Tony and Dawn

Tony and Dawn

I asked her where they were staying and her face tightened. Already, today, she was on fire with something and now this! How was she gonna make the rent? She slurred. She needed to find some work, but that could be just like finding money. As likely as that. I got the feeling that she had been applying herself to the problem for days - for as long as Tony's been gone, and now she is more visibly fucked up than I've ever seen her, and I have seen her and Tony pushing the street for years.

You noticed them because she and Tony were a young couple, and you didn't get many teams out there besides. If you did, one half was usually canine, and that touched you too - to see a broken man with no means who has taken up with a dog, the same, and you rarely caught sight of a leash. In that world, apart from this one, there were fewer leashes, which would frighten most of us I think.

And so now Tony's so-called friends were coming out of the walls and coming over to offer her company. She seems a little flattered by the attention but she assures me that she is devoted to her old man. Also, she understands, that these friends of his are in it for a place to lay, and a belly to lay it down on. She was Tony's action, she tells me, flat out.

Besides, she said, this would give her a chance to straighten up a little - saying it as though she believed that what she needed was time, and with the lifers, with the devotees to the streets or junk or booze or cock it was always a little, the desire to straighten up just a little bit. It was the straight game, when they needed it, in doses just like everything else. And like that, she was the one to occasionally turn up work and undoubtedly it was her who held it together enough to get the ok on a place to let if that's what they did. And so with him gone she needed to play the straight game to maintain what she and Tony had when he left - when he was picked up for warrants and priors and controlled substances. Yeah - the cops were after him for a while, she said, they wanted him to roll over on someone - to say who was selling and who was pimping over at the Sunset Hotel. Tony told them he didn't know these people. And they told him that he better find out. And so the other night he went out for cigarette butts and never came back.

Butts. Not a carton, not a package, not even a few loosies, but butts. Never mind what the real story was. Butts. That was the story now. Tony took care of the providing. He did the gathering. I saw him almost every day soloing it through the neighborhoods with his shopping cart. His stride was erect and musical, unlike most of the guys out there pushing the streets. He was light on his feet. A man of straw and torn clothing - a towering, emaciated frame on soft-soled shoes padding along the sidewalks and gutterways with a steadiness that sounded like forever. And I saw him all over, from one side to the next, and it made me wonder what fell in between. I knew there were routes and provident alleys, places where one could breeze on through or spend hours getting lost in the lifting of lids or turning over of boxes. I reasoned that there must be time-tables too, and collection days to consider, and the occasional mother lode, like when Tony found our dog Stinky, who had strayed from our neighborhood gift shop. He called from one of the nearby liquor stores, wondering if I knew where it was. He had a strange voice that worked on you. It had that announcer quality. It made you want to believe everything he said. And so when he told me that he spent a couple of dollars on the payphone, and that he had been watching Stinky for hours, and even sharing his chicken with her, I wanted to hear more. He had a warm resonant baritone and I marveled that a guy could be so pie-eyed and so clear throated. Of course his mind was going the way of cheese but he had a voice like a glass of velvet.

Anyway, that night I left him on the steps to the liquor store with two of his friends and ten dollars in his pocket. I knew they would get it out of him sooner that not. Already they were singing his praises at what a good thing he'd done. Tonight they would all be swimming in it, I thought, as I pulled away giving Stink the 'Bad Dog' lecture.

So we had a history that went back a couple of years and before that even, I used to see the two of them working the triumvirate: donut shop, laundromat and liquor store- the same makeshift scene you see everywhere for the down and out. Mornings I used to watch her ablutions at the gas station spigot on my way to get donuts and think that she was pretty.

Now we have a few words for each other whenever they pass the shop. It's become part of her daily routine to come by and say hello to Stinky who sleeps in the shop window. Sometimes Tony is along and they browse the sale rack outside and I hear them talk about paydays which sound more like jackpots. Of course, Tony doesn't usually bother with the light and social. By the time I pop out to say hello he has turned his back and is surveying the street like it was the horizon, like he was looking for distant ships and weather. In the time of the sun he can not afford to be idle - he pushes that cart like his granddaddy might have steadied a mule driven plow back in the Nebraska or Oklahoma frost. He is devoted. This is his piece of the blasted rock. His cart. His four wheels. His lady. His local renown as a vagrant and one time musician. His face that has weathered like an old photograph, eyes that look out from two distinct caves in his head; hair that hangs in thin white strands over his pickled face. Tired. Frail. Gaunt. Rickety. He is a fourth in the fief and drum, a modern colonial. There is not an ounce of meat on his frame. He has withered to limb-bones and hands. A sun-cracked leather draped over the muffler man that welcomes you to independent car garages everywhere. This is Tony in a bent and leaning way, in a way that sometimes seems a miracle that he can even stand and yet there he is. And there they are, existing within the hard time that the street keeps - time that is not measured by such things as clean teeth and towels and hot water and vitamins and cable TV and vacations from it all. No, these days were about warrants and priors and controlled substances, about bottles and cans and cigarette butts.

And so when she said that he went out for butts and never came back it was as casual to her as if he had gone out for a loaf of white, only without the forebodings of the proverbial hat that he might have left behind on the hat rack back of the door. Casual like I said. There were no omens. They just needed more butts - and Tony went. She was his mother and buffer to this world, and he provided. She provided him and he provided her. And now this. She was devastated and she was going over their streets alone. She had slow-legged it into the shop with her frozen face - a face stulted by a world it did not grasp today and for the fourth or fifth day running, since Tony was gone. She had stopped by on remote control, on instinct, and when she didn't see the dog in the window like every other day her mind just kept pushing and she followed it into the store. When she came to, she was startled to find me sitting there behind the counter - someone that moved, someone that talked and that recognized her. She was on a bad jag, and I, the world, was upon her and calling her forth.

She began in that cold-lipped way to tell me about their place. She was worried about the rent. It was so hard to find a place that they liked, she said. I wondered if they really had a choice. But she talked about it that way - that they would probably stay there and I listened with my heart tuned to her quiet whisperings of a tree lined street and a row of Tudor bungalows that Tony liked. Their apartment was next door. There was a white dog that you couldn't miss. He sat out in front of the place always and if you ever saw him you would know she said.

She went on. There were some trees, and one in particular, a big one in the middle of the yard - a big palm tree and so that was nice too, she said. Or maybe it was an oak tree, she wondered out loud. I guess it's more like an oak tree, she said, changing her mind like you could do that, oak tree to palm tree, but she didn't seem bothered by it.

And then she started humming an old popular song. I should do something for nice for him when he comes home, she said. It's like that song you know?

Before I could ask for a few bars, she whispered the chorus:
...Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree...it's been three long years, do you still want me? If I don't see a yellow ribbon round that old oak tree...I'll stay on the bus, forget about us, and put the blame on me.

She stopped suddenly and just like that she switched faces, palm tree to oak tree and she was back, leaning over an earring display, so close that she was almost cross-eyed with them and saying again that she needed to get a job, that there were a lot of things in here that she wanted and so like that...

From palm tree to oak tree. She provided him and he provided her. And the music came in at a low whisper and filled my head like a big band.