Jim

In all the time I had known him, I had never seen Jim smile.

We grew up together in the suburbs of a major metropolis, attended the same schools, rode the same bus.  He was a particularly morose child, distant and unresponsive; the perpetual outsider.  Wherever there was a group of children, Jim could be seen just outside the periphery, watching with a kind of disinterested look.

The inevitable ribbing he got from the other kids made no impression on him.  Even when the taunting escalated into blows, he endured them stoically and without a single complaint.  As he offered them no sport, the harrassment soon stopped and the bullies moved on to their next target.  Jim went on being Jim, silent and far away.

Once or twice I tried to engage him in conversation.  Not being much of a social animal myself, I thought I understood him better than the others.  He politely listened to me talk, answered in monosyllables I barely understood, and generally left me with the impression I had interrupted his train of thought.

I never saw him study or carry a textbook, but he passed his classes with a minimal score.  I would sneak looks at him during tests.  When the exams were passed out, he would look blankly at them for a few minutes, then go through them making random marks, as if they were checklists.  Afterwards, he would spend the rest of the time staring out the window or spinning a pencil absently or quietly looking off into space.

Well, maybe that's not entirely true.  Actually, he wasn't just looking dully ahead of himself.  He always seemed to be watching something no one else could see.  Whatever it was, it fascinated him so that nothing else mattered.  One fire drill I had to shake him hard to get his attention as he stood calmly in the hallway, watching nothing, the rest of the school scurrying around him.

He grew like the rest of us, graduated, and I lost track of him.  I heard that he took a job working for the city, but I never took the time to follow up on that.  The beginnings of my own adult existence took up the majority of my time, and somehow keeping up with Jim slipped my mind.  It wasn't until a few years later I realized why he'd been so remote.

I was driving along one of the many two lane roads interconnecting the subdivisions when I noticed signs announcing "Men at Work" and "Lane Closed Ahead".  As I neared the construction area, I recognized him.

There was Jim, leaning against a shovel, that far away look on his face.  In a three foot deep trench in front of him, five other men were working.

Suddenly, Jim didn't seem out of place at all.

END