"Trick or treat! Trick or treat! Trick or treat," dancing around her and taunting her in a wild melee of mean spirited activity, disguised in Halloween masks, the four teenage boys screamed their hatred at her.
I was stunned. I couldn't believe my eyes. It took me a second to react to what they were doing and to what I was seeing, before I went into action. Only, it was too late. They had already pushed her to the pavement and taken her bag of cans.
"Hey! Stop that! Get away from her! Leave her alone."
I ran to where the group of boys had knocked the old woman down. At first I thought she was just another kid dressed in costume trick or treating for Halloween. Only, her perceived bag of candy was a bag of collected cans for their deposit. Certainly, she had enough problems without having to be targeted for this shit.
As I neared, I realized she was a homeless woman. By her raggedy appearance and weathered, wrinkled skin, she was a witch of a woman. Dressed in dark colored torn and tattered rags, she looked really old. No doubt, living on the street made her look older than her age. Still, she looked as if those cans were all she had. Fearing the worst, I ran up to her expecting she had hit her head on the sidewalk or broken her arm or hip in the fall.
"Are you okay? Let me help you up. Careful. Are you injured? Is anything broken? Do you want me to call for an ambulance?"
"I'm okay, thank you," she said squeezing my hand to raise herself from a lying position to a sitting one, while looking up at me to give me a sad, little smile. "I got the little bastards," she said with a spiteful twinkle in her eye. "I got them. I took five from each of them and that's twenty for you," she said, as if she had been victorious in battle.
Clutching her left hand tightly, as if holding a trapped fly and not wanting whatever she held in it to escape, she raised her hand to my face for me to see and smiled. As I leaned in closer to see what she held, she inhaled and blew.
"From one to another, from bad boys to a good man, I give this gift to you for a good deed done," she said.
In a puff of her foul breath, she blew whatever was in her hand in my eyes, but there was nothing but air and the stench of her bad breath. At least, at the time, I thought that there was nothing and that her hand was empty, but I was pleasantly surprised, shocked actually, to discover later that it wasn't.
"Let me help you to stand," I said gently helping her up from the sidewalk.
"Those cans were my supper tonight. Such a waste of time and energy. I spent my day collecting them and was just on my way to the store to cash them in and buy some food," she said, as if talking to herself.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm so sorry."
"Don't you worry," she said. "Those little bastards thought they got the better of me, but I fixed them. They'll never even know enough to be sorry for pushing me down and stealing my cans, until it's too late," she said looking at me and waving her finger to pontificate her words. "I took something they can never get back, they're all short lived now," she said giving me a nod, as if expecting my acknowledgment, when I had no idea what she was saying.
"Here," I said pulling a twenty from my pocket, putting it in her hand, and wrapping her fingers around it.
"I can't take this," she said without even looking at the denomination of the bill.
"Please, I insist. I'll sleep better tonight, knowing you've had something to eat."
"Thank you," she said opening her hand and realizing that I had given her a twenty, instead of what most people give the homeless, a dollar or some spare change. "Twenty dollars for twenty years. Many a man would pay a lot more for what I just gave you, but you're kind, very kind, I can see that in your face. You're a generous soul even, the type who'd give someone the shirt off your back without knowing the gift I gave you. Thank you," she said again.
"You're welcome," I said giving her a smile.
"What comes around goes around and finally it comes around to you," she said with a wicked laugh and waving her crooked finger in a circle in the air over her head, before jabbing her long, dirty fingernail in my chest. The static shock of her finger made me feel, as if I was being jabbed with an electric needle and a sudden rush of energy surge through my veins like adrenaline. Supercharged, instantly, I felt invigorated.
"If only it was that easy," I said, then more people would step up and do the right thing, instead of sticking their heads in the sand, pretending they didn't see, and not getting more involved for fear they'll be inconvenienced.
"I bet you're like that all the time, a good Samaritan, helping those in need and not expecting anything in return. Only, it's about time that someone, who's as good as you have been to others be rewarded, too. It's your turn." She looked at me and smiled. "This is your lucky day. You'll thank your stars you met me."
Figuring she had been drinking and/or hit her head on the sidewalk in her fall, I had no idea what she was going on about. Maybe she was senile, maybe she was crazy, but whatever she was, she was talking nonsense and I was eager to deposit her somewhere, once I was assured myself that she was feeling better and okay to be left alone.
"I can walk with you a way, until you're more steady on your feet. Where do you live?"
Wishing I could take back the words, as soon as I said them, I felt dumb. Where do you live? Look at her. She's in rags, carrying all she has in a little wooden bucket. She's homeless. She lives on the street, no doubt, in some doorway or under a bridge with cardboard for a bed and mice and roaches for pets instead of a cat and a dog.
I should have a problem. Compared to her plight, compared to the misery that is her day, I'm lucky. Here I was feeling sorry for myself for being alone and lonely, after my wife left me for some home improvement contractor, and this poor woman doesn't even have a roof over her head, a bed to sleep in, and food to eat. I'd be cranky and miserable if my cable went out for a few hours and this woman goes without everything, food, water, shelter, and a toilet every day. I can't imagine how endures it all. I can't imagine how she survives.
Feeling that we meet the people we do for a reason and sometimes don't always discover why someone crosses our path when they do, until it's too late, I wondered what the reason was I was meeting this bag lady. Maybe there was none. As simple as this, maybe the reason having her in my life was to make me feel grateful for what I have.
For two years, I've been focusing on what I don't have, namely my wife, and compared to this old, homeless woman, I have so much. I have a good life. I have everything that I need. Maybe meeting this woman is just want I need to get over the breakup of my marriage and get my head back on straight enough to continue my life without her and to find someone else to love. Wouldn't that be great to find a woman to talk to, laugh with, and to hold, hug, kiss, and to love?
"Whoa," she said, suddenly looking, as if she was about to keel over. "Sorry, but I suddenly feel so dizzy."
I reached out my hand and caught her by her arm, before she fell.
"Have you eaten anything?" She looked at me, as if she didn't understand my words. "Have you had anything to eat?"
"Today?"
She looked the way my mother used to look, when she couldn't remember if she had taken her medication. And I always wished people had paid my Mom the same courtesy then, that I was paying this woman now, when my Mom fell dead in the street and people walked by her and stepped over her, figuring she was drunk. Dead before even hitting the pavement, said the medical examiner after the autopsy, she died of a massive heart attack.
Someone even stole her purse on the pretense of stopping to help her. They had his image on video camera surveillance installed by the police high up on a building, but the black and white photo was so grainy that it was useless in trying to identify the man. Because my Mom had no identification, she spent days lying in the morgue with a Jane Doe toe tag, while I was crazy out of my mind trying to find her.
"Let's go in here," I said motioning to a little cafe where we were stopped in front of, while waiting for her to regain her sense of balance.
"Oh, no, I can't go in there. It's cursed," she said pulling away from me, taking a step back, and closing and buttoning her sweater. She brushed off her sleeves, but they were so caked with hair, dirt, and city grime that it didn't make any difference.
"Why can't you go in here?"
"They won't serve someone like me, not the way I look," she said looking down at herself and then at me with an embarrassed smile. "I asked to use the bathroom here once, and the owner refused. I had to go so badly that I had an accident in my pants later, but I fixed him, too."
It was more than a bit disconcerting, whenever she said she fixed people. In the way she said it made me wary of her and I assumed she was mentally ill. Nonetheless, I was anxious to help her, so that she wouldn't feel the need to fix me, too. Perhaps, her blood sugar was low and that was making her say strange things. She'd feel better, no doubt, after a hot meal.
"Here," I said taking off my jacket and putting it over her shoulders. "They'll serve you, so long as you're with me, a paying customer," I said pulling her along. "C'mon, you'll feel better with some hot food in your stomach."
There was a metal box mounted to the wall with the photo of a man, the owner of the restaurant, who had suddenly taken ill. He was in the hospital in a coma and his family were asking for donations from customers to help defray his medical costs. Suddenly, after seeing his photo and being sensitive to his plight, feeling somewhat like there go I before God, I put in all the spare change I had, about three dollars worth.
Then, I wondered if this bag lady had somehow caused him to take ill, maybe that was how she fixed him. Nah, it was just a terrible coincidence is all. She's just talking ragtime. The fact that it was Halloween night was causing me to read more into her and into this than there was. Surely, she wasn't a witch. Surely she was someone's grandmother, mother, wife, sister and daughter.
We walked inside and I grabbed a table, a corner booth that was a distance away from the other patrons and that looked more comfortable than the little bistro chairs they had situated in front of the big, bay window that looked out over the busy city street and where most customers preferred to sit and people watch. Besides, I needed more room than those little bistro tables for the food I had planned on ordering to fatten her up and for her to take the leftovers with her to wherever it was she called home.
The waitress came over and looked at her, before looking at me and looking back at her again. I could tell she wanted to say something, but she didn't. She looked at me again, smiled, and handed us the menus.
"The specials are on the insert," she said opening the menu. "We have something different every day. Today is beef stew, where the chef takes the leftovers from the week and puts it all in a big pot, but it's really good and it's loaded with tender beef. Unlike the beef stews of other restaurants, there's more beef in our beef stew than carrots and potatoes."
