The Bystander
David Priest
Harold is standing across the street from the Kurli-Q station, which has just been robbed. Thing is, if you draw an invisible line from the center of Harold’s forehead out, everything to the left of that line is kind of like a splatter painting of different shades of black for Harold, which is to say: he didn’t see the robbery take place.
What Harold knows is that two men robbed the gas station and drove off in a blue car, which he only knows because when he heard the tire-screeching and saw the car fishtailing out of the lot, the lady who runs the Kurli-Q, or at least runs register, came stumbling out the door, shrieking a sort of narration of what’d happened. Chip bags, which Harold guesses the men didn’t buy, trail from the shop door.
Harold is scratching his prickly neck, tugging the pliable skin, when the cops pull up. He thinks about rebuttoning his shirt despite the heat and wheeling his mower over to them to talk, but he figures he’d just be repeating what the woman had screamed, and now that he thinks of it, he can’t remember if she’d definitely screamed that it was two men or just two people, as in Stop those two! And had she given any identifying details, like height, build, ethnicity, etc.? Harold doesn’t remember, so he decides to let the cops make the first move, and if they ask, he didn’t see anything on account of his eyeball, which has a chunk of metal lodged in the center of it, obstructing his vision and making most eye movements spasmodic, like sometimes the pupil of that eye sort of lurches after the other, so when Harold looks right, for instance, his eyes do a one-two twitch thing. Harold knows this is the reason people avoid talking to him, and Harold avoids talking to people because he has only one tooth, which in the end, solves the talk-to-the-cops-or-not problem, since Harold figures he really can’t.
At this moment a memory resolves out of the splatter on the left of Harold’s visional picture: it’s Juan telling him why he always walks the other way when he sees cops. Juan was just baking in the sun this one time, brown bagging, and he decided to relax in this empty lot, and he drank a little more and laid his head back on this perfect pillow of grass that had pushed up through the blacktop, and he passed out. While he was napping, a gas station got knocked over a block up, and the cops found Juan and sicked the dogs on him.
They ended up not charging him, but since Juan didn’t have money for insurance, he stuck around Cousin Jerry’s for a week or two with this soggy gauze swaddling his arm and shoulder, and it got to be kind of a yellow-red sick-sweet smelling sponge thing. The smell was the main reason Harold stopped going to Cousin Jerry’s—that, and whenever Harold was talking Jerry would tilt his head and close his eyes like he was tuning in to a conversation somewhere else.
The cops are poking around now. One of them crouches beside a bag of chips and prods it with a pen. Another one recognizes Harold and says Hiya, to which Harold raises the hand resting on his mower in peaceful salute. The cop is standing across the street with his thumbs hooked in his belt, and he calls New mower, Harold? Harold doesn’t say anything. It is a new mower, paid for with the earnings from his old mower, and now Harold is trying to decide which way to walk: west toward more houses that have out-of-control lawns, but where he could only get maybe ten bucks a pop, or south toward the new neighborhood he hasn’t seen yet, but where the young professors from the college are starting to settle? He could probably get twenty or thirty a lawn there, and he wouldn’t have to worry about exploding rotted two-by-fours nestled in the grass or tearing up moldy pink stuffed bears like when the guy told Harold he was being nice to let Harold go without beating him to a pulp for covering his lawn with pink fur and cotton. Harold had used half a tank of gas on that lawn, because the grass was at the very least waist-high, and Harold thought about socking the guy one, but he didn’t want to lose his tooth over it.
Harold hears the Kurli-Q lady say they had guns and he thinks about that. He thinks about the time he bent over to hear the sound his mower was making, which was right after he’d lost his job at the factory down State Road 9, and the engine blew right as he turned his head to look at it, and the sound like a gunshot barely registered before a piece of metal lodged itself in his eye, which hurt so bad Harold lay on the ground totally still for like an hour just soaking in the pain, like a trooper is what Cousin Jerry, who isn’t really so bad, would’ve said. Harold had thought he was going to die lying there in the grass, with his left eye seeing red fireworks and his ears just hearing birds Cheep-cheep from the swaying telephone wires and the occasional car passing like the ocean, sighing nearer, receding. Harold wonders now if he would’ve felt like he was getting ready to die if he’d known the guys/women robbing the Kurli-Q had guns, except he wouldn’t have been lying there with his eye hurting so bad his brain felt like spaghetti. He would’ve had time to contemplate his possibly imminent death, or remember something from his life—
Arizona, maybe, which is where he lived before, where the lawns were mostly just sand and tiny rocks and had maybe a square of grass that was sort of like your square foot of bright green life, and some native plants like cactus, and the houses were stucco-faced where when you were inside, you could feel the cracks between the floorboards through the carpet, and the walls felt like walls until you opened a window and you realized it was really just a shell between you and the outside that you could probably walk through if you walked hard enough.
Harold remembers his house down there, the one that his mom had given him back in the seventies before she’d passed, and how the girl he was going to marry at the time was Thai, this really small chick who barely knew how she’d turned up outside Tucson with him, but knew she didn’t like the dryness and how when you slept there with the windows open you sweated all night and you’d wake up with your eyes all blurry and dehydrated, so in the morning you had to pop open a can of beer and pour a few drops in your eyes and swivel them around a little before they moved like normal again.
Harold remembers his body back then, how he could count the different muscles and pick one he wanted bigger and work on it some, and Sanit really liked that, because she wanted a muscular guy to protect her and call her kid like American guys were supposed to. Harold remembers how, when they lay together, he could always count on her feet being cold so he’d hold them against his cheeks when it was a hundred and twenty out, and it’d help him chill.
Harold remembers lying with Sanit on the roof of the house still hot from the day, watching the fireworks crack open above the desert, where she said they looked like bouquets sprouting high above the sand, and then just colorful stars streaming down, and all he kept thinking about was his dad’s stories of war and how some shells, like the biggest ones, thunked out of their cannons in the exact way that sounded like a giant cork in the ground had thunked out of place and the whole atmosphere got sucked up like outer space, and it wasn’t until the shell burst high above them and Sanit clapped and the ghost of applause drifted across the desert like sulfuric smoke—out from their little lonely prefab—it wasn’t till then that he felt like he could breathe again, and even then, maybe not till they were in the house an hour later and she was screaming Yes again, when he felt embarrassed because the window was open, but also he felt like a man.
Harold thinks about lying naked next to Sanit, elbow-to-elbow, both of them panting and dripping in the heat, passing a sweaty can of beer back and forth, talking about having a baby someday, Or maybe, she would say, lighting a cigarette, We just shouldn’t plan for it. Let it come natural. He remembers sleeping then, how they’d stay up for days before sleeping so hard and drunk that they’d wake up at the same time they’d fallen asleep and start all over.
Harold as always remembers the time he took the garbage out, stumbling off the stoop and landing on the red dirt hard where he decided to nap, and how he’d slept not even shivering when it got to the cold hours as if he’d been covered by some impossibly soft down, and how when he woke the next afternoon he found her in bed, still and pale from the embolism, which according to the doctors was rare but not unheard of for smokers her age. Harold tries to picture her face now, but instead out of the black emerges Miss Amy, the Korean lady who works at the kitchen downtown and has a birthmark on her cheek that looks like two red fingers.
Harold thinks about prison after he burned down the house that turned out not to be entirely his. He thinks about the instructor who walked him through the process: Let your younger self apologize to your older self for what he did to you, and Harold remembers how his younger self, the one who lost Sanit and landed in prison, promised to hand over the steering wheel, or—what was the word the teacher used?—reins to the older and more mature Harold, and how the older and more mature Harold forgave the younger one for what he’d done, and now he was making good with the state and more specifically the assembly factory where the state assigned him.
It is starting to become muddled now, but Harold remembers fitting flywheels over crankshafts at the factory down State Road 9, and he remembers imagining each whirring center was a heart, and that each small engine was a little boy or girl. Harold remembers smiling as he worked on the line, sending out little pristine children into the world—loved and perfect, and it just hits him: maybe he assembled the motor that hurled a chunk of metal into his eye!
He shakes his head and blinks just thinking about it. The left side of his face is damp, and he realizes his eye has been leaking again. Harold decides to turn south now, wiping his face dry, because he figures if he can get thirty or even twenty bucks a lawn maybe he can make up for lost time.
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David Priest is a writer based in the American Midwest. You can read his fiction in Blotterature and Five on the Fifth.
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Oliver Banyard is a videographer and photographer from Toronto, ON who grew up overseas, from New Zealand to Singapore to Japan. He loves anything from the 1960s. He is passionate about reinventing and presenting the ordinary in an imaginative way. He has worked with record labels and product designers; from studio work with CEOs and mayors to street photography with passers-by. While currently based in Calgary, AB, he spends as much time as he can in Tokyo. Visit his website here: http://www.oliverbanyard.com/
