Why it is I don't know but
some of the busiest gathering places for a goodly number of folks –
hangers-on, street people and the disoriented and dysfunctional –
are bus depots, transfer stations and city parks, and virtually none are
destined for anywhere because they've already reached the end of the line.
And so it was the other balmy afternoon,
a youngish military-appearing man was marching along the gutter, sounding
off his own cadence, then making a sudden about-face and marching back down
the street from whence he'd come. Several times he did this before I took
closer note, but unable to distinguish his branch of service from the faded
and tattered blue uniform coat and matching trousers with a red stripe that
had come loose in several places.
When he sat on the sidewalk to rest,
I saw that he was sockless; and his shoes, one with a floppy sole, didn't
match.
Sidling over and sitting beside him,
I asked his branch of service.
“Cavalry,” he said, “but
my horse was shot out from under me and I bet I've walked a thousand miles
because they won't issue me another.”
“I thought the Cavalry was mechanized,”
I said.
He looked at me disdainfully.
“I guess it'll have to be now,”
he said, “after what those Redskins did to my outfit. I bet there
ain't a horse left between here and Montana after what that damned Sitting
Bull did to us at Little Big Horn. And that coward Reno ought to be shot
for what happened to us, and Gen. Custer was a damned fool too.”
“I thought all of Custer's troops
were killed,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “I
ain't,” and got up and resumed the gutter march.
As I was leaving, nearby was the same
old lady in a shawl that I saw yesterday, seated on the sidewalk, back to
a vacant building, waiting for her son to come home from the Viet Nam War.
I returned to the bus place the following
morning, there being little else for a retired bachelor to do, aside from
walking the mall, hanging out at a book store or sitting on a park bench,
but the veteran of the Battle of the Little Big Horn wasn't there.
It was a fine day for a visit to the
park and I took a seat on a bench, careful to sit as far as possible from
an elderly lady knitting on the other end, not wanting her to think I was
trying to pick her up, indeed made a point to look in the opposite direction.
But with a loud “Hmpf!” quickly
she stuffed the knitting in a sewing basket, looked daggers at me, and yelled,
“You masher!” and got up and hurried away.
Her seat was soon taken by a bewhiskered
old man in overalls, farmer hat and barefoot, his toenails yellow and at
least a half-inch long.
He mumbled about someone was supposed
to pick him up because it was past milking time.
Sewn on the corner of the overalls was
a piece of fabric on which had been stitched “This Man Is Lost”
and a telephone number to call. I went across to a convenience store and
asked the owner to call the number. There was no answer, so she called 911.
By the time I got back to the bench, the old man was gone.
On the way back to my apartment on the
bus, a seedy man I'd guessed to be in his early 60s was engrossed in reading
a well-worn book about Thomas Paine. He turned out to be a convicted bank
robber on probation, but that's a story for another day.
Comments: vallefox@accessbee.com.
