Always Walking

 

    Someone is dying in the blue house on the corner of the street Ray uses to walk to work every day.  It’s someone in the building with the big black dog that always runs and jumps at the fence pressing its black rubbery nose through the slats as if it to break them. Ray is drawn to this house—he does not know why—but he likes to watch it, to try and understand the people who live there. Today, he puts the back of his hand out for the dog to sniff, but it only growls and tries to nip at his dark callused fingers, causing Ray to pull away. He begins to jog slowly, like a person at the end of a marathon; he turns left at the next block, down the dirt alley and around the corner where he stops, leans against a brick apartment, and catches his breath in long even intakes of air.  

When he goes back, he stands just outside of the rotting wooden fence that encases the house.  He has dressed in his best pair of clothes—a light green T-shirt and a pair of old blue jeans, deciding earlier to meet the people who lived here.  He stands, letting the wind whip sand into his face, his eyes watering, until he paws at them, his fingernail leaving a tiny cut folded into the leathery wrinkles of the corner.

            Last night, Thursday he believes, he walked to the other side of town. When he started the sky had been clear, but the air tingled, electric with an incoming storm.  He could feel the static on his clothes, while the hairs on his legs and arms stood rigid like miniature tree branches. When the rain finally came, it blacked the entire sky, dropping in sheets, pelting Ray with cold pinpricks of water. And, like every time it rains in the desert, the streets began to flood, the water mixing with the dirt of front yards, piling in mountains at the end of the street. Boys and girls ran outside to play, jumping around in water up to their waists. Ray slogged through calf deep. But he liked it, liked the feel of the rain against his skin, able to smell his own hot sweat from earlier in the day. Where the drops hit him, he felt little balls of fire; his odor and the dirt caked onto his skin rising with a sizzle.

Ray is always walking, walking and thinking. He knows a lot of people think of him as homeless because he carries a large army issue backpack and a plastic jug of water, which he feels no shame to fill in any spigot. But he is not homeless.  Just smart.  If he takes a walk of that magnitude—across town and back, he never knows what he might need.  He doesn’t own a car, never even learned to drive and he doesn’t know many people, so he has no one to call to come and pick him up.  He carries the jug because he lives in a desert where it is easy to get dehydrated; Ray figures he would rather been seen as homeless than dead. Actually, he works at the University, in the physics department, but not as a teacher; he is a researcher. He earned his Ph.D. five years ago. This way is easier for him.

Ray knows someone is dying at the blue house because every Tuesday a truck labeled Home Health Care Supplies comes and drops off newly filled oxygen canisters.  It arrives at 10:00AM right after the gardeners leave.  The gardeners appear once a week too, which amazes Ray because in a desert grass cannot grow so fast that it needs trimming once a week. But they show up every Tuesday at 8:00, driving a green truck, trailing two different kinds of lawn mowers, hedge clippers, a weed wacker, hoses and other tools that line the cart, rattling around like peanuts when the truck stops.

Ray cannot see the purpose of so much mowing because of the smallness of the yard, no flowers or trees, just yellowing grass. But they try. They try hard to keep that grass green.  The sprinklers come on every morning, and stay on for hours. Grackles and doves strut about under the spray, pecking at the mud and squawking, but the grass stays the same dull sickly color.

When the gardeners are present, they stop and stare at Ray—every time acting like they have never seen him before.  They actually stop moving, the clippers stilled for the entire time it takes for him to pass by the house. This bothers Ray. He does not think that he looks out of the ordinary or even exceptional. So in retribution he has taken to glaring at them from under his own bushy black eyebrows as he walks.

*

            Last night in the dark, Ray could see into the window of the little study on the left side of the house. He only looked inside because of the light, shining, like an immense fire flickering shadows onto the wall of a cave. The people who live there left the shades open. Ray does not think his interest makes him a Peeping Tom or anything like that, but if someone leaves the curtains open, they are just asking for watchers. Ray thinks that perhaps the owners want strangers to look.

Ray wishes he lived in this study.  It appears extremely comfortable, although exceptionally small. A TV protrudes right from the wall, which he can watch from the street. A leather couch rests against the opposite wall and bookshelves make up the remainder of the room. They hold big heavy text-like books, so he knows the people are smart. Ray wishes he could run his hands over the top of the books, touch their covers and open the pages, while feeling the weight in his lap like a child. Sometimes there is a cat on one of the bookshelves, twitching its tail, waiting.

*

Standing outside the fence, Ray wonders if he goes up to the door and knocks, and the owners let him in and get to know him, that perhaps the dying person will leave him something in the will.  He knows this might seem like a strange idea to most people, but when he was little an old woman lived down the street who the children called Mrs. Henry.  At first Ray’s mother made him visit Mrs. Henry once a week, calling it his Christian duty.  But after a little while, he liked to go over to her house on his own.  Mrs. Henry always invited him in and gave him a cup of tea. 

Ray amazed her by taking it without milk, lemon, or honey. 

“That’s how men drink tea,” he said when she asked him why he refused these items.

Ray wished she bought coffee instead. Then he could have shown her how he drank it black. At home his mother did not let him drink coffee, she said he was too young and that it would stunt his growth.  His mother did not know that he drank it anyway. And he managed to grow to six feet, and two inches.

            Most of the time, when Ray went over to Mrs. Henry’s, she also invited him into the back room, the one with the TV.  He noticed the amount of TV that old people watch. She never turned it off, even while they talked. While it distracted him from their conversation, he also seemed drawn to the pictures that winked endlessly, and the way the colors reflected on Mrs. Henry’s face like slide photographs on a wrinkled and bumpy screen.

            Occasionally Mrs. Henry invited Ray into the parlor where she kept the nice furniture: a green and black sofa, a large purple chair and several pictures of old people.  They looked out the window at Ray’s house while Mrs. Henry asked him questions.

            "How are your mother and father?” She would ask. “Is your father still working at Proctor and Scott?"

            Ray would nod his head and sip luke-warm tea.

            "And your mother? How is the hospital treating her? I heard they were laying off lots of nurses."

            "She’s fine. She likes her job." Ray thought Mrs. Henry was nosy, but answered all the questions anyway.  She gave him a look when he told her something new sort of like, "Hum, I didn’t know that, I’ll have to go write it down." And she raised her left eyebrow. 

            Once she said to him, "I’m going to have a tower built on the top of my house like a castle. A room just big enough so that I can fit up there with a pair of binoculars.  Then I could really keep tabs on the neighborhood."

            "I can help build it," he said. After all, his dad was a carpenter. And everyone expected Ray to follow in his footsteps—he could use the practice.

            "What about those Stevens’ kids?" she asked.

            "What about them?" Ray didn’t like the next door neighbor kids. They were snotty, and spoiled, always getting their own way. Ray once saw the girl throw a fit in the front yard because he mother did not want her to take a toilet brush to school. Eventually the mother gave in and the girl marched onto the bus with the brush under her arm.

            "Billy hasn’t gone to school for the last week." Mrs. Henry went on but Ray’s thoughts were filled with the tower.

            "Have you seen Billy?" she asked again, cutting into Ray’s plans for the new structure.

            He thought about it for a minute then nodded his head, yes. "Yeah," he said, "He spends a lot of time out back throwing rocks in the water. Just standing."

            "Perhaps I should call the police," Mrs. Henry said.

            Ray just shrugged. Sometimes he stood with Billy, throwing rocks. They never talked—an unspoken, but yet agreed upon rule—they simply positioned themselves together. Sometimes it was pleasant to throw rocks with someone.

            One time Ray had been in Mrs. Henry’s bedroom, when she asked him to bring her a robe, but he had never gotten a chance to see any more of the house, which he wanted to see so badly.  He had stood in the yellow room and stared at the metal folding bed, reminding him of an army cot.  The room was small, just big enough to fit the bed and another television, which rested on a flimsy plastic table.  Ray opened her closet door and immediately saw the robe hanging from a hook on the back of it.  He ran his hand down the terrycloth and smelled it.  He fluttered his hand through her dresses, touching the edges of the material. He had not liked the way they felt—scratchy and stiff. He yanked the robe off the hook, folded it over his left arm, and sat down on the bed. The springs squeaked. He lifted his legs up and onto the bed so that he lay down, looking at the ceiling. A crack in the shape of a nose ran down its length.

            Ray really thought she would leave that house to him when she died. She did not have any children and he figured all her brothers and sisters had already passed on. Who else would she leave it to? It made perfect sense to Ray, but it turned out he guessed wrong. She had one sister left who got the house, not him. So because of that incident, Ray figures that these people owe him their house. That is only fair.

            The Problem:  he cannot seem to find the nerve to go and knock on the door and tell them, so here he stands outside the gate. He wonders if someone will get suspicious and call the police, since he poises here, not actually doing anything. Just staring at the blue house. Ray notices ivy crawling up the right side, which he had never heeded before and thinks perhaps the gardeners have more to do than just mow grass. He tries to find other plants that he missed and sees three flat-leafed shoots that look as if they grew from bulbs. Ray wonders if the dying person’s relatives planted these in homage.

He thinks of different ways of approaching the people in the house:  impersonating a salesman and get all dressed up in a suit and tie. When the residents answer the door, he will invite himself in, pretending to sell knives—no vacuum cleaners, a safer product; but he does not know how he will get himself invited back unless he can actually make them buy one. Or he could fake an accident, make believe he broke his foot or something and that he could not walk any further. They would tell him to wait for the ambulance right in the study. Then a few days later, he could go back with his foot wrapped up in a fake cast and tell them how much he owed them.  Maybe he will even offer to cut their grass or take that big dog for a walk. Or perhaps he will imitate the cable or telephone man and tell them there is a problem with the lines. He will somehow steal a uniform and tell the dying person that it will take him a few days to fix up the problem. They all seem like fairly good ideas.

            But, he does not know.

            Suddenly, he realizes the difficulty of this task; it weighs on him like a tank.  Feeling lonely, he wonders if the dying person is watching TV and absently wanders around to that side of the house. The bright yellow light shines out of the window onto him, a reflecting glow on his face, his neck, his hands.