Harris and Me

and burbled away, throwing a flat white glare on the table.
Glennis and Clair were at the wood-burning cookstove, turning pancakes. Knute and Harris were sitting at the table. Knute was drinking coffee from a mug, wrapping the cup in a hand that could have provided shade, staring at the table with a glazed early morning look on his face. Harris sat straight up, a fork in one hand, his eyes riveted on an empty spot on the table, his body half shaking.
At the end of the table sat an old man in a wool coat—though it was summer and hot in the kitchen from the wood stove on which the pancakes were cooking—a man so incredibly dirty that it was hard to find a patch of skin on his face or neck not covered with soil or grease. He wore a matted beard—stuck with bits of dirt and sawdust and what looked like (and I found later to be) dried manure and dribbled spit and tobacco juice. All this around two piercingly blue gun-barrel eyes and a toothless mouth.
Louie.
I had seen bums in the city looking better and tried not to stare as I moved toward the table. Nobody spoke, just nodded and watched the pancakes cooking, and as I sat Louie took a metal can of Log Cabin syrup and poured it a quarter inch deep in a big puddle on his bare plate. Then he sat forward, as Harris was sitting, and watched the blank spot on the table with a fork in his hand.
There were two empty chairs and I stood for a moment until Glennis motioned to me.
“Sit. There by Harris.”
I slid in next to Harris and assumed the other chair was for either Glennis or Clair. It didn’t matter because neither of them sat nor did I ever see them sit to a meal while I was there. Clair cooked, stood over the stove and cooked, and Glennis carried the food to the table. I know they must have eaten but I never saw them sit down and eat.
Harris ignored me, kept sitting with the fork in his hand, staring at the middle of the table so that I wondered if he was in some kind of trance, perhaps not fully awake yet. Sleepwalking. God knows I was having trouble keeping my eyes open. There wasn’t a clock anywhere but it felt like it couldn’t be much after midnight and I figured at the rate things were going I’d be ready to go back to bed about ten o’clock in the morning.
I noted Harris grow even more tense next to me and looked up to see Glennis coming with a stack of pancakes on a plate. They looked delicious, steaming and fluffy, and I felt my mouth start to water.
I was not to get any of the pancakes.
Before the plate hit the table, Louie leaned forward like a snake striking and hit the stack of pancakes with his fork.
At the same instant Harris made his bid, jabbing for the stack with his fork but he was too late by miles.
The whole stack went to Louie’s plate. Seven or eight of them dropped into the puddle of syrup, hesitated while he poured gobs more syrup on top of them, and then disappeared. With the possible exception of some species of sharks in a feeding frenzy, I have never seen anything eat like Louie. The pancakes were consumed whole. He deftly forked them in the middle, twisted them a half turn, and then speared them back into his toothless mouth letting his lips squeegee off the excess syrup, which then ran down into his beard, some of it to drip back onto his plate. In some wonderful manner he would then open his throat and swallow—all without chewing and only half choking.
The entire stack was gone in ten seconds flat, and he was sitting again with his fork in his hand, the syrup dripping from his beard down onto his shirt and lap.
“Rats,” Harris whispered to me, sighed, and leaned back, shook his shoulders to loosen the tension, and got ready for the next batch.
Knute hadn’t moved, was still wrapped around the coffee cup, and I stared at Louie in open admiration. He was a machine completely devoted to feeding itself. Not a word, no wasted motion—just strike and gone.
The next stack of cakes was the same except that Harris caught a corner of one pancake—a tattered remnant that he poured syrup on and ate carefully, chewing for a long time.
Louie ate the third stack as well—so far at least twenty pancakes—but he was slowing, dragged down by food, and when the fourth stack came he hesitated. Harris was ready, went in low and nailed it and put it on his plate—I thought with a low growl in his throat but I couldn’t be sure. Louie didn’t seem to mind and belched softly—a green drifter, the kind of belch that made people move away in a crowded room—and turned, waiting for the next delivery.
“Harris, you share now.”
“But Ma...”
Glennis turned from the stove, leaned across the table, flicked at Harris with the back of her hand, and I heard her fingers connect with his forehead so hard his head jerked back.
He handed me a pancake.
“More,” Glennis said. “Half.” She raised her hand and he flinched and complied, although he tore the last one in two with his fork so I didn’t quite get half of the whole stack. I didn’t care. By this time I felt lucky to get anything and dripped syrup from the can onto my cakes—Harris had got to it before me and nearly drained it—and ate quietly.
Knute still hadn’t moved except to raise his arm and drink the coffee. Glennis refilled his mug twice while we ate and he drained it both times without speaking.
“Come on,” Harris said. “We’ve got to get the cows in.”
He had finished eating and pushed back from the table. I still had half my pancakes