“I feel for the poorest and the richest alike,” began, at four minutes after the clock on the square rattled out the chains of 6:30, the sermon on the mound of trash in the vacant and patchy lot between the Tas-T-Freez and the PhillipsGas on West Belknap Street. “Consider the Lilies of the flees, that no man put asunder! Devise the carport of the very-Gods, for yearn is the kingdom of savings.”
He gesticulated wildly for half a minute, sometimes indicating the invisibles hiding in the ruts and laneways under the brown grass that still clung to life, sometimes conducting traffic in jerky and sweeping 7/4.
The multitudes were absent for these beatitudes. Up the hill, his four typical cronies were sampling the County’s finest cuisine boloney-ese in orange-jumpsuit-and-rubber-muleshoe afternoonwear after an uncomfortable night encounter with two of Tarrant’s finest. But he wasn’t alone. This new fisher of men who had appeared in the lot made him squirm and writhe down on the jagged hook of his soul. For one, she was a woman. For another, she seemed awfully amused by the whole thing.
“Consider! Cast the birds of the air and the lilies of the field into the oven with tomorrow! Clide them in raiment of kingly-finest mustard genes and mayonnaise dreams, for do not the birds fly naked? And do not the lilies spin and sew? Be not like the gentiles who seek for such comforts as Chicken a la Solomon, whence sufficient unto the oven is the stuffing therein!”
It wasn’t one of his better efforts, although he couldn’t tell it in the moment. You’ll have to take my word for it that some of them were better, some worse. He was hungry, and the lord had failed to provide him with the eight fifty he needed to buy lunch, so his sermon off the mount was, besides being distracted by this onlooker, also distracted by his onboard weaknesses of the flesh.
She stood in the trashy lot, feeling as out-of-place as he looked to be of-it.
It wasn’t just that she was a woman. There was a woman who sometimes lectured here in the Eremos plaza in a pseudo-African language that was full of Arabic and Zulu words she learned in a past life as a minor academic. Now, she held a maroon sleeping bag and danced in circles, slow-and-graceful or jittery-and-agitated as the mood took her, and spoke her tongues up to the heavens and down to the ants because the stiffs walking past in their ties and sandals did not care. No, it wasn’t the femininity of the onlooker that bothered him. It was the fact that, a, she looked like a tourist, and b, she made unwavering but nonthreatening eye contact, as one might to a friend or family-member, as long as he was lecturing.
Maybe not quite like a tourist, on second thought. But not a local. Her mouse-brown pixie-cut hair and faded denim jacket suggested a visit from some ungodly north, ill-suited to the Texas summer that began with March this year. Her sensible walking shoes were too clean, purpose-bought for a trip that meant miles of ground coverage, not daily-wear shoes. If he were in a more reasonable mood and were to guess her name by the markings on her face, he would guess Tara, and he would be correct. Her energy was pure visiting-aunt.
She was starting to irritate him, so he tried a new tack.
“Do not judge the moat around mine eyes! My measures and my meats, hypocrite! Ask and don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it. Ask for bread to get stoned! Ask for fish, eat a snake?” She laughed, once, like it slipped out of her mouth and flopped onto the dirt between them.
The agitation overwhelmed him. He pointed at her, waggling his crusty, blackened fingernail mere millimeters from her nose, and shouted, “Beware False Profiteers!”
He dashed past her, leaving his every worldly possession there in a pile, out toward the cars scudding and crepitating along Belknap. He chose one roughly at random, an Audi, going perhaps a little slower than the rest, and screamed it again.
The man inside was startled. He turned his head toward the lecturer and at the same time jerked the wheel instinctively away from the raving madman. The car next to the Audi also reacted, giving him half a lane of room and giving feeble-horned voice to its objection.
The lecturer turned back to his mount to see, much to his relief, that the interloper was gone. He resumed his position and began a new lesson on the dangers of forgiveness.
The man in the Audi continued on to his office up the hill, in the corner of the twelfth floor of one of the classier addresses in downtown. In the elevator, he straightened his mustache and laid flat his hair, hoping his encounter had not too disheveled him. He straightened up to his full five feet, seven inches, then slumped back to his usual sciatic hunch. He was not a practicing lawyer any more, but still had most of the health-related perks that come from the active practice of law: premature graying, back pain, exciting moments with his kidneys, and a troubling series of indigestive incidents that would suggest something larger was wrong, had he time to hear such suggestions.
He was now a manager and organizer of lawyers. He assigned lawyers to cases and rode them like a wizened jockey until the final appeal was won and lost. Mostly won, he was proud to say, for the good of the firm. Today he needed to berate young Boyd Hogg about a minor criminal matter he was handling at the court of appeals. The deadline was approaching and Hogg seemed not to have grasped what the writing in a legal brief needed to be—good.
Hogg’s work was weak and it made the firm look weak. He had the offending brief on his desk when he walked in, so he could look at it and hate it for a few minutes before setting young Hogg on the narrow path to righteousness.
But he found that he could not. The innocuous thing looked practically demure there on the blotter. The sun shining in his window left him uncharacteristically drowsy. The Wordle was harder than usual, and he failed to guess it in the allotted tries. The mail was early. Things kept stacking on the blotter and the weak brief moved to burners further and further back on the stove.
And then the day was done and he hadn’t called Hogg to the carpet and whipped the brief into fighting form.
He drifted on an unaccustomed air cushion generated by the difference in pressure between the contentment and disquiet of the day. He was so distracted that he failed to see the dark cloud of his friendliest neighbor lurking near the front door to “bump into” him. Before he could escape, he found he was in a conversation that bent, as the arc of the modern moral universe, toward jumping off a bridge.
The neighbor, it seemed, bought a package deal for four to leap from a bridge and down into a chasm, tethered by an elastic rope. He nodded along to the neighbor’s explanation and grand talk of adrenaline and excitement and he thought lazily of what was in his refrigerator. He realized that the tone of the conversation had shifted and become a shade more personable, more intimate and excited, and he suddenly understood that, in his forbearance shooing the neighbor away, he had agreed to go with the neighbor on this fool’s errand. He retraced mentally, looking for the moment where he slipped and conceded so he could reverse course and find stable ground. Finding no obvious gap in the armor of the conversation, he allowed himself to be propelled to the neighbor’s minivan where two more thrillseekers waited, breathless and pecuniarily necessary (“Is it even worth it to jump with only three people?”).
In the van, he removed his coat and tie and sat and stared out the window like a man condemned tasting final thoughts of freedom for half of the ride to the bridge. Then, as the van crested a hill, the sun struck his face, his back loosened, and he felt the pool of human kindness and goodwill filling within his breast.
He introduced himself to the two new fellow-jumper acquaintances. He was the least experienced of the four, but only by default. One had jumped once, the other had gone with him and watched, but was petrified by the joy and adrenaline and had to go home and lie down. The van rocked with friendly and chummy laughs and the four ribbed gently back and forth.
He found that he genuinely liked these three men. The two new jumpers had attended some level of school with the neighbor (he was never clear and genuinely did not care) and now, married and well-established professionally, they wanted to spend a little of the salaries they had worked so many years to build up.
The bridge in question was nearly to the county line, well outside the city limits. It had been built here in the 1950s, a paving project by the State on the theory that the suburbs would imminently explode in population. The explosion waited sixty years and approached from the far side, leaving the bridge a beautiful but excessive albatross for the county.
An enterprising county judge at the time, smelling an opportunity, had snatched up the land on both sides of the bridge on the official theory that it would be needed for traffic flow and the unofficial theory that developers could be quite friendly to county officials who looked out for their interests. Now, the large plots were occupied by a power switching station (on the side closest to the city) and a small and unkempt public cemetery (on the far, western, side).
The neighbor parked the van next to two other cars on a concrete pad outside the cemetery. In a voice that the neighbor doubtless thought evoked Vincent Price but that was closer to Webley Webster, the neighbor announced their arrival to his cargo and made a spooky “oOOooOo” ghost sound.
The joshing picked up the gallows humor, and the four set off for the bridge, bonded for life for the afternoon as only seekers of momentary immortality can be. The previous jumpers were packing in. They looked flushed and disconnected but with aggressively cheerful demeanors. He and the neighbor and the couple, as a crew, became excited and apprehensive and impatient.
The jump-leader pressed waivers and packets of paper on the crew and explained the general cadence of the afternoon. Normally, presented with such a document, he would have perused it long and careful, but today he simply signed and went with the moment. The jump-leader saw to their strapping and harnessing and whatnot and the crew stood on the side of the bridge, peering with the realization of new purpose down into a rocky chasm below.
The neighbor offered to jump first, but with the tacit gripe of actually wanting to be last. So, he stepped up, offered himself up to the process and, on a count of three, leapt out into the void. He felt decathexis, he left the world, he escaped from his life and his moment and his sciatica and from Hogg’s damnably weak brief.
Hauled bodily out of the chasm, he considered his life choices. He had thought of himself as a pleasant and agreeable person, as a youth. Now, he was a smith who rent iron from raw young attorneys, but he realized, feeling the breeze through his flapping and untucked shirt, wriggling the toes of his left foot where his loafer had escaped and become part of the landscape, that he had not been happy. Experiencing this moment of happiness cast his earlier happiness into darkness from which it could not escape.
He never wanted to do this again, but he also could not, in good conscience, climb back to the riverbank from which he had jumped. There could be no yesterday tomorrow. There must only be today forever.
It was on this trompe-l’oeil of philosophy that he had alit when the leader unstrapped and turned him loose, to the hearty-if-thin cheers of the crew. As the leader bundled the next jumper in safety, he wandered back toward the van and into the cemetery. He found a likely stone and sat and enjoyed the sunset and the singing of the insects in the air and the threats of an aggressive mockingbird in a spreading oak at the edge of the parking lot.
He slid down so his back was pressed to the stone and appreciated the cool surface on his back. He drooped and fell into a brief but dreamless sleep that gave way to eternity.
He was at the crook of the headstone and grave when the crew came looking for him to regale him with the triumphs of the three subsequent jumps. In a panic, they left him there and fled, along with the leader, for fear that they would somehow be tied to his death. He was discovered the next morning by county maintenance workers.
That night, before he was found but after he had slipped his mortal coil and joined the parade of heaven, back in the city, the woman sat on her brother’s couch. She had shed her sensible shoes and denim jacket and all but one of the cares of her day. Her brother had selected a tiresome movie for the evening and they were enjoying a happy boredom. She addressed her final chore by picking up her phone and sending a text message to Boyd Hogg: “it’s done.”