Reluctance

Short Story

He walked through my neighborhood at about the same time every morning - usually while I was on the front steps of my tenement sucking down the first Marlboro of the day. I’d sit on the cold concrete and pick leaves off the long-dead bushes on either side of the stoop, or peel the scaling brown paint from the door frame of the main entry, all the while watching that young man who, clad head to toe in black, seemed to glide like an upright shadow toward my smoking spot at the entrance of number 7, Winter Lane.

            I knew his routine. He would stroll two blocks in my direction and turn to his left, disappearing from view behind the condemned brick structure that marred the corner lot across the road from my building. Almost without fail, as he rounded the bend in the sidewalk, our eyes would meet and he’d acknowledge me with a quick nod. That would be the last I’d see of him until the following morning. No words were ever exchanged and yet, his subtle communication meant something to me. Over the years that little nod of salutation from the man in black became as much a part of my day as brewing coffee before I went to work or checking the mail box in the foyer when I got home.

             A NewYorker, born and bred, social interactions had never been easy for me. My desire to keep to myself overpowered the curiosity that I felt with respect to the mysterious “morning man,” as I came to think of him. That was how he looked to me…like a mourning man. Sadly, rather than experience the discomfort of initiating any kind of verbal contact, I just invented his life history in my head while remaining safely rooted to the porch. He worked in a funeral home. He’d lost his whole family in a house fire. He lived in a flat above a bar, and had a tiny little cedar-lined closet full of black shirts and slacks. Whatever his story, he seemed to travel through the projects in an invisible pocket of serenity and quiet, unaffected by the noise and clutter in his path. It occurred to me, on several occasions, that he had no true connection to my sad and mundane world. Perceptions change as the seasons; usually gradually…sometimes suddenly.

            Last year’s fall arrived late. The day it came, the few trees which struggled to survive in tiny patches of concrete-free earth, rare in the projects, were already covered in the appropiate colors...it was the weather that refused to follow the calendar. Carmel leaves relinquished their holds on spindly branches, heedless of the summertime conditions all around. Nearby Central Park was completely dressed in golds and browns while the temperature remained stubbornly in the nineties.  

I sat in a bent and broken beach chair that, too lazy to carry it to the community dumpster, someone had abandoned in my smoking spot. Peering streetward through a still flame, I was lighting up a red when I caught sight of the morning man’s black-clad figure approaching. He was nearly to the intersection where he’d hang a left, so I fixed my gaze on him in preparation for the customary inclination of the head, ready to return the gesture. The glance in my direction came right on cue, as it always had, but there was no nod. Instead, for the first time that I could remember, the man stopped…poised like a hound on the rounded curb. His eyes focused not on me, but on a small girl, maybe seven or eight years old, who was riding her big-wheel in the middle of the road to the right of where I sat. Even from a distance, I could see the musculature of his youthful face contort in an expression of fear. My own jaw line tensed as the relative silence of morning was chased away with the muted static sound that automobiles make when traveling at high speed on poorly maintained asphalt. Before I could call out or even move, a head mounted on a pitch black blur shot from the sidewalk where Morning Man had stood. Rubber on the roadway ceased its static hiss and loosed an almost human screech. The little girl gave a half yelp, her cry cut off by a thud and the sinister clatter of debris hitting the pavement. It was over by the time I had risen from the tangled mess of metal and plastic… the discarded corpse of what had once been a lovely chair. Filled with dread, I peeked around the bulbous dead bush that obstructed my view of the roadway to the right of my building. The man in black lay amid fallen leaves in the gutter on the far side of the street, motionless.

Concerned faces began to appear in windows and doorways left open to combat the persistent heat. Like the masses of pigeons in the park that were drawn to bread crumbs from miles around, residents of the surrounding dilapidated buildings gravitated one by one toward the drama unfolding on Winter Lane. Lassoing my stomach in a coarse rope of apprehension, it drew me as well. I descended the steps. A sweet, warm mixture of breakfast cereal and black coffee made several attempts to free itself from my abdomen as I closed the distance between me and the ever-growing crowd of pigeon people. Disjointed bits of conversation reached my ears.

“He’s that priest from St. whateveritis, up the street,” Said a fat black woman with greasy skin and a round piggish face.

“Isn’t he the deaf preacher from the soup kitchen?”  Inquired a toothless old man who ate most of his meals in that very refuge, and spent the rest of his time on a park bench with a booze-stuffed paper bag to his lips.

I elbowed my way through the orbitous clump of onlookers to reach the man that should have been my friend. I felt ashamed that each person I passed spoke as though they knew so much about him. I knew nothing, but would miss him in the morning. What was his name?

Once at the center of the throng, I stood, fists balled tightly at my sides, and surveyed the situation. A bright yellow bigwheel rested on its side below the bumper of an old Mercedes Benz whose grey paint showed, by its lack of luster, that the vehicle was very old indeed. It was still running. The hood bore a large dent and was slightly buckled, and the windshield held the whitened latticework of cracks that testified to the strength and speed of its collision with a human body. On a grassy patch of ground just past the sidewalk and away from the street sat a tearful mother, dead leaves swirling about her in a chilly wind that came out of nowhere. She frantically stroked the long blond hair of the child she had nearly lost, dutifully distracting her baby from the crumpled heap of black linen and broken flesh that lay unmoving in the gutter.

Crouched over his fallen victim, the driver of the Benz rocked back and forth on his haunches, pleading in a mournful voice with anyone that looked his way, “Oh God, I didn’t even see them. Did anyone see? God, someone call an ambulance! I tried to stop!” His tie was loosened about his neck, and grime from the road was smeared across his face and the front of his creaseless button-down shirt.  His cries mingled with the distant echo of sirens that I was sure were headed our way. “He pushed her out of the way,” he wailed, gesturing toward the fallen man with a wavering hand. On his feet now, tie guy was addressing the mother and daughter who still sat in the grass. “He couldn’t get clear of...Is he okay?” He interrupted his own explanation, directing the frantic question at a young woman dressed in gray scrubs who'd passed in front of him and crouched at Morning Man's side. She gingerly pressed two fingers against a cold, clean-shaven neck. A cloud moved in front of the sun, darkening her features. The woman shook her head, causing a few strands of hair to fall into her kind face. Looking up, she swallowed hard and took a deep breath.  

"I'm so sorry." She finally answered him, in a whisper. Tears weighed down her lower lashes. Turning her head back toward the lifeless visage that, even now looked peaceful, she whispered again "Oh, Father Sandy, I'm so sorry."

The gentleman in the tie collapsed to his knees. “Oh my God. Holy s**t. Oh God, please, no...” He turned his face toward me and our wet eyes met.  Pronounced crows’ feet deepened by his squinting grimace were filled with moisture. A blink sent two watery lines of pink racing downward through the grime on his cheeks. “He saved her.”

A hand appeared on his shoulder.

“Everything’s going to be alright,” came the calm words of the lucky little girl's mother. She had left her child in the arms of a neighbor in order to comfort the disheveled little man. “Just breathe deeply, everything’s going to be okay.”

A voice rose shrilly above the din of sirens, spectators, and sorrow. “Let me GO!” it exclaimed. The owner of the upturned bigwheel burst from among the observers, a bobbing tangle of blond hair against a sea of blue jeans and flowered skirts, and ran toward the kneeling man.

“I'm sorry” he repeated absently as she threw her arms around his neck.

“Don’t cry,” she pleaded in a sweetly comforting voice, audible only to those of us standing nearest “I love you so much, Daddy.”

Cold air moved over the collection of souls milling about Winter Lane. Trees that had known it was time for change weeks ago rustled their paper like foliage as though applauding both the drop in temperature and the heroic sacrifice of the mysterious man in black. I changed then too. The deaf priest from the unknown church up the road had showed just how much a part of my mundane world he was by allowing himself to be taken out of it. A life lived well was given in trade so another might live well as well.

Author's Note

Please be free with criticism, I don't get offended. I want to get better.

Reviews

Poignant. Isn't it like that, you see someone for years and never get around to finding out who they are or what their names are. And then something happens and it seems everyone around you has a snippet of information and it is all woven together to create enough of a narrative for the neighborhood to be satisfied.

My favorite line is "Over the years that little nod of salutation from the man in black became as much a part of my day as brewing coffee before I went to work " because it flows so easily and, really, it shows how he is a part of the narrator's life. Like coffee. Which coffee makers who are also into habits always make on time, every morning.

I liked the description of the driver, except for the mercury tears; I liked his rumpled jacket and his response to the accident. He did not run or evade, he just squatted there and wept. Very sad.

[Samuel Dickens]

I think this is a very good piece of writing, plus, you're a good story-teller. Both talents are needed to write well, and you have them. A sad ending---true, but also a triumphant one. I can't think of a more honorable and valid reason to die than this.

[Ken C.]

"Please be free with criticism, I don't get offended. I want to get better." I like your attitude. A lot of people on here seem to be afraid of being mean or something...
Anyway. I really liked reading this story. It's exactly what a short story should do, I think. It focuses on just one "little" event, encompassing all the emotional weight that goes with it.
Just a couple of suggestions, and they are pretty minor:
When you describe the moment the priest gets hit, don't show off so much. Not that I had to read it twice to understand what happened, but the style of narration should reflect the nature of the actual event; sudden, blunt, to the point.
The dialogue needs a little cleaning up as well, particularly that of the man who hit the priest. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry…I didn’t even see them…my briefcase..late for work…” No one talks like this, not even in nerve-wracking situations. When people are very upset like this, they tend to say "God" a lot. Adding this to his dialogue would tie in with the victim's way of life, and give the reader another layer to think about. Also, don't feel the need to explain the reason why the father crashed into the priest. That doesn't matter, really. What matters is that the man feels guilty for hitting him, and that we know it was an accident. Incoherent mumbling, crying, and the great posture you described for him gives just enough information.
Really, really good job. Like I said, these suggestions are pretty minor things. Keep it up, dude!