Prelude to a Scream by Jim Nisbet Page B

earwigs and if it ain’t the earwigs it’s the park service and if it ain’t none a them it’s election year.”
    â€œYou’d think they’d let a man rest,” Stanley heard himself saying. His voice sounded as if he had someone sitting on his chest.
    â€œNot me,” said the gravelly voice. “I’d think they’d kill us all and be done with it.”
    â€œThey might yet,” Stanley rasped.
    â€œMan’s got to stay on his toes if he ain’t got nothin’ but toes to stay on.”
    Now under full pressure, the sprinkler head began to ratchet rhythmically.
    â€œYou ain’t gittin’ up?” said the voice. “It’s fixin’ to git a mite damp in here. C’mon’n git up. We’ll score us a couple transfers and make it down to St. Anthony’s for breakfast.”
    So he was still in San Francisco. “I take some comfort, knowing we’re only a bus-ride away from St. Anthony’s,” Stanley said weakly, not even attempting to move. “But on what bus line, exactly, do we find ourselves?”
    â€œOh the Seven, the Six, that Noriega line… There’s four or five buses, run up there on Haight…”
    Ten feet above Stanley’s head a powerful stream of water played across the axis of the cypress tree. Spray ricocheted off the downsloping branches, and the jet passed on. Moments later a few drops of water and several cypress needles ticked down onto the sleeping bag and his face.
    He blinked, then opened his mouth and broadened his tongue. But no water fell on it.
    â€œI’m hurt,” Stanley whispered. “Thirsty…”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œHurt!” His voice wasn’t any louder.
    â€œYou’re fixin’ to be hurt and wet both,” said the man. “There’s a difference, I happen to know.”
    â€œI can’t feel my legs.” He struggled to free his arms from the sleeping bag. One of them, twisted beneath him, asleep, lay as heavy and unresponsive as a pig of lead. The other arm he managed to extricate.
    He still wore the pineapple shirt. The arm was in its sleeve and seemed to work all right. As he waggled the fingers of its hand in front of his face to prove its motor skills he saw the fat piece of gauze taped over the inside of his elbow, and a large purpling bruise sprawled across the skin beneath it.
    He stopped moving his tingling fingers. He stopped struggling to free himself from the unfamiliar sleeping bag. He stared at gauze and bruise for a long moment, motionless.
    The jet of irrigation water cycled back across the tree in the opposite direction.
    The bruise was a few shades darker than the purple sleeping bag, and yellowing around its edges. So maybe it was at least a day old.
    Stanley’s eyes began to move in his head, now darting this way, now that. He didn’t remember giving blood. Though, come to think on it, he’d had an HIV test about three months before.
    Que pasa?
    â€œHey. Neighbor.”
    The man beyond the cypress trunk was busy packing things up. “No,” he said. “You can’t borrow my power mower.”
    â€œWhere is this?”
    â€œCome again?”
    â€œYou mentioned the Haight. Where are we, exactly?”
    â€œThe fabulous Panhandle of the famous Golden Gate Park in beautiful San Francisco in the Promise-Me-Anything-Land, Californ-eye-ay, where joints and screenplays grow on trees and the dream never dies, yee-hah.”
    â€œDo I know you?”
    â€œI dunno.”
    â€œI like your attitude.”
    â€œMaybe I’ll run for office.”
    â€œDo you know me?”
    A grizzled face thrust itself between the two lowest limbs of the cypress, about two feet away and above Stanley’s head. The man was old, with a weathered face bronzed by the sun and empurpled by wine, with lips to match, a swollen nose long ago flattened by a fist and stippled by burst capillaries,