Handsome Harry Read Online Free PDF Page A

morning stiffie was poking out of my undershorts and I was casually fingering it when I turned toward the window and saw a young red-haired girl perched on a maple branch and grinning at me. I snatched up the sheet but she was already shinning down the tree, laughing her head off.
    I recognized her as Earl’s sister Mary. I remembered her as a short skinny kid with plum-red hair who used to come to the front door and wave to me whenever I’d pull up to their house and honk the klaxon for Earl. He’d recently mentioned that he still called herShorty because she wasn’t five feet tall and it looked like she never would be.
    I didn’t see her again until the following week, on a hot Saturday afternoon at a riverside park swimming hole. There were ropes attached to tree branches overhanging the river and kids would swing out on them and drop into the water. The air was full of their shrieks and laughter and the aroma of meat roasting on open grills. Earl was trying to make time with some girls sitting in the shade of a tree and pretending to be experienced cigarette smokers, but none of them was pretty enough to hold my attention. I was lying shirtless and sweaty on the grass at the edge of the river and staring up at the clouds when a squirt of water hit me in the chest. I flinched at its coldness and sat up fast. And there she was, a few feet from the bank and treading water as easily as a duck, wearing a white bathing cap and laughing at me. She had a scattering of freckles across her nose and upper cheeks.
    Daydreaming again, huh? she said. Better not do out here what you were doing the other day or you’ll get arrested. She waggled her brow and grinned.
    I felt my ears go hot and I said they should’ve named her Tom instead of Mary.
    Why’s that, she said. Because I’m a tomboy?
    Because she was a Peeping Tom.
    She said she was no such thing, all she was doing was climbing a tree to get some exercise. How was she supposed to know I’d be lying there playing with that big ugly thing?
    What would she know about men’s things, I said, she was just a child. I didn’t care for her calling it ugly but I was secretly pleased she called it big.
    She said she was certainly not a child and she knew plenty and I ought to keep the shade pulled down if I was going to engage in self-abuse. That’s the phrase she used, self-abuse, and it made me laugh.
    I said she had a pretty smart mouth for a kid and asked how old she was, anyway—fifteen?
    She said she was sixteen and way too smart for me—then gulped up another mouthful of water and spouted it at me, catching me on the ear.
    I scrambled to my feet and was going to jump in and give her a good dunking, but before I could kick off my shoes she shot away with a few strong strokes and then surged up onto the bank about ten yards downstream, coming out of the water in a silvery rush, the thin blue swimsuit pasted to her nipples and lean belly and small round bottom shaped like an overturned heart. She snatched up her towel and gave me another wag of her eyebrows and ran off, brown legs flashing. She sprinted past Earl and the tootsies and disappeared where the lane to the bathhouse curved around through the trees. And took a good bit of my breath with her.
    The next time I saw her was a few days later when she came over to clean the old couple’s house. She came speeding down the driveway on her bicycle and slid neatly off the seat and let the bike go crashing into the backyard fence. She was wearing her hair chippy-fashion, long and loose to her shoulders. As she started up the steps to the Carlson kitchen she saw me at the apartment window and smiled. When I smiled back she stuck her tongue out at me, then laughed and went inside.
    Over the next few weeks I saw her only on those days when I happened to be home and she came to tidy the Carlsons’ place or do their wash. On laundry days she wore shorts cut so high they would’ve had my mother shaking her head and remarking