ll •The Boy Who Smelled Bitterness
22 September, 2050
The train grumbled to a stop in the inky night. There was an
eerie silence around Harry as he got off. The night seemed to be pregnant with sinister possibilities.
Only a few passengers got out of the cars with him. A few more were waiting on the benches to catch the next leg of the route. Factory workers would have left in droves in the hours before. There was a feeling of unease, he just couldn't shake off.
He had been unable to peel the image of the girl's face away
from his eyes. The caramel skin, the wavy hair dancing about
her temples, and those dark green eyes had been encroaching
his thoughts again and again. But the strangeness of this hour as he stepped across the platform helped clear his mind.
Something caught his attention as he moved past the waiting
area. It was a vomit-colored jacket that jumped at him -he
would recognize that jacket anywhere in the world. The wearer of the jacket was a huddled figure slumped by the side wall of the long, stubby building hosting the ticket counters.
He approached and sat on his haunches in front of the
unconscious man. The man's legs were limp, splayed before
him. The open sides of the jacket revealed a threadbare shirt
with so many stains of eatables and more, that its true color
was lost. The head leaned into the wall at an uncomfortable
angle. An expression of agony was fixed on the ridged hard-
skinned face. It was a dead body.
The fingers of both hands had adopted different angles,
positions, and distances from each other in permanent repose.
They seenmed to reflect the pain of parting from this pointless
life that the man must have felt in stages, whatever the
sequential progression of a spirit leaving the body must be.
Frozen in time, already fossilized, ten snapshots of the past,
and sinister clues to institutional failures.
At last, Harry let a deep breath out and struggled to keep the
anger and shock from slipping through to the surface. He
wanted to hug this dead body, but that would be a deliberate
contamination of a possible crime scene. The man, of Puerto
Rican descent, was Jorge, Harry's sole family through the
lonely stretches of his childhood.
Harry stared at those fingers in horror.
At last, he exhaled slowly and steered himself clear of any
oncoming avalanche of loss and grief. He was over those,
determined never to mourn anyone ever again.
He turned his head around to view the scene. Passengers for
the next train had appeared, lazily walking to the front of the
building for tickets. A few vendors went about their business in wait for the next round of sales. Not a single head turned in the direction of the all too visible death on the side -a footnote to life no one had time to read.
The reek coming from Jorge's body was a potpourri of
conflicting scents. There was a splash of the cheapest beer this side of the state border. There was the brunt of stale cigarette smoke levitated from a nightly chain session, the way he knew Jorge. A slight but distinct, unpleasant smell of burnt rubber was thrown in for good measure.
There was one potent odor that seemed to crown them all, the
rose amid the perennials. It was pungent, but not very sharp.
He couldn't place it but he had a feeling it was a riddle with a
ludicrous, easy solution.
Somebody had stolen Jorge's shoes. Harry considered the
possibility of a fight over them. A charity worker had only
recently given them away. A good pair with no damage that
could bring in enough value for a junkie's next shot of
Tryptovam.
Examining whatever of the corpse's skin was visible, careful not
to touch anything, Harry found no signs of struggle or
altercation. But he did find prominent swelling surrounding the
ankles, while the fingers of the hands looked stubby.
He stood up and checked his watch. He still had time before he must be home.
The next instant, he was running.
He was breathless when he reached the open plot where the
Duvall Homeless Shelter had been constructed. It was more
crowded today than usual due to the threat of rain - a well-
populated jungle of metal-framed beds and egg-crate
mattresses. A permanent sweat hung in the air. Many faces
recognized him and send a hi his way but he was frantically
looking for someone else.
A shrill preteen squeak followed by a whoop broke his search.
Before he could turn around, a lanky boy of about twelve had
all but climbed onto his shoulders.
"Hold on, Woody! Where's Sheila?" Harry managed to ask,
pinning down the quicksilver limbs of the youth flailing in joy
and in that frantic attempt to climb.
"Merv, Merv! Where are de rols? I dun see no rols!"
"I dun bring no rols. Its my workday. Toldja before."
"Work? But yer no on work. Ye here for us."
"Wille pass my message to Sheila?"
"She right there feedin de baby."
With another burst of speed in the direction the youth had
pointed, dodging a crowd this time, Harry reached a bed
adorned with sundry items for babies and mothers. He almost
fell before the large-boned lady of about forty with a tender
face, quite hapless at the moment with a screaming baby
thrown over one shoulder. She didn't know she had been
widowed, her baby doll an orphan now.
"Do you even know where Jorge is, Sheila?" The note of
sympathy was absent in the haste of his irritation.
"What did he do? | haven't seen him for four days." Sheila
replied with greater irritation.
Well, you will never see him again. He almost blurted this out,
only to switch it with the only response that could be crueler:
the plain truth.
"I found him dead by the east corner of the junction office.!"
Not stopping to appreciate the widened pupils, gaping mouth,
and the loosening of the widow's arms that nearly dropped the
baby, he turned with merely a squeeze to her shoulder, and ran
all the way back to the junction. He was aware of the
ruthlessness of his action. But at a time when his own feelings
were like a live wire, he wouldn't dare introduce further
messiness between him and the widow than already existed.
Woody, the fast monkey-boy, followed him for several feet,
attempting to climb up on him again, all while trying to search
through the bigger boy's clothes for hidden treasure.
Harry made use of Woody's clinginess by dragging him along
for a few more feet and impress him with urgent instructions:
"Go tell Officer Sito find Jorge at junction pronto."
The youth easily repeated the telegraphic message, a skill that
his older friend had come to rely on.
As for Officer Sito, Jorge owed him a sum and had been
dallying with false promises of return. It was the quickest way
to bring an officer of the law onto the scene, though nothing
would become of it other than a routine sanitary cleanup of the spot sullied by another homeless junkie death.
The hateful job fate had thrown on Harry's shoulders was done
for now.
The notice mocked Harry as he stood before the door of his
room, back from the shelter. He tooka few steps to his left and
looked up at the roof. It looked the same.
The last tornado of the summer had caused severe damage to
the roofing of all four wings of the motel, but this corner was
the worst. The storeroom that flanked this side was unusable
now. A short stretch of the courtyard was littered with
crumbled bricks in a sizeable pile. He took care to keep clear of the rubble as he came back to his door and knocked.
That's how he had secured this room, the one next to the
storage, at half the rate.
The owner, Johnny Poppins, must have filed for bankruptcy at
last. That'd explain the notice. He had been playing dilly-dally
with the authorities for a few months. Luckily, the motel was
mostly inhabited by the trashiest population possible, all
homeless grifters and drifters, who had no better place to go,
rubble or no rubble. A saner population would have evacuated
the place long before, leaving the building to an early demise
and thus depriving him of a feasible shelter for young Brian.
"Hey, Harry! What? Things getting to you again? You look
ruffled." Brian's bright face and sparkling blue eyes greeted
him, well-supported by the peerless spirit of an eleven-year-
old.
"Yes, wise owl. You read me perfectly," he said stepping into the room, pushing Brian's wheelchair out of the way.
There was some damage to this room as well, to the front angle
of the kitchenette wall that he had hidden behind a pantry
shelf. To delay talking to Brian about Jorge, Harry squeezed his
torso behind the shelf and shone a flashlight. Nope. Exactly as
'safely damaged' - Poppin's words - as before.
After a small supper of Ramen noodles and a long discussion of Harry's history with Jorge, Brian at last went behind the curtain Harry had hung in the middle of the room to give the boy his own space. There was a double bed squeezed in there and Harry stood in waiting while Brian hoisted himself out of his wheelchair and onto the bed.
"How many times I gotta tell you I don't need supervision for
everything?" Brian asked, settling under the covers and pulling
The Murderous Adventures of Grodo and How He Was Caught
from under the pillow. Harry raised his brow, but Brian
quipped: "It's no use, I'm already on page 234."
With a shrug Harry pulled the curtains over to go back to the
table for work but was stopped by Brian's hand on his arm.
Harry peeked behind the curtain. Brian was looking at him with soulful eyes that twinkled with mist.
"Promise me, you're gonna be okay, Harry?" Brian's eyes
squinted with all the sincerity squeezed into that plea
Harry smiled. "The same as ever." His voice was a little hollow
but steady. He softly kissed Brian's mop of hair in goodbye.
"Good brother," he said from his heart.
Brian was not his real brother.
Instead, Harry had found this abandoned kid near an obscure
lake far out of town.
As he made himself a cup of coffee and sat down with it at a
study table studying a college textbook that he hoped to be
passing a course on one day, his lips gave into a sad smile. His heart filled with warmth and heaviness as he recalled Brian's doe eyes when the kid had gazed up at the face of Harry and his friends. They were huddled around him under the gazebo where he lay, discussing what to do with this little boy, their rare picnic planned for months forgotten at the moment.
That gaze had a stronghold in Harry's soul. It would have
haunted him for the rest of his life if he hadn't decided on a
whim to support the child. He knew their fates were
intertwined, the moment he met those eyes.
Some moments stand out like stars that burn the brightest in
their arc above the horizon, for better or worse.
Like, the time Jorge pulled an eleven year old boy out of his
hiding place and shared his bread roll with.
Like, at the junction today staring at five curved, frozen fingers.
And maybe, just maybe - only time would pass the final
judgment - like how he felt knocked out at the theater tonight,
playing against that strange girl.
