Harper’s Guitar
by William Shunn

 Harper was fourteen years old the first time he rode his thumb. That one was a pretty short trip. The second time, he was a year older, he wasn’t coming back, and it was all Joe Frank’s doing.

            Harper couldn’t remember a time when his half-brother wasn’t tormenting him. Joe Frank was a little more than four years older. Harper’s earliest memory was of that leering, gap-toothed face bending over him in bed—and then biting his nose. The twisted ears and noogies of Harper’s preschool years gave way to Indian burns and endless involuntary rounds of bloody knuckles during grade school. Harper learned fairly early that trying to appeal to their mother for protection or redress would only make the next session worse.

            They lived in a little house behind a stand of sycamores on a farm a couple hours north of St. Louis, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi. Mr. Henry gave Harper’s mother a break on the rent on the condition that she, or later the boys, helped out with some of the chores.

            The boys’ tasks were simple for the most part but assumed gargantuan dimensions on the days Joe Frank took it in his head to stand in Harper’s way. A bucket of fresh eggs might get tipped out of his hands on the way to the farmhouse. A horse might escape its stall shortly after Harper had delivered its meal of alfalfa to the stable. Worst of all, he had to take great caution climbing up on the split-rail fence to slop the hogs in their sty, lest a stealthy hand shove him square in the back, sending him ass-over-teakettle into the trough.

            No matter how many times mishaps like this occurred, no matter how many time both boys suffered scoldings from Mr. Henry or hidings from their mother, no matter how many times Harper had to see a doctor, the older brother always walked away smiling.

            As Joe Frank zigzagged his way through high school, drinking and driving and smoking and fighting and fucking with abandon, the beatings grew worse but at least less frequent. He was just too busy raising hell to pay Harper the customary attention. Sure, there was still the time that Joe Frank, in a blind-drunk rage, pushed Harper down the front steps and kicked him so hard he pissed blood for days. But Harper was almost content to endure the abuse as long as it meant a few days or even a week of peace.

            And then one day, things changed. It was his fourteenth birthday, a Wednesday, overcast and cold. He trudged home from the bus through the muddy slush, filled with foreboding. It had been nine days since Joe Frank had laid hands on him, a remarkable streak that couldn’t last. Harper hadn’t even seen his brother in five days.

            “Joe Frank isn’t coming home,” his mother told him after work that evening. It was more than she usually had to say. She wasn’t even forty but she looked tired and old. She also looked like she’d stopped off somewhere for a nip on the way home from her receptionist job at the John Deere dealership. “He’s been in jail, you know.”

            No, Harper hadn’t known, but he wasn’t surprised. This was hardly the first time Joe Frank had gotten locked up, though it had never been for more than a night or two before. That had been when Joe Frank was a minor, though. Now he was eighteen. Harper said nothing.

            “Well, don’t look so broken up about it. He’s only your only brother. You’ll probably be happy to hear what Judge Callan told him. Never wants to see him in court again. All charges dropped if he does something useful with his life. Join the Army.” She swiped away a stray tear and spat, “Useful. So that’s what your brother did, up and ran off with a recruiter. As if his own family didn’t need him at home.”

            Harper stood up and walked out of the room.

            “You get back here!” she called after him. “Harper! You always were a selfish little brat. Selfish and ungrateful! Harper!”

            He closed the door to his bedroom and lay down on top of the covers. He had been slow to believe the implications of what he was hearing, but it was finally sinking in. He felt as though a huge engine that had roared in the background of his thoughts his entire life had suddenly shut down. The silence was deafening.

            Harper slept for the next eleven hours. He did not dream.

            The rest of the eighth grade was . . . nicer. It wasn’t that he suddenly began to excel in class, or that he could sleep without nightmares, or that he made any close friends. School had always been a refuge of sorts, a place to still his thoughts and practice being invisible, but now it became something he enjoyed for its own sake. He began to pay attention, to believe that in some ways the world could be made to make some kind of sense.

            And that was before he picked up the guitar.

            It was near the end of that first peaceful spring. Joe Frank had been gone for almost four months, classes were winding down, and Harper found himself standing in front of the bulletin board near the school office. Students, teachers, and staff posted here about tryouts, committee and club meetings, and items for sale or trade. The word DREADNOUGHT on the mint-green 3x5 card was what caught his eye. He wasn’t sure what it meant, but it evoked visions of a huge, overwhelming, and implacable force. The clarifying GUITAR ran second in importance to the fact that such a monster could be his for a measly twenty-five dollars or best offer. Harper ripped the card from the bulletin board, stuffed it in his back pocket, and headed straight home.

            His mother kept Joe Frank’s bedroom locked, but Harper made simple work of the door by threading a length of baling wire behind the latch bolt. He was pretty sure Joe Frank had at the very least been dealing weed, and his brother hadn’t been home to grab so much as a change of underwear between his arrest and his enlistment.

            The bedroom smelled like wet towels and gym socks had been moldering in the corners all spring. The curtains were drawn. Clothing and fast-food wrappers were strewn everywhere, sneered over from the walls by Mötley Crüe and Scorpions posters.

            It didn’t take Harper long to find what he was looking for. Only two pairs of socks in Joe Frank’s top dresser drawer were rolled up. Each contained a thick wad of bills. Harper took all the cash from one and left the other in place.

            He was far more nervous dialing the phone in the kitchen than he had been stealing the money, but the male voice that answered could not have been friendlier when Harper stammered out that he was calling about the guitar.

            “Had another call about it earlier,” the man said, “but they ain’t showed up yet. You get here first, it’s yours.”

            Harper copied down the address, heart sinking. His guitar was more than eight miles south, back through town and out the other side.

            He went out to the porch and sat thinking. The sky was swimming-pool blue, and the breeze smelled like wildflowers. He didn’t question his need to acquire the dreadnought. He simply catalogued his available options and dismissed them one by one. He could wait for his mother to get home and ask her for a ride, but that would raise questions he didn’t want to answer, and anyway, she wouldn’t be back for at least two hours. He could ask Mr. Henry for a ride, but that would surely get back to his mother. He could call for a taxi from town, but he had no idea what that would cost, and he was not eager to spend more than necessary from what he was already thinking of as his war chest. He could take one of the horses, but if he got caught that might be one offense too many for their precarious living situation—the mother of all unforced errors.

            In under two minutes, he had narrowed his choices to one, and with that option in hand he did not delay. First he secured his war chest in a place where he was sure no one would ever find it. He kept back a hundred dollars in tens and twenties, then walked down to the highway and stuck out his thumb.

            Nine cars, six pickup trucks, and two semis roared past before a battered station wagon stopped. Harper shared the back seat with a wriggling baby strapped into a car seat, while an overly friendly chocolate Labrador in the way back kept sniffing and licking the back of his head. The middle-aged couple up front seemed to buy his terse story about chores that needed doing at his sick grandmother’s house. In fact, they had intended to turn left in town and head east, but they seemed so moved by his devotion that they offered to take him all the way.

            As they continued south, Harper kept his eyes peeled for the landmarks the man on the phone had given him. When he spotted the spindly metal windmill towering over a melon field, he said, “Watch for the blue mailbox on the left. It has a dog on it. There.”

            The bright blue mailbox sat atop a weathered barrel. It was surmounted by the silhouette of a pointing gundog worked in iron. The car turned into the dusty dooryard of a tidy blue farmhouse surrounded by fields of new corn. The nearby barn was also blue. A German wirehaired pointer came trotting around from behind the house as Harper exited the car. The Lab started barking, so Harper hurried to shut the door before a big to-do could start. He waved at the couple and rubbed the pointer behind the ears, waiting for the car to leave before heading to the farmhouse. He felt a strange hitch in his chest at their kindness.

            A steel-haired man in a checked shirt was already opening the door as Harper approached it. “Can I help you?”

            The pointer slipped past Harper and into the house. “I called earlier?” Harper said. “About the guitar?”

            “That was you?” the man said, frowning and looking him up and down. “You sounded older. And your ride just left.”

            He shrugged. “They were nice to bring me this far.”

            “And you got the money?”

            Harper nodded.

            The man stroked his neat mustache. “Okay, you may’s well see the guitar. And Cerberus seems all right with you. C’mon in, have a seat. I’ll be just a minute.”

            The front room was bright, filled with furnishings in blond wood and family photographs in silver frames. Harper salivated at the savory smell of roasting meat. As he perched on an overstuffed couch, a matronly woman with a neat bun and an apron appeared from the kitchen to offer him tea. Harper had never had tea, so he shook his head, embarrassed. The dog padded in and out of the room, checking on him.

            When the man returned, he was cradling the most beautiful object that Harper had ever seen. The guitar was big and imposing, a little like the man himself, lacquered a rich, brilliant blue that deepened at the edges to the shade of twilight.

            “This here belongs to our youngest. He’s headed up to Urbana-Champaign now with a better guitar than this one. You want to try it?”

            Harper stood up. The guitar was much lighter than he expected, with a colorful embroidered strap that went around his shoulder. He felt like a different person cradling it in his arms. His fingers hovered over the strings as if they were live wires that might shock him.

            “Do you play?” the man asked.

            “I’m going to learn.” Harper realized as he said it that he felt no shame at the assertion.

            “Then you’ll need Kenny’s books too, if you’ve got another five on you.” The man gave a cryptic half-smile. “Knowledge always comes at a price, you know.”

            The way Harper felt holding the delicate guitar, he would have spent everything in his pocket and more to master its intricacies. He handed over the thirty dollars with no hesitation, then, as the man helped him pack the instrument and everything else into its black case, had to fend off the wife’s repeated insistence that he stay for dinner.

            Harper won that battle but was unable to talk the man out of driving him back home, once it came out that he was planning to hitch. The guitar rode with Cerberus in the bed of the shiny blue pickup. Harper wanted to be back there too, feeling the wind in his hair and watching the thick tree line to the west for glimpses of blue herons over the distant river.

            He made it home well before his mother did, and set right to work in his room deciphering the strange notation in the instructional books. By the end of the evening the guitar was almost in tune and he was picking his way through scales and a few awkward chords. By the end of the week he was stumbling his way through a reasonable facsimile of “A Horse with No Name.” By the end of the summer he could play and sing about twenty different tunes, and he was messing around with a couple of songs of his own.

            His mother never once asked about the guitar, where he had gotten it, how he had paid for it. She seemed to withdraw even more into herself with Joe Frank gone, more often bringing home McDonald’s or Wendy’s at night than attempting to cook any actual meals. Sometimes she just dumped the food on the kitchen table and went out again, whether to Mr. Henry’s or somewhere else Harper didn’t know and didn’t care.

            He was living in a world entirely his own. Until the guitar, Harper hadn’t known he could be good at anything. He might have been good at baseball or car engines or chess if they had come to him at the right time, but no, for some reason the guitar had chosen him. That’s how it felt, anyway. Fingers that had never felt comfortable or even competent wielding a pencil demonstrated an inexplicable affinity for the contortions demanded by playing. The guitar, as opposed to the rest of his life, seemed comprehensible. But the magic of it was, it continued revealing deeper secrets and dimensions the more time he spent with it.

            The ninth grade passed like a dream he didn’t want to wake up from. His grades improved. He made a couple of friends. He started taking weekly lunch-hour guitar lessons from Mr. Orman, the music teacher, who was startled by how much Harper had managed to learn on his own. In May, as the academic year was drawing to a close, he even auditioned for a school talent assembly, playing a song he had written himself, and he made the cut.

            The day before the assembly, a Thursday, Harper was lost in thought as he finished his chores. He walked into the house singing his lyrics under his breath and mentally rehearsing his fingerings. He felt so relaxed that he didn’t register the front door standing open.

            He heard the banging and crashing just before he reached the kitchen. He looked down the little hall to the left and froze. His bedroom door was open, spilling light onto the threadbare carpet.

            Harper’s whole body shook. He took two steps back and tripped over a corner of the couch.

            As Harper pulled himself up, Joe Frank stuck his head out the bedroom door. “There you are, shithead.” His voice could have sliced cardboard.

            Harper ran for the door, but he’d hurt his ankle and he sprawled in the entryway. Boots pounded behind him as he scrabbled to his feet. A hand grabbed the back of his collar. Harper spun, trying to break the grip. His brother shoved him to the floor again, where Harper landed on his back.

            “Where is it?”

            Joe Frank loomed over him, somehow more terrifying than ever in a buzz cut and camo fatigues. In his left hand, like he was choking a goose, was the neck of Harper’s dreadnought. On his face was pure murder.

            “Where is what?”

            “You know what. Where is my money?”

            “I don’t know what you’re—”

            Joe Frank raised the guitar high above his head, two hands gripping the neck. With a silent scream, Harper wrapped his arms around his head and started to roll. The guitar caught him on the shoulder and back, splintering around him. Blue pain flared sforzando in dissonance to the keening strings.

            “I know you took it, you piece of shit! You little fuck!”

            The remains of the dreadnought came down on Harper again and again as he belly-crawled out the open front door and onto the porch. When there was nothing left to hit with, Joe Frank started kicking with his shiny black boots, shots to the head and the gut.

            Blackness came, too slowly, and black was all Harper knew until he opened his eyes in a spindly emergency-room bed. Eventually he learned that Mr. Henry had finally seen something he couldn’t write off as brothers being brothers, and had held Joe Frank at shotgun point until the sheriff’s deputies arrived.

            But that was too little too late for Harper. As soon as he was home from the hospital and could walk without immediately falling down and vomiting, and while Joe Frank was still cooling his heels (Desert Storm veteran or not), Harper retrieved not just his war chest but the rest of what his brother had stashed in his room, staggered down to the highway, and stuck out his thumb for that second time.

            He’d always been told that hitching was dangerous, but based on his own experience he had a hard time believing that. Anyway, it couldn’t be more dangerous than staying put, and somewhere out there in the bigger world his next guitar was waiting for him to find it. 

© William Shunn, 2019

William Shunn is author of the memoir The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Association for Mormon Letters Award. He is also an accomplished short fiction writer, with three dozen publications in markets like Salon, Asimov's, Newtown Literary, Realms of Fantasy, and elsewhere, plus nominations for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. He is a member of the XPRIZE Science Fiction Advisory Council and lives in Inwood. www.accidentalterrorist.com

Harper’s Guitar was read by Mark Woollett on October 2nd 2019 for Accident & Emergency