He left the house one night telling Amarelle the rooms were stuffy with heated air;
he was going for a walk. She looked at him as if he were deranged. She reminded him
where they lived, what the news had said just that evening about gunfire blocks
away, with warring gangs, an innocent bystander cut down. To think of walking the
streets with no real purpose at that late hour!
She followed him with her eyes as he got ready to leave, hoping he'd have a change
of mind.
It wasn't all that late when he walked. The darkness that swiftly came over the city
as early as four in the afternoon gave Amarelle the irrational fear of unsafe streets.
There was nevertheless a strange excitement about neighborhood streets at night, never
mind the broken glass, the graffiti, the vandalized phone booths. Always the sense of
people refusing to be cowed behind closed doors and drawn blinds; people coming off
the bus, charging head down into the wind and personal troubles; teenagers hanging
out on stoops; kids chasing each other between parked cars.
Always the sense of people not satisfied with simply turning in for the night; making
what they will of their lives.
He found a street with a neat row of houses, a kind of aberration of respectable
dwellings in the neighborhood, with a concrete stoop and iron rails and doorways like the
entrance to Simone's place in Ottawa. At the end of the street he'd turn back and walk
down the other side of the road, looking up at the doorways.
He'd pass fellows lounging outside the Deli, their eyes darting with the edginess of
birds; they'd catch his nod and ask "Howyadoin'?" He imagined he was no longer strange-
looking to any of them. What sadness. Here were able-bodied men whose lives, still in
their prime, had gone off the tracks.
Sometimes they'd ask him for a quarter. He was always amazed at the request. What
could a quarter do to transform anyone's life?
At a street corner someone, tall and thin, wearing ridiculous dark glasses, would be
coughing and hacking in a frightening near-death way. Radix felt sure the man, if asked,
would insist he didn't need a doctor; a beer or a cigarette would do. And that round-
faced fellow with the woolen cap, bracing a wall or lamp post as if it gave off heat – he
had this fierce-looking dog on a leash, an overfed pitbull it looked like, ungainly on its
legs.
The sodium street lights gave the streets a desolate look. Never once did he feel
threatened, or fear he'd be mugged. He didn't have much in his pockets worth stopping
and mugging for.
When a lone hooded figure crossed the street behind him and a whiff of danger
reached his nostrils, he'd take a deep breath, strengthen his stride, walk on.
(from "Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel!" a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 