“You have a grandmother’s braid.”
She smiles and goes soft in the eyes. I can see that someone once told her she was beautiful and she believed him. She still had the look of a woman who thinks she is beautiful. From where I sit, she is. I am old and I see beauty in everyone.
“How do you know about that?”
I can’t hear everything he says but I hear his voice is the voice of a white man and I hear him say the word “belief” a couple times. “My belief” I think he says. He may have Indian blood, you can’t tell anymore just by looking but more likely he is just enamored of the mythology, more interesting than the worn capitalistic interpretations of Christianity. All that crap about Santa Claus. It must make more sense to believe in dead ancestors.
And I hear that there is something going on in the silences. I’m not so rude as to stare but I can tell she is tearing up, touched deeply. From the corner of my eye, pretending to watch for the street signs out the window, I see her pull the bit of braid, it looks like a rope really, from the inside of her jacket and hand it to the man who examines it, not sure yet of her intention.
“It is given” is what she says, “to you” is the implication. He thanks her. She looks at him with that soft romantic glance, the half smile, feeling beautiful. She does have a kind of exotic beauty not completely obscured by the worn out jeans and oversized plaid shirt, the filthy down parka, all picked up at the Salvation Army thrift shop if not the trash.
He asks her name and repeats the name. I hear him say what I could not hear her say: Yellow Wolf. Telling her name, her real name, is a gift as well. I don’t catch his name, perhaps she didn’t think to ask, perhaps she thought he’d offer it without being asked. Their conversation stops, rendered awkward by her generosity. Where do they go from here? Once again she has given too much.
A couple stops later I hear her say the words “help out” and his response is louder than before. He says clearly he would help her if he could, she is asking the wrong person, he is broke, has only a few cents. She says she understands. She is already regretting her gift. No connection was made, not really. He understands too, softens his vehemence, says he does have some bus tokens if that would help any. She says it would and I imagine the exchange made quickly as the bus lurches, stops and he gets off at what may or may not be his stop.
A very short wide woman bundled in a snow suit, cap and boots gets on and stands uncertainly in the aisle. She is not as short as a dwarf but has some dwarf-like features and her face, there is something about her face, Down’s syndrome they call it now. She looks toward Yellow Wolf but says nothing. She looks in the direction of an empty seat but does not take it. The man sitting next to the empty seat points it out to her, an inviting gesture, and she sits down. Then she is sitting directly across the aisle from Yellow Wolf in those seats near the front that face the center aisle instead of forward and Yellow Wolf sees her there and smiles a huge, happy smile of greeting.
“I haven’t seen you in a while. Where you bin hanging out?”
“Home. I bin staying off the streets.”
“Yeah you gotta stay off them streets.” And Yellow Wolf smiles even more largely as if remembering some insider joke.
“I bin sick. Just came out to get medicine.”
“You can’t be too sick,” says Yellow Wolf
“No, I can’t be too sick. I’m out.”
They talk some more, riding through their neighborhood and being sociable on the bus pretending it’s a carefree summer day instead of the middle of winter and flue season and they are going home to a cold empty studio apartment over a liquor store or Laundromat.
At her stop, Yellow Wolf gets up and so does the short woman and they hug before Yellow Wolf gets off the bus and Yellow Wolf says “I love you, Shortstuff” and Shortstuff sits down again.
She is still on the bus when I get off in my more residential neighborhood of houses and trees. I imagine her riding all the way to the end of the line in Aurora, a place where concrete barricades are set at one end or the other of alternate blocks to cut down on drive by shootings and single teen-age moms carry babies in and out of each other’s apartments dropping them off before going to work at fast food franchises or telemarketing centers. They try to take such good care of the little ones and vow their children will not do drugs or get into gangs and they grow old before they are thirty and the kids grow up and big and start having children of their own as soon as their bodies are able. They do drugs and they do get into gangs because the few blocks to another life is a very long journey that most of them won’t make. There was a boy who resisted, refused, would not go through the gang initiation and he was shot: to death. His mother who gave birth to him at the age of thirteen is devastated. I hear her talking to another mother on the bus. I hear the boy’s name and remember him, I once represented him in the Juvenile Court when he got into trouble and social services intervened and we were all very pleased with ourselves when the case was closed because the family successfully completed all their classes and therapy. That was before I got sick and stopped working. I grieved a long time, overhearing on the bus that this boy I’d known briefly a few years before was now dead, could not have been more than sixteen. His mother didn’t recognize me, or maybe she did, but what was there to say?
Friends tell me to sell my old house and move to a safer part of town. But I find myself feeling foreign among educated middle class people. I am educated and they think that I am middle class, but I am a fraud really. I feel more at home among the people I observe on the bus. And when I feel threatened by some person who falls into step with me along the street, someone who seems on the very edge of violence, I ask that person questions, get him to talk about himself, about feelings and memories and then we find ourselves among the people at the bus stop and I am safe again. I am a good listener and it has served me well in this life.
I remember faces too and when I next saw Yellow Wolf, even dressed as she was in a sundress and sandals and looking cleaner, younger, I remembered her instantly. I was glad that life was treating her better at least for that day. I smiled at her but she didn’t notice or recognize me and I must admit I did feel just a bit hurt.
I recognized Shortstuff too on another day even without her heavy layers of winter clothing. It was a late summer day and she wore shorts and a tee shirt and tennis shoes torn at the toe. Yellow Wolf was not on the bus but there was another older woman who was a regular on that bus. This woman always dressed in outlandish outfits, sometimes a fancy dress from another era, sometimes pouffy pants tucked into knee high boots and a wide sleeved shirt belted at the waist so her outfit looked like a pirate costume, and hats, she always wore hats. Her hair was dyed a garish red and while old, she looked like she had once been quite glamorous. She acted very kindly toward Shortstuff and the two sat together and discussed what was on the menu at the place on Colfax that fed the homeless and the hopelessly poor. I noticed a man watching them. I began watching him watching them. Then the woman in the pirate costume got off after inviting Shortstuff to join her but Shortstuff said she had an appointment to meet her landlady. She said she owed rent and had finally gotten the money to pay it. She said this loudly enough for anyone to hear and I wondered about the wisdom of that. The man watching the two women continued to stare at Shortstuff and when she got off, he suddenly got off the bus as well as if he had forgotten and then suddenly remembered where he was going. I am old, I don’t move fast enough or I would have gotten off the bus as well, found a reason to walk with her, there is safety in numbers after all. But by the time I realized what was happening it was too late, the bus driver had started up the street and told me he couldn’t stop, he would let me off at the next stop two blocks ahead. I looked back and saw the two people, Shortstuff and the young man talking in what seemed a friendly enough manner. I got off two blocks away after getting a transfer and started heading in their direction as quickly as I could walk but wondered what I would say to the two
of them, she didn’t know me, for all I knew maybe they were not complete strangers and he had been staring because he wasn’t sure if he remembered her or not or from where, that happens a lot. When they turned and walked away together I changed my mind, realized I have an over active imagination, probably from watching too much television. Retirement has not been such a good thing for me. Then I got sick with a cold and didn’t ride the bus anywhere for several days.
The first time I went out again the leaves had changed color and the world was so purely beautiful I decided to walk somewhere. I walked a few blocks to a coffee house on Colfax where I ordered one of those fancy drinks and savored it slowly while I read a weekly newspaper. There was a story about a developmentally disabled woman, a very popular person on the street who had been found murdered behind a dumpster. The article said she was much missed and wondered who could have done such a thing to such a well liked individual and why. It couldn’t have been to steal anything, she had nothing to steal. The article gave the victim’s first and last name and a nickname that was not Shortstuff but I couldn’t help wondering if it wasn’t the same woman, maybe Shortstuff was just what Yellow Wolf called her, maybe I had not heard it right that one time months earlier on the noisy bus. There was no picture. I worried that it was the same person and that I should have somehow caught up with her and that young man who got off the bus with her. But she might have thought I was just a crazy old lady. I’d never spoken to her before. I agonized over this throughout the fall, and started riding the bus more often hoping to see her get on one day and lay my fears to rest.
It didn’t happen. I did see Yellow Wolf one more time and smiled at her again and even tried to ask her about her little friend but she just looked at me like she thought I was some crazy old lady who needed to mind her own business. After that I stopped riding that bus. I take the #20 now when I want to go somewhere.
INCIDENT ON THE #15 BUS