I could smell the man before I saw him. It was just summer in north Texas. There was a thin breeze, a relief from the sun, and I was grateful for it. But it carried with it the scent of the man. I could smell him as soon as I had opened the door to my car to get out.
“Is it garbage day?” I said aloud, to no one. It was not. I knew it was not. There were none of the green and blue and brown bins set in front of residences for tomorrow. In fact, the day before had already been the garbage day for the week. I knew it was a man, but I didn’t want to think it was. Buskers, drug addicts, and the general desperate population in this town are inconvenient and unaesthetic. There’s nothing romantic about them. They work in groups and take shifts at the busiest street corners or in front of grocery stores. They have smart phones. They smoke. They’re fat.
I walked to the square with the old west courthouse in the center, and turned towards the coffee shop. That’s when I saw the man. He was shirtless. His skin had a green-grey film of scum which made his complexion darker than I think it really was. There was no way to tell his age, for he had a full and lush head of hair and a wild birds nest of a big brown beard.
“Do I smell bad to you?” he said to another man. This other man was not smelly nor shirtless. He wore a clean suit. The well-dressed man shook his head and grunted at the bum, and then quickly entered the coffee shop.
The foul smelling man cursed at the other man in the shop. Then he looked at me.
“Do I smell bad to you?”
He had a voice that reminded me of the baptizer. Might as well have asked me if I had married my brother’s wife while he was still alive. He already knew the truth, he knew he smelled bad; he just wanted to hear me say it: wanted to know if I was one of the damned. I looked at his eyes and saw there not the artificial lamp of a con artist, but a swirling, bioluminescent fog of mystery.
“You’re not a regular bum,” I said.
“And you’re not good at answering questions.”
“What question was it again?” I knew well what it was.
“Do I—smell bad—to you?”
Oh, how I was tempted to lie to him. To make him feel better about himself. To ease his suffering as best as I could in my reply with just a simple little lie. And get away. And go about my own business. But I thought, though I hardly knew why, that if I pacified him and walked away into the coffee shop, that somehow that would have been a little cowardly of me.
“Yes,” I said at last.
“I do?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry, but, you do.”
“How bad?”
“Pretty bad?”
“Be descriptive.”
“Like—garbage.”
“You’re lying.”
“Well, are you saying that you smell better than—garbage?”
“Worse. Now, be honest. How bad do I smell?”
I thought of the worst kind of smell that I could imagine. Or of any smells that I could think of that made me want to gag.
“You sort of smell like sewage.”
But this did not impress the man who sat outside the coffee shop.
“Wouldn’t you say that I smell to high heaven?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you think that God himself thinks I stink?”
“No?”
“Well He does. My body odor offends the Lord almighty!”
He held up his hands towards the sky, and I took a step backwards.
“And since I offend the Lord with my abomination, I present you with my neck, and so please you to sever my head from my body to make amends to the Lord with an end to the utterly foul pungency of my person!”
He bowed over to me so that I could see the whole of his dirty neck: even the grime in the unfurled wrinkles of his skin.
“What?” I said. I had heard him clearly, but was shocked by his request. I took yet another step backwards.
Still kneeling, and without looking, the bum reached over to his army green knapsack which sat against the coffee shop behind him and reached a little bit with his hand until he found the opening to it. From this knapsack he removed a Walmart machete. It was greasy and rusty and had black electrical tape wrapped around the handle and up over three or four inches of the bottom part of the blade.
“If you have none, you may use this great-sword, Sir Knight.” He took the big blunt gardening tool in both his hands with the palms upwards and raised it over his bowed head so as to offer it to me.
“What?” I said again. I spoke with no imagination at all, because that same imagination had already been engaged in the what if scenarios which wildly played before me in flashes. Visions of blood and arrests and news reports. And the horrifying discovery that I was entertaining—in even the faintest and most fleeting what if scenario—the idea of actually doing it.
“Are you trying to kill yourself?” I said. I thought to call the police and reached down into my pocket.
“Don’t you think I could manage that on my own?”
“I mean that if you’re having suicidal thoughts that there’s ways that you can get help.”
“Shut up!” he yelled. I looked around me to find anyone else like me, other bystanders who might be able to help me to talk some sense into the bum and get him to seek help for himself. But to my surprise, the square of the college town which was always crowded with students or vacationers, was empty. I looked through the window of the coffee shop and saw no one sitting inside, and behind the bar, no barista. The sign in the window was lit and read OPEN.
“Will you, or will you not, obey the command of the Lord your God and strike me down as I kneel in humble supplication?”
“Absolutely not. But I will help you get some help—”
“—shut UP!” yelled the bum. He was looking at me now. “Shut up about getting help. You are the only one who can help me and this,” he raised up the machete again in both hands, “is the only way you can help me.”
“Sir, I can’t do that. It’s illegal, I’d go to jail. I’m going to leave now. It was good meeting you.”
“What if it wasn’t illegal?”
“Well it is,” I said as I walked away. I held open the door of the coffee shop for myself.
“But what if it wasn’t?”
“What if it wasn’t illegal for me to kill you?”
“Exactly, your excellency.”
“But it is.”
Then the bum looked past me at something else that had appeared to him. I turned too. I saw on what used to be the empty street, now a parked police car and the officer exiting from her side and closing the door behind her. The lights were flashing on top of the car. A familiar warning chirp escaped its speakers.
“Good morning,” she said. I could not see her eyes behind the thick black sunglasses which she wore, “what’s the situation here?”
I closed the door to the coffee shop and walked over to the officer.
“I think this homeless man is in distress and is having suicidal thoughts,” I said.
“This young knight is under the delusion that it is illegal in this land to put to death a criminal who has offended God,” said the man.
The officer made a grimace when she heard the bum talk and then turned to me with her head tilted, “he wants you to do what?”
“I want him,” said the bum, “to remove the head from my body so as to please the Lord with an end of my abominable smell.”
“Right,” she said. Then she turned to me and asked, “and you don’t want to.”
“Obviously,” I said.
“Why obviously?” spoke she.
“Because it’s illegal,” I said.
The officer shook her head.
“Yes it is,” I said.
“No it isn’t.”
“Is this a joke?”
“Nope.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. I was angry now. I thought they were playing a joke on me, or that I was being filmed. I felt suspicious and strange. “Of course it is illegal.”
“No it isn’t.”
My eyes were wide. Now I was the crazy one. I took out my phone from my pocket and turned on the video camera. I started to record her.
“Say it in the camera, then. Say that if I kill this man there will be no consequences.”
“Sure. You can kill this guy.”
“What? How?”
“What more could you ask for to believe me?” said the bum.
“This is a dream,” I said. “This is a dream. This is a dream and all I need to do to wake up is just to do it.”
So I picked up the machete and without another thought I raised it over my head and brought it down on the bum’s neck as hard as I could.
And I swear that as soon as I did, that I did not wake up. His head came off with a bloodless thump on the ground. It rocked for a moment before he found it with his hands and he caught it up and put it right back on his head. Then he reached for the machete and took it from me in my stupor and placed it back in his bag.
And then I felt someone brush past me.
“Excuse me,” they said.
“Sorry,” I replied softly, for I was still in shock. I stepped to the side and the man who bumped me went into the coffee shop. I looked again through the window and saw that it was full of people. I looked all around me at the square and saw that there was a crowd of college students walking behind me and all the parking spots on the street were full.
“Do I smell bad to you?” said the bum behind me to a young woman. I turned around.
“What?” she said.
“Do I smell bad to you?”
In her utter discomfort she looked to me for help. I felt bad for her and opened my mouth to try to help her. But I couldn’t say anything.
“No,” she said. And she walked past him into the coffee shop. He cursed at her as she went.
“Do I smell bad to you?” said the bum to me again.
“Yes,” I said, without hesitation.
“How bad?”
“You stink to high heaven.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
He closed his eyes all of a sudden, though he seemed to struggle to keep his lids closed as he took an unnaturally violent deep breath. It was more like a desperate gasp. As if he had been submerged underwater to the point of drowning and had just come up for air in time. When his eyes opened, he had lost the foggy look. He looked tired now. And relieved.
“Thank you so much,” he said.
He stood up and took his knapsack and walked barefoot down the sidewalk. When he got to the intersection he turned around and smiled at me. Then he walked around the corner. That’s when I noticed that I couldn’t smell him any more.
I really did run into a bum outside a coffee shop who asked me if he smelled bad and then asked me to decapitate him “if it pleased me”. It happened yesterday. The first part of this story is almost a true to life telling. He really did talk like that.
What a beautiful co-mingling of a moment and imagination, thank you for sharing!
Wow!😮