Hot Night in the City

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There were only three passengers on the last bus from downtown: a man, a woman, and a bum. The slim young man sat alone at the back of the bus because he had an instinctive mistrust of men in uniform, even bus drivers. Unable to sleep because of the heat and a relentless gnawing in the pit of his stomach, he had left the flophouse and deposited his bindle in a bus station locker so he could wander the streets unencumbered. The young woman sat close up behind the driver clutching her handbag to her lap, her knees pressed together and her gaze fixed on the nippled rubber floormat to avoid making eye contact with the old bum who sat across from her, smelling of piss and sweat and waking up with a moist snort each time the bus hit a pothole or lurched to miss one.

An oppressive heat wave had been sapping the city for over a week. Not until after midnight was it cool enough for people to go out and stroll the streets for a breath of air. In the stifling tenements that separated air-conditioned downtown from the breezy suburbs, kids were allowed to sleep out on fire escapes, sprawled on sofa cushions. On the brownstone stoops down below, women in loose cotton house dresses gossiped drowsily while men in damp undershirts sucked beers. At the beginning of the heat wave, people had complained about the weather to total strangers with a grumpy comradeship wrought of shared distress, like during wars or floods or hurricanes. But once the city's brick and steel had absorbed all the heat it could hold and began to exhale its stored-up warmth into the night, the public mood turned sullen and resentful.

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