In the Canyon
Jones is walking. All morning and then across the afternoon he walks as if he has a destination. He is exploring what people call the federal canyons of Washington, D.C. In mellow October sunshine he traverses block after gray stone block of monumental office buildings where government employees go about their business. Jones has no clue about that business, which vaguely bothers him. Until yesterday he was in the first semester of his sophomore year at George Mason University. That’s over now.
He can’t get a sentence out of his head. An ineffable sadness pierced the young man’s heart. He has no idea where the sentence came from, or why it lingers.
At the mid-point of the afternoon, the day’s warmest hour, he comes to an alley on a numbered street in South West. There aren’t many backstreets in this part of the city. He goes down it.
At the back end of the alley is a green Dumpster. Next to the Dumpster, out of view of passersby on the street, a large, heavily built woman sits on a camp chair. The legs of the chair are so low that her own legs must extend out in front of her to find ease. She wears jeans and a blouse with upside-down flowers, under an Army surplus jacket on one sleeve of which a pink heart is embroidered. Her beefy face is a storm cloud. The brow is furrowed, her gray hair wild. Her clear blue eyes collect the lightning of her mind’s storm.
Next to the woman is a pile of belongings including a sleeping bag rolled tight with a bungee cord. There is also an old blue suitcase with stickers on the sides announcing exotic destinations like Cancún and Singapore and Rio de Janeiro. There is a stack of DVDs, a Gideon’s Bible, a complicated toothbrush.
“What are you looking at?”
“Sorry.”
You’d think Jones would have the advantage, standing over the woman in her low chair, but the opposite is true. She is in control and snorts at his apology.
“Think you’re so goddamn high and mighty, don’t you?”
“No. I don’t think that.”
“You might be part of the machine, but you’re just a little tiny cog in a minor wheel.”
“What machine?”
“Don’t give me no lip, college boy.”
“I’m not a college boy.”
“Sure you are.”
“I was, but I quit.”
The information does not appear to change her opinion of him. He wishes she would ask him why he quit. That might help him figure it out.
He asks her again, “What machine?”
“The exploitation complex. Use any adjective you like. Military, industrial, governmental, technological, they’re all part of it. It gets bigger every year, and the space for freedom shrinks.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Another snort, indicating he is beneath contempt. He stands there wishing he knew what the right question to ask is until he feels something hard and sharp in the middle of his back. He pulls away, swings around fast to see a man as small as the woman is huge. The man is holding a knife. Jones thinks it’s a switchblade. He has a mousey look, as though he has been told to stand in a corner one too many times. His brownish hair is wispy, his skin looks unhealthy, his expression has a kind of determination in it as though he’s nerving himself up to do something scary. Like the woman, he wears an old Army jacket. His has no embroidered flower.
“Put the knife away,” the woman orders him.
He instantly obeys, grinning like a boy.
“This one don’t mean no harm, Reggie, he’s just a college boy lost his way. What’s your name, college boy?”
“Jones. What’s yours?”
“See how lippy he is?”
Jones learns that her names is Dolores. She likes to talk and has a lot to say. He’s a good listener, or wants to be. Reggie pulls up his own camp chair and sits next to Dolores, an insignificant moon in her grand solar orbit.
It’s weird, standing while they both sit, but Jones feels he has something to learn. Why else quit school in the middle of a semester? Apart from Dolores and Reggie, he has told no one. He’ll tell his family, he’ll have to at some point. Right now however he can’t get past the pleasurable sensation of driving forward out of ignorance.
“Jones here claims he quit college,” Dolores tells Reggie.
Reggie’s turn to snort, but it’s a spindly imitation of his friend’s disdain.
“I had him,” he says. His high voice is squeaky. “I snuck up on him good. Like a professional. If I wanted I’d a cut him.”
Dolores admits it grudgingly. That’s one way, Jones realizes, she maintains her power over the man. He craves her approval. This is better than any psych course he could have signed up for.
“This used to be a republic of free individuals,” Dolores informs Jones, starting up out of nowhere. “Rare in the annals of human history.”
“It’s not any more?”
“Hah! The big companies, they bought it when we weren’t looking, then they sold it for parts.”
“Where are you from, Dolores?”
The question takes her aback.
“Why? You with the government?”
“No, I just would like to know is all.”
“I was raised in a cabbage patch.”
This brings on a snigger from Reggie, who admires her power of invention. Pawing through their stuff he comes up with a chocolate bar, which he unwraps and bites with surprising brutality. He is the kind of man who is always trying to prove himself and never succeeding.
“The cabbage patch to which I refer was situated on a farm in one of the New England states. I won’t go any further than that, thank you very much. They took the farm, didn’t they? The sons a bitches. They gave my mother a drug made her go crazy. Seeped right into her sanity, which was precarious at the best of times. My dad had to stand there and watch his best beloved roll downhill to oblivion. Anybody tells you a man can’t die from a broken heart, that person never met my father. Kelvin was his name, like the thermometer.” She stops to study Jones’s face. “We live in a society that lacks compassion.”
“I know that.”
He says it hoping to get on a wavelength with her; with both of them. But the attempt backfires. With zero warning Reggie is on his feet, switchblade in hand. He is enthralled by the tiny click it makes when he presses the button with his thumb and the blade reveals itself, locked in place. One of life’s small pleasures. He comes straight at Jones, who is easily able to sidestep him. Momentum carries Reggie too far, and he stumbles, falling against a brick wall like a wind-up toy out of juice.
“Pathetic,” says Dolores. She is having difficulty breathing. It’s her state of mind. “You think you’re a full-grown man, Reggie? You think you’re a protector? Think again.”
He hangs his head, returning the knife to his pocket a second time. Jones feels what might be vertigo. What he longed for, leaving George Mason, was something different. Here it is. Is this good luck?
Dolores opens a plastic bag and takes out three bottles of cold-brew coffee. She hands them around. They drink the coffee, which has a strong chemical taste. Jones wonders if she might be poisoning him, cunningly giving him the bad bottle.
The coffee, or the worry, leads by a path he cannot follow to an admission: he quit school because he was restless and bored, and because living on campus felt like being in prison. There has to be more, is one way of putting it.
He would like to hear more from Dolores about the machine that ate America, and she cannot help obliging him. Social commentary is her passion. She takes pride in her point of view.
“They locked me up,” she tells Jones.
Reggie listens raptly even though he has heard the story who knows how many times.
“Where was this?”
“New England.”
“Why won’t you say which state?”
“What if you’re working for them?”
“I’m not, I’m not working for anybody.”
She shakes her head ponderously at his naïveté.
“They own you. With the very first breath your little lungs take in, they own you, Jones. The sooner you admit it, the better off you’ll be.”
“How long did they keep you locked up?”
“Six months to the day, and don’t ask me how I got away.”
“Why are you here, in Washington?”
She looks over at Reggie to make sure he is following the conversation.
“They won’t shut me up. They can try, but I’ll keep hollering the truth at them come hell or high water.”
“Until?”
This question, which Jones asks in innocence, strikes Reggie as a provocation, or an affront. Instantly he’s on his feet with the knife at Jones’s throat, pressing hard enough to score the skin. This time Dolores does not call him off. She pronounces sentence.
“This boy is on the wrong side of history.”
That’s all Reggie needs. The knife impinging, he yanks Jones to his feet. He snarls something hard to understand, then marches Jones back down the alley to the street. Jones feels blood trickling down his neck.
“I’m not on the wrong side,” he insists. “I’m on your side.”
But Reggie won’t hear it. As they reach the street he removes the knife from Jones’s neck. He looks up and down the street, alert for enemies. Then he says in a sinister whisper, “She’s a hero. She’s fearless. She’s all that stands between us and catastrophe.”
“You love her. You’d do anything for her.”
Again his ineffectual snort. “Wouldn’t you?”
Jones has had enough. He has learned something and is ready to be shut of Dolores and her acolyte.
“Listen,” says Reggie, grabbing him by the arm.
In his weakness, Jones realizes, Reggie can be a nasty man. “What?”
“I want to take her out to dinner. Tonight. Not tomorrow, tonight.”
It’s an effective way to put the bite on him, Jones decides. He eases a twenty from his wallet. Luckily, it seems to be enough.
“You were never here,” Reggie says, folding the bill by thirds and jamming it into his jeans pocket. “You never saw her, you never even heard of the woman, right?”
“Right.”
Then Reggie is gone, eager to hear more about the threat to America. Jones wishes he had a handkerchief. He would like to wipe the blood from his neck. He walks, feeling pretty good as he reaches the intersection of the numbered street with a lettered street. It’s going to be hard to top his first few hours as a college dropout.
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Great sequence of conversation and events that happen to a college kid trying to learn about the real world … short, sweet and powerful