Walking Home
Monday, April 26th, 2010
Helped by a momentarily dead wind, the train crossing sounded across the quiet parking lot and still highway. On a Sunday night, the town goes silent on its own, but this late in the spring, the high winds and the purple storm clouds settled in just as the day started to turn to night.
The sky was spitting buckshot sprinkles as though the rain was passing through a filter somewhere overhead and hitting my face in a million undetectable wet spots. I was walking back to my apartment along the shop fronts that connect to the grocery store, and all were closed or vacant. China Taste closed three hours before I was passing under its electric letters, but you could still smell the spicy beef and the chicken that had been singed to the tasted in their enormous woks. The last few times I’ve passed, a cook has sat forlornly at the block table closest to the kitchen with his food before him, but not eating, just staring out into the parking lot or maybe his reflection in the restaurant glass, wondering, “What am I doing all these miles away from my home, from my family, helping my aunts fry and mix all this in all the steam over the stoves all day, only to eat this same meal, Moo Goo Gai Pan, over and over, and not even at an elegant sushi place at all, but this little strip mall in a small Kansas town.” I think maybe he might think something like this as I look in at the empty tables, the dark lights overhead, the empty lettering on the door that explains why no one is here this hour on this day, but would be any other day.
The video rental store is closed and I laugh to myself as I imagine the movie posters and the boxes along the walls. I owed them late fees for a few movies and decided not to rent again because I didn’t want to pay that much for late charges. I never paid and because of customers like myself, partially maybe, they closed.
The liquor store is semi-lit, the front windows blocked by a few shelves and bottle shapes, the neon Retail Liquor sign, and a cardboard cut out maybe a NASCAR driver representation facing the cash register. The door is dark, though, and it’s hours are posted, too. Sundays in Kansas you can now buy beer. I remember when my uncle would drive across the state line late on Saturday nights which must have been Sunday mornings, to a store called the Red X, where he’d buy liquor and bring it back to my grandmas back bedroom that he had stashed with Penthouse and Hustler magazines, the worst porn you can imagine with ladies with bruised ankles and smoker’s hair, all dried out and naked, with make-up done for a few pics (these sincerely being some of the fondest memories of my childhood), soon after they’d hit the streets for another hit or line, and then they’d forget all about what they’d done. They wouldn’t mind what their parents would think. They’d be high in Hollywood, and a long, long way from a place where I walk, where someone would be more likely to confront them about god and make them feel the guilt of their ways.
The one place open other than the 24-hour grocery is a bar, Wally’s, and its front is protected by a broad awning and the door has been left open. The windows are appropriated with beer signs, and the light from inside is orange and faint. Here is when I hear the wind stop and am beginning to enjoy the quiet, cool night, when the train arms sound and start to lower, long, long before I can hear the train wheels rolling metallic and heavy and deadly past all the last life in this town on the weekend. I stop and watch the train move in, then its motion encourages me to move, and I do, down the high windows. Inside Wally’s, I can see three men, alone, at tall tables, a bartender far down the bar to give his customers some company, a couple at another high table, and a server waiting on one table. The bar is open, people are inside, and it is somehow the loneliest place among all the stores, the closed ones, and the last in the strip that I pass with this loneliness apparent in my mind, the Laundromat, and a woman slouched in a way that you wouldn’t believe her body could bend, at a table alone, studying. She’s intent, by herself, but not nearly as removed as the people inside the bar dousing their lives in one last weekend beer.
My grocery bag is my company, and the plastic rattles as I turn up the road to my apartment. I lose the building that was there blocking the wind. My arms get tighter, the muscles define just to carry this simple, lightweight bag. Rustling across an empty field between the stores and home, I hear the first bullfrogs from a collection in a small ravine lined with trees. The summer animals have all come to life on what will likely be the harshest night in the last month. The rain may not pick up, but the winds will, and the temperatures will drop, and all those animals that chose today not to be lonely, will go back into hiding for another week after making a poor decision to be born. I think there are some people behind me and maybe in my skin who can relate to that sentiment. Nobody is waiting for me at home, and when the door opens, it opens cleanly without a risk to anyone behind it. I made my venture into civilization for the night so I can prolong my absence in it a little longer in the morning, eating alone, dressing alone, and off into the work week, envious that a few men in this town were brave enough to kill their weekends at the last minute, late, at a forgotten bar more memorable than the townspeople.
