Traffic Calming

Ray braced against the horn, teeth clenched through the prolonged blare as the offending crosser calved away from the sidewalk. “Move, you old bitch!”

The woman—was it a woman?—turned to look at him. She was curled in on herself, hunched over under the weight of a massive black-green coat, a spindly walker supporting her doubled frame. Her skin was black, the color of cracked leather, and her head was crowned by a black helmet of a turban. Thick black goggles like glass ashtrays covered her eyes, and the gnarled hands gripping the walker were weathered and knotted as cypress knees. Not one, but three enormous black handbags dragged at her arms and shoulders, making her as wide as she was tall with the breadth of her burden. She stared at Ray with her black glass eyes and did not move an inch.

“Come—get out the way!” Ray waved an emphatic, exaggerated gesture of permission, since the humpbacked lady seemed unlikely to turn around. “Just go already!”

The old woman moved her spindly walker forward, dragging her cumbersome bulk after it, a bloated beetle on needle point limbs. Ray watched his gap in the traffic vanish, car after low-slung car surging around the roundabout as the old woman shuffled in slow motion beside them. Just as she was about to clear the way, one of her overstuffed handbags ripped free from its moorings and pflumphed down onto the pavement.

“Hey!” Ray honked the horn again, blasting out a triplet in the key of F. “Your bag! Get your bag, bitch!”

This time, the old woman did not stop. Instead, the bulbous pedestrian turned her rickety walker, continuing her ponderous shuffle down the length of Ray’s ‘62 Tempest. He watched her, a hot flush against his neck, as she passed the passenger-side window, wobbled beyond the back tire, and made measured steps past the tip of Ray’s stubby rear fin.

Another car horn startled Ray into seizing the wheel, heart kick-boxing in his ribs. A man was glaring at him from a once-stationary Lincoln as it rolled through the space it had been holding, fueled by the irritation of wasted courtesy. “Ah, fuck me,” Ray muttered, putting the car in park. He clicked on the hazard lights, pushing open the driver’s-side door, and turned to confront the old woman himself.

Honking complaints sounded from the herd of Mustangs and Impalas that drove around Ray’s parked Pontiac, lighting up the unimpressed bollards with his distress signal. Ray squinted in the gathering twilight, that grey time of day that was so much harder on the eyes than pure darkness. Despite the might of his squint, as Ray looked from the circle to the sidewalk, he could see no trundling beetle woman. As quagmiric as her baggage was, there was nowhere for her to hide. Ray put a foot in the door frame and peered over the hardtop, but the black ladybird was nowhere to be found.

Ray folded himself back into the driver’s seat, slinging the door shut after him. He put one hand on the gear shift, took a deep breath, and slid the stick into place. He hit the button on the dash for the hazard lights, gripped the wheel with both damp mitts, then looked up through the windshield right into the stare of black ashtray eyes.

“Jesus!” Hitting the horn was an accident, this time, but the old woman seemed not to notice, scratching her walker across the zebra stripes. Another bag of hers had fallen in front of Ray’s wheels, but this in no way diminished her bulk, the wide load wobbling around the curve of Ray’s headlight, into a second lap.

If there were enough open space in the traffic, Ray fantasized that he could plow right through this small obstruction, dragging the odd baggage and smearing it around the circle until he was free of the crumpled thing. He watched the plodding scarab glow crimson in the wash of taillights, meander up the left-hand side, just out of Ray’s long reach, shedding another handbag from an inexhaustible supply. When the midnight exoskeleton of charity-shop parka made its halting progress in front of the headlights, Ray noticed that the dark persisted, accepting no illumination beyond a beetle-green glint.

“Excuse me,” Ray petitioned, as the old woman pattered past his window. “Excuse me?” The black glass ashtrays did not blink.

Traffic around the circle was growing sparse, the daily rush hour drawing to a close as the sun went down. Busy Chevys craned to see around Ray and his barricade of handbags, no more intrigued than they would be by a cult of traffic cones worshipping a pothole. Ray watched their faces, the middle-aged man with a finger in his tie, the station wagon full of teenagers accusing each other of hogging the joint, a woman with a face full of worry and a sleeping child in the passenger seat. As the streetlamps flickered to life, Ray wondered where all these people came from, and why he never noticed them before.

“Excuse me, ma’am?” Ray appealed, as the sauntering cicada turned past the fender. The handbags completely surrounded him now, a little higher than the door handles. It was unlikely Ray could drive through them, and he would have to climb to get out, risk being buried in collapsing sandbags. Remembering the last time he opened his door, Ray’s stomach turned at the thought of letting this worn-leather creature out of his sight. “Ma’am? I’m sorry.”

Soon, the wall of bags was so high, Ray could not see the black ashtray lenses, or the little black turban on the hunchback’s head. All he could see was the waving curve of the black-green jacket, moving with the walker he could still hear scraping the street. Every once in a while, a car would whisper past, not even slowing down to gawk at the pocket-book prison. And then, another bag would land on top of the pile.

“Please," Ray whined, watching his gas gauge creep towards zero. “I wanna go home."

Another bag landed on top.