The Volunteer
6
G2 LIKED BEING SOUTH in the winter. It wasn’t like it was never cold. But what sent the locals running for sweaters and overcoats felt like a spring breeze to G2. He didn’t plan to stay in this particular town for long, but the train had run out of track when it reached the ocean, so he had to find the necessities of life and then find a way out of town. His path took him through the Historic District. G2 was tired and weak. He hadn’t had food since… He couldn’t remember exactly. His bottle and the loaf of bread had run out on the train. A big sign near the river said “No panhandling.” Bums seemed to be ignoring the sign as they approached people asking for a couple of bucks, sometimes even grabbing hold of a sleeve if a passerby ignored them. These were people that G2 didn’t want to be involved with. He turned south on Whitaker and saw a man give two dollars to a woman selling flowers. Half a block further, the man dropped the flower on the sidewalk. G2 picked up the flower and caught up with the man to return it to him. “Oh for Christ’s sake. Get lost. I already donated. Come any closer and I’ll call the cops.” The man continued on his way leaving G2 with the flower in his hand. It wasn’t a real flower. It was made of straw or reeds. G2 recalled that some of the homeless who camped over near Tybee Island cut the reeds and fashioned them into roses, then others sold them for a living. It was delicate—beautiful in its own way.
Of course, Gerald knew roses. His mother loved them. Gerald kept his paper route until he was a sophomore in high school and one of the things he did with his money was join the Rose of the Month Club so that he could plant roses for his mother. She was so sad after his father died. There were two bedraggled rose bushes in the back yard and in spite of their lack of care (and the number of times they’d kicked a football into them), his mother would sit at the kitchen table looking out into the back yard in the spring and stare at the blossoms. Gerald read up on the care of roses and joined the club, determined that he would make a rose garden that would match the White House. During the spring and summer, he received his monthly rose bush in the mail and read the instructions for care and planting. Then he dug a spot in the back yard and planted it. Come November, the instructions changed. The dormant plants received in the mail were to be hung in a cool dry place until the ground thawed in the spring and then planted. Gerald hung the five winter roses from hooks in the garage and hoped it didn’t get so cold that they plants died. Winter care for the roses that were planted had been difficult. Thanksgiving weekend, even though there was already snow on the ground, Gerald went out to the rose bed, pruned, and trenched his roses. This amounted to cutting them back impossibly far, then loosening the dirt around the roots and laying the rose plants over on their sides. Then he covered the plants with newspaper and straw to protect them during the winter. The job took him all day on Friday after Thanksgiving. He had even pruned and trenched the two straggly plants that had been there before he started his project. He had prepared his rose bed the previous spring by building a raised bed out of old 2x4s that he buried an inch deep and filled the inside with fill dirt from a home construction site that was being dug a block away from his house. In spite of warnings from the neighbors about the composition of the soil and the inadvisability of digging a basement, the contractor had dug out a full basement for the new home, so Gerald had carted away all the top soil he could in his wheelbarrow and filled a bed 12 feet long and six feet wide in the back yard. The basement of the new house was poured concrete and the framing was up when the first big thunderstorm hit that spring. After the storms, the builder had returned to find the basement cracked and flooded. Sage neighbors had wagged their heads and commented about too much clay for a basement, an underground river, and quicksand under the town. Gerald didn’t know how much of what the neighbors had said was true, but he did have dreams about the whole town being slowly sucked into the ground because of the quicksand underneath. The builder didn’t return that summer and the site stood derelict through the winter, framed studs standing like stark bones of a house that would never be built. The city eventually condemned the place and bulldozers came in to remove all sign of human habitation, which meant taking away all the building supplies and filling in the basement. Gerald couldn’t remember that a house had ever been built on that lot before he left for college.
In the spring, Gerald uncovered his roses as soon as the snow had melted off the straw. He stood them upright and gently packed the soil around their roots. He planted the five winter roses and then cancelled his membership in the Rose of the Month Club. There was no room for more than the 14 roses he now had in his garden. By Easter, all of the roses had leafed out and sent new shoots up to the welcoming sunlight and by June the buds had appeared on the bushes. Gerald watched his mother fix her coffee and sit at the kitchen table each morning looking out at the rose bushes and the riot of colors that they bloomed in. Gerald had not planned the garden by color, but rather by the month of the delivery. There were yellow roses next to pink next to white next to red. They bloomed all summer long and until Gerald left college and started wandering the country, he returned every Thanksgiving to prune and trench the roses and each spring break to set them upright again.
G2 wondered, as he looked at the Savannah rose in his hand if the roses were still there. Did anyone care for them? Were they all as straggly as those first two had been, or were they all dead by now? Sometimes when G2 smelled fresh coffee, he had a fleeting glimpse of his mother at the kitchen table flit through his mind. She had loved the roses.
A kind person at Sweet Charlotte’s saw G2 hanging around the back door, looking to see if there had been any slices of pizza thrown in the garbage. He was almost faint with hunger and his head complained of having had no wine. Sometimes the garbage behind a restaurant was not too bad. More and more, they were dumping things down garbage disposals at restaurants, though. He might have better luck at a grocery store, but couldn’t think where there was one just at the moment. A woman in an apron appeared at the back door shaking a cigarette out of a pack as she opened the door with her shoulder. She had spiky hair and tattoos that ran up her left arm. The inside of each wrist was tattooed with a Chinese character. Half a dozen earrings hung from each ear and there was a hoop stuck through her eyebrow and another through her nose. She looked tough, but Gerald thought she was strangely pretty. She looked up at him as she emerged from the kitchen. “Hey, you!” The voice wasn’t sharp, but G2 shied away nonetheless. He was used to being shooed away from places and found it best to just go. “Don’t go,” the woman said. “Come here. You hungry?” G2 nodded his head. “Wait.” She went back inside and came out a moment later with a paper plate and three slices of pizza. “Here. Sit down and eat. I like company when I come out to smoke.” G2 sat on the step at her feet and savored the pizza. It was cold—not refrigerator cold, but cold like it had been sitting out for a while. “You’re new around here, aren’t you?” G2 nodded, his mouth full of pizza. “If I have leftovers you’re welcome to them. People leave so much food on their plates it’s a shame to waste it. When they leave slices of pizza, I stack them up and hand ’em out if people need something to eat. Better than throwing it in the garbage. That one’s the specialty of the house. Enough calories in one slice to keep a normal man going for a week. Three meats and three cheeses and guaranteed to give you greasy farts all night long. Can’t believe guys bring their dates here and then think they’ll get lucky later on. I’m vegetarian myself. I eat pizza, but just with tomato sauce and vegetables on it. My own specialty. I’ll save a piece for you tomorrow night.” She finished her cigarette about the same time G2 finished the last slice of pizza. He turned to her and said “God bless.” “Don’t worry, She will,” the woman responded. “Now how about you help me out a little. I haven’t had time to get out front and clean things up. Take this broom out and sweep the walks in front of the restaurant nice and clean. Pick up the trash and put it in the can out there, don’t just sweep it into the street. Bring the broom back here when you’re done and I’ll give you a couple bucks.” G2 took the broom and dustpan and hurried to the front to sweep the walks. He was happy to repay the woman’s kindness.
G2 knew how to sweep. He learned from a pro. G2 called him Mr. Bags in his head, but had never heard his name spoken. He wore the baggiest pair of pants G2 had ever seen on a skinny man. Mr. Bags said they fit him just fine before he went on his diet. Mr. Bags showed up at the local coffee shop about 11:30 every day with his broom. The broom was worn down to little more than a stub, but it worked just fine on the cement sidewalk. He would politely and carefully begin at the crack in the sidewalk coinciding with where the coffee shop adjoined the upscale restaurant next door. Mr. Bags never swept in front of the restaurant. “They got people who do that,” Mr. Bags would say. “I don’t want to take anybody’s work away from them, even though they don’t do a very good job.” He pointed out the bits of trash in the gutter. Each night after closing, the restaurant sent one of their busboys outside with a hose that he hooked to the faucet and used a special wrench to turn on. He sprayed from the front of the restaurant out to the street, sweeping all the accumulated day worth of gum wrappers and mint papers and occasional pile of dog poop out into the street. There he left it, assuming that it would get washed down the gutters or a street sweeper would come by in the middle of the night and vacuum the crap up. Mr. Bags, however, was meticulous. He swept carefully, one section of sidewalk at a time from the building to the curb. But he didn’t sweep the detritus off the walk. He used a piece of cardboard, swept the trash onto it and deposited it in the receptacle outside the coffee shop. Then he moved to the next section of sidewalk and swept it. The piece of corrugated that Mr. Bags used as a dustpan was his sign. It read: “Not poor. Just can’t afford food. Thanks for helping.” It was a lot of words, G2 thought, but people often struggled to read the sign while Mr. Bags used it to catch a batch of dirt and paper. The other side of the sign read “Tips appreciated.” That way no matter what side of the sign people saw, they got the message. Those who read always seemed to have a dollar or two for Mr. Bags.
It wasn’t just sweeping. Mr. Bags had carefully instructed G2 on how to sweep properly, how to wait for a section to clear of customers before attempting to sweep it, and how to make sure his sign was always face up. Mr. Bags also acted as a sort of unofficial busboy. If he saw people finish at a sidewalk table and stand to leave, he politely asked them if he could take their paper cups and dishes for them. He would hold his sign in one hand like a waiter’s tray and put the trash on it. Customers often put a dollar or some change on the table which Mr. Bags picked up as he was cleaning. “It’s all about customer service,” Mr. Bags said. Some people said that Mr. Bags had once been a waiter in a fancy restaurant. Some even said it was the restaurant next door. Why he had become a street sweeper, though, no one knew and Mr. Bags didn’t say. He would disappear from about 2:00 until 5:00 when he would once again be at his appointed station. On nights when the theatre across the street had performances, he would often stay late, sweeping the sidewalk in front of the coffee shop even though it was closed. People leaving one of the restaurants nearby and hurrying to the theatre sometimes left him a little something on one of the tables. People with doggy bags from their restaurant seemed prone to realize that they couldn’t take the food into the theatre with them and left that.
One day, Mr. Bags didn’t show up at the coffee shop. There were questions asked and genuine concern on the part of both patrons and employees. Mr. Bags was found in the small orange tent he occupied in Tent City II. He’d died in his sleep. A local church held a memorial service and the coffee shop donated half their proceeds for the day to a homeless shelter. More than a hundred people came to Mr. Bags’ funeral. The newspaper published a story about him and as much of his history as they could find. The coffee shop hung Mr. Bags’ cardboard sign on the trashcan outside the shop and after about a year they replaced it with a real brass plaque next to the door. It said simply, “Thanks for helping.”
No one had taken up the job of sweeping the sidewalk after Mr. Bags died.
With the three dollars he’d gotten from Sweet Charlotte, G2 managed to get a bottle of wine and was settling down next to a park bench to enjoy a sip. It was full dark and most people had left the park. This bench was a bit out of the way and no street lights illuminated it. Rather than sit on the bench, G2 sat down beside it and leaned against the seat. He looked once again at the reed rose he held in his hand. It didn’t seem right to just throw it away. He took a mouthful of wine and let it sit on his tongue while he contemplated the matter. The wine was a little sour, but at $3.50 a bottle G2 wasn’t expecting Cabernet Sauvignon. G2 doubted that he ever got drunk on wine. It seemed he never had enough to be drunk, but as the wine warmed on his tongue a deep peace settled in over him. It was a clear night and he would sleep beneath the stars with a rose on his chest. Perhaps he would have no dreams.
It was into this peaceful state of bliss that the woman hurrying through the park with a slight limp on her left side tripped over G2. He nearly choked, swallowing the wine in his mouth. “Oh, I’m so sorry!” she said. “Are you all right?” Not from here, G2 thought. A Northerner like himself, come south to get warm. That gave him a sudden idea. He nodded his head and held out the rose to her. She pulled back instinctively from his outstretched hand, but then approached and took the flower. “That’s beautiful,” she said wistfully. “You must be an artist.” G2 didn’t want to take credit for the flower’s craftsmanship, but he still had a bit of wine in his mouth and didn’t want to say anything. She seemed to get the message and sat on the bench next to where he sat on the ground. She exuded confidence. G2 would have guessed she was much younger, but her appearance in the dim light suggested a woman, maybe as old as he was. He couldn’t remember right away how old that was. He had been 50 a while back, but he didn’t remember if that was last year or a few years ago. She searched in her purse for a moment and produced a ten dollar bill and handed it to him. Ten dollars! She didn’t immediately get up and rush away, though. G2 listened as she rambled on. “You get to be whoever you want to be and no one tells you to be someone else. I know life must be hard for you and I don’t mean to romanticize it, but I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be truly free of everyone’s expectations and just leave everything behind. But there is so much to give up; I know I couldn’t do it. There’s my friends, of course. It is so painful to lose a friend and sit through their funeral and say goodbye forever. How could I ever inflict that pain on them and just leave. And security. Having a home, a dog, a job. Those are the things that define me.” G2 noticed she didn’t say a husband. He bet she was just as alone as he was when it came down to it. He dared another sip from his bottle and offered it to her. “No, you enjoy it. I’m afraid I can’t. That’s what life is about—what I can’t do, not what I can do. If you don’t have anything, is it easier to give up what you have?” She was silent a moment and G2 sat looking expectantly at her. Then she rose and turned away.
“God bless,” G2 said softly. She hesitated a moment as if snared by his words, but she didn’t turn back. She hurried on her way.
Gerald was down to his last marble. He hadn’t had many to start with—a set of ten cat-eyes and a shooter that the kids called a boulder. Lots of the kids had marbles and they spent their time during recess trying to win them from each other. Gerald’s mother had taught him how to draw a circle in the sand and put the small marbles in the middle. Then he learned how to use his thumb to flick the shooter out of his fingers to hit the center marbles. He’d become rather good at knocking a marble out of the circle with the shooter. But the kids at school didn’t play that way. One kid tossed a marble out on the ground about eight feet away. The second would stand in the same place and throw his marble at the target. If he hit it, he won the marble. If he missed, the first shooter stood with a toe where his own marble had landed and try to hit the second kid’s target. This continued until someone hit a marble and won the match and the marble. Gerald wasn’t good at this game. It hadn’t taken long before he had lost all his cat-eye marbles and had only his boulder left. He hung on to the big marble, afraid to take a challenge or to make one. He watched everyone else play. That wasn’t as much fun as playing, even if he lost. Finally, Gerald put his boulder into play against a tough kid who had a big bag of marbles. Gerald tossed his marble out and held his breath as the other boy lined up to take his shot. If he lost, Gerald would no longer have any marbles. He was so anxious to have a bag of marbles rattling at his side again that his heart was beating too fast and his breath was coming in little gasps. The second marble was in the air, a long arcing flight that landed just short of Gerald’s marble, bounced and struck it solidly. Gerald watched his last marble being collected by the other boy. His gasping short breath must have sounded like sobs because the other boy said, “Gees, don’t cry. It’s just a marble.” But rather than give it back, the boy pocketed it, turned, and walked away.
Gerald was shocked, but relieved at the same time. The competition was over. He was out. He didn’t have any marbles, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. It’s not like the marbles were valuable. For a dollar he could buy another bag. He wasn’t even sure that he liked marbles. They just happened to be what everyone was doing. And now that he didn’t have any, he didn’t really care. He’d always liked swinging, but he didn’t have to own a swing. Even if he liked marbles, he didn’t have to own any. He didn’t have to put them away, or risk them, or lose them, or win them. In fact, a stone that he picked up was just about the same as a marble. Maybe it wasn’t as perfectly round, but you could play the same game and there wouldn’t be any tears wasted or gloating done based on winning or losing. Marbles were really kind of silly.
G2 hid behind a batch of railroad ties stacked up on the near side of the switch yard. He’d barely managed to snatch up his blanket and bag before he ran from the little camp. There were only a dozen men sleeping under the overpass tonight, but tonight of all times the police had decided to close down camps all over the city. Lights shone on the remaining men scrambling to clean up their tents. Police were shouting instructions to leave the cardboard boxes and get in the van. They’d be taken to a shelter and social workers would help them in the morning. The men filed onto the bus solemnly. Two policemen with a dog walked through the remains of the camp shining a flashlight into boxes and a lean-to made of brush, kicking the fire out, and shaking a blanket that had been left. Then a bulldozer moved forward and scraped all sign of human inhabitation off the ground and into a dump truck. The van pulled away and headed onto the ramp for the southbound freeway. Whatever shelter the men were headed for, it wasn’t inside the city limits, G2 guessed. The floodlights were dismantled, and packed away. The police got back in their cars. The bulldozer was loaded onto a flatbed truck and everyone drove away. The whole operation had taken less than an hour and they were off to clear another camp.
People assumed that if there were no places in town for the homeless to sleep, then they would no longer stay in town. But it didn’t work that way. Tomorrow the men would meet up with men and women from other camps. They would talk together in hushed tones. Some would say they were headed to San Francisco. Others would say they were staying. Someone would mention an abandoned warehouse they discovered big enough for a hundred. People would nod their heads.
The shelters would “process” them. Name? Last permanent residence? How long homeless? Skills? Need for medical attention? Education? Family? A few were good at this and would ask for assisted living. One or two would plead disabilities. Some would make sure the shelter lost track of them. Late that night, there would be three or four people prying open the door of an abandoned warehouse. The next night a dozen would have staked out places to sleep. In a week, there could be a hundred. The police would debate whether to move them out, but no one could locate the owner who would have to file a complaint. A councilman would suggest that the city should let them have the warehouse. Another would suggest it might get burned down.
But the homeless would still be in the city. The “problem” wouldn’t be solved. Days, weeks, or maybe months later, the whole scenario would be repeated, by which time the overpass would have a dozen men living in boxes under it.
G2 didn’t have a box. He didn’t have much in his bag, and aside from the fact that he had a bottle he wouldn’t have missed the bag that much. He could rewrite the license numbers in his little book by heart because he read them every night. The weather was warm enough not to really need a blanket. He didn’t have much, so he couldn’t lose much. He took the smallest sip from his bottle and slept with his back against the pile of railroad ties, a hundred yards from where the camp had been destroyed. He would be on the first train that moved in the morning.
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