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Tinkerbell

Dennis Vickers

    Lois always sat with Alice Wingard when she took the bus to work. Alice lived three houses up on Carlyle. They never talked much, only a word here and there, mainly noticing other passengers. “His face looks like my hoohah,” Alice said one Friday morning referring to a triangular-faced man three seats up, “only scruffier.” The man stroked his wispy salt-n-pepper beard and read his newspaper. “Market seeks new bottom,” the headline read.
    Lois considered how to respond without launching a hoohah conversation. “It’s like Tinkerbell,” she said. The wind blew dry snow against the bus window. Lois wore her long navy coat, wool and double breasted. Alice wore her slate colored, Michelin-man coat.
    “His beard?”
    “The market.”
    They rode in silence while Alice considered this. “Because it brings luck?” she asked after a long pause.
    “It dies when people stop believing.”
    Alice looked skeptical. “That fairy in the movie...”
    “Peter Pan. When everyone believes and claps their hands the stock market goes up; when they stop, it dies.”
    “Lucky me, I don’t have any money. The market can rot in its grave so far as I’m concerned.”
    The brakes squealed as the bus lumbered to a stop on Hamilton Square. Lois adjusted her coat collar around her throat, pulled her hat down over her ears, stood up. Alice was already pushing into the column of riders moving to the back door.
    The wind was quieter on the square and the snow had been pushed off the sidewalk into a pile at the corner. The two women headed up the street without speaking, their breath escaping in thin clouds that disappeared almost as soon as they formed. Half a block from the bus stop they fell in behind a man moving slowly up the middle of the walk. His coat was frayed and oily at the elbows. His pants were ballooned with newspaper shoved underneath. As they split to pass him on both sides, he let out a low moan and fell to the ground, rolled onto his back and lay looking up with small, pale blue, glassy eyes, unblinking.
    “God damn it,” Alice said turning.
    Lois knelt over the man and looked into his ashen face. “Call an ambulance,” she said. “He looks bad.”
    “Battery’s dead,” Alice said. “Can’t remember to plug it in.”
    Lois took off her gloves and found her phone in her purse. She punched 9-1-1.
    “Emergency dispatch,” the phone answered.
    “I’m not calling for me,” Lois said. “There’s a man on the sidewalk, on the Monroe street side of Hamilton Square.”
    “You’re with him?”
    “He’s homeless, I think.”
    “An accident?”
    “He just fell over.”
    “He’s breathing?”
    Alice looked around uneasily. People milled by the obstruction; a few stopped to watch. Lois looked carefully at the man’s nostrils. His head lay awkwardly on the sidewalk, right ear down. Seeing it made her own ear cold. She unwound her scarf, folded it into a small pillow, slipped it under the man’s head, turning his face up as she did.
    “Don’t think so; Better hurry.”
    “Poor bastard,” a man who had stopped next to Alice said. “I see him here every day. He’s got nothing.”
    “Our units are all on assignment,” the phone said. “Accidents all over town. Do you have a way to get him to the emergency room?”
    “Me?”
    “Is there anyone?”
    Lois looked up at each face in the small crowd that had gathered. Shrugs, raised eyebrows, turn away. “No one,” she said into the phone.
    “He’ll freeze to death there,” the man next to Alice said.
    “If he isn’t dead already.” Alice knelt beside Lois and nudged her with an elbow.
    “Try to keep him warm,” the phone suggested. “We’ll send someone soon as we can.”
    Lois put her phone away. “We need to move him someplace warm,” she said.
    “He’s a goner,” Alice said. “Look, he peed his pants.”
    Steam rose from the prone man’s thighs. A yellow puddle formed on the sidewalk between his legs.
    “That car in the unloading zone is unlocked,” the man next to Alice suggested. “Just parked, too; probably warm inside. We could put him there.”
    Alice nudged Lois again. “Not our problem,” she suggested.
    Lois considered the parked car. “We can’t leave him on the sidewalk,” she said.
    Lois, Alice, and the man who suggested the parked car dragged the homeless man to the car, opened the door, pushed him into the passenger seat. His head lolled onto his shoulder. Lois adjusted his arms and put his hands together in his lap. The car’s horn began to honk in a heartbeat pulse. “That’ll keep him warm enough ‘til the ambulance gets here,” Lois said. She slammed the door shut. The horn kept honking.
    “He’s a goner anyway,” Alice said. “Let’s get out of here.”
    “Smells like he’d been drinking pickle juice,” the man who’d suggested the car said as they hurried up the sidewalk.
    A block away the honking horn faded into the background city noise. Lois and Alice slowed their pace. Alice began to giggle.
    “What?” Lois looked at her scarf. She’d held it in her hand since retrieving it from under the homeless man’s head, now folded it into a tight square, slipped it into her coat pocket.
    “Bet he won’t leave his car unlocked after this. Dead man soaked in pickle-juice pee! Surprise!”
    “We don’t know he was dead.”
    They stopped at the entrance to the phone company where Lois worked.
    “I didn’t hear anybody clapping.”
    Lois pulled the door open and went inside. Alice pulled her collar up and continued up the street.



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