By
Porter Smith
The wallet was found and returned to the 30th Street Police Station. It was the last gift that its owner’s mother had ever given his father, and so had served for twenty-five years as billfold, heirloom and memorial. The mother traveled West with her sister more than a quarter of a century prior, visiting New Mexico’s magical landscape and gleaning from it, among the finery of food, fellowship, warmest winter weather and colorful craft, a modest, slender, expertly sewn, sturdy, brown leather wallet.
In the twilight of his thirty-sixth year, two days before Christmas, Clyde Rivers went to claim the lost wallet that he’d long inherited from his dead father. It occurred to him, upon entering, that he had never been inside a Police Station before. There was no merit ascribed to this reckoning, since he imagined he would need more than a felony-free record to feel any semblance of true well-being. The bottom had dropped out of a fairly winsome life. There was no addiction or treachery, no meanness, no indolence or inattention; he and his wife walked away from each other wounded, but without blame. Shortly after he left, on the day he turned thirty-six, a sense of loss began to pervade every cell of his body. The feeling mimicked that of the day of his father’s funeral and, in more recent years, the moment his wife apprised him of her pregnancy. Taken aback by his reaction, she absently commented, “I’m saying something you don’t want me to hear.” He laughed aloud, and that seemed to align his thoughts enough to liberate his arms to embrace her. The child was born seven months later with its umbilical cord wrapped snug around its neck. It was a girl with Clyde’s lips and his wife’s hands. They held her ghastly body for nearly an hour before they could begin to reckon her loss. Clyde sensed, in his farewell to his daughter, that his reckoning of loss was really for his wife, since she would want to bear other children, and he knew he couldn’t father any more than this one.
Clyde stood a while at the police station front desk, where lost and found items purportedly were to be claimed. “Christmas came early for you this year,” a boyish police officer remarked as he returned to his post, brandishing Clyde’s wallet.
“What do you know?” rejoined Clyde. “Well, it’s been through the wash once, but I’d never lost it till now. I thought it was the end of an era.” The wallet passed from the young officer’s hand to Clyde’s. He affectionately ran his fingers over its soft, discolored surface and worn stitching, then opened it to see what remained. Inside, he found everything in its place, except for one thing. He looked back at the officer with concern. “There’s a hundred dollars in my wallet.” The officer laughed a little snidely.
“Sir, that’s more than I ever have in my wallet. Maybe the guy who took it only needed whatever else you had.”
“I…I didn’t have any money in it.”
“That true? You serious?” the officer challenged.
“Yeah, I’m serious. Am I being snowed here?”
“What does that mean, sir?”
“You don’t know what being snowed means?” The officer shook his head. “My God, it is the end of an era. Come on, you didn’t put the money in my wallet to test me, to see what I’m made of morally?”
“Sir, where am I going to get a hundred bucks?”
“I don’t know. It’s a little cross-grained, though, wouldn’t you say?”
“Cross-grained?”
“Come on, isn’t it odd for someone to lose a wallet and get rewarded for it?”
“Maybe you just forgot how much money you had in there, sir.” The officer was waning in his attention span.
“No, I didn’t forget,” Clyde continued reflectively, “It’s hard to forget when you’re on the edge of losing it.”
“What’s that?” came an absent response.
“Oh, nothing,” Clyde’s own absence rivaled.
“Is there anything else, sir?”
“No, I don’t think so.” Clyde shifted indecisively. “So, you’re just going to let me walk out of here with this?”
“It’s your wallet,” the officer charged. Clyde smiled incredulously and relented.
“Indeed. Thank you. Happy Holidays.”
“Happy Holidays, sir,” the officer resumed his grown-up desk duties. Clyde folded his wallet and put it in its familiar back right pants pocket position, distracted himself with another scan of the police station before walking out onto the street with more than the usual weight on his mind.
Of the many blessings of his life, none was more utile than Clyde’s ability to always appear well, even within the present plight of unforeseen career misgivings and his headlong decision to move far away from his home. It was, in part, due to his proud posture, but more descriptively, owing to a disposition that, ordinarily, refused to stew and fret. “Not a soul knows me in this city,” he stewed. “Why would someone put a hundred dollars in my wallet? This is New York City for heaven’s sake. Who would do such a thing?” The length of the day began to stir a hunger in Clyde that he couldn’t simply rebut by the fact that he had no money. That much had changed; he now had a hundred dollars that he could spend on extravagances like food.
“The paradox of hunger is that food doesn’t necessarily taste better when you’re hungry. Pleasure is not a desperate emotion,” Clyde mused as he watched himself go through the motions of eating. He had been much more hungry in his life. When he was twenty-one, he made the decision to walk across America with no money and few possessions. He chose to ask for nothing from anyone and accept everything that was given. It was his attempt to meet up with his maker. He imagined that truth would be beckoned better by putting himself at a distinct and humble disadvantage. He did meet his maker in the hearts of those who picked him up and fed him, even in the one who took his knapsack and left him with only a tee-shirt, sneakers and jeans on the highway. After an ensuing, hunger induced stretch of delirium, Clyde recounted the grace of finding a perfectly ripe banana, slightly warmed by the sun, lying directly in front of him on his path. The story engaged a stranger at a truck stop who offered to give Clyde a hotel room for the night and a bus ticket home. “Be kind to my memory,” Timothy Bates said as he let Clyde off at the bus station. It seemed an unnecessary, ungainly remark, for the man had been so overtly gracious and solicitously careful with Clyde’s vulnerable state. The two had spent the morning in a long embrace, discussing Timothy’s plight as a forty-seven-year-old gay, southern business man in the time of AIDS. Clyde felt privileged to be counted in the life of someone born the same year as his father. He was, in no way, threatened by Timothy’s assertion and affection, and he suffered no untoward advances. Clyde often thought about Timothy and, without much effort, was always kind to his memory.
Having eaten, Clyde felt more civil and upright. Pleasure or no pleasure on its intake, the meal, down to its sentimental piece of banana bread, energized him and gave meaning to the adage, “Do you eat to live or live to eat?” The city seemed less imposing and heartless on a full stomach and, for the first time in weeks, by his own estimation, Clyde felt less awful.
“Let me see your wallet!” barked a street vendor who happened to be selling leather wallets and crafts. Clyde obliged, reaching into his back pocket and presenting his mother’s last gift to his father. “Just as I suspected,” the leathery vendor continued, “you need a new wallet. That one has folded its last bill. We’ve got some real beauties here, all leather all the time. Take a look. Take a long look.” Amused, but in no apparent need, Clyde slowly returned his wallet to his pocket.
“No thank you. I think this one…” he patted his right hip, “still has plenty of good years left.”
“Not by my hour glass, buddy,” the vendor winked in a familiar, avuncular way that caught Clyde comfortably off guard. He was, after all, from the Midwest, where folks treated each other more neighborly, and so, somewhere in him he still anticipated kindest regard, even in a place like New York. It could have been vending showmanship or the fact that the vendor, as bristling as he appeared, came from a softer place.
“No, but thanks,” Clyde resolved.
“Ah,” the vendor capitulated with disapproval. “You’ll be back.”
Clyde smiled politely, turned and walked head on into the full incandescence of New York City at Christmas time. It had been dusk during dinner, but night still fell as hard two days after the solstice. He wondered, upon noticing it for the first time, what on earth he would ever have to put in the left upper sleeve, zipper pocket of his coat. He opened it, to feel its narrow dimensions, and began to close it before he was called away from the task.
“Let me see your wallet,” a woman, heaped in thirty yards of scarf, sounded from her crouched, corner spot. Though taken aback by her directness, Clyde understood her meaning and reached into his right front pocket for the eighty-seven cents that was change from dinner. The change, however, was not in his right front pocket, nor in his left.
“That’s odd,” he began to confess to the woman, “I had eighty-seven cents in my pocket and it’s gone.”
“I said, let me see your wallet! Doesn’t anybody listen?” Silenced, Clyde placidly pulled out his wallet for her. She reached up from her bolts of gossamer and took it into her hands. “You can tell a lot about a person by his or her wallet.”
“Is that right?” Clyde deferred. The woman opened the wallet and ran her bone, blanched fingers over it, never once looking at its contents, but rather keeping her eyes on Clyde.
“You’re a high frequency soul, dear heart, far, far from home. Yes, yes,” she spoke as if she were being given information from a source beyond herself, “your feelings of loss are just sonar transmissions unanswered. You’re a whale in search of its mate.”
“I’ve been married before,” Clyde began, “and I…”
“Not in your soul you weren’t.” The woman continued, “You may have only a hundred dollars in your wallet and feel completely alone in a new city, nearing your thirty-seventh year with no clear direction and a wounded sense of self, but you are a whale.” Clyde thought of some of his friends who might receive this woman with less patience, and, certainly, a few of his female friends, for whom the epithet, “whale”, might only carry the connotation of being conspicuously larger than most other creatures.
“I only have eighty-three dollars left in my wallet,” Clyde proclaimed, “though that doesn’t really matter that much. You read me so well, so clearly.” The woman deigned to hear him out.
“I wasn’t reading you, I was reading your wallet. And your wallet has one hundred dollars in it. See for yourself.” She stiffly returned Clyde’s wallet. Clyde opened it and found the woman to be correct; he had again, a hundred dollars in his wallet.
“Why would you put money in my wallet just to make a point?” he asked sternly. “Your reading was just fine without your sleight of hand.” The woman calmly addressed him.
“Have we not been face to face this whole time? Can’t you see that I’m not a magician and that I don’t have seventeen dollars at my finger tips? I was drawn to you this evening, that’s all. I’m sorry to disappoint you so.”
“You haven’t disappointed me. I’m just a little confused right now. What do I owe you for the reading?”
“You don’t owe me anything.” The woman made a contented sound, almost that of a cat’s purr. “It was my pleasure.”
“Come on, it’s two days before Christmas and I apparently have, in my possession, a magic wallet,” Clyde reveled in the madness. The woman lowered her head slightly.
“Well, I’d love a new scarf.”
“You need a…you need a new scarf?” Clyde looked at her with amazement.
“I don’t need a new scarf, young man. I want one.”
“Okay. A scarf it is.” The woman stood up and carried her flowing bearing down the street with Clyde, in search of her next scarf. “Do you get a new one every time you do a reading?” Clyde teased.
“Do I look like a woman who’s only given thirty-seven readings in her lifetime? You don’t have to answer that, Clyde.”
“How do you know my name?”
“I saw your license in your wallet.” He raised his brow at her. She raised hers back. “I told you I was reading your wallet.” The two walked and talked for many blocks together and found themselves much at peace in each other’s company. They spoke of the meaning of true love; the woman recounted the final days of a lasting relationship with a man who loved to take naps with her and, to the end, looked after her in every way. Clyde told the woman that she and his old pet cat shared the same name. Their time together was interrupted too soon by a low frequency noise.
“Let me see your wallet!”
“Not again,” Clyde reacted with knee-jerk silliness.
“I didn’t ask for your goddamn commentary,” rumbled the low frequency man as he pinned Clyde against the side of a building and arched his thick hand back in a fist. The old woman in scarves threw herself in front of Clyde and absorbed the impact of several overwhelming blows. The low frequency man stepped back and watched, as thirty-seven wildly colorful scarves fell at Clyde’s feet. Clyde had not felt the force of a single punch, yet was clearly beaten senseless by what he had witnessed.
“Do you still want to see my wallet?” The low frequency man took one more look at the pile of scarves beneath him, turned and ran. “You’re sure you don’t want to see my wallet,” Clyde called after him, “because if you thought the scarf trick was something special, the bottomless wallet is going to blow your mind.” With this, Clyde fell to the ground and gathered up all the silk and cotton and synthetic fibers that made up the old woman and wept openly into them. He wept for the time when he was eight, when his father saw him break a window and let Clyde punish himself in the ensuing hour that he paced and agonized, gathering up enough courage to confess. He wept for the time he saw his older sister moved to tears by a story she was writing for her seventh grade English class. He wept for his long dead, beloved twenty-year-old cat Irene, who woke up from a nap with him, near the end of her life, and peed, unwittingly, into the shallow cup of his collar bone. He wept for the proud, unselfish manner his wife displayed when she pronounced that she wanted to deliver her dead baby naturally, without any pain medication. He wept for his big brother’s lonely, long-sufferance in an ill-fated, loveless marriage. He wept for his little sister’s innocence, his mother’s gallows humor, Timothy Bates’ goodness, a banana, a wallet and thirty-seven scarves.
It was just a little after midnight; it was Christmas Eve when he stopped crying. It was his birthday, and he was now thirty-seven. His entire thirty-sixth year trudged like a funeral procession through his consciousness and he threw up his dinner all over the beautiful bedding of scarves. Clyde remembered how much he hated his father when the old man was thirty-six. He never could forget the last thing he said to him: “Why can’t you just throw the football with me one time? I don’t want to but I hate you, Dad.” None of the children was home that late afternoon in early March, when Clyde’s mother found his father sitting alone in the big red station wagon, inside the garage, with the V8 engine running. On his lap lay open his new wallet, with pictures of his wife and children covering it completely.
More than a year had passed since her loss, when Clyde’s mother found his father’s wallet in a box she had set aside for good will. Clyde’s father had only carried it a few weeks after severe depression kept him from taking a trip to New Mexico with his wife. Rather than sending it off with the frippery of outgrown and obsolete items, Clyde’s mother thought the wallet might be best kept for Clyde, knowing how much he cared for things that last. Carrying his dad’s wallet was an honor; it was also a way to keep the old man involved in his day to day life. From Clyde’s twelfth birthday on, his dad never seemed that far away.
“Did you like your birthday present?”, a familiar voice spoke, “I know it came a day early, but I was never very good at getting things right.” Clyde looked up and beheld a thirty-six-year-old man with graying hair and proud posture, someone that others might have imagined could be his fraternal twin. Clyde smiled pitifully from his mess of tears and vomit.
“Dad.” His father reached down and grabbed his hand, pulling Clyde to his feet. He proceeded to dust off his son’s coat and to wipe the tears from his cheeks. “Which present was yours, the hundred dollars or the thirty-seven scarves?” Clyde asked.
“Oh, I don’t know anything about a hundred dollars, son.” His dad winked at him.
“That’s right!”, Clyde recalled, “You used to always say that a man should carry a hundred dollars with him at all times. It’s not too…too much to lose and it’s…”
“More than enough for almost anything,” his dad chimed in with him. “Indeed,” he went on contemplatively, “more than enough for almost anything.” The two stood there in a charged silence.
“Dad?” Clyde said barely audibly, “I…” His father took the mantle from him.
“You’re not me, Clyde, you know? Thank God! You’re a hell of a great guy.” Clyde looked at his dad, disconsolately.
“I’m a mess, Dad. I’m falling apart here.” His dad looked trenchantly into his eyes, took him in his arms and held him. Clyde grabbed hold.
“No you’re not. You’re just starting to get it together, son. Grief can take a long, long time.”
“I’m sorry I told you I hated you. I didn’t mean it, Dad. You know I didn’t mean it.” Clyde bellowed out, uncontrollably, and squeezed his dad hard enough that he could almost feel the dead man’s heartbeat.
“Just let it all go, son. You can let it all go now. I’m so proud of you, Clyde. You’re a hell of great guy.” Clyde cried on his father’s old coat and listened to the voice that he grew up knowing and trusting. As he drifted off into twilight, standing sleep, under the scant city stars, Clyde heard his father say in the near distance, “It kind of feels like you’re hugging yourself, doesn’t it? I’m sorry about your wallet, Clyde. I know how much it meant to you. I loved that wallet too. Goodbye, son.”
Clyde woke up in his father’s old coat that he’d been wearing since he found it several months earlier, cleaning out the family house before his mother’s move. He was draped in what he counted out to be thirty-seven nostalgically fragrant scarves, the scent of which reminded him of the laundry detergent his mother used when he was ten. He rose to his feet, adjusted his pants at the beltline, dusted himself off and felt his back right pocket for his wallet. It wasn’t there, and neither did he find it his back left pocket. He did notice, however, a hundred dollars peeking out of the open, upper left sleeve, zipper pocket of his coat. It was not too long after midnight; it was Christmas Eve when Clyde felt a true sense of joy for the first time in a year. He smiled and shook his head in wonder as he transferred the hundred dollars from his coat sleeve to his pants pocket. He hoped, despite the late hour, that the leather vendor might still be open for business.