The Wake

“Hey man, can you help me out? I’ve just got—Well, I’m a buck short; need to catch the bus. The 94, it’s two fifty man, can’t you help me out?”

His voice a murmur rising above the traffic, it became a very loud demand. I didn’t answer him, only looked up along his patchwork beard. He had calm imposing eyes.

“Shit. I’m tired. I want to go home. I only need a few dollars. I have no place to go. Can’t you help me, you got money, I know it?” he paused.

The Midway held us together – its gutters, exhaust, parking lots. The vicissitudes of cars and lights and neon schedules gripping on levers like the controls to a ship at night in the middle of a sea.

“You got a home. Where are you going? I can’t go with you, give me something.”

The dollar passed between us. Somewhere coastal surf trafficked beaches by the grain, and a dog ate grass outside a house that throbbed from the reverberations of good old Muddy Waters.

He said, “You know what it’s like on the streets?”

I liked his rotting teeth, his jeans, the putrid breath like Karkov’s and eggs.

I grinned, “Tell me all about the streets.”

“I’m fighting all the time with people I fought yesterday. I’m 42 years old. You ride around on these buses, then the transit police pick you up. I got no place to go, and sometimes you have to fight.

I could see him moving in to kick and jab, screaming and breathing heavy in the darkness and wind. His shoulders rose above me, heaving. His eyes were quiet but shone dull like he was working up to something mean. Despite the abuse his body suffered, the decay, the acne and the thrift store rejects, he was big enough for me to believe him.

He had black hair. His great stomach and shoulders, disheveled but gaunt and massive, an intimation to former grace; they belied his Asian hair. I knew him as a wild rice cultivator and Buffalo hunter. In the alleys of Frogtown he’d learned how to panhandle and intimidate, how to unseat the world with a dollar into a spiral of pine needles and gasoline. He’d shivered beneath bridges and ate the rain. He’d rubbed his face with broken glass in the margin between nothing and a car window on razor tipped wheels.

Someone passed between us, trotting along beneath the white-needle clock two floors above the earth, encased by green tile, a brand on the firmament reading PROPERTY OF, The City, St. Paul.

He left me and I threw myself into the iridescent blue-white interior of the 21A. I heard him last talking to someone else, ‘Hey, help me out. I’m short for the 94—”

I imagined him running into someone further along the Midway who’d tell him just to think of the glory awaiting him after death. This man would calm him, tell him to stick it out and act right so he could get the eternal ecstasy of tears in the beyond. The big Indian would probably suck this down like Karkov’s and sleepily wait out time for the effects. I’d have given him a gun and told him to bite the metal or kill the mayor.