by Jeff McMahon
An old black Labrador patrols these streets the morning after Halloween. He's humpbacked with elbows askew and his grayed muzzle sniffs for fallen plunder. He finds popcorn on a lawn, a Starburst in the camphor leaves. He puzzles at the waxpaper wrapper, decides it can be eaten, moves on. He noses a toddler's lost shoe, tips with his snout an abandoned baseball cap, wonders long at a wig of synthetic black curls.
He moseys past and eyes me brownly.
I am alone on this porch on this dawn of the day of the dead and then I hear a voice just over the hill two blocks north. Beneath a canopy of branches I see sneakers making fast down Chorro Street, then white socks, then trousers hemmed above the ankles. Is it Richard Bermine?
No. Of course, it was not.
I had planned to write about Richard, but the column I planned was not this one. I wanted to record what many have saidóthat he is the hardest working man in SLO County. I wanted to ask Richard how long it takes to walk to San Simeon, where a friend saw him once, towing that wooden cart of recyclables. I wanted to find out what he writes at night in the margins of the New York Times in that certain corner of the Barnes & Noble he always occupied. I hoped he would allow a photograph because everyone would recognize the intelligent face, the wiry and ageless frame, the back bent from toil.
He rarely took the time to talk. He seemed surprised if I said hello, and he answered without meeting my eyes. He was busy and gruff. He spoke to himself and I discerned what I could from his words.
"It's the lawyers and the bankers," he repeated once while passing my house. "It's the lawyers and the bankers."
The rumbling cart and the gravelly wisdom kept us company in Old Town day and night like the chimes of a village clock. One night in August as I lay awake, those chimes rang out of tune.
"I wasn't doing anything," he said, agitated, in lingering argument with someone behind him in time. "I wasn't bothering anyone."
The red eyes of the clock said 11:14. The bookstore had just closed. Who lurked at the other end of those words? A few days later, Richard stopped to talk.
It was one of those dog days of early September that seem so unlikely now. Hot air simmered through tropical light and lingered across cricketed nights. I had built a fountain in the front yard to shatter the stillness. It was simpleóa whiskey barrel sawed in half, filled with water. I sunk a pump and ran a bamboo tube up the middle so the water would rise and trickle down. Richard paused and set down the arms of his cart.
"I was wondering how you did that," he said. "I didn't see a pump or a hose."
I explained the workings and showed him the submerged pump and the electrical cord stashed under bark and leaves. He talked about the irrigation systems in India, where they make water flow uphill without a pump. I asked had he been to India? No, he said. He read about it. He asked, was I a student? No, I'm a grownup. I write a column for New Times. Oh, New Times, he nodded. He lifted the arms of the cart. He had to get back to work.
"It's nice," he said of the fountain. "A nice cool feeling on a hot day."
No one knew better the heat of that day. Soon I would approach him about that column, I decided.
It happened two blocks from the spot where we talked. It was on that hill to the north that he had crested so many times. Someone found Richard crumpled and bathed in his own blood on Oct. 15óa Farmer's Market nightónot long after the bookstore had closed. Whoever hit him must have used something hard to crack his skull like that.
The news reports labeled Richard a homeless man. "SLO Homeless Man Gravely Beaten." I read that with surprise. He always walked with purpose, toward a destination. He wore clean clothes and brilliant white socks. I don't know the homeless to bleach their socks. The police and the newspapers don't know the location or the nature of his home. We shouldn't judge it.
I would have written it this way: "Downtown Businessman Gravely Beaten." He deserved that title more than some who claim it. He pulled a cart weighted with salvage like some cursed hero in a Greek myth. He pulled it from the dark hours before dawn until the dark hours beyond dusk. He worked so hard that the San Luis Garbage Company prosecuted him last year for threatening its monopoly. The court sentenced him with ironyóhard labor at ECOSLO's recycling yard, where they welcomed him as a brother.
Richard Bermine is as much a part of our streets as the pavement he plied. He is the ragged emperor of a loose association of people who wander Old Town night and day, people who know the cracks in the asphalt like the lines on their hands, people who trust these streets.
Now Chorro bleeds with the wrongness of one moment. The light seems yellowed like a lingering bruise. The people wrestle a vile uncertainty. The trees stand as sole and silent witnesses, bracing themselves against the chill. Maple leaves fall and flee but leave their shape in brown stains on the sidewalk.
Children walked that block on Halloween, tiny feet treading the space where real horror occurred a fold away in time.
I wonder if the coward with the cudgel was at Barnes & Noble that night. Did he follow Richard through the double glass doors at closing time? Did he shadow him past the ice cream shop, beneath the eyes of Puckóthe mute bronzeóand across Marsh Street? I see where he made his move, on the darkest stretch of the journey.
I was not there to hear it but I hear it anyway, the sick hollow sound.
I wonder who among us has crossed paths with the attacker. I wonder if we've seen his eyes. Where he is now? Our streets have lost Richard Bermine, and in his place walks malice.
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He pulled a cart weighted with salvage like some cursed hero in a Greek myth.
This column won the 1999 Golden Quill from the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors and a first place from the California Newspaper Publishers Association.
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