Michael Bunker: WICK

The rich, deep voice of Johnny Cash came blasting out of an old school boombox. It was one of those black-cased, dual deck affairs with the chrome rimmed speakers and thin sliding buttons. Made it look like a ’65 Plymouth. Heightening the effect, the box was strapped, with a variety of hooks and multicolored bungees, to the handlebars of a broken-down bicycle that was slowly weaving in and out of pedestrian traffic. Johnny Cash’s voice asked how high the water was, echoing a refrain heard throughout the area on that day.

The man on the bicycle wore bright orange pants and a long trailing coat made from a textured fabric that might have looked better on a vintage couch. It was mostly green, the coat, but it was hard to tell for certain with its sun-faded pattern and the fact that much of it was covered by the man’s long red hair and a beard that was graying on the ends, spilling out of his neck.

Something in the cool misty air made Cash’s voice ring out with an otherworldly clarity. It amplified the gospel choir hum underlying the voice and the dum-thwacka-dum of the guitar’s choppy train strokes. When the key shifted higher, the voice might have been in the room, if it had been a room.

The red-haired man moved in meandering undulations past the people who were turning to watch him. He was barely even pedaling, merely turning the handlebars and letting the natural momentum of the bike carry him forward, until he came to a stop at the foot of the brownish grey tower. Clay watched him as the man squinted his eyes and peered up at the sky to the clear patch of grey that was framed by the parallel lines of the cables. A helicopter came into the space and circled around and then headed back up the river.

Clay had always loved the city’s misfits, even if he preferred to take them one at a time. The man leaned his bicycle against the tower’s sides and reached in a pocket and pulled out a handful of balloons. Balloons? Then he knelt down next to a small, curious boy, whose mother was busy talking to another man as they looked out over the river. She didn’t notice the boy reaching for her hand.

“What’s your name, little man?”

“Gareth.”

“Were you scared last night in the storm?”

The little boy began to nod, but Clay could see his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t like the implication, even at his age, but he was mesmerized by the man’s beard and the colors in his clothing.

“Or maybe… You were brave?”

The boy’s eyes lit up. This was more like it. “Bwave.”

The man took a balloon and pumped a lungful of air into its long curved shape, then began twisting it into a circle. Then he took another and asked the boy what was his favorite animal. Puppy. He twisted the balloon into a zig-zag shape that rose up from the circle and curled up at the end. It looked nothing at all like a puppy. If anything, it looked like one of those graphic blue waves found on a surf shop door. The little boy didn’t mind, though, and the man reached up and placed the balloon like a crown on the boy’s small head.

As he did so, the woman looked down and smiled, and another young boy, older than the first, came up and asked for an elephant. The man quickly fashioned the exact same hat. He handed it to the boy.

“Hey… That’s not an elephant,” the boy said, in obvious disappointment.

“Little fella, if you’d seen what I saw last night, you’d think that everything looks like a wave, too,” the red bearded man said, and he reached up and patted the boy on the head.

He stood up, and Clay, who had stopped to watch the show, laughed out loud, causing the man to turn and bow. As he did so, his hair poured out onto his chest. “Pat Maloney, at your service,” the man said. The song on the boombox, which had repeated at least once, maybe twice, while Clay stood there, wound down to its final thrum.

Clay reached into his pocket and pulled out a dollar. He extended it to the man but was waved off. The man told him he wouldn’t know what to do with it, that he lived by the seat of his pants. “Consider the lilies, my friend. They neither toil, nor spin…” Clay found the man charming and believed him. They stood for a while and talked as the clouds and the waves and the people rolled by.

The man told Clay that he had passed the storm in a shelter at a nearby high school. He’d wanted to stay in the streets, just for the experience, but he’d gone down to Battery Park in the afternoon (“To see if our lady was still standing…”) and the water washed up over the barricades and came up to the bench he was standing on. “I decided it didn’t make sense to die yet.”

They began to walk and, as they did, they talked about everything under the sun. Clay was surprised at the man’s knowledge. He quoted Russian poets as easily as he did the stock pages. Clay found him intriguing, and asked if he had a secret, if he was actually some trust fund millionaire in hiding or maybe a journalist on undercover assignment. The man shook his head and said no. “You are assuming that I am homeless,” he said. “And in that you’d be correct. But who isn’t? In fact, there are a lot of people who are going to be homeless now. This storm is going to wake people up.” Clay didn’t tell him that it had already done so for him. “Do I have a secret? No. I celebrate myself and sing myself. And what I assume, you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Again, Clay didn’t tell him that he knew Whitman well and appreciated the sentiment, and the man, in turn, didn’t seem to care what Clay knew or didn’t know. Not once as they walked over the bridge to Manhattan did he ask Clay where he was going. He didn’t have the need to find out. Nor did he explain why he was walking with Clay in the direction he’d just left. He just walked and talked, pushing his bicycle along, simply passing the time with a friend.

Clay had met such people before, but never one quite so lucid. They seemed to live in the shadows of the city, just biding their time, willing to drop everything and follow where life leads. Clay had wondered how people like this man made it, somehow able to string along with nothing in a city that taxed you in the morning when you stepped out your door. He himself had struggled to bring the ends together, even with the settlement he had received from the contractors responsible for the death of Cheryl and the girls. Clay imagined that the man with the red beard had simply decided the world of material reality could do nothing to help or harm him.

Clay once had a college professor tell him, as they walked across a parking lot next to a McDonald’s, that with the knowledge he carried around in his head he could flip burgers and be happy. Clay decided that this man had made much the same decision.

They came to a box for the exit that drops down over Park Row. Clay told the man that he was getting off there and the man reached down and fiddled with the buttons on his boombox. The voice of Johnny Cash began to sing about how he kept a close watch on his heart, how he kept his eyes wide open.

“I like your tunes, by the way,” Clay said.

“Oh, you like Cash?”

“I do. I especially like his prison stuff.”

Clay paused for a moment, wondering if he should share any more with the man, and the man took the pause as a sign. “Yeah, I wonder whether those guys over there still like it or if they have switched to Jay-Z.” He motioned with his thumb over his shoulder to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, just visible over the barrier of the walkway, nestled in among a jumble of buildings down the street. “I don’t know,” Clay said, “I guess a little of both.” The man laughed. “I noticed you didn’t have to ask me what I meant… that’s OK. I like a guy who has done a little time. I think it does something to clean out the soul.”