Without A Compass by Laura Creedle

On Wednesday Bob sets out for the Bart station. His plan (there always has to be a plan), is to meet his friend Steve outside the Church Street station. They are going hang out, listen to cds at Steve’s house.

He has memorized the directions from his house to the nearest Bart station. As he walks he counts his steps, tapping his cane in front of him in a slightly off kilter beat. The rhythm of his steps set the words of the instructions rolling around in his head like the fragment of a pop song, pleasant and meaningless.

He stops at a street intersection. Instead of walking straight, he realizes that he has turned towards the coffee house that is his usual destination at this hour.

“Oh fuck me.” he hisses.

Should he go back, retrace his steps, or should he go on, shorten the distance of the final leg of his journey by a block, and assume that the block lengths are the same?

A woman in boots walks up. She stands next to him, waiting for the light to change.

“I need you to walk me across the street.” He grasps her arm firmly. His tone is matter of fact; direct but polite. “Is the light red?”

“Yeah.” she smells warm, like she has been walking for a while, but clean. Bob tries to form a pleasant picture of the woman besides him, but the stiffening of her arm, the small grunt of surprise she made when he touched her clouds his mind with annoyance.

The light changes and they set out.

“Are we going north on Telegraph?”

She mumbles something.

“Are we on Telegraph?” he says, his voice rising.

“ I don’t know.”

“What street are we on?”

She shrugs, pulling loose from his hand.

“Fucking terrific.” A small seed of panic tightens his grip on her arm.

“You have eyes. What street are we on?”

“I don’t see a sign.” Her voice is a small choking sound from the back of a classroom: she doesn’t know, she didn’t do the assignment.

He wants to tell her that in the larger world, “I don’t know” is not an answer.

“What do you see? Tell me what you see and maybe I can figure out where we are.”

He is trying to be patient.

She stops abruptly in the street.

“Look,” he squeezes her arm, punitively this time, “we need to turn around and cross the other street.”

Without a word she turns into the oncoming traffic, walking crosswise in the intersection.

“What are you doing?” he yells at her.

At the bark of his voice she shakes her arm, trying to wrench free from his grasp. A car whizzes by so close that he can feel the bulk of it viscerally.

“What the fuck are you gonna do, leave me in the middle of the street?” He clutches her arm hard enough to feel his nails dig into her flesh. She make a noise.

“Take me back to the corner.” She doesn’t move. A driver honks a horn, blaring as he drives by.

“Oh thanks, I didn’t know I was in the middle of the street!”, he yells at the driver, already gone. The ridiculousness of the situation alarms him more than the danger. In all embarrassing moments his mind draws a picture for him. He is in a car, rushing past an impotent figure in a rumpled shirt with a slight pot belly, holding a cane in one hand and the arm of a woman with a cow-like expression of blankness in the other. His arm makes a decision.

He hits the woman with his cane. Satisfyingly, the cane feels like a extension of his arm, like a riding crop on a stubborn horse. He hits her again. She moves away from the direction of his blows, back toward the curb, making a repetitive bleating sound. He enjoys the surprising strength of her pull, the balance between his left hand, pulling back on her arm, and his right hitting forward with the cane. It is this awareness of the mechanical beauty of the world, the force and leverage of things that he misses the most.

They make it to the curb. He breathes in, his grip softens, then drops. He feels that he has emerged from the street as though from sleep or deep water.

The bleating sounds she is making form into words.

She is saying “I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry.” he mutters, stricken. The cane falls slack at his side and he reaches over with his left hand to find her shoulder. He hates the inadequacy of the gesture.

“I've beaten a woman in public,” he thinks, “Who says there are no new experiences left to explore?”

His hand finds her shoulder. At his touch, she falls into his arms with a lunge. She is tall in her boots, as tall as he is. She lowers her head onto his shoulder.

“I’m lost.” Hot words spill out of her, “I read about this job in the paper but I don’t know where I am—I just moved here.”

He hears his own voice as if it were someone else’s voice coming from a great distance. So far removed in sound and sentiment from his chest where her breast are pressing into him, or the moist region of her face in the side of his neck and shoulder, that it could be floating above them.

“Shhhh, its okay” he says. Some dumb kid from the midwest wandering around like a kitten in traffic, late for the kind of job they advertise for in the newspaper; telemarketing, or a backdoor entry into the sex industry through “modeling”. Nothing would ever be okay and he’d be doing her a favor if he told her. Instead, he calls Steve on his cell phone. Then he takes her to breakfast.

 

Laura Creedle: Laura lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and two kids. She has played guitar in different austin bands for the past fifteen years, most recently in TripleWide. She wrote stories for a San Francisco zine called Lobster Tendencies in the early 80's. This is her first story submission since then.