This woman rushed out the front door of her house, scampered down her driveway to the sidewalk, and shoved a sandwich wrapped in aluminum foil to my chest.
What?!
She wore a pajama set, purple pants and top, and a pair of plush, gray, kitty slippers.
“There!” she called, as she wheeled away. “There! That’s all I can do!”
She retreated back inside.
Me?
I was just out taking my morning walk, my mind on nothing, strolling past a row of modest, single-story townhomes occupied by, well, by elderly gals like the one who’d just accosted me with a ball of bread and sandwich meat.
What was I going to do with this thing? Mayo and mustard oozed from the sandwich and coated the inside of the loose foil. I thought about tossing it in her yard. Instead, I walked on, cradling the unexpected gift in front of me. When I got to the next intersection, I turned left up Edgewood Road, and there at the first house Caesar greeted me from his yard.
He tore up and down along the low white fence that ran next to the sidewalk, his barks and growls and snaps and snarls promising violence upon my body. If I ever get to you, if I ever get to you, I’m going to rip your balls off and lap your blood as you scream.
“C’mon, dog,” I said. “You’re telling me you want to rip my balls off, but you can’t even jump this stupid fence? It’s only four-foot high. You’re an embarrassment to German shepherds everywhere.”
I unwrapped the sandwich and tossed it into his yard.
“I doubt if it’s poisoned,” I told him, “but no guarantees.”
I wadded up the aluminum foil and dropped it down a sewer drain, and as I finished my walk I felt a gentle fall breeze at my back, pushing me along.
***
I snapped a photo of myself when I got home and texted it to my friend Frizz in Kansas City.
“Do I look bony?” I captioned the photo.
She rang. “Huh?”
“Do I look like I need to eat something?”
I told her about the pajama woman and the sandwich.
“Maybe she’s got a thing for you,” Frizz said. “That’s how us old gals will court you, we’ll give you food. Macaroni salad, cherry pie, bologna sandwiches.”
Frizz was no help.
“What’s your sweatshirt say?” she asked. “I can’t make it out in the photo.”
I was wearing a sage green hoodie that I’d bought at the municipal golf course the week before. I’d shown up for an early morning tee time, all in a rush to play with some other old farts I barely knew, and in spite of the season had neglected to put a jacket in my golf bag. So I went in the pro shop and bought a sweatshirt, a size too big but, damn, so soft.
“City of Omaha,” I said, glancing down to be sure.
“Oh. Gotta go.”
Frizz always had to go.
We’d known each other since the fourth grade, gone to college together for a year before she transferred, lost touch, and found each other again decades later, after we’d both turned gray. And lately, every call or text with Frizz — she was the DoorDash driver and I was the guy who’d just ordered the chili fries from LocoTex. Ding dong, order up, gotta go.
Yet I held on, because when your circle of friends shrinks with each passing year, even a DoorDash friendship is better than nothing. But not by much.
***
Two days later, walking by that same stretch of townhomes and on guard against stray sandwiches, I heard a woman calling out. “You can’t be here! You can’t be here!” Was she calling to me?
I turned back to look but saw no one, just an open garage door halfway up the block.
I’ll give it a look on my second lap, I told myself.
By the time I’d made it back around, though, I’d forgotten all about the open garage door and the woman.
As I started up Larimore and back toward the townhomes, two guys approached on the opposite side of the street. And something was off. One guy walked ahead of the other, talking to himself or to the sidewalk, which is where he fixed his gaze. The second guy trailed two or three steps behind, his feet skittish, unsure, as if he expected to be chased away at any minute.
Both wore the exact same green hoodie that I was wearing with the words City of Omaha across the front.
Did I know them from the golf course? Should I give a wave?
No. These two guys — they weren’t out for a walk. They were just out. They were homeless. All the way out west, at least twenty miles from downtown, in a little starter-home community that through the years had transformed to a downsizing haven for seniors taking one last stab at independence before all the fuss and trouble of everything associated with the inevitable.
The two guys took no notice of me, passed by, and headed north toward Standing Bear Park and the lake.
I finished my walk, my mind abuzz. Where did they get those sweatshirts? A church? A community center? A city shelter?
Home, I took the green hoodie off and tossed it on the floor of my bedroom.
“I guess I won’t be wearing that anymore.”
***
The next morning, I pulled on a gray hoodie with a large orange logo on the center of the chest and an orange lining that showed brightly around the collar and on the inside of the hood draping down my back. It fit the season.
The leaves had turned but not yet fallen. Halloween inflatables dotted front yards, cheesecloth ghosts dangled from trees, and headstones marked the fresh burial of Ima Goner, Dee Capitated, and Frank N. Stein in graveyard after graveyard.
One display boasted a towering, animatronic Grim Reaper. The visual effects were tremendous, the audio effects not so much. “Welcome to the afterlife,” he would say, followed by a staccato chortle that fell well short of maniacal. Or, “Go ahead, live a little, while you can.” Well, yeah.
The Grim Reaper’s threats seemed as empty and toothless as Caesar’s.
I could do better. Easy.
A furrowed brow over deep-set eyes watched me from the bay window of a low, yellow bungalow to my right. I raised my arm and pointed. “There’s a voicemail waiting for you. Your test results are in. Wa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.”
Ahead of me an old gal in a grand moo-moo rolled her trash bin to the curb. “Your car keys?” I said and pointed. “Have you checked behind the mayonnaise jar in the refrigerator?”
Tickled at my own sardonic cleverness, I worked my way up Larimore.
Then I saw him. The talker, by himself this time, his gaze fixed on the sidewalk ahead of him. And he was wearing an orange sweatshirt!
He walked past without noticing me.
I reached the summit at the top of Larimore and imagined the sandwich lady on her phone, calling the police. “Yeah, there’s this homeless guy and he’s wearing orange. Did you hear me? He’s wearing orange. So bright it’s blinding me. Orange!”
I cut my walk short at one lap and called Frizz when I got home.
“First green and now orange,” she said. “Congratulations, you’re twinning with a homeless guy. What’s this guy look like, anyway?”
“Brown or dark blond hair,” I said. “Average height, trim, walks with his eyes down. He’s kind of bow armed, you know, his elbows jut out from his body, and he doesn’t swing his arms as he walks, he kind of throws them or snaps them, like he’s trying to bust them loose from his shoulders.”
“What’s he saying to the sidewalk?”
“I wasn’t close enough to hear. I wonder . . .”
“Oh,” she said. “Gotta go.”
And she was gone.
I had mis-stepped and badly. I wonder. Just the words triggered her. For one thing, they threatened a longer conversation, and we couldn’t have that — no, indeed. For another, they veered away from the safe recounting of our daily lives. Have you got your flu shot yet? What’s the verdict on the new Thai restaurant? I wonder. Those words could take us anywhere, right off the map, face-to-face with uncomfortable realities, doubts, and fears. We might find ourselves suddenly grappling with the unknown meaning of things.
All I was going to say was, “I wonder if he’s camped at the lake.”
***
Green. Orange. White. Red. Black. Blue.
The twinning never stopped. Whatever color I wore, he wore; whenever I was out, he was out, although, thinking on it, he was out all the time.
Our encounters grew closer. I would turn a corner and he’d be there, coming toward me. I would reach a corner and he’d be stepping to the intersection from my left or my right. His pace and manner never altered; my own evolved. I no longer bolted to the opposite side of the street every time I saw him. Instead, I slowed my pace and shared the sidewalk as we passed shoulder to shoulder, person to person. Still, my hands closed to soft fists and my steps moved to the balls of my feet when we passed. I was ready to bolt, like the skittish fellow I spotted with him that one time.
He might have been my age, or, if not, then weathered by hardship to appear my age. His face, sallow and sunken. His beard, patchy and blond. His eyes, gray and withdrawn. A thick, flesh-colored scar divided his left eyebrow in two. A downward fold of his lower lip revealed missing teeth.
He never said anything to me, nor I to him, but his conversation with the sidewalk never ceased.
Sometimes, I thought he was reciting the days of the week. “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday” and so on. Other times I thought he was counting, but the numbers seemed a jumble. “One-two, one-two, three-three, five-six.” And once I thought he was just repeating, “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.”
I began to wish that I could talk to him, even if just for a minute. I didn’t know what I would say. What could I say that wouldn’t seem empty and meaningless and beside-the-point? Nice day for a walk? How could I say that when he had no choice, nice day or not? Any detail of my daily life I might share would flaunt a luxury that he did not possess; any complaint I might make about the world would sound hollow and ungrateful; any question I might ask about his life, no doubt intrusive and judgmental.
Perhaps I could talk with him about Frizz, as I talked with Frizz about him. I’ve got this friend, you know, and it feels like she’s disappearing, falling away. There’s less and less of her, all the time. Less and less of her for me, anyway. Or maybe I’m disappearing. And I just don’t know it.
I doubted if the words I wonder would scare him away.
“Maybe you should just get a treadmill,” Frizz suggested one evening.
“Huh?”
“Get a treadmill, walk at home, problem solved.”
Yeah, yeah, but then again, no, no.
***
Halloween came and went. The Grim Reaper retired for the season to a box in its owner’s garage or basement.
Out walking one Saturday morning, I made my usual turn onto Larimore. A man at one of the corner houses was sweeping out his garage. As I passed, he dropped his broom, tossed aside his gloves, and followed me up the street.
Odd.
The guy kept his distance, two or three houses behind me. Halfway up Larimore, he began calling to a dog. “Here boy. Here boy.” He whistled, too.
What dog? I didn’t see any damned dog. What kind of bullshit was this? He was calling to a non-existent dog as some sort of pretense for following along behind me.
He thought I was that homeless guy.
I turned around and walked toward him and offered to help him find his dog. I figured, what the hell, if he wants to chase a pretend dog, I can offer some pretend help.
“Hello,” he said. “My name’s Bob. I’ve seen you walking here before.”
“Did your dog get out?” I asked. “I heard you calling.”
“Here, take this.” He handed me a ten dollar bill. “For helping me look. If you see him, I’m at the gray house back at the corner.”
“What’s your dog’s name?” I asked.
His blank expression extended into a stare.
“Buddy,” he said finally. “He answers to Buddy.”
“I’ll keep an eye out.”
With that, he turned and walked away.
Okay, I thought, if this fool wants to pass out money to strangers on the street, I’ll take it. And I won’t toss it in Caesar’s yard, either. Maybe Lost Dog Bob will start giving me ten dollars every day.
***
I got my hair cut, with things buzzed tight. I had been getting shaggy. No more. I started shaving every day, instead of once a week. And I spent more than a few dollars on a pair of new tennis shoes, sparkling white.
“Why don’t you just buy a dog?” Frizz said. “If you’re walking a dog, people will understand you live somewhere, that you have a yard.”
“Too much work. Plus, you see homeless guys with dogs sometimes.”
“Not on a leash, you don’t.”
Frizz nagged me about getting a dog for a good week or so; for once, she was engaged, but not for my benefit. She wanted my day to become routine again, for me to get back onto familiar trails and keep to familiar thoughts. I suspected, too, that she wanted me to find other company. I had become a chore, and she hoped a dog could share the workload.
If she had said “You know, a dog will listen to anything you want to talk about for as long as you want to talk,” she might have won me over.
From my bedroom window, I could see the tree line at the edge of Standing Bear Park. Some nights I could make out the flicker of a light through the trees, maybe a lantern or a campfire in one of the stone firepits around the lake. I wondered if he was there and if he had company beyond his own thoughts and memories. Maybe the skittish man. Maybe another I had noticed, a younger, gregarious guy with a broad, toothy smile, who waved with the full motion of a swimmer’s backstroke and who always shouted “Hello, there!” mid-wave, as if to say, yes, I see you and you see me, let’s not pretend we don’t.
One night, as if to answer the light from the lake, I turned on my back porch light. It hummed against the quiet darkness and I wondered if he could see it. Later, I woke in the middle of the night, reaching up, grasping at something in the evaporating wisp of a dream that left me with a troubled feeling of unknown loss. I rose, went to the kitchen, and made a sandwich. I ate it, without ceremony, standing there against the chill of the night in a pair of old athletic shorts.
I found the green hoodie and pulled it on for warmth and wandered the rooms of my house, flipping on lights, rummaging through boxes, dumping out drawers. Letters in faded ink. Photos with worn edges. Places I’ll never be again, faces I’ll never see again, scattered across the floor.
A black and white photo showed a girl I could no longer name sitting with me on the hood of an old Buick, scarfing down tacos at a hangout not much more than a shack with a walk-up window, a long, narrow parking lot, and trash bins everywhere. I grabbed my phone and snapped a photo of the photo and texted it to Frizz. “What was this place called?” I asked.
I found and sent another into the thickness of the night.
And then another.
Another.
***
Caesar ignored me now, whenever I walked past. Over the holidays, my twin had tamed him.
I often observed the two of them lounging at Caesar’s fence, the dog standing on his hind legs, his forelegs resting upon the topmost rail, his head tilting, leaning into the hand that rustled through his fur and scratched the deep furrows behind his ears.
I did not know what secrets he shared with the dog, if any at all.
I approached Caesar’s fence one day, and the dog trotted over without a sound. I leaned against the fence and he joined me. His head sought out my hands and I scratched behind his ears.
“What’s this?” I said. “Don’t you remember me? Your mortal enemy? Are you saying you can’t tell us apart, either? Don’t I at least smell different?”
A black SUV pulled up to the curb and parked. Two clean-cut young men in jeans and black parkas got out and approached me.
“Hi, there,” one said. “My name’s Marcus. This is Julian.”
I said nothing and turned my attention back to Caesar. I wondered at the dog’s calm. Where did this new contentment with the world come from?
“We’re with the Flint Hills Church,” young Marcus said. “Just down the street.”
Ah, I thought. Perhaps they’ve lost their pastor and they want to give me ten dollars to help them look around.
Marcus talked and the words flowed softly around me, all kindness and concern, all courtesy and decency, and then Julian took up with words about the season and the weather and then about cots and meals and coats and hats and gloves.
“I live around here,” I said finally, my gaze steady on Caesar.
“Down by the lake, right?” Julian said.
With this I turned to face them. What did they see? What did they see when they looked at me? Couldn’t they see my damned haircut, almost military in its tight precision? Couldn’t they see my clean-shaven face? Couldn’t they see my tennis shoes, still white enough to look new?
Julian stepped closer and put a hand on my shoulder. I recoiled.
“Are you blind?” I shouted. “What do you want from me? What do you want?”
I stepped around them and trotted away, down along Edgewood for half a block or so. They did not follow.
***
I stepped from my house on a gray winter day, well past the holidays. A slight northwest breeze foretold the weather. Snow by nightfall, it promised, but not a fierce or driven snow — no, it will be a snow so quiet not even a windchime will stir.
I was dressed four layers deep, with the soft green hoodie that I loved over everything. And why not? My hair shaggy again, my face scruffy, my white tennis shoes buried deep in a hallway closet in favor of a pair of comfortable, well-worn hiking boots, one laced with twine. Why not do as I pleased? Whatever I wore, odds were my second self would match. Some hand, unseen and only faintly known, dressed us both. And I welcomed it.
I pulled a thick, black stocking cap onto my head, with a second one in the kangaroo pouch of my hoodie. If I see him and he is bare headed, I will offer this to him. I will just reach out without saying anything. Everything would be understood, in that instance, between any two people in the world, right? At least between the two of us it would be. I am like you and you are like me, so here, be warm.
When I stepped to the sidewalk, an unmarked black panel van hurried by. In its wake, the loose leaves that remained along the curb rose in a flourish and floated in the air before quieting again a foot or so further on. The homes along my walk were sealed tight against the season, but the van’s determined pace drew the insiders to their windows. The insiders, our spectators and judges. They wanted to know. Was there something to see? Oh, look, that homeless fellow again. Walking. Walking on.
The black van sat parked at the intersection with Larimore. Its back doors were open and two men were nearby, stepping here and there. One of them unfolded a blanket and spread it on the ground. I crossed to the far side of the street to give myself a better view and slowed my pace as I approached. Two police cruisers were parked around the corner, engines idling, officers sitting at the wheels, their faces lit blue by monitors as they typed onto unseen keyboards.
Together, the two men from the van picked up the blanket from the ground, but no, not a blanket, and not soft, not soft at all, and so clearly not warm, no, thick, plastic, stiff, rigid, laden now, and one of the men at each end lifting, lifting and carrying.
Quite a show for everyone to see.
I looked to the van for a clue. What was this show about? I saw only myself there, reflected in its glimmering side, standing alone within its yawning darkness. Khaki-colored pants, green hoodie, black stocking cap, all drifting, floating, refusing to be still. I saw that I held the second stocking cap in my hands. Someone needed it. Someone. I held it out, and my reflection and I, we offered it each to the other.
A figure joined me, stood close, and spoke gently.
“Sorry about your friend.” Lost Dog Bob.
He asked if there was anything I needed. He asked if I knew about Flint Hills Church down the road, open tonight.
“It feels like snow,” he said.
He handed me a ten dollar bill, and I thought about the church and the cots and a warm meal. Maybe I would go there later. Yes, later.
The back doors to the van thumped shut, one and then the other, sounding to me both near and far, echoing through my bones.
Why is my face wet? I wondered. And what is this salt that I’m tasting?
The van pulled away and left me without hope of a reply.
“Gotta go,” I said, and I struck off for my climb up Larimore.
The insiders were all watching now, I was certain. And my thoughts, my unsettled thoughts, they all gave way to a familiar hunger, a familiar emptiness. The sandwich lady. Would she notice me this morning and hurry out, a winter coat pulled tight over her purple pajamas? I hoped so. A sandwich would be nice, a sandwich to split with Caesar as I scratch behind his ears the way he likes.
I walked along, looking down, and the blocks of the sidewalk stretched out before me like the unmarked days of a calendar, to the top of the hill and beyond, an endless trail to follow, around and around and around. They disappeared beneath my feet as I climbed, one after the other, and in them I heard the echo of a voice that sounded very much like my own.
“I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.”
Image by Rohit Bhusan on pexels.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
