A master criminal would have known exactly what his objectives were, stepping over the threshold into the gloom of Hong Hing’s. All Harry could think of was Kik Cola on one side of the bargain; five dollars on the other. Hong Hing himself happened to be standing in the door frame of his dingy shop, gazing out over Horseshoe Bay, when Harry pulled up. Leaning his bike against the cord wood stacked outside the skewed wood-frame building, Harry did his best to look casual as he approached the ‘Chinaman’.
“What can I do fo you?” Hong Hing greeted him, stepping back into the shop to let Harry by.
“I want to buy some Kik Cola,” Harry said.
“Sure. Hot day, eh? Kik cool you down.”
Even though it was a brilliant summer afternoon, the inside of Hong Hing’s was dark and gloomy. At one end of the room, a jumble of used goods teetered haphazardly, looking more like the contents of someone’s disorganized shed than anything you could describe as a store, even a second-hand store. At the other, an assortment of vegetables and fruit was displayed in baskets and crates, some on the floor, others on a mismatched collection of tables. Hong Hing went round and stood behind the counter, flanked to the right by the cash register, to the left by towering jars of sweets. Behind him, shelves displayed tins of tobacco, canned fruit and vegetables, cooking oils, and on one of them—lined up like a squad of soldiers on parade—bottles of Kik Cola, flanked by Coke-Cola and 7-Up.
Seeing Harry’s eyes lock onto the prize, Hong Hing twisted round, grabbed a bottle of Kik, and put it on the counter between them. “There,” he said.
Before he could ring-in the purchase, Harry retrieved his mother’s five-dollar bill from his pocket, slapped it onto the counter between them, and said, “I want all the Kik Colas I can buy for this.”
Hong Hing blinked, then looked up from the five dollar bill. “You very thirsty!” he joked.
Harry nodded, as if commending Hong Hing for having figured out the scope of the transaction.
“Let me see. Five cent, one bottle; twenty bottle, one dolla; one hundred bottle, five dolla,” Hong Hing calculated, blinking again.
Shocked at the enormity of his purchase, Harry nodded defiantly.
“How you carry one hundred bottle on bike?”
Before Harry could fully comprehend the ludicrousness of his situation, Hong Hing scurried out from behind the counter and summoned him to follow. Hing hurried into the second-hand quadrant of his shop. Near the back wall, tottering under a heap of junk, was a dilapidated, rusty wagon.
“One quarta,” Hong Hing offered. “You empty; bring to counter; I fill with Kik.”
Too embarrassed to dicker, Harry agreed and began shifting the stuff out of the wagon onto the floor. One of its wheels wobbled, he discovered when he was finally able to move the thing, and the others were out of alignment, so it crabbed along like a wounded animal.
“Ah!” Hong Hing smiled. “Four dolla, seventy-five cent left, 95 bottle of Kik.”
While Harry watched in dismal silence, Hong Hing shifted all the display bottles of Kik onto the counter. “Twelve bottle,” he tallied once they were lined up. “You put in wagon; I get more.”
Disappearing behind a rag, draped from a couple of nails over a doorway behind his counter, Hong Hing left Harry to his task, shifting the first dozen bottles of Kick into the wonky wagon. Hing returned from his stockroom before the job was finished with three more cases of Kik on a hand truck, 72 bottles in all. “That make eighty-four,” he said excitedly. “You put in wagon.”
While Harry continued loading up the wagon, which seemed on the verge of collapse, Hong Hing took down five bottles each of Coke and 7-Up, putting them on the counter. “No more Kik Cola,” he said. “You take Coke-a-Cola and 7-Up instead. I give you one free!” He nodded emphatically as he suggested this substitution. “Both very good for thirsty boy.” Before Harry could object, Hong rounded the counter and helped by loading the bottles into the wagon atop the pyramid of Kik.
They stood back once the cargo was on board. Hong Hing admired their work as if they’d built something as magnificent and impressive as the Great Wall of China; aghast, Harry looked at the pile like a fretful slave, facing certain ruin and retribution. Hong Hing hurried into the second-hand quadrant of his store, trotting back with a frayed length of rope in hand. “You tie to bike; bring Kik Cola home,” he encouraged, nodding.
Weary beyond hope, defeated in mind and spirit, ashamed to a depth he’d never plumbed, Harry tied the rope to the handle and began dragging the swaying wagon toward the doorway.
Hong Hing laughed. “You pedal slow,” he said. “Have lots of time to think.” Then, after a couple of seconds more, he groaned. “Oh no!” he lamented. “How you get wagon down steps?”
Harry, who had been too busy keeping the wagon and bottles upright to notice the forgotten drop-off at Hong Hing’s door, turned round and gasped, the air rushing out of him like a deflating balloon. “No!” He wailed in disbelief. It might as well have been the Grand Canyon he was gaping into or the edge of a flat earth.
Hong Hing laughed and slapped his thighs, doubled over in a paroxysm of glee. Harry, jolted out of his torment by Hong’s delirium, stared in abject amazement. “Come!” Hong Hing beckoned, his hands gesturing like a couple of birds taking wing. “Come!” He scurried round to the merchant’s side of the counter, opened the till, and retrieved the fiver he’d taken from Harry. “Here!” he slapped the money back down on the counter. “You put Kik back on shelf and into crates; I pay you five dolla.”
He didn’t have to ask twice. It seemed a bargain made in heaven to Harry, the grip of fear and shame easing as, bottle-by-bottle, he unloaded the wagon and restocked the Kik, Coke, and 7-Up to their rightful places.
~~~
Catherine Sanderson never missed the five dollars, which Harry slipped back into her wallet. She wasn’t one to count her money except as she spent it. As far as she or anyone else in the Sanderson household knew, Harry had never been a thief. There was nothing to punish or forgive. His life of crime had been lived out in a single afternoon, and the wound it left in his memory never broke skin until years later, when he was grown up. He confessed to it over dinner one day.
“Oh my!” Mrs. Sanderson laughed. “What a lesson you learned.” Harry’s dad laughed, too, joking, “And here’s us worrying we had a son so perfect he’d never know how cunning and devious the human animal can really be!”
Hong Hing rewarded Harry in his own way. “You take,” he said, handing him a free bottle of Kik. “Come for more any time.”
Over the years, Harry did drop in at Hong Hing’s, but he never drank that bottle of Kik or bought another from Fong Yen Lew or anyone else. It sits, unopened still, on a shelf in Harry’s basement. Whenever he comes across it, he wonders: Would the contents still fizz if you popped the cap off?
He’s never going to find out. The memory of that afternoon remains in his background always, a secret Hong Hing took with him when, as an old man, he returned to China.
Pushing a hundred, Harry is still grateful for the ancient memory and the lesson Hong Hing taught him that crazy day.
“What is it I’m grateful to him for?” he sometimes asks. That’s not easy to capture in a sentence. But when he takes a stab at it, Harry says: “He taught me real joy comes from giving, not taking; from sharing, not possessing. Can’t say I’ve always lived up to that precept, but the farther I stray from it, the more it tugs at me like a bungee cord wrapped around my neck, reminding me who I’m really supposed to be.”
Next: Getting to goodbye