Word Count: 486
He was a strange little man. Nobody knew who he was but everyone knew him. If you believed the talk, he’d been around forever. The kids knew him, their parents and grandparents remembered him when they were kids. He never got grayer, nor thinner but he did lose height to a stoop and knees bending a bit from whatever he carried around in his mind.
One crazy rumor claimed he was a scientist. Worked at the big pharmaceutical company over in Denver. Of course, the story was that he discovered something very special, some said it was a sure cure for cancer, but the company let him go without warning.
I like the one about him being a clown with the circus and getting left behind one morning when they left town. He’d spent the night after performance at Kelly’s Green Shamrock Bar and fell asleep on the sidewalk.
No one spoke to him more than a Hi, how are ya? greeting which doesn’t really ask for an answer. More for the questionable claim to say that you know him rather than any real human interest at all.
He worked odd jobs around town in barter for meals or a warm shed or barn to sleep in when winter winds blew. He was trusted yet people were wary, though ashamed to admit any fear.
I once sat down beside him outside of the gas station where I saw him sipping the last taffy bubbles from a bottle of coke. I bought him another and one for myself and he took it with a nod of his head. It was a hot September Indian Summer and the leaves were still green on the trees. He smelled, not of sweat or urine, which my grandmother claimed she’d once noticed, but oddly enough, of sweet red cinnamon nickels, that candy you used to find in the penny candy bin at the small grocery store.
He didn’t say much, but he answered my questions. I was careful not to ask him too much. For one, I didn’t want to intrude on his self-imposed isolation, but mainly I don’t think I wanted to dispel my belief in the clown who got left behind by the circus. It seemed to suit the sadness that he wore like a tattered coat. I was only nineteen. Losing a job didn’t seem to be a viable cause for such emptiness in his eyes, the slowness in his step, nor for stripping his sentences down to just a few words.
Years later, after he was found dead on a bright Sunday morning, it was noted that his name was John McGinty and he had indeed once been the chief scientist at the pharmaceutical company that has since grown to cover several acres in size and cuts five stories into the sky. And now, since I too have grown up, I understand the sadness he felt.
