Dog must have known his day would come.
He was usually the victor in these bouts, but today, Captain Jack had him cornered. The two men had been at it since dawn, and soon, the coveted prize would be Jack’s. Dog made one final lunge for freedom. Jack wouldn’t have it. The Captain grabbed Dog’s long, yellow, matted tresses. Dog howled, “No! Jack!” and released the prize. For the first time, the Captain won the weekly dumpster brawl.
Everything had started out innocently enough. It usually did. Once a week, the two of them would anchor down beside my apartment’s trash bin early in the morning and pick through the contents inside. Within an hour or two, Dog and Jack usually each had a handsome pile of booty. But there was always some trinket they had to fight over. Today was the longest I’d ever seen them go at it.
I couldn’t make out through my kitchen window exactly what they were fighting over this morning. But whatever it was, it sure pleased Jack. He cradled his prize in his arms, glowering over his shoulder toward Dog, who was busy stuffing more booty into his shopping cart.
When Dog finally disappeared down the alley, Jack tenderly set his prize in his cart and wrapped it in a quilt. While he quietly took inventory of his day’s haul, I had time to finish making lunch. I wrapped up one of the sandwiches I had made, grabbed a banana, and went out to see him.
“Morning, Jack,” I said, as I offered up some grub.
“Ohhh,” he responded in his usual gritty growl. It was his only response whenever I came out with food. He took the sandwich and banana, and wrapped them in the same quilt that protected his cherished prize.
“Find anything good this morning, Jack?”
He shot me a suspicious look with his one good eye and growled, “Nothing . . . no good, none of your business.”
“Okay, Jack, have a nice day.”
He was silent.
I turned and went back inside. By the time I got up to my apartment and looked out the window, he was gone.
***
I always imagined that Jack harbored some slight affection for me. Or, at least, was comforted by my familiarity. I don’t know why I cared so much about what a homeless man thought of me, but the truth was I really liked him.
When I came to Edmonton, Jack was one of the first people I had met. I’d just moved into a small one-bedroom a few blocks from downtown. Since I didn’t have any groceries at the end of my big moving day, I walked down to the Husky gas station a few blocks away. I thought I could at least get a quart of milk and a bag of Doritos.
Though it was beginning to get dark, I could still easily survey my new neighborhood as I walked. Grimy remains of McDonald’s tossed out a car window, lay scattered down the street. The skeletal frame of a couch sat abandoned on the front of an untended lawn. A mob of magpies the size of roasting chickens stalked a black cat down the adjacent sidewalk.
I was close to the gas station when I heard a vehicle coming from behind. An old blue Mazda rolled by. It slowed down. It stopped. The passenger side window rolled down.
“Hey . . . hey, how ‘bout forty?” asked one of the vehicle’s occupants.
“ ‘Scuse me?”
“Forty bucks.”
“You want forty dollars? Uh, no . . . sorry . . .”
“No, bitch, forty bucks for a blow.”
“What? No . . . asshole.”
I immediately looked around for help. With the exception of the magpies disappearing down the street after the cat, I was alone. Before I could worry a second longer, the Mazda pulled away. I exhaled deeply and tried to calm myself. I exhaled a second too soon.
The Mazda pulled over and parked twenty feet in front of me. The occupant who had propositioned me, got out. I stopped dead, my feet cemented to the sidewalk. The man stood facing me, not saying anything, his face blank. I turned around, deciding it was safer to go home and be hungry.
As I picked up my pace, I could hear the man’s footsteps following behind, faster and faster. I quickly surveyed my surroundings and my options. I assumed that I couldn’t outrun him if he gave chase. I decided to take a stand. Why I thought that was a better option, I’ll never know. I turned on my heel and faced the creep. I was within his arm’s reach.
“Leave me alone.”
He didn’t respond.
“Fuck off.”
That did it. He reached up and grabbed a handful of my hair as I tried to back away. I knew I should scream, but my mouth was instantly swollen dry with fear, my jaw locked in an open-mouthed grimace. I couldn’t move my feet. My stomach had turned into an iron stone that weighed me down and held my core to that spot. A high-pitched squealing and metallic rattling sliced through my ears. I thought I could hear a man’s voice yelling indecipherably through the fog that had filled my head.
All of a sudden, a force vibrated through my assailant’s body, up through his arms, and into my head. He pitched sideways and fell over onto the street taking a fistful of my hair with him. My mind’s fog slowly started to clear as I stood staring dumbly at the man who was crawling backwards, scratching at the pavement behind him. Now he couldn’t get away from me fast enough. I turned to see what, or who, it was that had pitched him out onto the street. I could barely believe my eyes.
I’ve been saved by a pirate.
He stood only a few inches taller than me, and wore a beat-up leather coat that hung down to his ankles. He had a broad-rimmed black felt hat and an eyepatch. His face was weathered and seemed to blend into the brown leather of his jacket.
Then I saw the shopping cart. I realized that the pirate had used the cart to ram my assailant, who was already jumping back in the blue Mazda.
“Thank you,” I said to the pirate, my throat still clogged with fear.
He was silent.
“What’s your name?”
“Jack.”
“Jack, you may have just saved my life.”
More silence.
“You’ve got a lot of stuff in your cart, Jack. Do you have any food?”
He raised a grizzled, gray eyebrow and coarsely grated out, “No food . . . not for you.”
“Oh, no, not for me, Jack,” I tried to reassure him, rubbing the sore spot on my head. “For you. I’m on my way to get some food and, if you want, you can come with me and I’ll make sure I get enough for both of us.”
I turned and started to walk to the Husky. My legs felt gelatinous and unsteady, and my heart was still beating too quickly. Jack and his cart trailed behind me and I could see him loitering in the gas-station parking lot, making himself look busy with his cart’s contents, while I shopped inside. After I paid for everything, I went over and handed him an already greasy box of gas-station chicken and potato wedges, a slightly bruised apple, some granola bars, and a Gatorade.
“Sorry. They don’t have much of a selection, and that was the last of the fruit.”
A gravelly, “Ohhh,” was his sole reply.
He started to pack the food into his cart. I turned to walk home, my heart quickening at the prospect of walking back alone. I was about a block from the station when I heard the cart coming. I never looked back, but could hear it behind me all the way home. I got into my apartment, peeked out the curtain to the street below, and saw nothing. Jack had already sailed off into the night. Little did I know that he, and his companion, Dog, would be a weekly fixture in my life. My calendar and clock could be set for their weekly visits to the big green garbage bins in the alley.
***
Dog was Jack’s only friend. Though the two would fight it out at my dumpster every Monday morning, he was the only person I ever saw Jack hang around with. He wore a long, beat-up leather jacket that nearly matched Jack’s, but that seemed the only thing they had in common. That and their love of pilfering the garbage for booty, that is. I never spoke to Dog, but took to naming him after the long-haired, bleached-blond bounty hunter of TV renown that he resembled.
Though they fought on a weekly basis, Dog had Jack’s back. One night when I was driving home from work, I saw two people with Jack’s cart. I couldn’t see Jack anywhere, but I knew the cart was his from its masthead—an enormous plush Tasmanian Devil bungeed to the front. Out of nowhere, Dog came swooping in on the thieves, scattering them in opposite directions. The next day, I saw Jack with his cart.
***
Another Monday morning came along and, oddly enough, Dog and Jack were nowhere to be seen. It was mid-morning before I heard the commotion in the back alley. Before I could look to confirm it was them, the shrill scream of a woman met my eardrums. A booming male voice cursed in response.
When I reached my kitchen window, I saw a man grasping a woman by her hair, slamming her head into the door of a rusted-out, green pick-up truck. I tried to slide my kitchen window open—it was stuck. I ran out onto my balcony and screeched, “Stop it! What are you doing? Stop. I’m calling the cops!”
The man dropped the woman’s head and spun around to look at me—he actually appeared shocked to have been caught. The woman he was abusing tried to crawl into his pick-up.
“No, no! Don’t get in there! Come here!” I screamed.
The woman turned her bloodied head and shrieked in an inhuman sound, “I just blew him and he won’t pay! He owes me twenty bucks.”
The man finally spoke up and yelled, “Don’t listen to her! She’s a dirty slut!”
He got into his truck and the two drove away. He could kill her, I thought as I ran into my living room, grabbed the phone and dialed 911. The cops found the two one street over. He had beaten her so badly that she was going to the hospital.
“Yeah, sex deal gone bad,” the cop said when he called for my statement. “The guy apparently also hit and killed someone with his truck.”
The cop explained that the man stopped down another alley, tried to get the woman out of his truck again, and some “crazy guy with a shopping cart” tried to intervene. He was hit when the two got back in the truck and sped off, only to be stopped by the police a few blocks away.
“Aw, well, it’s just some homeless guy,” continued the cop, “And our only witnesses are some other vagrant and the hooker. Did you happen to see anything?”
***
Yet another Monday morning came along, just the same, but also entirely different. Neither Dog nor Jack were to be seen. I sat on the cement door stoop waiting—a sandwich and a banana in a brown paper bag resting on my lap. The truth was, I really didn’t know for whom I was waiting. The police sergeant who paid me a visit the week prior hadn’t been any help.
“What was the name of the man who was hit?” I had asked.
“No name. No ID.”
“Was his name Jack?”
“No name. No ID.”
“Was it a pirate? A pirate that got hit?”
He had looked at me like I was insane.
I decided to call it a morning, and got up to head inside. That’s when I heard rattly wheels grinding sparse bits of gravel against the concrete. I waited. Then I saw it. The giant Tasmanian Devil. Then Jack. When he saw me, he stopped, pulled something out of his cart, and pretended to be busy admiring it. I walked up to the green garbage bin and left the brown paper bag on top.
By the time I returned to the stoop, Jack was propping his cart up against the bin. I stood watching him, feeling terrible about Dog, and almost as bad for Jack. The Captain didn’t have a lot and he had lost his only mate. Jack collected the brown paper bag, and without looking to check its contents, wrapped it up inside his quilt. I watched him as he half-heartedly picked through the bin’s bounty and collected a few odd items. He stowed his haul away in his cart and pushed off for another bin.
“See you next week, Jack.”
The Captain stopped, looked back at me, growled a gritty “Ohhh”, and sailed off.