Harry (standard:adventure, 3381 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Jul 28 2007	Views/Reads: 3492/2353	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Harry and I found plenty of gold in the foothills of Colombia. The challenge was in staying alive to enjoy it!

HARRY 

I shifted my carriel, half full of rock samples, and braced my boot
against the rock. Above us, the cave roof was was a maze of slender 
crystalline needles -- stalactites.  Harry wanted to take a look at 
that upper quartz vein, so I made a hand-saddle and hoisted him to my 
shoulders.  From there, he could look up ... 

The crack was loud and distinct, with lesser but equally distinct echoes
from the cave walls.  In the dim daylight (the adit was only a dozen 
steps away), I watched a bat start up.  That same instant I heard a 
gurgling choke above me and warm, wet drops began raining down my 
cheeks. I looked up.  Harry was still standing, with one hand firmly 
grasping a notch in the rock, and about six feet of stalactite growing 
from his gullet, sprouting between his teeth.  Only then did I begin to 
crumble under his weight -- that rock spike must have weighed a hundred 
pounds! 

Even as Harry toppled from my shoulders, smashing the stalactite to
shrapnel, I felt a sense of relief.  If he didn't go peacefully, at 
least he went fast.  The gold would have to wait.  A little while. I 
tucked his legs inside my elbows and dragged him, step by step, along 
the little stream to the grass outside.  Without emotion, I took a 
close look and concluded that Harry would never walk again.  Ever.  
Anywhere.  The petrified carrot had kind of "unfurled" him, leaving him 
hollow, disemboweled; its blunt little point protruded from his 
scrotum.  No man should die like that.  I tried feeling sorry for him, 
but could only conjure up envy.  My stepfather lingered fifteen years 
in a nursing home -- a marksman plagued with blindness; an orator 
plagued with deafness, a man whose sexual appetites sated bevies of 
beauties over his long, rambunctious bachelor years, now barren.  Yes, 
better the stalactite. I couldn't bear the thought of simply dumping 
Harry's body for the vultures. At least not here. Where could I bury 
him? 

If nothing else, Harry could be called irascible.  Those he made suffer
might say "volcanic" or "explosive". I heard a doctor describe him as 
emotionally unstable.  But to tell the truth, he merely seemed edgy or 
touchy all the time, kind of irritable.  You could never call him cool, 
imperturbable, composed, at ease.  So it was no fun trying to get 
things done with Harry running the show.  If I said "light", he said 
"heavy" or "dark".  If I saw seagulls, he saw buzzards.  He took 
chances no right- minded driver of a dynamite truck would take.  But he 
had the money -- and gave it away left and right.  He wasn't right very 
often, but about one thing he was always right.  He could smell gold 75 
feet deep.  Once, for example, he pointed to a spot on the riverbank 
and said, 

"Dig down there, two, maybe three feet".  A few scoops with the shovel
proved he was right: always gold nuggets or gold sands; sometimes just 
colors in the pan. He was never wrong. 

Harry wasn't the product of any particular set of parents, nor was he
subject to much parental guidance.  He just grew up until he joined a 
mining company as a dowser.  That got him out in the field at an early 
age. Pretty soon he was dowsing underground streams to find seams of 
gold.  At that age, Harry cared a lot less for the gold than he did for 
the luckless young twit that shacked up with the foreman.  Two years 
later, when he took over the mining company,  I was hired on as 
assayer, and we stuck together until the company went broke.  After 
that we teamed up and hired on at one mining company or another.  Harry 
taught me a lot, the hard way. 

"Here, hold this anvil," he would say, hefting the ninety-pound chunk of
iron and dropping it onto my arms, "we're going to need it pretty soon, 
so keep it ready." 

At this point, Harry would laugh with an ear-splitting cackle that
shivered my tail bone.  The anvil in my arms grew heavier: it turned 
from iron to lead, to gold, to tungsten, to osmium .  When I dropped 
it, Harry doubled over with evil glee. 

"Fer Chris' sake, you moron, can't you lend a hand?" he asked. 

That was Harry.  The most successful asshole you ever met.  One night


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