oblivion, they were at peace.
He came out of the men’s room. The man who had been knocking swung wide to let him pass. He left through the side door where the drive-thru line had stalled and vomited up his lunch by the dumpster. He wandered off to a nearby patch of frostbitten grass between the McDonald’s and the Conoco and sat down there and perspired. The cars out on the road went by in slow motion.
He stopped in front of a display window in a downtown district recently renovated so as to better highlight its desolation. He stared through the glass of a sporting goods store at a pitched tent with a forest-green fly-sheet. Accessories surrounded the camp pastoral—a lantern and a canteen and a fire made of cardboard.
He lay down on a bench and took a nap. The city cop woke him by hitting his billy club against the wood.
“You got identification?” asked the cop.
He sat up slowly. He removed his wallet from the back pocket of his chinos. His insensate fingers made it difficult to remove the license. The cop looked it over and handed it back to him.
“No sleeping here.”
“Do you know your right-of-public-access laws?”
The cop looked at him. “You got some place to go, wise guy?”
With a crude and mechanical deliberation he opened the wallet in his lap and removed a crisp sheaf of newly minted hundred-dollar bills and made their edges flop between his fingers. “I can go anywhere I want.”
“Then get there,” said the cop.
“Your concern for my well-being is touching.”
The cop started to walk away.
“One might as well ask if the State, to avoid public unease, could incarcerate all who are physically unattractive or socially eccentric,” he called out. “Mere public intolerance or animosity cannot constitutionally justify the deprivation of a person’s physical liberty!”
He went back to sleep. When he woke up, he said no, he would not get up, no matter what, not now, no getting up, you are a fleshy weed for plucking. He said you are a feast for worms. You are a carping and hidebound bitch with your fevers and limps and predictable appetites.
Deficiency of copper causes anemia, just so you know. Which at this point is way down there on the list of concerns.
“A stench, a rotgut, a boil,” he retorted aloud, rising again on the bench. A woman stood nearby walking her dog. When his voice rose up she tugged at the leash to get the sniffing dog going again. “A gaseous blowhole. You are a blind clutch and claw. Go off. Go off and leave me alone.”
Can’t.
“You hang on the wheel of fortune. I rise upward on angel’s wings. You turn in the gyre. I dream of old lovers with youthful smiles.”
Sorry, pal, we’re in this together.
“Prove it!” he cried.
What is a wing? What is a smile?
“You can’t be smart,” he said. “Only I can be smart.”
I’m evolving, replied the other.
A crane and a tractor and a few smaller excavating vehicles sat as still as a display of dinosaurs in the man-made pit behind the convenience store. He took the access road down and sat in the cabin of the tractor as he ate a pair of hot dogs. He was able to keep them down, which he attributed to the other’s shrewd calculation for what nourishment a walk would require. “You are a wily cunt,” he said.
On the road that led out of town, a blackbird fell out of the sky. A second bird hit the shoulder and a third one landed in the far lane, followed by the rest of the flock. They hit with heavy thuds one after the other and lay scattered like jacks on the road. Then darkness fell and he was walking again.
He skirted the edge of a copse of trees that had been corralled at their trunks by orange plastic fencing and climbed the bluff that rose over the highway and traversed that weedy expanse that offered no purpose to commerce or settlement but a clear border. When he came down he diverted away from the highway into a neighborhood of half-finished Tudor-style homes on acre plots with dumpsters in the streets full of broken Sheetrock and mounds of rose-hued stone gravel in the driveways that with their air of thwarted expectancy accentuated the abandonment of the stillborn development. The freezing rain had soaked through his cornucopia sweatshirt and made it stiff. He was chattering and perspiring and raging like the fierce storm itself at the wrongs he had