Daddy's Gone a Hunting

37

In one way Clyde Hotchkiss was very careful. He always tried to save enough money from panhandling to have enough subway fare for at least one ride. Where he was going didn’t matter. He would get on a train late at night and get off to go to his van, or wherever he wanted. Sometimes if he fell asleep he rode to the end of the line and then back to Manhattan.

After the fight with Sammy, and then being thrown out of the garage driveway on Sunday morning, he had pulled his cart to Thirty-first Street to join the St. Francis bread line. Then, because he knew Sammy would talk to his homeless friends about what had happened and they might gang up on him, he decided to do the one thing he hated to do: stay at a homeless shelter on Sunday night. But when he got there, being near so many other people nearly drove him crazy. It was as though Joey Kelly’s body were again pressing against his in Vietnam, but even so he stayed. He was coughing a lot and the pain from his old hip injury was getting worse and worse. And the fact that he had forgotten the picture of him and Peggy and Skippy when he had fled the van was now bothering him a lot. At first he hadn’t cared, but now he knew that he needed the comfort the picture gave him, the feeling of being loved. He hadn’t seen Peggy or Skippy in all these years, but their faces were suddenly so clear in his head.

And then Joey’s face and the face of that girl began to follow the faces of Peggy and Skippy, going round and round like in a carousel.

On Monday it began to rain again. Clyde’s cough got deeper as he shivered, crouching against a building on Broadway. Almost no one in the hurrying crowd stopped to drop a coin or a dollar bill in the ragged cap he had placed near his feet. His luck was changing and he knew it. He had become so used to the nightly protection of the van that he couldn’t last much longer in the streets without it.

Cold and wet, he dragged his cart downtown to another shelter that night. As he arrived at its door, he fainted.