Thursday, November 30, 2006

Hear-Ye, Hear-Ye

Here's a short story from a while ago that you might dig. All rights reserved to the Global Coyote.

Hear-Ye, Hear-Ye

He cracked up when they told him that he couldn’t use a hand at his knee to denote a well-hung man. It was the 8th Annual Physically Challenged Conference. He was in the twentieth row. In the front were the people in wheelchairs. At the back were the blind. The blind weren’t allowed in the front anymore because the guide dogs got nervous when the palsied walked by. The deaf…well, the deaf just had to deal, didn’t they?

His name was Harry, and he could feel his mind splitting down the middle when the officious looking woman behind the podium reached down beneath her hemline and showed him the ‘well-hung’ sign. The interpreter to her left did the same, though it made more sense for the interpreter to do it, because he had the anatomy to make it mean what it meant.

The woman told the audience that the well-hung sign was offensive and was now to be stricken from the language.

Harry fumed. He had, indeed, had enough. Last year, at the 7th Annual, they’d told the deaf that they couldn’t use a limp wrist for the homosexual sign. Then the nose-thing for a Jewish person. Ditto the boob-motion for a woman. And now the well-hung sign.

It put Harry over the edge. Not only was he a proud, deaf man, he was also hung like a moose. The censorship of the deaf offended him almost as much as the censorship of the well endowed. Using the well-hung sign had let Harry feel like a human being these past 20 years. It had been that long since the snowblower accident had taken his hearing. Damned if he was going to let the powers that be take away his manhood.

When he left the convention, he knew he was crazy. Just like that. He’d felt the tear in his brain open wide. His deaf friends had said good-bye the old-fashioned way: saying it aloud for the lip readers, and signing it for the sign police.

It was the sign police that drove Harry nuts. They made him out to be a fashionable Rain Man. They wrote articles about him and how people should feel sorry for him. They shouted at him in Burger King when he ordered fries. They asked him if he needed help opening doors. They mimed icebergs when he ordered scotch straight up, and they flapped their arms like seagulls when he asked where he could take a well-hung leak.

The sign police were everywhere. The sign police were everybody. The second they saw him using sign language, they cooed as if he were a child, then asked if he needed any assistance. Being deaf, he couldn’t hear them, and so the woodpecker would land on his shoulder, tap-tap-tap. He would turn, and there they’d be: the soccer mom, the school teacher, the politician, the security guard, the theater usher, the doorman, the coat check girl. The sign cop.

The sign police knew what was good for him. They loved him as they loved a dim-witted child. They knew, deep down, that he needed them.

But not anymore.

He was quite out of his mind when he committed his first kidnapping. It was a fast food cashier. She didn’t ask him which soft drink he wanted. Instead, she went to the machine and pointed at each selection, one by one, nodding earnestly. When she got to Pepsi, he smiled. When she got off her shift later that night, he bonked her on her earnest little head and put her in the U-Haul.

The next day, the shoe store clerk got the nod. The shoe clerk blew it by holding his hands four feet apart when Harry said that he wore a size 13. Bonk-bonk, in the U-Haul.

Later that afternoon, the Helpful Passerby took a sap to the noggin. The Helpful Passerby had seen Harry signing to one of his deaf buddies on a street corner. When the traffic signal said ‘walk,’ the Helpful Passerby pulled a woodpecker and pointed Harry across the road. Harry bonked him on the head in a parking lot two blocks later. U-Haul.

The hot dog vendor at Shea ran out of luck when he waved at Harry fifteen times to tell him that his hot dog had arrived. Bonk-bonk...bonk-bonk (the vendor was tough), and into the U-Haul.

The week progressed. The U-Haul got crowded. He took three Helpful Passersby and a mime from the park. He bonked a woman after a date because she insisted on clapping along to songs and mouthing the words for him. He went to Hoboken and sapped the woman who had told him that deaf people shouldn’t use the well-hung sign anymore. He U-Hauled a stereo salesman just out of spite.

By the end of the week, the U-Haul was chock full of people. They were trussed up with duct tape and nylon rope. They weren’t going anywhere. Harry gave them sips of water through tiny holes in the tape. He didn’t bother to feed them. He found it fun to watch them try and talk beneath their gags while he pointed to his ears and shrugged his shoulders.

The drive out to the woods was peaceful. Harry followed the speed limit and used his turn signals. He tooted his horn a couple of times just for the hell of it. When he got into the forest he found a space to pull off. He waited a half-hour. Only two cars went by in all that time. Perfect.

It took him an hour to get all of the people out of the U-Haul and into the woods. Some of them fought and kicked and writhed. The ones that hadn’t eaten in a few days were easier to manage. He laid them all on the ground.

It was a nice day. Birds were out, though of course Harry couldn’t hear them. He whistled anyway, while the people watched. He found a suitable tree. He pounded metal stakes into the ground at three-foot intervals. He laid the people down in a row, and tied them to the stakes with more nylon rope, immobilizing them.

He stuck his finger in his mouth and tested the wind. Then he fired up the chain saw. It was a big Black & Decker. He guessed that it was noisy, judging by the looks on the people’s faces. Their eyes were open wide. Harry pointed to the chain saw, then his ear, then shrugged. He pulled the goggles down over his eyes.

He began cutting. Debris flew. The chain saw cut like a machete through newspaper. Harry laughed. This was fun. He was thinking about the dumb-ass riddle. If a tree falls in the forest…

He put his back into it, making more cuts, smelling the smell of gasoline and death. Vengeance from the Deaf Man. Revenge of the Poor Guy In the Corner.

When he was finished, the tree was on the verge. He’d cut a fairly neat triangle out of its side. It was on the brink of falling. The environmental people that always hung out at the Physically Challenged expos wouldn’t be happy, but that was acceptable.

Harry dug his heels into the ground while the people stared at him. He pushed. He heaved. The wood gave way. The shadow fell over the people’s faces as the timber came down to meet them. The tree fell in the forest. It crashed to the ground with an earth shaking thud.

Not a peep, Harry signed.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great story - should be on one of the CSI shows.