six fifteen

it's close to six fifteen when they walk along the outside of the park. it can be as late as six forty, though. they are two men who are maybe in their fifties or sixties, could be brothers, might be junkies with a shared habit, might even be in love. they have known one another a while and you can tell by looking they would have a hard time, each of them, without the other.

they walk from somewhere past the square, which is really a circle, and they go along the park eastish, never looking over at one another as they walk. they don't say anything. one wears a black fanny pack, maybe with keys and a wallet. the sort of thing you don't see so often on grown men in the city, men who mostly carry backpacks or messenger bags crammed with newspapers and headphones and hardcover books that weigh more than newborn children. the other wears a weight belt, a wide strip of leather with the look and color of a horse saddle. he wears this outside his clothes, outside a jacket when he wears that.

the one with the weight belt usually carries the sodas. plastic bottled cokes. three of them in a plastic grocery bag, the cokes condensing against the plastic of the bag like faces pressed against a window. they walk along the wide sidewalk, stay outside the waist high stone fence keeping the wildness of the park from spilling out into what is brooklyn. they never go in. they sit next to each other on one of the big wooden benches planted every few feet all along the outside of the park. benches large enough for homeless folks to stretch out on at night. big enough high school students avoiding going home in the afternoons can cluster around on them in groups and feel a little like they belong to something.

but today promises to be oppressive. those who know say 94, which means the thermometer outside the kitchen window will tippytoe itself right on up to 97 or so, striving for a personal best. this is city heat saved over from yesterday by all that is paved and tarred. it has stretched itself out like a lazy cat over everything, settled in and purring. suffocating already at 6:30.

today the man with the fanny pack carries the cokes. in the bag i can see five of a six pack, necks still collared in those plastic rings. the sixth one dangles from his right hand. he will open it soon enough, and all the other ones, too, guardians against dying from this heat. but for now, whether he knows it or not, there is at least some part of his brain thinking about what the bottle will sound like when he opens it. anticipating the snap as the cap twists free of its moorings. the hiss, somehow urgent and languid together. and in all that low and menacing heat, the tiny wisp of vapor escaping the opened bottle like a ghost or an angel flying home.