The Hangar
Harvey was
insane, but he wasn’t hurting anybody.
He took up a lot of space, but it was space no one wanted and they were
happy that someone found a use for it, even if that use was crazy. It was a derelict hangar half a mile from an
abandoned army base, an empty cracked concrete block with weeds thick as cockroaches
and cockroaches sprouting up like weeds.
Say what you will about Harvey, but he cleaned her up. His first week there, he pulled all the weeds
and stomped all the cockroaches under his old cracked leather army boots. He used a hoe and a hose to mix cement in a
wheelbarrow and filled in all the cracks.
He filled in the windows, too, and any openings, except the big hangar
door that the planes used to taxi through before the base closed.
I only met
him a couple of times. No one in town
has spent much time with Harvey, or even visited him in his hangar more than a
handful of times, with exception of Ike, who volunteers with the V.A. in his
spare time. No one knows if Harvey was a
vet, not even Ike knows for sure, but Ike says that he can tell, deep down in
his gut, that even if Harvey never served, he’d definitely seen something like
a war. He told me that when we were on
our way to the hangar. Harvey had been
living there for five years by that point, and hadn’t stepped out of that
building once. Every week, someone would
bring him food, usually Ike. I was
fifteen, that first trip. I think every teenager was brought out at least once,
like some rite of passage. Some people
see a shaman, some see a rabbi, some go on a hunt or a vision quest; we saw
Harvey.
The hangar
was five minutes from the highway, out over the hard-packed light brown
dirt. Ike parked his SUV off to the side
of the hangar, and we got out. He opened
the trunk and we grabbed a bunch of grocery bags and walked towards the gaping
entry to the hangar. Harvey never closed
that door, left it open night and day, in good weather and storm. The concrete near the door was coated in a
layer of dirt. Dried leaves lay scattered
throughout the structure, piled in corners, skittering and clattering whenever
a gust of hot wind blew in. A small
campsite was set against the wall farthest from the entrance. A patched gray one-man tent and a little
propane stove. Harvey crawled out of the
tent as we approached, a man at least sixty years old with ghost-white hair and
sand textured skin. His clothes were
worn and threadbare, a light shirt that was once blue or black but now seemed a
dull gray and jeans sun bleached almost as white as his hair.
Ike and I
walked to the tent and put the food down.
I noticed several empty grocery bags scattered around the place, some
half mulched. I didn’t say anything, and
wasn’t going to until Ike nudged me in the ribs with his elbow and said, “You
can ask him. He won’t be offended.” Harvey waited patiently as I put the words
together.
“Why do you
live out here?”
Harvey told
me. He said he was waiting. The universe works according to certain
principles, certain laws of physics. Diffusion. Particles tend to move from areas of high
concentration to areas of low concentration.
If he waits long enough, the area inside the hangar will become a
microcosm of the world in its entirety.
“Who wouldn’t want their own world?” he concluded.
I only saw
him twice since then. Once, a few years later,
when I dropped off some groceries because Ike was sick. And a couple years after that I saw his
picture in the local paper, with a brief passage about how his heart gave out
and he probably didn’t suffer. Since
then, the hangar’s been torn down. You
can still tell where it was by remnants of the concrete foundation, but even
that’s fading now.
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