“Roy, here’s fifty cents. Run down to Selma’s Grocery and get a quart of milk.”
Roy, who was nine years old, took two quarters from his mother and put on his navy tanker jacket.
“It’s snowing, take a hat.”
He took his black Chicago White Sox cap and left the house. Roy walked half a block and then cut through the alley behind Ojibway Boulevard. Snow was already ankle deep, it felt soft under Roy’s gym shoes. A tramp was bent over a large rusty garbage can behind Buddy Logan’s house, digging through it and tossing junk onto the ground. Roy stopped a few feet away and watched. After about a minute the tramp picked up the can, turned it over and dumped out what was left in it. The tramp had long, scraggly gray and black hair and was wearing a brown-stained green GI jacket. It took Roy another thirty seconds to realize that the tramp was a woman. Her baggy black pants were ripped open at both knees.
“What’re you lookin’ for?” Roy asked.
The woman did not answer or look at him. She knelt down on her bare knees and sorted through the trash. Roy moved closer to the woman and looked at her face. Her right cheek had a gash in it that was crusted over with dried blood. Despite her gray hair she had a fairly young face. Roy thought she might be about the same age as his mother, who was thirty-two. The woman put a couple of things Roy could not identify into her coat pockets and stood up. She was not very much taller than Roy. She turned and stared at him with her mouth half open, enough for him to see that most of her front teeth were missing. He was surprised to see how bright her blue eyes were. Roy dug into his right front pants pocket and took out one of the quarters his mother had given him. He held it out toward the woman.
“This is almost all I’ve got,” he said.
She reached out the filthy fingers of her right hand and daintily accepted it. The silver coin shone like a moon on the tips of her thumb, index and middle fingers. She deposited the quarter in one of her pockets and slowly began walking away from Roy down the alley. Suddenly he ran after her and put his White Sox cap on her head. She did not turn to look at him. The snow was falling harder.
At Selma’s Roy took a quart-sized bottle of milk from the refrigerator, brought it to the counter and handed the other quarter to Selma.
“Can I bring you twenty-five cents later?” Roy asked her. “I gave one of the quarters my mother gave me to a bum in the alley.”
“Sure, Roy. I know you’re good for it.”
“The bum was a woman.”
“Yes, dear. Tell your mother hello.”
Roy walked back through the alley. The trash the woman had dumped out of the Logans’ garbage can was almost completely concealed under the snow. Roy thought that she had to be pretty strong to have lifted up the can the way she did.
When he got home, his mother saw that his hair was wet.
“Didn’t you wear a hat?” she said.
“A big kid I never saw before stole it from me and he robbed me, too. We owe Selma a quarter.”