I left the office Saturday morning around eleven o’clock heading to the stop two blocks away to catch the bus home with the transfer from my trip down earlier. The skies were leaden, pregnant. The buildings, calcified accretions – a barren reef rising from a seafloor of flint – otiose in the absence of life’s green and volatile engines. The weathermen divined that snow would arrive that afternoon, but as yet the sharp edges on creation remained an indictment of summer’s retreat. I left my gloves in my pack and read with numbed hands as I walked, drawing warmth from Welty’s southern landscapes against the rising wind from the north.
A woman sat at the bus stop outside McDonald’s. I passed her and turned to the window of the restaurant. A line of Ojibwe faces peered back at me munching little machine-flattened bricks of fried potatoes and sipping orange soda. They looked past me indifferently as they looked past the woman on the bench and the theater across the street and the village just beyond named for a Christian king and saint and the woods and plains and rivers beyond that. Their pockmarked cheeks moved up and down in andante rhythms under deep black eyes that stretched back eons. I turned and faced the street, aping their nonchalance.
“This must be my day for men with beards! All I see is men with beards today!”
I nodded slightly and tried to smile in a way that was not engaging.
“I haven’t seen my friend Alvin in ages, and he came up to me today with a big beard on his face! What is it with all these beards today? You don’t think men are really wearing beards much these days, do ya?”
I tried to give a benign shrug and a smirk, as if to say, “I’m a foreigner. Please forgive me; I do not understand a word you’re saying.”
The woman had the voice of a well-trained parrot that rose and fell in dramatic fashion irrespective of where natural inflection should lie and the face of my maternal grandmother smiling up at me as she fumbled for a cigarette with gloved hands – little turquoise knitted mittens that hinged back to reveal tattered fabric on her fingers. Her hands trembled a bit.
I inclined my head at her again and tried to give her a pleasant look. I didn’t want to perpetuate the conversation, but I also didn’t want to be too brusque in my retreat and risk offending. I turned back to my book and drew my shoulders in as another gust of wind circled my neck and ran down my spine. Each blow from the north drained another increment of warmth from the reserves I carried and left me that much less to meet the next assault. I folded the book back and tucked it under my arm and buried both fists hard in my pockets. The bus should’ve arrived by now.
I turned back to the window. The panel of faces chewing their cuds and doing their best to maintain a stern countenance gave an almost imperceptible nod back in my direction. I turned back around and faced the theater across the street and noticed a coyote on the sidewalk under the marquis. He was staring back at me. He gave what sounded like a little barking laugh and danced in a quick circle before disappearing around the corner where the tobacco shop had recently moved out next to the cinema. The rest of the street was vacant, save for the woman and me. She noticed her cigarette had gone out. She reached again for the little leather holster that held her pack and returned the remainder into it.
The snow began falling as the bus rounded the corner. I stepped back enough to show her the right of way as it pulled up in front of us, but she merely sat and stared into the side of the bus and said nothing. The flakes were falling heavily already. I stepped up into the bus and sat by the window with the damaged and the penurious overlooking the woman on the bench. She continued to stare just below me at the side of the bus, or through it. She was accumulating puffy little cobwebs of snowflakes all over her head. I looked back at the window of McDonald’s, but my faces were gone. I returned to Eudora Welty. The bus churned me homeward through a thickening white rind that dulled the sharp edges.
Barbara Fryrear 2000
