“I know you!”
His raspy voice was a Bronx cheer from the bottom of a bed of gravel, and Smokey was louder than a lot of people would think he needed to be, even for the bus.
He did know me. Or at least, I knew him. We’d shared a ride a few months back. His small talk took frequent turns for the surreal, and he delivered streams of non sequiturs and utter nonsense with all the force and certainty of a man speaking plainly, with points to make. He’d made an impression
“You used to be a cook,” he insisted, regarding me warmly. “With Jerry and Ray. At the cooking school in Ohio.”
“Nope. I never was a cook in Ohio.”
“Must be a different person then,” he decided. Turning away, we were strangers again.
His head and face were overgrown by brown wiry curls patched with gray, and behind the sagebrush on his cheeks, he gnawed gently on a little wad of paper—the sheer wrapper from a drinking straw. The last remaining stub stuck to his bottom lip like a flattened cigarette butt.
Chewing quietly, he stared straight ahead, his eyebrows raised nonchalantly. Disheveled in a chocolate-colored nylon tracksuit, the canvas ball cap he’d parked high on his afro had tented there, bringing his head to a peak. In profile, he looked like an amiable yeti.
“You went to cooking school?” I asked him.
“That was years ago,” he said dismissively, then changed the subject. “I had a clothing store in Long Beach. On 103rd Street and Willow. It was ah, ah, it was called Interpretations. It was like, ah, the Men’s Wearhouse.”
“Oh yeah?”
“It was called Interpretations,” he repeated.
“It’s a good name.”
“I know.”
“Was it expensive?” I asked. “To run it?”
“Pepto Bizmo,” he said, brightening. “That’s what it was. Pepto Bizmo, gives you a hairy chest!” He leaned closer, exposing the bushy pelt under his collar with pride. “You got hair on your chest?”
I opened an extra button on my shirt and showed him.
“Ha!” He barked. “You got some, too! Pepto Bizmo!” He reached over and shook my hand in wooly comradeship.
“I just got out of the shower,” he continued. “I put the key under the mat. My mat, it’s, it’s a balloon. It’s a blow-up balloon. I have to keep it from floating away. Ha!”
He studied my face.
“Do you, do you make wristwatches?”
“Do I make wristwatches? No.”
“You, you don’t make wristwatches!” He laughed. “You make wall clocks! Ha! You make wall clocks!”
A sharp bang rang out a few rows ahead of us. One of the upper windows—smaller, horizontal slats of safety glass, about three feet long—had snapped loose intact from the bus wall, and was pointing at a jagged angle over the adjacent seats.
I recognized the girl in that row. She was tall for a Mexican girl, and slim. Not so curvy, but nice to look at, and she knew it. She caught the bus at my stop, where she never talked to anyone.
She couldn’t budge the disjointed window, and there were no open seats for her to move to. I got up and made my way down the aisle, clasping the handrails like monkey bars against the rocking of the bus.
“Here.”
Using both hands, I gripped the window by its aluminum trim. A firm shove put it back into alignment, and a second push set it back into its frame. The small pneumatic hinges on either side of the panel wheezed softly with the smooth closing of the window, and I fastened the clip at the top to lock it shut.
“There you go.”
I’d fixed it—at least temporarily—but she didn’t thank me. Maybe her lack of response stemmed from a sense of entitlement I thought I’d picked up on before. Or maybe it was my choice of company, and whatever assumptions she may have made about that.
I returned to the back of the bus and took my seat across from Smokey. I gave him a small smile. Of resignation, probably. He looked at me with a question in his expression.
“Did you…” He began, and I anticipated some comment on the encounter.
“…Did you ever see the Fish Man? That movie?” He mimed a breast stroke, his flattened palms parting imaginary waters in front of him.
“You mean The Creature?” I asked him.
“The Fish Creature?”
“No, The Creature from the Black Lagoon.”
“Izzat it? The Black Lagoon?”
“Yeah. They made three of them. Back in the ’50s.”
“Smart,” he said, nodding in appreciation of the idea. “Smart.”
 copyright, © 2008 Wyatt Doyle for information on Wyatt Doyle's collaboration with Stanley Jason Zappa, STOP REQUESTED, click here.
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