The Simple Way

         
The Simple Way
Jake Morris

I stepped out of the shiny black car parked curbside on 10th and Winchester.  A blazing sign hailed from a cheap bar, casting its haggard red glow into the night air.  A lot of thought and praying had brought me to this dark street downtown, and I was muttering a prayer over and over again as I forced my blue and white Nikes forward.  “God, I don’t know what I am doing right now, keep an eye on me Lord, bring me back safely.  Amen, Amen.”  My heart was beating furiously underneath my black Patagonia jacket and fleece.  Somehow though, even all that pounding couldn’t force enough blood to my cold ears beneath my hat.  It was damn cold, the opaque vapor escaping from my nostrils agreed.
         I knew how to get to the bridge, but my eyes drifted to safer places where I could see laughing couples and old people going into movie theatres and quaint restaurants.  I wanted to be there, instead.  A street light illuminated a green and black Caribou Coffee sign and I imagined crawling in and sitting down by the fire.  My usual drink was the Vanilla Cooler, and even though it was colder than hell out (a saying that makes absolutely no sense) I could taste the Vanilla. 
         Caribou Coffee wasn’t what had brought me to downtown St. Paul on this frigid winter night, though.  I had come because my conscience, perhaps God, had gotten the best of me.  I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, an aspiring doctor, and a big fan of Scrubs.  Yet, the glamour of working toward an internship was paralleled by the fact that every day I walked past homelessness and poverty on the city streets.  I became adept at averting my eyes, at shuffling over to the far side of the sidewalk.  I still saw though.  The old, the young, the normal, the apparently delusional, marked for their situation by the grocery bags that hauled their possessions and their worn look and worn clothes.
         Most of the time, I treated them as invisible.  Tonight, as I paced myself down the iced-over sidewalk, I wished that I possessed that superpower.  I walked past a park bench guarded on either side by over-filled metal trash cans.  A thin layer of snow had settled over the top of the garbage.  I was getting further from the shops now, and the fading laughter was replaced by a sharp breeze that pushed a Sunday paper down the walk ahead of me.  On my back the bag that usually held my books was instead awkwardly packed full with a blanket, several pairs of mismatched gloves, a few retired hats, and a bag of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  I felt ridiculous, and silently cursed the book about evangelism I had been reading lately that had inspired and forced this excursion.
         The edgy, dark path I followed ran alongside the Mississippi River, and I could hear the unabated rushing of the water nearby.  Several sections of the Mississippi are dammed off as it runs between the cities, and near these spots concrete bridges bear bike paths and roads across the river.  I could see one up ahead.  Flickering beneath the arc was a drum barrel bonfire.  Sometimes, as I made my way back from classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, my eyes would be momentarily drawn to this same flame.  I always imagined who those blotched forms around the fire might be.  Realizing that I would soon find out amped up my already frantic heart.
         The block or so before the bridge seemed to slow down the blur of my footsteps.  Slowly, the scene beneath the bridge took shape, like shadows from a puppet show coming into focus on a wall.  A white man in a blue-hooded jacket stood behind the barrel, holding a dull silver pot over the flame.  I could see his fingers wrapping around the handle as they poked out of his fingerless gloves.  He looked up at me with his illuminated eyes as I walked down the embankment next to the bridge.  I was too absorbed taking account of the four others that I forgotten what I planned to say.
  “Are you lost?”  He still held the cauldron over the fire but was focused now on this suburban kid in front of him.  Words suddenly took on the difficulty of third semester O-Chem.
  “No, I just thought… I’d stop by.”  I spoke so quietly that I couldn’t be sure the words had found their way out of my imagination.  Two middle-aged guys who had been leaning against the overpass talking had gone quiet, and for the first time I could hear a quiet crying from the frail hunched figure just on the edge of where the light reached.  What looked like an even littler bundle sat there, too.
  “I just thought that it was a really cold night, and that…”
  “The fuck? You get us a Holiday Inn?  Fucking room service?”  The black, thirty something in wide jeans and an inflated white jacket interrupted, to the half enthused laughter of his buddy.  I was rescued from my awkwardness by the man at the fire.  He stepped onto the other side of the barrel and extended his hand.
  “Jack.”
  “Justin,” I replied, shaking his warm, calloused hand.  I unslung my backpack and set it softly on the ground. If only for something to do.  I stood there quietly for a moment.
“I’m making some soup if you want some.  It’s tomato.”  He motioned to the pot he was holding and I could indeed see a red liquid swirling thickly in the tin.  He looked like he was in his fifties, and had a short, shadow-colored beard and flat cheekbones.  His eyes were as blue as his jacket and still looking into me. 
  “No thanks, thanks though.  I have some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches…”  That prompted the smallest little bundle I noticed before to materialize hurriedly into a little girl with black pig-tails and shiny brown skin.
  “Can I have one?!  I really like peanut butter and jelly.”  She was wearing a white snoopy hat and a too-big green jacket.  Her hands extended toward me expectantly.
  “Tanya, hold on.”  The other man from the embankment stood up and walked down toward me.  “Where are you from, kid?”  He didn’t sound threatening, which was an answer to my subconscious prayers. 
  “Plymouth, just west of here about thirty minutes.  I’m going to school at the U.”  He scooped the little girl up with one arm.
  “Deandre, this is my girl Tanya.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking the little girl’s hand.  She looked at me with her big brown eyes.
“I’ve gotta take a piss.”  The man who commented before stood up, turned around, and walked into the night with his wide jeans swaying.  Deandre looked back toward me.  I could still hear whimpering from off to my right.
  “You’re gonna have to take her home if you give her peanut butter and jelly.  I don’t think she’ll let ya go.”  Deandre looked warmly down at the little girl as I unzipped my Jansport and took out a Ziploc bag from the top.  The little girl took it with both hands and started to pry it open with her thin black gloves.
  “Tan…”
  “Than’ you.”  The little girl said to me as she hopped down from Deandre’s arms and ran back to the crying figure.
Deandre gave a toothy smile as Jack splattered soup into a ceramic mug and handed it to him.  He covered the mug with his glove to keep the cold out as he walked back up the embankment underneath the bridge.  Jack motioned to a couple of lawn chairs, probably saved from the river, that were sitting next to the barrel.  I sat down.
  “Deandre is a good guy.”
  “Yea,” I offered.
  “What brings you down here, Justin?”  He took a long pull of tomato soup from his coffee mug, “It’s not that often we have visitors.  Kind of refreshing.”  I hesitated, though definitely encouraged by his kindness.
  “God, I guess.  I don’t really know…”
  “That is a good reason.”  I searched anxiously for a topic of conversation and only the obvious came to mind.
  “What is it like… you know… living on the street?  I don’t know how long I would make it.”  Jack paused and looked down into his blue mug as if the answer waited within the broth.  He was smiling when he looked back up.
  “It is a lot simpler,” he chuckled.  “No deadlines, no house payments.  It wasn’t always like this, you know.  Do you see that building past Calhoun Square.  The one with the blue lights?”  As I looked up I realized that the sobbing had gotten quieter, still there, but more relaxed.  I saw the building he was pointing to, I was pretty sure it was a bank of some sort.  The blue lights made a “U” shape against the dark backdrop.
  “Yea, I see it.”
  “Well, I used to work there.  Right out of college.  I did pretty well, ya know.”  He smiled again.  “I had a knack for picking the right investments and maneuvering the right clients.”  He looked back down at his soup, the dimples of his smile just ever so slightly still indented in his cheeks.  What happened?  I wanted to ask, but gave him his time to go on.
  “My wife and my daughter were in a car accident a few years ago.  Maggie was about your age, going into veterinary school at Hennepin Tech,” The beating of my heart was replaced by an aching, as I saw the moonlight glimmer off the drops in his eyes.  His lips parted as if to speak, but then closed again.  I waited.  “I spent too much time doing what I was good at and not enough time doing what I loved.  Sometimes you never know how important something is until it’s gone.”  He still had a sad smile on his face and faint tears hung just above his lower eyelid. 
  “Love is more important than all the wealth I could have earned in my lifetime.  It took me too long to realize that.  After the accident I quit my work and sold the house.  I just decided that I had had enough with the American dream.  Like I said, it’s simpler out here.  Not always better, but simpler.  Jesus was homeless, you know?”
  “Yea, I do.”  I said, as I looked over toward the whimpering bundle beside Tanya.  I could make out a thin elderly lady with a kind, wrinkled face and closed eyes.  Tanya had snuggled her Snoopy hat and pig tails into the woman’s shoulder.
  “What happened?”  I asked, still watching.
  “Some kids thought it would be funny to spray Lysol in her eyes because she’s blind.”  As dancing light played across her face I recognized the woman.  She had long curly black hair and always sat outside of the biology building on France Street playing an old flute. 
  “That’s sad, why would anyone do that?”
  “There are a lot of bad people in this world, but it makes the good ones that much better.”  He gave me a soft smile and passed me a bowl of soup.  Steam rose slowly from the pooled surface.  As I watched it rise up and dissipate I realized why I was here.  With people who were not invisible, just simply ignored.  My cries to change the world were something more; they were cries to keep the world from changing me.