Harry’s theory of the truth couldn’t have been more different than Maggie’s. Truth wasn’t a fixed and elemental entity like gold just waiting to be uncovered; it was more like a tree in the path of his bulldozer. It could be knocked down, pushed over a bank, moved out of sight, or covered up to make way for something new. He had no choice but to think this way; it was how he changed the entire trajectory of his life and left the poverty of his childhood behind. There was nothing that couldn’t be changed, including the truth, if change was what the situation called for.

Harry threw a few tools in a sturdy canvas bag and headed down to the transfer station. As an informal gathering spot for wrenchers it couldn’t be beat. It had an unlimited supply of decent coffee and a clean bathroom. It had piles of broken lawn mowers, weed whackers, leaf blowers, chain saws, and other small engine tools in need of repair. It had no radio, no television, and poor cell phone reception. Best of all, it had at least a few men loafing around at any given time. If he wanted to know what people were talking about or how they sized up a situation, it never took long to find out at the transfer station. Men gossiped much more than women⏤under the guise of analysis.

Each repaired item was sold at the transfer station store for the highest fair price they could get for it. Everything else was free, but the repaired tools cost money⏤at Harry’s insistence. Every so often, someone would come in and buy the very same tool they had dropped off weeks earlier as useless and without value. It didn’t happen often but when it did, it made every tinkering hour worth it. In its own illogical way, it was Harry’s revenge for growing up in thrift store clothes in a town this small, of walking the halls of his school in the discarded clothes of his wealthier classmates. Before the fires came and changed everything, the single most dramatic event in the history of West Vernal was kicked off in 1989 by a single, cruel sentence: 

“Hey, loser. That’s my jacket you’re wearing.”

Harry was a wealthy man, a successful man by any measure, but it would be a lie to say he was at perfect peace and didn’t hold grudges. If someone wanted a tool back that they had thrown away, then it was going to cost them. As his father used to say, “Possession is nine tenths of the law.”

Copyright 2023 Kesel Wilson (entirely, 100% human-created)

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