this afternoon. A record's search at the hospital would indicate that the wife he'd left five years ago had died, leaving his son without a family.
Half an hour later, after cleaning themselves in the back of a Tommy Burger fast food restaurant, Homer and Hemingway stood on a street corner.
"Hey Homer?" asked Hemingway watching the traffic rush by.
Homer's hand rested on the larger man's shoulder, as they both waited for the light to change. Yeah?
"What does it sound like right now?"
Why do you care?
"Because I miss all the sounds that other people hear," said Hemingway.
How can you miss something you've never had?
"I could leave you in the middle of the cross-walk, and let you answer that question."
Father Jim had long ago explained to Homer and Hemingway that their symbiotic relationship was proof that a higher power existed, for who but a divine spirit would provide the trajectory of friendship between a deaf boy and a blind boy. Father Jim always spoke of trajectories, as if the world were a physics equation, and the answers formulaic. Nothing was by chance. There was no thing as accident. Everything is an intersection of time, space and physical objects. Everything has a trajectory.
Now, middle-aged and closer than any married couple could ever be, Hemingway and Homer stood at the crossroads of Sunset and La Brea. One stared across the street at the red light waiting for the light to change. The other had never seen the color red. One led, and the other followed. One spoke, the other listened. Such was the life of Homer and Hemingway. Named by Father Jim at the Lost Angels Children's Home, the pair had arrived within days of each other back in the summer of 1962 and had been placed in the same rusty bunk. Homer, who slept on the lower bunk, was a born storyteller. Like his namesake, he'd been cursed with blindness; only his disability came from a bullet that had stuck him in the head when he was just a toddler, leaving him blind and unable to speak. Born deaf, Hemingway was by nature more reclusive. But if there was ever an opportunity to prove himself a man, it was the strapping young ten year old who dared anyone to challenge him, whether it be a race, or a fight, or a game of chance. He was the one who championed young Homer, protecting him from the other boys at the home. And because of his generosity, Homer spoke to him, his, the only sound the sandy-haired boy would ever hear.
But if you left me, then you'd have no one to talk to, said the rail-thin man wearing blackened John Lennon glasses. Homer wore an LA Dodgers T-shirt, jeans and canvas tennis shoes. His clothes were well-worn, but clean. The jeans even had creases from where a lady at the home pressed them.
"Such is the conundrum," said Hemingway, dressed in a similar style. His only difference was the Spearmint Rhino T-shirt over a broad muscular chest, an advertisement for a men's only social club with the outlines of a naked woman the centerpiece for his torso. A pie-shaped wedge of dirt spoiled the picture at the shoulder, a souvenir from his scuffle in the alley. "So what about it?"
A young black woman in a too-tight denim skirt and tube top standing next to them glanced over and gave him the stink eye. Hemingway leered hard enough to make her glance away, well aware that he and Homer appeared nothing more than two homeless men in search of a Mad Dog afternoon. Theirs was a disguise they'd cultivated. Low men such as themselves needed to blend in, or else they'd be too easily identified. Here in the Los Angeles landscape, nothing was more at home than two homeless men shambling from street to street.
When the light changed, Hemingway grabbed the hand that rested on his shoulder, and guided Homer across busy Sunset Blvd. People hurried past in both directions. Homer and Hemingway crabbed like rummies, cumbersome steps mostly in balance.
Obscene horns blaring from cars with impatient drivers. The buzz of a billion trillion volts of electricity ominous as it powers everything around you. Shouting from the laundry down the block, where two Hispanic women are arguing over a man. A jet passing overhead, the roar temporarily drowning out every other sound. The beep of the warning from the stop sign, telling us sightless fools to hurry up. A siren somewhere proving the savagery of man.