3.16.2026 - Pedestrian Scum [2]

5.
When he gets back to the co-op a few days later his vision is blurry and he's having trouble following conversations but he's just there to get his bike and that’s when someone tells him it got stolen. He knows it’s the Bentley twins, or one of them, and if he could he'd say it but no one can say if it’s one or the other so there’s no way to be sure. Then they tell him he doesn’t have a job anymore on account they find out he stole a daikon the day he was hit by the first car and he figures they’re right but he doesn’t know why he would do that, he doesn't even know how to cook one of those or what they taste like. He goes out into the parking lot and no one runs him over but down the street in front of McGough’s Feed Store someone does. It’s an old-timey truck, blue with rounded corners and a front grill like a sad face with rust creeping up from the undercarriage which he can see from down here, it’s corroded all the way through the exhaust which is why it was so loud and why he should have heard it. The driver gets out and he’s dressed just like you’d expect an old farmer to dress with suspenders and a plaid shirt and everything and is he chewing on a piece of hay is his last thought before he passes out.

 6.
One hundred steps a minute. However fast or slow he paced himself it was a hundred steps per minute. There was some principle at work, he reckoned, something Einstein figured out and wiped some crumbs out of his moustache with before going on to the big stuff, the special stuff and the general stuff. He could track his distance by the clock on the bank when it wasn't broken. Phones were for talkers, or folks who wanted to keep up with the news and send texts to their friends and those were responsibilities he didn’t have.

 7.
When he really got going he'd march from back to front through storefronts, through Deerings where the odd clerk greets all the male customers with announcements about her sex life as she hands you a coupon for a premixed tequila cooler. Claude down the street with his gallery where he paints whiskey bottles cranked on gin and he knows and you know he's playing on his first name but the surname isn't French or fancy at all and after a few disappointing minutes of conversation you learn he's not from Provence but Toledo as in Ohio. And it's Claude's last client also most days his only client Marcy who comes into town on pretense on Tuesdays and Wednesdays when he's open and she tries to find other reasons for the days he's available but it's hard on short notice and it's hard on no notice and she has to get back to the townhouse for some responsibility or other probably a child or a husband or an animal or two and her motion bell is dinging in the big cruiser she drives to feel safe and she backs over a pedestrian and the Sirius radio has her show on and she doesn't notice the double thump and she shifts the manual into drive and goes forward and double thumps again and she thinks she didn't buy a painting from Claude this time and she hopes he'll forgive her for that.

8. 
The waste treatment plant was pungent any time of year. The trucks with their long tubes and snake hoses were the only lights at night and you could hear the lake lap slower against the edges and congeal. This was where the homeless guys made camp when the shelter was closed. Where he talked to a guy on his bike last summer and he couldn’t even say watch out so threw his hands up which probably looked to him like he was telling him to take it easy on the shit he was on which also would have been good advice and the the guy had a lot to say about the government, man, and had both his hands up too, not on the handlebars, and not looking he crashed hard into the wooden railing over the bench where those guys often hung out and smoked and if one of them had a little radio listen to music and his bike flew over the edge and down into the reeds where the wastewater from the plant leaks and collects and mingles with the mud into a new breed of textured semi-organic material and his mouth was bleeding and he wanted to tell him to go the clinic but he couldn’t and then he was still going on about the government and truth is he got what he was saying and it wasn’t that he was wrong, he just was putting it out there in a way that looked wrong and sounded worse but at least he didn’t blame him and he was able to keep going over the footbridge where the teenagers jump down into the river like perfect models of a bygone era right under the sign that says no diving which has been up since a thirteen year old went in a few years back and they never found him but he doubted it was the river's fault.