Heat Waves

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

He left through the side door of the court building and started across the street mid-block, leaning with years, awkward but sturdy, the sun igniting his silver hair. His blue overalls were hitched up at the waist with a workman’s belt, a trick of the shrinking elderly.

I slowed down, not annoyed by his jaywalking, but certainly noting it. Then his pace got the better of me and I enjoyed the moment it allowed to watch the sun find its way through the wind and the trees to drop blind spots on my windshield. The city isn’t so terrible when there are trees, and I imagined the old man, pruning his own.

He would trim them with care, cutting only the weak, the unnecessary. Strong arms shaping strong arms. And tending a small urban garden, perhaps. Tomatoes, certainly, some peppers, maybe snap beans. He’d bring his grandchildren to the plot to teach them the miracle of planting and nurturing food from the earth. For them, only the crisp sweetness of beans fresh from the vine, the warm joy of afternoon tomatoes, blood red as God meant them to be.

The old man stumbled, hesitated for a moment and hopped a step or two. I pulled up, not too close, and waited for him to finish crossing, hoping for his parking place. He was not, after all, so old, maybe a middle-aged man, Latino perhaps. The thick, purple-black hair of his ancestors remained with him still, shielding him from eons of heat and rain. Its sheen must have reflected the sun’s rays. That’s what I had seen, not the halo of a silver-haired old man.

And what had seemed the stoop of age, was, more likely, the twisted result of bending over to pick the produce of another man’s vines. Bending and reaching, bending and reaching, but never tasting the fruit. Maybe he left a family in his homeland, as eager for the spare words he scribbled to them each month as for the currency he sent, while he risked his dignity to a hostile nation. Cowering in a canyon at night, among his compadres, they would seek flickering warmth from their shared misery, feed one another on the constant desire for something better.

In the center of the road, he stopped and looked toward me, so I waved him on. He raised his hands slightly, oddly, gesturing something, I wasn’t sure what. I smiled and nodded to reassure him he was safe, I would not hit him, and I waved him on again.

He turned back to his destination as an animated branch blocked the sun from my windshield, and I saw his workman’s belt become straps and steel, and the chain forcing his slight stoop, thick enough to keep a bull in tow, shackled his limbs to the impenetrable leather at his waist. Then the sun meandered through some shifting leaves and found the man’s hands, only to be frightened off by the muzzle of the flat-black gun he clasped.

He stumbled again, and the chain snaring his legs clanged against the ground before him. He squinted at me once more over his shoulder.

Looking around the sun’s rays, I caught his eyes, dark and frightened. He was eighteen at most, and sad, fearfully sad — a lost soul loved only by a mother fettered to her child’s failure. A mother hoping to save her boy who was hopeless. She would kneel every night and pray to the Madre de Dios for his salvation, for him to know some peace, for him to escape his anguish. Then she would sob, not trusting God to give her weak one this miracle.

Did his mother know, deep in her heart, his only escape would be found the next day in the angry aim of a policeman’s gun, in the speckled shade of a backyard garden, his crimson fluid seeping into the earth, feeding the tidy rows of tomatoes and snap beans?

The boy ran a hobbled race the final yards, his prison blues marked with the sweat of his effort. A passenger door swung open, an engine revved. He looked back toward me one last time, and I waved him on again.

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Photo by Vicky Sedgewick via a Creative Commons license.)