The Vagrant at the Gate

by Wayne Brown

Woodbrook

(Originally published in 2000)

Bad news: the 626 abruptly decelerating, all power gone, in a stressed and disappointed silence. But then, good news: an acquaintance in a white Galante had been behind me all along and now obligingly stopped too. (“Pull the hood.”) His brief and hesitant self-insertion therein proved—as we’d both expected, though I still hoped—infertile. He left to go in search of his mechanic, “an electrics guy” from upper St. James.

I’d pulled over to the curb facing south on X, two or three car lengths above Y. (X: a north-south residential Woodbrook street. Y: one of the main roads crossing it.) It was not yet nine, but already there was only one viable pool of shade left on the pavement. It came from the dormer-window protrusion of an old forties Woodbrook house which had been expensively and hideously “modernized.” I retired into it to wait.

Almost at once, the vagrant materialized. I glanced at him irritably.

He was your standard vagrant: matted hair, too-bright eyes, red skin upon which the passionate sun had laid a light gloss of washed black, like an old j’ouvert greasing. Baggy trousers, still recognizably khaki, curling outward at the waist like the lip of a vase, from which rose the stem of his tucked-in torso, with its furious navel.

“Eh, uncle, uh beggin’ you,” etc.

The way he said it, it sounded rehearsed: not quite your true-blue vagrant’s heartfelt expression of illimitable desperation. And the light in his eyes was not quite ownerless, I saw: not quite the unsigned light of lunacy. But what to do. My pocketful of coins changed hands (“T’ank you, boss!”) and he was turning away when the oblong bulge in my shirt pocket caught his attention. He ducked and peered at it, making a vagrant’s urgent mime—two forked fingers tensely pumping from his lips—and I gave him the Benson and lit it for him, doing this with a look which told him we both knew he was pushing the envelope.

For a moment, inhaling, he was all concentration. Then: “Heh-heh-heh,” he said sheepishly into his chest, turning away.

He didn’t go very far. There was an electricity pole not far from the corner, a car length or so south of the 626, and he went and leaned on it in the immemorial posture of a whore: hand cupping elbow, cigarette at the ready, one bare sole cocked against the pole.

And, five years ago, I might have rounded on him (“Haul y’ass! What the fock more you want? G’won, move!”). But I discovered I didn’t have that part anymore—or at least, didn’t have it that morning—and so I lit one myself, and paced irritably back and forth in the little pen of shade by the 626’s boot, and presently fell to considering the house across the street, to which my attention had been drawn by the sound of a car engine being laboriously tumbled . . . and then wailingly revved . . . until, with a few last, precautionary, throat-clearing revs, the car itself was modestly induced to demit its driveway—or so I deduced, since both were out of sight on the far side of the house.

On my side there wasn’t much to see. Chain link between unpainted concrete pillars, backed by a tall, untidy hedge and bisected by a padlocked garden gate, BRC on steel pipe, from which a flagging flagstone path led almost at once to four or five concrete steps with, at their summit, an empty, small verandah and a door through whose half-height panes of glass the morning sun irradiated confusedly. The place had a neglected, impoverished look. The galvanized zinc roof was rusting badly.

From twenty feet away: “Watch dis,” the vagrant said. He might have been speaking to himself.

In the house behind me, the “modernized” house, a glass sliding door opened, then closed, and a big, paunchy, Portugee man in perhaps his late forties came down the steps and out onto the pavement. He was evidently dressed for work: white short-sleeved shirt (pulling tight at the waist) with an undervest showing; dark trousers. Big forearms, the hair on them long and black; the hair on his head, too, suspiciously black. He crossed behind the 626, close enough that a passing nod at its owner would have been natural. But he merely glanced angrily from the car to my face, and went on over. At the padlocked gate he looked up and down the street, then banged the metal saddle three times.

“Um bad!” the vagrant wailed softly (the Michael Jackson song). “Um ba-ad!” And he pinched the stub of the cigarette, inhaled mightily, and blew the smoke up, straight up, to the bright blue morning sky.

In the house across the street the glass-paned door opened, and a woman—a youngish, brown-skinned woman in a housecoat of fading flowers with her hair in curlers—emerged and came down the steps to the garden gate. She might have been in her mid-thirties, or she might have been younger, for her face had the graven, naked-sad look of one not long come from sleep, and her gaze when she glanced across the street (at me, then at the vagrant) was appraising rather than disapproving. She and the Portugee man stood at the gate talking.

How is it that one can unerringly tell from forty feet away when a man and woman are talking about “doing it”?

Maybe it’s just that they stand too close—even when separated by a BRC gate. Or maybe it’s the way they take turns glancing around, though not as if expecting to see anyone. Or the sense you get, though out of earshot, that they are talking softly yet urgently . . .

At any rate, the woman seemed of a mind to demur (perhaps, I thought, because of the presence of two witnesses across the street). But the Portugee man’s broad, white-shirted back gave off the uncompromising “planted” air of someone who was not about to move; and abruptly the woman broke away and went up the steps into the house and returned with a bunch of keys and opened the gate.

Locking it after him, she glanced a last time at the vagrant—and I saw that the vagrant had gone perfectly still. Then she turned and went up and in, closing the door behind her.

“Um baaad,” the vagrant crooned softly, as though to himself. “Um ba-ad!” Abruptly he sang it out, harsh and loud: “Um baad! Um baaaad!”—and I turned, then said angrily: “Hey!”

The vagrant had slipped his hand into his trousers-front, and—staring hard at the house—was vigorously agitating himself there.

“Hey, you!” I shouted enraged, and the vagrant swung away, interposing his shoulder between me and what he was doing, and went on doing it.

I said, “Jesus Christ!” and swung away myself, and started walking—and in this way found myself abreast of the driveway of the “modernized” house from which the Portugee man had come. There was a car parked in it, some way in, near where the back steps would be. It was a silver shining Mercedes 300 SL: PBA something or the other.

And, writing this now, I cannot explain it, but I looked at that car and knew—knew—that what was taking place in the house across the street, the house with the once-more-locked garden gate, was not at all what I’d assumed it to be—not a solitary man’s heat and hunger calling into some stifled night of marital loneliness (though I understood that the wailing, revving car, laboriously leaving from the far side of the house, had been the signal the Portugee man had been listening for); not a free negotiation between loins and heart, impassioned, urgent, yet free; not male want calling to female bewilderment—but the brute operation of money upon moneylessness (those broken flagstones, that neglected verandah, that badly rusting roof!), the adamantine imposition of power upon powerlessness and need.

Behind my back: “Um baad!” bellowed the vagrant suddenly. “Um ba-ad!” And I turned and saw that—hand out of sight, trousers-front shaking violently—he was glaring at the shut, glass-paned door of the shabby old forties Woodbrook house across the street—glaring at it as if he could kill it.

 

2.

It was minutes past nine, and though the street where the 626, without warning, had crossed over from life into death (and now lay by the curb, embalmed in silence) was a quiet, residential Woodbrook street, cars still came down it, one by one. I stared at each briefly but hungrily—for who wants to stand in the burning sun not fifty feet away from a violently masturbating vagrant?—but none was a white Galante that might be bearing my acquaintance and his “electrics guy.” So, gloomily, I watched each car come, decelerating as it passed, and then of necessity—just as it came abreast of the engrossed vagrant—braking for the major road ahead.

(“Um baaad!” bellowed the vagrant at sporadic intervals, glaring at the glass-paned door across the street, one hand working wildly in his trousers-front.)

Like that, there came down the road:

1) A dark blue Sonata driven by a young Syrian woman who, when she saw what she was pulling up next to, accelerated so desperately that she swung onto the major road barely ahead of a thundering garbage truck, which repaid her by shattering the quiet morning with a three-second blast of its horn.

2) A brown PAY Laser, piloted by a young creole tess who shook his head when he saw what he saw, bending over in such exaggerated disbelief or misapplied mirth that his forehead bumped his horn and made him jump.

3) A pastel Laurel, the padded cell of a well-dressed, middle-aged, red-skinned lady, who must have suffered terribly—or so the back of her head seemed to say—while she waited for a gap to open in the main road traffic, and who was full of hatred by the time it did, judging by the vengefully accelerating swerve with which she put behind her forever (except, perhaps, in her dreams) the lit and dreadful apparition suffusing her peripheral vision for a petrified Eternity.

None of these fazed the vagrant in the least.

(“Um baad!” bellowed the vagrant at the house with the two unseen occupants and the locked garden gate. “Um baaaad!!!”)

On the other hand, not even he could have ignored the battered pickup with three Indian guys wedged in front and a fourth with a power mower in the tray.

“Yuh crazy nigger!”

“Yuh nasty bitch!”

“Stay right dey, we bringin’ de police for yuh mod-ah cont!”

The vagrant’s hand stayed in his trousers but stopped moving. The guy in the tray jumped up and with an oath flung a cardboard box at him. (It missed.) Reflexively the vagrant picked it up, looked inside, then tossed it away into the gutter. With a chorus of obscenities the pickup turned onto the main road and was gone.

The vagrant looked dismayed. He glanced around him (including at me) disappointedly. And I was just judging it safe to return to my pool of shade, two car lengths or so from where he stood, when his gaze fell again on the glass-paned door, and I saw it strengthen there, and grip, and his hand slipped back into his trousers-front; and I said to myself with feeling, “Oh, fuck!” and for the nth time looked up the street in vain for the Galante.

(And if some amateur psychologist wishes to explain to me at this point that my reluctance to stand near the vagrant in that state was due to latent homosexual tendencies on my part, fine. I only know there’s a certain, irrefragable distance from a masturbating man within which I am not prepared to stand; and the only pool of shade on the pavement lay well within it.)

“Um bad,” the vagrant said pensively; and I saw that with him the trousers-front business was now meditative rather than frenetic.

Here a black PBB Corolla with dark-tinted windows came down the street, pulled up for the major road, and stopped. There was a lull in the main road traffic, but the Corolla didn’t move . . . a stream of cars passed by, then another lull . . . still the Corolla didn’t move. And I had just amazed myself with a surge of fury, which for a moment actually had me looking around for a stone to pelt at it, when the vagrant threw himself upon it, screaming, “Uh go kill you! Uh go kill you!” kicking and banging on the fender and boot, and the black car leapt away like a startled animal, out onto the main road, and was gone.

“Uh go kill him!” the vagrant screamed, and his eyes were terrible. “Uh go kill him!”

Our eyes met. I nodded, and the vagrant saw, and his wildness abated slightly.

“Uh go kill him!” he shouted at me a third time, as if making sure I’d heard him right.

And I said, quite loudly (returning to my patch of shade at last), “Yeah, kill him. Kill his ass!”

“Uh go kill his mo-dah’ss,” the vagrant said with desolate satisfaction. And he leaned on the telegraph pole and folded his arms and resumed watching the glass-paned door across the street, but without frenzy now.

And so we stood there, me and the interrupted vagrant, and watched the silent house across the street (in which, for some reason—though I claim a robust imagination and am no especial prude—I could only imagine what was taking place in there as occurring in the (foully named!) “missionary position,” with the brown-skinned young woman almost out of sight and struggling to breathe beneath a great pale threshing bulk.)

And, sure enough, presently the glass-paned door opened and the Portugee man came out, dressed for work just as before, with behind him the young woman, barefooted now and wearing only an old thigh-length white T-shirt, imprinted with some fading festive scene.

She was in the process of taking the last curler out of her hair. (And that, for some reason, depressed me even more. To think he hadn’t minded her keeping the curlers in!) She deposited it on the verandah sill and came down the steps and unlocked the garden gate and let him out.

“Uh-go-kill-his-mo-dah’ss,” the vagrant said.

But he said it experimentally, in the tone of one rehearsing a phone number; and I knew that nothing was going to happen.

The Portugee man never looked at him. As he had done earlier, he glanced from my car to me (but without anger, now) and went on down his driveway and got straight into the Mercedes and started it and backed out and drove off, stopping for the major road, then going on. And I marvelled at his doing all that as if nothing at all had just happened: as if he were just a normal guy, driving off to work on a normal weekday morning.

The young woman in the T-shirt had stayed at the garden gate: presumably, I thought sourly, to wave goodbye to her gruff ex-smotherer and philanthropic paramour. But now she lingered a moment longer, fingers lightly gripping the BRC at breast-height; and I saw that she was looking at the vagrant . . . looking at him with a sort of tutelary patience . . . and that the vagrant was looking back at her, with an expression I couldn’t quite name.

I glanced from one to the other—from bare feet to bare feet, from matted locks to ex-curlered, untidy curls—and realized, startled, that, across the width of that quiet Woodbrook street, dishevelment was considering dishevelment.

Then the woman locked the gate and went in, picking up the plastic thing from the sill in passing, closing the glass-paned door behind her. And the vagrant turned and walked away without a parting glance at me, walking now not with a vagrant’s swagger but as any man would walk, going unhurriedly about his business, on a normal weekday morning—and that, I suddenly understood, had been the expression on the vagrant’s face which I’d be unable to name.

From behind her garden gate, she had turned to him her unmade-up, naked-sad face: looking at him not as one man’s housewife, nor another man’s whore, but as a woman: just a woman. And from the pitiless glare of a shadeless pavement, he, the vagrant, had looked back at her, not with the bright eyes of his kind, nor with anything even remotely resembling a lecher’s leer, but levelly, steadily, as a man considers a woman who means something to him. As a man. Just a man.

They were sobering, somehow wondrous, realizations. And, left alone on that empty Woodbrook street with the occasional car coming down it, I stood there for a long time, in my shrinking pool of shade (until, as he’d promised, my Good Samaritan returned in the white Galante, with his “electrics guy”), musing over all that I had seen.