‘You got any aftershave?’ he asked.
‘Not with me,’ I said. ‘Why, you got a date?’
‘I haven’t been on a date since Nixon was president.’
‘Another thing to blame him for: ruining your love life.’
‘He was a sonofabitch, but I didn’t need no help on that front.’
I washed my hands and dried them with a paper towel. I had money in my pocket, but I didn’t want to offend the old man. Then I thought that it was better to risk hurting his feelings. I left a ten on the sink beside him. He looked at it as though Alexander Hamilton might bite him if he tried to pick it up; that, or I might ask him to bite me as part of some bizarre sexual fetish.
‘What’s that for?’ he said.
‘Aftershave.’
He reached out and took the ten.
‘I always liked Old Spice,’ he said.
‘My father wore Old Spice.’
‘Something stays around that long, it has to be good.’
‘Amen,’ I said. ‘Look after yourself.’
‘I will,’ he said. ‘And, hey?’
I looked back.
‘Thanks.’
17
It’s a full-time job being homeless. It’s a full-time job being poor. That’s what those who bitch about the underprivileged not going out there and finding work fail to understand. They have a job already, and that job is surviving. You have to get in line early for food, and earlier still for a place to sleep. You carry your possessions on your back, and when they wear out you spend time scavenging for replacements. You only have so much energy to expend, because you only have so much food to fuel your body. Most of the time you’re tired and sore, and your clothes are damp. If the cops find you sleeping on the street, they move you on. If you’re lucky, they’ll give you a ride to a shelter, but if there are no beds free, or no mats available on the floor, then you’ll have to sleep sitting upright in a plastic chair in an outer office, and the lights will be on full because that’s what the fire code regulations require, so you go back out on the streets again because at least there you can lie down in the dark, and with luck you’ll sleep. Each day is the same, and each day you get a little bit older and a little bit more tired.
And sometimes you remember who you once were. You were a kid who played with other kids. You had a mother and a father. You wanted to be a fireman or an astronaut or a railroad engineer. You had a husband. You had a wife. You were loved. You could never have imagined that you would end up this way.
You curl up in the darkness and you wait for death to kiss you a final, blissful goodnight.
Shaky was back on the streets. He’d been tempted to stay at one of the shelters and find a mat on which to sleep. His arm ached. It always pained him in winter, leaving him with months of discomfort, but it had been hurting more since Jude died. It was probably – what was the word? He thought and thought – ‘psychosomatic’, that was it. It had taken him a good minute to recall it, but Jude would have known the word instantly. Jude knew about history, and science, and geography. He could tell you the plot of every great novel he’d ever read, and recite whole passages of them from memory. Shaky had once tested him on a couple. He’d jokingly remarked that, for all Shaky knew, Jude could have been making up all of those quotations off the top of his head. Jude had responded by claiming that Shaky had impugned his honor – that was the word he’d used, ‘impugned’ – and there had been nothing to do but for the two of them to head down to the Portland Public Library on Congress, where Shaky had pulled The Great Gatsby from the shelves, along with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lolita, The Grapes of Wrath, As I Lay Dying, Ulysses and the poems of Longfellow and Cummings and Yeats. Jude had been able to quote chunks of them without getting a word wrong, without a single stumble, and even some of the librarians had come over to listen. By the time he got on to Shakespeare, it was like being in the presence of one of those old stage actors, the kind who used to wash up in small towns when there were still theaters in which to perform, their costumes and props in one truck, the cast in another, and put on revues, and comedies, and social dramas, or maybe a condensed Shakespeare with all of the dull parts removed, leaving only the great moments of drama: ghosts, and bloodied daggers, and dying kings.
And there was Jude in his old checked suit and two-tone shoes, the heels worn smooth and cardboard masking the holes in the soles, surrounded by curious readers and amused librarians. He was lost in words, lost in roles, someone other than himself for just a little while, and Shaky had loved him then, loved him as he basked in the glow of pleasure that emanated from Jude’s face, loved him as his eyes closed in reverie, and he said a prayer of gratitude for the presence of Jude in his life even as he wondered how one so clever and so gifted could have ended up scavenging in Dumpsters and sleeping on the streets of a city forever shadowed by winter, and what weakness in Jude’s being had caused him to turn away from his family and his home and throw himself to the winds like a leaf at the coming of fall.
Shaky’s pack weighed heavily on him. He thought again about the shelter. He could have left his belongings there – even without a bed for him, someone might have been willing to look after them – and returned to pick them up later, but increasingly he found the presence of others distressing. He would look at the familiar faces, but the one he sought was no longer there, and the presence of the rest only reminded him of Jude’s absence. How long had they been friends? Shaky could not remember. He had lost track of the years a long time ago. Dates were of no consequence. He was not marking wedding anniversaries, nor the birthdays of children. He left the years behind him, discarded without a thought like old shoes that could no longer fulfill even his modest needs.
He was near Deering Oaks now. He kept returning there, coming back to the place in which Jude had breathed his last. He was a mourner and a pilgrim. He stopped outside the house, its windows now boarded. Someone had placed a new lock and bolt on the basement door since Jude’s death: the police, he assumed, or the owner, assuming it was still owned by a person and not a bank. Crime scene tape had been placed across the door, but it was now torn. It drifted in the night’s breeze.
Shaky had no sense of Jude at the house. That was how he knew that Jude had not taken his own life. Shaky didn’t believe in ghosts. He didn’t even believe in God, and if he turned out to be wrong, well, he and God would have some words about the dogshit hand that Shaky had been dealt in life. But Shaky did have a certain sense about people and places. Jude had it too. You needed it if you wanted to survive on the streets. Shaky instinctively knew who to trust, and who to avoid. He knew the places in which it was safe to sleep and the places, though empty and apparently innocuous, in which it was best not to rest. Men and women left their marks as they moved through life, and you could read them if you had a mind to. Jude had left his mark in that basement, his final mark, but it didn’t read to Shaky like the mark of a man who had given in to despair. It read to Shaky like the mark of one who would have fought if he’d had the strength, and if the odds had not been against him.
He walked down to the basement door and took the Swiss Army knife from his pocket. It was one of his most valuable possessions, and he maintained it well. There was one blade that he kept particularly sharp, and he used it now to make two signs on the stonework beside the door. The first was a rectangle with a dot in the center, the old hobo alphabet symbol for ‘danger’. The second was a diagonal line joined halfway by a smaller, almost perpendicular line. It was the warning to keep away.
He spent the rest of the night asking questions. He did it carefully and discreetly, and he approached only those whom he trusted, those he knew would not lie to him or betray him. It had taken him a while to figure out what he should do. Talking to the detective had crystallized it for him. Someone had taken Jude’s money, and the contents of his pack. It might have been those responsible for his death, but it didn’t seem likely that they’d then call in his hanging corpse to the cops. Neither would they have taken the money if they wanted his death to appear like a suicide. Anyway, from what Shaky had learned, Jude was dead for a day or more before his body was found.