed the story and not many people remember it anymore. The thing is, there were only five factories that made rubber garden hoses those days, and the people who owned the factories all got together and said, hey, everyone who wants a hose has to buy from one of us, so if we all agreed to set the price really high, then we could make a lot of money. That's what they did. It was illegal as all get out, but they figured to make a lot of money and retire to somewhere far away before anyone was any the wiser. Of course it would only work as long as nobody was selling hoses at a fair price, so they all had to be in on it. The Delaware Hose Conglomerate was the secret organization they formed to keep the prices high, and they did all kinds of scary and dishonest things.

Every so often someone would try to make hoses of their own. Maybe it'd be a little mom and pop hardware store with a rubber stretching machine in the back, or maybe it'd be a bungee cord plant that figured to branch out and try something different. The people who did that would always be found dead, beaten to death. Oh, right, kid, I mean they would be found "passed on" with a lot of bruises, not actually "dead", oh no. The Delaware Hose Conglomerate didn't let their goons beat people with rubber hoses because they figured that would be too obvious. They used wiffle bats. It takes almost forever to kill someone with a wiffle bat, but they would do it.

Setting the price high only worked up to a point because if the D.H.C. charged too too much, people just wouldn't buy hoses at all because they wouldn't be able to afford them. So they were always trying to come up with other ways to get people to buy more hoses. They started hiring people like Mr. Henrick to steal all the hoses so people would have to replace them. The hose thiefs would mail the stolen hoses back to the D.H.C., who would clean them and sell them back to the public as new, which meant that they could sell the same hose, remember at the inflated price, too, six or seven times before it was worn out enough that people would know it wasn't new. Since the hardware stores were required to report back the names and addresses of whoever bought a new hose, the D.H.C. could always tell Mr. Henrick and the other hose thiefs which houses had fresh hoses to steal.

Anyway, that's about all there is to say about the hose thief racket, you can use your imagination for the rest of the details. The economists hatched a lot of interesting theories about the social conditions that caused it but you probably don't want to hear about those. I was gonna tell you the rest about Mr. Chatterjee's shade tree.

I was walking home from school one night a week or so after the church party, and it was pretty late and pretty dark because I had been kept in after school over something which is, of course, another story entirely. Just about the time I passed Mr. Chatterjee's house I happened to look over my shoulder and saw something floating along behind me. I turned to look but it was gone, and I had a creepy prickling sensation around the back of my neck.

I turned my head to the other side and saw a sort of whitish thing like fog with texture come kind of crawling over my shoulder. It was like cloth but it was also like bubble gum. It slid in front of me and floated up like a cloud of breath. Then, all of a sudden, it made a horrible face at me! I shrieked and ran home. That night in bed as I was about to go to sleep I saw a hazy glow around the turned-off ceiling lamp. I pulled the covers over my head and waited for it to go away, taking a quick look every few minutes to see if it was gone yet, and eventually it drifted down onto the floor, where the cat pounced on it and ripped it to shreds. I was a little sorry about that, but Mr. Chatterjee, when I told him, laughed and said that there was no harm in killing a shade. "They are dead already, small boy, and in any case they last only a few hours after ripening." I hadn't really liked being scared, right then at the time, but over the years as the shade tree became a neighbourhood fixture, I grew to enjoy the anticipation of wondering when the shades would ripen and come floating around. Mr. Chatterjee and I always got the best ones.

I had another from that first crop a few days later, and Mr. Chatterjee said I was lucky, it meant the tree liked me. He got two himself. Mr. Henrick had the first one at the picnic, one ripened and blew away on a day we had a big wind, and the last one hung on until late December and then frightened my friend's aunt who had come down for Christmas. She went outside for a breath of fresh air during a party one night, and came indoors tight-lipped and vowing never again to drink port. In later years, when the tree grew bigger, it did often have fruit ripe at Halloween, which always made trick-or-treating in our neighbourhood a special thrill. Mr. Chatterjee would stand under it with a shade or two swooping and popping up around him, handing out his spicy little foreign candies to any of the neighbourhood children brave enough to come into the yard.

That was a lot of years ago, and I suppose by now Mr. Chatterjee must be dead and they've probably chopped down his tree to build a condominium block or something. There probably isn't another one in the country. But listen, kid, there's something I want you to do for me, and it's sort of important and it's sort of secret so I want you to pay really good attention, okay? You're a good kid, you always come to visit me even though your father doesn't. Yeah, I know, he and I didn't see eye to eye when he was young, but he's still my son and I miss him, you know? He's a good kid too, you tell him that.

Anyway, I was thinking about this when I talked to the nurse and then I was thinking about it while I told you about the hose thief and now I'm sure of it. The thing is, I don't know where the shade tree came from, but I sort of think it might have something to do with people being "passed on", you know? And it sure was a wonderful thing. So, this probably won't work and I'm probably just a silly old senile man, but here's what we're going to do.

I'm gonna die soon. Oh, maybe it'll be five or ten years yet, you don't have to look so glum, kid, but here's the thing. I'm gonna tell my lawyer that whenever I do kick the bucket, he's supposed to see that they burn my body, all proper-like, and then they'll take my ashes and put them in an urn. I'll say for them to give the urn to you, kid. Oh, there'll probably be some fuss because the people from the church, people like old Mr. Henrick was, will say I ought to be buried instead, but if my lawyer writes it down they won't really be able to do anything about it.

Some time when nobody's looking, I want you to take a good look inside that urn. Maybe, if we're both lucky, there'll be something in there that looks like a seed. I'll do what I can, wherever I end up. If you find anything that looks like it might be a seed, I want you to go find a nice place, maybe in the park or something, somewhere where there'll be a lot of people, and plant the seed. Don't worry about watering it, that doesn't seem to be necessary. And then see if anything comes up. You got that? Good. As Mr. Chatterjee used to say, "Good God, small boy!" You're a good kid.

Oh, and remember to tell your Dad to come visit me some time soon. Maybe next time you come you could bring him with you. And I'll tell you about Jenny McGuiness.