Read Ebook: The Little Man Who Wasn't Quite by Stuart William W Walker Illustrator

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Ebook has 156 lines and 10047 words, and 4 pages

This time Jones was there hunkered down against the wall when I wandered up. Coaster Joe squatted on one side of him. On the other side, no one. I looked; I looked close. There was no one there. Still, when I nodded around, I nodded at the empty space. Noticed that Bootnose Bailey was missing. A mild surprise. Bootnose and a bottle were nearly as much Yard fixtures as Gen. Scott in bronze and pigeons. I settled in. A little time and a jug went by. I still didn't see Stanley.

My curiosity finally insisted on a remark. "Jonesy, I--haven't seen Stanley tonight."

Jones smiled, not quite as easy and relaxed as usual. "Stanley isn't around tonight. He went someplace."

"Oh? Well, that's good." It seemed a safe statement. If Stanley had been in jail, Jones would have said so. Any other place was bound to be better. I was being unjustifiably nosy, but curiosity wouldn't let me drop it. "Where did he go?"

Jones shrugged. Then, seriously, "To tell the truth, Ed, I don't rightly know. Fact is, I been a mite worried about old Stanley lately."

No one else was paying any attention to us. "So? How's that?"

"Well--" He shrugged again and then made a decision. "You know, Ed, it's a sort of a odd thing about Stanley. If you have a little time...?"

"Time is what I have."

Jones sighed. "It might turn out to be a problem, I think. Bothers me some. It would be a kindness if you would let me talk to you about it."

I stood up. Jones, making a gesture that clearly set him apart, put a quarter on the flat collection stone as he got up to join me. We strolled off through the dusk in the park, quietly. Jones, even in a state of some unease, was a comfortable presence. Over on the Broad Street side of the Yard, we sat down on a bench.

"Don't rightly know how to begin," Jones said, scratching his head with a fielder's-mitt-sized hand, "but--Ed, I expect you noticed something funny about Stanley? Or maybe about me?"

"I noticed that sometimes I see Stanley and sometimes I don't. And that sometimes you act as though you see him when he positively is not there."

"Um, yes. Makes you kind of unusual too, Ed. Because with Stanley it is mostly like this--when he is around, I mean. There are people who see him; a few. But most people, they can't see Stanley at all. With you, seems like it changes. Uptown you can't see him; down here you can."

"What?"

"Now me, I see him most all the time. All the time when he's around, that is; when he hasn't gone off someplace, like tonight. But most people, what you might call really normal people--no offense, Ed--they can't ever see Stanley."

It sounded silly. But Jones said it with a calm conviction that carried weight. If I couldn't believe it exactly, I didn't disbelieve him either. You hear plenty of queer stories on skid row--dreams, nightmares, nonsense. There used to be one crummy, rummy old bum around called Gov'nor who used to claim he really had been a governor. He drank down some office duplicator fluid and died. Police routine checked. He was an ex-governor. Probabilities eliminate no remote possibilities; if you flip a coin long enough, someday it will stand on edge.

"How do you figure that?" I asked Jones.

"I don't want to sound like I think I am a brain," Jones said. "I only read some. But these men down here--you might say, couldn't you, that they are maybe men who don't have much of a hold on the world any more?"

"True."

"And the world holds them mighty lightly. They are nothing. Nobody pays them attention. They are outside of everything. They are pretty much outside the world, even. Now you, Ed--you are mostly a part of the normal world. But one time you were all the way on down here, right? So you--"

"I have a feeling for it? Something like that?"

"Something like that. And so down here you are like the others; you can see Stanley. Uptown, you couldn't see him."

"Sounds nuts. But how? Why?"

"That goes back, way back. Stanley and me, we were kids together. Stanley, his people were what down there they call 'trash.' Fourteen, fifteen kids. Who was whose pa, who would know? Or care? And Stanley, he was kind of the runt of the whole litter. Nobody paid him any mind. He never talked much 'cause nobody listened. Got to be a real dopey, dreamy, moody kid. Not ever sick, but sickly. He was more like nothing than any kid I ever did see.

"Me, I lived down the road a piece from Stanley. I don't know why, but he took to following me around. Mostly because everyone else ran him off, I expect. I don't guess I was real good to poor Stanley, but I let him tag along. You would hardly know he was there; no trouble. And he struck me so sort of lost and pitiful, you know? I never had the heart to chase him. After a while, it got to where he even took to trailing along after me to school.

"Now that was a funny thing; kind of got me to wondering. There was a white kid down in that part of the country, running along after a colored boy to a colored school. You would expect that to attract a good deal of attention, wouldn't you? Maybe stir up a big storm in the county. But nobody ever hardly seemed to notice Stanley at all. There wasn't anything ever said about it.

"Well, you know, Ed, any kid, even Stanley, he wants some attention, some affection from someone. Stanley, all he ever had was me and I never more than about put up with him when we were kids. And any kid likes to feel kind of important sometime. Be noticed. Be king of the hill at recess. Win a spelling bee. Whup somebody, or even be the kid that gets made to stay after school the most. He wants to feel like he is somebody. Only Stanley, he never could. Seemed like the more he wanted to push out into things, the more he would get shy and not able to, and he would pull away back inside even more. He never could talk much hardly, even to me. Got so I would scarcely know he was around myself."

"He lost touch with the world?" I put in. "Well, that happens. There are oddballs all over, you know."

"Oh, sure--sure there are, Ed," said Jones. "But Stanley wasn't like that, not exactly; or only. Seemed like it was as much the world lost touch with Stanley as it was the other way. He always did feel a resentment about it, too, and I believe it turned him pretty bitter way down someplace. 'Course he never did say much, but I could tell. I got the feeling."

"So? How did you come here?"

"Well, my mammy, she passed on and there wasn't anything to hold me back there around home, so I left. Stanley, he tagged right along after me. Like a shadow. You might say he was a sort of a shadow's shadow, huh? We bummed around. I worked here and there. Then I found out--we found out--that most people couldn't even see Stanley at all any more."

"He got so far out he was really gone?"

"Only it was kind of pitiful the way it made Stanley mad. Me, I got vagged a few times. Only Stanley, he could be right beside me and spit in the sheriff's face and they wouldn't touch him. They wouldn't even know he was there. When I was locked up, he could walk in and out to visit me. Nobody ever stopped him. Nobody saw him--except, we found out then, that some of the prisoners could see Stanley plain enough."

"Oh?" I said.

"Yes. And that's the way it has been. Seems like the only people who can see Stanley are people like, well, like the ones down here around the Yard. The ones who are--how would you say it?--in the world but not of it, huh? I read that somewhere. People who are far enough out can see Stanley; only he is farther out than any of them."

"Hm-m. Well, the world being what it is, maybe Stanley is lucky."

"Ed, you don't really mean that."

He was right, of course. This world positively was not built according to any specifications of mine, but still it is my world and I guess I am pretty fond of it at that. Couldn't ever have managed to leave skid row if I weren't.

"So," Jones said, "poor Stanley, he always has been mighty dependent on me; more, maybe, since we been moving around. Until just lately."

"Kind of a damn nuisance, huh?"

"It never bothered me too much. Of course it keeps me down around this part of every town we make and maybe this isn't the kind of life I would have picked for myself. But Stanley has made me feel sort of responsible. And some kind of responsibility is good for a man, wouldn't you say?"

I couldn't argue with it; not me. Anyway, it proved what I had felt from the start--Wino Jones wasn't a real or a natural skid-row type; he was forcing himself.

"Well, Ed, Stanley has been trailing me around all the years--only somehow I don't believe Stanley ever did really like me much. He followed me because he couldn't do anything else, but he never took to me. I guess maybe I couldn't ever quite look up to him the way he wanted. So I suppose he has always been looking for something else. Well, before we came here, we were stopping in a mission one evening and I looked around when I finished my soup and I couldn't see Stanley. It gave me a turn. But after a little while, there he was again. I asked him where he went. He couldn't or wouldn't ever tell me much, only that there was someplace he was trying to get to and friends he wanted to meet.

"'I can almost get there,' Stanley told me. 'There's the border and over there on the other side, they want me. I can feel they want me. They understand that I am important to them. They want me to come. If I could just find the way across to--'

"He never told me who it was wanted him, or where, or what for. But ever since then, every once in a while I would look around and Stanley would be gone. First part of this last week he was gone again--and when he came back, he was changed. He was kind of superior-acting. Not pleasant. Wherever he was trying to get, he had got there. 'Now,' he told me, 'I have friends who know I am somebody.' He was real set up over it. Tonight he went back again."

"Where?" I wanted to know.

Jones shook his head. "I told him, 'Stanley, we been together a long time. You got friends besides me, I'm glad. Only, you know, I kind of feel responsible. Maybe I ought to meet your friends, huh? Why don't you take me to meet them?'

"'No,' says Stanley. 'Oh, no.' He wouldn't hear of it. I got to stay here and wait for him, he tells me."

"Well, sure," I told Jones. "How could you go with a man into his dream?"

"Yeah--only Stanley did take old Mr. Bootnose Bailey with him."

"Uh-huh. Stanley said he was going to prove it to me. He said he would take somebody along with him to this place and then he would bring one of his friends back here to visit. He said that would show me, would show everybody. And you know, Ed, I don't believe I much liked the way poor Stanley looked when he said that. He looked kind of mean."

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