Fuck Henry

We drink beer and rip the wood paneling off his bedroom walls. We pull and pry with crowbars until the wood splinters apart and all the dust and stale air rushes out at us.

My hands and face are gritty with dust and sweat. We’re both covered with pieces of wood that come flying off the wall with every tug of the crowbar. Mark’s got his radio playing on the floor in the corner and I trip over it whenever I walk past.

Underneath the wood paneling, we find old wallpaper.

Mark says it’s the ugliest wallpaper he’s ever seen.

It’s mustard yellow and has this strange pattern of birds and snakes and symbols that look like hieroglyphics.

Mark stares at the wallpaper and says, “This is just so fucking ugly. Who the hell would actually want their room to look like this?”

I shake my head and pick at a loose piece of wallpaper with my fingernail. It peels off in a long strip in my hand.

“I guess we’ll have to take all this off, too, before you can paint,” I say.

Mark curses. He got laid off a couple months ago, from the job he dropped out of college for. After that, he had to move back in with his folks. Now he wants to take down the wood paneling in his bedroom and paint the walls, so it’ll feel less like he’s eighteen again and trapped in the same old room, waiting for the future to happen.

We finish ripping down the wood paneling. Then Mark sees a piece of molding that got pulled off with everything else. It’s a long strip of wood that ran along the floor on one side of the room, and Mark finds it laying in a pile of wood chips and other garbage.

Mark notices it because on the back of it, the side that’s been pressed up against the bedroom wall for the past thirty, forty years, it has penciled on it in block letters “FUCK HENRY.”

Mark’s laughter sounds like coughing. He holds up the molding so I can read it. He says to me, “Fuck Henry?”

I go, “Who’s Henry?”

Mark throws the piece of wood on the floor and says, “I don’t know, but somebody must not have liked him.”

Mark finds two scrapers in the garage for us to use to get the wallpaper down, but we decide to take a break first. We sit down at his kitchen table and he gets two more beers out of the fridge. The bottle seems more natural in my hand than the crowbar.

After a while, I ask Mark if he’s talked to Pam lately, if he thinks they’re getting back together or not.

He shakes his head. “We haven’t talked since the fight. But I hear she’s been seeing somebody.”

I go, “Already? Do you know who it is?”

Mark tells me it’s this guy named Danny. “You know,” he says, “The Amazing Danny? The magician?”

“Oh, fuck!” I say. “She’s dating that fucking magician?”

Mark nods.

I have to laugh. I can’t help it. I almost make a joke about the magician pulling a rabbit out of Pam’s snatch, but stop myself.

Mark takes a big gulp from his bottle. “It’s cool, man,” he says. “I wish her all the best. Really.”

I ask Mark if he’s serious. He claims he is.

*

Through the kitchen window, I can see the sun beginning to set. The room gets darker and darker, and I say to Mark, “So…fuck Henry.”

Mark laughs. I ask him what he thinks it means.

He goes, “Well, I don’t know. But it has to be from before I was born, from before my parents bought the house. Because when they moved in, the wood paneling was already put up.”

I ask if he wants to hear my theory. He shrugs and takes another gulp of beer.

tell him I think the carpenter that put up the wood paneling all those years ago was named Henry. And maybe Henry had somebody working for him that just really hated him. So one day, this guy, the one working for Henry, who just hates Henry’s guts, he snaps. But instead of quitting the job, this guy writes “FUCK HENRY” on that piece of molding and nails it to the wall. All that anger and resentment, sealed up tight against the wall this whole time.

Thirty, forty years, that little bit of hate and frustration has been sitting there, just waiting for someone to find it.

*

Mark’s mom walks into the kitchen and dumps a bag of groceries on the counter. Then she turns and glares at Mark.

“Don’t offer to help me or anything,” she says. “I mean, I can see you’re busy.”

“I didn’t even hear you come in,” Mark says, standing up. “Lemme help you.”

His mom says, “No, don’t bother. I’m fine. But God, Mark, drinking beer in the middle of the afternoon? And your father’s beer, by the way.” Then she points at the kitchen table. “And you’re not even using coasters!”

Mark stares at the floor. He breathes in deep, then strides out of the room. I get up and scurry after him, avoiding eye contact with his mom the whole time.

When I get back to the room, Mark’s already started on the wallpaper. He’s moving so fast the scraper in his hand is a blur as it goes up and down. Pieces of wallpaper are flying everywhere, hitting him in the face and getting in his way, but it doesn’t slow him down. I almost ask if he’s okay, but stop myself.

Instead, I stand in the doorway watching him as he presses the scraper harder and harder against the wall. He presses until it’s digging into the wall itself, into the sheetrock, and still Mark presses harder, as if he wants to uncover something hidden there, underneath, waiting.

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