Ragged Company (46 page)

We look at each other. There’s more he wants to say but I can tell he’s chewing over what I just said. I look around the room and the others are all waiting for something to happen, something to give them a fucking clue about what to say next, how to move or what the hell is even going on here. It makes me sick all of a sudden. I have to get away. Go where things make sense.

“You figure out what to do,” I go to all of them. “You’re all so tight. You’re all so touchy-feely. You figure out the moves. I’m outta here.”

The old lady stands up as I move toward the door. I stop and look at her. She just nods. That’s it. Just nods at me as though she
knows what is going on inside me, and that pisses me off more than anything.

T
HERE DIDN’T SEEM
to be a lot to say after Digger stormed out. We sat there in the living room and I really believe everyone felt the absence of both of them, Dick’s weighing heavier perhaps, but Digger’s disturbing and heavy too. James, in his steadying capacity, made inquiries about our choices for the memorial service, and somehow we mumbled replies. It would be at the Salvation Army chapel in the downtown core. Dick liked it there. Sometimes it seemed like it was the only place he could ever really feel at peace with things other than being at the movies. Amelia and Margo would meet with the funeral director and choose a spot for Dick to rest. Me? I’d try to finish the man in the chair, and Granite would write the piece for the newspaper. Once we’d made those choices, we moved away to our separate places.

When I got to the store, I thought that maybe Digger would be there. He wasn’t. We’d arranged a small spotlight to light up my work and I gasped when I saw the piece. My Christ. It was him. It was Double Dick Dumont as I had seen him, not only on the veranda that day but many times on the street. I wondered why it had never affected me back then the way it did that afternoon on the veranda. There were so many times we huddled in alleys, in gazebos in parks, under bridges, behind buildings, or under expressway overpasses with the same desperation, the same need for comfort, and I never ever saw it until that day. Never saw him until that moment. We only see what we think we know. Digger said that. At first I thought he meant the world around us, but I knew in that moment, staring at the living wood that embodied Dick, that he meant the people we call friends. I thought I knew him as a rounder and that was all I saw all those years. But there was always more. Always. Tucumcary. I wondered what dreams lay unsatisfied in that small New Mexico
town. I wondered what hopes he’d carried through the years, hopes he’d wanted to unload against a desert sky. So much to see that I hadn’t. So much to know that I didn’t. So much to learn that I couldn’t. I picked up my blade and tried to put those feelings into the wood.

Amelia and Margo were sitting on the veranda when I got back to the house. It was late evening. I carried the piece wrapped in a blanket and they stared at it in my hands.

“It’s finished?” Margo asked.

“Yes. If it’s ever really going to be finished, anyway,” I said, and set the piece on the veranda and leaned against the railing to smoke.

“What will you do with it now?” she asked.

“Take it to the service. After that, I don’t know.”

“I think he’d want you to use it,” Amelia said.

“Use it how?”

“To get attention for your work. You’re really talented. He’d want you to use it to let people see what you can do.”

“Hm. Maybe. I haven’t thought that far ahead. I just wanted to get it done. What about the site? Did you find one?”

Amelia smiled. “Yes. It’s glorious. Just what he’d want, I think.”

“On a curve above a small stream. Under a big elm tree,” Margo said.

I grinned. “Yes. He’d like that. Remember where we used to go before they started kicking us out? That little park? You used to tell us stories under that big tree. Dick loved that. I think it was his favourite thing before we discovered the movies.”

“Yes. Digger loved it too,” Amelia said.

“Heard anything?”

“No. He wasn’t at his place, I take it?”

“No. He’s pretty upset. How’s Granite?”

“He’s okay,” Margo said. “He’s in Dick’s room right now writing his piece. It’s so good to see him doing that. He’s a pretty incredible writer.”

“I bet. Tough way to get back into it, though, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But a storyteller is a storyteller. Isn’t that right, Amelia?”

“Yes. Yes, it’s true. It’s an honour to carry stories and honour’s gotta breathe,” she said with a small grin.

“How are you?” I asked her.

“I’m fine. I’m a little lonely. Sad. Wistful, really.”

“Could you use a movie?”

She smiled. “Yes. I could certainly use a movie.”

“Good. Me too. Dick would like it if he knew we weren’t spending all our time being morose and sad.”

“You’re right. Let’s find something in his collection. Will you pick something for us, Margo?”

“Certainly. Granite won’t be disturbed. I’ll go see.”

We sat there in the cool air of the evening and looked at our street. It was hushed and quiet except for the bubble of distant voices that faded quickly into the dark. I sat beside her and she took my hand. We sat there together, me and Amelia, and looked at the neighbourhood we lived in.

“He loved it here too,” I said.

“As long as we were together he loved it anywhere,” she said.

“True enough. Do you think Digger will be back tonight?”

“No. I think Digger is busy sorting himself out. He’ll stay away to do that,” she said, and squeezed my hand.

“You’re sure about that?”

“Yes. I’m sure. I saw it in his eyes as he left.”

“Saw what?”

“Questions. Lots of questions he never took the time to consider before. He needs quiet time and space to get at himself.”

“Or get drunk.”

She laughed. “Or that.”

Margo returned with a movie in her hand. “Well, I think I found something we can all enjoy. Something wistful.”

“Wistful?” I asked. “What is it?”

“It’s called
How Green Was My Valley.
”

“How perfect,” Amelia said. “How perfect.”

I
T WAS PERFECT
. A perfect tale about longing and looking back. I’ll never forget it. The magic of the movies fell down around me one more time. I watched and I fell in love all over again. It was a story about changes. It was a story about how hard we cling to things sometimes, and how rubbery and slippery our grasp becomes once time has had its way. It was also a story about memory, and how we become eternal by being held in memory’s loving arms. Dick would like that. I remembered a poem I read in school where the poet says that the world’s first gold—its richness, its treasure—is green. The green of that valley shone in that man’s mind like spun gold, and Double Dick Dumont and the life we had shared glimmered in mine the same way. In all of time, there was none so beautiful.

“I liked that,” I said after it ended and the three of us sat in candlelight waiting for a sign to tell us where to move to next.

“I loved it,” Margo said. “I read the book when I was a girl, then saw the film in my twenties, and it touched me the same way both times.”

“Nice,” Timber said. “Touching. Wistful, like you said.”

We heard Granite moving down the stairs and turned to look as he entered the room. He carried a sheaf of paper. He nodded solemnly at us and made his way to the bar. As he poured, he looked at the street through the window.

“Any sign of Digger?”

“No,” I said. “Did you expect any?”

“Not really, I guess. I suppose I just wanted to know that he was back and safe.”

“You’re a good man,” I said. “Thanks for caring.”

He swallowed some of his drink and moved to the couch where I sat with Margo. “What did you watch?”

“
How Green Was My Valley,
” I said.

“Ah,” he said, “the classics. Nothing better.”

“Not right now, anyway,” I agreed.

“Is that your column?” Timber asked.

“Yes,” Granite replied. “I think it’s finished.”

“‘Think’?” Margo asked.

“Yes. Sometimes I never really know. I put the period at the end of what is conceivably the last sentence and I wait.”

“For what?” Timber asked.

“I don’t know. A bolt of lightning. Thunder, maybe. I don’t know. Something to tell me that all of that time spent pulling words and phrases and sentences from the cosmos was worth something. That it matters.”

“I know how that feels,” Timber said.

“Do you?” Granite asked. “Is it finished? Your carving?”

“Yes,” Timber said. “At least I think so.”

The two men grinned at each other and it felt good watching them connect in that way. “Maybe we should see it and then after, maybe we should hear the story too,” I said.

“What about Digger?” Timber asked.

We all fell silent. There was the whisper of a car passing outside. Everyone stared at the floor. Distance. I knew then how far people can travel from each other in the amount of time it takes to form a string of words, and how the echo of those words plays across the great stretches of our departures. Digger. We all missed him. We just didn’t know how to say it.

“I think it will be okay,” I said finally. “Digger’s never much for sentiment anyway. Too touchy-feely for him.”

“Okay,” Timber said. “I really want you all to see the piece.”

He set it in the middle of the room and began unfolding the blanket he’d wrapped around it. We watched like kids at Christmas. Granite switched on a table lamp and the room was lit in a hazy gold as Timber carefully unveiled it.

It was a statue. It went far beyond a carving or a sculpture. It was a statue. Three and a half feet high and ablaze in the hues of wood and a light stain. When I’d seen it in the shop it had looked complete to me, but now, in the golden light of the living room, I saw how much more had been coaxed from it and I marvelled. The lines had been smoothed and the face that previously had borne the look of rough weather and wind had been sanded to the
point where it was the face of an old, well-travelled man. A sad man. A man with secrets behind his eyes but a world of small joys at the corners of his mouth, which looked like it could spring into a boyish grin and erase all the suggested woe in a heartbeat. It was like Dick. Exactly like Dick. Only the hands spoke of hard living. Timber had tattered the blanket, made it rough about the edges, and there was a pilling texture to it that gave the effect of an old cloak, a gypsy cloak, a rambler’s wrap. His posture in the chair was like a thinking man instead of a crying one. Dick had been a thinker. He’d been a sponge trying desperately to soak up and hold the world, and the look that Timber had given him told the tale of a man looking back at the valley of his youth, the changes in landscape, the alterations of time, the shine of memory like spun gold.

“He’s magnificent,” I said.

“Yes,” Margo said quietly beside me. “He is. He was.”

“Amazing,” Granite said. “Simply amazing. It looks as though you loved him very much.”

“I did,” Timber said. “I do.”

“It looks as though you really saw him. You really saw him, really knew who he was and who he wanted to become.”

“I did. I do.”

We sat and looked at the statue for a long time, each of us lost in our recollections, each of us longing for the man in the chair who looked as though he could speak to us, and each of us hoping against hope that he would.

“I suppose the only thing left is to hear what I’ve written about him,” Granite said. “Although I don’t think I’ve done him as much honour as this work of art has.”

“There’s only one way to know there, chief,” Margo said.

“Let’s hear it, Granite,” I said. “Please.”

He unfolded the papers, cleared his throat, looked at the three of us and began.

I
BELIEVED
that I was a worldly man. I spent my life on pages like this, telling you how I see it. Telling you how this world is made, how it moves, how it works, how it shines at certain times and sits silently in the deep, spectral shadow of our choices at others. I have known this world: travelled it, explored it, studied it, written about and explained it. But only recently have I learned that I never really knew it at all.

Double Dick Dumont taught me that. His name is a street name, a nickname, an alias—a dodge, as his cronies like to say. Because Richard Richard Dumont, as his birth certificate identifies him, was a homeless person, one of those people we pass every day and never give a thought to beyond an exasperated epithet or the pitying doling out of dimes or quarters or dollars on the days we feel particularly generous. I likely walked by him a hundred times and never saw him.

But he was one of the greatest teachers I ever knew. Dick saw the world through the eyes of a child and never tired of wonder. He was illiterate. What he gleaned of this world he picked up by asking or by shrewd observation. Words confounded him. Principles, paradigms, systems, and ideas eluded him.

But he gave me the world.

We met in the movies during one of the deadliest cold snaps this city has endured. Homeless people died in that freeze. Many more were hospitalized, and Dick and his friends sought the shelter of a movie house. They weren’t cinephiles or even particularly attracted to the prospect of film. They were just cold and seeking shelter wherever shelter could be had.

I was horrified. Homeless people did not belong in the territories I inhabited. My world and theirs were separate, created by disparate gods and never meant to meet. That’s what my civilized, educated, liberal mind told me, and it was how I reacted.

But the minds of gods are tricky things, and we not only met but became friends. Good friends. When Dick and his pals won big on the lottery a couple of years ago, they called on me to help
them. That story has been told and there’s no need to retrace it. It’s the story of what came after that matters.

Double Dick Dumont was a rounder. In the language of the street, a rounder is the top of the heap, a survivor, a Ph.D. in living off the avails of the alley, the street corner, the missions, shelters, and hangouts of the ill-fortuned. Unlike us, rounders see the city from the concrete up. We moneyed folk only ever learn to see it from the heights of our privilege, our homes, our neighbourhoods, our guarded possessions—and because of that, we never really see it at all.