I’ve never met someone with eyes like holes and I always try
my best not to judge people from the get-go, but I was left with no choice when
he lifted his arm in a wave to me.
I live in a
town where the most unusual people don’t stay very long; it’s a place where
generally people like to think and act a certain way and they don’t question
the fact that sometimes people feel empty just from being there, because life
goes on even without you.
So that’s
the reason I felt so unnerved by the fact that one day out of the blue a
strange man I had never seen before was walking down the road I turn off of to
get into my neighborhood. Aside from the walk-discouraging fact that there is no
sidewalk there, he was wearing jean shorts and a t-shirt tucked into them (I
couldn’t tell you what was on the shirt) and the kind of sneakers you can only
attribute either to people who are old enough to forget what fashion is or ever
was, or the ones who don’t appear to understand the fashion of the place around
them. I suppose they were comfortable for walking but I could be wrong. Anyway,
he waved and in my brief contemplation of whether I should pull over and ask
him if he needed a ride I forgot to wave back. His expression betrayed nothing,
and I turned into my neighborhood, forgetting him almost instantly.
The next
day I was on my way to work, and there he was again, this time walking in the
opposite direction. He waved to me again and I gave him a nod of
acknowledgement. I added a new judgment of him in my mind: he had the facial
expression of someone who was either creepy by nature, or foreign. It was a
personal thought, and I attributed it to the fact that I am a product of my
environment first, despite my grandest efforts at dispelling stereotypes as
explanations. In conveying my new hypothesis to my mom, I found her to agree wholly;
he was strange, and apparently only waved to certain people, picking them out
from a line of cars and resisting the urge to keep his arm raised for the full
duration. It’s a wonder he could do that, given the thoughts he must have known
he was already inspiring just by being there.
I’m a
lifeguard at a single-guard pool during the summer and what this means is that
I do not have coworkers, my shifts are eight hours long, and I alone am
responsible for every person who enters the facility while it is open. It’s a
small place, hardly bigger than a backyard pool, actually, and most days I spend
more time reading a book to the background of an empty pool than I do actually
watching people swim. My opinion of it varies from day to day. However, one
important note about the pool where I work is that it is owned by the apartment
complex known as Harford Village Apartments, meaning anyone who comes there
lives in a one- to two-bedroom apartment in one of three walking-distance
locations (one of them being the apartment complex right behind my
neighborhood). This is important because it distinguishes the type of people
who come to my pool; the majority of those who live in Harford County live in
comfortable family homes in freshly baked developments, and though I am not
technically part of the comfortable upper-middle class, I am not the member of
a family who is forced into a small, two-bedroom apartment with NO PETS
ALLOWED.
On days
when it is raining I usually find myself in my yellow raincoat smashed up
against the door of the guard room (a small room with spiders, the umbrellas
for the tables and one regular-sized fridge) counting the hours and reading
until I’m tired of it, which is saying something because I like reading the way
I like my favorite meal. It was one of these days that the gate was open to
enter the pool but no one was acknowledging it that the man-who-waved-to-me-on-the-street-by-my-house
strolled in wearing a worn-in pair of kelly green shorts and an old white towel
around his neck. He gestured to the pool and I maintained my shock accordingly,
nodding silently and scrambling to assemble my chair, lifeguard tube and safety
binder as if all along I hadn’t been reading with my feet up but in fact had
been watching the wet-getting-wetter leaves on the surface of the pool.
Hanging his
towel on the metal railing of the steps into the three-foot end, the man
stretched and then jumped in with a timid cannonball (the jump itself was
timid, he didn’t even say the word at all). Quickly he swam to the side and
then jumped out, grabbing his towel in one fluid motion and doing a modified
speed-walk to the exit. Without so much as a wave, he was gone.
Shocked but
not unnerved, I found myself returning to my book and wondering why he even
bothered bringing the towel at all, he was wet with the rain anyhow and I
figured he was walking home. I guess that was speculation but with a glimpse
out the front gate I saw I was right anyway. I took my post back at my chair,
carefully put my feet back up and forgot about it.
On my way
home that night I found that there was some sort of traffic hold-up at the road
right before my house. It was irritating because I wanted to get home to
dinner, but I tolerated the extra ten minutes and eventually was able to resume
my summer evening friendship with my television.
Riding to
work the next bright sunny afternoon and I happened upon a breaking news story:
a man presumed to be in his mid-50s and of Indian descent had been found dead
in the grassy knoll next to Moores Mill Road with his throat slit. He was
wearing a pair of kelly green board shorts and t-shirt with a Cleveland Cavaliers
logo. A bloody towel was found a few feet from him, sitting idly in the road.
“It could be a hate crime,” speculated one of the reporters. “but the fact
remains that the man had no identification, and we have not yet received word
of anyone missing him.”
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