He raked his hair the way those who knew him would say was familiar, though no one had seen him around here in ages. He left all of a sudden way back when but now he was back though not for good, meaning both "not for good" as in "not permanently" and "not for good" as in "not for any good reason or for anything that would ultimately come to anything good for anyone."
Know what I mean?
If they were looking for him the walk alone would have been a dead giveaway. As it was some people he passed felt like a ripple in the air--like their mind registered him passing but it wasn't able to compute the math of it; not even to get up to a point where they would say "who was that guy" or "he looks familiar." They would only just find themselves looking out down the street, away from the stack of newspapers with the pile of coins, up from the sidewalk where the hose pooled leaves and dirt, dropping their wrist's watch to their side without actually getting the time. Later maybe they would remember a story about him and tell it, laughing and seemingly out of the blue, without making the connection to that morning and that he had walked by.
It's not that he's some kind of legend or anything. He was just here for a long time and then he wasn't and it was sudden, his leaving. And even the suddenness of it all was lost in the years, that line was blurred too, though it was the thing that made him most memorable had anyone bothered to really remember--that he left in the night, as they say. Now people just remembered that he was gone, and probably resented that he had gone because they probably wanted to go too. And even more resented him because they interpreted (wrongly) his leaving as actually having somewhere else to go and they believed in their hearts that they would leave too if they too had somewhere else to go. They were wrong about that also--it takes more than that to leave.
So he raked his hair and walked with that hitch like a little jump in his stride and he shrugged one shoulder every now and then adjusting his shirt on his frame. He talked briefly to someone who had never met him and so didn't know him and he asked about some man with a Chevy who lived on Cahill Street who was probably Mr. Sullivan but she never knew him with any car but it sounded like him because that was the only really old guy who'd ever lived up Cahill and but he's dead now anyways and his daughter, looked like, took his stuff that day away in the minivan you know those green ones, are they Chevy's maybe but yeah?
So she saw him and talked to him but she didn't know who he was so she didn't know to tell anyone and she didn't care anyway about the old stories. He walked up the block and he used his handkerchief, white as always, to dab his forehead and he stopped to watch a playground one-on-one for a second. Then he walked out behind the school a little more to where the dumpsters were and he stood there looking at them. More raking of the hair and this time with both hands his handkerchief shoved down into one of the back pockets of his denim shorts. He held his hands in his hair remembering. He felt self-conscious in this position since he was wearing a white tank-top t-shirt and with his arms up his was exposing his armpits which was a thing he had which was just...a thing. He stood, alone, remembering, allowing himself that, the memory and this time.
He stepped into the space where the dumpster fit into the wall, between it and the wall, and reached up stretching his body. Above the wall in a space he knew was there he found the rock he had come for. He pulled it out and down and looked at it for a moment. Then he stepped out and disappeared again.
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