4.20.2026 - Pedestrian Scum [5]

Oh hey there. Had to take a break to start a business and get a little older but here we are. Cheerios to that.

Back with more Pedestrian Scum. No idea if any of you are enjoying these; this will probably be the last one for a while but maybe not forever.

Otherwise, things are well enough in San Francisco even as other places flood and burn. The area around the Boardman River dam project in downtown Traverse City (see map above) where I used to walk every day and dodge all manner of vehicle is looking downright Biblical. Good thing we have those kayak rental shacks all over. Tie enough of them together and I reckon you could have yourself a makeshift Ark.

-JA

*

It was winter now and he didn’t know where he was going with this.

He could walk down to the river (two blocks, north by northeast), follow the trail behind the Crooked Tree Art Center that was once a library built by public works during the Depression and was now a gallery for landscape painters and photographers and meditations on driftwood and he passed through the short corridor provided by shrubs and trees and plants he assumed were all some variety of maple or invasive species then it opens up and the river is pretty far below and there will be a couple of guys fishing down there and maybe that improv troupe he avoids on Tuesdays and he goes by the big house on a low hill with the barn in back the guy uses for a midlife recording studio and from that angle behind the house you can really see how it was an estate back about a hundred twenty years ago when the first white folks settled here just close enough to the brack and noise and oil smells from the riverfront to have access to travel and luxuries and just far enough away that no one had any funny ideas that this was a place whose residents performed their own labor, but he didn’t need to go that way today so he cut in front of Reynolds Jagoff Funeral Home and Cremation Services.

The morticians had plowed berms over the sidewalk and it was impossible to pass on foot without stepping into the street. Even on a sleepy Saturday like this one it was dangerous with drag racers and wrong-way drivers skidding and sliding and gunning over the icy tire-shaped tracks.

Someone in a Toyotathon Tumbler had pushed the nose of the vehicle right into the ridge made by the plow, effectively obliterating the sidewalk. So he walked into the lot behind the angled parkers, checking each one for the red glow of brake lights. The white hearse was pulling out of the carriage barn, getting ready to receive the casket which he guessed would be carried down the front steps. Mourners were coming out. He slid between two stationary vehicles trying to reach a spot where he could climb over the piled snow. His ankle was already wet and cold but he didn't want to interrupt.

He was scrambling, trying not to slip, and he thought he looked like a guy trying to catch a moving train.

There'd been three big snowfalls already this week with rumors of a fourth and in that solid wall of silence everything was loud. He heard the noise of a car window rolling down, zzzt click. That morning he'd had to kick his way out of the van in case the sun never came out to loosen the edges of the doors. And his ankle was still sore and he remembered everything else he was annoyed about as he also wondered if there was a special word for a driver of a hearse as the man behind the wheel said "Can't be in the lot with a funeral going on," like he was there on purpose, like he wasn't boxed in by all these inconsiderate bastards using their grief as an excuse to complicate his route.

It all ran through him like a trigger script. The way the hearse driver talked, keeyant, that Michigan accent, all those long flat vowels, and the shorter the word the more syllables packed into it, and the way the man breathed like he was upset or generally out of shape, either way it didn't matter; all of it pissed him off.

He turned his head and the ear flap from his hat dangled in front of his mouth. He tried to blow it out of the way, but it hung there, like the tail of whatever animal the hat had been made from. He was muffled when he said, "Make some room for the living, man," and there was a pause where you could hear someone sniffle on the steps and he noticed how dark out it was already.

The hearse driver stared at him and he saw that maybe he hadn't heard him so he repeated himself, louder this time so everyone coming out of the funeral home could hear what he said, and he regretted it even as he yelled but he knew he was also in his rights.

A couple of embarrassed-looking men stood at the front, followed by the pallbearers and everyone in black or in some lazy approximation of a suit.

Now he was the spectacle. No one was thinking about the guy they were about to bury. Maybe he'd done them a favor. Helped them to forget their grief.

The hearse driver was having a worse day than he was. He didn't know but the guy might have been part of the family, a Reynolds, or a Jagoff, and maybe he’d been stuck with this job his whole life, dressing up dead folks and throwing them into the backs of cars since he was old enough to hold an embalming stick or whatever it was they used.

He still wasn’t quite out of the snowbank. He was afraid his boot would get stuck and stretch the whole scene out longer than it needed to be and then he heard the engine in the hearse. It was louder and more powerful than he expected.

He turned and through his hat flap saw the hearse coming right for him and it collided with the rear bumpers of both cars he was between and he thought, maybe they'll just take me inside when it's done.