“Do you need a ride?”, Japeth asked the older man. The older man didn’t stir. He sat motionless on the cracked concrete steps legs out in front of him and his hands softly on his knees as he squinted out past the parking lot, out past the rusted fence around the drainage basin, out the past the backs of houses and backyards of the suburban tract housing that seemed to sprawl itself in an oppressive crescent on the horizon.
The last hurrah of a cigarette stood sentry in the corner of the older man’s mouth. It’s smoke trickled up past the man’s eyes. This is why he’s squinting, Japeth thought. He thought he felt a cloud pass overhead, but when he looked up, the sky was clear.
“No ride”, the man said. The voice was steady, but a bit higher than Japeth had imagined in should be. It didn’t have any of that old-man raspiness he sort of expected it to have. The old man took the cigarette butt from his mouth and laid it on the step next to him. Smoke still seeped out from it.
“Well”, started Japeth, “do you need…?”, he trailed off, perturbed that it was so difficult for him to talk to this old man. Most people react, he thought. Most people use body language or vocal inflection as clues to how they’re feeling, or their thoughts on a matter. But this old man here, in the clean, pressed chinos and white v-neck t-shirt, was giving nothing away at all. He was impossible for Japeth to read. I think I’m pretty good at talking to people, Japeth tried to assure himself. The tail-end of his unfinished question wagged away into silence. The cigarette went out.
Behind him, Japeth heard the door continue to open and close. There was a small bouquet of jingling bells above it which was nudged into music whenever the door was opened. And every time the door opened, the smells of the bakery wafted outside, enveloping the front stoop in a cloud of sweetness.
“Will you be the one?”, the old man asked, w/o turning around. He wiped his hand across his chest, then his pants. He reached into a pocket, took out another cigarette, and placed it, unlit, in the corner of his mouth. His hands went back to rest on his knees as he continued to squint way way past the nameless purple smudge of a mountain range way way off in the distance.
“Well, sure. I have…--“, as Japeth gestured with his thumb, he turned his head around. The sun stung his eyes a thousand times as it reflected off a thousand different angles of glass and metal in the parking lot. Red and green blotches bloomed in his vision, then faded to yellows and grays. He looked from car to car. “…I have…”.
But his ride was gone.
He found himself walking away from the old man, then away from the bakery. Cars pulled in and pulled out around him as he staggered, dumbfounded, across the gravel lot out to the highway. Once there, he turned around to take in the parking lot and bakery as a whole, as if this new perspective might lend him a more concise and total view wherein he would finally notice his ride. But, no. It was gone.
He looked both ways down the road. To his left, a billboard stood towering over a cluster of scrub-brush and cacti. To his right, about a half-mile down, on the other side of this 2-lane interstate, was a gas station. Somewhere between him and the gas station, a wall of heat shimmered, making it seem unreal.
Japeth took one last look around the lot and one last glance at the old man and the smoky plume from a new cigarette, then set himself toward the gas station.
