The Prophet Of Seattle by Gavin Pate

He likes women with strollers with blue and red covers and black English wheels.  From behind his stand, watching these women, motherly, with full length dresses and modest shoes.  Older women, women with husbands, women out for a day in the sun.  Ones who like relish and kraut on their dogs and are not afraid to smile at him when he smiles, will even wish him a good day, something of the sort.  Women who walk slow.  The ones who are unsuspecting.
“Thanks,” she says.
She holds out her money, turns to the baby in the carriage.  The carriage is blue with black English wheels.  The baby squints.  The mother shakes her head, plays peek-a-boo.  Her mouth is covered in relish, and she licks it clean, shaking her head at the baby.
“You’re welcome,” he says.
She weaves in and out of stores wearing a lilac dress covered in flowers.  Her yellow hair curled at her shoulders.  Her breast full, firm.  She crosses Second, enters the parking garage, strolls towards her car.  Hums a sitcom theme, catchy and familiar.  The baby cries.  The woman places the baby in a car seat, gets in the driver side, and starts the car.  She opens the vanity mirror and applies a fresh coat of maroon lipstick, arranging her bangs.
It is these moments that decide things.  Moments of will and decision.  Is she right?  Is she the one?  The woman touches her cheek, moves one finger across her lips.  She backs up the car, and as the gearshift grinds, she looks to her left.  A fist tapping lightly on her window.

The city is gray and terrible.  Rain down gutters towards Puget Sound.  Streetlights dull yellow and blue.  It is an alley broken off of a main street, barely lit, where two men argue in front of The Morning Star, a downtown bar shining with dead neon.
“You owe me a drink, Karl.  You do.  You promised me last night that today you would buy me a drink.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“Bullshit.  You were out all day.”
“But the rain . . .”
“No!  You buy me a drink like you said.  I’ve waited here all day.”
He sees them from a distance and tries to avert his eyes, tries to sneak into The Morning Star without being noticed.
“Hey you.  Buddy.  How about some change?”
He sits at the far end of the bar.  The room is black like his eyes and smoke lingers beneath the low ceiling.  The bartender, a small man with thick hands, a burnt-out cigarette hanging from his lips, pours him a whiskey.  He drinks, rubbing the bridge of his nose with his fingers.  There is almost no noise, the jukebox silent, no noise until the man from outside barges through the door.
“Hey Buddy, how about buying me a drink.  Karl was supposed to buy me one.  He promised.  I told him to get the hell out of here if he can’t keep a promise.”
He buys the man a Budweiser.
“Thanks Buddy.  Malachi’s the name.  It’s good of you to do this.  I don’t know what’s wrong with some people.  They have forgotten how to be.  Just look at this city: robbers, cheaters, liars.  It makes me sick.  Cursed is what this place is.  And all this rain.  When I first came here it didn’t rain like this.  It was nice and when it rained it wasn’t like this.  God, when was that?  People like Karl who say one thing and do another.  I can tell you’re different.”
Malachi raises his glass, toasting the two of them.
He smiles at Malachi.

The lady wears sunglasses, a black suit, heels, and a long black jacket cut halfway down her calves.  The sun is blinding.  He watches and imagines her with children, smiling the way mothers smile.  Her house, her bedroom, the pictures on the walls, the sweet smell of scattered bowls of potpourri.  What it would be like, the two of them, shopping, dinner, every luxury, every indulgence, coming home to the sweet smell of their house together.  Watches and waits, but the opportunity never presents itself.  Waits for a long, long time.

Malachi waves from the far corner of The Morning Star.
“Aren’t you glowing today.  That’s good.  The weather’s letting up, don’t you think?”
He sits down beside Malachi and orders a whiskey.
“Yep, I was just telling Karl that it’s going to get warm soon.  No more of this rain.  It’s almost rained out.”
“Yep.”
“That’s right.  What do you do, Buddy?  I don’t see you around the Square.”
“I’m a vendor on Pine.”
“That’s a good spot.  I was going to be a vendor last year but it didn’t work out.  Can’t remember why, just one of those things.  I bet you see all kinds of stuff up there.  Lots of ladies I bet.”
“Lots.”
“That’s right.  Lots of money up there.  I don’t go up there much because they hassle me.  What kinda people got to hassle a man for walking someplace?”

He locks the cart, pushes it over to Union, and leaves it in the garage he rents in the alley.  He walks to the market and buys his dinner: a potato and a pound of salmon.  On the bus he sits beside an older woman in a bright dress with her umbrella stuffed beneath their seat.  A baby stirs in her lap.  The bus travels north past a crumbling, gray cemetery.
“Beautiful baby.”
The baby is tan and its hair sticks out from beneath its bonnet.  It has tiny, gentle hands.
“Don’t be looking at my baby and don’t be talking to me.”
“I just . . .”
“What?  Keep your eyes on your stop, Mister.  I don’t want to be talking to some crazy on a bus.”
“But . . .”
The lady pulls the cord and stands.  She holds the baby with one arm and grabs her umbrella with the other.  He rises politely, trying to move into the aisle, but he catches his jacket on the seat’s arm and stumbles.
“Get out of my way.”
The lady pushes by him, and he falls into the aisle.  She hurries towards the exit without looking back.
The passengers stare at him on the floor.  His jacket is ripped and the potato has rolled out of his bag, towards the front.  No one attempts to retrieve it.  He crawls up the aisle, feeling the eyes watching him, and he looks for the potato.  It lies beneath a young black man who is listening to headphones, bobbing his head with his eyes closed.
“Excuse me, Sir.”
He reaches under the chair and grabs the potato.
“What the hell?”
“I was getting my . . .”
“What are you trying to do?”
“My potato.  I was getting my potato.”
“What?”
“My potato.”
The man turns off the headphones and stands.
“I’m sorry.  I was just getting this potato.”
He holds up the potato and the man knocks it from his hand.  It rolls awkwardly down the aisle.
“Get out of my face.  Fucking potato.”
The passengers watch as he drops his head, picks up the potato, and slouches back to his seat.
He tries to focus on the city.  The narrow apartments, the marinas, the graffiti tagged housing, the bustling convenient stores, but they pass too quickly.  The bus slows, stops, and he hurries off.
He hits the pavement and begins to run.   A stale, brass taste like heart attack on his tongue.
Someone follows close behind him.
There is numbness in his fingers, a cold deadness in his legs.  He turns onto Fremont and glimpses the black man from the bus.  The man is not smiling.
The gray awning hanging above his building’s door in the distance and he sprints, not looking back, breathless.  He turns his key and hurries behind the gate.
In his apartment, he begins to shake.  He holds himself in such a way as to crush the tremors welling up inside of him.  He begins to sob.  He pulls at his hair.  Creeping over to the window, he parts the blinds, looks out onto the street.  Nothing but rain and pavement.  He turns on the oven and listens to the rain.

“I tell you what I believe, Buddy.  The devil is real.  Evil is real.  And I mean in the straight up biblical sense.  Demons and possessions.  The need for a definitive faith.  A lot of the boys out on the street think I’m crazy when I talk like that.  They just roll their eyes.  But you know what is going on, the way they’ve been finding people stuffed in the bottom of dumpsters, babies left to wallow in their own shit.  Who do you think is responsible for that?  Society?  Some ordinary person?  Someone who’s just a little off?  Shit, some nights I get a chill when I’m out there, feels like it comes right off the water, but it doesn’t.  Get that chill one time.  Tell me what it is.”

“No explanations.  No excuses.  I don’t know how long you’ve been following me but if you try to get on my bus you will be sorry.”
Her voice bleeds out of the rush-hour traffic.  People begin to move; a lady and her daughter slide down the curb; two boys stop fighting and begin to watch; a fat man chuckles and folds his newspaper.
“Just sit over there and wait on your own bus.”
The sun lights her face.  She is young, beautiful, and her voice is as smooth as the breeze lifting off the sound.  A can of pepper spray rests gently on her lap.
Buses come and go and they sit this way in silence.
He wants to explain.  She is different, not like the others, different, like no one he has seen.  She makes him feel honest, romantic, kind.  The coldness in her face makes him blush.  His hands get damp and pasty.
“Are you sick or stupid?  You can answer.”
The fat man hits his belly laughing.
“You better answer, Boy.  Hell, he might be mute.”
“Or just scared and stupid.”
“I’m not stupid.”
“Well, he’s not mute.”
“I wasn’t following you.”
“No?”
“I’m here to catch my bus.”
“And which bus is that?”
“The fifteen.”
“Boy, the fifteen don’t run by here.”
The fat man laughs.
“Listen to that.  No fifteen.  So why are you following me?”
“You following this lady, Boy?”
“He sure was.  All the way from the market.”
This is not what he planned.  A name, nice-to-meet-you, mountains, the coast, wine and roses, what it would be like once and for all to love and be loved and to do something absolutely real and beautiful.
“I’m not sick or stupid or following you.  I’m catching my bus.  There has been a terrible misunderstanding.”
“There is no misunderstanding.  Not only were you following me but you are a shitty liar.  I don’t know what you were thinking but it is not going to happen.  Not with us.  You know what it feels like to be stalked?  It’s a bit unnerving.  How would it feel to you?  How does it feel to be humiliated, to have absolutely no control.  Who’s powerless now, asshole.”
Her face is calm.  The bus arrives and she slips the pepper spray into her briefcase.  She nods at him, grins, and steps onto the bus as the bystanders laugh.

He rocks back and forth in his bedroom staring at a blank wall.  He wears tattered jeans and a tee-shirt advertising the previous summer’s Oldies Marathon on WKLX The Force.  He is sick.  His stomach cramps and seethes.  Things clutter the floor: a two day old bowl still wet with milk and cereal, a book without a cover, a high school yearbook, an open shoebox full of hair, photographs, bits of clothing, and the small paring knife recently sharpened, used, and cleaned.
The dictionary is open in his lap.  He has looked up the word love.  It is noun and verb.  It has over ten meanings, meanings that connote lovers, God, sex, tennis.
He pulls clumps of hair from his head.
There is something, he thinks, something meaningless in what’s before him, as if it explains the how and why and the answers to a whole assortment of other questions that torment him.  Like if what he reads resembles the way his mother kissed him each and every night after his prayers, the way she would tuck him in and say, I love you, Son, and the way his father’s friends over to watch a baseball game would smile, hold their beers high up in the air, and his father would snatch him from the floor and say, I love this boy, and he is sure, because these things were surely said to him, that love is tangible, something he knows, something he should be comfortable with.  But still, he thinks, there are other things, things like when his high school girlfriend who said she loved him slept with someone else, and later told him that she did not want to sleep with that someone else and because of this they cried in each other’s arms, cried, it seemed, until the day she finally said they were over, they were through, but let him know she still loved him, loved him even then, loved him even though she never would sleep with him but seemed to have no real problem sleeping with that someone else.  And what of the woman in Nevada who had laughed, Sure baby, I love you, as they made love but afterwards he felt wretched, alone for hours, and she took his money, wouldn’t even look at him, and he realized that sometimes women sleep with the ones they love and sometimes they don’t and sometimes they don’t even know they love someone until they sleep together, and what a complicated matter that can be, and how all of this, and then some, seems to expose the futility of trying to pinpoint what does and what does not genuinely qualify as love, or at least, it is a very hard thing to achieve a working definition.

“That’s him.”
The day is yellow, sunlight off of glass and steel.  There she is, the lady in the black suit.  The lady in the black suit coming this way with a security guard.
He scoops a little relish and onion on the hotdog and hands it to the business man.
“That will be three-fifty.”
The business man takes out his wallet.  The lady and security guard walk up beside him.
“Can I have a word with you?”
The security guard is thick, tan, with a face like concrete.
“One minute.”
“Now.”
“That’s the guy who followed me, Rich.  Son of a bitch followed me all the way down to my stop.”
“Is that true?”
“Hold on one minute.”
“Is that true, Mister.”
The business man handles his money, looks at the three of them, and leaves without his food.
“Look, I have a permit to be out here.  You can’t be running off my business.”
“Were you following this lady the other day?”
“I don’t have to . . .”
“The hell you don’t.”
The security guard puts both of his hands on the cart and leans in.
“Mister, I got the jurisdiction to take you around to the back of this building and kick the living shit out of you if me or her thinks you’re a problem.”
“A problem?”
“Undesirable.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“I’m not threatening you, Mister.”
“Leave it.  You’ve seen him.  If he does anything again, I’ll let you know.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“You can’t come out here and talk to me like this.  I’ve got a city permit.”
“I don’t give a shit.”
“Don’t worry, Rich.  I think he understands his situation now.”
“I told you, this is all a terrible misunderstanding.”
“Sure it is.  And I’m sure there won’t be another one.”
As they walk back inside the building, they laugh.

“No, you can’t buy me a drink.  You better get lost before my boyfriend gets here and kicks your ass.”

Lately, he has been angry.  It singes his chest, scorches his eyes.  It gives him blinding, white headaches.
It is not his house.  There are long, horizontal windows that face east over the lake and a crescent deck coming off the bedroom with cement planters and a well finished wooden railing.  The bedroom has lovely pictures: a family posing at Christmas, Rainier above the clouds, a couple, young and happy, vacationing in Hawaii.  There is an oriental rug spanning the floor and the bed sits high on oak carved posts.  A woman lies there.
“I love you.  Don’t you see I love you.  Love me.  Say you love me.  God, please love me.”
She says she loves him and they weep themselves to sleep.

It could be he dreamed of a fancy dinner, and when he awakes, this is what he remembers.  Bright orange wallpaper with birds and moons.  The waiter in a black wool jacket, crimson tie.  China and crystal shimmers on the white tablecloth.  He eats lobster, she eats fowl, and they smile, laugh, drink as much as they can.  The wine is a deep burgundy.  It pours freely.  Sunlight fades and reappears and fades and reappears and fades again through the stained-glass windows.  Red, blue, and yellow colors the hardwood floor.  Her lips are wine, her hair violet, eyes the color of gorgeous, swirling bruises.  She wears a black, silk dress that falls to her ankles.  Kiss, say I love you, and the waiter smiles at them both.

“It’s your eyes, Buddy.”
“My eyes?”
“You got a prophet’s eyes.  I may have the name but you got the eyes.”
“I haven’t seen anything.”
“No?”
“I’ve spent my life not seeing anything.  Don’t you think it’s better that way?”
“You’re telling me.”
“Eventually you stop seeing anything.  It just disappears, and if it doesn’t disappear, it gets to be like a cartoon or something.  Bugs Bunny.  Woody Woodpecker.  Goofy shit that is more entertainment than real.  No one really looks at it.  You know, when I was growing up my Mom and Dad made it a point to teach me things.  Right and wrong.  Truth and lies.  You learn those things, simple things Malachi, and you’re a better person for it.  You then have the tools to make decisions.  The tools to be someone.”
“You came from good people. That matters.”
“Mom and Dad made it a point to sit down to dinner as a family every night.  You don’t get that anymore.”
“Nope.”
“It’s all about love, I know that sounds faggot, but it’s true.  It’s like some dumb poem you write a girl you are in love with.  Like serenading someone beneath the window.  That stuff matters.  It really does.  If people just would love . . .”
“You see things, Buddy.  You know things . . .”

What it’s like for him is like sitting on a park bench way past the time at night when any decent person still walks the streets.  The night a memory of the bustling which is the day.  Something colder than a breeze blows east off the water, sneaking its way through the downtown alleyways and around the corners of buildings, buildings like the one he sits in front of now.  His hands and face chapped by this same cold night that blows off the water.  Sitting, as he does, waiting, as he will, another minute, another hour, hoping, as he always seems to do, that tonight will be the night when she leaves alone and crosses the concrete plaza directly in front of him and takes her place beside his own, sits gently down, lays a hand on his leg and smiles at him, a sincere smile unmistakable for what it is, and he can take what he holds, the small short piece of sharpened steel, take that thing and toss it across the street with a clank, clank, skip into a gutter, never to need or use it again.

It is the middle of the day, but inside The Morning Star, it is drunker than midnight.  The bartender hands him a whiskey.
“He’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“The cops found another bum stuffed in a dumpster behind the Kingdome.  Someone had carved him up like a Thanksgiving turkey.  Weird, isn’t it?  Karl said he split town, said he was heading south to San Francisco.  Maybe San Diego.  The cops drilled him for a while.  I bought Karl a beer but he barely drank it.  He told me his name wasn’t even Malachi.  It was Richard something and I guess they had a pretty long sheet on him.  But I liked him.  He usually had money and he was smiling most of the time.”
“You don’t think he had anything to do with it, do you?”
“He told me his name was Malachi.  He paid his tab.”

Malachi is gone.  Karl is gone.  The lady in the black suit is gone.  No longer is there anything familiar, except this.
The bar is red, red wallpaper flows from ceiling to floor, a red neon sign trickles its light across the window, red carpet, red chairs.
She laughs at him.
“You’re funny.  You’re so funny.”
He buys her another drink and pushes the hair from his eyes.
“Did you know you’re so funny, just so funny.”
He laughs with her and curls his arm around her waist.
“Where do you live?”
“Oh no, I’m not going . . .”
“Come on.  Where do you live?”
But she says, No, so he buys her another drink and she stumbles off her stool, laughing, and goes to the bathroom.  He slips the folded paper from his pocket, drops its contents into her drink.
“So funny.”
Her hair is oily yellow.  Her shoulders are frail.
He has been drinking all day.  He has been drinking a lot.  His mouth tastes like whiskey and ginger ale.
She wears a ragged black tanktop and her chest is flat.
“So funny . . .”
Her eyes wane from open to close and he tips her back onto her stool.  He smiles at the bartender, a big honest smile with teeth and lips, and he tips her onto the stool again.
She looks old but she is young.  His stomach turns as he fishes his wallet from his jeans, lays thirty dollars on the bar.
He carries her down the sidewalk, her feet and legs dragging, her head slack and faceless.  The April moon shines white, cutting clouds like knives across the sky.  They round a corner and stumble towards his apartment.
He wants to drop her, leave her, but he won’t.  She doesn’t wear a nice suit or have a nice house or even a nice pretty baby.  She is neither a good mother nor a good wife.  She has rancid breath and a horribly pale body.  She has half-done tattoos and a crooked haircut.
The squadcar flashes and shines a white light on the two of them.
“Sir, stand against the wall.”
“We’re just . . .”
“Sir . . .”
The voice booms out and across the street .  The car-door opens and the cop gets out.
“How are you two doing tonight?”
“We’re on the way home.  She . . .”
“Who?”
“What?”
“Who is the young lady?”
“Her?”
“Do you know her?”
“Yeah, I mean I just met her at the bar, I mean, I’ve known her, but I just met her there a few hours ago.  She got pretty drunk.”
“Uh, huh.”
“I’m taking her home.”
“What’s her name?”
“Linda.”
“Linda what?”
“I don’t know, I mean, we’ve only met a couple of times.  Linda though.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“Drinking, yeah, I had two drinks.  I don’t live far.  I’m just going to take her home and go to sleep.”
“What’s your name?”
“What?”
The girl falls to the ground beside him and vomits.
“Jesus Christ get her to a bathroom before I arrest you both.”
“Yes Sir.”
“Where do you live?”
“Right down there.”
“Get her home.”
“Yes Sir.  Yes Sir.”
The cop circles the block twice, sees them enter his apartment, and leaves.
He takes the knife from the kitchen.  It is black and silver and made by J. A. Henckles from Solingen, Germany.  It has a three-inch, stainless-steel blade.
She lies face down in the bedroom, snoring, and he cuts the back of her tanktop from waist to neck.
He closes his eyes and runs the blade across the small of her back.
This is how he begins.

They never understand.  They never take the time to really look inside him, really see that all he wants is someone special with whom to share his life.  A reasonable and honorable desire for sure.  But it never happens that way, and instead, what do they do, what do they always try to do?  They humiliate him.  With a laugh, with a glare, with a dismissive sigh.  They humiliate him.  Just take the lady in the black suit.  Never giving him a chance, never knowing what could have been.  Instead, she humiliates him.  Powerless.  That is her word.
And again it always comes back to this.
The woman lies on his bed with her pants on the floor, hair in her eyes, her hands bound, mouth gagged.  The woman who drank the drink he bought her and left with him looking drunk and wanting.  She loves him.  She does.  She just got done loving him and even though she cried, he knows this is only because she does not yet realize what there love will be.
He stands and removes his shirt, kicking the bowl of milk and cereal under his bed.  He leans down and caresses her neck, her breast, her soft and delicate thigh.

In the end how else would it have gone.  The one thing he was always sure of.
He taps the window lightly at first.  Just hard enough to get her attention.  She looks at him, and even though the baby in the backseat is crying, screaming with a scream as high and horrible as anything he has ever heard, he can hear her scream above it.  Reaching towards the backseat, her hand securing the car seat, her other hand a flicker beneath the seat, he watches this, trying to smile, trying to be kind, considerate, smiling; but he is just the same as he has always been.  The woman pulls the gun from behind her, and to his surprise, he gets a good look at it.  It small and black and silent at first.  Silent until it is not.  Silent until the glass explodes on him, shards of white silver in all directions.  The woman’s car pulls away.  His head has hit the pavement, hits it hard and above the concrete is grey and the echo inside the garage takes a long time to fade.

Gavin Pate can be reached at:  gavinmcshan AT hotmail.com