Chapter 12 -- The Man in the Red Shirt

He had been waiting on the west side of the street all afternoon for Cleo to show up. The sun was
beating down on the back of his neck.
Seated on the stone bench, he played with alternating his fingers' shadows on the pavement.
Dropped his hands alongside his knees.
He was so bored he could pull his own head off and kick it off the Bridge.

He had stopped counting the pores in the bench long ago.
Run out of sidewalk to slide can lids or kick gravel down with the toe of his shoe.
Was no longer consoled by the sound of paper lanterns. No breezes now!

He had already made so many orbits standing 'round about the area, over so many hours, he
barely knew anymore what he had seen and in what order.


There was the tall man in the grey suit who had gotten out of the limo in front of the old
theatre. He had leaned in toward the driver briefly, stood a bit, then walked briskly into
the narrow door by the restaurant.
He had also seen him emerge again, his face strangely distorted by theatrical makeup,
lightly touching his chest pocket with two fingers of his right hand.

He had watched the man that tended that blind horse leave it to go up the same stairs
that the tall man had just left. Watched and heard the carriage, untended, pulled away
up the block and out of view.

Sat, stood, and sat again, long overly aware of the black police van parked across from him.
The one man sitting inside it, silhouetted with his head down as if asleep or
mourning the dead they had obviously come to remove.

He especially recalled the heavyset, bald man glowing in the sunlight like a mound of butter
deposited on the street by a dark green, squared-off vehicle...(one of those cheaper imports
from the continent). And wondered at his ridiculously worn spectacles.


Other than all of that, between his own multiple, restless rotations and 'fascinating',
minute fixations, he had surely only half-heard and half-seen at least fifty other things.
And as sure as the glaring red of his shirt, someone else will have spotted him as well and
let on to the police.

He gave up on it all, no longer caring to gear himself to trying to please them with some
recitation they hadn't even asked for yet.
He stalked into the brushy growth of the vacant lot, determined to divert himself, (and
perhaps cool off), by finally checking back of that billboard to see how it worked.

As he turned, he barely glimpsed the return of the horse drawn carriage around the
sunbright south corner of the theatre. And, turning away on his 'mission' did not care a whit
to prove to himself that he'd also half-heard the limo, as well, turning the corner slowly
behind it.