It was the final straw, that notice from the Social Security Administration. According to it, Darryl was deceased. Not just that, but he died four years previous and therefore his estate owed the government this humongous figure, he could not remember how much, for continuing to receive money after death. He was a bit simple, poor man. At seventy-five he still could not grasp the ways of the bureaucracy, had no notion how to procure legal help. His online applications for jobs, made on library computers, went unheeded. His rent, two months overdue, had prompted the eviction notice that was left on the kitchen counter, along with the keys. He stepped, with a suitcase in hand and inside his shirt a pocket organizer and pen, onto the sidewalk, after carefully shutting the door. He wondered, for the hundredth time, where he ought to go. He believed, if Mom still were living, he would not be in this fix. But Mom was cremated, her ashes strewn in the flower bed she once cultivated. Her check had never been much, but she always knew what to do. His steps automatically turned in the direction of downtown, the part where the street people hang out. His mind was filled with tangled references to a younger day, fifty years ago, when he was essentially a hobo. In those times, he did not need to think about it. There were day jobs for the taking. All one had to do would be to show up and wait in line. Life was so easy then that he had hitchhiked across the Midwest multiple times, owning just a few clothes and having less than five dollars to his name each time. Still, he found a bed and food at the end of any journey.
He was on a different planet these days, for the '60s gave way to a decade of increasing myopia and erosion of the poorest ones’ ability to make money. Following the accidental death of his big brother, Darryl reconnected with his family in the mid-’70s and settled down to a life of labor carpentry and staying home with his mother. He was a television watcher and he liked to rest from his labors with beer and TV episodes of favorite comedies and westerns. Being a lonely soul, who shunned contact with strangers, due to an inability to relax and hold interesting conversations, he entertained no illusions of having a friend or a wife.
Oh, he once might have married a girl, when he and a nearly forgotten girl named Ellen both were twenty, for she was vulnerable and lonely at the time and did not recognize his silence for the handicap it would become, had not grasped that he had no notion of how to support or care for a family. It was up to him to walk away and in his state of alienation become the rootless wandering soul that made no connections, soul to soul, beyond the family.
His walking took him the length of Bradbury Street, a decision calculated to avoid the clubs on First Avenue. Then a right on Wylie Avenue, which should actually be Second Avenue. It was a street of mixed business and residential interests. Most of the homes were fenced with chain links, all modest wooden constructions. Among the businesses were a glass company and someone dealing with car batteries. A person could bring an old battery there and get a few bucks in return. Wylie Avenue intersected with Baldwin Street, a wide avenue with hundreds of pedestrians intermingled with street folk and hustlers. Darryl had never been precisely a street folk but used to approach a few now and then. The last episode among them had been an uncomfortable one. It began with Darryl spending a few days in jail, for hitchhiking too near the freeway. A fellow jailbird adopted him, for no reason he could discern. He had been sitting on a bench, staring at nothing, when Jake approached him and asked him to join him, instead of acting like a fool, “which is what you‘re doing.”
Darryl was grateful to receive any attention at all, even if insulting. He followed Jake and stood around, listening to him speak and throw a few barbs at other inmates from time to time. It seems he held a grudge against black people. “After what they did to me -” he said to one inmate. Jake must have fancied himself Darryl’s mate and protector. He had a way of moving between him and anyone attempting to start a conversation. Darryl remained passive, partly because it was his nature, but also because Jake promised to get him bus money out of town.
Released from jail and back on the sidewalk, Jake immediately began panhandling. Inside of an hour, he informed Darryl he almost had the funds for that bus ticket. He decided to celebrate and bought himself a beer. That hustler quickly drank up the money he had promised.
Darryl, in his disappointment, began to realize he needed to set out on his own. Meanwhile, Jake was conversing animatedly among a group of eight street people. One street person approached to ask Darryl a question or to make an observation. Jake was all over the man, fists doubled, telling him to back off and let his friend alone. When Jake went back to the store for more alcohol, Darryl walked away, as fast as feet could take him.
That day he walked far beyond the city limits until it became dusk and the freezing weather prompted him to approach a gas station. “Do you mind if I get warm by your heater?” he asked the attendant?
He found himself enthusiastically invited in. After a few moments, his genial host exclaimed, “Aw. You’re hitching. Where are you going?”
The incident was transpiring at a time when Darryl had begun tiring of being always on the road. He was grateful beyond measure when the man pressed bus fare into his palm and instructed him how, where and when to board one. And so he rode in comfort and rested the whole way to his destination. He could no longer recall said destination, but he never forgot the gas attendant. His next time through he looked for him, with money for reimbursement in his pocket, but was unsuccessful at finding him.
As he stood at the center of the block on Baldwin Street, between Hawthorne and Porter Avenues, he watched the street activity and awaited a cue. As he loitered, there reeled a memory of hitching across Oklahoma and getting a ride from a police officer, who at first offered him a bed in the jail, then let him off in Wichita, after he declined the bed offer. As he stepped out of the police car, other police cars converged from all around the city, with their lights full on him. He knew they were sizing him up in case they needed a suspect for the time he spent on their turf.
After they disbursed, he had traveled but a short distance when there appeared before him an all-night diner. Penniless, he nevertheless went in. “Do you have some work I can to do for a meal?” he inquired of the woman, who worked the shift all by herself.
Turned out, she had a big heart. Without hesitation, she said he could mop the floor in a while and then be fed. She lead Darryl to a back room and showed him to a cot. “You can rest here until I am ready for you,” she said.
He marveled to this day how kind she was. And then she would not allow him to properly clean up the place, but instructed him to just sling a dirty wet mop over the floor. In ten minutes, he had finished. She brought him the greatest breakfast they made there, along with a steak dinner. It lifted his spirits all the way to Kansas City.
He almost smiled, remembering. Then became aware he was being spoken to. “You with the suitcase.”
“Huh?”
“What are you doing here?”
The accosting man bore the air of a self-assured smart aleck. Darryl knew from long personal experience he could be easily manipulated by such a person, should he allow him to grow too familiar. He warily eyed the man, who had the elbow blown out on his imitation leather jacket and effected a cocky strut in his step. He asserted that he awaited a friend, to pick him up, and moved near the curb, feigning expectancy. The man believed him and altered his approach accordingly. “Can you spare some change? A dollar, maybe?”
The man pushed a flat palm at him and impatiently waited for money to appear on it.
“Oh, I can’t.” Darryl’s apologetic response had the man wrinkling his face in derision and pitching the hand repeatedly before his face.
Then Darryl remembered seventy-four cents in his right pants pocket. He reluctantly dug it out and held it up for the smart alec to take.
He watched the smart alec combine the coins with additional money, counting, calculating, then, turn wordlessly and hurry off to the corner store.
Gusts of cold wind breached Darryl’s clothing. He wrapped his jacket more tightly, facing the street, the toe of one shoe jutting off the sidewalk. A clumsy action caused the suitcase to flip open, its contents dumped and scattered in the gutter. He stepped down and bent to retrieve it all, unheeding of cars slipping by. A cream-colored SUV clipped his shoulder and sent him sprawling, half on the concrete, half in the gutter. He lay still, uncertain if he ought to move. Through waves of blackness and light, he watched car wheels turning relentlessly before he passed out.
When Darryl awakened, he found himself fully in the gutter, beside an empty suitcase. He could not understand that on a bustling sidewalk or traffic-clogged street nobody would play the good Samaritan. He began to see that a man could die in plain sight only to get swept up like refuse the next day. He waited and nobody came. Finally, he let his head back down and closed his eyes.
There ensued a deep sleep, black and formless and eventually interrupted by agonizing pain. He had to help himself or die. It required a Herculean effort by the injured man to set himself upright. His belongings were forgotten when finally he found his footing, as he shuffled down the gutter and realized his pockets were turned inside out. From someplace within the tortured haze, he heard a voice aimed at him and knew the smart alec had returned. The man said, “Come with me,” grabbing the good arm and tugging Darryl up on the sidewalk. “You were out for about two hours. Don’t worry; I took care of you.”
After stumbling blindly for several minutes, Darryl understood that they left the sidewalk and entered someplace dark. His companion perched him on a plastic chair, holding on to him until it was ascertained he could sit on his own. “Here,” he was told. “Drink some of this.”
The man pulled a flat bottle from his pocket and unscrewed the lid.
Darryl kept his mouth shut.
“Come on. Drink,” the man insisted.
“I don’t drink,” Darryl stated, as though that ought to be the end of it.
The man pushed the bottle opening between Darryl’s lips and tried to squeeze shut his nose. Darryl relented and allowed a swig to flow into his mouth. He coughed a few times but kept it down. Then he was assisted from the chair to another spot and made to lie down on a dirty mattress. The pain was exacerbated by the shifting of the shoulder, but he lay still, after making a few moves to lessen the pressure to his injury. He could not tell if the liquor helped any. He suspected it didn’t. Then he lay still for seeming hours, his mind in a stupor, his smashed shoulder suffering unrelenting torture. Eventually, the one he thought of as “the smart-aleck” came back.
He leaned over Darryl, reeking of alcohol and tobacco. “Are you awake? I brought you something.”
He pressed a smashed up hot dog into his hand and watched Darryl try to eat it. “I’m going to come back later and bring you a (thinking quickly) big hamburger.”
The man poised before Darryl and looked at him a moment. Darryl figured he expected something from him, but he could not figure out what something might be. “I’m Dennis,” the smart-aleck said.
“I’m Darryl,” Darryl replied.
Dennis turned away and vanished in the darkness.
The injured man tried to diagnose his injury, whether a separation or broken bones or both. Ultimately, he had no idea. “To a hospital,” he muttered. “Got to get -.”
After many tries, he stood on his two feet and set his course for the glow of light in the distance. The shelter he was about to leave proved to be a construction of cardboard and plywood, mostly. And the chair and mattress were the sole furnishings. The narrow distance between two tall buildings afforded a lane that lead him to a sidewalk. He was not able to guess the street he came out upon but reasoned he could not be far from where the SUV knocked him over. A short exploratory walk convinced him he was a block off Wylie Avenue. And left from there would have him back on Baldwin. But the charity hospital had to be about ten blocks away, in the other direction.
He set out and made steady progress in his journey, despite stumbling over the irregularities he encountered with almost every step, for the sidewalks here were cracked, the concrete shifted, over many seasons of neglect. He was aware when Dennis caught up to him, made so by the distinctive flavor of his voice. “What are ya doin’? Ain’t I taking care of you?”
He fell in step with Darryl, haranguing as he walked. “I brought you some food, but you weren’t there.”
Then he tried to halt Darryl’s progress by stopping in front of him. “Where ya goin’?”
Trying to step around, Darryl explained, “Charity hospital off Dickenson Street.”
“You’re crazy,” Dennis scoffed. “Ain’t no hospital anywhere near Dickenson Street.”
But it was the location of the hospital where his big brother drew his final breath, following that horrendous traffic accident. His experience told him Dennis was wrong and he picked up his step. “Yes, there is” the response came in the form of a rare assertive snap that caused his tormentor to back off.
Light sleet peppered the men and twisting gusts of wind tormented them. Dennis threw up his hands, thereby placing a wall between himself and this man he had taken under his wing. “All right,” he said. “You know where to find me.”
The smart-alec hoisted his collar over his neck and quickly vanished.
Grimacing, he began to doubt his stamina, but the hospital must be very near. Desperation alone kept him aright until he staggered across an intersection and knew by his surroundings he was almost there. The dwindling sleet storm stung less, as he came up a high curb, expecting to see the charity hospital. Instead, he almost bumped into a tall chain-link fence. The fence blocked out the entire block. Behind the fence towered the hospital building, dilapidated and boarded up. Its once proud front appeared to droop with sadness. He stared at the abandoned hospital in horror. He stood there until his vision was blurred by the tears flooding from his eyes. Eventually, Darryl wondered what sort of food Dennis had for him, as his aching legs turned him around to try to make the journey all the way back.
His toes felt frozen. Water had trickled inside his collar. He was starting across the intersection when a shrill voice caused him to look around. Pausing, he scoured the area with weakened eyes without seeing the loud person. “Where are you?” he croaked at last.
“Over here.” The voice issued from within the hospital fence enclosure. “Come get warm.”
The stranger directed him to a rent in the fence, large enough to accommodate a man. “We’ve got a fire and everything.”
With a short burst of renewed energy, he followed instructions and forced his way through, onto the forbidden grounds. The strange person had not emerged from the shadows. He was not even certain which gender to assign. He followed the dark form inside, through a formerly boarded-up door. There were fire flickers now and he could make out the silhouetted slender form of a lady. She lead him into the next room, where a cheery fire roared, in the middle of the marble floor, a bearded man feeding it. Safely back were cardboard boxes, some of which had been fashioned for resting upon. Darryl and the woman halted at the optimum distance for warmth, she rubbing her hands, seeming somewhat gleeful, he shaking violently, nearly losing balance. When the woman gauged his condition she unzipped and pulled away his wet jacket. She dug among the boxes until she came up with a beach towel. She threw the towel about Darryl’s shoulders and used the loose ends to wipe him dry. The shivering subsided, in increments. The woman had in the meantime discovered the blood on his shirt. Taking great care, she opened the garment and took a look. “Oh God,” she said, despairing. “I can’t do anything about that.”
The bearded man had come up to watch. “Belle,” he said. “Give ’im a few hits.”
His name was George. He produced a pipe, which was passed to Belle, who lit its cargo with a disposable lighter. She pushed it in Darryl’s mouth and told him to take a drag. Darryl had always felt morally opposed to illegal drugs, but in this dire crisis could be persuaded to try anything. He knew by watching movies on television how taking a drag works and so was administered two hits. He had been rendered virtually incapable of speech and so regarded his benefactors with wordless gratitude. The stuff from the pipe had an immediate effect on the pain and as he relaxed, he began looking at the cardboard for a potential bed. Correctly reading his actions, Belle lead him to her own bed of cardboard and helped him settle there. In a short time, he went sound asleep.
It was then George and Belle’s true nature became apparent. They were disgusted that the new arrival already had been robbed. There wasn’t even lint in his pockets. There was another worry. “If he dies here it’s going to stink up the place,” George lamented.
“We can’t toss him out. He’ll die for sure.”
“He’s not our responsibility,” George insisted. “We can’t even take care of ourselves. Let’s leave him in here and start a new fire in the next wing.”
After much persuasion, she gave in and they quietly slipped away.
The next hours were sentinels over his still form, the raging fire reduced to ash and embers. Belle’s last act before she left Darryl was to drape his jacket over him. Eventually, he stirred and, being cold, he wrangled the jacket on. He understood that his benefactors had deserted him. There was no bitterness tied to the realization. They had gone out of his life as had everybody in the world but Mom. He accepted that.
Darryl moved his bed closer to the warmth of the embers. His one hand barely managed the move. In fact, it required three trips to put it all together. He was weary. He eased himself down and passed out.
His sleep was dark, dreamless, permeated with pain. It might have lasted many hours but in the mid of night, he found himself roughly taken up and carried away on somebody’s shoulder. He knew somehow the shoulder belonged to a firefighter or a police officer. He was coughing, barely able to breathe, for a thick black smoke had replaced the clean air. Only slightly conscious, as they loaded him on a gurney, he marked the faces of the EMT crew. Then he awakened in a hospital bed.
Many tubes and gadgets clung to or penetrated his upper body and a nurse was taking his blood pressure reading. When she saw him stirring, she planted herself before his face. Speaking loudly, the woman asked for his name. His tongue moved, but no words issued from his mouth. She tried in vain for several minutes to establish an identity for Darryl. She wrapped up her tasks and went from the bed. He longed desperately for a drink of water.
There quickly arrived a battery of obviously important representatives. Their leader, a pugnacious man wearing a charcoal business suit, named Will Sykes, lead the charge. He regarded Darryl sternly and Darryl could not meet his gaze. “May I have your name, please?”
The man’s no-nonsense demeanor yielded the identical result as had the nurse’s questioning. He began again. “Perhaps you don’t understand. We want to help you. With no personal information, we can do nothing. You trespassed on a private property, which got burned down. Two persons were killed. It is a grave matter. Would you like some pain medicine? With no information, we cannot administer even that.”
Darryl’s eyes pleaded for compassion. Sykes would have none of it. “Because you are refusing to cooperate and because the police have not arrested you, this hospital has no choice but to put you out of it.”
The ill man was stupefied. He had never heard of hospital “dumping” and had assumed a patient’s well being to be the ultimate goal. That he was being rolled out in a wheelchair to a van, to get put out on the street somewhere, seemed entirely too surreal. The vehicle stopped on a traffic-free stretch of street. The crew hustled Darryl out on the sidewalk. After balancing him, seeing him take a few steps, they and the van cruised to the light ahead and made a quick right turn.
He surveyed the unfamiliar street, as far as he could see up it. No point of refuge greeted him. At the intersection, he carefully let himself down from the curb, aware that should he fall he likely could never get up again. Having lost his jacket at the hospital, he went with arms crossed, looking for anything that had paper or cardboard, to use for warming purposes. At the end of the street, he came upon a carnival and continued onto the grounds. Clown dummies howled with manufactured laughter. Men threw balls, trying to knock down lead bottles. Deepest in were a Ferris wheel and a rollercoaster. The food booths wreaked of hamburgers and corndogs. For Darryl, food had lost all meaning. He nearly collided with a young bull of a man, who was intent on showing his girlfriend a good time. The man laughed and advised him to give up drinking. Then he saw the blood on Darryl’s shirt. Subdued, he and his date hurried off, blending into the crowd.
Two children began to follow him, throwing up questions, such as, “What’s wrong, Mister?” and “Mister, are you hurt?”
Cruelty manifested itself when he moved along without responding. The smaller boy scooped a candy apple core off the pavement and made a baseball pitch that put it in the small of Darryl’s back. The hit elicited no response. His feet continued moving. The larger boy restrained the smaller and lead him away.
Two men, obvious carnival employees, came and escorted him off the grounds, releasing him on a dark street. They held his arms and propelled him to that spot, before releasing him and hustling back to their jobs. Having reached that imminent point at which mortal flesh must give way to dissolution, he stayed as they put him, tottering like a pillar that must crumble, causes for moving exhausted. At seventy-five he had gone on more years than many of his peers. It was a statistic, merely, and no cause to feel grateful. No longer aware of his surroundings, he failed to detect a car that slowed when passing. He only heard when it returned and parked. He could not tell that a woman had taken it on herself to approach him, that she felt concerned, that she was a lonely widow, out driving, and that she had the money and influence to rescue him, to take him into her home and there dwell in comfort throughout his years of December.
He was on a different planet these days, for the '60s gave way to a decade of increasing myopia and erosion of the poorest ones’ ability to make money. Following the accidental death of his big brother, Darryl reconnected with his family in the mid-’70s and settled down to a life of labor carpentry and staying home with his mother. He was a television watcher and he liked to rest from his labors with beer and TV episodes of favorite comedies and westerns. Being a lonely soul, who shunned contact with strangers, due to an inability to relax and hold interesting conversations, he entertained no illusions of having a friend or a wife.
Oh, he once might have married a girl, when he and a nearly forgotten girl named Ellen both were twenty, for she was vulnerable and lonely at the time and did not recognize his silence for the handicap it would become, had not grasped that he had no notion of how to support or care for a family. It was up to him to walk away and in his state of alienation become the rootless wandering soul that made no connections, soul to soul, beyond the family.
His walking took him the length of Bradbury Street, a decision calculated to avoid the clubs on First Avenue. Then a right on Wylie Avenue, which should actually be Second Avenue. It was a street of mixed business and residential interests. Most of the homes were fenced with chain links, all modest wooden constructions. Among the businesses were a glass company and someone dealing with car batteries. A person could bring an old battery there and get a few bucks in return. Wylie Avenue intersected with Baldwin Street, a wide avenue with hundreds of pedestrians intermingled with street folk and hustlers. Darryl had never been precisely a street folk but used to approach a few now and then. The last episode among them had been an uncomfortable one. It began with Darryl spending a few days in jail, for hitchhiking too near the freeway. A fellow jailbird adopted him, for no reason he could discern. He had been sitting on a bench, staring at nothing, when Jake approached him and asked him to join him, instead of acting like a fool, “which is what you‘re doing.”
Darryl was grateful to receive any attention at all, even if insulting. He followed Jake and stood around, listening to him speak and throw a few barbs at other inmates from time to time. It seems he held a grudge against black people. “After what they did to me -” he said to one inmate. Jake must have fancied himself Darryl’s mate and protector. He had a way of moving between him and anyone attempting to start a conversation. Darryl remained passive, partly because it was his nature, but also because Jake promised to get him bus money out of town.
Released from jail and back on the sidewalk, Jake immediately began panhandling. Inside of an hour, he informed Darryl he almost had the funds for that bus ticket. He decided to celebrate and bought himself a beer. That hustler quickly drank up the money he had promised.
Darryl, in his disappointment, began to realize he needed to set out on his own. Meanwhile, Jake was conversing animatedly among a group of eight street people. One street person approached to ask Darryl a question or to make an observation. Jake was all over the man, fists doubled, telling him to back off and let his friend alone. When Jake went back to the store for more alcohol, Darryl walked away, as fast as feet could take him.
That day he walked far beyond the city limits until it became dusk and the freezing weather prompted him to approach a gas station. “Do you mind if I get warm by your heater?” he asked the attendant?
He found himself enthusiastically invited in. After a few moments, his genial host exclaimed, “Aw. You’re hitching. Where are you going?”
The incident was transpiring at a time when Darryl had begun tiring of being always on the road. He was grateful beyond measure when the man pressed bus fare into his palm and instructed him how, where and when to board one. And so he rode in comfort and rested the whole way to his destination. He could no longer recall said destination, but he never forgot the gas attendant. His next time through he looked for him, with money for reimbursement in his pocket, but was unsuccessful at finding him.
As he stood at the center of the block on Baldwin Street, between Hawthorne and Porter Avenues, he watched the street activity and awaited a cue. As he loitered, there reeled a memory of hitching across Oklahoma and getting a ride from a police officer, who at first offered him a bed in the jail, then let him off in Wichita, after he declined the bed offer. As he stepped out of the police car, other police cars converged from all around the city, with their lights full on him. He knew they were sizing him up in case they needed a suspect for the time he spent on their turf.
After they disbursed, he had traveled but a short distance when there appeared before him an all-night diner. Penniless, he nevertheless went in. “Do you have some work I can to do for a meal?” he inquired of the woman, who worked the shift all by herself.
Turned out, she had a big heart. Without hesitation, she said he could mop the floor in a while and then be fed. She lead Darryl to a back room and showed him to a cot. “You can rest here until I am ready for you,” she said.
He marveled to this day how kind she was. And then she would not allow him to properly clean up the place, but instructed him to just sling a dirty wet mop over the floor. In ten minutes, he had finished. She brought him the greatest breakfast they made there, along with a steak dinner. It lifted his spirits all the way to Kansas City.
He almost smiled, remembering. Then became aware he was being spoken to. “You with the suitcase.”
“Huh?”
“What are you doing here?”
The accosting man bore the air of a self-assured smart aleck. Darryl knew from long personal experience he could be easily manipulated by such a person, should he allow him to grow too familiar. He warily eyed the man, who had the elbow blown out on his imitation leather jacket and effected a cocky strut in his step. He asserted that he awaited a friend, to pick him up, and moved near the curb, feigning expectancy. The man believed him and altered his approach accordingly. “Can you spare some change? A dollar, maybe?”
The man pushed a flat palm at him and impatiently waited for money to appear on it.
“Oh, I can’t.” Darryl’s apologetic response had the man wrinkling his face in derision and pitching the hand repeatedly before his face.
Then Darryl remembered seventy-four cents in his right pants pocket. He reluctantly dug it out and held it up for the smart alec to take.
He watched the smart alec combine the coins with additional money, counting, calculating, then, turn wordlessly and hurry off to the corner store.
Gusts of cold wind breached Darryl’s clothing. He wrapped his jacket more tightly, facing the street, the toe of one shoe jutting off the sidewalk. A clumsy action caused the suitcase to flip open, its contents dumped and scattered in the gutter. He stepped down and bent to retrieve it all, unheeding of cars slipping by. A cream-colored SUV clipped his shoulder and sent him sprawling, half on the concrete, half in the gutter. He lay still, uncertain if he ought to move. Through waves of blackness and light, he watched car wheels turning relentlessly before he passed out.
When Darryl awakened, he found himself fully in the gutter, beside an empty suitcase. He could not understand that on a bustling sidewalk or traffic-clogged street nobody would play the good Samaritan. He began to see that a man could die in plain sight only to get swept up like refuse the next day. He waited and nobody came. Finally, he let his head back down and closed his eyes.
There ensued a deep sleep, black and formless and eventually interrupted by agonizing pain. He had to help himself or die. It required a Herculean effort by the injured man to set himself upright. His belongings were forgotten when finally he found his footing, as he shuffled down the gutter and realized his pockets were turned inside out. From someplace within the tortured haze, he heard a voice aimed at him and knew the smart alec had returned. The man said, “Come with me,” grabbing the good arm and tugging Darryl up on the sidewalk. “You were out for about two hours. Don’t worry; I took care of you.”
After stumbling blindly for several minutes, Darryl understood that they left the sidewalk and entered someplace dark. His companion perched him on a plastic chair, holding on to him until it was ascertained he could sit on his own. “Here,” he was told. “Drink some of this.”
The man pulled a flat bottle from his pocket and unscrewed the lid.
Darryl kept his mouth shut.
“Come on. Drink,” the man insisted.
“I don’t drink,” Darryl stated, as though that ought to be the end of it.
The man pushed the bottle opening between Darryl’s lips and tried to squeeze shut his nose. Darryl relented and allowed a swig to flow into his mouth. He coughed a few times but kept it down. Then he was assisted from the chair to another spot and made to lie down on a dirty mattress. The pain was exacerbated by the shifting of the shoulder, but he lay still, after making a few moves to lessen the pressure to his injury. He could not tell if the liquor helped any. He suspected it didn’t. Then he lay still for seeming hours, his mind in a stupor, his smashed shoulder suffering unrelenting torture. Eventually, the one he thought of as “the smart-aleck” came back.
He leaned over Darryl, reeking of alcohol and tobacco. “Are you awake? I brought you something.”
He pressed a smashed up hot dog into his hand and watched Darryl try to eat it. “I’m going to come back later and bring you a (thinking quickly) big hamburger.”
The man poised before Darryl and looked at him a moment. Darryl figured he expected something from him, but he could not figure out what something might be. “I’m Dennis,” the smart-aleck said.
“I’m Darryl,” Darryl replied.
Dennis turned away and vanished in the darkness.
The injured man tried to diagnose his injury, whether a separation or broken bones or both. Ultimately, he had no idea. “To a hospital,” he muttered. “Got to get -.”
After many tries, he stood on his two feet and set his course for the glow of light in the distance. The shelter he was about to leave proved to be a construction of cardboard and plywood, mostly. And the chair and mattress were the sole furnishings. The narrow distance between two tall buildings afforded a lane that lead him to a sidewalk. He was not able to guess the street he came out upon but reasoned he could not be far from where the SUV knocked him over. A short exploratory walk convinced him he was a block off Wylie Avenue. And left from there would have him back on Baldwin. But the charity hospital had to be about ten blocks away, in the other direction.
He set out and made steady progress in his journey, despite stumbling over the irregularities he encountered with almost every step, for the sidewalks here were cracked, the concrete shifted, over many seasons of neglect. He was aware when Dennis caught up to him, made so by the distinctive flavor of his voice. “What are ya doin’? Ain’t I taking care of you?”
He fell in step with Darryl, haranguing as he walked. “I brought you some food, but you weren’t there.”
Then he tried to halt Darryl’s progress by stopping in front of him. “Where ya goin’?”
Trying to step around, Darryl explained, “Charity hospital off Dickenson Street.”
“You’re crazy,” Dennis scoffed. “Ain’t no hospital anywhere near Dickenson Street.”
But it was the location of the hospital where his big brother drew his final breath, following that horrendous traffic accident. His experience told him Dennis was wrong and he picked up his step. “Yes, there is” the response came in the form of a rare assertive snap that caused his tormentor to back off.
Light sleet peppered the men and twisting gusts of wind tormented them. Dennis threw up his hands, thereby placing a wall between himself and this man he had taken under his wing. “All right,” he said. “You know where to find me.”
The smart-alec hoisted his collar over his neck and quickly vanished.
Grimacing, he began to doubt his stamina, but the hospital must be very near. Desperation alone kept him aright until he staggered across an intersection and knew by his surroundings he was almost there. The dwindling sleet storm stung less, as he came up a high curb, expecting to see the charity hospital. Instead, he almost bumped into a tall chain-link fence. The fence blocked out the entire block. Behind the fence towered the hospital building, dilapidated and boarded up. Its once proud front appeared to droop with sadness. He stared at the abandoned hospital in horror. He stood there until his vision was blurred by the tears flooding from his eyes. Eventually, Darryl wondered what sort of food Dennis had for him, as his aching legs turned him around to try to make the journey all the way back.
His toes felt frozen. Water had trickled inside his collar. He was starting across the intersection when a shrill voice caused him to look around. Pausing, he scoured the area with weakened eyes without seeing the loud person. “Where are you?” he croaked at last.
“Over here.” The voice issued from within the hospital fence enclosure. “Come get warm.”
The stranger directed him to a rent in the fence, large enough to accommodate a man. “We’ve got a fire and everything.”
With a short burst of renewed energy, he followed instructions and forced his way through, onto the forbidden grounds. The strange person had not emerged from the shadows. He was not even certain which gender to assign. He followed the dark form inside, through a formerly boarded-up door. There were fire flickers now and he could make out the silhouetted slender form of a lady. She lead him into the next room, where a cheery fire roared, in the middle of the marble floor, a bearded man feeding it. Safely back were cardboard boxes, some of which had been fashioned for resting upon. Darryl and the woman halted at the optimum distance for warmth, she rubbing her hands, seeming somewhat gleeful, he shaking violently, nearly losing balance. When the woman gauged his condition she unzipped and pulled away his wet jacket. She dug among the boxes until she came up with a beach towel. She threw the towel about Darryl’s shoulders and used the loose ends to wipe him dry. The shivering subsided, in increments. The woman had in the meantime discovered the blood on his shirt. Taking great care, she opened the garment and took a look. “Oh God,” she said, despairing. “I can’t do anything about that.”
The bearded man had come up to watch. “Belle,” he said. “Give ’im a few hits.”
His name was George. He produced a pipe, which was passed to Belle, who lit its cargo with a disposable lighter. She pushed it in Darryl’s mouth and told him to take a drag. Darryl had always felt morally opposed to illegal drugs, but in this dire crisis could be persuaded to try anything. He knew by watching movies on television how taking a drag works and so was administered two hits. He had been rendered virtually incapable of speech and so regarded his benefactors with wordless gratitude. The stuff from the pipe had an immediate effect on the pain and as he relaxed, he began looking at the cardboard for a potential bed. Correctly reading his actions, Belle lead him to her own bed of cardboard and helped him settle there. In a short time, he went sound asleep.
It was then George and Belle’s true nature became apparent. They were disgusted that the new arrival already had been robbed. There wasn’t even lint in his pockets. There was another worry. “If he dies here it’s going to stink up the place,” George lamented.
“We can’t toss him out. He’ll die for sure.”
“He’s not our responsibility,” George insisted. “We can’t even take care of ourselves. Let’s leave him in here and start a new fire in the next wing.”
After much persuasion, she gave in and they quietly slipped away.
The next hours were sentinels over his still form, the raging fire reduced to ash and embers. Belle’s last act before she left Darryl was to drape his jacket over him. Eventually, he stirred and, being cold, he wrangled the jacket on. He understood that his benefactors had deserted him. There was no bitterness tied to the realization. They had gone out of his life as had everybody in the world but Mom. He accepted that.
Darryl moved his bed closer to the warmth of the embers. His one hand barely managed the move. In fact, it required three trips to put it all together. He was weary. He eased himself down and passed out.
His sleep was dark, dreamless, permeated with pain. It might have lasted many hours but in the mid of night, he found himself roughly taken up and carried away on somebody’s shoulder. He knew somehow the shoulder belonged to a firefighter or a police officer. He was coughing, barely able to breathe, for a thick black smoke had replaced the clean air. Only slightly conscious, as they loaded him on a gurney, he marked the faces of the EMT crew. Then he awakened in a hospital bed.
Many tubes and gadgets clung to or penetrated his upper body and a nurse was taking his blood pressure reading. When she saw him stirring, she planted herself before his face. Speaking loudly, the woman asked for his name. His tongue moved, but no words issued from his mouth. She tried in vain for several minutes to establish an identity for Darryl. She wrapped up her tasks and went from the bed. He longed desperately for a drink of water.
There quickly arrived a battery of obviously important representatives. Their leader, a pugnacious man wearing a charcoal business suit, named Will Sykes, lead the charge. He regarded Darryl sternly and Darryl could not meet his gaze. “May I have your name, please?”
The man’s no-nonsense demeanor yielded the identical result as had the nurse’s questioning. He began again. “Perhaps you don’t understand. We want to help you. With no personal information, we can do nothing. You trespassed on a private property, which got burned down. Two persons were killed. It is a grave matter. Would you like some pain medicine? With no information, we cannot administer even that.”
Darryl’s eyes pleaded for compassion. Sykes would have none of it. “Because you are refusing to cooperate and because the police have not arrested you, this hospital has no choice but to put you out of it.”
The ill man was stupefied. He had never heard of hospital “dumping” and had assumed a patient’s well being to be the ultimate goal. That he was being rolled out in a wheelchair to a van, to get put out on the street somewhere, seemed entirely too surreal. The vehicle stopped on a traffic-free stretch of street. The crew hustled Darryl out on the sidewalk. After balancing him, seeing him take a few steps, they and the van cruised to the light ahead and made a quick right turn.
He surveyed the unfamiliar street, as far as he could see up it. No point of refuge greeted him. At the intersection, he carefully let himself down from the curb, aware that should he fall he likely could never get up again. Having lost his jacket at the hospital, he went with arms crossed, looking for anything that had paper or cardboard, to use for warming purposes. At the end of the street, he came upon a carnival and continued onto the grounds. Clown dummies howled with manufactured laughter. Men threw balls, trying to knock down lead bottles. Deepest in were a Ferris wheel and a rollercoaster. The food booths wreaked of hamburgers and corndogs. For Darryl, food had lost all meaning. He nearly collided with a young bull of a man, who was intent on showing his girlfriend a good time. The man laughed and advised him to give up drinking. Then he saw the blood on Darryl’s shirt. Subdued, he and his date hurried off, blending into the crowd.
Two children began to follow him, throwing up questions, such as, “What’s wrong, Mister?” and “Mister, are you hurt?”
Cruelty manifested itself when he moved along without responding. The smaller boy scooped a candy apple core off the pavement and made a baseball pitch that put it in the small of Darryl’s back. The hit elicited no response. His feet continued moving. The larger boy restrained the smaller and lead him away.
Two men, obvious carnival employees, came and escorted him off the grounds, releasing him on a dark street. They held his arms and propelled him to that spot, before releasing him and hustling back to their jobs. Having reached that imminent point at which mortal flesh must give way to dissolution, he stayed as they put him, tottering like a pillar that must crumble, causes for moving exhausted. At seventy-five he had gone on more years than many of his peers. It was a statistic, merely, and no cause to feel grateful. No longer aware of his surroundings, he failed to detect a car that slowed when passing. He only heard when it returned and parked. He could not tell that a woman had taken it on herself to approach him, that she felt concerned, that she was a lonely widow, out driving, and that she had the money and influence to rescue him, to take him into her home and there dwell in comfort throughout his years of December.
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