by the breeze. Soon it would be Thanksgiving, although it seemed that there was little for which to be thankful as the year drew to its close. People I met on the streets of Portland spoke of working second jobs to make ends meet, of feeding their families with cheap cuts of meat while their savings dwindled and their safety nets fell away. They listened while candidates for high office told them the answer to the country’s problems was to make the wealthy wealthier so that more crumbs from their table might fall into the mouths of the poor, and some, while pondering the unfairness of it, wondered if that was better than no crumbs at all.
Along Commercial Street some tourists still wandered. Behind them a great cruise ship, perhaps the last of the season, loomed impossibly high over the wharves and warehouses, its prow reaching out to touch the buildings facing the sea, the water supporting it invisible from the street so that it seemed a thing discarded, marooned in the aftermath of a tsunami.
Away from the waterfront the tourists petered out entirely, and at the Great Lost Bear there were none at all, not as afternoon melted into evening. The Bear saw only a small but steady stream of locals pass through its doors that day, the kind of familiar faces that ensure bars remain in business even during the quietest of times, and as the light faded and the blue of the sky began to darken, the Bear prepared to ease itself into the kind of gentle, warm mood where conversations were hushed, and music was soft, and there were places in the shadows for lovers and friends, and places, too, for darker conversations.
She was a small woman, a single swath of white running through her short black hair like the coloring of a magpie, with an ‘s’-shaped scar across her neck that resembled the passage of a snake over pale sand. Her eyes were a very bright green, and, rather than detracting from her looks, the crow’s feet at their corners drew attention to her irises, enhancing her good looks when she smiled. She looked neither older nor younger than her years, and her makeup was discreetly applied. I guessed that most of the time she was content to be as God left her, and it was only on those rare occasions when she came down to the cities for business or pleasure that she felt the need to ‘prettify’ herself, as my grandfather used to term it. She wore no wedding ring, and her only jewelry was the small silver cross that hung from a cheap chain around her neck. Her fingernails were cut so close that they might almost have been bitten down, except the ends were too neat, too even. An injury to her black dress pants had been repaired with a small triangle of material on the right thigh, expertly done and barely noticeable. They fitted her well, and had probably been expensive when she bought them. She was not the kind to let a small tear be their ruination. I imagined that she had worked upon them herself, not trusting in another, not willing to waste money on what she knew she could do better with her own hands. A man’s shirt, pristine and white, hung loose over the waist of her pants, the shirt tailored so that it came in tight at the waist. Her breasts were small, and the pattern of her brassiere was barely visible through the material.
The man beside her was twice her age, and then some. He had dressed in a brown serge suit for the occasion, with a yellow shirt and a yellow-and-brown tie that had come as a set, perhaps with a handkerchief for the suit pocket that he had long ago rejected as too ostentatious. ‘Funeral suits’, my grandfather called them, although, with a change of tie, they served equally well for baptisms, and even weddings if the wearer wasn’t one of the main party.
And even though he had brought out the suit for an event that was not linked to a church happening, to an arrival into or departure from this world, and had polished his reddish-brown shoes so that the pale scuffing at the toes looked more like the reflection of light upon them, still he wore a battered cap advertising ‘Scollay’s Guide & Taxidermy’ in a script so ornate and curlicued that it took a while to decipher, by which