Becca spotted the homeless man hunched against the slats of a boarded up Woolworths. Scarecrow thin, his high cheekbones and receding gray hair resembled her Henry, who had drowned in a whiskey glass after a supersized Wal-Mart gobbled up their farm. And like the scarecrow in their cornfield, now plowed over and turned into a parking lot, the vagrant went unnoticed by the flock of pedestrians that stepped around him.
Always she had avoided this ill-kempt vagabond. Never once had she greeted him. Asked about his day. Wondered if he harbored dreams that had been sacrificed to something immense and indifferent.
Today would be different. He was her neighbor even if he didn’t have a roof over his head. Detouring from her planned picnic at the park, Becca crossed the street and approached him.
When the man with scraggly whiskers looked up at her, her heart startled. His hazel eyes with brown flecks could have belonged to her husband. Hard to fathom how the massive stroke had ground Henry’s twinkling presence into a hulking nothingness. Erased four decades of marriage.
She blinked back tears, dug into her canvas bag, and handed the frail man a pastrami sandwich. “Care for a bite to eat?” She couldn’t summon Henry back to life, but she could reach out to someone down on his luck.
“Thanks,” he said as his blue veined claw took the sandwich. He lifted a soda can as if to salute her generosity. Instead, he spit a stream of goopy brown tobacco into the can before winking obscenely at her. “Got wine? We could kick back and celebrate my birthday."
As she stumbled backwards from the whiskey fumes that assaulted her, a policeman ambled over. “Last warning,” the officer barked. “Bother someone again, you’re in the clink.”
Becca meant to defend him, meant to explain that she had approached him. Let the officer know that he hadn’t been bothering her. Instead, her stomach twitched in revulsion. From the safety of a doorway, she watched him weave through a clutter of delivery trucks.
Left behind, abandoned on the pavement, was the sandwich. She wanted to retrieve it and run after him, tell him she was sorry. Instead, her feet carried her back to her third-floor apartment. Henry would have been baffled. How could she have let a wad of tobacco juice suffocate the words she meant to speak?
For the rest of the afternoon, Becca hid in the apartment as she wrote a long letter to her son in Barcelona.
When day spilled into evening, she escaped the sauna-like apartment to sit on the fire escape. She spotted the scruffy scarecrow rooting through a dumpster. His frailness alarmed her. He needed a decent meal.
When he vanished into the night, she ducked through the window, unbraided her hair, and climbed into bed.
In the sweltering heat, Becca stirred. Thoughts of her husband’s caressing fingers made her loins prickle. She squeezed her eyes and willed his image to visit her. Nothing. She couldn't conjure up his beard, his smile, not even his brown-flecked eyes.
Again she fled to the fire escape to catch a morsel of breeze.
Above her, thick clouds streamed across the sky. Below her, coarse laugher erupted. She peered into the darkness and witnessed two bearded men with dreadlocks ram the scarecrow against the dumpster. They scattered his cans and grabbed his whiskey, tossing it over his head as he made pathetic attempts to intercept it. An obscene game of football.
Words clawed out of Becca’s throat. “Stop,” she screamed. “I’m calling the cops.”
The men fled but not before smashing a brick against the skull of the whimpering man.
The bundle of rags sprawled in the darkened alleyway. She clattered down the fire escape and darted across the street.
The bald skeleton, reeking of whiskey, slurred words at her when she crouched over him. “Goway. Leave me lone.” Blood leaked out a gash in his cheek. His stinking, unwashed body revolted her. Again, retreat tempted her.
Instead, she tugged his arm. Using strength garnered from years of hefting bales of hay and splitting wood, she pulled him to his feet. He staggered and feebly resisted while she murmured, “It’s okay. You’re safe now. I won’t let anyone hurt you.” She half-pushed, half-towed the man up the stairs and along the hallway. At her apartment door, she hesitated. "Do you have someone I can call?"
"Yeah, lady, I got a dozen children who beg me to visit them."
Letting a stranger into her apartment was stupid. He could be a murderer, a rapist. She squelched her misgivings. She couldn’t abandon him in the hallway.
When she opened the door, he pulled away, lurching against the doorframe. “Lemme go!”
She crooned, “It’s all right. I’ll take care of you. No one will hurt you.”
As he stumbled inside, he fell to his knees and vomited a foul mixture of stringy noodles and globs of tomato sauce. She sucked in her breath to keep her dinner from catapulting out her mouth. He fell like a rag doll on the couch, his bloodshot eyes large holes in his stubbly face. Becca hurried to the kitchen to soak dishtowels under scalding water.
When she returned, he was snoring on his back, another burst of vomit splattered on his ragged shirt. She wiped up the mess where he had left his innards.
Bone-tired, she dragged a rocking chair between the couch and the door to the hallway. Sleep eluded her as the chair tapped an uneven rhythm on the wood floor. As she watched her abandoned scarecrow man roll to his side and tuck his arms around his legs, she knew she should call 911. But how could she live with herself if this helpless shell of a man was installed in a jail cell or a shelter where the last of his dignity would be swept away? Like gutter trash.