Shadow Traffic by Richard Burgin Page A

decision that night saved my relationship with Maggie, probably our friendship too. You’re a wise man, Jeff.”
    It was the first time anyone had ever called me wise, and then he left. I returned to the silence of my condominium. I watched it get dark and it started to hurt. I thought how I’d let a dangerous person stay at my home, but it turned out that after he left it felt more dangerous than before. Then I thought about going upstairs to visit Birdwoman but didn’t have the will. I was gonnatake a ’lude but I didn’t want to wait thirty minutes for the high so I smoked a joint instead, put on TV, ate my food, fell asleep. My usual pattern. Only I didn’t sleep for very long. I had a crazy dream that I had a different body. It was me but I was taller and stronger and strode around the playground like a giant. I saw the dealer shooting baskets at the other end of the court and began walking toward him wanting to see if I was as tall as him, when I woke up.
    For the longest time (though it was probably only a minute or two of marijuana time) I couldn’t shake the feeling that my body really had changed. It made me sad and happy at the same time as if I’d finally found the reason for my life being the way it was. I thought about seeing Birdwoman but worried I might scare her to death if she saw me in my new body. Anyway, she wasn’t someone I could talk to about it, but Dash was. It’s strange what you end up missing about people. You could talk to Dash about almost anything. I’ll give him that.

Memorial Day
    There’s a lot to admire about Grandfather Pool. Even though he’s close to a hundred and moves very slowly, he walks by himself—doesn’t even use a walker. And even though his skin hangs on him like paper, you can see the outline of an excellent physique underneath. It’s as if his bones were playing hide-and-seek and temporarily chose a semitransparent place to hide. Still, I admit, I’d rather not get too near him (he’s not
my
grandfather, after all). I don’t want to listen to him in the hot tub, where we were both headed until I saw him, if he should try to talk to me as he has before. He likes to talk a lot when he gets the chance, as old people do, and old-man talk makes me uncomfortable and sometimes sad.
    It’s odd how as men get older they slowly become more like women. The only man I know who handled his age really well was my father. He used to take me to this pool all the time, especially on weekends and holidays when I was around nine or ten (including a number of Memorial Days, which it is again today), until I thought I’d outgrown it, fool that I was.
    I was addicted to the slide then. I liked the Lazy River and thewhirlpool, but I spent half my time on the water slide. I loved it when he went on the slide with me, but when he got tired he’d still stand in the water and watch me every time I slid down. He said I always arrived with a smile.
    Just as Grandfather Pool finally gets settled in the tub, I see a group of three men with walkers moving toward the kids’ pool, of all places, slowly and stealthily as if returning to the scene of their crime. I guess it makes sense because at the entrance to the kids’ pool the water’s only a few inches deep and they couldn’t handle anything much deeper. I notice they’ve got a lifeguard helping them walk and kind of sealing them off from the general public. The lifeguard is really ripped. He’s got lots of muscles, but his face is almost comically blank and completely disinterested in what he has to do. When you’re that young you live half in the present, half in the future, generally speaking. You can’t imagine the way the past invades the present when you get older any more than you can imagine a world without sex.
    My father was a monogamous man. You could say he was the product of a different era when it was easier or more