Chilled Wine

Last night my dog came home with a man. I was on the front patio where Danny and I used to gather in the summer, fall and spring to drink chilled wine and hail our neighbors. Each person up and down the road with enough patio space to hold four, five or six people, some sitting and some standing, would be a summer evening stop on the weekend journey. The Pendelton’s with their clear beer (better to bring your own drink there), the Blaver’s with their Californian Sauvignon Blanc, the Muller’s with the bar on wheels, us with the rose chilled just right. We talked about the comings and goings of the neighborhood, our own variation of a community meeting. 

Last night, though, I was standing alone, with a watering can in my hand, not a sweating wine glass, watching a wasp drown. I was in the middle of wondering if wasps gasp for life, or if him moving in circles was just him removing, not knowing he was about to never see the sunshine again, when I heard the bells on Sam’s collar tinkling down the street. She jumps the three-foot iron fence easily, even now at ten years old, to roam the neighborhood. At some point in her stroll she will end up at Scheele’s butcher and wait patiently for a bone to be tossed out the door to her. She’s the only dog in the neighborhood with an open tab at the butcher’s. 

From the black, dying wasp’s head I turned my attention to the shock of black hair atop a human head, looking up at me from the street level with Sam by his side. The watering can pitched in my surprise, dumping the wasp onto the bricks, but it was too late. He no longer moved. The man asked if Sam was mine, his deep, friendly voice drawing my attention back to them. He already knew she was, but I answered affirmatively anyway. I said thank you for bringing her and did he want a drink of water?

Sal and he entered through the gate, both drinking the water offered but then the man sat down while Sal turned back to the gate and jumped again. For the bone or for another man? I wasn’t sure.

“I’m Tom,” he says, immediately leaning down to pick up the trowel near him. I peeled my hair away from my sticky neck before picking up my small gardening tools.

“Yes, I know. The clean one who fell down on his luck.”

“Or fell into his luck.” He said this showing white teeth in his amusement. Most of the vagabonds, (is that what they’re still called?) come to this neighborhood because it’s safer to wander close to the old sturdy brown stones now worth millions more than when I or the other old guards ever paid, with camera systems and private security cars roaming the streets. It’s the side of town where tourists are more sympathetic and store owners turn a blind eye as long as the vagabond is at least one kind of clean: of drugs, of mud or of mind. Tom is the neighborhood conundrum. The man who wanders and who is triple clean. Never asking for anything. I asked him what he was doing that night, as though a clean vagabond had a busy agenda, and immediately felt my face flush. 

“Looking for conversation,” he replied without hesitation, which helped me allow the embarrassment to fade. “Someone to tell where I”ve been and what I’ve seen. To hear where you’ve been and why you’re trying to grow a fig tree in a pot.”

I look where he’s pointing and smile. There is a story there. I excused myself, then turned on my heels and entered the air conditioned house. White wall, sleek modern furniture with a touch of every place I’ve been in the world. I put my gardening box away, wash the residual dirt off my hands and return to the clean vagabond with two glasses and a chilled bottle of wine just as Sal padded up the steps, bone between her lips.