“Saw him again. Same coat, same hood, different street.”
He nodded and pointed back and two days later we were walking in the outlying parts of town. I gestured toward a pair of large trees, bare branches forking up fifty or sixty feet.
“Norway maple,” I said.
He said nothing. They meant nothing to him, trees, birds, baseball teams. He knew music, classical to serial, and the history of mathematics, and a hundred other things. I knew trees from summer camp, when I was twelve, and I was pretty sure the trees were maples. Norway was another matter. I could have said red maple or sugar maple but Norway sounded stronger, more informed.
We both played chess. We both believed in God.
Houses here loomed over the street and we saw a middle-aged woman get out of her car and take a baby stroller from the rear seat and unfold it. Then she took four grocery bags from the car, one at a time, and placed each in the stroller. We were talking and watching. We were talking about epidemics, pandemics and plagues, but we were watching the woman. She shut the car door and pulled the stroller backward over the hard-packed snow on the sidewalk and up the long flight of steps to her porch.
“What’s her name?”
“Isabel,” I said.
“Be serious. We’re serious people. What’s her name?”
“Okay, what’s her name?”
“Her name is Mary Frances. Listen to me,” he whispered. “Mar-y Fran-ces. Never just Mary.”
“Okay, maybe.”
“Where the hell do you get Isabel?”
He showed mock concern, placing a hand on my shoulder.
“I don’t know. Isabel’s her sister. They’re identical twins. Isabel’s the alcoholic twin. But you’re missing the central questions.”
“No, I’m not. Where’s the baby that goes with the stroller? Whose baby is it?” he said. “What’s the baby’s name?”
We started down the street that led out of town and heard aircraft from the military base. I turned and looked up and they were there and gone, three fighter jets wheeling to the east, and then I saw the hooded man a hundred yards away, coming over the crest of a steep street, headed in our direction.
I said, “Don’t look now.”
Todd turned and looked. I talked him into crossing the street to put some space between the man and us. We watched from a driveway, standing under a weathered backboard and rim fastened to the ridge beam above the garage door. A pickup went by and the man stopped briefly, then walked on.
“See the coat. No toggles,” I said.
“Because it’s an anorak.”
“It’s a parka — it was always a parka. Hard to tell from here but I think he shaved. Or someone shaved him. Whoever he lives with. A son or daughter, grandkids.”
He was directly across the street from us now, moving cautiously to avoid stretches of unshoveled snow.
“He’s not from here,” Todd said. “He’s from somewhere in Europe. They brought him over. He couldn’t take care of himself anymore. His wife died. They wanted to stay where they were, the two elderly people. But then she died.”
He was speaking distantly, Todd was, watching the man but talking through him, finding his shadow somewhere on the other side of the world. The man did not see us, I was sure of this. He reached the corner, one of his hands behind his back, the other making small conversational gestures, and then he turned onto the next street and was gone.
“Did you see his shoes?”
“They weren’t boots.”
“They were shoes that reach to the ankle.”
“High shoes.”
“Old World.”
“No gloves.”
“Jacket below the knees.”
“Possibly not his.”
“A hand-me-down or hand-me-up.”
“Think of the hat he’d be wearing if he was wearing a hat,” I said.
“He’s not wearing a hat.”
“But if he was wearing a hat, what kind of hat?”
“He’s wearing a hood.”
“But what kind of hat, if he was wearing a hat?”
“He’s wearing a hood,” Todd said.
We walked down to the corner now and started across the street. He spoke an instant before I did.
“There’s only one kind of hat he could conceivably wear. A hat with an earflap that reaches from one ear around the back of the head to the other ear. An old soiled cap. A peaked cap with a flap for the ears.”
I said nothing. I had nothing to say to this.
There was no sign of the man along the street he’d entered. For a couple of seconds an aura of mystery hovered over the scene. But his disappearance simply meant that he lived in one of the houses on the street. Did it matter which house? I didn’t think it mattered but Todd disagreed. He wanted a house that matched the man.
We walked slowly down the middle of the street, six feet apart, using rutted car tracks in the snow to make the going easier. He took off a glove and extended his hand, fingers spread and flexing.
“Feel the air. I say minus nine Celsius.”
“We’re not Celsius.”
“But he is, where he’s from, that’s Celsius.”
“Where is he from? There’s something not too totally white about him. He’s not Scandinavian.”
“Not Dutch or Irish.”
I wondered about Andalusian. Where was Andalusia exactly? I didn’t think I knew. Or an Uzbek, a Kazakh. But these seemed irresponsible.
“Middle Europe,” Todd said. “Eastern Europe.”
He pointed to a gray frame house, an ordinary two-story, with a shingled roof and no sign of the fallen grace that defined some of the houses elsewhere in town.
“Could be that one. His family allows him to take a walk now and then, provided he stays within a limited area.”
“The cold doesn’t bother him much.”
“He’s used to colder.”
“Plus, he has very little feeling in his extremities,” I said.
There was no Christmas wreath on the front door, no holiday lights. I didn’t see anything about the property that might suggest who lived there, from what background, speaking which language. We approached the point where the street ended in a patch of woods, and we turned and headed back.
We had class in half an hour and I wanted to speed up the pace. Todd was still looking at houses. I thought of the Baltic states and the Balkan states, briefly confused — which was which and which was where.
I spoke before he did.
“I see him as a figure who escaped the war in the 1990s. Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia. Or who didn’t leave until recently.”
“I don’t feel that here,” he said. “It’s not the right model.”
“Or he’s Greek, and his name is Spyros.”
“I wish you a painless death,” he said, not bothering to look my way.
“German names. Names with umlauts.”
This last had nothing but nuisance value. I knew that. I tried walking faster but he paused a moment, standing in his skewed way to look at the gray house.
“In a few hours, think of it, dinner’s over, the others are watching TV, he’s in his little room sitting on the edge of a narrow bed in his long johns, staring into space.”
I wondered if this was a space that Todd expected us to fill.
We waited through the long silences and then nodded when he coughed, in collegial approval. He’d coughed only twice so far today. There was a small puckered bandage at the edge of his jaw. He shaves, we thought. He cuts himself and says shit. He wads up a sheet of toilet paper and holds it to the cut. Then he leans into the mirror, seeing himself clearly for the first time in years.