River Dog and the Shadow Man, a story

Michael Henson

I.

It started out as just another long, gray shadowy muddle of an October day, not the best, but not so bad, as good a day as any to fly a sign. It was the foggy crack of dawn, or what passed for dawn in that cold, gray, clouded-up soup of a Cincinnati morning, and a young man stood with a cardboard sign that read Homeless Please Help at the Interstate-75 southbound Mitchell Avenue off-ramp where he could catch the inbound suburbanites.

The fog was thick as cake. It had rolled up from the channeled waters of the Mill Creek and scrolled over the leveed creekbanks and over the fences and across the vacant fields and parking lots and through the strip malls and the railroad yards and over the roaring highway. The shrouded lights of the cars on the highway moved like luminescent fish at the bottom of the sea.

It was still early. Just a few cars peeled off the highway and down the ramp to where the young man shivered with his sign. And those few were as blind in the fog as he was.  If the drivers had the green light, they gave him no more than a glance. And if they stopped for the light, they stared past him as if he were no more than a shadow. He lucked out, finally, when a hard hat in a pickup truck laid a five-dollar bill on him.

“Get yourself some help,” the hard hat said.

The young man wanted to say, I don’t need your fucking help. Instead, he said, “Yes sir, I will,” and “God bless,” and made ready for the next car coming off the ramp.

The hard hat looked like he wanted to say more, but the light had changed to green and the next car had come crowding up behind.

Five dollars, not a bad start. Enough to get, for breakfast, a power drink and maybe a candy bar.

But not enough, really, not nearly enough.

*

Over the next hour, the wind picked up and the fog lifted. He was in the day’s first dope-sick hours, and nothing mattered but to get enough money to get himself well, and no one would stop but one old lady who waved him a dollar bill as she slowed through the light.

Just a dollar bill, next to nothing, really. But still he shouted, “God bless,” as she rolled past him.

The fog lifted with the hour; the young man began to sweat and ache and he was dope-sick and miserable and cold and so he did not notice that the wind which blew the fog away had also blown the gray clouds black. So when the rain came, it jumped him like a junkyard dog—a sudden clap of thunder and a brutal slap of rain and a goatish wind that nearly butted him off the curb.

He pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt, folded up his cardboard sign, grabbed his backpack from its hiding place behind a tree, and splashed through the swamped sidewalks and gutters to the shelter of the underbridge.

The rain had sluiced the steep downhill path and he skidded down the clay bank, past the honeysuckles that crowded against the path, and slid almost to the edge and a ten-foot drop to Mill Creek below. He reached for the honeysuckles and missed, and his backpack slid off his shoulder to the crook of his elbow and threatened to drag him over the edge and down into the water. But he grabbed the flange of an I-beam, held fast, and swung himself and his backpack onto the dry concrete floor of the bridge abutment.

As soon as he straightened himself to stand, he saw a movement on the other side of the abutment. Cat-quick, slim as a shadow, a man, a smallish, thin man, a bone-skinny stranger in loose black clothes, rose from a crouch and looked the young man’s way. His eyes were dark and his face pale as bone and he showed his teeth in what was either a grin or a grimace. Then, he slipped out from under the bridge and flitted like a bird up the guttered embankment.

The young man wondered, Who the fuck is that?

He half-expected to see the man come rafting back down the hill in the rush of rainwater. But he was gone up top without a single glance back, gone like a thief in the night.

The man might well have been a thief, though there was nothing much here to steal. The young man had laid out some flats of cardboard to lie on and an old blanket to shudder under in the cold. He had stuffed everything else he owned into the one large backpack, which now hung half off his shoulder an inch or two above the ground.

The young man sat down with his pack and cursed his life and cursed his luck and he cursed the man in black who had found his way to his campsite under the bridge. There were camps all around here—under the overpasses, up and down Mill Creek, and in the narrow woods between the north-bound off ramp and the cemetery.

So why, he thought, does this stranger have to barge in here? He’s got plenty of other places he can go.

The rain continued to pound the pavement above and to set the I-beams humming. Cars crossed the bridge with an overhead whisper and trucks with a rumble. And every few seconds, the young man could hear from across the creek, on the other side of the underbridge, an irregular metallic stomp and crush. It took a moment to sort out what he was hearing—Stompandcrush. Stompandcrush. Stompandcrush—but then he saw the old man, his advisor in all things, River Dog, the king of cans, pale face and pale hands visible in the shadows, crushing cans to sell for scrap.

“Yo, River,” he called. If anyone knew what was up with the shadow man, it would be River Dog.

River Dog looked up.

The young man pointed to where the shadow man had been sitting. “Who was that?” he called. River Dog raised his hand and cupped his ear, so the young man called again, “Who the fuck was that?” He pointed again toward the spot where he had seen the man.

“Get your ass over here so I can hear you,” River Dog called.

The rain had not stopped and the wind had not relented. The young man hesitated a moment. But he wanted to know, so he ducked his head and lunged for the honeysuckles. He caught them this time and began to pull himself up. Each drop of rain was like a driven nail and his feet slipped at nearly every step, but branch by branch, he pulled himself, step by slippery step, up the slick clay bank.

Up on Mitchell Avenue, the young man looked around to see if he could spot the man from the shadows. But there was no one on the sidewalk, no one out on the bridge, no one out on the traffic island at Mitchell and Spring Grove. No sign of Sugarfoot, nor any sign of Wonderbread, nor Casper the Ghost, Jody the Judge, Uncle Big Boot, Patch, Silverback, Boxcar Billy, Too Short, Jim Cherokee, nor the guy from Ethiopia who called himself Obama. And no sign of the Shadow Man. By the time the young man turned to see if there was anyone working the off-ramps from the Interstate, the rain had slapped him half-blind. So he crossed over to River Dog’s side of the bridge.

Below, in the shadows of the underbridge, he found River Dog among his cans, in mounds and clusters to the right and the left and before him, as if he were the emperor of aluminum. An aluminum lawn chair, an aluminum fold-up table, and an aluminum chaise lounge sat among the heaps of cans and plastic bags. A blanket lay neatly folded on a pallet of cardboard flats. The lower end of an I-beam formed a pantry lined with cans of beef stew and pumpkin pie filling.

“It’s a hell of a time to be selling metal,” the young man said. "It’s pouring down rain out there.”

River Dog looked up. “Due to unforeseen circumstances beyond my immediate control,” he said, “my dividends failed to partriculate for the month. So, I have to sell off some of my assets.” He paused in mid-stomp. “What’s up? You got that what-the-fuck? look in your eye.”

“Who was that guy?”

“What guy?

“The guy that was in my camp.”

“I wasn’t informed you had a camp.”

“You know, my spot, on the other side of the bridge.”

“Your spot?”

“My spot, on my side of the bridge.”

“Your side of what bridge?”

“This bridge we’re standing under right now.”

“So, you own a piece of this bridge?”

“No, I don’t own it.”

“Then it ain’t yours.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Right, I know exactly what you mean. But it’s not what you think you mean. You mean you think you own the title to that little cave you set yourself up in.”

“I was there first. I claimed it.”

“Yeah, well some Indian claimed it before you. And where is he now? And then, here come Daniel Boone or some other pioneer motherfucker and he claimed it and now he’s gone too.  Then some farmer claimed it. And where the fuck is he? And then some factory guy. And he’s gone too. There’s been hobo camps up and down this creek for over a hundred years. And where are they now? They’re all gone. And now the city comes along and puts a bridge over it and you think you can claim it like you’re Columbus and it’s yours. Ain’t nothing yours but what’s under your hat, if you was to have a hat.”

“But you’ve got a camp.”

“I got nothing.”

“What do you call this?”

“I call it nothing.”

“But I bet you want to keep this bit of nothing.”

“If that Creek comes up like it did last spring, it won’t matter what I want or don’t want.”

“Then why do you have it?”

“I got it because I got it.  I didn’t get it because I wanted it and I won’t fret about it if I lose it.”

The young man looked again at the piles of crushed aluminum cans and River Dog’s assortment of castoff furniture and supplies.

“This sure looks like a camp to me.”

“It’s not a camp,” River Dog said.  “It’s a collection.  I collected it once, I can collect it again. If the Creek wants it, the Creek can discollect it and carry it away.”

“Would the Creek ever come this high?”

“Look for yourself.” He pointed to the nests of stream litter on the shelves of the I beams, then to the mudline on the wall that showed the high-water mark. “That’s how high it got last spring,” he said. “Not as high as ’37, but high enough to cover us up where we’re standing now. It don’t usually come up this high in the fall, so I’m not too worried. But it could. These days, you don’t know what it might do.”

“But anyway, that guy . . .”

“What guy?”

“The guy who I just saw on the other side of this bridge . . .”

“What about him?”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you.”

“So, go ahead and ask.”

“What was he doing under this bridge?”

“What were you doing there?”

“I was getting out of the rain.”

“Don’t you reckon he was doing the same?”

“But he could see I was there first.  So, what’s he doing there?”

“Are you really as stupid as you look?”

“Ah, fuck you, River.”

“Now don’t get all argumentatious again.”

“I come over here looking for a little information and all you do is fuck with me.”

“I’m just trying to tell you the truth. I tell it like I see it and if people don’t like it, they can kiss my ass.”

The young man had started to shiver again. He crossed his arms and held himself close and shuddered. He tried to hold it in and not let it show, but the effort made him moan a little thin moan.

“You’re geeking,” River Dog said.  “Ain’t you?”

The young man nodded.

“I been telling you, man, you got to give that shit up.”

“You’re an alcoholic. That’s just as bad.”

“Yeah, but my just-as-bad doesn’t cost me six days hustling for a two-minute buzz.”

“So?”

“So, I can sell this little bit of cans and have enough money to keep me at a perfectly intoxicatious state for four straight days. And I don’t have to wait on some dope boy to feel like he’s in the mood to sell me some dog food.”

The young man shuddered and sniffled. He wiped his nose on the sleeve of his coat. “Fuck this,” he said again.

“See, you’re miserable.”

“I’m not miserable.”

“And my name’s Donald Trump.”

“Everybody’s got their misery.”

“Yeah, but my misery only costs a buck fifty-seven for a twenty-four ounce can of the finest malt liquor made, a medication which, applied once every few hours, is entirely efficacious to my needs. But you got nothing.”

“I got six dollars. Ten dollars is a hit.”

“You still get your shit from Mexican Dick?”

“Why you asking?”

“Do you know how he got his name?”

“No, do you?”

“No, I don’t. But I’ll tell you this. I don’t think he’s a Mexican, but I do know he’s a dick.”

“He’s dicked me a few times.”

“And he’ll dick you again if you let him.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know, but just because you’re a piece of shit doesn’t mean you should let people treat you like a piece of shit.”

The young man looked out at the rain sluicing down the levee. “If this rain doesn’t quit,” he said, “I’m fucked.”

“Rain or no rain, you got to roll back out there and do some serious panhandling to get you what you gonna need, though you could help an old man out with these cans first.”

River Dog got up and lined up a row of cans and began to crush them one after the other with a sharp stroke of his heel. The young man picked up each can and tossed it into a big, black plastic bag.

The rain continued to pound the asphalt and to keep the I-beams humming and the cars and trucks kept the bridge floor whispering and rumbling. Below them, in the concrete shallows of Mill Creek, still visible in spite of the rain, a line of carp, each of them two or more feet long, ranged across the floor of the creek, each one beside and slightly behind the other, like ascending notes in a bar of music, holding their places in the current with small movements of their fins.

The young man stopped a moment to shiver and to wipe his nose on his sleeve again. “So, River,” he asked, “Who was that guy under the bridge?”

“I don’t know who the fuck it was and I really don’t care. I didn’t even see the motherfucker. As far as I can tell, there’s been nobody under this bridge but your geeking ass.”

“He was right over there, just this side of my camp, which you say isn’t really my camp.”

“You sure you’re not seeing things?”

“River, I know what I saw.”

“Well, since he owns just as much of this bridge as you do, he can’t take anything from you that you don’t already don’t have. So, what are you worried about?”

“Why is this guy sneaking around my camp? And why did he take off as soon as I saw him? And how come I never saw him before?”

“There’s your problem.”

“What?”

“You’re thinking. You think, think, think. You think too much. You got all the pistons firing and you got that brain running like an old car with the timing belt thrown. You’re always thinking about questions you can’t answer. You see those carp down there? You need to be like one of them. You think they read any books? You think they got any thoughts? You think they worry? They don’t worry about nothing but that little bit of whatever the fuck they eat. See that?” He pointed to a fish that had moved out of its holding place. Its snout popped at the surface, then it drifted and finned back into position. “You see that? He’s not thinking, Am I too fat or Am I too skinny? or Am I rich? or Am I poor? None of that. He ain’t thinking shit. He just wants a good place to catch some food.”

“So what’s your point?”

“Consider the lilies, motherfucker. They neither toil nor do they neither spin.”

“It sure looks like we’re toiling right now,” the young man said.

“That’s because you never seen real toil.”

River Dog continued to crush his cans and the young man continued to bag them up. The rain continued to whisper and drum above them and the creek steadily darkened with the runoff. River Dog nodded toward the stream. “See how that creek’s beginning to muddy up? In a couple hours, it’ll start running through here like a freight train.” He pointed to the line of carp. “In a little bit, you watch. Once the creek muddies, you won’t see these fish anymore until it clears up again. They’ll dive deep and wait it out. Then, in a day or two, it’ll clear up and they’ll be back.”

“So, what do you make of that?”

River Dog paused in mid-stomp. “Do I look like a fish?” He hefted one bag and then the other and decided they were full. Then he picked up one of the leftover plastic bags and, with a knife, cut out holes for his head and arms and slipped it over his head for a raincoat.

The young man shivered again. He shivered and ached and looked out at the rain. “I’m fucked,” he said.

“You don’t have to be out here, you know,” the old man said. “You can always call your mom and dad and get you a bus ticket back home.”

The young man shook his head. I can’t go home strung out like this, he thought. “No,” he said.  “It won’t work.” He shivered again. “I’m fucked,” he said again.

“You are,” the old man said. “You’re double-dog-fucked and packed for shipping.” He pulled a strip of towel out of the pocket of his coat and tied it to the neck of one of the bags. “But in the end,” he said, “we’re all fucked. Heart attack, cancer, skinheads, seizure, pneumonia, car wreck.  One way or another, we all got to go. There’s no need to worry about it. We’re all food for the fish when it’s over.”

River fastened the other end of the strip of towel to the neck of the second bag. With a swift movement, he swung the bags onto his back with the towel settled across his shoulders like a yoke.

“It’s a short trip, no matter how you take it,” he said. “So, you might as well enjoy the ride. That’s what I plan to do. I’m gonna turn these cans in for a little bit of money and I’m gonna take my little bit of money and meet up with my old friend Malt Liquor. And the next time you see me, I’ll be in a completely inebriatious state of mind and body.”

He looked out at the rain and adjusted the pack of cans on his shoulders.

“So,” he said, “we have had our little moment of bonding. Leave the key under the mat when you go.”

In a slick minute, River Dog was up the levee bank and gone. There was still a plastic garbage bag among the leftover cans. The young man picked it up and, following River Dog’s pattern, cut him out a raincoat of his own. It didn’t fit him as neatly as River’s had, but it would do the job, so he set to climbing up the bank. By the time he reached the guardrails of Mitchell Avenue, his hands and knees were covered in mud.

River Dog was a hundred yards away, already turning onto Spring Grove. At that distance, the old man looked small as a bird. The wind gusted him along the sidewalk and the bags on his back sailed out like a pair of wide black wings.

II.

It had started for the young man as a personal test. He was bored with college, super-bored with life in the suburbs. He was taking too many crazy risks, drinking too much, smoking too much, trying a little too much of this and that.  A little weed, a little Adderall, a little Vicodin. Not much, just a petty little knick-knacking snort-a-little, chip-a-little, eat-a-little, smoke-a-little sort of a thing. He knew it could get out of hand, but he had it totally under control.

What bothered him was all the craziness and hypocrisy and waste, all the gaming and trash talk and cruising the endless strip malls of his little world. He needed to purify his life. He needed a quest, a goal, a path to a new vision, something to lift him out of the triviality of his life, something that would save him.

He decided to see just how low he could go and still survive. Could he divest himself of possessions, contacts, and connections and use only his own native survival powers? Not in the woods. Not in some corner of a state forest, but in an urban environment, the real test of these times. His friends from high school, his friends from college, any of them had enough Boy Scout know-how to survive a week in the woods.  But what about a week in the streets? Or better, how about a month? A whole month living on the street by his own wits. He set that as his goal.

What would he need? What would he take with him? He decided it was no true test if he took a lot of gear. Instead, he would take as little as he could. Just a little money to get him started, but no ID, no credit card, no cell phone. Just a change of clothes, a backpack, a few sticks of beef jerky and half dozen apples to get him started.

This test would not work in his home city; it would be too easy to run into friends or to call his parents and to stroll back into his old life when things got tough. So, when he heard about a friend driving to Cleveland, Ohio, he invited himself along. In Cleveland, he said goodbye to his friend, made his way to the Greyhound station, and found he had just enough money to make it to Cincinnati, where he knew no one and where he had never been. He told no one, so no one could come and try to rescue him before he had done what he wanted to do, which was to look rock-bottom life in the face.

One week into his experiment, he thought he would starve. Rock bottom was not supposed to arrive so fast. The apples and the jerky were gone by the second day and he found he couldn’t get a temp job without an ID. Even a homeless shelter wouldn’t take him in without an ID. Will Work for Food got him neither work nor food. He was a total failure at hitchhiking. The soup kitchens and sandwich windows were all downtown, miles away even if he knew which way was down. He was too nervous to shoplift. By the time he got his nerve up to try it, his hands had gone shaky and weak and he couldn’t trust them to do the job.

Exhausted, half-starved, he lay himself down on the banks of Mill Creek.

I see how people just give up and die, he thought. I feel like I could just drift away and die right here.

But before he could drift any farther, someone kicked his shoe.

It was a withered up old man, scrawny as a baby bird, with pale, out-sized hands like those of a mole. “Look here,” the man said. “You’re not allowed to die over here and bring a bunch of investigatious police down on us, so eat a little something or move it on down the road and die there.”

“Who are you?”

“What the fuck do you care? I could be Mother Fucking Teresa for all you know, but if you call me River Dog, I might answer.”

He reached down to the young man and handed him a sandwich. “See if you can get that down,” the old man said, and he hunkered down to watch.

The young man could get the sandwich down. He downed it in half a minute without even knowing what it was.

In the next half minute, he staggered to the bushes and puked up everything but his kidneys.

“I knew it,” the old man said. “Come on down to my camp. I got some soup. If you can’t handle that, I’m gonna have to feed you to the catfish.”

For the next several days, River Dog nursed the young man back to some measure of strength. He taught the young man procedures for panhandling, what the police would and would not allow, where to get food from church pantries, and which bikers were helpful and which ones were out to kick some homeless ass.

One day, while they were walking Mitchell Avenue in search of cans, the young man asked, “So, River Dog, what’s your real name?”

“River Dog.”

“No, I mean your real name.”

“River. Dog. Just like it sounds.”

“But I mean, what’s your given name?”

“First name, River. Last name, Dog.”

“That can’t be your given name.”

“Why not?”

“Nobody gives their kid a name like that.”

“River Dog is my given name. I given it to myself.”

“Why?”

“I live by a river and people say I smell like a dog. So, there you have it.”

“But don’t you have a regular, birth-certificate name?”

“Of course, I do.”

“So why don’t you use it?”

“I do use it. Whenever I get arrested.”

“How come you never call yourself by that name?”

“Because the guy named River Dog is a free man. When I was under that other name, I was in chains, but now I’m free. I’ve been reborn in a new place with a new name and now I’m a free man.”

Everybody, River Dog’s notion ran, has somebody or something they have to bow to. Someone always has to surrender somehow. The cop on the beat has to surrender to his sergeant and the sergeant has to bow to the captain and the captain has to bow on up the chain to the chief of police. The chief of police has to bow to the mayor who has to bow to his funders and a few thousand voters.

But the suburbanite, River told him, is the biggest slave of all. He might think he owns that little trim house in the cul-de-sac, but to keep it, he surrenders all his independence and in the end, the little trim house owns him. “The credit card is the chain and the mortgage is the whip,” River Dog said. The man under the lash of the mortgage has to surrender to the boss, the bank, the wife, the homeowner’s association, the township trustees, the school board, the parish council, the zoning board, the neighbors, and the in-laws. On the job, there is the clock, the corporate culture, the office gossip, the boss, and the boss of the boss, and the boss of the boss of the boss and all the other bosses. And even to get to work in the morning, there’s the lash of the gridlock on the Interstate, the traffic cop, the rent-a-cop, the meter maid, and the highway patrol. “He thinks he’s Adam in the Garden, but everybody wants a bite out of his apple.”

River said he had once been that suburban slave. He had the house in the cul-de-sac, the two cars in the two-car garage, the boat on the lake, the wife, the well-behaved children in private school. For years, he slogged down that corporate trail. But alcohol slowly freed him from his subservience. The job, the marriage, the children, the little trim house—alcohol’s golden hammer broke each link in his chain.

River Dog answered now only to the bottle. And the bottle, kindest of masters, asked little of him. He could collect his cans and other scrap in a few hours’ time, and the little he made went mostly to the bottle. In return, the bottle took him to that place where nothing bothered him, nothing disturbed his bliss. “I got nothing,” he said. “But I need nothing. A man can’t get more free than that.”

*

The place where River Dog sold his cans was called Garden Grove Metals, some fifty acres of dust and engine noise where people brought scrap metal in pickups, shopping carts, dump trucks, and the trunks of cars, all piled with rejected screen doors, blown engine blocks, shards of sheet metal, outmoded desks and metal shelving, fenders of wrecked cars, the wrecked cars themselves, the poles for swing sets and the chains that held the swings. Dinosaurish cranes plucked metal from one pile and dropped it in another amid the constant roar of motors and clang of metal.

River Dog and the young man turned in their cans and got their money and headed back toward the Mill Creek bridge. For a shortcut, they crossed the vacant field where a meat-packing plant once stood. Over the ground worried by the ghosts of slaughtered pigs and broken men, Queen Anne’s Lace had grown thick and the stems of it snatched at their legs and ankles.

“Ain’t this a bitch,” River Dog said. “Fucking bunch of flowers got us snagged.”

About halfway through, the field cleared around a broad concrete platform. They high-footed it through the remaining yards of tall stalks and, relieved to be free of the snags, were about to step up onto the platform when River threw up his hand for a signal and they stopped.

“Hold up,” River Dog said. “We got us a situation.”

“What’s up?”

“I think I know this motherfucker.”

Just at the edge of the platform, half-covered in the greenish-white flowers, lay the body of a Black man. Blood still gleamed at his temple.

“Is he all right?”

“Fuck no, he’s not all right. He’s a dead motherfucker.”

“You sure?”

“Look at him. You want to give him mouth to mouth?”

“Well, who is he?”

“Yesterday, he was a guy named Cornbread. Today, he’s just another dead junkie. Let’s go.”

“Shouldn’t we call 9-1-1?”

“What phone do you plan to use?”

“Well, shouldn’t we do something?”

“We shouldn’t do nothing but get our asses out of here. Come on.”

They high-footed it again, faster this time, and broke out of the field into a little stand of trees where they paused to catch their breath.

“So why are we running like this?”

“There’s no happy ending to this story. There’s no way this doesn’t end up bad news for you or me.  So, it’s better we stay out of this story altogether. You tell the police, you’re either a witness or a suspect. Either way, you’re fucked. If you get charged with it, there’s nobody to take up for you. If you’re a witness, you’re asking to get your own little plunk in the head.”

“So we’re just gonna leave him there?”

“That’s exactly what we’re gonna do.”

“Well, somebody ought to know.”

“Like who?”

“Surely, somebody wants to know. His family?”

“If there was anybody who cared about the motherfucker, do you think he’d be a homeless junkie with a bullet in his head?”

“Nobody?”

“Nobody. And if you ever find me like this one day, don’t call nobody. There’s nobody to call. And don’t turn me over to the county. Just let me rot or feed me to the carp.”

“Whoever did this is going to get away with murder.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what they’re going to do.”

“It’s not right.”

“You act like that’s news. There’s a lot of things that ain’t right. If there’s a heaven, and if I get there, on both of which improbabilities I doubt, God is gonna have to answer for a lot of shit that’s happened in this world.”

“So now you’re judging God?”

“Exactly.  And I find him guilty as charged. You name anything that’s wrong in this world, the devil might have brought it, but God’s the one who sent it.”

*

The young man’s apprenticeship lasted about ten days. Then River announced, “Alright, little birdie, it’s time to get the fuck out of my nest.”

And so, he was back out on his own, but better prepared this time. A homeless camp, he had learned, might be anywhere: tucked under an overpass, in a little patch of woods, in the corner of a parking garage, on the third floor of an abandoned tenement, re-plumbed and wired to tap the electricity of the building next door and renamed an Abandominium. There were camps built of scrap lumber and furnished with Ikea castoffs and divided into rooms, camps run over with cats, half pet and half feral, and even an under-Interstate camp with a white picket fence, couches set up for conversation, a pet rabbit in a shopping cart cage, and a portrait of Jesus painted onto an overpass pillar.

For himself, the young man decided to keep his camp simple—he didn’t plan to be out there that long—so he set himself a spot across Mill Creek from River Dog with a few flats of cardboard to cushion the concrete of the abutment and a blanket to throw over him at night. He kept everything else in his backpack and he carried his backpack with him everywhere he went. He panhandled every day for enough to eat and he visited the pantries and the agencies for everything else and he got to where he was living fairly well. For the first time in his life, he began to feel competent and free.

Two days after River Dog sent him off, he saw the old man on the levee, stretched out in the sun, leaning back on his elbows with his shirt and jacket open like a buzzard with its wings outstretched. His ribs made a washboard of his pale, bony chest. He was gazing up at the sky, his wide-open eyes gone to glass. He was fixed in a celestial stare like an ancient Chinese poet, oblivious to all.

“River,” the young man called. “River Dog.”

The old man did not move.

“River,” the young man called again. “Are you alive?”

The old man still did not move. The young man shook him by the shoulder. “River,” he called again. River Dog slowly turned his gaze toward the young man, moved his lips as if he wanted to speak, then turned his head away again.

“River,” the young man called. “What’s up? Are you all right?”

The old man slowly brought his head around again, like the turret on a tank. He formed words in a whisper and the young man leaned in to hear.  “River,” he said. “Say it again. I can’t hear you.”

He leaned even closer and heard River Dog say, in a sandpaper whisper, “Leave me the fuck alone.”

*

Finally, the young man completed his month, which stretched to two months, then three months. Some days, the young man was not sure what day of the week it was or how long he had been standing at the Interstate exit and sleeping the night under the bridge. He had now been in so long and gotten so deep, he was not sure he could ever get out. For by now, he had collected, among other items, a pocketknife, a plate and utensils to eat with, a change of clothes, a copy of Moby Dick, a pen and notepad, three pairs of extra socks, a black marker for making up a new sign, rolling papers and a pouch of tobacco, three cans of ChiliMac, four power bars, a couple Trojans in case lightning struck, a badly-healing gash on his left cheek from a fight with another panhandler, and a heroin habit that he picked up in the final week of his self-imposed test from a woman who came to share his blanket and left after shooting him up for three straight days.

On the fourth day, she and her stash of heroin were gone and he was sicker than he had ever been. The heroin he had kept as a pet had turned into his master. The leash had become a chain.

III.

The morning rain had settled into an all-day drizzle that was likely to continue into the night. The young man wanted to stay right where he was under the bridge, cold but dry. But his dope-sickness was steadily advancing and he dreaded the hammers of withdrawal even more than the rain. So, covered in his garbage-bag raincoat, the young man pulled himself up the bank and headed back to his place by the highway exit ramp.

But there, in the spot he claimed for his own, stood the Shadow Man in his loose black clothes. His bony shoulders were bent under the rain. A cardboard sign shivered in his hands.

 “Hey, motherfucker,” the young man yelled. “This is my corner.”

The Shadow Man looked up. It was the same man for sure, the same skeletal frame in the same black hoodie, baggy black jeans, and heavy, black coat. The same bone-pale face turned toward the young man with the look that was either grin or grimace. He made a sound that was either laugh or taunt. Then. bird-like, he lurched into the trees and disappeared.

Running the Shadow Man off was almost too easy and the young man felt a little guilty, though not as guilty as he felt sick, so he pulled out his sign, set himself in position, and faced the oncoming cars.

*

The rain continued into the afternoon, relentless as God. The young man was getting steadily more dope-sick and he had a spasm of shivering so intense it was hard at times to hold his sign straight. But he had finally been able to flag down enough dollars that he would be ready when Mexican Dick showed up. If Mexican Dick showed up.

If Mexican Dick didn’t show up, the young man would face some serious withdrawal or else a run downtown, where there was a dope boy on every corner, but could have serious consequences for a white boy from the suburbs with no car and no friends.

So, for now, he stood beneath the awning of an abandoned carry-out to wait for Mexican Dick. The dollars warmed the young man’s pocket and the rain continued to fall, sometimes heavily, sometimes, just a hint. He had no idea what time it was or how long he had waited. It could have been high noon or sundown for all he could tell from the rain-heavy, slate-dark sky.

*

Mexican Dick drove a large, black, fat-tire pickup truck that was tinted dark at the windows and fitted in the back with a pair of speakers the size of coffins. Out of the coffins rolled a steady, blinding bass line so dense it felt to the young man as if he were swimming through butter to walk the fifty yards through the vacant lot to where Mexican Dick waited behind the wheel.

The window slid down and the young man showed Mexican Dick his money and shivered while he counted it out. BombPa BombPa BombPa Bomb, thundered the speakers. The thunder of the speakers half-blinded the young man. It was hard to see into the dark of Mexican Dick's truck and hard to see around the frame of his dark glasses, but River did have a point: Mexican Dick didn't look Mexican at all.

Any other time, Mexican Dick would now drop a little envelope into the young man’s palm. The earsplit speakers would drown any talk. But this time, Mexican Dick reached to the dashboard. For a moment, the young man feared he might be reaching for a pistol. Instead, the speakers snapped so suddenly silent, it nearly knocked the young man over. When Mexican Dick turned to the window and spoke, he didn't sound Mexican at all.

“I don’t think it’s healthy," said Mexican Dick, "for a fuckhead like you to stare so hard at a person like me.”

“Sorry,” the young man said. He hadn’t realized he was staring so hard.

“A guy like you could hurt his eyes staring so hard at a person like me.”

"Got it," the young man said. "Sorry."

Mexican Dick dropped the packet into the young man’s hand. The window slid up and the caskets began to blaze again.

At the far edge of the field, the Shadow Man in his crow-colored clothes nodded in time to the BombPa BombPa BombPa Bomb from Mexican Dick’s coffin-size speakers.

*

I got to quit this shit, the young man thought. I got to quit all this and go back home and get back in school. He meant every word of it. This is insane, he thought. Some guy threatens to kill you because you look at him too long. And there’s nobody to care if you’re alive or dead. I got to get out of this one way or another. I’ve got to go home.

But for now, he took his treasure in hand straight to the place where he kept his kit behind a loose brick in the wall of an old gas station. It took a minute to spoon it up, fire it up, and cook it up, and his hands shook the whole time. Rain still drizzled across his face and hands as he needled it up and tapped it free. He took the needle into his teeth like a pirate would a dagger and wound a strip of rubber tubing around his left bicep and pulled it tight to tie off.

The veins stood up, smart and alert. The point of the needle found a fat one and he drove it in, pressed the plunger, and watched the fix roll in.

He pulled the needle out quickly and capped it and hid the whole kit back behind its brick before the mess had time to hit highway speed and to roll around through the Interstate of his pulmonary system and into the back roads of his brain where the real deal would happen.

And yes, it was the real deal.

Damn, he thought, while he could still think, this is some powerful shit. It was powerful enough to make the rain stop falling. The dictator clouds, which had ruled the skies for over a day, were now overthrown. The exiled sun returned like a prince. Everything was lit like a coronation. Sunlight flared over the scrambled bricks around him. The peeling walls of the gas station, the disrupted concrete floor, the rusted frame of an abandoned Jeep, the shards of glass that surrounded the Jeep, and the wildflowers growing up in the cracks of the concrete. All were illuminated.

He leaned back against the station wall and stretched himself out. He gazed at the newly bejeweled parking lot around him.

The sunlight warmed his face like the hand of a lover.

*

Two days later, the young man stood on the steps of a hospital with a paper in his hand, looking at the everlasting rain.

He remembered the smack of sudden light when the Narcan hit his brain and his lungs snapped open like an umbrella.

He had a shadowy memory of two men in blue who folded him onto a gurney and strapped him to the gurney and rolled him into an ambulance, a vague memory of lying propped on a hospital bed with an IV strapped to his arm. And just when things began to come clear and his brain began to work like a brain again, a doctor came in to tell him he was lucky to be alive and a social worker came in to give him a lecture and a list. I’m not ready I’m not ready I’m not ready yet, he told her, so they wheeled him out the door and set him on his feet on the hospital steps with his legs all shaky and the clean, rainy light of morning blazing up his brain. The list—he looked again at the paper in his hand and the list of treatment centers and their phone numbers. He had no idea where these addresses were and he had no way to make a phone call.  He had no money. His only address was a cardboard pallet under a bridge. He had no ID.

He wondered to himself, what was I thinking? He could have called home. That would have fixed it all. The social worker had offered to help him call home. Mom and Dad would have bought him a Greyhound ticket. Or they would have come and picked him up. They would have killed for him the fatted calf. But he had turned the social worker down and now he had no way to call.

What the fuck was I thinking?

He balled up the paper with the list and threw it into the shrubs at the side of the steps. He looked up into the rain and thought, What now? What the fuck do I do now?

*

First, he went back to the gas station to retrieve his backpack. The rain was little more than a whisper of a rain by then. He had walked the whole way and, because he did not know the way, it was getting late when he finally got there. His backpack was still in the alcove where he had left it.  But someone else had found it first. The clothes were there, and Moby Dick, and his notebook, and most of his other belongings. But his knife and all his food were gone. He mumbled a curse and stuffed his soggy clothes and his soggy Moby Dick into the backpack and headed down toward the bridge.

The rain had finally stopped. He had thought the waters, after all this rain, would be roaring downstream. But the creek, having taken on the runoff from a hundred hillside rivulets, tributary runs, gullies, gutters, culverts, over-run sewers, and industrial ditches, had run its burden up against the dam at its gate to the Ohio. There, it paused, eddied back on itself, spread bank to bank, and back-watered upstream for miles. It had flooded the willow brakes and honeysuckle thickets, robbed the nests of the birds, and collapsed the muskrat tunnels hived into the levees. The carp had found pocket water and lay low and the catfish and bluegill and suckers did the same. The great blue herons watched from nests perched in the crowns of the sycamores.

The creek seemed still as a farm pond, the surface smooth as glass, broken on the margins by the upper branches of the half-drowned willows and honeysuckle and by the reflections of those branches on the glass of the water.  But, once he looked long enough, the creek’s strange, mist-spectral, seeming-stillness was marked with eddies, ripples, and cross-currents. Near the far bank, a black bundle, snagged on the branches of a honeysuckle, slowly bobbed and spun in the hidden current.

The sun had started into its big slow dive. The mists had already started to swirl up from the surface of the creek like sleeping sentries called to duty. The underbridge camps were flooded on both sides. So where, he wanted to know, was River Dog?

He asked all up and down Mitchell Avenue and all up and down Spring Grove, but no one had seen him. Most of them had been driven out of their camps by the rising waters and most carried what little they had left in their arms.

I got troubles of my own, they said, whether they said it or not.

*

He sat down on the levee to think. The waters had dropped a foot or more in the time since he had come back down, but not enough that he could get back in under the bridge. And even after the waters dropped, it would be days again before it was dry enough to make a camp, even such a bare camp as he had made before.

He had passed his test, though it had almost killed him and might kill him yet. He was done with camps and panhandling. He wanted to go home and start his life again. Tomorrow, he would call. He would find a way to call.

He had just a little daylight left. He was hungry now; he would be even more hungry in the morning. There was a girl at the Subway who might sneak him a sandwich if he talked to her right. If she wasn’t there, he might still be able to panhandle money enough to get himself something to eat. But it bothered him that he could not find River Dog.

He scanned the creek once more. Bats had begun to flit like shadows over the water and into the honeysuckle and the willows on the levee banks. There, on the bank, mingling his skinny limbs with the limbs of the willows, stood the Shadow Man. It was as if he had flown there with the bats.

The young man thought the Shadow Man might flit away as he had before. But this time, he turned and met the young man’s stare. As before, he said not a word. But he pointed a pale finger toward the creek. The young man turned to see where the Shadow Man pointed and saw what he had not noticed before: the pale hands and face and black bloated body of his friend and mentor, first name River last name Dog. He was snagged in the willow branches and bobbing slowly with the current. It could have been any of the homeless men who camped along Mill Creek, but the young man knew it was River Dog by the bone-shiny knob of his forehead and the yellow-tooth grin.

The young man suspected what had happened. The rising creek had caught River Dog in his aluminum kingdom and drowned him as he lay utterly drunk and perfectly free.

“River,” the young man called. He knew it was useless to call, but he called again, “River Dog,” he called. “River Dog.”

He ran to the creek’s edge, then past the creek’s edge. Suddenly he was shin-deep in October-cold water. “Goddamit, River,” he shouted in a fury. He threw his backpack back onto the levee and started to wade out to where the willows had snagged the old man. The water was deeper than he thought it would be. And colder. In a few steps, he was waist-deep, then chest deep when he finally reached the hem of River Dog’s coat and began to tug him loose.

If the Shadow Man would just reach him a hand, or a branch—that branch that lay at the edge of the creek—together they could pull the old man ashore. “Dude,” he called. “Help me out, will you?”

But the bat-flit Shadow Man was gone; the branch was out of reach.

“Goddamit, River,” the young man muttered. He continued to mutter as he grabbed the old man’s coat with both hands, dug his heels into the mud of the creek, and pulled River Dog free of the willows. The force of his pull nearly took his feet from under him and he leaned against River Dog for balance. The current tried to push River back into the willows and the young man tried to pull him back to shore. For a moment, they were mutually encumbered, the young man and the dead man, in a balance of currents.

The sun had reached the crest of the levee; the creek took on a copper sheen. It seemed placid as a copper plate. But there were currents and cross-currents and the young man’s feet were on tip toe; he had no purchase by which to pull River Dog to shore.

He looked at the face of the old man once more. His one open eye was blank as an egg; his lips were pulled back in a victorious grin. “Okay. You win, you old sonofabitch,” the young man whispered. With a shove, he launched the old man toward the middle of the stream. The old man bobbed and spun as current and counter-current took him around and under and up again. Finally, the main current took him, steady now as a driftwood log.

The young man scrambled up onto the levee; he watched River Dog slowly bob and tumble down toward the Ohio until he disappeared in mist and shadow.

###

In "River Dog and the Shadow Man," a young man caught up in homelessness and addiction seems to have arrived at a point at which he is ready to bury his pride and seek help.  This story derives from my experience working with addicts and the homeless (as well as my own experience of recovery).