"Hold the bus!" the man hollered. Then he repeated. And repeated. In the near darkness, where the weak street lamps were beginning to outshine the last vestige of twilight, the man with three legs were hollering.
Who was he talking to?
Anyone. But no was paying attention. I turned to look at the bus he was screaming at, or about. Then I realized he had been hollering for a while, probably since he saw the bus from the corner down the street. He couldn't run. He used his third leg to propel himself as quickly as possible. I saw that there were people sitting and the last person of the line into the bus had just got in the bus.
Should I stop the bus? I wondered. I wasn't even taking that bus. What would I say to the bus driver? A man with a cane is yelling for you to not drive a way? No one was paying heed to the three legged man's holler. I was at the point of helping, or I convinced myself that I was about to do that, when the bus door closed, its left signal started blinking, and the man's renewed cry was quickly drowned out by the roaring of the engine of this piece of public transportation.
The three-legged man was still quite a few paces away; it would have taken him another two minutes to get to the bus, two precious minutes that I doubt anyone, not the least the bus driver, had patience for. When the man stood next to me, looking at the distant bus that eventually disappeared in the lights of downtown, I recognized him. I didn't know who he was, but I knew he was one of the panhandlers I often saw around downtown. He had had a problem with his leg for as long as I had lived here. He was balding, his face a little disfigured from some event unknown to me, and he was developing a hunchback. He sat near me, about three people away. I braced myself for the usual homeless people smell, but I got nothing. He didn't really notice me, didn't look at me; he was catching his breath.
A few minutes later the sky was completely dark, and the man was somewhat of a concrete shadow sitting close to me. He would be waiting for another twenty minutes or so. My bus would come in about six minutes.
Then, out of the blue, the shadow with the cane started singing. It was a sweet, Southern song, at least it sounded like it, sounded like something black people would say in the south, a chorus of soul-searching black people with their stentorian voices praising the Lord. Maybe it was Gospel music. But I don't know. Maybe it was just my assumption based on the fact that he was a black man. His voice was clear, and I wondered why he didn't sing when he panhandled; I would imagine people would be more willing to give him some money.
The song was about a river that flowed in front of his house. Well, maybe not his house, but the house of the voice of the song. It was a swampy river, slow moving. There were birds and it was the evening, when the last bit of twilight had disappeared. It was, unlike now, very hot and humid, and the swamp started singing too.
Then his pocket started glowing, as if a flashlight just lit up inside. I didn't want to stare, but it was filling my head with imaginations. Maybe it was a bottle full of fireflies, the kinds you find in the summer, maybe where there were swamps. And I could have sworn that the light inside his pocket was moving even though.
Two more minutes left and my bus should be here.
His tune changed, and it became a sadder song. It was about some woman who never wrote back to him. She was from another town hours of bus ride away. And he only had the memory of the gardenias outside her little shack when he visited her that one time. The light in his pocket was glowing ever brighter. Was I the only one who noticed this? But even more, at this bus stop, surrounded by bare elm trees and no other vegetation, I started smelling something strong. Did a woman walk by with some strong perfume? No. People who took the bus in this sad town didn't put on anything but second-hand clothing from the Salvation Army. Besides, all this time I didn't notice any other creatures moving. No one joined us to wait for the bus, even though a lot of buses stopped here. Not even passersby. I wondered if that was the scent of gardenias; I have heard about them, but I don't even know what they smell like, or looked like. But this fellow told me; in his song he said she had the whitest teeth when she smiled, as white as the gardenias that still lingered in his mind. I started thinking about Ray Charles; he would sing a song like this, though I've never heard this song before.
The bus is late. It's a minute late. Typical. I don't know why I even keep track of time.
I sighed and shook my head at the predictability of the city's unpredictability. Then the singing stopped. I turned my head a little and realized he was looking at me, smiling. I was a little creeped out at first. The amber mercury light cast on his face made him look even more sinister than usual. I never really looked at his face when I bumped into him and hear him asking for change. He was one of the half dozen panhandlers in the downtown area, it was their place of employment so to speak. At first I looked away, but he said to me, "Hey Mister, you know what a jubaloo is?"
I turned to him, with my mind a little distracted by the hope that the bus would show up now. I saw his eyes this time. Dark, deep. There's a scar cut almost perpendicular to his right eye straight in the middle. Not too deep, barely noticeable, and not at all if you were just getting on your way ignoring his plead for money. Actually, it never really sounded like a plea, just like any innocent question so that "You got change for the homeless?" sounded just like "You know that water is a liquid at room temperature?" I noticed that his whiskers around his lips and on his chin were mostly gray. His face had a lot of freckles on. And when he spoke again, I noticed his lips, all chapped, and his teeth, revealed when he started smiling, very yellow and some were missing. "I'll show ya!" He dipped his hand into that pocket with the light glowing inside. The light didn't come out when he pulled his hand back out. And when he opened his palm there was a perfectly round ball inside, mostly yellow with some hint of red, though it's hard to distinguish the colors in this light.
"What's that?"
"Jubaloo! That's what you find in the swamps, a wild fruit. I never seen the tree but once a while, when the temperature is just right and the rain come just the right time, green flowers glow in the swamps like stars at night!"
"Green flowers? You mean leaves?" I thought.
"And if the right temperature come the right time after that with the right amount of rain and the right kind of bees, this fruit come burstin' out!"
"And how often does that happen?"
"I don't know. I've only experienced it once! They say it only happens once in a lifetime!"
I frowned. He laughed
He understood my bewilderment. He saw my incredulity. He continued, "That was nine years ago!"
"So the fruit can last nine years? This jumaboo?" I asked.
"Jubaloo. It can but only if you have the light," he said, at which point he pointed to his glowing pocket. "It doesn't need the light all the time, just sometimes. You would know when it needs it. It gets sad when he doesn't get enough light."
"Sad?"
"You just know when it's sad. If you are fortunate to witness the birth of the fruit, you are connected to it! And you can feel it, even though it's just a fruit!"
"And what is that light?"
"It's the light from the swamp. But it only glows so you can remove it, and then it stops glowing until you believe in it."
"Believe in it?"
"It is fueled by your belief in something. It will glow when you believe in something."
"Something?"
"Yeah, man. Something. It doesn't have to be the same thing; it doesn't have to be true for anyone else."
"And what did you believe in now that it is glowing?"
"I first believed, wanted to believe, that someone would stop the bus. Even though it didn't stop for me, I realized you wanted to stop it for me, but you were too late," he said, looking at me. "Then I believed that you would like my song, that it would make you believe in things too, like the smell of gardenia, love, life, whatever!"
As his face started glowing, so did his pocket. It was odd. It was incredible. I took one last look at the fruit; it was perfectly round, and somehow I believed it was sweet, sweet like nectar, sweet like memories of joy, sweet like hope. And it was at this moment that my bus finally came. The light of the stairs to the bus came on as the door was swung open. No one came up, and though I couldn't see the expression on the face of the driver, I knew I was being beckoned. I turned to take one last look at the panhandler, who smiled at me and didn't take his eyes off me before I looked away. In the bus, after paying my fare and sitting down by the window, I looked out, but the brightness of the bus, aided even more by the tint of the window pane, I couldn't make him out in the bus stop. I think I saw a glow, maybe the glow from his pocket, and in my mind I feel like I could see that fruit, then see the swamp he was singing about, the ivory teeth of the smile of the woman never to be seen again, and I wondered where my hopes and beliefs were flying off to.
