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Found Photo #7
He had an elaborate way about him, masked hand signals cupped to the wind, some overcompensated gesture of cigarette-lighting glory days. And his ragged face looked like it’d been dragged along the pavement at some point, the cratery and creviced shapes of faded scars hooked like snared Dolly Varden here and there, high crescent dome of a forehead, a dangerous proposition for a nose. Some called him cagey. A few who never knew him close enough thought of him as a beat-up bicycle with missing parts they don’t make anymore. I mostly called him Reginald. He wore those regimental ties that were dull and striped in olives and maroons and sunset blues. Never owned a watch that anyone would want to steal, and his teeth were like cracked and chipped yellowing tombstones from The Mexican-American War. I once heard him tell a stray dog that the heavens were made from chocolate chip riots and bowls of chiffon meringue. Nobody called him Fella or Stranger after they hadn’t seen him for too long of a time. There were afternoons he’d spend planting shrubs by the gulley behind his front yard’s fence, only to go on and rip them all out that same night, softly whistling and sometimes even singing gospel hymns the whole while. His friends, those of them he kept, didn’t have a clue about his personal life. Maybe he’d had a few kids at some point. There was a chance they’d been killed in a war, or had fallen in with mattress thieves on the nod. He kept his love…
