Not Little (fiction)

There are not an endless number of choices once you have done the city attorney's offices.  Did I mention that he has two?  This seemed excessive to me, and I thought of saying something but thought better of it once we got into the pencil drumming and watch glancing stage of things.  One office appeared to be the usual book-lined bastion of jurisprudence, the other a toned down version of the same.  Why the taxpayer, a.k.a., me, has to support this, God only knows.  In any case, I had let it pass.  And now I was passing myself, out into the sunlight, leaving the city attorney to his lunch and thinking about one of my own.

From a wheelchair, our downtown opens like a vista.  It is difficult to see from one end to the other.  More important, rolling the distance from the bank at the western edge to the framing shop on the eastern front takes just long enough to make the experience, an experience.  You think twice about flinging yourself at the coffee bar across from the bank when you are just approaching the framing shop.  Hard to say why this is.  Age certainly has something to do with it.  The arthritic bumping of bones upon seat cushion upon wheelchair springs upon tree-root-shifting sidewalk, induces just enough discomfort to present a barrier.

It's all of five short blocks from the beginning of the town's main street to its end, and no more is necessary.  Another block would, in fact, be excessive.  It's big enough as it is, and any more of it would bore you, probably tire you, certainly drain your wheelchair batteries unnecessarily.  Driving the blocks in a car gives you a sense of the downtown's smallness, which you really don't need to know about.  Driving presents other complications.  The wheelchair-van interface is a cumbersome matter.  Steering and braking and accelerating with half the normal complement of limbs is more than nerve-racking.  You don't want a town on the driving scale.  You want something on the Lionell scale.  Never mind wheelchair access or even wheelchair range.  The first is a legal issue.  The second can be computed in your head.  It is closer to Zen.

In any case, lunch.  The odd thing about downtown is that the wheelchair population is remarkably scant.  I know my rolling brethren exist.  I see one or two of them at the Sunday farmer's market just off the main street.  One explained that he lives in a subsidized low-cost county housing facility a few streets north of the shops.  For reasons that are unclear, he only appears on Sundays.  I have the downtown almost exclusively to myself.  The kiosk by the bakery displays important events, coming attractions, things to know.  It is a static town crier, this thing, yet no one seems to take any notice.  Its notices go unnoticed.  I pause long enough to see what's happening at Stanford.  There's a blood drive.  You can recycle your batteries.  As I say, five blocks of this is enough.

What I don't like to admit is that, while our downtown is benign and becalmed, I become nervous in it.  Fact is, it's good having something to do.  It was my pleasure, and my civic responsibility, to give the city attorney a fair share of my mind.  I may have burdened the encounter with too much personal emotion, it is true.  But the facts spoke for themselves.  Crosswalk buttons out of reach.  General vulnerability to terrorism.  There was something there, and the city attorney would do well to to turn these matters over in his mind.  I was certain he was doing that now, staring, or trying not to stare, over the top of those crispy chili rellenos they do so well at the better Mexican eatery.  Not to worry.  I would improve upon his cuisine, top it, and with great pleasure.

Eating alone holds a certain vacancy.  There is the thought, more than a thought, that a person is dining at a lone table for distinct and justifiable reasons.  The reasons stretch back to high school, where shunning was an everyday social policy.  Yes, you entered the restaurant alone, but why?  Don't you have any friends?  Is there no one else in the restaurant who would like a civil companion?  Doubtless there is, and you have been excluded from the running.  Maybe, you are thinking, it is because you are not running.  Unless running on batteries counts.  You are chairing.  On a wing and a prayer and a wheel and a chair.  Why don't you take that table, sir, the one in the corner, behind the post, next to the men's room?

These thoughts made me shudder as though from cold, though it was July.  In a weekend or two, sawhorses would appear at either end of the main street, not to mention the side streets, and the whole commercial district would degenerate into an encampment.  The antiques and crafts fair, God save us.  Wheelchair passage on the sidewalks would become virtually impossible.  The idea, of course, was to roll up and down the street, closed to pedestrians.  But that would mean getting through the barricades, overlooking the porta potties and sharing the pavement with people who were mostly strangers, and the rest distinctly out of their element, slightly disoriented to be jaywalking on a grand scale and staring at questionable merchandise. 

The metal sculptor is most imaginative.  He has fashioned humanoids from old gasoline tanks and alarm clocks, the figures pleasantly rusted.  But what am I to do with such things in my apartment?  And hand-carved classic automobiles.  Another winner.  Quite fascinating in their wooden detail, wheel spokes like toothpicks.  Perhaps once they were toothpicks.  One doesn't feel quite right asking the carver about this.  One moves on.  In fact, one moves out of town during that weekend.

For now, no need to worry, the street was a street, the fair a distant prospect, and lunch a more imminent battle that I had decided to lose.  This is why God invented the deli or the specialized food shop.  I went rolling the aisles of the latter, Trader Joe's, stopping before the display of wraps.  Surely there's a better word for this cuisine.  The things are closely related to burritos, yet distant enough to have their own nomenclature.  And 'wraps' doesn't do it.  There's something lazy about the name.  And there they were, the price ranging upwards to five dollars.  One second sufficed to seize the red pepper pipenade chicken.  Good choice.  

No matter how powerful the current, the mercantile flow narrows at the cash registers.  Squeezed between counters, the shoppers reveal themselves.  This one has a family, judging by the masses of Juice Squeeze and the five-bushel corn chips.  That one is some sort of vegan athlete, one pint of sweetened electrolytes, plus a tofu snack, if one believes in such things.  That guy either has a party or is a wino.  And we are all advancing, about to be squished into brief confrontation with cash and cashier.  But meanwhile there's this long and unendurable march, everything with four wheels, me and the carts, and it's all taking too long.  And reading the wrapper, I can now see that this chicken thing requires heating, oven or microwave, it hardly matters.  Which is why the thing really belongs back in its refrigerated home on the shelf at the back of the store.  And, why didn't this occur to me before, things are much brighter and less insistent outside.

The air is fresh, the day young, the options unlimited.  On the other side of the main street there remains a homey, unthemed ethnic sort of minimart.  A Chinese bodega.  Oaks Foods.  Never mind that it makes no sense.  'The Oaks' would have been classier, giving the place the expansive feel of, say, a retirement community.  'Okie Foods' is at least grammatical.  It's a bad riff on the local theme.  Oaks.  The town tree. 

Anyway, I'm there now, rolling in the door, and John, who either owns or manages the place, is nodding his inscrutable greeting.  I get you, he says.  By this, he does not mean that he understands me, but that he will get something for me.  It is the thing he knows I want, perhaps the thing that has been at the back of my mind all this morning, momentarily bumped to one side by thoughts of the crispy chili rellenos.  But it is back in play, coming at me the way express trains do at their rush-our worst.  I have neither said yes nor no, but his friendliness and enthusiasm amount to more than an invitation.  There is a convivial momentum behind this and, what the hell, I'm in his establishment for a reason, and nutrition be damned.  We smile my 'yes' and he is off.

This is the good part, perhaps the best.  The Chinese food sitting in the steam-tray-and-heat-lamp corner of the store seems to have been there for years.  Doubtless, John or someone replenishes it from time to time.  Embarrassingly, I do not care.  The grease content of the dish that is my absolute fave makes it more suitable for packing the rear wheels of my van.  But watch John have a go at his shovel-like spoon, a flat serving thing that scoops my lunch into a white carton with a metal handle, hot and aromatic.  The chicken fried rice contains the colors of the rainbow, yellow egg, green peas, brown bits and strips of something blue.  I don't care.  I want to buy this shameful, diet-busting mixture before common sense gets the better of me. 

You'd think from the way John has dug and packed and rung up his fried rice that this was the finest moment of his day.  Very good seeing you, he says.  I ask for a plastic fork.  He doesn't hear me, for John, being fickle in his retail attentions, is now turning on the ethnic charm for the woman with a large box of Tide.  I want a fork, dammit.  The fried rice is getting cold.  I am getting cold feet about eating it, for the caloric load of this lunch exceeds bodily specifications.

A fork is not an interruption, or even if it is, my needs are legitimate and logically come first.  Leaning over John's counter far enough to rap the surface with my wedding ring requires some fancy neurological footwork.  For balance, I extend my right paralyzed arm under the counter's fabric skirting.  I catch the solid wood at the top, then pull with what's left of my abdominals.  Now my hand is over the Masonite counter, the ringed knuckle clicking away.  'John, please' is half out of my mouth, but only half, for there's a shriek and a knock to my arm.  Followed by 'what do you think' and 'my God'. 

John has done something.  The woman in line is horrified by the Tide box.  Looking up, I see the drawn and frozen features of someone who is actually younger than her voice.  She shoves at my arm.  I realize this is the second time, having filtered out the first.

'You disgusting little man'. 

I am filtering this too, or trying to, but, no, she is speaking to me.  Of her four carefully chosen words, the 'little' most inflames my soul.  My height is currently obscured by the fact that I am seated.  And this is what she means, that I am lower than she, in a wheelchair.  I am little.

John has his hands in the air, like a conductor, as though he has signaled this outburst and will now cut it off.  What are you going to do, the woman asks him?  Her veins are standing out, face reddened, breathing sharp.  She cannot have reached this emotional pitch without having already been there, or close.  I have forgotten the plastic fork.  The fried rice is cooling on my lap.  No one is going to call me little.

'What is he supposed to do?  About what?'  I stare her full in the face.  Alarmed, she takes a step back. 

There is a woman in blue jeans leaning against the soft drink machine by the door.  She moves as though fatigued, staring at the floor but listening.  I catch bits of the Tide woman's breathless narrative.  There's this 'slid his hand up my skirt' theme, which repeats.  She was opening her wallet, she said, and this hand slid.  The woman in the blue jeans walks toward us, glances down, taking in the scene, then me.  I give her a dirty look.  She shrugs.

'My friend says you lifted her skirt'.  She is looking at me without conviction, wearied by her own question.  In this opening, things lighten just enough for me to retrace my steps, as it were.  This dress lifting thing is too barmy for words.  But in our open court of retail inquiry, the charge is worth considering in the interest of fairness.  I had leaned over John's counter, that was all.  I had balanced.... 

A penny dropped.  Okay, something may have transpired.  For the woman is wearing a heavy skirt.  Being short on nerve supply, my right arm cannot tell where it is, let alone what it is touching.  The old-fashioned curtain hanging under John's counter felt only vaguely like yardage when my neurologically numbed hand lifted it to brace against the wood.  While looking the other way, whether that fabric is part of John's store or this woman's attire is impossible for me to say.  I may have lifted her skirt.  Strangely, this is true.  I don't know whether or not to feel proud.

'Well, if you won't, I will.'  The woman places her cell phone on the Tide box.  '911'.  She says this out loud.  Her friend frowns and crosses her arms. 

Something has shifted.  The woman's conversation with 911 took remarkably long.  She wandered outside to get the building number, then returned, caught my eye and faced the door to wrap things up.  Force, yes.  Molestation, that is correct.  Yes, he is still here.  No attempt to flee.  Thank you.

Hard to say why, but the ludicrousness of the situation seemed to spread.  You could feel it moving, like crab grass in a lawn.  The Tide woman clicked her mobile phone closed.  A guy with glasses and tie approached with a quart of Pepsi and a packaged sandwich.  John rang him up, barely saying a word.  The transaction normalized things and saddened them at the same time.  Now, we had only to wait.  The two women leaned against a freezer which roared beneath their butts.  The woman in the blue jeans turned, her eyes nowhere in particular, speaking to her friend.  'Look at his hand'.

The two of them checked me out, eyes moving shamelessly.  Miss Tide looked away.  I'm used to my hand and its disturbing effects.  With the fingers clawed backwards, the wrist bending abnormally inward, the overall effect is mildly grotesque.  It is a point of personal pride that I am rarely disturbed by my own extremity, for the fingers, the palm, the knuckles, all of it is a neuromuscular desert.  Most of the nerve supply evaporated long ago. 

They were eyeing me, almost voraciously, these two women.  They had declared open season, and on what I wasn't sure.  Reflexively, I tried to move the hand out of sight, but this was impossible and, of course, unnecessary.  An inspired moment.  I now lifted the hand, raising it along its one axis.  The blue-jeaned one nodded to the other.  The Tide woman looked mortified and seemed to deflate.

I love those action movie chase scenes when the good guy, pursued by the bad guys, ducks into some side street.  A second later, he's chasing his pursuers.  Everything flips as prey pursues hunter.  This is where we were, Miss Tide and I.  Her friend sauntered over.  There had been a mistake, she said, sorry. 

I stared at her impassively.  The charge was a serious one, I said.  A glance at my watch.  I told her the police would be there shortly.  No, no, she said, her friend was phoning them now.

'Calling off the dogs?'  I fumbled for my cell phone.  'The police might not like being called dogs.'

'You called them that.'  She was looking hard at me.

I clamped the cell phone to my ear.  '911?  Hello.  Actually, the incident at Oaks Foods is ongoing, and we do need the police after all.  I know.  But I'm involved, and it's necessary.  Thank you.'

Never mind that 911 hadn't really answered, that I was listening to this endless recording about emergencies, if this and then that.  I snapped the phone shut.  The woman, her box of Tide still on the counter, had hitched up her handbag for departure.  The two of them whispered.  They made for the door.

'I would wait for the police,' I said.

'I don't know what's on your sorry little mind.'  This from Miss Tide.

'It's all on film.'  I pointed at the video surveillance camera above the salad dressing.  'John, the police will want your tape.  They will take a statement from you.  A statement from me.  And they will want to know who called them and then ran off.  Do you know these women?'

This slowed their exit just long enough for me to think of the killer line.  'John, even if the police don't show, we'll have to hand your tape to the city attorney.'

'Stop it.'  Blue Jeans couldn't help herself.  'You're making a mountain out of a molehill.'

Without a word, I followed them out of the store.  They walked straight down Cypress Street, whispers back and forth, the friend turning around to see if I was still there.  I was.  One of them laughed.  I followed them across the parking lot.  The taillights on a Volvo flashed as Blue Jeans squeezed her electronic key.  Damn.  I didn't have a pencil.  Nothing to do but roll very close to the license plate, bend over and chant the number.  Trouble is, my memory isn't very good, even with audio repetition.  I didn't want to lose the license number, not that it was clear what I'd do with it.  Hard to say what I'd do now. 

'Would you please get away from my car.'  She was standing by the driver's seat, door open, face flushed, high cheekbones getting higher by the second.  Now I knew what to do.  Nothing.  I was blocking her car, and that was enough.

'Go away.  You molested me.'  A faint voice from the passenger side.  Now she looked at the sky, fists clenched.  'Okay.  You did nothing.  Now leave.'

I stared at her.  My wheelchair was turned off.  No sense in wasting battery life.

'Go, you disgusting little...cripple.'  She burst into tears.

I felt eyes on the back of my neck.  An elderly man was staring.  He was climbing out of his car.  Now he was climbing back in.  There was a scene under way.  A public scene in a parking lot. 

A wheelchair and its energy field exerts a subtle power.  And speaking of power, it came to me, still staring at the license plate and knowing that whatever I retained of the number, say, a few minutes from now, would already have gone wonky, numerals reversed, scrambled, gone.  Not that it mattered.  For I had the power.  More important, I had the power to not have the power.

'Would you fucking go away.'  She pounded the roof of her car. 

'Can't,' I said.  'Batteries are dead.'  It flew by, a blur of navy blue officialdom, visored cap like a policeman's, paper waving like a small flag.  The meter maid presented the ticket, then strode away.  Miss Tide eyed the paper, turning it over, reading the back to her friend.  I caught snatches of 'disorderly...disorderly conduct,' then sobbing.

No one likes to hear a woman cry.  That's why I decided to help.  The thought came easily, for this had been the way of things.  Chasing, then being chased.  Reversal.  I did know the city attorney.  Next time I was around the Civic Center, I would stop in.  For now, I was headed back to give the wrap counter another try. 

I am part of our community.  Rolling at three feet off the ground I see things that many people don't.  I know what's under the counter at Oaks Foods.  I'm not little.