Fourth Row Watcher

Chapter 5: Next of Kin

The road came down off the ridge in one long curve, and at the bottom of it the town started, and so did the sidewalk.

Two and a half miles, downhill the whole way. He had done it in forty-one minutes by his watch, the last mile of it with the sun on the back of his neck and the tar soft at the edge of the shoulder.

Main Street at 1:22 in the afternoon in the middle of May was eighty-six degrees and half empty. The bank had its blinds down. The hardware store had a hand-lettered sign in the window about a sale that had ended. Three cars sat along the curb with nowhere to be.

Otis was under the third tree down from the corner, sitting cross-legged on the square of concrete the town had left in the sidewalk for the trunk. He had on two shirts, and Ellis had not seen either of them before. The outside one had three patches on it, all different: one cut from a canvas drop cloth with the weave showing, one denim, and one that had started out orange. The cup in front of him was enamel, white with a blue rim, and there were two chips out of it now instead of one, and it was not empty. A folded bill stood up out of it, one corner caught on the chipped rim.

The cane lay across his knees. His hand was wrapped around the top of it, and the top of it had been worn so smooth by that hand that the light lay flat on it, and Ellis stood there looking at it for a second before he crouched, because crouching was going to cost him something.

His lower back had been at him for a week, and it did not want him down on the concrete. He went onto his heels in stages, one hand out for balance, and then he was low enough, and he reached over the cup.

His fingers got as far as the two coins at the bottom.

The cane came down across the back of his hand, hard enough to be heard.

"Christ—" He got his hand back and shook it. "You had your eyes closed. I watched you."

"You breathe like a horse." Otis did not open his eyes. "A man can hear you coming from the corner."

"You hit me with the cane."

"You put your hand in my cup."

Ellis sat back on his heels and looked at the red line coming up across his knuckles. "How much of that is mine?"

Otis moved the cup in against his hip without looking, one hand over the top of it, the way you'd keep a dog off a plate. "None of it."

"There's sixty in there. Maybe seventy."

"Sixty-one." Otis's eyes came open. They were not old eyes at all, and they went over Ellis fast, and then they stopped being sharp again and he tipped his face back up into the leaves. "Sixty-one dollars, and it's mine. The rest of it's promised to the man who owns this corner. That's me."

"Sixty-one." Ellis nodded slowly. "Out of which I'd take—"

"Nothing."

"The overpass," Ellis said. "Last month. The Thursday it rained. I stood out there for four hours in a jacket that wasn't waterproof while you lay under the blanket, and I told everybody who slowed down that you were a veteran with a bad heart and the power was getting shut off on Friday. I said Friday. I had to say Friday to nine different people."

"And?"

"And we said half."

Otis worked his jaw like he was chewing something tough and getting nothing out of it.

"Half," Ellis said again.

"You ate it."

"I ate it."

"The diner. Wednesday." Otis raised one finger off the cane. "You had the meatloaf plate, and then you had the pie, and you know what that pie costs, because you asked her."

"That was nine dollars."

"You had two."

"One plate."

"You went back." Otis closed his eyes. "I heard about it from her."

Ellis opened his mouth and shut it. Behind them a car went by with its window down and something on the radio, and the sound of it moved off down the block toward the water.

"The Camry, then," Ellis said. "Behind the CVS. You went down by the front wheel like your hip was done and I did the whole thing, the medical, the deductible, the man in the Corolla crying in his own car about his insurance, and we said thirty-seventy."

"You got your thirty."

"I got nothing. You went inside and I sat on the curb and waited for you to come out with it."

"You got your thirty." Otis's eyes stayed shut. "And you ate it."

"You can't eat everything twice. That's not a thing."

A man walked past them both and looked down into the cup and kept walking, and Otis waited until the shoes were gone and then lifted two fingers, like a man blessing somebody from a distance.

"Get out of here," he said. "Go on."

"I'm not going anywhere. I walked forty-one minutes."

"Then walk back."

Ellis stayed where he was. Otis's hand came off the cup, and he dug in his coat, in some pocket that took him a while to find, and came out with a handful of change, and threw it. It went off Ellis's knee and scattered on the concrete.

"There. Take it. You're a walking loss, you know that? Take it and go."

Two of the coins kept going. One of them went down the sidewalk in a long low curve and stopped dead against the lip of the storm grate, and turned over, and lay flat.

Ellis went after it. He got down on the concrete and picked the coins up one at a time, out of the joint where the slabs met, from under the dry grass at the tree pit, and the last one out of the mouth of the grate with two fingers, and he blew the grit off each one before he put it in his pocket.

Two dollars and eighty cents. If he'd been quick there would have been a bill in that cup, and they both knew it.

He stood up and dusted his knee. The shadow of the tree had moved off the concrete square. Otis had his hand back on the cane, his eyes closed again, his face tipped up, no more to say to anybody.

"Thursday," Ellis said.

"Thursday."

"I'll bring the sign."

"Bring the good one," Otis said. "Not the one that says the thing about the doctor."

The market on the corner had its cooler just inside the door: one glass door, two shelves. The water on the top shelf had a picture of a mountain on it and cost four dollars. Ellis took it down and held it and read the back of it, then put it back and took two off the bottom row at two dollars each, and carried them to the register, where a girl of about nineteen rang them up and told him four dollars and thirty-two cents.

He paid. The clock over the register said ten past three. He put the change in his pocket and carried the bag out onto the corner with the coat over his arm, and the sun came off the window behind him and off the hoods of the parked cars.

Down had cost him forty-one minutes. Up was the slow direction: an hour, near enough. The car came up the drive at seven thirty-five on the nights it came straight from the city. To be through the gate and up at the house ahead of it, he had to be off this corner by six. He had two hours and fifty minutes.

He crossed the street.

The tree was still there. The square of concrete was there and the grass in it was there and the shadow was where the shadow had been.

Otis wasn't.

The bag hung from Ellis's hand. He stood in the middle of the block and turned his head once to the left and once to the right, and the block to the left was empty all the way down to the light, and the block to the right wasn't.

They were in the road, forty or fifty of them, standing out past the parked cars and the crosswalk in that way that means nobody is driving anywhere for a while.

Not again — he started to walk, and then he was running, the bag banging against his leg, and he cut around the back end of a parked truck and came up on the outside of the crowd, and it was all backs, backs and shoulders and one stroller and a man holding a dog's leash short.

Through the gap between a woman's arm and the shoulder of the man in front of her he saw it: the cane, on the asphalt, the handle worn pale by a hand.

He put his shoulder in and got through, past an elbow, over somebody's foot, and the front of the crowd was standing in the road with their phones up, and Ellis came out of the middle of them and stopped.

There was a car stopped crooked in the lane behind Otis, and its engine was running, and he looked at Otis instead.

Otis was on his side on the ground with one arm flung out and his mouth open, making a sound. There was blood at the corner of it, and it had already gone dark. His other shoe was off and lying a little way past him, upside down.

"Don't move him," somebody said.

"Is he hit? Is he—"

"Don't move him, don't move him."

The bag went out of Ellis's hand, and one bottle got away and rolled off the curb and into the gutter and kept going until it hit the grate.

Ellis went down on his knees, and then he was flat over Otis with one hand on his shoulder and his mouth near the old man's ear.

"Dad."

Otis's fingers found his wrist and squeezed, two quick pumps, and let go.

He lifted his head and turned it toward the crowd. There was sweat on his forehead and road dust down the side of his face, and there was a woman about six feet away with her phone in both hands and the light on behind it.

"Dad—" He turned his head so it would carry.

The third one came out louder than he meant it to.

"Dad."